A Rewarding Film Night

So, you know when sometimes things are hyped up. Of course you do. People say, “OMG, like, you haven’t seen so-and-so?! How is this possible?! I need to tell my kids I was there when a person hadn’t, like, you know, seen so-and-so”. And how, invariably, so-and-so doesn’t live up to such hysteria?

Well. Fight Club is not one of those things. I don’t know if I can forgive the people who, upon discovering I’d not seen it, did not stop it with the “OMG!!”, and did not instead get out their DVD of the film—“I don’t care we’re in a god damned pub, stop THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD: this guy hasn’t seen Fight Club.”—and force me to watch it. Right there. It was that good.

So, to avoid being that person, I don’t care where you are. Stop what you are doing. Leave your desk. I don’t care about your netflix subscription; go to the rental store right now. Get the film. Get a nice bottle of wine. And just watch the thing.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron and the HP Compaq 8510w

I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron onto my work laptop today, the HP Compaq 8510w. This post describes the experience, and covers:

  • the install;
  • what hardware worked and what didn’t;
  • bonus: how I got my rails development environment up and running (ruby/rails/netbeans).

The Install

This went very smoothly, aside from one initial hiccup. Here’s a tip to avoid it:

  • Install from the “Install Ubuntu” option rather than booting into the LiveCD using the “Try” option; when I used the “Try” option, the partitioner refused to work. Booting directly to the install resulted in a working partitioner.

First Boot

What works and what doesn’t on first boot? Live-blogging at its finest! Or it would be, were I to get off my sorry behind and publish after each test rather than at the end of the process.

Not working:

  • Suspend and hibernate.
    • Suspend: computer sleeps, but doesn’t wake up. Required a hard reboot via holding the power button down.
    • Hibernate: computer seems to hibernate—at least switches off—but doesn’t appear to be able to boot up from hibernated state. Like Windows, the computer does a normal boot after a failed attempt at recovery from a hibernated state. (Phew!)
    • On the plus side, the power save auto-sleep options are off by default, meaning this problem won’t sting on a default install.
  • Monitor refresh rate is (implausibly) reported as “-2147483 Hz” by the screen resolution tool.

Working:

  • Wireless networking works out the box. Though the system spots the network is WEP protected, I need to select whether I have a passphrase or WEP key. Leopard seems to work this out for itself.
  • Bluetooth can successfully bond with and copy a photo from my phone, using a passkey. Phone appears as a mounted device, this is nicer than OS X’s weird bluetooth file browser.
  • Video:
    • Correct screen resolution selected.
    • Colour depth seems wrong, but I can’t be sure: wallpaper has banding in the background gradient.
    • Nvidia driver for the laptops Nvidia Quadro seems to be installed on first selecting the Restricted Drivers manager, but then seems to need to be reinstalled on enabling Compiz, rather than Metacity, compositing. Weird interaction bug here, I feel. This re-install and activation of the driver seems to have fixed my colour depth issue.
    • The Metacity compositing manager seems to work.
  • Scrolling with the mousepad works. It’s possible to turn off mouse-clicks-by-tapping-the-touchpad. I can’t find a way to enable multi-touch, ala the MacBook.
  • Power:
    • Battery applet seems to be working.
    • Suspend, hibernate broken, see above.
  • Doesn’t seem to have imported my Windows Firefox bookmarks.
  • Hardware buttons:
    • Sound buttons work as expected, including the sliding volume control.
    • Wireless button works, and affects both the bluetooth and wifi. Things all come back on correctly.
    • (i) button launches Help, a nice touch.
    • Can’t test the projection-mode button, I don’t have a projector to hand.
  • Can’t test printing.

Essential Applications

I needed to install a couple of extra applications.

  • Gnome-do is in the repositories. This was actually the first application I installed.
  • Gvim isn’t installed by default; this surprises me.

Conclusions

Overall the laptop seems compatible with Hardy, modulo the sleep/hibernate issues.

Sleep and hibernate still seem to be the perennial Achilles Heal of the operating system. This is especially frustrating for laptop users, and, I feel, an issue that all involved—the Linux community and hardware manufacturers—should have sorted out a long time ago.

Bonus: Getting Rails up and running on a fresh Hardy install

Getting rails running was a bit of a chore, so deserves its own section. Having a full-stack ruby environment set up from the get-go on OS X Leopard is a fantastic choice by Apple, and Ubuntu adopting this would be a great move.

Before starting installed supporting applications; this was simple:

  • Followed Mark Pilgrim’s guide to installing MySQL.
  • Netbeans 6.0.1 is in the repositories; installing this installs Every Java Package Ever. The Ubuntu version doesn’t pick up your GTK theme, nor can it launch firefox; it also doesn’t allow you to select to only have ruby or java tools—it’s all or nothing.

Getting rails itself up and running is a little more involved:

  • $ sudo apt-get install ruby irb rubygems
  • $ sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8 ruby1.8-elisp ruby1.8-examples libdbm-ruby1.8 libgdbm-ruby1.8 libtcltk-ruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8
  • $ sudo gem update --system (I needed to run this twice, the first time it errored out.)

After this line, I started getting the following error:

rhodesmi@rhodes-m-4:~$ gem install rails -y
/usr/bin/gem:23: uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner (NameError)

This was fixed by following the instructions on this blog post.

  • $ sudo gem install rails

After this, I could use script/server to launch a webrick instance over a new project.

