1. Turn on single-click file browsing mode.
2. Create an empty file on the desktop.
3. Drag a rectangle around the new file and the recycle bin.
4. Hover your mouse over the new file until it turns darker.
5. Press F2 and rename the file.
6. The recycle bin win also rename, without any visible way of changing it back.

It’s a curious bug, and I couldn’t understand what I’d done when it happened to me this afternoon. I actually did it twice in one afternoon which is how I worked out what was going on.

The only way to change the name of the recycle bin in Windows versions less than Vista is to go through the registry and edit the name manually.

Simply put the following code into your mysite/_config.php, substituting en_AU for the language code of your choice. It’s almost too easy.

i18n::set_locale('en_AU');

This line will update the automatically generated meta language definition in your template, as well as facilitate multilingual sites should you require.

If you’re using an encrypted drive (sometimes known as a crypto disk,) you’ll find you have problems with the standard recovering after a Windows install instructions.

The Problem

The problem lays in the difference in the way the partitions are laid out between a standard Ubuntu install, and an install that uses crypto disks.

By default Ubuntu installs your boot loader in the /boot/ directory on your root partition. However this way if your disk is encrypted, your computer can’t load the bootloader because it’s locked behind the complex encryption scheme.

The alternative installer for Ubuntu solves this problem by setting up a separate unencrypted partition for your /boot/ files.

The Solution

This solution can be administered pretty easily if you have an Ubuntu live CD handy.

1. Open the terminal.
2. Start the grub utility by typing sudo grub.
3. Find your boot partition by typing find /grub/stage1. This will show which partition your boot loader resides on, in a format similar to (hd0,0). If this command doesn’t work, you may have to manually find the partition with your grub files. These files are usually in /boot/grub or just /grub.
4. Type the command root (hd0,0) substituting for whichever partition the previous command revealed your boot loader is on.
5. Type the command setup (hd0). It’s important to set up on (hd0) because this is where windows installs itself. If you use another partition for this step, the Windows bootloader will take precedence and you won’t be able to boot Linux.

You can now type quit, and reboot your computer. If all went well, you will be able to dual boot Windows and Linux once more.

More on Encrypted Partitions

For help mounting an encrypted partition, you can find detailed instructions for mounting and accessing your LUKS encrypted partition over at UbuntuGeek.

For extra credit, you can also find out more on LUKS (the Linux encryption scheme) and Truecrypt (a proprietary alternative) on Wikipedia.

Dual monitors is important in my line of work for any number of reasons. Especially now I’m working on a 15″ laptop screen, I need extra real estate to spread my clutter across. Unfortunately having set up my new desk, monitor and laptop, I found that the performance left an awful lot to be desired.

Dual Screens Destroys Performance

After enabling dual screens, my 3d capabilities were wiped out, and even general rendering performance was terrible. Moving a window was reminiscent of the early days of Windows 95 (you know, when you’d see the window contents lag and constantly draw behind where you were dragging them?) Video playback would flicker the screens before starting, and sometimes wouldn’t plat at all. Loading a web page would place such a load on the processor that my music would stutter.

I’m using Ubuntu 9.04, so it’s a known problem that the new driver (while technically superior) is still somewhat wanting in performance, so the first step was to downgrade to the previous and much faster version. Nearing the realease of Ubuntu 9.10, it’s also apparently possible to upgrade to the next version of the driver to increase performance as well, but I can’t verify this.

Compiz in Intel Dual-Screens

Still, after some reading I discovered that Ubuntu 9.04, and the Intel driver in general won’t support any display surface greater than 2048*2048 pixels.

My heart dropped a little bit because both my screens are 1440*900, which when combined while not taller, are much wider than the highest resolution, at 2880*900.

Obviously this kind of performance isn’t acceptable for a modern computer, so just this morning when I was thinking about nixing my setup, I had a curious little idea. What if I changed the virtual orientation of my monitors from side-to-side to top-to-bottom?

This would change my virtual screen size from 2880 pixels across to a mere 1440, and my height would be 1800 pixels; still well inside the 2880 pixel limit. Ingenious.

