In the latest version of Ubuntu I noticed that partitions in fstab are referred using UUIDs instead of device names. If you want to find out the UUID for an existing partition then you can use a couple of rather obscure commands: blkid and vol_id.
Theory and Practice
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
-- Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut/Yogi Berra
The Corporation now on BitTorrent
The Canadian documentary The Corporation is available for free on BitTorrent. Even though the official site says nothing about this, it seems to be all legal, the torrent being release by the film maker himself, Mark Achbar.
Download it, watch it and please consider making a donation.
Film Canadiana
A few months back I got this message from my colleague David Huska, really nice pointer to Canadian animation:
For years as a kid we all saw these *instead* of commercials on public stations. Canada's National Film Board is a publicly-funded agency. They just put 50 of their animated shorts, spanning 70 years, up on their site.
http://www.nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/films/
I haven't seen many of these, and it's been 25 years since I last saw the ones I have seen! Some of my old faves:
http://www.nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/films/film.php?sort=title&id=15310
Java on Ubuntu Edgy
I had Java running on my Ubuntu system for quite a while now and I switched to the Sun package provided by Ubuntu as soon as it became available. Upgrading to Edgy seemed smooth with regards to Java, until last Friday. The problems I started noticing were related to keystore generation, first issues with the format of distinguished names (no spaces accepted after commas anymore) and today problems with the format of the keystores. Keystores created with keytool could were no longer recognized by Java code.
It turns out that the version of keytool I was using after upgrading to Edgy was the one provided by Gnu. Actually the whole set of Java binaries was a mix of Sun and Gnu binaries. Running a debian alternatives command fixed this:
IEs4Linux
IEs4Linux is a nice package and script to install Internet Explorer (yes, IE) on a Linux box. It is dead simple, but obviously it will work on i386 architectures only.
Firefox 2 and the Greasemonkey + Digg This Toolbar add-ons
My PowerBook was behaving quite strange lately, but never looked into it. It would slow down and the fan would spin up quite often. After I upgraded to Firefox 2 today the problem got worse and Firefox started behaving really strange, could not open the Preferences or Add-ons windows.
Turns out that Firefox was maxing out the processor, this is why the machine was slow and overheating. Starting Firefox in safe mode, which disables all the add-ons, solved the problem. So it was one of the extensions. After a bit of trial and error it turns out that it is a combination of extensions: Greasemonkey and Digg This Toolbar. Not sure which one is the culprit, Firefox gets crazy only if both are enabled. I am running Firefox 2 on a PowerBook G4, Greasemonkey is 0.6.6.20061017.0 and Digg This Toolbar is 0.1.2b.
Google Co-op
Yesterday Google released a new service (beta, of course): Google Co-op. This basically allows you to create a search engine that will search only certain sites.
To give it a try I created a search engine to search a few sites indexing free computer books: OpenBoox Search Engine.
I also tried to integrate the search result into my new pet project: OpenBoox.com (beta as well). I am using Drupal for OpenBoox.com and it does not seem to be possible to integrate the search result into a Drupal site.
Coping with Climate Dread
A really disturbing article was published today by The Tyee:
Coping with Climate Dread
The only sensible thing to do seems to stick your head in the sand and forget about the whole issue. Really depressing.
Gnome Screen Ruler
Just found this little Gnome utility that puts a ruler on your screen so you can measure things: Gnome Screen Ruler. Unfortunately it is not in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories, so you have to compile it yourself, especially if you are running amd64.
I found good compilation instructions (there are quite a few problems) on GnomeFiles. I attached the amd64 deb file, it may work for you: gruler-0.
