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.
This gnome tab-rip thing is just killing me
Aargh, it’s too bloody easy to rip off these tabs and there’s no way to re-attach them from what I can tell. Something about the sensitivity pop-up menus and the tab drag thing has been tuned up. It’s practically impossible to keep a pop-up menu open using a two-fingered click (touchpad).
Every time I rip-off a tab it makes me want to throw gnome out the window. the UI seems to have become more and more of a crayon interface without actually improving.
Tabs. A logical option for grouping works on different projects. Apparently, you’re supposed to use multiple windows in a desktop.
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…
what does the ‘+’ mean at the end of an ls entry?
For Linux and the mac, it means that the file has an ACL associated with the file.
~% ls -ld . drwx--x--x 163 pshanahan pshanahan 12288 2008-06-16 16:26 . ~% setfacl -m user:postfix:rx . ~% ls -ld . drwxr-x--x+ 163 pshanahan pshanahan 12288 2008-06-16 16:26 .
On the Mac if you see an ‘@’ sign where the plus(+) is, then it indicates that there’s extended attribute information. If you’ve got a version of ls that supports extended attributes (takes the -@ option), you should see the same thing in Linux.
Bad mac on the sorting front
Well linux and solaris get it correct, but it looks like the little old mac can’t sort things lexicographically (even when it claims in the manpage that it does).
On Linux/Solaris:
~/x% locale LANG=en_IE.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_ALL= ~/x% ls a B c
On the Mac:
himitsu:~/x% locale LANG="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="C" LC_CTYPE="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_IE.UTF-8" LC_ALL= himitsu:~/x% ls B a c
According to the spec:
The following environment variables shall affect the execution of ls …
LC_COLLATE
Determine the locale for character collation information in determining the pathname collation sequence.
Sad little mac does not sort by the locale’s character collation specification (case insensitive, in case you missed it).
typedef long time_t;
There isn’t a lot of time before this evil, evil signed long value goes negative. It should make a good retirement gift for us; Kind of like the Y2K problem. Of course this issue goes away almost immediately when you start working on LP64 programming environments.
Grumbling about determining a particular time zone’s offset from UTC without actually setting the value. There doesn’t seem to be much in the lines of determining this without significant programmatic interference.
Time to get dlna working on the mybook
Well, I have a dlna server running on my little always-on laptop. Now I just need to get something similar on the worldbook, removing the need to have the laptop always on.
Updating Ubuntu over ssh can be dangerous
Setting up network-manager (0.6.5-0ubuntu16.7.10.0) ... Installing new version of config file /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf ... Auto interfaces found: lo eth1 eth2 ath0 wlan0 iface to disable = eth1 iface to disable = eth2 iface to disable = ath0 iface to disable = wlan0 Disabling interface: eth1 ... done. Disabling interface: eth2 ... done. Disabling interface: ath0 ... done. Disabling interface: wlan0 ... done. * Reloading system message bus config... ...done. * Restarting network connection manager NetworkManager
And that’s all it wrote. I do not like NetworkManager – it is a piece of crap
In their rush to get the product out to the customers…
Apple have obviously made some significant backwards compatibility errors. Firstly, there’s the firewall – altering the on-disk content of applications to make them signed when you accept them. Its an interesting approach, but it’s complete pants. You don’t go around altering binaries on disk. You create a detached signature! It’s not really bloody difficult.
On Vista, you can see *every* rule that exists for the firewall. On Leopard, you only get to see the exceptions you created yourself.
I’ve been having random application crashes. They seem to be related to drag and drop operations that went wrong.
the calendar application does not want to talk to my instance of davical properly (all the calendars disappear after restarting, and I get an error every time I create a calendar).
Then there’s the ‘the application terminated unexpectedly’ – no, it didn’t, I used the <Apple>Q menu item to quit the application.
Context sensitivity on the mail application is kinda limited – It doesn’t detect URL links properly – I have a site that’s called http://foo4/…, and all the link comes up with is http://foo. As I said, a bit limited.
Overall, though, the experience is positive. I would have preferred if apple had simply spent some more time testing the damned thing against anything other than their own applications and services.
And, as soon as they allow a replacement for .mac that can be replaced with an external, non-proprietary service I’ll be a happier person