Bearfruit

(as a follow-up to “How data affects wifi range”)

It’s also important to realize that if a country consumes more media on the Internet than it produces, the electrons will get shifted from the creating country to the consuming country.

Because electrons have a negative charge this will leave the creating country with a positive charge and the consuming country with a negative charge. In effect, “polarizing the nations.” This was actually discussed in ancient biblical prophecy and is a sign that the battle of Armageddon and the end of the world is near.

Among the elite hacker community it is sometimes considered cool to have an unstyled website. I’m not certain what makes this cool, but I respect it none-the-less. However a few absolutely minimal styles can make your site easier to read. Here they are:

The Beagle Board is getting a lot of attention lately. It should, it’s an awesome platform. How does it compare to the Tin Can Tools Hammer (discussed in a previous blog post here)? Well, the Beagle is faster and cheaper for one thing, it also has excellent video and audio output capabilities. But that doesn’t necessarily make it better. It all depends on the application.

OK, I’m making my own meme, though I’ve not googled it, someone may have come up with it before me.

1. Click in your firefox address bar,
2. delete what’s there,
3. type the letter “w” and list the first four or five entries that firefox suggests

(feel free to use whatever web browser you like if they offer the same functionality)

Mine are:

1. Google Analytics - www.google.com/analytics
2. Canonical Homepage - www.canonical.com
3. Netbook Redirect Page - www.canonical.com/netbooks
4. Bearfruit.org comments moderation page - hidden page on this site
5. Ubuntu.com homepage - www.ubuntu.com

Post yours in the comments or a link to your blog post that continues the meme.

I get three kinds of email from launchpad generally:

1. Regarding bugs I’ve reported or specifically subscribed to
2. Those assigned to a team I’m a member of
3. A very occasional question or notification about a code branch I’m subscribed to

Of these above the second is the most voluminous and the first group is the most important. However sometimes items from group 2 can be important, depending on the project. Launchpad includes headers for filtering email which I’ve used in thunderbird. I’ve not been able to create sophisticated filters in Gmail though. Until now.

The new Ubuntu 8.10 release is out. It was geared to be the smoothest release I’ve done yet but at the last minute an emergency popped up - the animations for the homepage didn’t work properly in Firefox! Fortunately, a very helpful community member, Emilio Lopez, a student from Argentina, stepped in to help. For the record, he found that jquery’s default frame rate which is 1000/13 (about 76fps) was the culprit and lowering it to 1000/100 (10 fps) made our animations very smooth, even in firefox.

But the most interesting part of this release to me is the launch of the new download page. A lot of thought was put into it and we incorporated feedback from several sources, including some students doing user testing for their university classes. Here’s what we changed and why:

I love buying mp3’s on Amazon. It’s easy and the files work with any mp3 player or software. The songs are $0.99 and the albums are pretty reasonable - cheaper than the CD bought new, more expensive than the used CD store, but you get to listen to it instantly.

Amazon offers a Ubuntu installer on their website for the downloader software so when you make your purchase the song can begin downloading in the background. Its nice that they consider Ubuntu important enough to invest the time into making an easy to use client. When it runs the first time you tell it what folder to drop the songs into. I put it right into my Music folder and rhythmbox picks it up. Anyway, this is very nice alternative for people who don’t use iTunes - which is most Ubuntu users.

The most recent song I purchased was one I heard on a Lincoln car commercial - it’s kind of funky and different, “Technologic” by Daft Punk. Check it out. ;-)

I used to install apache, mysql, etc on my laptop for local testing. However having all these extra services caused my computer to start slowly. I disabled them from starting automatically but that became tedious because I needed to remember to start them (generally 3 or so) before I used them. Here’s a better idea - use Virtual Box (recently renamed to Sun xVM) to run an instance of Ubuntu Server (or whatever) locally. When you’re ready to do some dev work, fire up the vm (it boots in about 30s).

The problem is, if you’re on a laptop then you probably use wifi, and that means you’re probably going to need to use a NAT connection for your Ubuntu Server to have network access. Unfortunately, with a NAT connection no one, not even your laptop, can see the guest services running on the Ubuntu Server. Fortunately the Virtual Box developers provided a solution, if you know where to look.

I have a contact form that has been sending me data via email. It was quick and dirty and I didn’t expect to get nearly as many responses as I did. The data really needs to be in a spreadsheet but the thought of manually doing this bothered me so I wrote some python code to do it. Here it is. Note that:

• it is quick and dirty
• change the gmail user name to whatever, this should work on any imap server so change server name if not gmail
• change the name of the imap folder containing the messages - mine go into a folder called P/package-registration
• once I’ve downloaded a batch of messages I mark them as read using my email client so that they won’t download again when the script runs (that’s what the “UNSEEN” bit is for)

I was recently chatting with the programmers of inkscape and lamenting the lack of font hinting. The developers responded that font hinting didn’t seem applicable because Inkscape is a vector application used to create resolution independent graphics and it didn’t really make sense to add a resolution dependent feature. This is logical and the conclusion is that font-hinting belongs in your raster application, such as the GIMP.

(font hinting is the magical property of high quality fonts to manually adjust their size and shape in very minor ways so that they line up with pixel boundaries and avoid blurred or invisible portions of the text)