fragility

I’ve been using Ubuntu Hardy Heron since I got my new laptop (ended up getting a refund for the CR-21 and got a CR-31) but when I tried to start Firefox 3 it complained that the majority of my extensions weren’t FF3 compatible. I didn’t really had the time to investigate the issue so I installed Firefox 2 (which is still available on Hardy’s repositories) and kept using it. However, I’ve been reading so many blog posts and tweets on how Firefox 3 is blazingly fast that I had to try it. And it is. It’s stupidly fast. I can’t even believe this is really Firefox. As for memory consumption, it’s too early to tell (I’ve only been using it for a few hours now) but so far seems better.

By the way, regarding the new laptop, I’m keeping a wiki page about it which I’ll be updating with more details later.

So, after searching for a while I found out that some of the extensions I use have beta versions which are already compatible with FF3, so I decided to give them a try. Here’s the list of extensions which are not FF3 compatible and how I managed to install them or the alternatives I’m using.

Adblock
Not compatible with FF3 but it seems kind of unmaintained anyway, so I installed AdBlockPlus instead (which seems like what everyone’s been using for some time anyway).

del.icio.us Bookmarks
According to this discussion the extension is ready but it only works over the next delicious version which has not yet been released to the public. I’ll be following the news on the delicious blog closely.

I ended up using a hack which bypasses the check for extension compatibility, but if this turns out to cause any instability I’ll use the bookmarklet.

Firebug
Had to install 1.1 beta from http://getfirebug.com/releases/.

FireFTP
Had to install the latest preview from http://fireftp.mozdev.org/developers.html.

FireGPG
Had to install the latest svn. More info on http://firegpg.tuxfamily.org/?page=install&lang=en.

Gmail Manager
Supposedly there’s a FF3 compatible version on this discussion thread but this is probably just a hacked version of the regular extension and FF3 crashes on start. This is a handy extension but I don’t consider it essential so I don’t really mind not having it around for a while.

Google Gears
Doesn’t seem to be compatible with Firefox 3 yet, but I don’t really use it much these days. Maybe I’ll drop it for now. The hack I talked about before lets the extension load but I prefer to disable it for now to avoid any issues.

Google Toolbar
Doesn’t seem to work either but I only used it to check on the Pagerank so I guess I’ll drop it too.

TinyURL Creator
No compatible version available, but works with the compatibility bypass. There’s also an alternative bookmarklet.

User Agent Switcher and Web Developer
Apparently, the developer of these two extensions refused to release Firefox 3 compatible versions until the Firefox 3 final version is out, but the Firefox developers are asking for add-on creators to update their add-ons to check for any issues so the creator says he’ll be releasing a test version soon. I just hope he hurries because this is has always been one of my favorite extensions and I’m sure lots of webdevelopers rely on this extension as a part of their work. Oh and these two don’t load even with the compatibility bypass.

Like I said in my previous post, I bought a new laptop. And no, it’s not one of those fruit laptops. It’s a white Sony Vaio :p

Of course I installed Ubuntu on it right away, and I actually thought most things would work out of the box here, according to someone on Ubuntu Forums, but looks like the guy was wrong.

Wifi worked out of the box. But sound and suspend/hibernate didn’t. I already solved those two issues (installing a more recent kernel) but lost the wifi configuration in the way and I have lots of work to do today so I won’t be fiddling with that until tomorrow. I’m compiling a list of all the issues and how to solve them and will post them later on a Ubuntu Forums thread related to this model (which I’ll link to later).

A post on why I chose this laptop and not a Macbook (which was in fact my other option) will come later.

Dear intarwebs:

Why are drawers in Gnome’s panel so damned slow ? Seriously, I know my computer is not exactly fast by today’s standards but why is something so simple as a stupid drawer so slow ?

I guess I’m gonna start writing about these stupid little things which annoy me on software I use more often. Some of them are just rants and I might not be willing to research enough to make a bug report (and some things like these are not exactly bugs) or even provide a fix, so hopefully someone will notice my rant and do something about it.

Yeah, I’m a dreamer.

I was going to make a post about what I thought it would be a good way to solve this problem, but looks like that way already exists (how silly of me to think nobody would’ve tried and search for a solution for this problem before).

I read about it here and I just won’t install it right now on my laptop because I haven’t been using it as a laptop anymore (because of the cracks) and it just sits here always on, so it wouldn’t be that much useful to me right now. Maybe when I finally get a new laptop.

