Laney's blog

photo credit: JohnSeb

I cycle to work and back every day, a journey of about 6 miles each way. This really shouldn't be a problem, but it actually is, due to how naff my current bike is. It's a bog standard off-the-shelf mountain bike from Halfords which cost about £90. That's enough of an issue on its own – just cycling along in a straight line requires far more exertion than it should. But add to this the extra problems that it's developed…

• Seat which refuses to stay level despite tightening the nut so hard that the spanner bent
• Brakes which don't work (the front one actually snapped off one day)
• Bizarre rattling noise

…and you might arrive at the same conclusion I have: it's time for a new bicycle.

Alright then, dear dear old Lazyweb, please advise me thus. I want to spend about £200 on a new bike for cycling around town. I guess I want a hybrid, right? But I quite obviously know nothing about this, so this is me soliciting recommendations. I want to know what I should be looking for in terms of features – there seems to be a wide range of options to choose from. If you commute by cycle, please recommend (or de-recommend) your model. Or, what manufacturers should I be looking at? Is it worth buying new or can I find a good deal second hand?

Last week I installed the Karmic RC on my Macbook (5.1, late 2008), which I have now upgraded to final. I had previously installed Jaunty, but it wasn't usable enough out of the box to prise me away from OSX for good. The niggle:quality ratio seems to have slid to an acceptable level for this release to make the system good enough for daily use. However, there are still issues that persist. Being in the fortunate position of having a system dual booting with an OSX install that mostly does what I'd expect, I'm going to give a list of the ways in which my experience has been a little bit lacking thus far.

This is all about my personal use case. I am probably overlooking areas that you care about, and concentrating on those that you don't. This might read as me bashing Ubuntu a bit, but it's really not supposed to. By being honest about these issues, we can hopefully work towards fixing them.

• Proxy support. At Uni/work I am behind a web proxy – the firewall has a default deny policy which means that users are required to go through the web proxy in order to use the web. The problem is that not all applications notice that I have changed the proxy, even when I use the "Apply systemwide" option. I noticed this just now when trying to file a bug report using Apport – the collecting process just hung until I got bored and cancelled it. Launching from a terminal with http_proxy exported worked just fine (actually, automatically exporting http_proxy in terminals if one is set in Gnome would be cool – OSX doesn't do this). I'm not sure where the bug lies here, in applications or somewhere in the Gnome stack, so I don't feel comfortable filing a bug report.
• The speaker output is not muted when I plug my headphones in. I have to go to alsamixer and adjust the headphone volume separately. There's a workaround for this on the Macbook pages of the Ubuntu help wiki but I'm yet to try it. Bug 437150.
• Brightness adjustment doesn't work out of the box. There's apparently a fixed driver on the wiki page that I've just installed. We'll see after the next boot whether it works or not.
• External monitor support is a bit suboptimal. To be fair, I've probably been spoiled by the fact that OSX handles this so well. I have to manually enable/disable the monitor when I remove or add it. OSX detects this automatically and adjusts the windows as required so I can just yank the connector out and go on my merry way. See this Ubuntu QA blog post from Bryce for more on this.
• Battery life leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes the machine gets really quite hot.

I think that's it. Really these are minor niggles that I can overlook in order to use my OS of choice. I've concentrated on laptop/Macbook specific problems here. We can see that most of the problems I mentioned are hardware/driver specific, and really these are some of the most difficult problems to fix due to hardware manufacturers in the main being difficult to work with, so it's not hard to let issues like this go.

On the plus side, suspend finally works! I can just shut the lid to suspend and open it to resume, just like I can in OSX. This is really great. Also, using my phone as a 3G modem is faster, easier and more solid under Karmic. And of course all applications (barring the proxy issue), work just as they do on any other Ubuntu machine, meaning really well. There's also the benefit that I no longer feel like a hypocrite .

We've a little way to go to overtake the major proprietary players, but with incremental improvements like these, it's just going to be a matter of time.

It is reasonably well known amongst Haskell enthusiasts who use Debian/Ubuntu that the experience of using and developing with Haskell on these distributions is, to put it diplomatically, not as good as some others are able to provide (Arch, I'm looking at you, you sexy heroes). A couple of recent mails to debian-haskell have made this abundantly clear to us; we have a bad situation and blocking on maintainers (especially since some of them appear to be inactive) is just making things worse.

Enter the Debian Haskell Packaging Team! This had been proposed previously, but never carried forward for various reasons – including, importantly, nobody just rolling up their sleeves and getting it done. Recently John Goerzen wrote a mail which shone a bright light on several areas of our Haskell infrastructure that need work. This seems to have spurred several people into action, and John took the necessary administrative steps to get the pkg-haskell team back up on its feet (it did indeed exist previously but seems to have fallen into disrepair with only two members). As I write, there are now several packages under team maintainership:

laney-guest@alioth:/git/pkg-haskell$ ls
agda.git    haskell-convertible.git  haskell-ghc-paths.git  hdbc.git
gtk2hs.git  haskell-ghc-mtl.git      haskell-x11.git

laney-guest@alioth:/darcs/pkg-haskell$ ls
_darcs    haskell-ghc-mtl    haskell-haskeline  haskell-ifelse        haskell-terminfo
gtk2hs    haskell-ghc-paths  haskell-hint       haskell-monadcatchio-mtl    haskell-zlib

We truly live in exciting times (if you care about this sort of thing). Now, as soon as the debates about group policy are over, and we've decided what VCS to use (urgh…), we should be able to get down to some actual work.

