This morning I let my Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade itself to 10.4. The upgrade itself ran fine with only a few interruptions where I had to confirm or deny changes to configuration files for PHP etc.

As I landed at the office and hooked up the laptop (Thinkpad T61P) however, my external monitor was flickering a lot. Tried booting into Windows and everything was fine. Google’d and found this post on Ubuntu Forums.

The post suggests making changes to menu.lst in /boot/grub. This is a somewhat short term solution, because the problem will probably reappear at the next kernel upgrade (which could be just around the corner). The fix may be on it’s way in an actual Ubuntu fix, but i chose a different approach which may also seem hack’ish – the fix could be more robust though.

Disclaimer: If you are not sure what you are doing, be very careful. Misspellings or deviations from the description below may lead to an unbootable system. This worked for me and doesn’t have to work for you. Make sure to back up any files you change.

OK? Let’s go..

First start a terminal (ALT-F2, enter “gnome-terminal”):

cd /etc/grub.d

Then:

sudo nano 10_linux

which will open an editor. Around line 96 inside the linux_entry-function is a line that looks like this:

linux    ${rel_dirname}/${basename} root=${linux_root_device_thisversion} ro ${args}

and it should be changed to:

linux    ${rel_dirname}/${basename} root=${linux_root_device_thisversion} ro radeon.modeset=0 ${args}

Having done this, you should ask grub to rebuild it’s configuration files with:

sudo update-grub

Reboot and go on without the flicker..

This is not about the usual geekyness – it is about a change I am sure is about to happen. Once the benefits are clear – I am quite sure everybody will want an electric car instead of their gas/diesel-one. The concept of having an energy-buffer, in the shape of the cars in a region, to collect surplus energy in low usage periods for use in high usage periods are so compelling. Windmills are cool, but still inefficient in comparison with other sources if the surplus energy isn’t stored. This is in a broad perspective what Better Place wants to do.

I passed a long line of gas stations the other day – What will happen to them? I know the change will not happen overnight – if at all. But how would we prepare for the future if we had a gas station? Better Place says they will prepare the stations for the transition of becoming a battery station, but as I see it – many people will not need them anymore. Why? Because many commuters drive less than 160km per day. According to Better Place, that will be the range of one battery charge – and a key part of the new model is that drivers charge their car at home when the energy is cheap/green – also offering the battery in their car to the common energy buffer.

So – in Denmark anyway – if the gas stations will no longer sell gas and only (let’s guess – unable to find numbers) 10% of the current customer base (those driving more than 160km a day) will need to recharge their cars/switch batteries at the old gas station – can the gas station survive merely as a 7-Eleven store only closed at night?

My guess is that they are looking at a pretty big change in their business model – and I think they can if they embrace the change. If they fight the change they only have to look at the news papers to see how that works out..

What they need to do? Dunno – but one thing that has bothered me for ages now is the inability to find stuff for my car in the shops. If i want chewing gum, porn or soda – the gas station is where to get it. But light bulbs, fuses, polish is hidden away in the far corner of the shops. I think that stuff needs to move up ahead in the shop, so the mindset of the customers in five to ten years won’t be: “The gas station? Ahh – you mean the 7-Eleven that is closed at night!”

Found this little test which gives an indicator as to Javascript performance in your browser.

On my system (Windows XP on two year old Lenovo T60p laptop) i tried to run it ten times on my browsers with all plugins disabled (lower is better):

Google Chrome: 297,7
Firefox 3.5 beta 4: 340
Firefox 3.0.10: 408,9
Internet Explorer 8: 631,3

As the score is time, lower is better. This is interesing because sites uses Javascript more and more, and as we work more and more online with more applications in the cloud, the Javascript engine has a lot to say about our perception of overall performance.

I got a bit disappointed about my Atom-based netbook – specifically Ubuntu 9.04 on that machine. It never went below 1800 (Firefox 3.0.10) and on the same hardware, the Windows-browsers gives me minimums of 1500 and 2800 for Firefox 3.0.10 and IE8 respectively. Gotta find some tweaks there.

Writing this on my Lenovo S10e netbook, I am furious. It’s before mid-day and yet I have had two experiences of software designs that did not consider netbooks a platform – or at least the new low screen resolution these computers imply. And before you call me a whiner (besides the fact that you’d be somewhat right), this is just a description of the changes I will make to include netbook users as an audience of software and website in the future.

