Archives for the month of: April, 2008

Hardy Heron upgrade, VMware and geek machismo credits

April 29, 2008 //

I know I know.. I was gonna wait a week or two. But the trigger finger got itchy this morning and I clicked the upgrade button sitting atop Ubuntu’s update manager before I left for work this morning.

It came as no surprise to me that the process had stalled about 70% of the way through, waiting for me to answer a simple question about overwriting a samba configuration file. But happily after punching in my answer tonight, it was only about 20 minutes before I had a freshly booted Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron system.

It all seems fine. I’m still running Openbox and that seems to work smoothly as does sound and video. Hmm. They are definitely getting good at this.

There was one hurdle. I tried to run VMware server from the terminal and got a message to re-run the vmware-config perl script. No biggie. But then the something called the vmmon module wouldn’t load, had to be built and it all came to a screeching halt.

Now what follows are a few pieces of information that might prove valuable to others who might be having problems getting VMware up and running. There’s not much explanation to go along with them. Mostly because I don’t understand what they do, or how they work. Me need to run VMware.. me type commands.. Me get VMware to work.. Grunt.. Me Happy.. Me Share Info for others…

1. You may need an update to the ‘any any’ patch for VWware. What it does, I have no clue. But you can get a recent version that worked for me right here:

http://taltan2.free.fr/dl/vmware/vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz

2. While you would think something called the “Any Any” patch would fix just about anything (world hunger anyone?), once you run this (which should also run the vmware-config script too). You may still find errors when you attempt to run VMware. The errors in my terminal window looked something like this:

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4’ not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0’ not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6) …

To solve this, I found this ubuntu forums thread which recommended the following commands:

sudo cp /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/

sudo cp /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.2.3/libgcc_s.so /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1

These seemed to do the trick and VMware fired right up. I’ve clearly used up all my geek-machismo credits for the month with one single post. So I’ll now go back to posting about slightly less pocket-protector-ish things.

Categories linux, technology

How to Make Better Use of Gtalk/Gmail for Twitter

April 24, 2008 //

I’m still playing around with how I use Twitter. Some key points:

I use the Gtalk interface within Gmail to monitor Twitter. It’s more of a flow of information rather than the periodic polling that most Twitter clients do. With the Twitter problems this past weekend, my Gtalk gateway never seemed to stop working - at least not that I noticed.

The ‘track’ functionality is very useful. I simply track my own username “track rfquerin” to catch any posts with my name in them. I also track a few other search terms that interest me. This way I get all replies whether or not they are @ directed. Also, tracking other terms leads to much more valuable stuff flowing my way.

If you want the people you currently follow to flow into the Gtalk gateway, then you have to turn on each one’s IM notification in your followers list. This can be a pain if you follow hundreds and hundreds of people. I don’t. So it’s not. That said, I also don’t turn on IM notification for everyone that I follow.

One niggling problem with using Gtalk within Gmail is that I’m missing the character count. I’m never quite sure how close I am to the magic 140. So I went looking and found a couple of solutions. One ‘mehh’, so-so solution and one much better workaround.

First the ‘mehh’ solution:

If you’re into Vi, Vim, Cream etc., you can use the TwitVim plugin. I tried using this so that I could create and send my Twitter posts using Vim and get a character count. It also let’s you do things like view all your timelines (friends, replies, public etc.), do direct messages and all that stuff, but I was strictly using it to post so I’d have a character count while I type. Kind of like using a sledgehammer to push in a thumbtack. I was still using Gtalk and not TwitVim to monitor my Twitter stream.

My current solution (and I think a much better one):

I forgot about the It’s All Text plugin for Firefox. I posted about this great little tool months ago. It didn’t get FF3 beta compatible until recently so I hadn’t been using it.

What this does is put a little translucent blue ‘edit’ button beside any standard html text entry field so that when you click it, it will launch your favourite editor. So you enter in your text using your editor and when you close the editor, the text you created is plunked right into the text dialog. Voila!

So now there is a little blue edit button right at the edge of my GChat text entry box. The best part is that you can set the plugin preferences to launch your favourite text editor that has character count functionality like Vim, Gedit, TextMate for Mac-heads.. whatever. As long as you like it and it has character count display, you’re rocking and rolling.

Categories Uncategorized

Ubuntu 8.04 now out – Upgrade to Commence in… 2 Weeks

April 24, 2008 //

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) is out today. I guess I’ll wait the customary week or two for the smoke to clear from the Ubuntu servers before trying it out. I’m not sure if it’s just simple underestimation, but in past releases the servers have always slowed to a crawl for many people. Hopefully this time they’ll anticipate things a little better.

