Posted by at 2:19 PM in General
Ubuntu makes certain things that should be difficult, easy and some things that should be easy, difficult, like assigning keys to commands. I'm a keyboard jockey, I'm way happier using the keyboard than the mouse> I tell my self this is because the keyboard is quicker, but it's probably because I cut my teeth in the days before mouse, and and in Emacs where key chords are king!
This means I am lost without my keyboard shortcuts, in Windows such things as W+L to lock (where W is the Windows key). I use Windows a lot, and if I'm using Ubuntu I'd like the same keys to work. This should be easy, however it appears that having Compiz enabled, Compiz and Gnome clash!. Gnome has dialogs to set up keybindings, but you have to jump through hoops to get it to work.
First hoop is getting Ubuntu to recognise the Windows key (called the Super key in Linux) as a key modifier, like Control and Alt. To do this go to System..Preferences..Keyboard, select the Layouts tab and then Layout Options. From here select Alt/Win key behavior and then choose "Super is mapped to the Win-keys"
Once you've done this you can now edit the Gnome keyboard preferences. From System..Preferences..Keyboard Shortcuts, scroll down to Desktop. Here you can click on the "Show the panel run application dialogue", select this and hit WindowsKey + r on the keyboard. Do the same for Run a terminal, but select WindowsKey + t. You may think you can do the same thing for the Search, Home Folder and Lock screen commands (assign them to Windows + f, Windows + e and Windows +l respectively), however, those commands cannot be assigned from here and if you try, not only will the commands not work but you may have trouble re-assigning the keys elsewhere. Instead to assign these key you will need to you the Compiz Configuration Manager
Select System..Preferences..Advanced Desktop Effects Settings. In the dialog box select General and then Commands. I have my first three commands set to "beagle-search", "nautilus" and "gnome-screensaver-command --lock" respectively and the key bindings set to
There's more here on this.
Now, if only I can get Ctrl+Esc to bring up the main menu!
Posted by at 12:21 PM in General
This post seems to have fixed things for me.
Having played with these settings it looks like I only need
POST_VIDEO=false
from the
/etc/defaults/acpi-support
file
Posted by at 5:18 PM in General
This is a list of recent books that I've read (and these are just the ones within the last three months)
Posted by at 3:10 PM in General
I especially loved this one:
Literature - Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the", and how it can flummox those trying to put things into alphabetical order.
Sounds like the sort of thing Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchet would write.
Posted by at 12:34 PM in General
Posted by at 4:39 PM in General
Posted by at 8:44 PM in General
It's a great book, go get it!
Posted by at 2:29 PM in General
This week I'm attending a Microsoft "VSTS Proof of Concept" training course in Paris. The course is here.
All I can say is: Never have your training on a boat!!
Posted by at 2:16 PM in General
Posted by at 5:58 PM in General
For example, myelf and my family are fans of Lost, but, being in the UK, we can't follow series 2. I bought a copy of the series 1 DVD in the US when I was there in September, and we watched the DVDs inside a week a so. My kids wanted to watch Series 2, so I thought I'd be go get the episodes on-line. I go to the Apple music store and try and download the episodes, turns out I need a US billing address to get the episodes, as I'm in the UK they're not available to me.
I have lots of friends in the US and I ask one of them to download the first episode for me, which they do, so I grab the episode and of course it's DRM'd and I can't unlock it on my PC. This is an episode that I've paid for and only my family will watch. At the moment nothing is available to remove this DRM so I have to either wait until Lost Series 2 becomes available in the UK, or I have to get an illegal copy of Lost using BitTorrent or something similar!
Which brings me to the real point of the post. Sony have released a DRM'd CD which installs a root kit on your PC when you install the software on the CD. This was brought to the world's attention by Mark Russinovich here, and has been discussed in many places. I just wanted to point at this excellent Inquirer article which starts
SONY SCREWED UP WITH its rights removal to protect its profit margins philosophy and there is no way the use of rootkits can be justified.Caught with its pants down, what did it do? Make things right? Heck no, it blamed the user, and doesn't do anything more than window dressing to deflect what are valid criticisms.
