Disabled inputs in Firefox with the Ubuntu Ambiance theme

And here’s what it looks like when using the New Wave theme in Ubuntu:

Disabled inputs in Firefox using the New Wave theme

This issue caused me a few moments of panic when I thought I’d broken the app – I was glad it was just a theme glitch! I’ve switched to using New Wave for the time being until I can figure out how to get the Ambiance theme to behave properly without screwing the rest of the system colours.

UPDATE (2010-05-27): Ok, so this turns out to be actually caused by a strange coincidence meaning that our CSS style for disabled inputs had exactly the same colour as the disabled text in the Ambience theme. Since the res of our users are running Windows and IE, it’s not a problem. It only affects us developers using Ubuntu :-)

At work, I’m stuck behind an NTLM authenticated proxy which I can get my system talking to thanks to running cntlm locally and setting the gnome proxy settings to point to that. On my previous laptop, I was running 32bit Ubuntu and Eclipse just automatically picked up the native proxy info and worked fine. It turns out that this functionality isn’t available by default in the 64bit version of Eclipse 3.5. Despite having the option to select “Native” in the Network Connections preferences in Eclipse, no values are picked up and I couldn’t connect to the outside world to install the extra features I need.

It turns out that the solution is to grab the native proxy library from the forthcoming 3.6 version of Eclipse and install it into 3.5, as explained in this eclipse bug. Here’s how I did that using the Ubuntu supported version of Eclipse.

1. Download the 64 bit Linux version of Eclipse Classic 3.6.0 (M6 at the time of writing)
2. Extract it locally and copy the file plugins/org.eclipse.core.net.linux.x86_64_1.1.0.I20091106-0506.jar to /usr/share/eclipse/dropins (you’ll probably have to create the dropins directory first).
3. Edit /etc/eclipse.ini to include the following: -Dorg.eclipse.core.net.enableGnome
4. Delete the eclipse 3.6 directory unless you have a pressing need to keep it around ;-)

When you next start eclipse, the Network Connections preferences will be prepopulated with the gnome proxy settings. It took me a while to figure this out, and I’ll no doubt need to do it again sometime, so this post is mostly for my own benefit, but hopefully someone else will find it useful too.

Bootnote: You may be wondering why I didn’t just install 3.6 and run that. Well mainly because it’s not fully supported by the SpringSource Tool Suite and also it’d mean looking after upgrades and dependencies myself. I’d rather have apt handle all that for me.

Sadly, I’ve been very disappointed so far. It seems that the version of Likewise-open that ships with Kucid, has a number of glaring bugs that make it virtually pointless.

Firstly, there is no support for a default domain. This means that the user has to always log in as user.name@domain or domain\\user.name which is a pain. It’s not a show stopper but it is trivial to set up using samba, so why can’t Likewise support it? Well, Likewise claims to support it, via a registry setting, it’s just that it’s broken.

More importantly, is the broken credential caching. Laptops aren’t always connected to the domain, so any solution needs to be able to cache credentials to let the user log in when they’re out and about. It turns out that the default cache timeout in Likewise is 4 hours. And there’s no way to change that. 4 Hours! So that means when you take your laptop home with you at night, intending to work at home the enxt day, you faced with the fact that you can’t log in in the morning, or even later that evening. How handy.

Until these issues can be resolved, I’m going to purge Likewise and resort to the Samba config method. It’s long winded, but at least it’s tried and tested and I can actually configure it to work how I need it to. Who knows, maybe Meerkat will have working Likewise, it’s just a shame Canonical were touting it as a big improvement in Lucid.

Oh yes, and on a side note, when I upgraded my netbook from 9.10 to 10.04, it killed my wifi and lost the nice netbook remix clutter UI. Ho hum. Time to do a clean install and see if that fixes things.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m still a big Ubuntu and Linux fan, I just would have liked this launch to have gone a bit smoother…

First a little history; Oracle bought BEA, makers of Java application server Weblogic, a number of years ago. Sun, obviously, has their own opensource application server Glassfish. Oracle isn’t known for their embracing of opensource philosophies so there was a lot of worry that the Sun technologies would get dropped and merely have the good bits integrated into Oracle’s products.

