Sam's L33t Journal

The latest Ubuntu release (a long-term support release, 12.04 "Precise Pangolin") is at least much improved from the last release (I finally upgraded a few weeks ago). A lot of the problems with the last release are fixed. Still not totally used to Unity, but this one's worth the upgrade.

There are still some hiccups: Previously-working hibernate support is disabled, and when I re-enabled it on my release it didn't work. IM program Empathy has terrible issues (but I don't really use it).

I went to NYC last weekend. The High Line is a really cool park. I spent not too much money on clothes. Bolt buses are not as cool as those for MegaBus, but the drivers are certainly better.

About a week ago, I saw a story in the Metro about the FBI looking for leads on the girlfriend of famous Boston gangster and fugitive, James "Whitey" Bulger. Earlier this week, he was captured. That's two of the ten most wanted captured or killed this year (both Bulger and Osama Bin Laden were on the Forbes world list and the FBI list).

I arrived at work on Monday to be greeted by the sound of a failed hard drive. Took me until Wednesday to have a work desktop I could login to, and until today-ish to be back to my last saved state. I now have an automated script that takes the changes for each of my checkouts and saves it to a remote directory each night. I didn't before, and I lost a few days of coding as a result.

(Good news: ITA ops supports Ubuntu now! Bad news: It's the LTS release (obviously), so that's a bit of a downgrade. Guess I could try upgrading and see if stuff breaks.)

Family is coming into town next week. I'll be visiting my aunt and uncle on Cape Cod on Thursday. Then I'll be heading to Sandy Island Camp (and disappearing from the face of the internet) the week after that. I am excited!

One of my favorite restaurants in Somerville is closed temporarily after being hit by an SUV. Hopefully, it will be open for business again in short order. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the accident.

Open Source Software:

Went to the Olin Etherpad FAD this last weekend. (Etherpad being a popular piece of open-source collaborative document-editing software, FAD being a "Fedora Activity Day", a hackathon.) Was good, and I can increase the number of open-source projects I've added useful work to by one. Etherpad's code is a mess, though.

Ubuntu 10.10 ("Maverick Meerkat") was released on 10/10. Upgraded my home computer with no problems, upgrading my work machine now.

OpenOffice developers, not willing to take Oracle's (mis)management of the project have forked it, taking the source code and founding LibreOffice. While the process is not quite complete, I think I'll be recommending that over the old OpenOffice.org in the near future.

Open-source Facebook competitor Diaspora put out their first alpha release, demonstrating that when it comes to security, they're completely unprepared.

Finally, here's a brief post on why some of the most successful Linux-based operating systems don't mention Linux in their marketing copy.

Toxic Mudslide in Hungary:

On October 4, a reservoir containing ~700,000 cubic meters of toxic alumina sludge burst in Hungary, killing eight, injuring 123, destroying towns, and threatening local waterways. Photos here. On October 7, the sludge reached the Danube river.

A Bit of Politics:

President Obama vetoed an act requiring state and federal courts to accept notarizations done outside of their jurisdiction, due to concerns that this would facilitate foreclosures based on fraudulent mortgage papers. Several major banks have halted foreclosures in the 23 states that require some judicial process for foreclosures. Last Friday, Bank of America halted all foreclosures, they have since been joined by Goldman Sachs.

Worth watching: Stephen Colbert's in-character testimony to a congressional committee on immigrant labor. Colbert was asked to testify because he was one of the few people to participate in the United Farm Workers "Take Our Jobs" campaign.

Here's a post on the amount of corporate money being spent in the 2010 election in the wake of the Citizen's United case. I still don't think we'll see the whole impact of that case until 2012,

Finally, a post pointing out that the Republican opposition to healthcare reform basically advocates the same thing as the bill that was actually passed.

Other:

Why Groupon may be a terrible deal for small-business owners.

Two videos: Out of Sight (an animated short) and a dance from Genki Sudo (they're odd).

A list of the best Sunday brunch places near Boston, according to followers of BostonTweet.

