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It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

Weblogging and commentary by Chip Rosenthal

Responsible Growth for Northcross

Submitted by chip on Wed, 06-Dec-2006 - 10:36 pm
in

You may have heard they are trying to build a 24-hour Wal-Mart mega-center in my neighborhood. Have you also heard that at 219,000 square feet, it is to be the second largest retail store in central Texas? Ay caramba!

There is a group called Responsible Growth for Northcross that is working on this issue. Today, they rolled out a new web site. There is even a blog there. I'm helping with that. So, stop by and visit some time.

An Example of Ruby Introspection

Submitted by chip on Wed, 06-Dec-2006 - 11:06 am
in

In my blog post yesterday about Java, I made positive mention of the Ruby programming language. I pointed out that by giving you the power to do some potentially dangerous and confusing things, Ruby also gives you the power to do some very cool stuff. Let me give you an example.

Let's start with a class called Person with a single attribute name:

class Person
    attr :name
end

Java is the Snubby-Nosed Scissors of Programming Languages

Submitted by chip on Mon, 04-Dec-2006 - 11:54 pm
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I've had to teach myself Java for my current contract. You may be surprised to find that with all the code I sling, I've not done any Java development up until now. Java is popular for enterprise application development, and I haven't done a lot of work in that space before.

I usually like learning new languages. I'm not enjoying Java at all. It's verbose and wordy, like a pedantic little schoolkid. It's like the snubby-nosed scissors of programming languages.

Why Regal Cinemas Suck

Submitted by chip on Sun, 03-Dec-2006 - 11:36 pm
in

If you want to know what's so wrong with the movie business today, go look at somebody who is doing it right. That's easy here in Austin, because we're home to the Original Alamo Draft House theaters.

My wife and I frequently go to Sunday night movies. The town is quiet and it's easy to get in. That is, it's easy unless you are trying to go to our neighborhood theater, the Alamo Village. For the past couple of months, every time we've gone to a Sunday movie the show has sold out. Even when we went to a Sunday evening showing of The Departed many weeks into the release, every seat was taken.

You May Be a Jerk

Submitted by chip on Sun, 03-Dec-2006 - 10:50 am
in

Here is the world's smallest personality test:

You are sitting in a restaurant. A call comes in on your mobile phone. Do you:

  1. Silence the phone and return the call after dinner.
  2. Excuse yourself from the table to take the call.
  3. Answer it and say you'll call back after dining.
  4. Answer it and talk away.

Okay, pencils down. Let's score your results.

Fighting Web Scraping with Apache Rewrite

Submitted by chip on Sat, 02-Dec-2006 - 9:23 am
in

The Austin Bloggers web site recently was attacked by a scraper site. The scraper was grabbing our RSS feed and republishing it on their own web site, pretending it was their own content. We received no attribution and the scraper put their own copyright on the page. The scraper also plastered ads all over the stolen content, which, of course, is the whole purpose of the scam.

Welcome to Holidailies. Why the Hell am I Here?

Submitted by chip on Sat, 02-Dec-2006 - 12:41 am
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I've been telling Jette for many weeks that I'd help her run the Holidailies web site this year, but there is no bloody way I'm signing up to post.

I just started a new contract a month ago. I also started a new access television show. I'm on overload right now, and have so much more I could be doing. I don't need to be signing up for a month of blogging.

A year ago things were different. I had finished up one contract and didn't expect even to begin looking for a new one until the new year. I was involved in a number of interesting projects that seemed worth blogging about. I was in a good place to take the Holidailies challenge.

Yet, somehow earlier today, when I was fiddling in the database, an urge took hold of me to flip the is_participant bit next to my name from 0 to a 1. So, here I am.

Yes, I know that all sounds very lame. Now that I look back, my rationale for joining last year was pretty lame too.

More Ubuntu Brokenness: hibernate

Submitted by chip on Sun, 26-Nov-2006 - 11:17 am
in

I continue to encounter bugs introduced by the Ubuntu Linux Edgy release. My media computer used to hibernate and resume fine with Dapper. It's been broken ever since the Edgy update.

Hibernation is important for an "appliance" computer such as a media player. It allows you to shutdown and restart the computer quickly. I don't want to have to sit through an entire Linux reboot just to listen to a CD.

Fortunately, this is a known bug with an easy fix. It appears that Edgy switched from identifying disk partitions by their device name (such as /dev/hda2) to a unique UUID identifier. This is good, because device names can change (e.g. you add or move a disk around) but UUIDs should stay constant.

Unfortunately, the UUID of my swap partition never got entered into /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume file, so the system startup was never configured with the location to look for the hibernation signature. Fortunately, the manual procedure described in the bug report corrected the problem, and now hibernation is working again.

More Ubuntu Brokenness: kdepim

Submitted by chip on Tue, 21-Nov-2006 - 9:06 pm
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I'm beginning to think I need to create a new blog category called "Ubuntu Edgy Brokenness". I continue finding functional defects that just shouldn't persist in post-beta software.

You may remember that I was delighted to find that the Linux kernel in Edgy would sync my Samsung i-500 PDA/phone, whereas Dapper would just hang. Unfortunately, I later realized that it was syncing a blank calendar.

This is a known and reported bug. The workaround is to build kdepim from source.

I did that and it works. But if I wanted to be building the blasted system from source I'd be running Gentoo Linux.

So, you might think, the solution is to get more involved in testing and bug reporting. Unfortunately, I've been there and done that, and I've yet to receive acknowledgment on a single one of the Ubuntu bugs that I've reported. I don't know what to productively do, other than cross my fingers and hope that the Feisty release next year isn't as bad.

Nov. 26 update: This bug has been fixed for the next release. Also, I finally got a response to a Ubuntu bug report I've made. Huzzah!

Ubuntu Edgy Eft: More Upgrade Unhappines

Submitted by chip on Mon, 20-Nov-2006 - 9:13 pm
in

I recently reported my unhappy experience upgrading my main workstation from Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake to 6.10 Edgy Eft. There have been an awful lot of reports of difficulties with the Ubuntu upgrade.

There is a recent note posted to the Ubuntu Forums web site that says the method I used is now considered deprecated. They now specify a different method, using the update-manager command.

I held out some hope this new procedure would address my difficulties. So, I thought I'd go ahead and upgrade my Inspiron 600m laptop. The new procedure did address the old problems, but it still didn't go well.

The first problem is that the kubuntu variant doesn't include the update-manager program. I wasn't sure exactly which packages I needed to get that, so I went ahead and loaded the entire Gnome distribution (ubuntu-desktop) on the system.

Fortunately, the upgrade through update-manager did go a lot more smoothly than before, when I used apt-get.

Unfortunately, once complete, I was left with a non-functional wireless network. It appears that in the Edgy release, Ubuntu has switched from a community-maintained driver for the ZD1211 USB wireless network adapter to a preliminary version included in the Linux source tree. This new version loads correctly. It even sees my access point (iwlist eth1 scan). Unfortunately, it just never seems to connect and acquire an IP address. The network adapter worked under Dapper Drake (it appeared as device wlan0), albeit it would get a little flaky sometime.

I'm currently researching alternatives. I fear I may need to build a new Linux kernel and fall back to the community version. Any solution that involves building custom kernels is not a good one, so I'm not too happy about this.

Nov. 21 update: This document has a procedure that fixes the problem. I'm now operating fine with the community-supported zd1211 driver.