Since upgrading my Kubuntu installation to 9.10 (Karmic Koala) a few days ago, I had been experiencing problems with sound. Firstly, loud popping noises would come out of my speakers every few seconds when no audio was playing, as if the sound system was sending bursts of random junk to the sound card. Secondly, Flash media in Firefox wouldn't produce any sound.

The first issue is with Pulseaudio and HDA Intel audio controllers. By default, Pulseaudio tells the sound card to power down after ten idle seconds; unfortunately, it seems that this causes loud pops to be emitted. The solution is:

In /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, look for and comment out (add a "#" to the start of the line) the following line:

options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

Note: These files are system files, so you will need to have root (administrator) privileges to edit them. This is typically achieved by opening a console and typing sudo [editor] /path/to/file ; the [editor] should be replaced by the name of whatever console-based text editing program you have, typically nano, pico or my personal choice, joe.

Fixing sound in Flash was trickier. The first step was to make sure I had the latest correct Flash package for [K]Ubuntu. I had a package called adobe-flashplugin installed, and attempting to remove it using apt-get resulted in the following error message:

update-alternatives: error: no alternatives for iceape-flashplugin.

A little research revealed the following: firstly, that adobe-flashplugin is not the correct Flash package. I suspect that it's the version that Adobe themselves offer from their website, which I must have installed at some point. Secondly, that it comes with a script that it tries to run before the package is removed, and that script it is very much broken. The solution, as I was able to adapt from this bug report, was as follows:

sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/adobe-flashplugin.prerm
sudo apt-get remove adobe-flashplugin
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound

The final step, which I derived from this Ubuntu Forums posting by klemes, was to go back to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, and add the following line:

options snd-hda-intel model=auto

(Again, the problem seemed to be related to my HDA Intel sound card.) Follow this by running the command sudo alsa reload in a terminal, and restart Firefox. Hopefully now you should have sound back in Flash.

What a lot of hoo-ha! If you've needed to read this, I hope it saved you some trouble.

The new "Highlights" column that appears on the right-hand side of your home page is particularly-poorly thought-out, presenting a mish-mash of items that your friends have interacted with and presenting applications that they've used. Not what they've done with the applications - just the applications themselves. This is largely useless. It also has an advertisement stuck right in the middle of it.

April post update: As if that wasn't bad enough, they've started treating "Pages" (the little mini-websites you can create in Facebook for people, places or things and to become a "fan" of - quite a good idea until now) as people, and they now appear in a "People You May Know" box. In addition to being wrongly titled, this is sheer noise - 99.9% totally irrelevant. It will be worse and worse as your friend list increases, as it's sourced from your friends' "fan" affiliations.

Thankfully, the marvellous Adblock Plus extension for Firefox allows you to hide page elements based on their style identities, so here are some filter rules I cooked up. To apply them, open your Adblock Plus preferences and choose "Add Filter" from the "Filter" menu, then paste in the code snippet of your choice.

Remove the advertisement from the Highlights column:

#*(id^=highlights_ad)

Remove the contents of the Highlights column altogether:

#*(class^=UIHotStream)

Remove the "People You May Know" box:

#*(id^=pymk_hp_box)

Remove the "Connect With Friends" box (how many times are you gonna need it?):

#*(class^=UIConnectWithFriends)

Remove the rounded corners from all the user icons (I think they're ugly):

|http://www.facebook.com/images/ui/UIRoundedImage.png

Unfortunately, if you do manage to track that down - it's in the README - you're told to download an archive of binary codecs and stick it in /usr/local/lib/codecs. This won't work, because the archive doesn't actually contain drvc.so, the one needed for RealVideo. If you search around, you'll find a lot of confused forum and mailing list posts, mostly unanswered, and a number advocating things like symlinking that directory to /usr/lib/codecs or /usr/lib/win32 or variants thereof. Ignore all of that completely, none of it will work, and even if you did manage to find the magic voodoo chicken incantation to make it work it would be an ugly and tedious way to do it.

Thankfully, I discovered in the course of searching for a solution that there's a great Ubuntu package repository called Medibuntu ("Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu"), which is "dedicated to distributing software that cannot be included in Ubuntu for various reasons, related to geographical variations in legislation regarding intellectual property, security and other issues". That includes various binary video codecs, including the RealVideo one. Here's what you need to do:

1. Follow the Medibuntu repository instructions. (Note: I hadn't heard of the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ directory before, and simply dumped the repository location directly into /etc/apt/sources.list, and it worked fine; but if you're not used to working directly with that file, just follow their instructions and it'll be dandy.)
2. sudo apt-get install w32codecs (or w64codecs or ppc-codecs depending on your platform).

