somethingkindawierd

My first github project!

jon beebe — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:00:11 +0000

Dynamic page head

Over the past few years I’ve had a need for dynamically adding/modifying the html element as php builds pages. I created a singleton object for this purpose, and I’ve finally massaged the code to a point where it’s ready to release into the wild. My dynamic page head class comes with some convenient features such as:

Add linked js/css and inline scripts and styles
Optionally render javascript to the bottom of the DOM, as Yahoo’s YSlow recommends
Merge files together, reducing requests to the server
Minimize css with csstidy or YUI Compressor
Minimize javascript with jsmin or YUI Compressor
Optionally include/exclude any css or js asset from merging/minimization
- This is useful when including items such as TinyMCE, which uses javascript to include other assets. Minimization will break relative references to these items because the TinyMCE script will, mosty likely, not live in the same directory once minimized.
Convenience functions for certain items such as nocache metadata
Operate in xhtml (default) or html mode, rendering valid markup for either

Check it out at github

Battery always 0% in Ubuntu 10.04

ubuntu productivity — Wed, 19 May 2010 02:20:06 +0000

Update, 22 May, 2010. While the fix below was working for a while, it eventually stopped as well. Then I came across this article at Apple. Evidently, when the battery reports 0%, it is a hardware error and the System Management Controller must be reset. It’s quite simple:

Shutdown your laptop
Take out the battery and remove the A.C.
Hold down the power button for seconds.

I recently had an issue where Ubuntu 10.04 stopped tracking my battery’s charge — it always reported 0% and would run the battery down until it died. Not a big problem…except that it never notified the computer to hibernate when the battery was critically low…no different than yanking the power cord out of a desktop!

A post at the Ubuntu Forums clued me into the problem: upowerd was crashing.

So the solution was simple…start upower again. By adding upower as a startup item the problem was fixed :)

Go to System → Preferences → Startup Applications and click add. Then type ‘upower’ as the command. Here’s a screenshot of my Startup Items:

Adding a custom startup item to Ubuntu

Instal Ubuntu 10.04, single boot, MacBook

ubuntu productivity — Sat, 08 May 2010 16:50:16 +0000

I just installed Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 on my white MacBook 2,1. Everything is working flawlessly :)

I wanted to write this, though, to share how I got it working, because there are many differing opinions on how to install Ubuntu as the only OS on a Mac.

First off, as I discovered, if you have the wrong partition map your Mac will not boot. Instead you get a question-mark-folder icon. This article shares two recommendations, using MBR or GPT partition mapping. However, following it’s advice of using gparted to create the partition map did not work for me. I used the OS X Disk Utility to format my drive using the GUID partition map, leaving the drive unpartitioned as Free Space. This was the key that got it working. No need for Bootcamp, no need for rEFit, no need for manual partitioning.

Second, I booted via the Live CD and did the simple install, telling it to use the available free space. In about 15 minutes I was running Ubuntu 10.04 as the only OS on my MacBook.

I know this sounds simple, and it really is. However most advice I’ve found involves complicated gparted partitioning, or using rEFit (which is awesome for multi-boot setups, but unnecessary for single-boot.)

Happy computing…

Wine on Ubuntu outperforms Windows

ubuntu productivity — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:51:03 +0000

AnandTech ran an interesting (and VERY thorough) review of Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to highlight my favorite section.

Titled CPU Benchmarks, they test applications running on both Windows Vista and Ubuntu. The amazing thing is the applications running on Ubuntu via Wine performed better than they did on Windows!

Let’s let that sink in for a moment…the open-source project written ½ by volunteers and ½ by commercial interests, intended to duplicate the Windows API on Linux, actually outperforms the software it’s intended to mimic. That’s amazing to me.

Check out these two images from the article that prove Wine can be faster than Windows:

Excel running on Windows & Ubuntu via Wine

Photoshop CS2 running on Ubuntu Linux (via Wine) and Windows XP

The strangest graph of them all is the last one on that page: it shows mp3 encoding on Ubuntu, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu via Wine. The Wine version ran faster that either the native Windows or native Ubuntu test.

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3616

GoogleDocs integration with Nautilus

ubuntu productivity — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:59:50 +0000

I’m really looking forward to this project maturing: Nautilus support for Google Docs.

During his 12 weeks at Google’s Summer of Code this developer managed to integrate Google Doc’s cloud with Nautilus, so all your docs can be browsed and edited on Linux just like normal documents. This is how I imagined cloud computing working, where the document can be accessed both locally and remotely, and all the cloud docs can be easily backed up like any other file on your system.

I’m particularly interested in the fact that all the docs appear as OpenOffice files.

gPHPEdit 0.9.91 on Ubuntu 9.04

ubuntu productivity — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:00:04 +0000

I am excited to see that gPHPEdit is now under active development again. I downoaded the Feb 9, 2009 snapshot and tried compiling it.

At first I was given the error that the following libraries were not installed:

gtk+-2.0
libgnomeui-2.0
gnome-vfs-2.0
libgtkhtml-2.0

So I ran these commands to install them:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libgnomeui-dev

Then navigate to the source directory and run these commands in your terminal:

cd gphpedit
./configure
make
sudo make install

Here is gPHPEdit 0.9.91 running on Ubuntu 9.04 :)

gPHPEdit 0.9.91 running on Ubuntu 9.04

Read/Write to hfs+ on Ubuntu

ubuntu productivity — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:50:23 +0000

Recently I re-configured my setup for more convenient dual-booting between Mac OS & Ubuntu Linux. I created a common hfs+ partition that both Ubuntu and Mac OS share, and this is my main storage for my work.

