The 5th semiannual Ubuntu upgrade post

Ah, the thrill of the upgrade. The excitement of downloading all-new versions of your favorite software, and the very real possibility that your entire system could get hosed. After a series of relatively uneventful upgrades, I wondered when my luck would run out.

So Ubuntu 9.04 (insert codename that no one likes here) came out on Thursday. As I've been doing for the past few upgrades, I downloaded the alternate install CD (although I used BitTorrent this time).

Once I got that going, the actual upgrade went pretty smoothly... until the end, when Ubuntu said that the installation failed due to a broken package. It was Bonager, an old program I installed from a third-party .deb package and used for a while but wasn't using anymore. I went to Synaptic and it told me to try sudo apt-get -f install, but that didn't work. After some Googling, I found this, which got rid of the program.

sudo update-rc.d -f bonager remove
sudo rm /etc/init.d/bonager
sudo dpkg -P --force-all bonager

Thinking that was over with, I went to the Update Manager to see if there were any new updates since the release. The Upgrade Manager told me I had to do a partial upgrade, presumably because of the broken package mess. I started that, and it asked me to insert a CD. I hit cancel, and it continued for a bit but then stopped without explanation. I tried again, and the partial upgrade would start but then the window would disappear. I tried it on the command line (sudo apt-get dist-upgrade) and the reason was that there were more broken packages, presumably caused by the breakage of the first one. sudo apt-get -f install actually fixed the problem, and I ran the upgrade again on the command line without any problems.

The ordeal caused me a lot of grief, but at least there weren't sharks involved.

I like the new version of Ubuntu. There haven't been too many funky changes to trip me up, and there have been some little improvements here and there. You can now change gedit's syntax highlighting from the status bar; Rhythmbox's gapless playback allows songs to finish; Transmission allows bandwidth limit scheduling. As usual, Ubuntu has thrown in some new fonts, but I actually like them. They're the Liberation fonts, which are apparently metric-compatible with certain popular fonts. They also look pretty slick, like you'd find them in a book or magazine that was trying to look cool. And the new pop-up notifications aren't that bad. I just wish I could customize them. The little preferences app does nothing.

Some reviews I've read assert that subtle improvements have made the Ubuntu experience better overall, and I find myself agreeing. Maybe it's just my imagination, but OpenOffice.org and Firefox even seem a bit zippier. It's almost as if Firefox is saying, "Yes, Jordon, install as many extensions as you want!!"

Probably my favorite improvement is the inclusion of Ekiga 3.2, which has buddy list capabilities so you can actually see whether other people are online. At this juncture I'd like to renew my perennial plea for Ekiga contacts. You know, just say hi or something. I'm sip:jordon@ekiga.net. Pretty easy to remember. (It's also available for Windows!) I really wish there were something like a "Skype Me" forum for SIP users. I've even thought of creating something like that myself. Seriously, there must be some people who use SIP for fun, right? How are they supposed to contact each other?

Clerkdogs provides movie recommendations from former video store clerks. The recommendations are supposed to be all the better for it. (Via The Presurfer)

Here's a USA Sitcom Map showing the settings of sitcoms across the country. There's a whole map for New York City as well. (Via waxy.org)

E-E-E

Oh, honey, he's teasing you. Nobody has two television sets.

I haven't talked much here about my upcoming trip to Europe with my friends, but believe me, it is still going to happen. I've been making arrangements bit by bit. I've bought a plane ticket and a train ticket already. But since I'm going to be gone for over two months, I felt that there should be something more.

I've decided to keep my job while I'm on vacation. I'm a webmaster here at school. I also happen to blog as a hobby. ("Really?") I also like to take pictures with my digital camera... do you see where this is going?

I need a laptop.

I do have a laptop. I've been using my Dell Inspiron E1505N since I got it almost two years ago. But it's big and heavy. It has all personal information on it, so I'd hate for it to get lost in a foreign country. It was kind of expensive, so I wouldn't want to have to replace it. It's also fragile; I've come close to breaking it while carrying it around.

So, for my trip, I'd need a laptop that's the opposite of all that—one that's small, light, ad hoc, cheap, and sturdy. Fortunately, the market has answered. I am speaking, of course, of that newly popular class of PCs, the netbook.

