All the popular kids seem to be doing it. IE8 has the feature. Chrome seems nippy too.
Meh, lets leave Xgl out of Ibex
Not really stated anywhere obvious, but apparently Xgl isn’t the preferred mechanism for all the special effects in Xorg post 7.1, it’s AIGLX that you should be using. It’s integrated too 🙂
So after wasting a lot of time trying to get the nvidia driver working properly with XGL after the latest updates I just searched the docs here, there and everywhere and finally picked up on the ‘just use AIGLX’ vibe.
Maybe I should be reading the release notes… or are they in the release notes at all? I managed to survive gutsy and hardy without changing over to AIGLX and it still worked, so I may just have missed this in the notes somewhere.
This entry is brought to you by intrepid ibex
Sitting in the Galway Hooker bar, having a pint waiting until my train starts boarding.
Using an Acer Aspire One laptop, running Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex and my USB 3g data dongle.
It’s actually usable. It may be small, but it’s cabable.
Oh, and it looks like my train is boarding. At least I have a seat reserved so I don’t need to queue with the other folks.
Address book searching on the Mac
I don’t want to keep manually syncing my address book on Vodafone with that of my mac, so I use this script to pull out the phone numbers of people when I want to send them a text message using webtext (or my webtext script).
#!/bin/sh
search_for=name
return_val=phone
args=$(getopt s:r: $*)
set — $args
while :; do
case $1 in
-s) search_for=$2; shift;;
-r) return_val=$2; shift;;
—) shift; break;;
esac
shift
done
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
echo 1>&2 "usage: $(basename $0) -s <search> -r <return> YOUR_SEARCH"
exit 127
fi
search=
for i in $@; do
if [[ -z $search ]]; then
search="($search_for contains \"$i\")"
else
search="$search and ($search_for contains \"$i\")"
fi
done
scriptcode="tell app \"Address Book\" to get (value of $return_val) of every person where $search"
osascript -s "s" -e "$scriptcode"
exit 0
You can get it Here.
Trust me…
It tells me to trust it. After all, it’s a certificate that’s signed by a CA that isn’t in the list of known certificate authorities.
I don’t trust certificates. There is a list of certificate authorities a mile long stored on my computer of groups who are to be trusted when a certificate is presented. I don’t know them from adam, and the certs from the Hong Kong post office are about as trusted as the ones from the Apple Root CA – get real people this is not security, this is just posturing. I trust them about as much as I trust the digital quicksand upon which they are based.
I’ve stopped caring anymore. The only thing that these certificates establish is a temporary private channel between me and the web server. The rest; it’s just smoke and mirrors.
Don’t hide or disable menu items…
The suggestion by Joel to not hide or disable menu items is a good one. There’s only one issue. With the way it’s worded you could end up with a swarm of dialogs. I would suggest some form of stackable notification item. The status bar isn’t really suitable for this as there’s no way to get stuff back from it historically.
The ‘in frame‘ dialog that’s becoming popular these days in such browsers as Firefox. This is a reasonable ‘dialog’, and you could remove them automatically after a period of time (say 30 seconds). as long as they are differentiated from the other items on the screen it would be reasonable.
I reboot and get an ’emergency security update’ from Flash
Apparently, it needed to install a security update. I don’t believe I’m using any flash applications that would keep the player in use, so why the pathetic dialog on the left after I installed it? This is one of those cases where pushing through the update makes more sense. As it is this only tells me that I need to reboot my computer to be safe from ‘flash viruses‘.
Is it that the flash component is so embedded in the operating system that updating it requires a reboot? If that’s the case then why? it’s only a little thing for displaying animations; not the end of the fricking world.
Busybox… It’s not soul destroying… mostly
Busybox is pretty much essential if you’re using a small, embedded linux. It’s small footprint and complete replication of most of coreutils (and a bunch of other packages) makes it great. All you end up with are a bunch of symlinks.
The problem is, though, that pretty much all the commands are ‘slightly different‘. They don’t take long options. Help is not helpful (I’ve regularly had to look at the source to tell what’s the problem).
The real problem comes when you decide you want to rip it out of your system. All those minor things that had to be changed to work under the busybox system now have to be re-checked under coreutils and family.
Fun for all the family.
First week into the use of Firefox3
It’s great. simply prettier and a lot more usable than Firefox 2. The awesome bar (the address bar) kicks ass. Much easier to use than the previous one. Bookmark management has been improved. The look and feel is nicer. I even ‘kind of‘ prefer the subtle dialog box improvement which turns up at the top of the form, which is like a wide series of websites that perform the same thing themselves.
This definitely has replaced my web browsers in Windows and Linux. There’s a very high chance that it will replace Safari on the Mac. The only niggle I have is that it doesn’t store your passwords in the Mac keychain, which I still feel is the better place to have them.
Damn the electric fence…
Getting back into the game
Defeating the laughing octopus this time round was significantly easier, simply due to knowing all the patterns already. I do like the leaking the color out of the scene effect that is used at certain sections. Very artsy and very well done.
Then I played for at least an hour after that and remembered to save.
Why can’t these folks auto-save upon zone transitions (like half-life 2). I was saving every time I could simply to be on the safe side.