That's it! Your video players should now be able to cope with RealVideo files. Happy viewing.

I also did this alternative version, for the traditionalists among us.

• The interface:
  • The syrupy greetings and cutesy button labels and other cheesy trash. At first it was merely annoying, now it's unbelievably grating.
  • The way forking out cash to Flickr for extra storage allocation gets you a little picture next to your name that says "pro". PROTIP: unless you make a living from your photographs, you're not.
  • The massive lack of styling options for your album, oh, I'm sorry, "photostream" [sic] (ecch).
• The way Flickr think they know better than you.
  • They nanny-edit your comments (ever tried writing something in all upper case? Think again).
  • Maybe you like making empty folders, or sets, or whatever you want to call them, and then filling them up with stuff. Flickr's nauseously-named "Organizr" won't let you.
• The users:
  • The camera-obsessive parts of the user base that think they're so goddamn great.
  • The parts of the user base that leave twee little pictures in comments saying WOW GREAT PIC, YOU ARE INVITED TO THE PINK STAR AWESOME KITTY KAT PLATINUM PHOTO AWARD GROUP and other similar dreck.
• The technical failings:
  • Linux users are second class citizens.
  • "Collections can contain collections or sets (but not both). Collections can be nested 5 deep." Arbitrary restrictions, wonderful.
  • Worst of all, everything is squashed into a stream. As this is the single way that almost everyone will see your pictures, it means that any organized collections of photographs that you have and upload to the site are presented to the viewer as a meaningless jumble of images, bereft of the sorting you've applied to them. This is almost intolerable.

However, my number-one hate feature of Flickr is a single, particular user.

Me.

Because I just gave up writing my own photo management software, after failing to finish it in over two years of dribs and drabs of development; and because due to that I just paid Flickr for an account because it's the easiest way for me to put my photos on the Web somewhere, even though it is so very hateful.

I have a very low tolerance threshold for annoyance, so I may well just delete the whole thing out of hand if the Flickr crud gets to me enough. At that point I'll probably give up for good on the whole idea of having my photos online; we'll see.

Dec. 18th 2008: I deleted everything. That's that.

Then I saw the license statement.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

And right there at the top of each ontology's source code is the line

<dc:rights>Crown Copyright 2008</dc:rights>

The license confirms my misgivings about the Ordnance Survey, in spades. Why? Because non-commercial licenses are not free. By using the OS vocabularies, you taint all your data. It is no longer open data (part of the wider field of open knowledge). And if someone uses it, thinking that it is, in a commercial project, they open themselves up to attack from the Ordnance Survey's lawyers (who have proven themselves time and again to be unsympathetic, confused or worse).

What a pity. Clearly a lot of work has been put into the project, but as currently licensed, these ontologies are data plague. Keep your information well away.

Would it be too hard for some of the authors of these add-ons to get together (possibly even mediated by someone from Mozilla) and agree on what their Tools menu entries look like? I think having them all in an Add-on options sub-menu would be a start.

As the contented owner of an OpenID identity, I've come to appreciate the facility of being able to log into multiple websites with a single username and password. Who wouldn't? The legacy model of having multiple user names across different sites - am I hex, downlode, earlemartin, or earle? - to remember, and worse still, multiple passwords*, is looking increasingly outdated and confusing. Sites that don't give you any option but to enter your details (and often way too many details at that), and then not letting you transfer any of that data out, are disparagingly becoming known as identity silos.

An identity silo has been defined (interestingly, by the Information Commissioner's Office of the British Government) as:

An identity that is used to represent an individual in that person's dealings with a particular application and is not integrated with other identities that the person has.

So I decided the other day to make the rounds of some projects that I use on a regular basis, and ask them what they think about OpenID.

First up was LiveJournal. LiveJournal is where OpenID began, and an early first place to allow OpenID logins in some form. However, it is still impossible to link an OpenID identity with a LiveJournal account. In this post to the lj_dev community I ask what's happening. Official response comes there none; and some interesting replies point to much earlier (two years earlier, in fact) discussions in which, allegedly, promises were made to go further (and volunteer patches received) but nothing was done. Conclusion: LiveJournal no longer cares.

Next I stopped by the Wikimedia Foundation's wikitech-l mailing list for MediaWiki developers. The situation there appears to be that once they've concluded their work on unified login for all Wikimedia projects - which is close; as an admin on Wikipedia I've beta-tested it and it seems good - they can look into it. Which is great.

A query to FriendFeed's newsgroup got an enthusiastic user response, but nothing from the developers. The same for this thread in the Ohloh programming site's forums.