Two Quirks of Our Flat

I am informed one way to become a better writer is to write. Then write some more. And so on. This alarmed me, but not so much as it will alarm you when you discover what I have in store for you today.

Something which has been providing excitement chez Mike is our rather characterful heating system. The system is so old it was probably a little past it by the time I was born; it could charitably be described as temperamental. It provides two (theoretically) discrete services: “Heating” and “Hot Water”, controllable via a so-retro-it-would-hurt-if-it-were-not-actually-from-the-70s control device. In this context, “controllable” should be read as “often not controllable”.

Since moving into the flat two months ago, the system has needed attention no less than three times. I believe we are close to collecting all possible combinations of failure; so far we’ve been treated to “Heating Stuck On with No Hot Water For Anything Else”, “Bountiful Hot Water but No Heating” and “Nothing Whatsoever, I Hate You”. Thankfully, we are currently being treated to “Working Services, but with a Constant Irritating Pouring Water Noise”.

The boiler is actually embedded in a wall behind a gas fire. The gas fire looks dangerous, but I can no longer mock as it saved me from frostbite during the period with no heating. During one central heating debugging session we were called upon to provide a report on the boiler’s status. To do this, one must partly dismantle the fire before peering into the depths of the wall, squinting to detect a set of flames amid the darkness. Or see just darkness, because as it happened we were in the Nothing Whatsoever state during this escapade.

Inside the heating system—that is, the radiators and associated pipework rather than the water we use to clean the dishes—is a metallic slop which sticks to magnets, rather than the clean, sparkling water one might hope to find. This is the cause of at least some of our woes, because small shards contained within tend to destroy Important Valves as the slop merrily carouses around the system. Newer systems have chemicals present in the water to alleviate this risk; we are told if those chemicals were introduced to our system, they would produce a critical mass which would cause our radiators to melt.

Connected to this system is our shower, a second mysterious entity which veers wildly and unpredictably between a state of warm and powerful (roughly once per blue moon) and a more common state bearing more than a passing resemblance to a light dusting of rain. A favoured modus operandi is to teasingly begin with a jet of warming water, then slowly reduce the temperature until one is left shivering.

There are a couple of useful tips I can offer to anyone unfortunate enough to visit:

  • The knob is turned towards Cold for Hot Water, and Hot for Cold Water;
  • Sometimes it only produces cold water no matter which was you turn the control knob;
  • Turning the shower off for a minute or two often leads to brief periods of heat to the water when it is turned back on;
  • Sometimes this brief period of heat may be scalding;
  • Though occasionally turning the shower off for a minute or two leads to a state where it refuses to come back on;
  • We have found setting it all the way to cold more often than not improves the power when turned back up to hot;
  • Generally, the control knob provides mere millimeters between the settings for “freezing cold” and “scaldingly hot”;
  • Availability of hot water in the heating system provides little guide as to whether the shower will utilise such resource;
  • Beginning with low expectations is advisable.

Overall, both the heating and shower tend towards sub-optimal.

The Background Hum of Friends

Lately, I have thought a little on how public and private people would choose to be, on average, if they did not need worry about intruding on others.

Previously, most aspects of a person’s life—especially their day-to-day activities—were de facto private, as there was simply no way to expose them without significant intrusion upon others. The internet is becoming ubiquitous meaning this is no longer necessarily the case. Why? Because the internet provides a perfect asynchronous medium allowing new modes of communication.

I’ve been harping on for a while about Twitter. I do believe there is something truly different about twitter; the communication pattern it allows is different from any before available. I dislike snappy sound bites, but I’ve been taken somewhat by the phrase “background hum”. Twitter allows me a more ambient view of the lives my friends lead than explicit discussion does. More a feeling for their moods, a less explicit interaction pattern.

Explaining Twitter is difficult; as with anything new. Why do small details engross one so? Because they are from friends; people for whom one cares about little things. About how Jason found green tea milkshake odd or that Des is enjoying Cut Copy.

Less frivolously, my parents found out my flight back from Seattle was cancelled via my tweets as I found out and rebooked my flights. (Still waiting on BA’s compensation offer, distinctly underwhelmed). It wasn’t something I considered worth telling them explicitly, preferring not to worry them, but the non-intrusive posts to twitter kept them (somewhat) informed.

This leads back to my question of public and private aspects to one’s life. There are, in reality, relatively few things we would prefer to keep private. Until services such as Twitter, providing a non-intrusive method of publicly detailing small items, it has been untenable to project small, but somehow meaningful, aspects of life. Following from this the question becomes not, “why would you wish to publish this”, but, “what’s stopping you publishing it”?

Twitter, though technically public, is not public in the sense a blog is. A blog has the feel of being intended for the world at large. Tweets are intended for the people who choose to follow you; people who have expressed an interest in you personally. The short format encourages little snippets of life. For a reader, Twitter’s non-intrusive, drop-in format makes a five minute tea break into a glance into your friends’ highs and lows. More intimate than Facebook or MySpace, with their projected personas and considered posturing. Twitter encourages off the cuff remarks, posting of trivialities and curios. It’s something new and different; a quiet revolution as much as blogging or emailing ever was.

Guess what I've been up to

My interest was caught by jdub


michael-rhodes-computer:~ mike
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
230 ruby
72 cd
26 ls
21 rake
15 gem
14 script/server
14 irb
12 ping
11 exit
10 sudo