What would be more ingenious is if the Jaunty or even Karmik could work this out itself and compensate for it, because I know I’m not the only person been bitten by the limitations of this hardware. Luckily I’m happy to work around it in this way (although it takes some getting used to moving the mouse to the top of the screen to change to a monitor that’s physically somewhere else.)

At least if you can manage to pull off this hack, you can get back to a blistering fast hardware rendered desktop experience in your dual-monitor setup.

Five years ago any self-proclaimed expert would tell you that we’re moving away from personal computing and toward a “cloud computing” ecosystem; one in which all our software runs on the Internet. While ubiquitous web services like Hotmail, Facebook, Google Apps and Flickr seem to back up this notion, there’s a few interesting developments which are blurring the lines and promising to mash up the cloud with the desktop.

Frameworks & Offline Storage

In February 2007 Adobe released AIR, their cross platform runtime environment for developing desktop applications. What’s interesting is that instead of being based on a traditional compiled languages like .NET and Java are, it utilises existing web technologies like Flash and Javascript to create sandboxed desktop applications out of the very same tools that power the web.

Since then, there’s been a plethora of webapps ported to the platform because of its short learning curve, effortless cross platform functionality, and strong ties to existing web languages. A search through Adobe’s online marketplace for Twitter apps alone will return almost thirty hits, which quite possibly makes it the de-facto language of choice, at least for Twitter desktop clients.

It’s not the only framework that’s looking to leverage this new phenomenon either. Mozilla Corporation‘s upcoming Prism is aiming to be a lightweight and open source “webrunner” with similar features and a more standards based approach than Adobe Air. Another player, Appcelerator, Inc has also released Titanium which is Apache licensed and a direct competitor.

While there’s currently no collaboration between projects, the latter two have one important difference that sets them apart from AIR: standards.

AIR (and to some degree Titanium) has its own proprietary API for advanced functionality, but the Prism is looking almost exclusively at upcoming technologies such as Gears and HTML 5 to deliver things like offline storage and advanced graphical features. The benefit of the latter is a synchronicity between applications, bringing the possibility of platform-independent webapps that run anywhere in the same way today web sites can display across any browser.

Ubiquitous Connectivity

This focus back on the desktop is driven in part by an integral change in our workflow.

In the early days of computing, you would probably have needed to access a “dumb” terminal, which was then wired into a massive great central computer — the mainframe — which would do all the hard work. This was an appropriate architecture for the time because terminal clients were nowhere near as powerful as they are these days, and you certainly wouldn’t carry your computer around in your backpack with you.

Through the ’80s and ’90s this all changed, with the advent of powerful desktop computing you didn’t need the aid of a powerful central computer to do all of your work, and the mainframe structure became mostly obsolete.

When the Internet, and especially web 2.0 became mainstream, people started thinking in terms of mainframes again for a different reason. The connectivity of the Internet facilitates all kinds of social and pseudo-social applications, and the mainframe architecture makes this much easier to develop for. With thousands of millions of users running a multitude of different operating systems and version numbers, desktop-based software becomes a nightmare to manage. Microsoft is having no end of trouble, because many people don’t understand they need to upgrade their software, let alone pay to do so.

So while everyone expected the “browser as an operating system” model to relieve these pressures and bring an all-new social computing experience, the desktop-based webapp has crept in and changed the playing field once again. Built on open standards and generous APIs, this new creature blends the best of both worlds.

So what now?

Numerous frameworks and languages are nowadays available and aimed specifically at producing rad web apps, but the question remains: where do we go from here?

With the amount of work that’s gone into accessibility on the web, will this make desktop web apps more, or less useful to those who need these features most? With standardised environments such as AIR or Prism will we still need to focus on graceful degradation for other platforms, or will accessibly standards like WAI-ARIA finally be all we need to focus on with Javascript driven applications?

The answers to these questions may seem obvious but I’d propose that in the same way browser sniffing in the ’90s seemed a good idea at the time, the abundance of webapp platforms may eventually prove to be more tricky to unify than we anticipate.