It took a bit of finagling to get Ubuntu Linux writing to the hfs+ drive, so I wanted to share my experience for those who might benefit from it.

Furthermore, I experienced a wierd issue where, while running Ubuntu my computer improperly shut down, and the hfs+ drive was no longer writeable. Below is how I fixed that.

Setup

Mac OS Leopard on hfs+ journaled partition

Ubuntu 9.04 on ext4 partition

Common hfs+ (unjournaled) partition for sharing data

Prepare Ubuntu

I found everything I needed to mount an hfs+ drive already installed on Ubuntu. But write support was not working be default. So I edited my /etc/fstab to include this as the last item, and it mounts the drive with read/write permissions.

/dev/sda3 /mnt/common hfsplus user,auto,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

From what I found about fstab, here’s what all that means:

“/dev/sda3” is the path to the drive’s partition
“/mnt/common” is the location I want to mount the drive at
“hfsplus” is the partition type
“user” allows a normal user (not just root) to mount this drive
“auto” means mount automatically when booting
“uid” is my user’s id, allowing it access to this mount point
“gid” is my user’s group id, allowing that group access to this mount point
The two zeros at the end…
1. zero 1 is the dump option: “should this be backed up?” Zero means “no”
2. zero 2 is the order in which fsck should check the filesystems. Zero means “don’t check”

One caveat, I had to adjust the permissions on all files that I want read & write access to in both operating systems. Otherwise, when Ubuntu saved a file, OS X only had read permission, and vise-versa.

Here’s the command that recursively sets permissions an all files in the common drive to 777:

sudo chmod -R 777 /mnt/common

Fix hfs+ read/write when improperly shut down

Once, after hibernating my computer in Ubuntu, it would not wake up, so I force-restarted. Evidently this caused the common partition to have an improperly-unmounted flag that would not let Ubuntu write to it. After booting into OS X and restarting into Ubuntu, it worked. I guess booting into Mac OS reset that flag…but I’m not entirely sure. But it did fix my read/write access to my hfs+ partition :)

Meld redux

ubuntu productivity — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:40:39 +0000

Meld is, by far, the best diff viewer & editor that I have used. Earlier I posted about getting Meld up and running on OSX and overcoming a couple of issues. With the current version of MacPorts (1.7.1) and Meld 1.2, it’s much easier :)

After installing MacPorts 1.7.1 and running sudo port install meld you will have Meld installed. But, most likely, when you try to run Meld it will give you an error similar to this:

Dynamic session lookup supported but failed: launchd did not provide a socket path, verify that org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist is loaded!

To fix this simply run this command in Terminal:

sudo launchctl load –w /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist

Now, when you try to run Meld in OS X you will get this:

Meld 1.2 Running on Mac OS X 10.5.7 using MacPorts 1.7.1

AMD steals $1.45 billion from rival Intel

jon beebe — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:20:06 +0000

I recently came across a Yahoo Finance article about Intel’s $1.45 Billion fine in Europe. In it was this:

“The fine against the world’s biggest chip maker represents a huge victory for Intel’s Silicon Valley rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., or AMD, the No. 2 supplier of microprocessors to PC makers.”

Let’s contemplate what this “victory” really means.

Intel invests its resources into some of the best and brightest minds in the world. Intel applies itself, and as Capitalism Magazine recognizes “a market for computer chips would not exist at all if Intel did not invent, develop, and constantly innovate the chips that become the brains of computers.” Anyone in the industry can recognize the effect Intel has had on the landscape. To my mind AMD should be thanking Intel for the amazing marketplace, and opportunity, that their pioneering efforts have created.

Instead AMD submits Intel to the looting European Union by suing Intel and lobbying regulators for the past 5 years. The result: the EU is stealing $1.45 billion from Intel. Money that Intel won by selling it’s innovations to consumers who freely paid for them.

Why is all this happening? Neelie Kroes, the EU Competition Commissioner, said “Intel did not compete fairly, frustrating innovation and reducing consumer welfare in the process.” These “unfair” tactics include offering rebates to big customers, a common practice of any business wishing to entice more. The EU requests of Intel were so vague that they left Intel “mystified” about what it should change.

But the real kicker in all of this is what AMD has done to itself and to all who value freedom. Instead of fighting the looters alongside Intel, as it should have done, it feed them to lions. AMD has helped to usher in a dystopian Atlas Shrugged style world in which the best and brightest among us must work for free so the looting masses can feast on their efforts.

I wonder, what will Dirk Meyer, AMD’s Chief Executive who said this decision was “an important step toward establishing a truly competitive market,” be saying when the looters come after him?

Sources

Yahoo Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Record-euro106-billion-EU-apf-15225753.html
Capitalism Magazine: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5564

French Police save with Ubuntu

ubuntu productivity — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:52:06 +0000

Here is a great article describing how the French Police saved money with Ubuntu. It starts out by saying

“France’s Gendarmerie Nationale, the country’s national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.”

“…has saved up to €50 million on licensing and maintenance costs as a result of the migration strategy”

“The Gendarmerie migration also demonstrates the significant cost savings that governments can get from adopting open source software. As the global financial downturn continues to put pressure on budgets, governments are going to increasingly look to open source software as a way to cut IT costs. We have recently seen moves in this direction from Canada and the UK.”

I found it interesting that they state the biggest difference between Ubuntu and Windows, from their point of view, was the icons

“Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

I am also very encouraged that they’re concerned about open standards. I wish more businesses and institutions though this way and I hope the Gendarmerie’s example promulgate open standards.

“[The Gendarmerie] has found that open source software is better at handling open standards.”