Feisty Fawn
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 28, 2007, 10:44 pm
So, Ubuntu isn’t officially releasing their next release (named “Feisty Fawn”) until April, but Ubuntu users are given the chance to beta test it by doing a distribution upgrade. I immediately jumped at the chance.
There’s a lot of good stuff — all the latest software versions (Firefox, Gaim, nVidia drivers, etc.), but there’s one big drawback — the network manager.
Here’s a bug report that details the problem. I’ll break it down for you.
If you want to configure a static network using network manager, you’re screwed because it won’t handle it. If you want to do it the right way (by modifying /etc/network/interfaces), then network manager will tell all your apps (like Gaim) that there’s no internet connection — even though you can ping all around the world and you clearly do have a network connection.
My solution? Uninstall that pesky “network-manager” package… but then it forces you to uninstall the “ubuntu-desktop” dummy package (it depends on network-manager). Not that big a problem, but now every time I update from the command line, apt tells me that I’ve got ninety zillion packages that “are no longer needed” — like all the gnome packages. Funny.
Hopefully by April they’ll have this bug fixed.
In other news
I’ve made a few slight changes to the site:
- Made the article titles links to that article. You’d think that would have been the way I originally designed it, but I was dumb.
- On that note, I moved the comment count under the article, right above the social links. I think it looks much better there.
- Set the “articles per page” to five instead of ten. Ten articles makes a given page way too long.
Hopefully soon I’ll have some kind of banner up.
I’ve also been told that there’s a problem with the border at the bottom of the content panel in IE6 (though it looks fine in 7), and that the size of the content div is off in IE7 (the header and footer are both two pixels wider than the sidebar/content divs).
Honestly? Fuck it. If you’re bothered by it, download Firefox… or Opera… or Safari… or any browser that makes an attempt to conform to standards.
It's Two Inches Bigger
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 27, 2007, 12:56 pm
Check out my new monitor, folks. Here’s the highlights:
- Samsung LCD, model number 731BF
- 17 inch (standard ratio, 4:3)
- 1280x1024 native resolution
- 0.264 pixel pitch
- 2000:1 contrast ratio
- 2ms response time (GTG)
I’ve finally replaced the nine-year-old 15 inch CRT monitor that came with my first Dell — the one with the smokin’ fast 400 Mhz Celeron (or “celery stick”, as someone once called it).
It’s amazing what a difference I’ve seen. I can actually see the contents of a syntax-highlighted file in Vim (even the dark red or dark blue text). I don’t have the brightness set to 100 percent so I can see my desktop. When I play World of Warcraft, I can see when I enter a cave without adjusting the gamma.
I know it’s only two inches bigger, but everything looks huge compared to my old monitor.
Also — Wow, I have a desk. I can set a bowl of popcorn in front of myself while I’m watching a DVD.
It’s a Godsend. Well worth the $200 I paid.
As with everything, though, there are a few bad parts. The stand isn’t that adjustable. You can change the viewing angle, but that’s pretty much the only adjustment you can make. It didn’t come with a DVI cable. The thing that gets me down, though, is that there’s no room for my stickers.
On my old monitor, I had about two inches of plastic framing that I used for my little personal touches. Stickers, mostly. The green-on-black dot-matrix font sticker that says “I LIKE SOURCE CODE”. The yellow caution sign that says “Are we having fun yet?”. The Chiquita banana stickers. Several others.
This new monitor has maybe a quarter of an inch of real estate around the screen, and I’d be hard pressed to put anything there.
Oh well. Now I have my own refrigerator to put stickers on.
Why Google Maps kicks even more ass
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 22, 2007, 6:50 pm
I was wowed by a new Google Maps feature — “Add destination”. It greatly enhances your trip planning experience by allowing you to plan a route with multiple stops along the way. You can even shift around the order of the stops with ease.
Let’s say you’re going to a party in Atlanta. You pop the address into Google Maps and get directions by putting your address in after clicking “Get directions: To here” link in the balloon popup.
Suddenly your buddy Mike calls and says he wants to go too, but you need to pick him up because his car’s in the shop. No problem. Just click “Add Destination…” (right below the directions) and add his address.
Well now (according to the directions), you’re going from your house to the party, then to Mike’s. No problem. Just drag Mike’s “destination block” above the party destination block. The map is instantly refreshed.
I wonder how many destinations you can add. What if Carl and Tiffany wanted to come? Could you use Google Maps to plan a bus pickup schedule with fifty passengers? Could you manually solve the Chinese Postman Problem ?
But wait, there’s more! Go up to the top of the page and click “Saved Locations” (I think you have to be logged in to your Google account to use this feature). Bam, a list of almost every location you’ve ever searched for using Google maps. You can’t directly add locations to your current map from this page, but it does list the locations it uses to for auto-completion.
The only problem I have with the system is that you have to open another window to find extra destinations if you don’t have an exact address (or at least a close approximation). It’s still light years ahead of all other mapping applications, though.
Piracy and College Campuses
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 22, 2007, 4:40 pm
It seems that music companies are cracking down on Universities.
I used to be a pirate. I remember dealing with the stupid Scour.net downloader app until napster came out. I justified my actions with the typical arguments:
“Music should be free!”
“I’m too poor to buy a full album.”
“Why by the whole album when there’s only a few good songs on it?”
“I’m only trying out the music. If it’s good, I’ll buy the album.”
I’ve since realized that it’s just wrong. No matter how you slice it, no matter how you justify it, it’s wrong. Copyrights exist for a reason. Right now the only mp3s I have on my hard drive are mp3s I’ve ripped myself from my own cds (well ok, so I ripped some cds from a friend or two).
My conviction has only been strengthened by working in the IT department here at Georgia Southwestern. I’ve even seen the little eight-minute video (which was released with a fairly open license — I’m sure you can find it somewhere) they mention in the article.