Since Andy and I will be traveling as a duo for much of the time, we talked about the possibility of buying a netbook together, sharing it during the trip, and selling it after we get back. I did a bit of research and found a barely used one in my immediate area for $250. It had basically everything I wanted: a low-capacity solid-state drive, a Linux-based operating system, good battery life, and of course, small size. It's an ASUS Eee PC 4G, and today, it is mine ours. Craigslist does it again!

Apparently, the woman selling it got it as a gift and didn't want it because she already has a laptop. I can sympathize. I had a hard time convincing myself that I should buy a second laptop, even a cheap one that I would only have for a short time. I figured it would be tantamount to declaring my two-year-old laptop obsolete, and that computer cost too much for me to take it out of service so early.

After using the Eee PC, I've set aside those concerns. The netbook is for casual use only. The 800x480 screen is almost too small for web browsing, and the keyboard is almost too small for typing. (In fact, I haven't switched the layout to Dvorak because I need my fingers to move around more!) It's not the most pleasant experience, but you can manage in a pinch. And dang if it isn't convenient.

So, during our 68-day pinch, it should get the job done just fine. It'll be much better than not blogging, not being able to take lots of photos, and not making money. Now, I'll just have to show it to Andy and see what he thinks. I'm pretty sure he'll like it. Also, he owes me $125.

Here's a fun mashup for your listening and viewing pleasure: Mother of All Funk Chords. (Via Lessig Blog)

Recently, an old portrait that might be of Shakespeare has come to light. If it's actually of him, it would change the little that we know about his life. But those of you who like a little mystery in your Elizabethan poet-playwrights need not be concerned because we'll probably never know one way or the other.

Look around you

No posts in six days. That must mean I'm having fun, right? The answer is yes!

Actually, I got sick this week, and that was annoying... you know, because I was at home on spring break and all. But I passed the time with... panoramic photography.

See, I'd long missed putting together panoramas easily with a certain program that I no longer find ethical to use because it's not free as in freedom. I was wondering what was free but also very easy to use. There's Hugin, which runs on Linux, but from what I had seen, it couldn't stitch panoramas automatically. You had to choose a lot of corresponding points between images for it to put them together.

Actually, it turns out that Hugin can work with programs that pick points automatically, which makes the task of stitching panoramas much easier. It's not quite as easy as giving a program some images and telling it to go ahead, but it's close. I just downloaded Hugin and Autopano-SIFT (both available from Ubuntu's software repositories) and made sure that they would work together, and then everything was ready.

All you have to do is follow the instructions in Hugin's Assistant tab. It will guess the focal length of your camera based on the EXIF data in the images or something like that. All I know is that it didn't like photos I took with the camera sideways unless I stripped the images of their EXIF data and entered the focal length manually as three-quarters of the camera's actual focal length as calculated by Hugin (due to the aspect ratio being the opposite and aw, you don't really need to know this, do you).

Anyway, you load the images, then you and Hugin decide what the camera's focal length is. Next, Autopano-SIFT picks points common to different images so Hugin knows how to stitch them. You're then presented with a rough idea of how the panorama will look, and there you can set some parameters like the projection. That's one thing that I don't remember [non-free automatic panorama stitching program] being able to do.

It turns out that one projection is not suitable for all kinds of panoramas. For example, it's common to see buildings looking very bendy, like in some of my previous panoramas, but they look much better if you can keep straight lines straight, as in this example. But that sort of projection isn't always the best because the edges of the image get more distorted as the field of view gets wider. It's a trade-off.

Finally, Hugin generates an image. I like that it's an uncompressed TIFF with transparency around the panorama, as opposed to the aforementioned program which generated a (compressed) JPEG with black around the panorama.

Taking panoramic photos can be tricky, but with the right software, stitching images together doesn't have to be a problem. As long as you do a good job of taking the pictures, you can get a pretty flawless panorama like this one I took of my backyard. It consists of 17 photos.

(Also: I finally upgraded WordPress today, so let me know if you notice anything funky with the blog. 2.7 is sexxay.)