I’m looking forward to this release of Ubuntu. While nothing on the feature list is a life-changer for me, I am keen to get Gnome 2.22. With each new release of Ubuntu (I started with Breezy), I’ve always found added stability, interface improvements and an overall increase in quality.

There has been a little bit of backlash recently over the fact that Ubuntu seems to be treated by many - including more mainstream info sources - as the de facto Linux distribution, relegating the multitude of other distros to also-rans in the eyes of many. I personally don’t think this is anything more than a simple (and expected) result of its success. Ubuntu is trying to be all things to all people and doing it pretty well. I don’t think it’s technically superior in all aspects to every other Linux distro, but they are stronger in many other non-technical areas such as community, promotion and web design work. This has helped them immensely.

I’m not precluding the fact that I might be running some other Linux distro a year from now. But unless someone comes up with something very compelling, I just don’t see any reason to consider a switch to something else right now. Nobody does anything so much better or so much different that makes me consider a jump. Don’t misunderstand me, I’d love for that to happen, but I just don’t see it anywhere on the horizon right now.

Categories linux, technology, web

Death, taxes.. and rising fuel prices

April 18, 2008 //

Driving in to work today I saw gas prices at $1.20/litre (regular unleaded) for the first time. Every day that the price continues to rise, the happier I get that I bought a small car last time out.

For our neighbours to the south, that’s about $4.50 per US. Gal.

But I’m not going to complain too much. In the UK they’re paying the equivalent of about $2.20 per litre or about $8.30 per US Gallon!

Note: all values are shown in Canadian or US dollars since at the present time, 1 Canadian loonie is worth about 99.2 US cents.

Next time you wonder why Europeans and Brits drive such small cars, just look at those numbers.

How much are you paying for gas these days where you are?

Categories life

deco archive extractor – I love you. Really.

April 17, 2008 //

While I’m a big fan of the Linux command line, one of the things that I’ve never managed to wrap my head around are the commands used for extracting archives. Sure I generally know what utilities I need to use, but those damn command line flags will be the death of me! Is it tar -xvjf? or -xzf? or.. You get the idea.

Well deco just came to my rescue.

deco is a tiny old-school command line utility that is exactly what I’ve been yearning for. It handles a wide variety of archive types (around 40! according to their site). And best of all, it handles them consistently, simply, and smartly.

The vast majority of what I do is extract archives. With Deco this simply means typing:

deco archivename.tar.bz2

And that’s it. It will extract to the current directory. And better yet, if the archive contains multiple files in its root directory it will create a new folder based on the archive name and put the extracted files in there. But if the archive contains a single file or a single parent folder in it’s root directory then it just extracts it to the current working directory. Exactly what I want to happen! Smart!

In addition deco never overwrites files and will generate copies of extracted files or folders prepended by a “%” symbol if the folder already exists.

Yeah sure it has command line switches for giving an absolute extraction path, controlling how verbose the output is, and a few other things. But I don’t have to mess with any of these to handle 99% of what I do with archives. This is the best part of it.

There doesn’t appear to be pre-built binaries for deco, but I simply downloaded the source, and built it on Ubuntu Gutsy like so:

make
sudo make install

[there is no configure script and I didn’t need to make any changes to the build scripts]

If you’re having trouble keeping all those archive command line switches in your head, you’ll find deco a great little utility.

ps - thanks to the TLLTS guys for the free LinuxJournal subscription - I read about this one over a bowl of Cheerios this morning.

Categories linux, technology

Edumacate these people will ya??

April 15, 2008 //

The other day I received an email at work from a co-worker and friend. He had received it from a friend along with 30 or so other people in the “To:” address field and several other bunches of recipients along the way. He felt it was serious enough to forward to me - I clearly owe him my thanks.

Seems someone was putting HIV-loaded hypodermic needles under gas pump handles. Eeegads! And it was backed up of course by a very official notice posted by an Ontario Provincial Police Captain. Who could refute that? Never mind the fact that this was all done with the noble purpose of alerting all our friends to the grave danger lurking at every fill-up.

Being the geek/skeptic/smarty-pants that I am, I figured a quick visit to snopes.com was in order. Wow. Seems that Mr. Staff Sargeant gets around. He’s issued the same letter for the past several years while working for a variety of police organizations around the continent. I didn’t know it was such a widespread problem.

