Colin Harrington

I dual-boot OSX and Ubuntu, but primarily live, work and play in Ubuntu.  The only reasons that I boot up into OSX these days are to sync an iPhone, or more recently play some Steam Games (Go Steam for Releasing an OSX Client!  A Linux client shouldn’t be too far behind right?).  Windows is now relinquished to a VM for IE testing & other software that is stuck on that platform.

I’ve always been bothered by mice in OSX, they never felt good and didn’t handle as I had expected.  This is especially important when doing some intricate work with Photoshop, or in a computer game.  I don’t have much time to play games on the computer, but I’ve been able to get a few hours in recently and really noticed that the mouse acceleration was unusable/unreliable for fast-paced action…

A little googling turned up the “Mouse Acceleration Preference Pane” for Mac OSX by Christian Zuckschwerdt.

I downloaded version 1.1 and then had this preference pane is my System Preferences:

Which then lets me configure the acceleration for both the mouse and trackpad.

Even better, I could turn off acceleration all-together!

From Christian Zuckschwerdt’s site:

Extented mouse settings

“The Mouse Acceleration PrefPane is a GUI and startup item to Richard Bentley’s MouseFix.  You can set up extended speed parameters and acceleration curves for your mouse.”

Good work Christian!

After setting up a laptop with Ubuntu, one of the things that I typically like to do is add a the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applet (cpufreq-applet) to my main Gnome panel.

I typically work running large web applications (Grails…) that typically use a lot of CPU power when running tests, launching the apps or refactorings within an IDE.  I like the ability to quickly adjust the CPU ‘govenor’ which governs how the CPU is utilized from a power/performance perspective (see CPU Frequency Scaling in Linux for more).

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) uses Gnome 2.28.1 which requires authorization to change the CPU Frequency (which makes sense).  Earlier versions did not require this authorization since it is new in Gnome 2.28.

With policykit-1 (also new in Ubuntu 9.10) you can grant yourself authorization for the cpufreq-applet based on a user or group by creating a policy file (at /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/org.gnome.cpufreqselector.pkla for example) that looks something like this:
[org.gnome.cpufreqselector]
Identity=unix-user:YourUser
Action=org.gnome.cpufreqselector
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

Thanks to this post/discussion for pointing this out   be sure you change YourUser to your username or group that you wish to have authorized.

I don’t know of a policy GUI that works with policykit-1 yet, so let me know if you find something.

I also replaced the icons in the /usr/share/pixmaps/cpufreq-applet/ with something I found on  gnome-look.org

Hulu Desktop (currently Beta) is now available on Linux!  A friend tipped me off to an article on TechCrunch about it. 

Downloading it and setting it up was pretty easy.  I went to Hulu Desktop and selected download for linux.  From there It gave me choices for Fedora and Ubuntu (both 32 & 64bit versions!)  Since I run Ubuntu I downloaded and installed the deb – easy enough.

When you first launch it it asks you to accept the EULA.

The first time I launched Hulu Desktop I got an error, that "Hulu Desktop could not locate the Flash plugin.  If you do not have it installed, please modify ~/.huludesktop with the correct location of libflashplayer.so." (remember the beta sticker?)

I had to edit the ~/.huludesktop file to use the wrapped version of the Flash plugin /var/lib/flashplugin-installer/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so and it worked like a charm!

Playback worked great, probably better than the in-browser experience.  The interface is slick, better than the web-interface and more along the lines of Boxee.  Fullscreen worked well for me.

Props to Hulu for providing a Linux version.  The Linux desktop is a first class citizen.  Skype has a Beta version that rocks on Linux.  Google Chrome, Firefox, etc. Who is next? Adobe?  CS5?  I’d pay for Adobe CS5 on Linux.

So far its been pretty good stuff for Beta Software!  I’ll definitely be using Hulu more now. 

Here is a shot of the opening screen:

And another of the Menu (while watching media):

Yep that’s a snail on a turtle with a Vista tattoo to illustrate how Vista = slow³.  I threw this together to console a friend who was going through an upgrade to Windows Vista SP3.  It took them weeks(so far) to roll it out at his work; and it still isn’t complete.  The pic is adapted from an icanhazcheezburger.com post.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled with the speed of a Linux desktop without intrusive ‘virus protection’, but everytime I use a Vista machine, I find myself frustrated.  I guess I get sick of the waiting, double confirmations, the "I told you to shutdown, why are you installing updates… ", etc.

