by Mary
The phone itself seems OK, although there’s the possibility of further corrosion I guess. The battery is dead as a door nail, but I’ll be back on the air once I get a new battery.
This seems as good a way as any to let people know: I put my mobile phone through the washing machine yesterday. Andrew is optimistic about it drying out as good as new, I am pessimistic. Either way, I won’t be contactable at all on my mobile for the next few days.
Network Manager can’t always tell the difference between wired and wireless cards (bug 60162) and X can’t always… work (bug 60882).
I think I’m noting these more or less just to imprint on my mind not to upgrade before the beta release, next time. Especially not just because I can’t join an IRC channel, of all things.
I upgraded to Edgy on the weekend, mostly so that I could get a newer version of my IRC client. And actually, I was doing that because an IRC channel keyword I’d been given wasn’t working and I figured it must be my client. It turned out, in fact, that the keyword was bad somehow, so that was a wasted upgrade.
So, what of Edgy in general? Unfortunately for Ubuntu, the software as a whole tends to work well enough that I only notice broken things when I upgrade, so here’s the bad things I’ve noticed:
When I log in, GNOME reports that CPU scaling is not available on my machine, so dagnabit, it’ll either run it at 1.6GHz constantly or just tell me it is, I haven’t worked out which. This is one of those things that has worked for me in every previous version of Ubuntu, so it’s annoying that it’s broken now. I believe this is bug 36014.
If you type words into the address bar, the epiphany browser no longer treats them as search terms for Google, it instead treats them as a bad URL. Now you need to type words in and then select Search the Web
in the drop-down box. This is one of those niche desktop behaviours that a very small fraction of the users were doing but that I was so addicted to that it was central to my use of the application. It is going to take the best part of a month to retrain my URL usage. I’m heartily tired of the behaviour of the address bar in both Firefox and Epiphany changing (and differently changing) in every new Ubuntu release. That dialog is probably my single most used text input box. No bug, because in my experience changes in the behaviour of this kind of dialog are generally deliberate.
Aptitude, which I use for package management, is now incredibly slow to resolve dependencies. As in, dependency problems that it previously worked out instantly now take a minute or so. It takes that long to begin every single system update. I’m pleased to see that this is bug 51893 and there should be a new package waiting that fixes most of it.
So far, Edgy seems unlikely to best Breezy (Ubuntu 5.10) in its place in my heart as most stable Ubuntu release to date
(Dapper — Ubuntu 6.06 LTS — was less stable for me, Long Term Support be damned, although it’s solid enough on servers). I guess the name is a warning though. In news of things that aren’t broken suspend and hibernate don’t seem to have broken this time around, which is, I think, the first major development version I’ve upgraded to where I didn’t have to spend a lot of time convincing them to work again. And Unison still works for once: usually it whinges if you’re copying files to a machine with a different version of Unison, which is a problem if I don’t want to upgrade all of my servers to the development Ubuntu. (That’s Unison’s fault, not Ubuntu’s, of course. The protocol ought to be stable enough that the server and client can have different versions and still talk to each other).
I hope the intermittent problem with hibernating I had with Dapper are gone, but since they were intermittent I don’t know. Likewise, I hope bug 49221 has disappeared for me at least, but since it was intermittent I can’t be sure yet.
Andrew and I are going to the snow this week, and we’ll be un-broadbanded. Since I have some work I need to finish for a conference paper, and I know that the lodge has a fixed line, I thought I’d grab a temporary dialup account.
I would have thought that pre-paid dialup, which does exist, made sense. But either you have to pay a lot for a little (our friends at BigPond, as usual) or you have to go to a physical store and ask the blank-faced underpaid sales assistants to provide you with something that they sell very little of and therefore have never heard of (Primus, Chilli). And in any case I really don’t like the model where I look something up on a computer at home with a broadband connection and a perfectly good Visa card sitting right next to me, only to have a website tell me that I have to go to the shops to pick up a card, at which point I have to take the card back home, log onto a website using said pre-existing connection, and set up a new account. Since it involves a pre-existing connection anyway, why not just let me sign up online?
I do confess to having been stupid enough to try this retail outlet scheme this morning though. I was duly punished for that when Dick Smith told me that they don’t even sell the starter packs for pre-paid dialup, only the refills, for goodness sake.
Anyway, thanks to those picky folk at Whirlpool I found Beagle. Nice and simple. Beagle’s not pre-paid in the usual sense (that is, you have a fixed amount of access that expires at some point), they do actually sign you up for an ongoing dialup connection on a monthly billing cycle. But there’s no contract and cancellation is an easy, automatic and well-advertised website feature. $13 a month. Looking around a bit more I see that AstraTEL among others could do it a little cheaper, but with uglier web pages, so on the balance I’m still ahead.