I have lots of gift cards that I rarely get a chance to use, so this site might be handy: you can buy and sell gift cards at Plastic Jungle. (Via mcgees.org)

Fun project: a Scrabble Keyboard. And it's for a Mac. Go figure. (Via The Presurfer)

You may have heard of Songsmith, Microsoft's new program that generates backing music for melodies. (See a recent post where I link to Songsmith's treatment of "Roxanne.") But it turns out that the program can do more than that. Here, Songsmith plays melodies based on recent stock charts... descending melodies, of course. Funny in a seemingly inappropriate way. (Via waxy.org)

Someday the somethingteenth

This semester, I've got a lot of homework. It's kind of odd. In previous semesters, I haven't had much homework that I had to sit down and write out on paper and turn in a few days or a week later. Now I have regular homework assignments in three of my four classes, and they're keeping me busy during most of the week.

I was up late last night working on a MIPS assembly programming assignment for my Computer Organization and Design class. For those of you who don't know, programming in assembly language is the digital equivalent of going about your normal day without your right arm and your left leg. It takes a conscious effort and a lot of work not to fall over (or just give up on life).

One assignment was to ask the user for an arbitrary number of integers and then calculate how many of them were divisible by 4. This took me a couple or three hours. I tried using the "div" operator, but it wasn't working the way I expected it to, so I had to find the divisibility of a number by 4 using other MIPS operators. I have discovered a truly marvelous way to do this, which this blog post is not boring enough to contain.

Something else: recently, someone on Slashdot asked, "How Will Recent Financial Downturns Affect IT Jobs?" The consensus, if you read the comments, is clear: do stuff. Grades don't matter, experience does. Help out with an open source project, they say. I wish I had the time and knowhow to do that. (And, let's face it, the inclination. Maybe there's some program I would be interested in developing, but I don't know what it would be.) Are any of you readers involved with that sort of stuff? Could you provide any tips for an Ubuntu user who doesn't know how to compile from source?

A video from my friend TJ: Ninja Poetry. Could this be the next big viral video? He really did write the poem.

In 2001, C. Brian Smith had just graduated from college and was living in a new town when his only friend there invited him over for dinner at her family's new house. Smith writes about his visits to the White House and what it was like to hang out with George W. Bush.

A look from the other side: Interview with an Adware Author. The guy actually started out with good intentions, but it became a slippery slope from there. (Via waxy.org)

Life with walls

Too few posts ago, I mentioned that I would have to use a certain Windows-only program to do work for my digital logic class. As a Linux user (Ubuntu, to be exact), I of course find this detestable. I first considered trying to run it under Wine, but the all-knowing app DB reports of a show-stopping issue when doing so: USB operations don't work. Or, actually, maybe they do if you pull the right strings. I don't know. But I was going to need to use a special USB peripheral to program circuits, so there was no room for maybes.

I decided to virtualize. As an engineering student, I'm allowed to download copies of popular Microsoft software (except Office) for free, including Windows itself. I figured I should pick Vista over XP because I'll probably need Windows for a while in the future. I picked Vista Business, the most basic variety they had available. When it came time to download it, I hit a little snag. They couldn't provide a simple download link. Oh no, that would be too easy. You have to download a downloader, which itself is a Windows program. Vicious cycle??

Not quite. I installed Wine to run the downloader, and it worked fine, as I could expect. Next, I downloaded VirtualBox OSE, the free software version. I'd never run a virtual instance of an operating system before, so it was a little scary. But the installation went well, and in half an hour, I had Vista running inside Ubuntu. It was then that I found out that the free version of VirtualBox doesn't have USB support. So I uninstalled the free version and installed the non-free version. For once, I'm glad that programs leave their configuration files behind after an uninstall; I was able to keep the same virtual machine.

As is custom when I'm putzing around with my Ubuntu system, I now provide the gritty details of what I did, both for my future reference and for everyone's benefit. (This is for Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex," by the way. I don't think I know what an ibex is. It sounds like a six-dimensional ibis or something.)

