Category: Technology

I have to say, I wasn’t expecting to like the Linux laptop experience that much, but I was just playing with the synaptics driver written for XFree86/Xorg, and I can’t believe how much careful work has been put into it. The authors have a truly well-designed driver here. Let me give a quick resume:

• Non-linear acceleration. This means that you can define a minspeed and a max speed for your mouse cursor, and also define an acceleration ratio for how quickly it goes between those two speeds. This allows you to have a slow moving cursor when you want to make fine movements (i.e. in the GIMP or when positioning an insert cursor), and still allows you to get across the screen by moving your finger quickly across the pad.
• Fully working palm detection, so that when you are typing, you can still rest part of your hand on the trackpad and not move the cursor.
• Support for all sorts of tapping. This is the one I love most. I can tap the pad for single click, double-tap for double-click, and double-tap and drag for selection and/or drag and drop. Additionally, one can tap with two fingers (middle and index, for example) for middle-click and tap the bottom-right-hand corner for right-click. Alternatively to the two-fingered middle-click, one can tap the top-right corner.
• Support for vertical scroll on right side of trackpad. A great feature that allows you to slide your finger down the right side of your trackpad to achieve vertical scroll up or down.

Conclusion: you can do all your mousing from the pad, without even using the clicking buttons. It’s extremely intuitive, fast, and accurate. I’m impressed.

The other innovation I discovered was the taglist plugin for vim, which, when combined with exuberant-ctags, makes for quick source file browsing. Very handy for these OS class labs I’m working on, where the source files tend to be pretty big and involve lots of routines you didn’t code.

I didn’t really like any of the wifi-related tools out there for switching networks, so I scratched an itch and coded my own. Read more if you’re interested in obtaining an easy-to-configure bash script that requires iwconfig, ifstate tools, zenity and dhcpcd, and can easily allow you to set an array of prioritized wireless networks which are scanned and joined if found. After you establish your connection, dhcpcd is called to negotiate your IP address. It works quite nicely, and allows me to move from network to network and only have to click a button to enable my wifi access. Check it out (code inside)…

It may have taken me a few hours and some lost hair, but I finally got Linux running (and running well) on my Averatec 3225 Notebook last night.

Kernel support is there for everything in 2.6.8.1, but the two major causes of problems are the Wifi chipset (RaLink’s 2500) and the built-in video (VIA’s S3/Unichrome chipset).

To find out how to get this stuff working decently well, read on.

This article on OSNews elicited a response. Here it is:

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Horrible to get these issues confused. A standard says: “there’s one way to do X because without a single way of doing X, the benefits of system Y would be useless or unavailable to most users and/or developers.” A lack of choice says: “There’s only one way to do X… just cause.”

So, yes, HTML, CSS, these are standards. Are they suboptimal? Maybe. But if there were 65 different markup languages/style sheet specifications out there, the web would be useless. So a standard was necessary.

That’s why good standards tend to last a long time. Other ones tend to get phased out. For example, HTML is a standard, but XHTML (some might argue) is a better standard, which may be phasing HTML out (in the long term). ASCII was a standard for a long time. UTF-8/Unicode is now considered a better standard, and is phasing ASCII out.

There’s no paradox in saying, “I want to have the choice to use emacs, vim, or gedit, but I also want there to be only one encoding for text files so that I can send those files to my friends or cut and paste their content into other programs.” Again, if there were no text encoding standard, then computer systems as a whole would more or less break down as there would be no application interoperability.

So please be clear on these definitions! I don’t think UNIX developers want to “have it both ways.” I think they are being completely sane about this. Edit: Think about it: what better way to increase the power of choice than to enforce good standards? We want choice in applications, but standards among them!

Some scary stuff going on in the discussions at Slashdot today over Microsoft’s “Trusted Computing” initiative.

quote (Two Slashdot posters):

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They [Microsoft] have already made the deals w/ Phoenix to make a MSFT certified BIOS that will enable them to not boot �insecure� OSs [read: Linux]. They are in talks to get the RIAA to support a format to make CDs unreadable in machines other than those running Windows (I presume this would include insecure versions of Windows as well). They are working to get the MPAA to agree to allow them to distribute movie materials via WMP which will likely lead to DVDs �protected� with MSFT products…

Sure, you can run all the free software in the world on your OpenBIOS computer. You will not be able to watch media, listen to media, surf the net, etc, because everything will require a “trusted” computer.