I have professionally developed on all major desktop OSs (Windows[98,2k,XP,Vista], OSX, and Linux) as well as used many others over the years (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Solaris, HPUX, Windows[2k3,2008], etc.)   So when I started my current contract, I had a bad dream the night before.  I dreampt that I was forced to use Windows Vista.  I’m not going to call it a nightmare, but it came close   (They ended up giving me an XP box)

This is my OS Preference as it stands today:
Vista < XP < Windows 7 < OSX < Linux (Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc.)

I honestly expected more from Vista seeing that it was coming from the largest/wealthiest software company/OS vendor in the world.  Using Vista isn’t the end of the world, but you don’t know better until you get a taste of freedom   To be fair, Microsoft has put a lot of effort behind Windows and it is a big responsibility when you take the OS Market in the 90’s and into the 2000s.  MacOS was saved by OSX; can Microsoft follow suit?  Either way, good competition makes for a better Operating System landscape. 

When I was developing on OSX, a fellow developer Ted Naleid tipped me off to a script that does Growl notifications for Grails events that Marc Palmer had written.   The Growl notifications were handy, but now that I’ve been working on Linux, I’ve definitely missed them.

I first used a tool called Mumbles, which attempted to be a clone of Growl, but I later realized that the built in notification system is probably the way to go.  After I learned of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) had some major visualization enhancements to the notifications, I thought that it was definitely the way to go. 

This is what I currently have with Ubuntu 9.04:

Implementing this is very simple, you simply create an _Events.groovy file in your ~/.grails/scripts  directory (create it if it doesn’t exist) with the following contents (modified from the Growl Script):

eventStatusFinal = { msg ->
    libNotify('Final status', msg)
}
eventStatusUpdate = { msg ->
    libNotify('Status', msg)
}
eventCreatedFile = { fileName ->
    //libNotify('Created file', fileName)
}
eventStatusError = { message ->
    libNotify('Error', message)
}
eventExiting = { code ->
    libNotify('Exit', "Return code $code")
}
eventCreatedArtefact = { type, file ->
    libNotify('Created artefct', "$type with name $file")
}
eventCompileStart = { kind ->
    //libNotify('Compiling', "Compiling $kind")
}
eventCompileEnd = { kind ->
    //libNotify('Compilation complete', "Compiled $kind")
}
eventPluginInstalled = { pluginName ->
    libNotify('Plugin installed', pluginName)
}
// Do the notification
void libNotify(title, message) {
    def cmd = [
        'notify-send',
        title,
        message,
    '-i',
    'grails'
    ]
    cmd.execute()
}

It is simply using Groovy to execute "notify-send $title $message -i grails".   if you don’t have notify-send, it is part of libnotify so sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin will get you what you need.  If I get some time I’d like to find a way to take advantage of a Java Dbus implementation to talk to the notification system without having to go through libnotify.

If you want mumbles notifications just do something like this:

void mumblesNotify(title, message) {
    def cmd = [
        "mumbles-send",
           "-l",
        title,
        message
    ]
    cmd.execute()
}

Occasionally I’ll get a failure that there are too many files open (using .execute() in Groovy) and that should be cleared up by using a Java implementation of the DBus notifications.

Let me know what you think.  Anything that could be done better?

I recently installed Ubuntu 9.04(Jaunty Jackalope) on a 17" Macbook pro and as a part of that process, I had to install a bootloader called rEFIt.  You could think of EFI is just a next-gen BIOS.

Even though the bootloader looks decent, I don’t like the look of silver/grey color, so I decided to customize it.  The process to customize rEFIt was relatively straight forward and the result is beautiful.

This is what I came up with:

This is what it looks like with a Windows Partition:

I love the simplicity of it!!

Here is a closeup of the icons / OS Choices:

I don’t really know where the icons came from, but they look tasty  On Linux there is a decent package for working with mac icons (.icns) or sudo apt-get install icnsutils  which will get you some useful tools (png2icns and icns2png)

I did have to make a few modifications to the Tux icon [os_linux.icns] to give him a ‘glow’ so that he doesn’t fade into the black on black:

This windows Icon [os_win.icns] is the stock version I think (send me a link to the author if you know):

I did add a slight ‘glow’ to the apple icon [os_mac.icns] (send me a link to the author if you know):

I tried a number of custom ’selected’ themes but gradients didn’t look right, so I went with the simple plan.  The selection bitmap can be found here:

the process is simple once rEFIt is installed:  modify the refit.conf with the icons in place, and you are done!

Here is what I came up with for my refit.conf (comments removed):

timeout 5
banner hostname.bmp
selection_big   selection-big-ring.bmp
hideui tools shell funcs hdbadges label
legacyfirst

The original comments in the refit.conf file are helpful!  Its straight forward if you can read

• timeout = the number of seconds before it automatically chooses for you
• banner = the bitmap of the upper part of the screen (top left pixel = background color)
• selection_big = the grey ‘ring’ that indicated the selection
• hideui = Hide elements of rEFIt so we can get a clean interface
• legacyfirst = Legacy OS first (Linux)

Use at your own risk!!