Mostly for my own reference, here's how to set up the Android SDK with Eclipse on Ubuntu (the documentation has most of this information, but it's rather spread out):

1. Get Eclipse: sudo aptitude install eclipse
2. In Eclipse, go to Help > Install New Software. Add the following as software sources:
   • http://download.eclipse.org/tools/gef/updates/releases/ (for the Graphical Editing Framework)
   • http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo/ (for all the other dependencies, assuming the version of Eclipse you're using is still Galileo)
   • https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ (for the Android SDK itself)
3. Choose that last entry, select all of Developer Tools, and click Next. It should find all the dependencies at that point. If it doesn't, close and reopen the Install New Software window and try that again.
4. Download the Android SDK and unpack it somewhere.
5. Go to Window > Preferences > Android and point that at the directory you unpacked the SDK in (probably named android-sdk-linux_86, with a tools subdirectory). No targets will show up, but that's okay.
6. If you have a specific project to work on, go ahead and import that now. It will complain about missing a specific API or SDK version, use that in the next step.
7. Go to Window > Android SDK and AVD Manager > Available Packages, find the version of Android you want to develop for (probably the lowest version you definitely want your app to work in) or the API version your project wants and select the platform, docs, SDK, and APIs for that.
8. Go back to Window > Preferences > Android and you should see the relevant installed targets.
9. Go to Android SDK and AVD Manager > Virtual Divices > New, select the desired target, and create the device.

Man that's complicated. Wish it was just "sudo aptitude install eclipse-android-2.1". (Also note that 127.0.0.1 on the emulator points to the emulator, 10.0.2.2 points to localhost on the enclosing machine.)

Upgraded Ubuntu to the latest (9.10, Karmic Koala) on my work machine yesterday and my home machine today. Encountered a bunch of problems:

1. Ubuntu Firefox Modifications and Tab Mix Plus still don't get along. The solution is to disable Ubuntu Firefox Modifications in the Add-Ons window in Firefox. I caused myself a lot more trouble trying to debug that one than fixing it actually required. It's a bizarre bug, but only an issue if you use Tab Mix Plus, and really easy to fix once you know what's going on.
2. autofs is still not handled quite right in the boot process. Only an issue if you're mounting your home directory from the network using autofs, but with all the good work they did on the boot process, you think the devs would have caught that one.
3. Speaking of network-mounted home drives, if you have a lot of them, gdm breaks because it tries to mount them all for no good reason.
4. Obsoleted packages were not cleaned up on my work machine at the end of the upgrade process, due to some minor error in some debathena package.
5. The menus in emacs don't update properly. Workaround is to set GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1.
6. Random crashes in gnome-terminal. Possibly this bug? That's really, seriously bad. Actually, it's random crashes in zsh (a non-default shell). Tried downgrading.
7. Had to reinstall some stuff to get Japanese language input working again.
8. Bad behavior on the part of the SmartLink modem driver can cause sound to stop working. If you don't use your modem, the solution is to go to System > Administration > Hardware Drivers and disabling "software modem".
9. Got a bunch of error messages during the upgrade talking about dbus_move_error()... that doesn't seem to have been a real problem, though.
10. Mass operations (backups, anyone?) on Window-format hard drives have been badly broken.
11. The upgrade breaks mp3 support. To fix, remove .xine from your home directory and install (or reinstall) libxine1.
12. The upgrade randomly moves the hue setting in Totem (Movie Player) all the way to the left (this affects a setting also used by other applications, evidently). To fix, go to Edit > Preferences > Display and click "Reset to Defaults".
13. Compiz (desktop effects) breaks workspace switcher drag and drop. Solution is to go to System > Preferences > Visual Effects and set that to "None", but that results in a less pretty desktop, obviously.
14. A new installed-by-default font breaks fonts.conf. The solution is to remove the misbehaving package with "sudo aptitude remove ttf-wqy-zenhei".

There seem to be some really significant good changes, too, though: The easy programs installation / removal utility has been changed from Add/Remove Programs to the slickly designed Ubuntu Software Center. A lot of audio stuff has been improved (although that comes with new issues, as well). Pidgin has been replaced by Empathy as the default IM client (Empathy can do video conferencing, but I don't like the interface quite as much). The boot time is quite a bit faster. Fresh installs also get a new boot loader and an improved default filesystem (ext4 instead of ext3).

Also, a lot of the problems above don't hit most users. Still, unless you need to be on the cutting edge, I might suggest delaying the upgrade for a month or two.

Edited: Reworking this post in place instead of adding new posts on the same topic.