As it turns out, Oracle is doing some of that, but they’re also keeping the Sun products around but targeting them at a lesser departmental level than Oracle’s own offerings.

Sun’s HotSpot virtual machine is getting merged with Oracle’s JRockit vm, so now there will be one “high performance” virtual machine to choose, hopefully better than the separate ones.

JavaFX, Sun’s attempt at competing with Silverlight and Adobe Flex lives on for some reason. And who knows, maybe Oracle can make it an attractive proposition, lord knows Sun couldn’t.

Sun’s IDE NetBeans lives on, along with Glassfish but will be target at departmental applications rather than enterprise ones. Oracle’s JDeveloper and Weblogic will be marketed as the tools of choice for full scale enterprise apps (mainly because Oracle can charge for Weblogic, I would guess).

Thankfully Hudson, Sun’s open source continuous integration and deployment server/tool lives on under Oracle’s ownership. This is particularly good news for me as I’ve been looking at that for improving the Java development and deployment at my employers (I’d have hated to have gone down that route only to find the product is being mothballed).

As for development of Java as a language, Oracle now has main control over the Java SE, EE and ME specifications and they’ve committed to adding more staff and money to developing them, which is good. Although it remains to be seen which directions Oracle will choose to take the language in.

As an aside, I notice that the Sun website has now been Oracle-ised, which means it’ll probably end up being as painful to navigate as Oracle’s. Look forward to URLs changing on a weekly basis and bookmarks to help pages and so on dying regularly!

The OU is pretty heavily geared towards using Microsoft Windows and associated software when studying and submitting assignments, and I’m strictly a Ubuntu kind of guy, so I’m going to be in for a few issues along the way, no doubt. I’m aiming to use Linux alternatives wherever possible, falling back to WINE to run Windows applications if I have to and I’ll document my progress here.

M865 requires you to use project management software to do some of the assignments and activities, and you’re provided with a copy of Sciforma PS8 to do this. Thankfully, this installs and runs fine using WINE, so I’ll be able to use that if none of the open source alternatives work, but I intend to investigate the linux native options such as Planner, Taskjuggler and Openproj.

I have managed to find and install a linux version of the FirstClass messaging software that the OU use for discussion forums. Whilst you can access the forums via the website, the functionality is reduced and it’s not so nice to use. There’s a debian package available, along with a generic linux archive. It’s a simple case of installing that package and running it on Ubuntu 9.10

The first time you run it, you need to click on the advanced link on the login screen to configure the server to use, this will be either oufcnt1.open.ac.uk or oufcnt2.open.ac.uk. Try both if you have authentication problems, you may not have an account on both.

Next up I’m going to investigate the eTMA assignment submission system and see if there’s anything specific I need to do for that.

Now a bit of background, I’m using a Technotrend S-1500 tv capture card to receive free-to-air satellite transmissions here in the UK (aside: I originally chose this card because it came with a CI slot which I could use with a Dragon CAM to get subscription services from Sky – a not supported configuraiton but working according to my research. However with the release of FreeSat, I decided not to bother and stick to the free to air services, including BBC HD and 8 day program guide). This card comes with a little IR eye and a remote control to make interacting with Mythtv easy.

Configuring Lirc took a bit of trial and error because I couldn’t find a configuration file for the remote control. There’s plenty of documentation out there on how to configure Lirc, that assumes you have a more common remote. One of the best guides is Garry Parker’s MythTv guide, which includes a nice tip on ensuring your remote receiver get allocated the same id each time. However, without the lircd.conf file, you need to create one using irrecord. For me it was a case of running this command:

irrecord --driver=dev/input --device=/dev/input/event6 lircd.conf

Follow the onscreen prompts and away you go, using that file in your lirc configuration.