First, in the Settings window, I went to "USB" and created an empty filter so that the virtual machine would recognize all USB devices. After that, I was able to mount and use my printer from Windows. VirtualBox recognized my other USB devices but wouldn't let me select them, so I had to do more tweaks. These fixes came from various sources and I found that they worked when applied together.

I edited /etc/udev/rules.d/40-basic-permissions.rules and replaced the two USB lines with

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE="0664"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", MODE="0664"

For good measure, I added myself to the vboxusers group even though I think I was automatically added already.

sudo usermod -G vboxusers -a `whoami`

For my next trick, I had to go to Users and Groups to find the number of the vboxusers group. On my computer, it was 127. Thus, at the end of /etc/fstab, I added the following:

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=127,devmode=664 0 0

Then I think I rebooted, and everything went swimmingly. I was able to mount multiple USB devices from Windows.

I still hate Windows. But even when I get mad, all I have to do is think back to Tuesday, when I was at work with my friend Mark and we were watching live streaming video of Barack Obama being sworn in as President of the United States. That's something to be happy about. Now whenever I'm unhappy about something, I can just say to myself, "Barack Obama is the President," and I'll feel a little better.

Here's a computer simulation of that airplane landing in the Hudson River. (Via The Presurfer)

During the inauguration on Tuesday, the new incarnation of whitehouse.gov went online. Jason Kottke examines the country's new robots.txt file. (Via waxy.org)

We are the champions

Ah. Victory is so sweet. Even if it is vicarious.

So my university's football team went to the national championship game on Thursday night and won their third national championship. It was a nail-biter but a good one in the end. The last national championship was only two years ago, and the first was ten years before that. Not bad, I say. Yeah, I do like football, and whenever I feel like I picked this school because of its superior sports programs, I remember that even after I had been accepted, I wanted nothing to do with college sports. Remember? This is me not wanting to watch the basketball championship!

I still don't care about basketball, but times have changed, so I was glued to the football game Thursday night. I could have watched on semi-big screens with thousands of other fans in the basketball... arena?... but I stayed at the dorm and watched it with this one guy Jon and some other people who weren't paying attention. We ordered a pizza during the game, and when we went outside to get it, the streets were basically empty. Sure, it was a college campus at night, but it was still kind of eerie. It was strange to know that almost everyone was inside watching the game on TV.

"But Jordon," you ask, "how do you know that so many people were inside watching the game on TV?" Oh, easy. When we won, they all went outside. I had heard that after recent football and basketball championships in the past, students would storm University Avenue, one of the main roads through town, and engage in general merrymaking get crunk. After the game, Jon and I set out. It was kind of cold, but people were pouring out of the streets and onto the avenue, which I think had already been blocked off.

I don't think I've ever been in such a crowded crowd of people in my life. People were singing fight songs, chanting cheers, climbing poles, blaring horns, waving signs, getting amorous, throwing toilet paper, taking pictures, shooting off fireworks, and who knows what else. I'm misrepresenting the crowd, though. A lot of people were just mulling around, including me when I wasn't shouting "It's great to be a Florida Gator!" I stayed till about 1:30 in the morning and was hanging around with some other acquaintances after that.

Oh yeah, there are classes going on too. That brings me to an unfortunate development. As you may know, I've been getting by using Linux exclusively for almost two years. This semester, it ends. At least, I think so. For my digital logic class I have to use a program called Quartus from a company called Altera. I've done a little bit of searching and it seems that running it under Wine won't work for what I need to do (programming logic things). I think I could accept having to virtualize, especially if I'm going to need Windows again later, which is likely. I really, really, really, really, really, really, really don't want to dual-boot. Really.

Oh. Man. I think I have just found what I am looking for. Turns out there's actually documentation about running Quartus in Windows in VirtualBox in Ubuntu. And I think my school has a deal with Microsoft so I can get Windows for free or a low, low price. I guess that's what I'll have to do.

Windows sucks.

Pretty cool from the BBC: Ancient Supernova Mystery Solved. Apparently it's possible to learn about a past supernova by detecting the faint echoes of light it leaves behind.

Here's evolution at work. This guy named Roger Alsing created a program that would start with some random polygons and, over many generations, approximate a predefined image, discarding the results of mutations that looked less like the image and keeping those that looked more like it. After about 900,000 generations, the program came up with a good re-creation of the Mona Lisa. He then released source code and binaries and posted some other results people sent in.