If I had the time, it would be fun to build/enhance rEFIt to have an all-black fill instead of the grey/silver.

I’ve had a good experience with Ubuntu 9.04 on a 17" Macbook Pro, and I’ll Blog about it – and see what I can do to help update the documentation – look for an upcoming post.

The Keynote for iPhone 3.0 just got over and I thought I should share a tiny greasemonkey script that I put together to reload http://live.gizmodo.com/ much sooner than the 90 seconds that one would wait.

It is too bad that macrumorslive.com is out of buisiness since they got hacked this past January.  Their application wasn’t too hard to mashup either.  It was simply changing a timout var in one version and then changing an obfuscated function later.

So the Greasemonkey script is really a breeze, it simply loads jQuery, hides the banner/space-waster and sets a timer to reload the page after 15 seconds (15000 milliseconds…) 

// ==UserScript==
// @name           live.gizmodo.com
// @namespace      live.gizmodo.com
// @description    live.gizmodo.com
// @include        http://live.gizmodo.com/
// ==/UserScript==

// Add jQuery
var GM_JQ = document.createElement('script');
GM_JQ.src = 'http://jquery.com/src/jquery-latest.js';
GM_JQ.type = 'text/javascript';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(GM_JQ);

// Check if jQuery's loaded
function GM_wait() {
    if(typeof unsafeWindow.jQuery == 'undefined') { window.setTimeout(GM_wait,100); }
else { $ = unsafeWindow.jQuery; letsJQuery(); }
}
GM_wait();

// All your GM code must be inside this function
function letsJQuery() {
	$('#header_container').hide()
    setTimeout(function(){ window.location.reload(true);}, 15000);
}

Sierra Bravo is putting on an overnight website challenge tomorrow featuring 12 teams and 12 non-profits.  The challenge is a great way to give back and strut our stuff.

I’m on a team called the Groovy Goolies and we plan to use Grails to deliver a powerful web-app.  Our team has an excellent lineup with a broad range of experience and talent.  I’m sure we’ll do great – we’ll definitely get to beat my friends on the Inetium Team.   The rich set of Grails plugins, excellent testing support and the power of Groovy will go a long way.

Checkout another post from another team-member or follow us on twitter.

Why is everything so slow?  Why does it take forever for the laptop to go to sleep? 

Holy thrashing platters Batman — Firefox is taking up 1.25GB of Memory.  I guess it is partially my fault.  Having 126 Tabs open isn’t the nicest thing that you can do, but thats what I did during some intense research.  After I brought it down to about 30 tabs, it still held 1GB.  That is a little too much if you ask me. 

I’ve been a fan of Firefox for a while.  Its attractive because of its extensibility, flexibility, W3C dom, and rendering standards.  I’ve been a fan of good add ons like greasemonkey, Firebug, Better Gmail, View Source Chart, Fullerscreen.  I enjoy using these tools regularly.

I use IE7, and Safari 3, and rarely opera.  Usually its just to make sure my css and javascript are cross-browser compatible.  Each one has it’s strength’s and weaknesses.  Obviously with Firefox, Memory usage is not its strength  

http://dotnetperls.com/Content/Browser-Memory.aspx

I’m hoping that Firefox 3 will help with the Memory usage.  I hope they can adhere to a different model; Weak references please?

I’m also excited to see what the IE8 team is cooking up.

Update:  I’m not so excited to see what IE8 is cooking up for Microsoft’s business plan.  Firefox 3 is Doing great on Mac, Windows and Linux for me.  Yea I wrote this a while ago, but thought it was still worth putting out there.  I don’t use Opera or IE7 much anymore now that I am primarily on Linux (home) & OSX (work)

I’m trying to restart MySQL from the command line in Mac OSX.  The GUI tool in the Preference Pane wouldn’t work for me, so its time to go back to the Command Line roots.  I knew that there was a way to restart MySQL from the commandline, but I was looking in all of the wrong places, (no /etc/init.d/ or others).  I fired off a few quick Web Searches with Google and found many hints.

Most of the articles I found online were not very helpful.  They all contained information that didn’t work for me and OSX 10.5.3 with MySQL 5.0.51a MySQL Community Server (GPL). Maybe Mysql changed their installer recently, maybe its a Mac Update thing, but the I ended up finding the solution in a comment of this article.  A comment by someone named Russell proved to be very helpful.

Basically it came down to knowing where to find these commands:

Start – sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server start
Stop – sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server stop

Thanks Russell – You rock!!