I had the chance to install Chrome — the beta of their open source web browser — on a few machines in the last week, and I have to say I’m very impressed so far. It’s deliciously lightweight despite a (surprisingly attractive) application skin, and it’s incredibly well laid out. It’s going to be big when it grows up.

At the moment it seems more aimed at the developers and early adopters types who like shiny new things. With a lack of anything more than a basic browser it’s not going to replace your extension-laden Firefox any time soon, but it’s got some interesting features that promise to make it a power player.

Take the evolution of the address bar for example. Drawing cues from the AwesomeBar in Firefox, Chrome does away with the separate search & address boxes altogether, amalgamating them into one very suave interface. Also consider the very intuitive speed-dial-esque start page, automatically displaying your bookmarks, most visited sites, and recently closed tabs. It’s a contextual delight.

To close the deal, the entire affair starts up in the blink of an eye — much faster than Firefox — with speeds rivaling that of the pre-loaded Internet Explorer. The application itself is zippy but the Webkit rendering engine shines, especially on low-end Pentium machines that are showing their age as Internet Explorer continues to expand.

We saw Chrome overtake Opera in browser share in the first few weeks, and it looks to be holding its position steady. It’s also interesting to note that most of these users seem to have moved from the ageing Internet Explorer 6, which indicates a reluctance for your average user to upgrade to the radically different Internet Explorer 7. If the trend continues this way, Chrome could bring the end of the IE6 tyranny a lot sooner than any of us expected.

While independent reports have stated that Mac and Linux versions are still a long shot without major work, at least there’s another major browser on the Windows scene to mix things up a little. This is the browser we expected from Apple when they released Safari for Windows, and is certainly shaping up to be something very impressive indeed.

If I release code under the BSD license, you can do almost anything you want with it as long as I’m credited for my part of the work. That’s all fine and dandy. With the GPL the authors that contributed before you have a lot more control over your subsequent contributions — it sounds a little like a pyramid scheme if you don’t agree with the GNU philosophy.

There’s another thing I can’t stand in the world of licensing: Thoughtless phrases like “free for non-commercial use.” Why should I be allowed to use a piece of software at home, in the park, at school, but not at the office? What is the difference? There’s none, but because it’s been the standard tagline of proprietary software for so many years now, it’s become ingrained into the way people think.

Considering this, I’d like to point you over to the GPU page on sourceforge where the developers have modified the GPL to include Asimov’s first law of robotics. It’s a seemingly innocent thing to do, but at the same time it’s caused an uproar for all kinds of reasons.

My primary thought regarding changing a well-known and accepted license to include a seemingly trivial addition is this: Why bother? Aside the fact that it will give you a little thrill every time you read it (“Hey, aren’t we funny, look!”) what purpose does it really serve?

People have said it’s a good idea: This way the armies of the world can’t use the software to kill and maim. My take on the issue is that even if the righteous American war lords respect a software license, there’s always going to be people who don’t. There’s no way you can shame someone into respecting your intellectual property if they’re pointing a superweapon toward your face.

So when it comes to issues like this, there’s a need for software, the software exists, and no license is going to stop anyone who’s really intent on using it. I know that if I had a battalion of troops at my front door hungry for my blood, I’d use all the help I could get to get away. In addition, there’s no point taking away one more freedom from a license that’s designed entirely to hinder your right to modify and redistribute in the first place.

I don’t disagree with the GPL as I don’t see the overwhelming need for it in my line of work. Pascal has a somewhat less inflammatory coverage.

The other day I came across an application called LMMS, which “combines the features of a tracker-/sequencer-program and those of powerful synthesizers and samplers in a user-friendly graphical user-interface.”

Essentially, the team is writing Fruity Loops for Linux.

LMMS is a qt application, and is Linux native. Although it might feel more at home in a KDE desktop, the interface is very intuitive and pleasant to use. The interface borrows somewhat from the Fruity Loops feel, but various aspects are different — for better and for worse, in some cases.

