Monthly Archives: October 2008

Intrepid: Growing Pains

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Updated again Nov 1st 9:00pm, Taiwan time.

I’ve upgraded from Hardy to Intrepid and found a slew of problems. First the problems which are not fixed:

  1. Gnome does not want to start the gnome-terminal which is saved in the session configuration. After further investigation I found that session saving in gnome 2.24.1 does not work at all. This is a regression bug and a major one at that.

  2. Update: I can’t sync to my cell phone using bluetooth. The bluetooth driver is there and working but to be able to sync there need to be some configuration performed. The configuration of the bluetooth tools has significantly changed since Hardy so this is not a trivial thing to fix. And the documentation seems nonexistent. One step forward, two steps back.

  3. Evolution displays negative total number of emails.

Then the problems which I have been able to fix:

  1. The guys working on compiz have decided to go from 0-based indexing of viewports to 1-based indexing. Of course, user settings are not automatically upgraded so I had to go into my configuration and fix that manually. I think the change is good because 0-based indexing makes sense only to programmers. However, not providing for an automatic upgrade of the configuration data is asinine.

  2. scim initially refused to start. It turns out that skim was preventing it to run. Not skim directly but there was a session script which checked whether skim is present or not and if present would refuse to run scim.

  3. Evolution at first did not want to connect to my mail server. I fixed this by switching from TLS to SSL for the connection protocol.

  4. Update: Hardy and Intrepid run different versions of rsync. Unfortunately, the two versions do not speak the exact same protocol. There is some degree of compatibility so not all uses of rsync between an Intrepid and Hardy machine are doomed to fail. However, I use rsync in such a way that Intrepid’s rsync cannot talk to Hardy’s rsync. I’ve backported Intrepid’s rsync to Hardy to take care of that problem.

  5. Update: Skype initially was not able to produce audio. Changing my sound out and ringing devices in the “Sound Device” tab of the “Options” dialog to the value “pulse” fixed the problem.

  6. Update: Spamassassin’s cron job fails. A workaround exists.

  7. Update: The Eclipse version bundled with Intrepid is both ancient and buggy. To be fair that is also a problem with Hardy. The problem has been reported and a newer version of Eclipse exists in one of the PPAs.

  8. Update: Evolution displays a huge “Show:” button. I fixed this by going into the gconf registry and removing the key at /apps/evolution/mail/labels.

I will update this page as I find more.

The Power of the Network

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Last week has been quite eventful. I owe a debt of gratitude to (in chronological order of people who helped me last week) Adeline, Shu-Fun, Li-Ching, Hui-Hwa, Hsin-Hsing, Mr. Lee, Venerable Chang Lang, Bill, Ken Shu, Hsiu-Lan and Mr. Lin. I should also point out that Hsiu-Lan on multiple occasions previous to this specific event has provided me with tremendous help. I hope I’m not forgetting anyone and that I got all the names right and spelled properly. I’m using the names as I’ve heard people introduce themselves to me. Sometimes I remember a last name better than a first name, sometimes the reverse. No disrespect is intended. Read on for the full story of my misadventure.

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Sponsored OSS

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I’ve added a widget in the sidebar in which I’m going to list OSS projects I’ve given money to. I have two principal goals for doing this. First, I want to promote software I’m sponsoring. The publicity I provide is quite modest but it is better than nothing. Secondly, I want to encourage other people to also sponsor OSS projects. For sure, the idea here is not to promote a “holier than thou” attitude. I’m not interested in “oh, look I’ve given to this or that project, what have you done?” This is just childish.
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OOHanzi and Open Office 3

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I’ve tested OOHanzi in Open Office 3 and have good news to report:

  1. OOHanzi will work with Open Office 3 without modification.
  2. There was a bug in Open Office 2.x which affected only people using compiz. If compiz was running, all dialog boxes which were created by the Java virtual machine running in Open Office would be displayed smaller than they should have been. This bug crippled OOHanzi pretty badly. After testing Open Office 3, I found the bug has been fixed.

Stanford exhibit on cigarette advertisement

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Standford has put up an exhibit on cigarette advertisements. It is unbelievable what the tobacco industry fed people. I am particularly amazed at the number of vague claims made. For instance: “from the report of a well-known research organization…”, “what distinguished doctors found…”. If the institution is so “well-known”, then why not just tell us the name? Who are those distinguished doctors?

Master Sheng Yen’s exhortation to study hard

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Yesterday, Master Sheng Yen gave a public talk. Master Sheng Yen is the founder of Dharma Drum Buddhist College, where I am now conducting research in Abhidharma. During the talk yesterday, he first presided over the presentation of awards to distinguished students. It was a good occasion to take pictures but I had not realized that ahead of time and did not bring my camera.
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