Being an optimist by nature I hope that the furore surrounding this will bring companies like Sony to their senses, but realistically I doubt it!
Posted by at 7:45 AM in General
A colleague of mine lives in LA and was going to teach in Austin Tx. He arrived 30 minutes late on the first day of his class and this is his story:
I had missed my flight from LAX leaving 5:00 pm to arrive 11:30 pm in Austin. I missed it because I'm an hour from LAX, and one of my lovely daughters removed my wallet from the bag it was in, so by the time I realized it I knew I'd miss my flight. No other flights in to Austin from LAX would arrive on time -- time to panic. I ended up taking a 9:00 pm flight to Las Vegas, sitting in a lounge for an hour with a bunch of drunk Minnesotan college students, then getting on a plane to Houston. Arrived in Houston 4:00 am local time. Took a taxi to the *other* Houston airport (there are 2, about 30 miles between them). Rented a car -- literally the *only one* left in Houston because at that time all the Louisiannans have grabbed anything that can get to take them back to the battered Gulf Coast -- and drove 197 miles straight to Austin. Actually I did stop at my hotel to check in and change my ripe clothing, but then went straight to teach.
And we lead such a glamorous life!
Posted by at 7:21 AM in General
Posted by at 7:24 AM in General
After the outrage of 9/11 the US and UK governments decided that one way to fight the terrorists was to introduce new 'Anti-Terror' laws. One aspect of these laws is to curtial the freedoms that we enjoy.
These freedoms include the right to free speech and free assembly
At the time these laws were mooted, and in the intervening years some people (including me) have worried about the impact of these laws. The governments assure us that these laws won't be used against "ordinary" citizens, however it seems obvious to me that once these laws are put in place it is very hard to stop the police from using them.
Two stories recently have highlighted this. The first of these was widely reported, as was the fact that he was held under UK anti-terrorist laws.
The second story about a student at Baylor is almost comical, except for the fact he was questioned by police about committing a "terrorist act."
I fear that these incidents are going to be the thin end of the wedge. We cannot afford to give up our freedoms, if we do then terrorism wins!
Posted by at 8:31 AM in General
As Blojsom is a Java web app I needed a Java web server, and being very familiar with Tomcat I chose to use that server (currently 5.5.9). The machine that hosts this blog is running Apache and I can't remove Apache just to run Tomcat so I had to get them both working together
The simplest solution was to use mod_proxy and just for giggles I decided to go with the VirtualHost approach. I found this Document and used that as the basis for setting up my server. Initially my VirtualHost entry looke like this
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName blogs.advantaje.com
ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8081/blojsom/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8081/blojsom/
ErrorLog /etc/httpd/logs/blogs_error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /etc/httpd/logs/blogs_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
i.e. forwarding any call to http://blogs.advantaje.com to http://localhost:8081/blojsom/
In the end I went with a different solution. I create another instance of Tomcat, made Blojsom the default (ROO) app, changed the ports in TC from the default values and changed the VirtualHost to look like
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName blogs.advantaje.com
ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyPass / http://localhost:48081/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:48081/
ErrorLog /etc/httpd/logs/blogs_error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /etc/httpd/logs/blogs_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Blojsom's happy and I'm happy!
Posted by at 11:39 PM in General
It needs to be tested a lot more and the home page(s) needs to be fixed, but I'll get there.
Why move? Several reasons, the blog I currently have was originally written by Ted Neward and then re-written by me and there are several features missing such as categories. I was working on another re-write but simply don't have the time to do what I want so I figured it's time to move on. I've chosen blojsom as the blog engine. I wanted a Java engine and I liked blojsom having seen poor reports of JRoller. Hopefully here I'll blog more often but it will be on other things as well as Java.
Posted by at 7:02 PM in General