Whine #1: Twice I’ve been cripled by software that saw the low screen resolution as a handicap – one of them on purpose. First I installed Pidgin - the cool cross-platform/cross-protocol IM and IRC client. I like it a lot, but on Windows some dialogs are too big and will not allow me to navigate to the OK/Cancel buttons at the bottomof the settings dialog. Fortunately this is Open Source stuff, so I can just participate and actively fix this myself.

Whine #2: I had to install a printer driver for my HP Photosmart 2575 printer – the install took over one hour because of some “ingenious” package system. That obviously poor user experience decision aside – the minimum requirement for the printer driver is a screen resolution of 800×600 pixels. My S10e runs at 1024 x 576. The consequence – I cannot print from my netbook in Windows because the printer driver won’t finish installing, as it has an irrelevant requirement. Fortunately I am dual-booting with Ubuntu, which has excellent support for my printer (without the requirement)

I’ve read somewhere that 20% of all computers that will be sold in 2009 will be netbooks. Some producers (including Asus) will stop production of 8.9″ -screen netbooks. The 10-inchers seems to dominate right now, and probably for the rest of the year (note: my guess only). Every company designing software will have to take this into account before they ship the next version of any product with a user interface.

I’ve worked on so many web projects with art directors saying: “Nobody runs 640×480 or 800×600 anymore”. Hey we know – but do you know how many users run with their browser maximized because a designer thought up a design that required it? Web designers don’t own the real estate of the users screen resolution – they can only hope to own the area the browser is sized to – and you have to count on users having at least one open history/bookmarks sidebar and/or plug-in and/or Google/MSN/Web developer toolbar enabled.

My point should be rather obvious: It is vital to include netbooks as testplatforms for serious UI-designers or your product will no longer be compatible with the equipment of the customers you want. The rules have changed – live with it.

You may argue that netbook users are asking for it, but if the competing website or software support the netbooks and you don’t – the users is no longer making the decision of leaving you.

Seems like a very cool plugin to enhance the userexperience – performance wise, plus it seems to prepare Wordpress blogs for high traffic spikes.

Bug found: Links to posts from archives seems to cache PHP-code – not the resulting HTML. There’s gotta be a simple fix. Was a bit quick there. The bug is in my theme – not in WP Super Cache.

Edit: Also – the issues may have to do with my host who seems to mess with their user database right now..

This post is written on my new netbook – a Lenovo ideapad s10e. Actually I had given up on netbooks. My first one was an Asus EEE PC 900 with SSD and that machine was a serious disappointment. I have always liked Asus hardware, mainly because it is extremly well updated with software. That was also the case with the eee 900, but in order to make it cheap enough a cut was made on the CPU and on the keyboard. Actually I think I could live with the somewhat slow Dothan CPU (Celeron’ish), but combined with the poor keyboard the experience was like:

I don’t know if the machine refuses to react on my keypress because the stroke wasn’t registered on the keyboard or because I am waiting for the CPU.

That is of course not acceptable. So the too-cheap netbook has been gathering dust for a while now.

Some colleagues also purchased netbooks. One of them a Medion Akoya (looks very much like the MSI Wind – which 95% of the hardware probably is). It had an Intel Atom processor, which seems to do A LOT for these small laptops. The price did get an extra nudge compared to the Asus eee PC 900, but that can actually mean the difference between a usable and an unusable netbook.

The Lenovo machine is Atom-based, responsive and so far a really really nice piece of machinery. I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux on it and have yet to encounter missing drivers or missing responsiveness from the keyboard.

As with anything, you get what you pay for and you actually don’t have to pay that much more for a netbook that actually behaves as you would expect.

My brother is now a fairly long time Mac-user. I haven’t gone down that road (yet). Last night he was here and i showed him my Asus EEE (which is currently running Ubuntu 8.10).

“Cool” – he said. “It supports two-finger-scrolling”. I didn’t know, but he is right. Googling for it found me this. Apparently the touchpad is new enough in the Asus EEE to support two finger scrolling. Nice to find hidden coolness.

..the Del.icio.us add-on was announced.

Ever asked yourself what actually happens when you perform a certain thing in a certain program? Which files are read, created, updated and what goes on in my registry.

The Sysinternals Process Monitor tool does this. Filter the events any way you need and you will be able to release registry updates quickly. I just used it to identify the registry changes performed as I changed the cache settings of IE, so a registry update file can be made and distributed to anyone who needs the same settings. It took about 10 minutes to learn to use Process Monitor and identify the key in question.

For a web project I needed to create invoices, to be downloaded or e-mailed to clients in PDF format. The platform is PHP and the documentation for this almost exclusively describe PDFLib for this purpose. I am sure PDFLib is fine, and the tutorials that come with the package looks really good.

