JfwHome

Easy: betterbing.com

I’ve been using VirtualBox for a few years, and I like it. I thought I would try out the latest VMWare Player to compare and see how it has moved on since the last time I used it — from what I’ve heard, the seamless mode in Player is now very good.

However, it all came to naught — VMWare fail. Miserably. Why? Because I can’t download the thing.

VirtualBox provides nice direct download links, and — even better — an Ubuntu repository.

What about WMWare? They provide… this:

VMWare... What the hell?

Problem solved — there’s no way I want to hand over this kind of data. Sure, I could just fill in nonsense data (and I started to)… but then what happens when I need an update, or even upgrade to a paid version? VMWare: What the hell are you thinking, asking for all this personal information? The bounce rate for your software must be hideous — what a great way to send people to your competitors.

If you’re here because you’re searching for a “direct link to VMWare Player” in Google: Sorry, try this, much better link, instead.

I’ve never been one of the vi or emacs brigade — when editing code (mainly PHP and Python), I’ve always found it easiest using a lightweight editor (together with a local server).
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Logitech Squeezeboxes are great little network audio streamers — I have a squeezebox Duet, which is much cooler (IMO) than an Apple TV + iPod.

Squeezeplay is the Squeezebox controller / squeezebox touch user interface, and it can run on any computer. You can use that computer as a controller for your squeezebox receiver, or as a complete squeezebox, playing music. If you can get it running on a portable device, you effectively get a new Squeezebox Controller for free.

Unfortunately, even though the Squeezeboxes are based on a GNU/Linux foundation, Linux users don’t get much love when it comes to releases of SqueezePlay… so we have to compile it ourselves.

Here is how to get SqueezePlay working on Ubuntu karmic amd64, but the instructions should apply to other distros. I’ve also tested it on Karmic 32 bit.

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One of the first things I noticed on upgrading to Karmic was that notifications were lower than they were in Jaunty.

Like most people, at first, I thought this was a bug. The short answer is — it isn’t. The devs, in their infinite wisdom, think its better this way — the “top slot” for notifications is reserved for synchronous notifications, such as brightness and volume.

Karmic notification position

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If you followed my guide on getting Ubuntu 9.04 to run nicely on the eeePC 1005HA, and have or are considering upgrading to Karmic, these few notes will help you.

A karmic Koala in a seashell

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This took a while to figure out. I’ve been trying to query the SharePoint lists service using getListItems().

Getting something from inside one folder is easy — you just set the queryOptions parameter to be <QueryOptions><Folder>folderName</Folder></QueryOptions>.

This works and returns items fron within that folder. But what about subfolders?

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Ubuntu 9.10’s new login screen looks great — brown, black and white. Much improved over the previous version.

However, if you try out the Accessibility options, in particular, the “improve contrast” option, it goes ugly, with a nasty grey bar.

The problem is that, even after you deselect the option, the theme does not revert back, even after restarting again. The problem is that some needed theme files are deleted.

The solution is simple — you need to re-install gdm. Either fire up Synaptic, search for gdm, and then mark it for re-installation, or do sudo aptitude reinstall gdm in a terminal.

There you go — sexy login screen back again.

The 1005HA is one of the brand new Asus eeePC netbooks, and it is a great little machine — aside from the fact that it comes with Windows XP or a dumbed-down customised Xandros (allegedly — as time goes on, Asus seem to be selling out to Microsoft).

As the 1005HA is pretty new, it has a few odd hardware quirks that won’t be fully supported out of the box until the next release of Ubuntu.

Here I run through what I did to end up with a 100% working install — including all Fn hotkeys. The good news is that it is very easy!

My perfect Ubuntu setup on the 1005HA

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I have several network NFS shares that I mount in Ubuntu using /etc/fstab. While this works fine, recent versions (I think it has been annoying me since Edgy) of Ubuntu have an annoying habit of creating a desktop icon for each share.

Annoying!

A desktop icon is fine for an SD card, or a USB stick, but it’s not ideal when you have a ton of network shares.

It is easy to turn off all desktop icons for mounts using gconf-editor. But I still want some of them (such as the aforementioned USB sticks) to show — just not the NFS mounts.

As it turns out, the solution is actually obvious: semi-permanent items should be mounted in the right place, under /mnt. If you mount elsewhere, e.g. under /home, you get the annoying icon. Under /mnt? No icon.

Although this turned out to be quite obvious, it is new to me — for well over a year now I’ve just had all desktop mount icons turned off waiting for the solution.