This served me well until the aforementioned system upgrade to Ubuntu Intrepid. My remote suddenly stopped working, except for the arrow keys and the 0-9 numbers. I went back over the configuratiosn with a fine toothed comb but everything seemed to be correct. I thought that maybe the signal from the remote was being interpreted differently, so I decided to try regenerating the configuration file with irrecord but now irrecord was telling me it couldn’t get exclusive access to the hardware, despite me shutting down mythtv and lircd! Something was very wrong…

After a lot of searching, I came across this page that shed light on the problem and gave me a solution. Essentially, X was grabbing control of the input and treating it like a keyboard, which is why the number buttons and arrow buttons were working but nothing else. The solution is to enter your car’d product string into the /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/20thirdparty/lirc.fdi file as an exception. This mean X will ignore the input and let Lirc handle it instead. Annoyingly, my card is based on the saa7134 chipset and there was an exception for those card already in the lirc.fdi file. Unfortunately, my card’s product string is “Budget-CI dvb ir receiver saa7146 (0)” which didn’t match, so I needed to add another one…

Anyway, I now have a working remote control, which is nice, but I can’t help but feel that this is a bit of a backwards step, in that these devices worked before the changes to the HAL system and now, a fairly large list of exceptions needs to be maintained to ensure that cards continue to function as they used to. I’m sure there are good reasons for the changes but it’s one of those things that as an end user I just find irritating :-)

As part of my recent desire to sort my life out and get more things done, I’ve been adding features to my project and have decided to get it running in django 1.0. Now, as I was using a version of django part way between 0.96 and 1.0 I didn’t have as much work to do as I anticipated, which was nice. What was even nicer, was this helpful guide to porting on the excellent django documentation site.

As I was already suing the newforms module, a few renames later had me working using the forms name instead. And most of my other changes were fairly minor as well, I’m glad I decided to use a post-0.96 version when I started my project otherwise I’d have had a fair bit more work to do. The most major changes came with the Admin functionality for my models as this has changed quite significantly. It’s all well documented though, so an hour or so later I had some new admin.py files detailing the admin interfaces to my models.

I did run in to two stumbling points though. I use modified pre-order tree traversal for a number of my models and the third-party implementation I was using wasn’t playing nice with the new django admin stuff. However, a quick svn checkout of the latest revision got me past that problem. The second stumbling block was with getting my user profile models to be displayed inline with the django authentication User model in the admin interface. The trick is to first unregister the User model from the admin site and then re-register it with my own admin class:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin

from users.models import UserProfile

admin.site.unregister(User)

# Set it up so we can edit a user's profile inline in the admin
class UserProfileInline(admin.StackedInline):
    fields = ('donated', 'tagline', 'birthday', 'profile')
    model = UserProfile

class MyUserAdmin(UserAdmin):
    inlines = [UserProfileInline]

# re-register the User with the extended admin options
admin.site.register(User, MyUserAdmin)

And that was it – I now have a version of my site ready to roll with django 1.0

What there is less of, it seems, is people writing in praise of companies and the service they have received. A search for “good customer service” will return loads of sites telling you why customer service is so important and how it can be improved, but very few specific examples of good companies. This is human nature though, I suppose; a level of good service is expected and when it isn’t achieved we moan about it. Because a certain standard of service is expected, it would take something really extraordinarily good to get most people to comment about it. And hence we finally get to the point!

I own a very nice Mark 4 Golf GTi (the 1.8 Turbo if that sort of detail floats your boat) and whilst it’s getting a bit long in the tooth it’s nice and reliable and fun to drive. However recently I noticed the exhaust was blowing a bit and was louder than it should be. As the car still has the original exhaust system on it, I was expecting a hefty bill to have the whole thing replaced. So, I took it along to a local branch of a nationwide chain that promises to quickly fit tyres and exhausts to your vehicle. Firstly, they kept me waiting for 15 minutes before anyone dealt with me, then there was a lot of the usual teeth sucking and “it’ll cost you” comments you expect from mechanics. Culminating in the manager telling me that they’d need to order in a new exhaust (before even looking at the car on a ramp) and that’d take a few days, but they can’t look at it now anyway as they’re too busy (despite having several mechanics sitting around idle) and to bring it back in a day or two. So much for a drop-in, while-you-wait service.