But..

You pay for PDFLib – I don’t mind paying for software, you should pay for usable high-quality stuff, which I am sure PDFLib is. US$ 995 is a little steep though – compared to free. The FAQ however mentions a few free alternatives. Right now I am looking into FPDF – which seem to do the trick.

Actually I found out that my previous ISP (invoicing their customers only by PDF invoices via E-mail) use FPDF. This tells me that FPDF is more than ready for production. I’ll let you know if I something disappoints me – although I would hate to bash a truly free initiative such as this one. Oh – and by the way it has another edge to PDFLib – It is written in PFP and does not need server reconfiguration to work. If you want a head start, there are quite an extensive list of code examples available.

Wanna know how Mac og Linux users running rare browsers view your website? Then check out http://browsershots.org/. Queue up your URL and depending on the current load, the screenshouts will begin pouring in over the next couple of minutes. Why, oh why should we wait soo many years for a service like this?

The shots are of course static, so it is not possible for you to actually check how your site performs and functions without running the actual browser on the actual OS you want to test. It can however save you A LOT of time, getting rid of the most common errors early in the layout debugging process.

The site features quite a few languages, and more a being added all the time

Amazon profiles you by the books you buy. Google sponsored links are displayed by the contents of your gmail e-mails and general website interests. All “Big Brother” considerations aside – this is clever – or at least technically interesting. There are risks of evil marketeers profiling you down to the bone, but on the other hand you probably only see stuff that is interesting to you – as opposed to receiving a load of Viagra spam e-mails. I know – The fact that something really sucks, does not make something that sucks a bit less excellent..

A group is in the process of specifying the APML format. APML is short for Attention Profile Markup Language and will specify a fileformat to express your interests ranked. OPML can already be considered an APML subset describing your feed subscriptions, but APML i more of an aggregation of your interests also including e-mail, browser history and bookmarks.

An important thing about your attention profile is, that is has value – to you as well as to others. Check out AttentionTrust for more..

I am a Wiki-virgin. Not in the sense of being a wiki-reader/contributor, but today I set up my first Wiki which is about to go online. Wiki’s based on the MediaWiki software (which is also used for WikiPedia) are actually skinable, but as content usually is king in Wiki land, very few operators make an effort to change skin before going online. The well known default Monobook skin is used almost everywhere (you know – the one where the monochrome image of an book is the back-drop).

This has one obvious benefit: People recognize it as being a Wiki-type site immediately. Indeed a strong argument to keep things as they are. I may be running my mouth of as the green first day Wiki operator, and maybe I have actually used Wiki based sites that I did not recognize because it used some great unknown skin. But doesn’t the Wiki deserve it’s Kubrick skin – which was considered the defacto blog-look a few years back. People would look at the skin (which is beautiful) and say “Ahh – that’s a weblog”. These days I (and probably a few other) say “Yuck – It’s a Wiki”.

Michael Heilemann did such a great job with Kubrick. Isn’t it time for Wiki’s to have their own updated slick skin? Do you have it or know where to get it? There is one Wiki-skin I like: Cavendish. I would love to be able to create one myself, but my graphic skills are unfortunately only focused around my eyes – not in my hands.

Thursday and friday i will be at Reboot 9 – it’s the third time I attend – last time was two years ago, and the first time was actually at the first Reboot conference – pre-bubble, y2k and all. This years theme is “Human”. The focus is rarely technology, but future ways of thinking and working. This year one of the headliners are Dave Winer – a talk on friday I will forward to. I also expect this to be another great networking opportunity.

I was annoyed – but not anymore. I have been developing for Apache/MySQL on my laptop for a while, and in the beginning I would start the Apache and MySQL services automatically as I booted Windows. Recently I embarked to minimize the boot time of my Windows installation – and that included minimizing the services starting automatically – including Apache and MySQL. To start these two services, I enabled the System Tray icons for the two services and when I wanted to start the services I would right click the MySQL monitor and choose “Start instance”, and then left-click the Apache icon and click “Start” in the submenu.

This seems fairly simple, but if you try to navigate icons in the System Tray before everything is done loading, you will know that right-clicking something may give long delays, sometimes sub-menues disapear and you don’t know if it was because of your click, which it did not respond to or if your click was actually registered. So the tip is simple and low tech – perform the same thing in a .bat file:

startamp.bat:

net start mysql
net start apache2

stopamp.bat:

net stop apache2
net stop mysql

Put these on your desktop or quickstart menu..

