Author Archives: TC

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

Leave a reply

I’ve been trying out the last few Ubuntu releases. Ubuntu 7.10 looks even better and the installation was really easy.

Observations:

  • I’ve some kind of keyboard issue. Sometimes it seems lazy (1-2 seconds delay), other times it gave me 3-5 repeats of the typed character (old logitech PS/2 keyboard).
  • It couldn’t find my second monitor. Detection of the primary monitor, a Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC, (including resolution and refresh rate) worked great. The new live resolution changes stuff, is great. Welcome to windows 2000! 😉
  • Detection of any but the basic buttons on the mouse where, still, not detected (like “back”). Amazing. This is such basic functionality…
  • My main applications is Adobe Lightroom. It’s a windows application, and Wine has had some bad issue with it. With this release it has gotten a lot better. It’s actually possible to start Lightroom, it just can’t load an existing image database (needs to be on a local drive, and I think it sees the wine mapped drives a network drives), and can’t display images when they have been imported. And it take a year to start – you can actually see it draw the GUI elements, it’s so slow.
  • Disc partition tool takes 3-4 minutes to detect the two hard drives in my machine. Actually crashed once.
  • Compiz Fusion looks nice, but seems rather useless, and all the window flip-flopping becomes tiring really fast.
  • Hardware on my desk that’s useless under linux: Creative Web-Cam, Huey Pro screen calibration, Dell x51v PDA.
  • NTFS R/W support works great!
  • Looks good. Starting stuff like firefox etc. was fast.
  • I had to open a shell terminal once – when I edited the grub boot managers menu, to changed the default item to windows. Didn’t edit xorg.conf once.
  • Migration of windows users is a really cool idea. Could be taken further… (option; “share setting with windows”, or “copy from windows”. Use these setting in Wine for drive mappings, and for firefox/thunderbird settings including add-ons).

All in all, it looks good. I’m sure the minor issues could be solved. To bad about the “deal breaker” with Lightroom.

The Baloo Software Developement Method

2 Replies

I’ve been thinking about the, much ignored and rather unglamorous, state software ends in, when it’s about to be replaced by a newly developed version. It may be an old maintained branch, or it may have been or be about to be replaced, with a new version that’s based on a new code base.

While thinking about this I heard the song The Bare Necessities from Disneys The Jungle Book. Here Baloo sings:

Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
That’s why a bear can rest at ease
With just the bare necessities of life

The Bare Necessities, by Phil Harris, Bruce Reitherman

I decided to name the method used for this kind of development after Baloo.
Continue reading →

Complexity

2 Replies

I’ve been thinking about complexity vs. simplicity, and I’ve decide that the general issue can be described with these two statements:

1. No issue is so complex, that it can’t be reduced to a meaningless yes/no question

2. No issue is so simple, that it can’t be made to complex to decide on.

Not totally happy with the phrasing, so suggestions are welcome….

New Box

Leave a reply

I’ve finally gotten around to building a new box.

My old was an AMD Athlon 2200+, with 512MB ram and a couple of 120Gb Drive. Still up to most tasks, but getting a bit hard driven in some cases.

New one is build around an Intel Duo 2 Core E6320 (running 1.86Ghz), with 2Gb ram and a 400Gb Samsung hard drive. I’ve mainly build it to be silent, but it can be over clocked if I so choose (an Asus P5B motherboard helps with that). I tried running it at nearly 3Ghz for at bit, but haven’t tested it extensively.

One benchmark

LightRoom 1.0: Export 16, Dng files to Jpeg. 10MP.

New: 47 seconds (33 seconds overclocked)

Old:  345 seconds

Yes, the SSE2 instruction set is really important for LightRoom and makes all the difference.

Firefox I love you!

2 Replies

I’ve started to use google sync, to syncronize my bookmarks between my machines (Desktop XP, Desktop Ubuntu, Notebook, Work XP, Work Vista). When I installed GSync on the new Ubuntu installation it … crapped all over my bookmarks and everything from my “bar”, where I keep the most important things, was gone.

Luckily Firefox keeps series of backups of the bookmarks in a sub-directory below your profile directory. Look for around for c:\documents and settings\yourusername\application data\mozilla\firefox\profile\default.xyz\bookmarkbackups – note that the “Application data” directory is hidden, so you have to have “show hidden files” turned on, in the explorer settings.

Just open the bookmark organizer in Firefox, and import an old file. Find the old “ToolBar” root and select “edit->Set as bookmarks toolbar folder” in the menu.

“what we need now is coffee” – Google Search

Leave a reply

“what we need now is coffee” – Google Search

It’s in the middle of the night and we are getting ready to go to the hospital to have our second son delivered. I have the phrase “what we need now is coffee – lots of coffee!” stuck in my head. Strangely the first part of that sentence is only found two places in the web. Both copies of “fear and loathing in Las Vegas” by  Hunter S. Thompson. But that wasn’t what I was thinking of, so I guess that not everything can be found on the net. Not sure where it comes from, but I thinking Lucky Luke…

Adobe LightRoom 1.0 First Impressions

4 Replies

I’ve been using the LR beta for quite a while. This is my first impressions of the final release, version 1.0. I’ll walk through the most interesting (to me) features and try to include any insights that I may have. Enjoy.

Get it from: Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Available for both Mac OS and Windows (XP/Vista).

30 day trial is available from Adobe, so you can download from Adobe and run at once, while you wait for the CD and printed manual to arrive.

Continue reading →