Almost Christmas

I'm a webmaster. When I'm designing web pages, it's often useful to see how they look in different browsers and on different operating systems. But at work, I'm just one guy with IE 7 and Firefox 3 on Windows XP. What am I to do? Browsershots is a great service if you want screenshots of your page in different browsers. But what if you need to interact with your pages on different platforms?

Enter CrossBrowserTesting.com. The site gives you access to various Windows, Mac, and Linux boxes so you can do your thing. It's kind of slow because you've got this stuff going back and forth over a network, but it's pretty indispensable if you need to see how your web pages behave, which is often the case. It's free to create an account and use the service; unless you buy credits, you're limited to 5 minutes at a time, and paying customers get to skip ahead of you. In spite of that, there usually isn't much of a wait. Sometimes there's none.

The site requires Java, which shouldn't be a problem for most people. By default, you connect to their computers via a Java applet. They also let you use your own VNC client, in which case they just give you the IP address and a password. You'll still need to have Java, though. I know, it's kind of lame. (I should add that Vinagre, the default VNC client in Ubuntu, is pleasantly easy to use. I had never needed to use it before.)

So CrossBrowserTesting.com went swimmingly on Windows at work, but on Ubuntu at home, the Java applet would cause Firefox to use 100% of the CPU and hang. It turned out that many, but not all, Java applets were doing this. I found out that it was a problem with the Java plugin that Firefox was using. With the version of Sun Java in Ubuntu 8.10 (Java 6 Update 10), there are two browser plugins: the regular one and the "next-generation" one, which fixes some bugs. The regular one is used by default, but the next-gen one is supposed to work a lot better.

So how do you switch between them? Here's what I did. Your mileage may vary. No warranty, etc.

First, I deleted the symbolic link I created about a year ago:

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
rm libjavaplugin_oji.so

As per this comment on the bug, I created a symbolic link to the new plugin in the same folder:

ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.10/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

But it didn't work; both the old and new plugins were listed in about:plugins. So I followed the instructions of another comment:

sudo rm /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/mozilla-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.0.4/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/xulrunner/libjavaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/mozilla-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.0.4/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/xulrunner/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/mozilla-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so

The author provides these commands as a shell script (I found it easier just to run them one by one) and notes, "Don't worry if you get an error message saying that something can't be deleted." (Not all of the files to be deleted existed for me.) Anyway, I did all those things and sho' 'nuff, Java was working fine on CrossBrowserTesting.com and other sites. Yay.

Okay, that was boring. Here's something a little more exciting. I just found out my grades for this semester: three A's and two B+'s. It's better than last time, and it brings my GPA up ever so slightly (about one hundredth of a grade point). I had already found out (or could guess) the grades for several of my classes, but my Indian Ocean class I had no idea about: part of the grade was a paper, which of course would be graded subjectively. Fortunately, I got an A. Thanks, prof. I'll give you a good rating on Gator Ratings, a new site that a computer science student recently started.

Also, Where's George?, a site I used to be heavily involved with, turns 10 years old today. I can't believe it. That means I've been a member for almost nine years, which is crazy nuts. I haven't done much in the past few years, though. Hardly anything, in fact. Still, the site is an interesting idea: enter the serial numbers of your US currency to track them as they go. The idea just got boring for me after a while, but it's still cool when I think about it. (Also, when the forums were changed from WWWBoard to vBulletin, things were never the same.)

Although World War II ended in 1945, several Japanese soldiers held out from surrendering for various reasons: either they were really, really convinced that they shouldn't surrender, or they weren't aware that the war had ended. The last ones surrendered in 1974.

Video

While I've been home for the weekend, I realized that my webcam was here. Ah yes, my beloved webcam that I bought earlier this year to use with the video/phone program Ekiga. What happened to it?

When I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 in April, I encountered some changes the Ubuntu developers made to the way sound works. I couldn't get sound working with Ekiga. My microphone wouldn't work with any application. So that was that... until I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10.