So I started doing some more research about this subject and ended up finding two bug reports about it (here and here) and the AutoFsck official website is even located on the Ubuntu wiki. It’s author wants to promote it’s inclusion on Ubuntu 8.04, so here I am showing my support to the project and hoping it really gets included on Ubuntu some time soon.

Update:
Link for the blueprint page for AutoFsck on Launchpad, kindly provided by AutoFsck’s creator, Jonathan Musther.

As if installing software on Ubuntu wasn’t easy enough, there’s now an easier way: installing applications from the web with a single click. Read all about it here, including how it works and security issues. Oh, and this is an upcoming Gutsy feature.

And this is not only easy for users, it’s easy for developers as well. They won’t have to develop any new packages, they will just have to place new links on their websites. Now, ideally, the best way to do this was not having an apt:// link, but something like a install:// link, which would support the main distributions and package installing tools (apt, rpm, emerge, and so on). It would then check which distribution you are running and do whatever was needed to install the package. If those who developed this method are reading this, please think about it before this method becomes popular.

But the big advantage here is not only in how easy it becomes to install software: it’s also in a big approach to the method Windows users have of installing software.

Although it’s really easy to install software on Ubuntu, many Windows users still find it weird that they have to use an application to install your software instead of going to an application’s website and download the installer. You can still find many newbies on the help channels asking stuff like “oh I downloaded this file but I don’t know what to do with it”. Ok, the problem here is also that many application websites probably don’t have distribution specific instructions.

So let’s just hope that developers notice this effort and start using this feature ASAP.

If you are a Jaiku user and you don’t like any of the other external alternatives (windows/mac clients) for your OS, or if you are a GNU/Linux user, pjaiku might be what you’re looking for. But beware: it’s still a very young project, and it’s on heavy development. There are no distro packages yet, so if you don’t mind solving it’s dependencies by hand and manually extracting it (you just have to extract and run), then it’s no big deal. On Ubuntu, you need the packages python-simplejson and python-qt4. And if you can help developing it (or at least package it), better yet.

By the way, I’ve tried using Jaiku with imified and anothr, but imified never really worked for me, and anothr is just…weird. The damned thing only updates when it feels like doing so, and having to type the command for reading new items every now and then, defeats the purpose.

And if you are a Jaiku user as well, here I am.

Oh and I almost forgot: thanks a lot to it’s sole developer for the attention he’s been paying to my suggestions :)

With yesterday’s launch of Google Desktop for GNU/Linux, I decided to take a look at the desktop search options again. I tried Beagle on the past, but I always found it too slow and ram consuming, and it never seemed to index stuff right. So here’s my new comparison of three desktop search options for GNU/Linux. If you know about any other options, I’d really like to know about it.

Beagle

I hate it. It’s still slow as hell, eats up a lot of ram, takes a long time to index stuff the first time (but it’s not intrusive because it only indexes while the processor is idle) and even when used together with deskbar it’s somehow stupid, because you have to type in the result, select the “search with beagle” option and wait for the beagle application to open and search it for you. I have to admit that I didn’t even let it index everything before I uninstalled it. Some guys I know would say “oh…it’s Mono !”. I’m not really an anti-Mono fanboy (I love Tomboy) but I don’t think Mono is the kind of platform which should be used to develop this kind of app (at least, not the daemon). But then again, what do I know ?

Tracker

Extremely fast indexing stuff on the first time, but in order to be that fast it uses your processor a lot, which can become intrusive, so you’d better have it index your stuff over night on the first time. Has a low ram consumption, it’s fast, and has a great integration with deskbar (gives you live results within deskbar, just like spotlight on the mac).
By the way, thanks a lot to Filipe Carvalho for writing about it. I had heard about Tracker before, but completely forgot its name, and I didn’t try it at the time because the project was still very young.

Google Desktop

Looks good and it’s easy to setup. Takes a long time on the first index (but like Beagle it’s not intrusive). The keyboard shortcut (hitting Ctrl twice) is not configurable and can become quite annoying, specially if you’re a keyboard shortcut freak like me. I use Ctrl+Alt+Directional Keys for desktop change, and sometimes Google Desktop just comes up unexpectedly. Also, the fact that it only shows a few results and in order to see more you need it to open a browser page, is not very practical.

Considering these three options, my favorite is undoubtedly Tracker. It’s fast, light and has a perfect integration with my Gnome desktop.

Update:
Looks like there’s a way to integrate live Beagle searches into deskbar as well (thanks to those who pointed that out on the comments). That’s not the biggest hassle I have with Beagle anyway, so I’ll still keep Tracker. Other thing I noticed and forgot to mention: Tracker eats less disk space than Google Desktop.