Instead, I decided to pop round the corner to a local firm called Plume Tyre Service, where the experience couldn’t have been more different. I was greeted as soon as I walked in by a friendly receptionist, told to take the car straight round to the service area where it was popped up on a ramp and someone looked at it immediately. 15 minutes later, in popped the mechanic to explain that there was a hole in the sleeve in the central section but that the rest of the exhaust was sound. Unfortunately they didn’t have one in stock but they would order one and have it in the next day. In the meantime they’d clamped a temporary sleeve over the hole so that I could still use my car in the meantime. I took out my wallet to pay only to be told there was no charge for this temporary repair!

This morning I took my car in again and they again greeted me immediately, stuck the car on the ramp and 20 minutes later, the new sleeve was fitted and my car was waiting for me outside. Total cost: £23.50 including VAT! The cheapest and quickest piece of work I’ve ever had done on a car.

Needless to say, I’m going to be taking my car to them for all future exhaust, suspension, MOT and tyre work. It’s just a shame that they don’t do servicing as well.

Sadly Plume don’t seem to have a website and I’m not sure how extensive their network is – it seems to just be Birmingham and some parts of the West Midlands but if you have one near to you I thoroughly recommend you pay them a visit.

Update: I’ve found their website! Plume Tyre Service would appear to be a family run business with 5 branches in the West Midlands, which probably accounts for their good service.

Here’s an example illustrating how to run Windows XP in a virtual machine on Linux using VirtualBox. I’m not picking on this one in particular, it’s merely the most recent example I’ve come across. There are many problems with this approach, including but not limited to:

• Blurred text
• Slow Pace
• Graphical artefacts obscuring what’s going on.
• Very difficult to review a section
• Specific only to that one person’s environment.
• You can’t print them out!

You have to sit through the whole thing and follow it as it goes, making notes in order to be able to do it yourself, whereas if it had been a set of written steps, you could follow the instructions at your own pace with much less hassle. I’ve seen videos illustrating how to install linux, which is completely pointless – how are you supposed to follow along toa video? Surely you’d prefer to print out a copy of the instructions to follow them if you don’t have a second computer to hand during the installation?

This sort of thing isn’t limited to software installation guides, it happens a lot on the usually fantastic instructions site, Instructables. The whole point of the instructables site is to provide step-by-step instructions on how to perform some task or create something, yet all too often you’ll see a one-step instructable that merely contains a brief intro and a link to a youtube video. Use a video to illustrate a particularly tricky step by all means, but don’t use it as a substitute for proper written instructions.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying people shouldn’t produce their own instructions and HOWTO guide, far from it, I’m just saying that the appropriate form should be used. Thankfully, video instructions don’t rank so highly when searching due to the inherent difficulties in indexing videos in search engines in any meaningful way, but they still irritate me.

I’ve just found out that there is an airport at Coventry which is serviced by Thompson Fly and WizzAir. WizzAir fly to Gdansk and Katowice in Poland, and after reading up a bit, I quite fancy the idea of Katowice – maybe make a photography trip out of it. But mainly it’s the thought of flying with a company called “WizzAir” that has me tickled.

I haven’t had a proper holiday in years – there just hasn’t been the time/money/inclination for me to go away and I’m not thrilled by the idea of going away totally on my own. The last time I went away was to a friend’s wedding in Italy last June, but that was a big family get together and the whole wedding thing depresssed me massively so I didn’t enjoy it perhaps as much as I would have liked.

I’m not a big fan of laying around on a beach, I prefer to be doing things. I’ve long had the desire to do something like a cycling tour of somewhere but can’t make my mind up where that “somewhere” is. Maybe I should go for one of those charity fund raising trips and do a bit of good while I have a holiday at the same time? Although that’s probably something to plan for next year…

This year I have plenty of holiday to use up so I’m taking a week off in October while my Mum comes to visit and then I may take a week in November just to mooch about a bit – maybe visit some friends? Anyone fancy I visit – I promise to bring cake and tea?