20 June, 2009

Success came, this week in the form of a Wacom tablet working in Jaunty. My new Intuos 4 arrived more quickly than expected so I have had some time to get it working before I have to use it in anger. Luckily people much smarter than I have been figuring it out for the last few months and posting on UbuntuForums. My job was to read, understand, copy/paste and restart until the thing did what it was meant to. The first attempt resulted in a stylus that worked but jerked around the screen like a ninja LOL cat. The second attempt included another restart and everything worked fine. So far I have a working stylus and touch wheel that scrolls. I want to keep going to get the pad buttons working and get the scroll turned into a zoom function. Apparently it’s all possible so just need to bash my head against it a little longer. I am also assuming that with the next release of Ubuntu around October sometime the new drivers will be stock standard.

Two weeks to go at school. I am well and truly finished up there now. I have heard that the ICT room is to be converted back to WindowsXP, which was fairly inevitable I guess. The olds were proposing a rename of the course to “Computer Design Technology” but the Art department (and mine) went up in arms and it seems to have fallen over. I’m still not sure why ICT is so hard for them to understand. It’s a fairly ubiquitous term these days, especially in education. It also turns out that despite pressure and advice from tertiary that our folks see Computer Science and ICT as being the same thing. In fact any subject that uses a computer is apparently the same thing. This is what I have turned away from completely. Two more weeks and I will physically follow my emotional self away from secondary education and into something with a lot more promise. All good really.

The new Wacom tablet and the snazzy new monitor waiting for me at my new place of employ beckon. Two weeks to go.