And testing it out, I find that the support for my laptop’s onboard SmartLink modem has improved, I now only have to install sl-modem-daemon rather than needing to compile a kernel driver as well. Another win!
It’s Blog Day, or at least, it was, I was alerted to it late and timezones don’t help. Anyway, the idea is to recommend other people’s blogs. I’ve done this before for the Australian blog awards, so I’ll stick to new discoveries and people to whom I am not related:
I know I have a number of readers who really don’t like reading about weight loss or dieting (mostly for political reasons or because it’s triggering), and so I’ll warn that if you don’t want to read about weight loss or dieting, you shouldn’t read Diet Girl. DG — she’s actually Shauna Marsh, the author of perennial Australian super-blog favourite What’s New Pussycat, but only outed herself as Diet Girl recently, due to having made the press — is not totally unaware of or unsympathetic to pro-fat or health at any size arguments… but she’s obviously personally rejected some of them.
That said, the reason I’m recommending it to untriggered folk is that, well, it’s Shauna Marsh and it’s the same mash of silly moments, minor neuroses and general fun.
This is one of those cheating ones where I’m recommending something that’s a lot more popular than I am (2–3 orders of magnitude, I’d say, in the case of OW). But just in case it isn’t well known to Australian readers: if you’re interested in US domestic politics and international relations from what would count as the soft-left point-of-view as judged in the US you could do worse than following at least Hilzoy’s and Katherine’s posts.
Again with the super-blogs, sorry. But I read Making Light for one of the minor sideshows: Jim Macdonald’s posts on first aid and emergency treatment. You can grab the lite emergency-only Making Light from my del.icio.us feed.
Cheating again, but in a different way: this is a carnival of blogs, not a blog itself. Go to the sidebar for the action.
I’m surprised that the carnival thing hasn’t crossed over into Free Software blogging. In any case, the idea is that each week or fortnight or whatever, a chosen blogger hosts a ‘carnival’: a round-up of the best posts fitting under a certain umbrella. There seem to be a lot of them, but this is the one I read, because it touches on issues I’m perpetually interested in: posts on sexual harassment, women’s roles as homemakers and workers, sex, that kind of thing.
Divster is the best general purpose scuba diving blog I read, the others are mainly holiday fantasy blogs about diving in South-East Asia. Non-divers should at least check out their Flickr pool This is Why We Dive and also their competition to pick the real close encounters with sharks.
Andrew and I have one good set of speakers. Actually, they’re mine. I saved money for one and got the other with 21st birthday money. But this breaks a lot of the assumptions of household music sharing applications. It’s quite common to want to have a single place where all the music is stored and then siphon it off onto random players. It seems comparatively uncommon to want jukebox functionality: not uncommon enough that it’s never been done (oh boy has it been done), but one does rather seem to get stuck in the land of I had this party once and hacked up this software
rather than something with the imprimatur our new desktop overlords.
Anyway, the Music Player Daemon is rather big in this world, and for a while I used its client gmpc because it seemed to be the best of the GTK-clients (and I just hate dependencies, don’t you know?). But it wasn’t actually good enough. To select a song to add to the playlist involved launching a new window, scrolling down a huge list of artists, clicking on the artist I wanted, clicking on the album the song is on (how should I know?) and then clicking the song.
Having used Rhythmbox I’m really quite stuck on a one window model where it’s possible to find a song in various ways without having MPD’s first artist then album then song hierarchy imposed on me. And today I found Pymp’d (I suspect it’s meant to be pronounced pimped
, or possibly pimp-d
), which is an MPD client in the style of Rhythmbox.
So far so good, with a few hassles:
But it’s going to actually make my expensive speakers usable again, so thumbs up so far.
Dennis Forbes has a nice line in Google criticism, or Google-cheerleading criticism anyway:
While Google is undoubtedly a technical superstar that is executing ideas absolutely brilliantly, it is remarkable seeing such admiration for what is essentially an internet advertising company. Where was the love for DoubleClick?
I recall this most often when their employees occasionally forget that the term unsolicited commercial email
might apply to email from them… even email about something they’re sure I’d really like! Every time I post about this I hope I can ride a wave of Internet scandal, but no one ever notices. Nevertheless:
And now they’re bothering the freedesktop.org mailing list administrators, which is better than bothering me of course, but even so.
Dear Internet travel pundits,
At the moment, people flying in and out of London and some European and North American airports cannot take hand luggage on their flights. Owners of laptops an other expensive electronic equipment must check it in if they wish to fly with it. Stop sanctimoniously telling people with laptops that they shouldn’t worry unless they don’t have travel insurance, in which case their main worry is that they’re an idiot anyway.