All the sound issues seem to have been sorted out, so I'm taking out the old webcam and microphone again with the hopes that someone might call me. You don't have to be using Ekiga; you should be able to use any SIP client. So hit up sip:jordon@ekiga.net if I'm on Ekiga. This status indicator will say "Call Me!" if I'm online and "Offline" if I'm offline.

I've also been having fun with my webcam because I can now use Cheese to record videos with it. And with that, I've been delving into the magic of ffmpeg. (We're getting into some serious Linux stuff right now, so you can just skip ahead if you don't care.) I was bored and I figured out how to crop a 640x480 video to the ever popular 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio.

ffmpeg -i input.ogv -sameq -aspect 4:3 -croptop 60 -cropbottom 60 -aspect 16:9 output.mpg

Explanations: input.ogv is the input file, -sameq indicates that the output file should be of the same quality, -aspect 4:3 forces the aspect ratio to be 4:3 (in case ffmpeg acts up, which I've noticed that it does), -croptop and -cropbottom take off that many pixels from the top and bottom (60 in this case), and -aspect 16:9 ensures that the new aspect ratio is indeed 16:9 if ffmpeg doesn't understand that from the cropping (which it doesn't). output.mpg is the output file. If you were using a different sized video, you would take off a different number of pixels from the top and bottom.

Turns out that ffmpeg can't write to Ogg Theora video. But there is a similar tool called ffmpeg2theora that can. The equivalent command for ffmpeg2theora is:

ffmpeg2theora input.ogv --croptop 60 --cropbottom 60 -o output.ogv

This is simpler because ffmpeg2theora doesn't screw up the aspect ratio while it's working.

I'm going home soon, and I've got another busy week ahead. Let's get to the links.

Too weird: Anti-Terror Law Requires God Be Acknowledged.

Maybe you've heard that "piracy" of "intellectual property" causes 750,000 lost jobs. Where did the number come from? Find out.

And finally, here are 10 Weird Psychology Studies.

Thanks given

I'm at my grandparents' house, and it's Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday that may or may not be about gluttony. Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday, which means that people get the Friday after off and sometimes the Wednesday before also. Even if they don't have the day before Thanksgiving off, they act like they do. I'm talking about everyone at my school, which was basically abandoned yesterday. I had one class on Tuesday which was dismissed early because I was one of the only people there. Yesterday, one of my classes was canceled and the other one wasn't. There were only 8 people there when there are normally 50.

What can I say? People love their Thanksgiving. They love the four-day weekend, and would love to have a five-, six-, or nine-day weekend if they could. That leaves me. I wanted to go to my classes, and I also wanted to work and make that money. With my job as webmaster for the Dean of Students Office, I've been working on updating a web site for a biennial event that will be held in the spring. The person in charge of the event keeps telling me that Google's listing for the page hasn't been updated. Hey Google, go check out the Florida Hispanic Latino Collegiate Forum 2009. You might also want to see how I replaced an ugly JavaScript drop-down menu system with a beautiful, mostly-CSS, screen-reader-and-search-engine-friendly drop-down menu system. Don't ask me how long it took to make it work on Firefox, IE7, and IE6. Please don't.

Ah, Internet Explorer 6, the bane of every web designer's existence. Fortunately, the percentage of IE6 users visiting the Dean of Students Office web site is at 15% and falling. (For this site, it's about 12%.) But that's still a significant number. Most of the computers in the DSO now have IE7, so what is a web designer supposed to do when he needs to test a site on IE6? I once resorted to going to the conference room and kicking someone off their computer to use IE6. But it turns out there's a better solution. CrossBrowserTesting.com has saved my life. You can get free access to various testing environments for five minutes at a time, usually with little waiting. (You can also pay and skip the wait.) Java is required, but that's no big. Except it doesn't seem to work on my Ubuntu Linux setup at home; I think it's the Java check that makes Firefox hang. Does anyone have a fix? (Please, nothing involving Wine.)

Anyway, right. Yesterday was quiet. The campus was practically dead. I could hear every footstep I took. In class, I could hear every stroke of my pen while I was taking notes. I hardly had to overtake anyone on the sidewalk. There wasn't even a lot of traffic when there normally would have been. It's a good thing, I guess. Everyone is with their families, enjoying Thanksgiving. And that's really what Thanksgiving is all about.