Dive into the possibilities of Microformats from this article at Smashing Magazine. The article points out a few simple additions for your website, that will easily add context to the contents of your site to humans and machines.

An example: If you are selling something, specific crawlers of trade sites will know it as they find the appropriate microformat code on your site. Another example: Make your resume available in hResume format embedded in your regular HTML code and it can be indexed by recruiting companies.

Thanks to Marjolein for the link.

Up until today, I have had to make important files from the shares of my home Linux server available as Windows Offline files to have them readily available on the road. I could sftp to my home server and fetch the files, but with the overhead of having to remember to actively upload the files again if they have been updated. I had a hunch that SSH tunnels could help me out, but today I finally made everything work, enabling me to map drives to the Samba shares of my home server through a secure SSH tunnel. Here’s how..

Background info

I am creating this setup using my home Linux server connected to my ADSL connection at home. I want to connect my laptop to my Linux server in order to map the Samba shares as drives on my laptop, when I am connected to the internet at the office or at a client. The Linux server is running OpenSSH which enables me to make regular SSH terminal connections using a client such as Putty, SFTP file transfers using WinSCP AND tunnels – also using Putty.

A tunnel through SSH works like this: A service is listening for connection requests on some port on the server -A Samba server listens on port 139 (like any Windows machine that has “File and printer sharing” installed does). When you create a tunnel like this one, you are “rewiring” the network of your workstation telling it to forward all connection attempts to the local port 139 to port 139 of the remote server through a the secure connection supplied by SSH. As only one service can listen on one port at a time, you need to uninstall “File and printer sharing” for your network connections. Please note that when you do this, any folder or printer shared by your computer will no longer be available to other users on your network.

Do it

If you have Samba shares and OpenSSH running on your server and you can connect to it using an SSH client, you only need to change the setup of your client pc.

1. Install Putty – which should be fairly straight forward.

2. Uninstall “File and Printer sharing”. Note: If you merely disable the element, this will not work as the service will still listen on port 139 and block Putty from listening on the same port. A complete Uninstall is necessary.

3. If you already have a terminal connection set up for your server in Putty, it can be reused and you can merely add a tunnel to the connection. To make your initial connection in Putty, simply supply your internet IP address (or domain name if you have one) for your home server, and make sure the standard port 22 is NAT’ed in your router to your server. You may choose to increase security by having OpenSSH run on a port other than 22 – but that is a outside the scope of this post.
4. Open the Tunnels configuration and enter:
   • 139 in the Source port field
   • The internal IP adress of your server followed by :139 to indicate that you wish to connect to port 139 on the server. In the example below, the internal IP adress of the server is 10.0.0.150

Apply your changes and open the connection. Once you have succesfully logged on in the terminal window the tunnel will be established and you should be able to start mapping drives to \\127.0.0.1\remotesharenames.

This post is written from Internet Explorer 6. In itself that is not so strange – I have a large client that exclusively run Internet Explorer 6 throughout the entire enterprise, so my work needs to be 100% tested on this browser. On my Windows XP installation i am running IE7 which cannot coexist with version 6 and i didn’t feel like downgrading. Installing Windows XP as a virtual machine is not an option – as I don’t want the expense of another Windows license.

Wine was apparently not able to run Internet Explorer out-of-the-box, but a bit of Googling gave me what I need: EIs4Linux – a package that can install any (also simultaneously) of IE 5, 5.5 or 6. I used this step-by-step guide to get everything running.

IE7 is currently not supported (by Wine according to the EIs4Linux guys), but it is work in progress.

I like to keep stuff separated, so this blog will contain observations and hopefully conversations about IT, geeky stuff and social software. As I am writing this, I have just completed downloading Ubuntu Linux 7.04 which was released today. Their site still have symptoms of quite a heavy load, as the most of the (geeky) world is probably reading about or downloading version 7.04 of this great Linux distribution.

I was actually about to rant a bit about the pet names they give their releases (this list was nicked from Wikipedia) – I have yet to figure out why animals with distinctions make better release names.

• 4.10 The Warty Warthog
• 5.04 The Hoary Hedgehog
• 5.10 The Breezy Badger
• 6.06 The Dapper Drake LTS (Long Term Support)
• 6.10 The Edgy Eft
• 7.04 Feisty Fawn

In October of this year Gutsy Gibbon (of course referring to version 7.10 of Ubuntu Linux) should once again start an extra fan or two on the Ubuntu download mirrors.