Why? Well, here’s what travel insurance companies have to say about checking laptops in as cargo hold luggage:
Navigator Travel Insurance Budget Policy
The Underwriter will not pay for the following in addition to the general exclusions on pages 5 and 6 in connection with claims made under section E:
[…]
12. loss, theft or damage to Valuables, which at the time of such loss, theft or damage were located in checked-in luggage or an unattended motor vehicle
[…]
Valuables Means cameras and other photographic equipment, video equipment, audio equipment, computer including all discs and tapes…
We will not pay for any of the following losses:
[…]
12. A loss, or theft of, or damage to:
[…]
(e) a video camera, mobile telephone, photographic equipment, personal computer, or jewellery left unattended by you in a motor vehicle, or are transported in the cargo hold of any aircraft, ship, train or bus;
11.2 WE WILL NOT PAY
We will not pay a claim in relation to your luggage and personal effects if:
[…]
b] Your jewellery, mobile phone, camera, video camera, computer equipment or their accessories are transported in the cargo hold of any aircraft, ship, train or bus.
[All italics are this author’s emphasis.]
OK, I might be cheating with the last two, because they’re both Australian and for all I know have the same underwriter, possibly the same lawyer. However, the basic point is that travel insurance people are in the business of not paying out and those very moments where you think phew, thank goodness I have travel insurance, I’m a smart person and therefore have nothing to worry about
are those times when you find that they don’t cover some perfectly normal activity; like being forced to carry a laptop as checked baggage thanks to security threats.
Back in the glory days of 2000, you could tell a geek house because of the blue Cat-5 cables strung everywhere. We sure had them. In 2001 when I lived in a 5 geek household I think one was the best part of 30 metres long. Andrew has had a trusty Netgear DS108 hub since about two days after I added my computer to his and Tim’s and the house network had to grow beyond crossover. It’s been driving our network ever since, even though Andrew has been looking at it and willing it to turn into a switch about once every three months for all that time.
Anyway, these days the revolution is wireless, and that’s for values of ‘these days’ that covers about three years. Andrew and I are tragically slow to spend money on gadgets, oddly. We got wireless enabled laptops in 2004 and they were even supported by our operating system before the year was out. But blue cables have remained, until today.
Why today? Well, that’s because of another, older revolution. For the last month and a half, my parents have had broadband. (Actually, this is a meaner feat than it sounds; they live about 10km out of town in a rural area. I didn’t even know that Telstra did ADSL for people like that until my father emailed me from his new email address.) This means that it’s somewhat plausible that we can go out there for a few days and work from there, which is certainly nicer than spending five hours on a bus on Saturday, spending fifteen hours there, and spending five hours on a bus back. But that means being able to hook nicely into their ‘net setup. And that means wireless.
So we shopped around purely on a price basis and ended up getting a Netgear WGR614 wireless router, with bonus points for the salesman actually being quite nice and chatting to us about our setup and warning us that if we were to accidentally mention to our ISP’s tech support that we used wireless they’d probably hang up. (That’s ok, Andrew told him, we use Linux. They can’t hang up twice in one phone call.)
And then of course there were fun and games configuring the thing. It wants to be the kitchen sink: a router with an in-built DHCP server. We have a large and fairly expensive router and DHCP server already as it happens, and for bonus points it has an 80GB hard-drive and acts as my primary mail server. And I know how to set it up. So I needed to get into the wireless router and hit the magic don’t be clever
button. I was expecting this to be rather like our ADSL modem configuration: that is, you really do log in and say please be a dumb bridge, no routing, yes, I’m looking at you, stop that routing
(so to speak). Not so easy with the wireless router. It really wants to be the kitchen sink.
The trouble with stuff like this is usually knowing what to search for. I was searching for netgear wireless modem bridging
initially, which was just stupid, I kept getting product reviews. (It turns out the search term would be access point
, by the way, access point being the wireless jargon for not being a clever clogs.) And, notably, for once I was actually saved by a natural language query interface! I worked on natural language question answering for a year without ever believing that anyone had a working one. (To be fair, we were trying to return short pithy answers, not whole documents.) I put How do I put wgr614 in bridge mode?
into the the Netgear knowledge base search box and actually got something useful back.
And then we spent an extra hour fiddling around because I stupidly didn’t pay attention to the bit where you change the IP address of the wireless router/access point
to one that fits your network manually rather than expecting your main DHCP server to do it. (Also, for the benefit of anyone wading through this crap trying to actually configure one of these things, change the IP address under LAN IP Setup
, don’t bother about the Internet IP Address
under Basic Settings
because that’s to do with the port that you’re not going to use. And for the benefit of confused people thinking about bringing wireless into your lives and wondering what the hell I’m going on about, don’t worry, and follow the install directions and let it work everything out automatically; if you don’t have a machine in your house that you affectionately know as my server
you don’t need to go through this, lucky you.)