Here's a blog that's counting down 1000 Awesome Things. It's up to #886 right now.

Talk about quiet: the quietest place on earth is unnervingly quiet.

This article gives some insight on why cell phones work the way they do: Peering Inside a Mobile Phone Network.

Yeah, computers

Who's ready to rock and roll?!

Well, too bad. You're reading a blog post instead.

Ubuntu 8.10 (code-named "Intrepid Ibex") came out last Thursday, but I didn't make the time to upgrade for about a week. I was a bit hesitant as I usually am, especially since my friend Mark told me that the update messed up his computer quite a bit. I forget what it did, but it was something scary.

Like last time, I decided not to rely so much on the servers for the upgrade because I figured they would probably still be smashed due to the traffic. While I was home for the weekend, I downloaded the alternate installation CD image via BitTorrent (which I can't do from my dorm room). When I was ready to upgrade, I mounted the CD image as a CD (details here), thus eliminating the need to burn a physical CD. This saves me time and makes Mother Nature happy.

Still, upgrading your operating system is a little scary. I fear for the safety of my computer and my data the same way a parent might fear for his or her child. The horror stories, like Mark's, do nothing to help. But usually, everything turns out fine, and things seem to have turned out fine this time. Each release of Ubuntu has a few annoying bugs that are (hopefully) fixed in the next release. Fortunately, Intrepid seems to fix more than it introduces.

First, the new quirks. Intrepid relies less on the xorg.conf file, so when it reset my default keyboard layout, I had to look up how to change it. There's a semi-graphical way to do this sort of thing now. You have to enter sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup, go through every screen, wait while the computer thinks, and then reboot. Well, maybe you just have to restart X, but I usually reboot when that's called for. I also wanted to edit my actual keyboard layout file. It had moved from /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/us to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us.

GNOME has a new "guest session" feature that creates a temporary account that doesn't have access to anything important. This would be handy if someone needs to use your computer real quick. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. Good thing people don't need to use my computer real quick very often, I guess.

Recently, I figured out how to enable gapless playback in Rhythmbox. In Intrepid, this gives me a problem when I'm listening to albums or playlists. Rhythmbox stops playing the last song of the album or playlist just before it's over. The only solution I've been able to figure out so far is to turn gapless playback off.

During the upgrade, I was prompted about overwriting several files. They had to do with the fixes I implemented for this nasty hard-drive killing bug that I thought should have been fixed now. It turns out that the bug hasn't been fixed, so I tried this fix suggested on the Ubuntu Forums. It seems to work.

And now some good things in Ubuntu 8.10, in no particular order:

• There's an option to allow sideways scrolling with the touchpad. I don't know if this is new, but I've never seen it before.
• Ubuntu 8.04's infamous Adobe Flash/PulseAudio bug is no more. Now I can watch Flash videos without worrying about Firefox crashing. This is really, really, really good. Really.
• The new version of GNOME puts less space between lines when listing things such as files. This saves space in a lot of places, including Pidgin's "Buddy Details" view.
• Keyboard controls: I'm once again able to change the volume (I don't even know when that stopped working), and some of the sensitivity in changing the screen brightness that was lost in Ubuntu 8.04 is back.
• The Wi-Fi light once again lights up if a signal is detected.
• Audacity isn't at all sluggish or uncooperative like it was in 8.04.
• For the first time, the desktop effects actually seem to work. My graphics driver hasn't been up to the task in the past, but things seem to be going pretty smoothly with this release. I haven't had a freeze yet.

Overall, it looks like 8.10 is a big improvement over 8.04.

On Flickr, here's a photoset of Barack Obama before, during, and after his election night speech. The behind-the-scenes photos are especially interesting. I like this one of Obama watching McCain's concession speech on TV. The photos aren't very large, but they're licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

A probably out-of-date link from our own reader Daniel: Will You Go To Homecoming With Me? Aw, how cute.

Advice I should follow: How to Be Interesting. I already do two of those ten things, so maybe I'm 20% interesting?