Asking the del.icio.us mailing list got no response at all.

Get Satisfaction are working on it (they already have OAuth support, which is good). Brightkite will "probably" do it, but they don't have a timescale for implementing it yet. Twitter have yet to reply a month after someone asked them in this GS thread.

I also asked the wiki-standards mailing list, which is comprised of wiki engine software authors, if they were looking to implementing support, and got a generally positive response.

So that's what I did. You can help out, by asking the people whose software you use if they're planning to implement support. Be sure also to stop by OpenID, please! and vote for your favorite applications.

*Or even worse than that, having a standard password for web stuff (come on, most people do) that varies in some small way across sites due to local restrictions on possible passwords. Ugh.

When Mac OS X arrived, in 2001, I immediately disliked the glossy new interface that replaced the crisp, almost cartoonish GUI of the old OS. More than disliked, actually; I experienced an immediate, visceral repulsion from a number of facets of the new look. As a result, I stayed away from Macs for a long time, until, in fact, this month. However, my current place of employment contains a large and, for the most part, inscrutable systems department, who for reasons of their own decided to give me an iMac. It took me only a few minutes to discover a range of irritations within it, and start looking for fixes. Here's what I found. Software is free unless otherwise mentioned.

Essential fixes

A non-Apple keyboard and mouse

Essential. Even though I was a Mac user for years, and have no problem with the key layout, there's something about the key spacing that's just wrong. I found myself making way more typing errors than I do usually (which isn't many, I'm a good typist). So I got a typical Windows USB keyboard instead. Setting it up to work properly is not as easy as you'd expect, considering Apple's otherwise rather good hardware support. Luckily, Phil Gyford has produced a handy guide to using a British/UK Windows keyboard with an Apple Mac in OS X, including a keyboard layout file you can install.

In addition, Apple's mouse (with the cringe-makingly awful name of Mighty Mouse - pass the sick bag) is abysmal.

• Instead of having buttons, it does left- and right-clicking by detecting when you press on the left or right side of the mouse. Sounds great in practice, but for me it caused unexpected "right-clicks" on a regular basis.
• They've also replaced the scroll wheel with a sort of mini trackball thing. It's horrible to use - too small to get a decent roll distance, and with an itchy, tickly physical feedback instead of the ratcheted rolling sensation of most modern scroll wheels. Plus, the "360°" aspect of the ball is totally useless in 99% of applications (I'm being generous, here; I have yet to actually see anything that supports it).
• It has a shiny, slippery surface. Call me crazy, but I like using objects with a texture.
• The pill shape just doesn't suit my hand at all.
• Finally, it has these "squeeze buttons" on the side. You have to press them pretty hard for a button. I didn't use them/it - they both act as one button - at all except to see what happened when I did (some unnecessary zoomy thing appeared).

Solution: I bought a cheap but perfectly good mouse. My comfort level just shot up.

FruitMenu

The new Apple Human Interface Guidelines say: "The Apple menu provides items that are available to users at all times, regardless of which application is active. The Apple menu’s contents are defined by the system and cannot be modified by users or developers." Well, in the old days you could put whatever you liked in it, because that was useful. This handy "haxie" from Unsanity restores that behavior. For me, having all the control panels - I'm sorry, "System Preferences" available as a sub-menu justifies the $10 cost of this software alone. I also put my Applications folder in it.

TinkerTool

I don't like the Dock much. It took about a day before I turned off the zoomy stuff. Shrinking the icons down helped a bit, as did sticking it on the right-hand side of the screen and turning on auto-hide. But it still insisted on being vertically centered, and I'm a corner kind of guy. Happily, TinkerTool, a sort of PowerToys for the Mac, allows you to stick the thing wherever the hell you want it to be.

WindowShade X

Another feature that the new OS X lost was WindowShade. In the classic System, double-clicking a window's title bar would cause it to "roll up" into it. It was a very useful way of temporarily moving windows aside without actually moving them, or letting you "stack" lots of windows on the screen at once. In OS X, you can only hide windows away on the Dock. No thanks. WindowShade X, another $10 Unsanity haxie, brings that back, as well as a great "minimize in place" feature that lets you turn your windows into live thumbnail versions of themselves with a keypress.

ShadowKiller

Another Unsanity haxie - free this time. Kills those bloody awful drop shadows (on three sides of windows and even menus - what the hell?) stone dead.

Enhancements

Growl

Displays application event notifications in various attractive but low-key ways.

Mail.appetizer

Displays excerpts from new mail arriving in Mail.app in Growl notifications and lets you read it, delete it or mark it as read on the spot.

Hey Folders!