We’re fairly strict about downloading music and other copyrighted material. If you’re caught once, you’re kicked off the network until a technician can verify that you’ve uninstalled all known P2P software. If you’re caught twice, you’re off the network until the end of the semester. If you’re caught a third time (or any offense is considered “severe”), you’re off the network for good.
Sound harsh? I don’t think so. Our network administrator has gotten a few official letters and irate from movie and music recording industries’ lawyers. I think I’d rather be warned by my university before I had Universal Studios sue my ass.
“But Tim,” you say, “what’s the difference between a campus network and my home network?”
It’s called the Open Records Act. The link points to Georgia State Code. I’m unsure if other states have similar laws in effect.
When you’re surfing from home using Bellsouth DSL or Mediacom Cable, you’re using privately-owned hardware and a privately-owned IP. Your ISP has no obligation to give out any information about you to anybody without a warrant. You’re fairly anonymous.
At a university, however, the network and the IP belong to the state, and your records fall under the Open Records Act. By law, our network administrator must cooperate fully with any authorities by providing network traffic records, information about your dorm, and even your name. You’re not nearly as anonymous.
Somehow, some students escape judgment and blame can be placed on the University. Departments feud about the rights of the student. We’ve got a student here (and no, I won’t tell you his name) that we’ve gotten two official letters on two separate occasions. That’s two severe offenses. When asked about his second offense, he says “Yeah, I just wanted to see if I could get away with it again.”
You know what? He did. He got off scott fucking free. He should be off our network. He should have been expelled. He should be tied to a chair so our Network Administrator could come in and kick him in the nuts every day, but he’s not. He’s free, and he’s still using our network because the Office of Student Life has more clout with the higher ups.
So yeah, we are a little strict, but don’t worry. OSL takes care of its babies.
Autumn
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 21, 2007, 2:24 pm
I read an interesting story about one man’s quest to find the setting of a photograph recently. It’s funny how you can read about someone else’s obsession and completely know how he feels.
Here’s a google map of the address according to the article. I think the barn in question is the building slightly south east of the arrow (switch to satellite view to see it).
I’m not sure how to express how this makes me feel. It’s just amazing that someone could find something so trivial, and it was interesting to read about his search.
RSS
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 19, 2007, 12:32 pm
I’ve switched from a local rss to a feedburner rss… so everyone that’s subscribed to the local rss (I think that’s just one person) needs to re-subscribe or I can’t get the full benefit of using feedburner.
Anti iPhone?
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 16, 2007, 2:13 am
Ever since the iPhone was announced, I’ve been looking forward to an alternative that would work with Verizon. Today, I ran across this little wonder. At first I was elated, but after reading the post I’m not too convinced it’s such a good thing.
For starters, there’s nothing that says it’ll work on a CDMA network, and I can’t help but notice a bit of trepidation about the device from the author of this blog post. Any time a fellow geek starts talking about his “BS meter”, it’s a bad thing.
Still, I think it’s a good idea. It’s based completely on open source software, which is any geeks dream, right down to the operating system — Linux.
But it’s not just the fact that it uses OSS that gets me. It’s that the philosophy behind the device follows the ideology behind OSS.
Man, I can’t wait for some mouthbreather to write a virus for it and screw us all out of a good thing.
First web form post
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 14, 2007, 3:37 pm
If this post goes through, it’ll be the first post I’ve made using my own php form — up until now I’ve been using PHP MyAdmin to make my posts, which can be a tad annoying because if it takes me more than 30 minutes to write up a post, my session times out.
I’ve also fixed a few other things. The archive links now work. I’ve also fixed the code so that only ten posts show up on the page (not in the archives, though). If I ever get past ten posts, you’ll see links at the bottom to go to the next (or previous) page of posts.
I’m also double-thinking my strategy about using Markdown for html formatting (for posts and comments). It does lessen the amount of coding I have to do, but I often find that I’ve forgotten the syntax for something and I have to go back to the Markdown page to look it up.
Also, I need a banner. Any good graphical artists out there?
EDIT: Apparently the “mysqlrealescape” function in php doesn’t like line breaks — it turns them into the 4-character string “rn”.
Why is that four characters instead of just two? Hell if I know, but it makes all my posts (and comments, which is something I never bugtested) into one big paragraph instead of several nicely separated paragraphs. Strange.
EDIT Again: OOOO! I fixed it!
Something New
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 12, 2007, 5:44 pm
I’ve added RSS and “social” buttons. Right now the frontend of the blog is mostly complete. I just have to make archiving work properly, then it’s on to the backend stuff (interface for posting and editting and what not).
I haven’t run the rss through a validator (yet), and I’m getting an odd problem. If you check out the rss feed through firefox, it doesn’t show any of the items, but it works fine through google reader — at least for me. Let me know if you have any problems with it.
I wanted to use some cool 3-D icons that I found online for the social buttons, but they didn’t have reddit or digg, so I just stole the images from Daniel Miessler.
Free Software
by Tim Faircloth on Feb 12, 2007, 12:36 pm
I saw a post on slashdot today (article) that got me to thinking about free software. Every linux geek out there (including myself) will tell you how great linux is because it does everything you need it to and it’s stable, but I think there’s another underlying reason we all like linux so much.
It’s free.
Think about it. If you hired me to create so much as a web page for you, I’d probably charge some nominal fee. Linux and FOSS programmers, however, offer their services free of charge.
That says a lot about the programmers themselves. Running linux and using those tools is a tribute to all those nameless faces that sat at their terminals late at night writing code because that’s what they enjoy doing.
I think every linux geek wants to write some uber-tool that people will use, and that’s why we use linux and FOSS: it brings us closer to that true hacker mentality.