EndAll, my megalomaniacal Xbox Live identity, turned five years old on May 6th. He was created solely to download extra Splinter Cell levels, but quickly developed a zen-like penchant for murder within multi-player arenas. I proffer a moment of silence for the bereaved.
DoubleSplitter: He hasn’t forgotten the many and various grenades launched at him (while you were teammates, let’s not forget). This is why you are made to suffer mercilessly while playing Tetris.
I still want Flash to fade away, but at least Adobe is acting more responsibly. It’s not quite open source and has done nothing to alleviate concerns over performance and security, the latter of which may affect just about everyone.
I don’t usually get excited about Adobe products. They’re either restrictively expensive or horrible little scourges of the Web. Which is why I let news of Adobe AIR fly right by. I appreciate what I think they are trying to do. It’s certainly nice having a development platform accessible to the three major desktop operating systems. The few applications I’ve read about looked pretty slick.
In my never-ending quest for the perfect Twitter client, I installed AIR to check out the Spaz Twitter client. I tried it first on XP (work machine), and it’s very nice. Slick, but it is an early version and there are some little bugs here and there. AIR is still in beta for Linux and installed fine on this notebook running Ubuntu 8.04. AIR was nice enough to make sure that Firefox knew how to handle AIR application installs from the web, so Spaz was painless to install.
The AIR installer defaulted to ‘/opt/spaz’, which would have been okay except that it wasn’t initialized by a process that would give the installer root privileges, so I changed it to ‘/home/user/Programs/’ where I keep programs I install myself. Also, the fonts were not nearly as sharp as they were on XP. It was not affected by the sub-pixel hinting enabled by the desktop environment (the picture below was smoothed a bit from the jpg conversion, so it doesn’t look as bad). It may be looking specifically for Microsoft fonts, found in the ‘msttcorefonts’ package, which is not installed as web pages will use those instead of the lovely fonts installed by default. Also, the Spaz client took up ~30MB of memory, roughly the same as the Firefox instance that was running at the time.
I may use Spaz at home on my desktop, but it certainly isn’t ideal for this notebook due to memory limitations (a too-often recurring theme).
Spaz Twitter client under Ubuntu Hardy
I find it funny that the content from Ricky Gervais’ feed comes from a host named ‘plumplard’.
I forgot you’re not supposed to edit the ‘/etc/sudoers’ file, which defines which users can assume administrative rights, by hand. As the first lines of the file will tell you, you should use ‘visudo’ to make changes. I guess I just don’t screw around with that file enough to remember that (or follow directions).
If you do try and edit the file, it will be read-only. You can use ’sudo’ to change the permissions of the file to include write, but then ’sudo’ will not work. And then you cannot use ’sudo’ to change it back. Root can make the changes, but Ubuntu disables the root account by default (you just have to give it a password to enable it). I generally do not enable the root account as sudo works fine. If I do happen to be doing a lot of administration, I’ll just use ’sudo’ to become root.
Alright, so nothing local will work. I boot up a trusty Knoppix CD and click the desktop icon for the hard drive’s root partition. Oh. I encrypted the file system. Damn. I did a little searching around to see if there was any easy to way to get Knoppix to decrypt the file system. It’s probably not that hard, but I didn’t find any easy answer that wouldn’t mean potentially screwing something up further. Not that I care about any of the data, but I have a very simple logic for situations like this:
if time_to_fix > time_to_reinstall then screw_it_reinstall
Which means more fun. I installed the Hardy alpha (now beta) and it worked great. Loved the little changes and appreciate the new features. But the install CD for Hardy has a bug where you can’t install with certain CD-ROM configurations. Lucky me, I have such a configuration. So, for the second time, I’m installing Gutsy just to upgrade to Hardy.