Colors labeled folders' icons as well as their names, as it used to look pre-Mac OS X. (Can you spot a theme in my suggestions developing?)

VirtueDesktops

Virtual desktops for Mac OS X. Not being developed any more as virtual desktops ("Spaces") will be a feature in Mac OS X 10.5, but useful until then.

Essential applications

Firefox

Obviously. The downside is a slightly awkward set of key shortcuts (for example, Command-shift-H for History instead of Command-H, since the latter triggers the global "hide application" shortcut), but I can live with it. Safari just isn't good enough, and Camino, which is essentially Firefox with a more Mac-like appearance, is crippled by the fact that as a native Mac application, regular Firefox extensions (many of which are essential, and I may write an article on these later) can't work with it. You might as well buy a sports car with a V8 engine and rip out half of the cylinders. I'll stick with the real thing, thanks.

iTerm

A terminal emulator and big improvement over the default Terminal.app included with the system. For one thing, it has tabbed windows.

Adium

A great multi-protocol instant messaging client.

After all this, I finally have a Mac I can use comfortably. And who knows, I may even get one for myself at some point. Five months later: No. I'd rather shoot myself in the face.

It is well known that when you do anything, unless you understand its actual circumstances, its nature and its relations to other things, you will not know the laws governing it, or know how to do it, or be able to do it well.

My first attempt at the process was with TekArtist's instructions, which suggested using the Livna repositories. However, trying to install the Livna RC6 package resulted in a complaint about needing a newer version of the fedora-release package. Confusingly, when I attempted to update the fedora-release package, yum told me there were no newer versions available. Looking in /etc/yum.repos.d/ (warning: contains strong language), I couldn't see how to bump the Fedora Core version number. (This was weird for someone more used to the Debian way of things, where a distribution upgrade is as easy as changing one line in your sources.list and doing an apt-get upgrade.)

A bit more searching gave me these instructions from Alexandre Gomes, which suggest downloading the fedora-release package and using rpm to install it. However, that package in turn relied on fedora-release-notes, which relied on fedora-release (I think; my notes are incomplete). The solution was to get both simultaneously:

This successfully updated fedora-release. The next step was to do the actual upgrade of the whole distribution! The command for this is yum -y upgrade (the -y option means "answer yes to any questions asked"). yum went off and got a lot of packages and calculated their dependencies. The process then failed, due to a conflict between the fedora-logos and redhat-artwork packages, of all things. A yum update redhat-artwork resolved that. Running the update command again, I got:

Error: autofs conflicts with kernel < 2.6.17
Error: hal conflicts with kernel < 2.6.17

Predictably enough, the next step was yum update kernel, which brought it up to 2.6.18. However, running the upgrade again resulted in the same error. So evidently some old kernel was hanging around. Investigating, I found:

[root@localhost Desktop]# yum list installed | grep kernel
kernel.i686                              2.6.18-1.2200.fc5      installed       
kernel.i686                              2.6.18-1.2798.fc6      installed       
kernel-smp.i686                          2.6.18-1.2200.fc5      installed       
kernel-smp.i686                          2.6.15-1.2054_FC5      installed

There were indeed some old kernels that needed removing. Now, for the life of me I couldn't work out how precisely to issue the package name and version to yum in order to remove it, despite the section of the yum manual about doing precisely that, so in the end I used rpm instead, which just does what you tell it instead of trying to be friendly.

[root@localhost Desktop]# rpm -qa | grep kernel
kernel-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5
kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
kernel-smp-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5
kernel-smp-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5

[root@localhost Desktop]# rpm -e kernel-smp-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 kernel-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5

Pow. Gone. I ran the upgrade command again, and... success! yum went through and upgraded about 1,400 packages. One reboot later and I was running the shiny new Fedora Core 6.

Minor niggles: One of the features of FC6 is the compiz visual-effects thing (because we all need wobbly windows and desktops that spin around on a big 3D cube). However, I couldn't get it working, apparently because of something to do with my video card. If I ever manage to, I'll document it here as well. Also, strangely, you can't get Firefox 2 from the default package list in FC6, which strikes me as bizarre for a major new OS distribution. You have to get it from the development repository, like so:

[root@localhost ~]# yum --enablerepo=development update firefox
[output snipped...]

Updated: firefox.i386 0:2.0-2.fc7

Complete!