It comes with useful number of samples and effect generators, and you can always add your own. The only thing that I’m missing is the effects channel filters, which can be replicated anyway with a bit of leg work.

All in all, LMMS is a great start to what will hopefully be a great audio application. If you’re not interested in paying through the nose (again) for shoddy Windows-only audio software, give this a try.

• Pros:

  • Linux Native
  • It’s Free Software – You don’t pay for it, and can modify it as you see fit.
  • Has a really cool range of instrument plugins
  • Has an auto-limiter function to prevent clipping

• Cons:

  • It’s at version 0.2 – People have been complaining of crashes. Compile from the latest CVS version, or wait for the next release to solve most problems.
  • No effects channels
  • Some interface discrepancies between Fruity Loops. It’ll take some getting used to.

1. Install Debian with as few packages as necessary.

   I installed Debian from floppy. You can find floppy disk images in /debian/dists/stable/main/installer-i386/current/images/floppy/ on whichever mirror you choose to use. The once you’ve written the floppy images (This tutorial doesn’t cover that, sorry,) you put in the boot floppy, and follow the prompts. It’s really not as difficult as the Debian documentation would have you believe.

2. Install and configure X server.

   apt-get install x-window-system should do the trick for you. I believe it even automatically starts up the configuration interface. If it doesn’t, I’ve heard booting from a Knoppix disc and copying over /etc/X11/XFree86.conf file is a really quick and easy way. If you don’t mind editing it yourself, feel free. A good way to test if you’ve got yourself set up nicely is to just type ‘X’ (That’s a capital,) and see what happens. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace will kill the X server.
   Another thing to look out for is if the X server is starting up with the machine. This is bad, and you can stop it from doing so by editing /etc/inittab to read id:2:initdefault:. This starts the machine in runlevel 2, which is pretty much non-graphical multi user mode. Failing that, you might want to try removing GDM from startup if it’s installed. I’ve heard it can have the same effect.

3. Make sure X can connect to another server.

   I sort of neglected to mention this earlier because I assumed everything would be fine (I did a net install, and regularly connect to my server via xdmcp). You want to first make sure you have network connectivity with the server. A good way to test is to use the ping tool.You then need to make sure you can connect to the X server. It’s not overly hard, but annoying if it doesn’t work. The command to connect is as follows. X -query YOUR_SERVER_IP

4. Configure X to automatically connect to the server.

   Here’s where it got tricky for me. I sat up until half past 4 this morning trying to work it out. What you need to do is create an init script that will start the x server, instead of having it start automatically. To the end user there is no difference, but to the administrator this might seema little yukky. I’m fine with yukky though, especially seeing there’s no side effects.
   This init script was prepared by someone else, and I can’t damn well find the URL to reference them. They had some great information on setting up this kind of thing though. Essentially, what you want to do is create a file called /etc/init.d/xterm that will start the x server. You’ll want this file to look something like as follows:

   #! /bin/sh
   set -e
   
   case "$1" in
     start)
       start-stop-daemon --start --verbose --pidfile /var/run/xterm.pid --exec /usr/bin/X11/X -- -quiet -query YOUR_SERVER_IP_ADDRESS_OR_HOSTNAME &
       ;;
     stop)
       start-stop-daemon --stop --verbose --pidfile /var/run/xterm.pid --exec /usr/bin/X11/X
       ;;
     reload)
       # echo "Reloading $NAME configuration files"
       # start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON
       ;;
     *)
       # echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/$NAME {start|stop|reload}"
       echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/xterm {start|stop}"
       exit 1
       ;;
   esac
   
   exit 0

   This should be enough to start the x server. You can test it by typing /etc/init.d/xterm start If it doesn’t work, you may need to chmod 755 the file.

5. Set the xterm service to autostart.

   Very easy, this step. Simply type as root: update-rc.d xterm defaults 99

If everything’s right, you should be done now.

I’d like to help as much as possible, but this article was written in 2005 and things have changed a fair bit since then. If something’s not working, feel free to drop me a mail, or post a comment.