Yeah, it’s paranoid, yeah it’s probably [it seems] unlikely, but this is where we are headed whether we like it or not.

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I wrote a quick patch for the mbox-dedup.pl script I found online awhile ago. Basically, the author wrote a script that takes an mbox and creates a new mbox with all duplicate messages removed. I have to deal with duplicate e-mails constantly due to some weird incompatibility between Evolution and my Argosoft Mail Server (Windows), which I’ll have to figure out some day soon.

This script is just a temporary solution. I modified it so it now creates three files: $f.bak, a backup of your old mbox; $f, your new, dupe-free mailbox; and $f.dup, which is a mailbox which ONLY contains messages detected as duplicate. You can probably get rid of f.bak and keep f.dup around in case there were any mistakes in duplicate detection (which is what I’m doing). How annoying through. Anyway, if this bothers you, download the script, but use at your own risk.

Read it here. It encourages programmers taking breaks to think about the bigger issues and reduce code bloat.

I understand now why programmers end up so conflicted. They have to work to meet deadlines, but often problems could be solved much more elegantly if there were extra time.

If I ever did run a software development company, one of the rules would be that everyone runs Workrave, a great free tool that forces you to take breaks from your computer every once in awhile. Not only does this reduce your chance of RSI/Carpal Tunnel, but it also provides a way for you to sit back and think about a problem in the abstract, rather than code your way through it.

I know deadlines are a reality. But in a perfect world, programming projects would be done “when they’re done.”

Man, Linux actually crashed. My little Workrave window was about to come up telling me to take a break, and before it could be drawn by GTK, the whole computer hard-locked. That teaches me to run a development kernel (2.6.6-rc2) when there is a newer, stable release out.

Luckily I didn’t lose anything since I constantly save my work. But hard-locks are exactly why I switched away from Windows, so this was disheartening.

Once August rolls around I’ll upgrade my kernel to something more stable.

Just got back from Northampton today. Was able to do some work remotely but not as much as I wanted, so I’ve been working late into the night. Still much to do, but at least I got JavaMail working properly and am finally, finally, finally finalizing my form design with JSP/Servlets on the UAC project. In the meanwhile, in Noho I was able to use my notebook to put together new form designs to be plugged in later.

But in more interesting news (not much more interesting)…. Wow! Lots happened while I stayed out of touch with the major news websites. Eclipse 3.0 (including new native builds) is well-received. Mono 1.0 was released. Java 1.5 (or, ahem, 5) Beta was released. Looking Glass was open sourced. Apple’s OS X Tiger was previewed and is now being scrutinized by Mac lovers. Wow, wow, wow, wish I had more time to explore all this good stuff.

Man, Dashboard is what gdesklets should be. Once we have a solid X system that is actually 3D accelerated in Linux, then we’ll be able to have more fun on the desktop.

Spotlight seems very cool, but I think Gnome Storage will be better. This may be an armchair code pundit speaking, but I think Linux geeks know how to do searching better than Apple geeks. Spotlight’s integration with Finder will look nicer, but Gnome Storage will actually find me my files.

Argh, gonna lay off this blog for a few days ’till I can say work isn’t bogging me down.

I think I must be doing the funkiest development on the planet right now. Connecting to a Debian Linux server running under VMWare Server under Windows 2000 Server as my test server, which is modeling the production server, a Redhat environment.

Locally, I’m connecting to this virtual Linux server via NFS, and plugging Eclipse right into the NFS exported directory, using uid/gid mapping to make sure permissions are okay.

Finally, running VMWare Workstation locally (for access to Dreamweaver/Photoshop) and connecting to the NFS mounted drive by connecting to the mount point on my local machine via SAMBA! That is, I have a mount point on my machine /mnt/server1 which maps to the IP of my server via NFS. And I made /mnt/server1 shareable via samba to my VMWare “Virtual Machine’s” IP address. So that means when I write a file from VMWare, it’s using the Windows SMB implementation which is interpreted by Linux’s SMB daemons, which are then sent over the Internet to my server using the NFS protocol and finally written to my server’s disk. All in milliseconds, no less.

Wow! That’s a lot of layers to peel off when something goes wrong. But so far, nothing has (this is very surprising for me).