Yes, it looks like I've made it to FC7 already. :)

The first problem that I encountered was that the installer would stop working at the first point where I needed to switch CDs, with the message An error occurred unmounting the CD. Please make sure you're not accessing /mnt/source from the shell on tty2 and then click OK to retry. Hitting Ctrl-Alt-F2 to switch to the terminal, I tried unmounting the disc manually:

sh-3.1# umount /mnt/source
umount: /mount/source: Device or resource busy

Switching to the log terminal with Ctrl-Alt-F3, the following message was visible:

14:50:36 ERROR: exception in unmountCD: (16, 'Device or resource busy')

The install process would also freeze completely sometimes (generally a few screens in, most often immediately after choosing what packages to install) with the following error in the log:

14:50:36 WARNING: Try 1/5 for file:///mnt/source/repodata/filelists.xml.gz failed

Doing a bit of searching indicated that the FC5 installer seems to have difficulties reading from the disc if it's in a high-speed drive. So, I swapped out the DVD-ROM drive for an old CD-ROM job. Plus various combinations of other people suggested disabling APM/ACPI, APIC and even DMA. To do that, it's necessary to edit the kernel arguments when the system is starting up. I issued the following:

apm=off ide=nodma pci=noacpi acpi=off noapic

This, combined with the lower-speed drive, allowed me to install FC5 successfully. Although annoyingly it stored the kernel arguments during the install process, which meant that during the first normal bootup it wouldn't start, probably because DMA was disabled. (The boot messages showed that udev couldn't be started.) If this happens, you need to edit /etc/grub.conf and remove them.

If you've got here from searching for the same problem, I hope this helped.

It's common practice to find out when someone was last around by asking one of the bots "seen Somebody?" - the bot will then respond something like "Somebody was last seen on #perl 3 days, 7 hours, 52 minutes ago saying 'You what?'" This, however, is limited to a per-channel basis for the two bots. If Somebody was in #perl three days ago but hasn't been in #london.pm for six months, then dipsy and purl are going to give conflicting answers to that question when asked.

#london.pm's main bot is dipsy, while #perl's is purl. Both were originally based on infobot code (which now appears to be often referred to as "the venerable infobot", which should tell you a lot), but have seen a lot of modification and custom hacks. (dipsy eventually got a total rewrite, and it's been proposed for purl for a long time although nothing's ever happened.)

Ideally speaking, there should be some sort of infobot data format which bots could send to each other, perhaps with a safety measure in the form of a secret key which would never actually be transmitted - in pseudocode key := salt( secret + msg ).

Today I tried to log in and got this message.

Your login was deactivated for one or more of the following reasons:

• Repeated failure to comply with the Open Directory community's editorial guidelines and policies.
• Continuous poor and/or abusive editing.
• Self-promotion and biased editing, including, but not limited to, cooling your own site, title or description manipulation, unfairly editing your own sites or those with which you are affiliated.
• Unfairly tampering with competitors' listings and submissions.
• Inability to function well within the Open Directory community.
• Uncivil and intentionally disruptive behavor.[sic]
• Violation of Open Directory forum and email privacy.
• Spamming the directory.

We do not disclose the specific details of login removals. However, the decision to deactivate your login was made by consensus of the meta community, and thoroughly reviewed by DMOZ staff to ensure that our decision was appropriate and warranted. Our decision to remove your login is final. Removed logins will not be reinstated, and you will not be granted a new login. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

Needless to say, I'm very upset about it. I would be merely pissed off, but it's the insulting final paragraph that really did it for me. I didn't do ''any'' of the things in that list of bad behavior. Go look at the directory category. See all those subclassifications? The careful organization? That was all me. All of it. Before I became editor the category was a shambles.

And what did I do to deserve this? God knows, because they "do not disclose the specific details of login removals". I know that once I was unable to edit the site for a while, and my login was temporarily suspended; however, after an email to them some anonymous ODP drone was happy to reinstate me.

They didn't even have the common courtesy to send me an email about this. I only found when I tried to log in. I have no idea when this happened, and they won't tell me. But they're only too happy to tell me that their "decision was appropriate and warranted".

So, since the "Open" Directory Project has decided to treat me this way, then forget the "Open" Directory Project. I will never use it again, nor any site that derives data from it. Their loss.

I guess it doesn't really matter, anyway, because in the end the wiki model is going to hammer them into the ground. For fun, have a look at this thread on their BB. Can you say, "in denial"? Browse around that site a little more and you'll get an illustrative glimpse of the incredibly arrogant way the members of the ODP hierarchy treat non-members.

In fact, here's an interesting snippet:

Only in very special situations where the integrity of ODP is in great danger editors will be removed without warning.

What does that make me then, Genghis Fucking Khan? I demand an explanation.

Well, I just got a snotty response (duh, it's the ODP forum). I emailed exactly the same message to staff@dmoz.org, as suggested. Of course, nothing happened.