Clearly not as widespread as gullibility though. In an effort to at least inform a few concerned individuals inside my own tiny circle of influence I hit ‘Reply to All’ and simply typed:

“This is bullshit. See: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/mayhem/gaspump.asp”.

I received only one reply back from the 30 odd people it went to. And that reply was just one word, “Unbelievable.”.

I’m hoping the 29 others were too ashamed/shy/embarrassed to respond, but afraid that most never clicked through on the link.

Maybe there should be some sort of viral campaign to point all of these posts back to snopes or some other source of rational evidence. Deflate ignorance, and the fear it creates and inflate skepticism and intelligence.

Lets edumacate these people!

Categories Uncategorized

Overestimating threats and other parental traps

April 15, 2008 //

As someone with 6 years of successful fatherhood under my belt - what… no award? - I’ve often reminisced about my youth, or more precisely my parents’ handling of my youth. I model a lot of my parenting, as do most I assume, on my own parents. I like the way I was brought up and while I do some things differently, I’ve got a great playbook to work from.

One of the wonderful things I remember is walking to school on my own at the age of 7 or 8. We lived in a section of Metro Toronto called Rexdale. Nowadays it has a significantly poorer reputation, much of which I think is still ill-deserved. Anyways, I used to walk a couple of blocks to school every day enjoying the sunshine and inspecting ants on the sidewalk. No muss. No fuss. My mom was an emergency nurse and as just about any offspring of an emerg nurse will tell you, they don’t mince words. My mom had fully explained to me on many occasions prior, that there were bad people in this world. Not in a way that would hamper my enjoyment of life, it was just a matter of fact thing. She trusted that after explaining these things to me, I would know enough about potential dangers to avoid them. Luckily, and thinking more realistically, not surprisingly, I was never beckoned into a van by a stranger and never fell prey to some foaming-at-the mouth psychopath during all those 15 minute walks back and forth from school.

As a parent now, I confess to letting my daughter run (or ride) to visit the boys a couple of doors down for some well-enjoyed playtime before supper. I find it hard to resist a peek out the window to catch her mid-walk, but there have been a couple of times that I’ve been able to hold myself away from that window and given myself a good 2 or even 3 minutes before inevitably heading out into the garage and onto the driveway for some purported “yard work”. I’m sure she knows that in fact the rake is a shoddy front for parental observation, but she’s not of the age to really care whether I’m watching or not. That comes later I assume.

But still I want to build that trust. I know it will never be easy for me to sleep soundly even when she turns 35 and is finally allowed to start dating. Let’s not even discuss turning 16 and asking for the car keys. Baby steps I tell ya.. baby steps.

Anyway, what brings all this on is a post by security guru Bruce Schneier on Overestimating Threats Against Children. It’s thought provoking to say the least. And I’m inclined to rally against a lot of the fear mongering that pervades the media and society. Sure, all this stuff gets to me once in a while too, but then I force myself to step back and realize that having children (or adults) paralyzed by fear and anxiousness is not the way we should be living our lives - at least not my daughter’s, and not mine.

Categories family, life

Episode 057 – Page Curl

April 11, 2008 //

Episode 057 is now up over on Screencasters. This one took more than a few takes. But I finally got something presentable.

Categories graphics, inkscape, screencast

Canadians So Horny – TheHour

April 10, 2008 //

Categories humour, life, podcasts, web

CrunchBang!

April 9, 2008 //

I’ve been seeing more than a few mentions of CrunchBang Linux on “the Twitter” over the past few days. I had never heard of CrunchBang Linux, but I checked out the site and it appears to be an Ubuntu-based distro aimed at lightness and speed, and uses the Openbox window manager and GTK applications. Hmm.. sounds familiar to me. - I’ve been running Openbox on Gutsy for quite a while now.

Looking at the screenshots on their site, (I haven’t tried out the LiveCD yet, but plan to very shortly), it looks a little dark to me, but they’re basically using the same window decorators as I do, but with more of a clearlooks styled control set. I use the Murrine style of control themes to brighten and shine things up a bit.

Also, Crunchbang appears to use some sort of full-fledged panel (not sure what it is - but plan to find out), whereas right now, I either go panel-less or run Tint for simple application switching. I’ve been itching just a little for a proper panel if only for more automated access to Ubuntu update notifications.

All in all it looks like something I should try out. I still love me the Openbox so it would be nice to have a pre-packaged HardyHeron/Openbox distro. And the fact that CrunchBang is just a cool sounding name to me doesn’t hurt either.

Categories linux, web