Use Tables!

(posting to planet in the hopes that some kind soul has a clue what’s going on)

So most eyes these days seem to be firmly focused on that other operating system release, but I want to talk about Gutsy for a bit. A few nights ago I updated my machine to it, and there are quite a few new problems, and also quite a few old ones that are still not fixed.

Update 2007-10-31: Most of the below is now fixed. For explanations, see the comments at the bottom of this post.

• [FIXED] Somehow whenever I boot, my system believes it’s necessary to make my harddisk churn continuously. It didn’t use to do this on Feisty, I have a gig of RAM on this machine and am only running a webbrowser and Gnome Terminal, so I doubt my ‘extreme use’ is the cause of it all. System Monitor manages to tell me that udevd is eating CPU, at least (I can’t figure out how to monitor harddisk activity). “man udevd” seems to be telling me “it could be anything telling me what to do, I’m just a humble event daemon”. So no clue where that’s coming from.
• [FIXED] I can’t mount my other partitions anymore. Windows has no trouble finding them though, and Feisty had always been fine with them. The three partitions in question are formatted using NTFS (1) and FAT32 (2). Running “sudo mount /winC” manually gets me:
  
fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy
FUSE mount point creation failed
Unmounting /dev/sda1 ()
• [FIXED] Somehow I now have a huuuge submenu “Other” in my Applications menu, containing things varying from “Browser Identification” to “Zeroconf Service Detection” to “Fonts” (twice) to “AdBlocK Filters” (To my knowledge, I’ve never installed this) to “Joystick” (I don’t have a joystick). This didn’t use to be there on Feisty, either. It doesn’t seem to serve any purpose whatsoever. Why did it pop up?
• [PROBABLY FIXED] It seems to believe that, if there is still a cd(-rom) left in the drive, using the Eject button on my cd/dvd-rom drive really means I want it to show me how fast it can open and close the drive in succession. I’ve almost lost a cd like this, and have no clue where to look for info on why it behaves like this. It shouldn’t have any reason to keep the disk in there - it’s not writable, so there are no writes left so unmounting should be quick and painless (and even if it weren’t, it should keep the drive shut tight, instead of being all weird about it).
• [POSSIBLY FIXED] GRUB sucks, or Ubuntu’s use of it sucks. Whenever I update this machine, it adds two boot entries for the new kernel (one is ‘normal’, one is “Recovery Mode”). It doesn’t remove old entries. If I remove entries manually, they reappear the next time the kernel is updated. I have edited menu.lst to boot my windows install by default. Whenever these two entries get added, the default boot index is off-by-two, causing it to start memtest86 if I’m not at the machine to correct it. Why is it smart enough to remember the value I set it to, but not smart enough to update it when it changes the list?
• This machine is slightly over two years old. Ubuntu is still not able to shut it down correctly - I always have to press and hold the power button for five seconds after I hear the harddrive shut off (without Ubuntu telling me “you can now turn your machine off” - it seems to think this will happen automagically). Back when I just got this machine, I installed debian stable on it (I believe that was Sarge, back then, but I’m not sure). It never had a problem with this (nor does Windows). So clearly it’s not just that it’s not possible, but that Ubuntu somehow isn’t using the right version/type of acpi or whatever. This machine has an ASUS P5AD2-E motherboard, if that is any help.

All in all this means I really don’t want to use Ubuntu anymore, as it’s downright painful to get anything done (without access to my windows partitions, most of my documents, patches, photos and other personal things are out of reach, and with my computer busy with some invisible SomeThing, getting other work done becomes painfully slow, too). Solutions appreciated.

I would be most interested in any (semi-)official documentation on this particular icon overlay, and when it is used by Mac OS X. I was unable to unearth anything - possibly because I don’t know what to look for.

So after actually getting a complaint about it, I finally got fed up with Thunderbird sending text file attachments as inline attachments. I’d already been annoyed at GMail displaying things I sent myself inline, making it hard to copy diffs (because the amount of whitespace at the end needs to be exactly right) or easily save files.

Here’s how to tell Thunderbird to always send attachments as attachments, instead of inline:

1. Open the Thunderbird Preferences (this is under “Preferences” in the Edit menu, or “Options” in the Tools menu, depending on your OS).
2. Go to the Advanced section, and the General tab on there.
3. Click the Config Editor button on there.
4. Enter mail.content_disposition_type in the filter box.
5. Double-click the only item in the list (with the exact name mail.content_disposition_type, obviously), and enter 2 as its value (instead of the 0 it’s on originally).
6. Close the Config Editor with the [x], and close the Preferences with [OK].

You’re now done. Thunderbird will now send plain text files as an attachment. Any other non-binary files will still be sent inline. If you want all your files to be ‘real’ attachments rather than inline attachments, set the pref to 1 instead. Tip-of-the-hat to Marco for the tip about using 2 instead of 1.

All this information was obtained from LXR and the MozillaZine KB.

I needed to find “two key papers on the future of Computer Mediated Communication” (and then summarize them and write a personal opinion on where we’re going).

The University of Amsterdam fortunately has a digital library you can access over VPN which allows you to search in lots of major databases. So I duly searched for:

“future” in Title AND  “Computer Mediated Communication” in All Words (after some failed other searches), in the “Informatiewetenschappen” subject area (”Information Science”, basically)
5th result from JSTOR:

“Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse” by Peter S. Bearman.

No comment.

My weblog is blocked in the People’s Republic of China.

You can test your own website if you want to.

(to think I used to believe my secondary school rejecting submissions for the school newspaper was bad)

For those who didn’t know, I picked up a brand new shiny black Apple Macbook last thursday. I bought a black one because it meant I could get it three weeks earlier (that is, I would have had to wait 3 weeks to get a white one for an actually lower price). (more…)

Imagine, you’re not a native Dutch speaker and you come across someone named “Gijs”. How on earth do you pronounce that? Well, for reasons which will currently remain a small mystery (but will likely be cleared up later) I have a demo version of JAWS, a screenreader by Freedom Scientific, installed. So now I can give you:

• My pronounciation
• British English pronounciation
• Castellano Spanish pronounciation
• French pronounciation
• German pronounciation
• Italian pronounciation
• Finnish pronounciation

Yup, it’s hard alright!

Using the mildly interesting Google Webmaster tools, I was astonished at some of the search queries that land people on this site:

• ie7 “new tab” greyed out
• find out who blocked “you msn”
• onkp

These are supposedly first page hits (ie, my site ranks in the top 10 for those queries), as opposed to relevant things like “chatzilla” which apparently gets me roughly the 43rd position. Right…

So, GCal allows me to share my exam schedule, which is of course way cool and stuff. Here you go:

Well, it was bound to happen sometime. I just removed 256 spam comments. I hadn’t cleaned up for 4 days. Which is not too strange considering I don’t have internet at home, but still. I need a good way to shield this blog from spam, apparently. Suggestions are welcome.

In other news, I moved succesfully. I have tv by now, but still no internet or landline phone at my new home. Which is a shame, but oh well. Otherwise I like my new place. I have a couch now! If you’re in the area (Amsterdam) and want to drop by, let me know.

In other social news, I turned 19 a little less than an hour ago. I’m not sure what there is to be excited about, but the rest of the world seems to disagree. So be it.