Lucid Lynx Beta

I upgraded my primary machine to Lucid the other day.

So far I've been pretty impressed.

I'd heard a lot of stuff about the 'me' menu and the messaging integration, without really knowing what it is all about.

Under karmic, my experience with empathy had been more than a little disappointing.

With Lucid, things are much better. The envelope in the top panel which goes green when a new message comes in is working really well for me.

The Super-m keyboard accelerator takes me to the messaging indicator and allows me to switch easisy if I want to talk to a contact.

I took a look at the code, the Super-m key binding is hard-wired into the indicator code, so I've had to re-train my fingers which, since I've had that bound to minimize windows.

Super-s takes you to the logout menu, again no way to configure this though.

On balance, I'm a big fan of keyboard support for everything.

This is probably one reason I don't really care about the buttons moving to the left. I don't use the things as a rule (I use the keyboard). One thing I do like on the buttons is the close window one is red -- easy to spot and hit if I need to.

In other news, so far sound has behaved itself. Hopefully the days of 'killall pulseaudio' are numbered.

What do you do if your gas pedal gets stuck?

So the press is having a field day with Toyota's gas pedal problems.

Maybe I have missed it, but I haven't come across any advice from the press (or Toyota for that matter) as to what you should do if you encounter this problem.

I've heard a few tails from people who did, most recount tales of having both feet on the brakes trying to slow the vehicle.

Putting the car into neutral would seem a good option, failing that I would think the thing to do would be switch off the ignition, but then you have to worry a bit about power steering and steering locks.

So why isn't the press interested in educating the public?

The Pants Bomber

Another (failed) terrorist attack, once again the solutions being proposed involve more inconvenience, more invasion of privacy and little in the way of true increased security. Chalk up another round to the terrorists.

It is more than a little annoying that having had to give fingerprints to travel to the US, submitting all those details they so love, with talk of countries passing on credit card information and the like, that this attack was done by someone on their 500K list of people to watch.

See this article for more on the information that was available about the terrorist. It seems that this attack was an intelligence failure, as indeed was 911: there was information out there that might have stopped the attack if the pieces had been put together.

Of course, it isn't quite this simple, with hindsight you can look back and find the pieces that needed putting together. 500K is of course rather a lot of people to keep an eye on, OK as a table that computers can check names against, but you're not going to be able to keep track of them all.

It would be interesting to know where in the 500K people he ranked in terms of risk. A single list is less useful than a prioritised list, 500K might be manageable for singling out for special searches (depending on how many are frequent flyers). It is no use having so many on the list you can't afford to check any of them at an airport -- some prioritisation is in order.

Fancy new search equipment isn't the answer to stopping someone on your high risk list getting on a plane, that stuff is there to catch the ones you don't know about yet and to discourage the nutters. Sure, it helps when your intelligence fails, but the solution to an intelligence failure is not to beef up plan B.

Good news from Jamaica

As mentioned in an earlier post I left my Acer Aspire One with a guy in Jamaica.

He has been having his challenges getting all the stuff he wants working on that machine. He has asked a few questions, but has mostly found his own solutions.

He's been trying hard to get the video conferencing (with empathy) working. Not much joy there, I've had trouble myself, tends to be a bit hit and miss + the AAO can struggle a bit with voice and video.

Anyway, this mornig I got a video call from him :)

Some Italian guy from the Ubuntu forums had helped him install the latest pidgin, talking him throught a bunch of terminal stuff.

Ubuntu you are awesome.

Copenhagen shows what can be done if you are serious about supporting cycling

The video here shows what can be done if you are serious about promoting cycling in your city.

Some of the things they have done:

• Lots of double width cycle lanes
• specially designed junctions to cut down serious accidents
• LED's to warn right turning vehicles about bikes
• traffic lights co-ordinated so bikes travelling at 20km/h never have to stop
• bike counters to a. monitor and b. let everyone know how many bikes there are.

Such a refreshing change from the world's worst bike lanes. Hopefully, other cities will start to catch on.

Karmic Koala on Acer Aspire 11.6" ZA3

I left my 8.9" Acer Aspire One behind with a really great Jamaican guy on a recent trip there.

It had Ubuntu Karmic Koala on it, so far the guy is doing pretty well, I've been impressed by his resourcefulness in trying to work around problems. One of the early questions I got was something like, "This wine stuff is a bit complicated".

Meanwhile, time for a replacemen beastie for me. There is a Canadian Computers store just up the road from me. The staff there are pretty clued in and helpful with it. The 8.9" acer has been excellent. Good points were the long battery life, light weight, compact size. I've found myself wanting a larger screen some of the time, but the plus points have offset this.

The 11.6" aspires were too tempting. Similar weight, half inch bigger all round, but 1366x768 screen resolution and 5 hours battery life. Perfect.

Only problem is the Poulsbo chip set used for the graphics driver. On the plus side, this is the chip that combines lower power consumption magic with the high resolution. The big problem is it is proprietary, with closed source drivers. At first sight, it appears to be an Intel chip, but it turns out they have done a deal with a third party, so the usual rule of thumb, where Intel really do play nicely with open source goes out of the window.

Nonetheless, Karmic installed from a USB stick without problems, bar the screen resolution. This thread provided the solution to the resolution problem. The scripts from lucazade worked like magic.

The only remaining issue is I have a choice between working sound and using the compiz 3-D effects. I'm sure someone out there has the answer to this one.

I was a little concerned tha the Atom Z520 processor might be a bit under-powered, but so far all is ok. I do have to keep an eye open for runaway firefox processes though -- occasionally it starts the cpu racing and then of course performance nosedives.

Meanwhile I've installed the Google Chromium browser with these instructions. I'm really finding it very slick on this machine. Added bonus is Chromium extensions are starting to trickle in, so it is becoming a viable alternative to firefox for me.

First snow flake spotted in Ottawa

From snow and balloons

Actually, this gets a fail as a snow flake. The real thing should be here any day now, so the baker can go and check what they really look like.

In other news, I went to a Halloween party as balloon boy at the weekend. Since then, I have carefully adjusted the balloons payload so they hover about the apartment. It is a bit worrying how much entertainment I'm getting from this.

From snow and balloons