But why will this help? The main areas we have problems with are:

• Core infrastructure packages (outside of the GHC complier) being out of date as they are maintained by inactive developers.
• Uninstallability caused by new upstream releases of GHC. GHC releases make no ABI compatibility guarantees so with each new upstream version we need to rebuild the entire dependency chain. This takes time and can not always be done through binNMUs. Inactive maintainers can again block here.

Being able to grind through all packages and fix/upload on new GHC releases will provide a massive improvement to the churn that is currently inevitable after an upstream release. And being able to update out of date packages is an obvious win for team maintainership.

Once we have these issues cleaned up, we can move on to the real goal of implementing the Haskell Platform in Debian. We should now be better prepared to cope with the increase in package load that this will necessitate. Contributors, too, in seeing more cooperation should feel more inclined to give their time.

If you're reading this and would like to get involved with the team, helping us to maintain existing packages and to package up new libraries then join us at #debian-haskell on OFTC. We'd love to see you along.

Here's to a happy future!

. o O (Wordpress 2.7.1 is pretty sexy)

Congratulations on mankind for reaching the splendid milestone that is 1234567890 seconds since 1970 began. Who'd have thought we'd make it this far?

But really, congratulations on the Debian team for releasing Lenny (I even have one package uploaded there)! The point of this post is mainly to point people upgrading their Xen DomUs of a bug that I encountered and how to fix it (thanks to Andy Smith).

When doing the upgrade I got this message:

laney@cripps:~$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
Setting up linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 (2.6.26-13) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-xen-686
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
warning: grub-probe can't find drive for /dev/sda1.
grub-probe: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sda1. Check your
device.map.

dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-2.6-xen-686:
linux-image-2.6-xen-686 depends on linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686; however:
Package linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6-xen-686 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-xen-686:
linux-image-xen-686 depends on linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686; however:
Package linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing linux-image-xen-686 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686
linux-image-2.6-xen-686
linux-image-xen-686

This is apparently a bug in grub-probe when dealing with Xen virtual machines. A post by Andy here gives the magic incantation to fix it:

sudo sh -c "echo '(hd0) /dev/sda' > /boot/grub/device.map && cd /dev && mknod sda b 202 0"

(you might need to change sda to xvda depending on what your error says).

A quick dpkg --configure -a later and everything is hunky-dory. Now in a sexy Lenny system in which everything seems to just work, just like the marketing says. Some Apache and MySQL warnings to fix up, but nothing too major. Yet.

(on a side-note – I got MOTU recently. Breakage coming to an Ubuntu near you. Yay!)

I was just making dinner, listening to Radio 4, when something caught my ear. The words "Creative Commons". Wait, what? Why are they talking about this? It turned out to be a nice introduction to free/Free, copyright, creative commons, free culture, delivered by Auntie. A communist conspiracy!

You can get it on the podcast or stream it from here. Show it to your unenlightened friends!

edit: It appears that the versions I linked to cut off early. If you're in the UK you can listen to the whole version on the iPlayer.

Forgive me, planet Ubuntu, for talking about OSX…

I just managed to get 3G working over Bluetooth, and thought I'd share the recipe incase anyone needs this in the future. It's stupidly simple, which is probably why I could only find incorrect information online. I feel a bit silly posting something so easy, but I spent a long while looking for this so I hope it saves someone else the time. I'll get round to trying it on the Ibex soon (once support is a bit improved).

Here's how to set your Nokia phone up to connect to three's 3g network over Bluetooth. I am on a contract, not pre-pay. This may not work for pre-pay people.

1. Follow the Bluetooth setup wizard to connect your phone to the computer. Make sure Bluetooth is on and discoverable on the device. These instructions will get you paired.
2. At the end, tick the option to connect to the internet. Leave the telephone number, username and password blank and set the APN to three.co.uk. That's it, it should now work. Ignore anything you see elsewhere about *99# as a number or 3internet as an APN.
3. Surf.

If you've already paired and cannot get back to the wizard then you can still set this up through network preferences. Just set the same settings for your bluetooth modem that appears:

photo credit: James Nash (aka Cirrus)

I got a new N96 a couple of weeks ago, as my old Nokia was barely functional any more. No backlight and ~8 hours battery life is not good, I tell you now.

The good:

• Build quality is nice. Some people might say it's a bit big, but I like it. Despite its size, it's still quite light – I weighed it against an iPhone and it came out lighter.
• Huge, excellent quailty screen.
• 16GB of storage, for plenty of music. Goodbye iPod.
• FM Radio(!)
• Uploading geotagged pictures to Flickr works a treat. You do have to remember to have Location Tagger running though.
• BBC iPlayer, not that I've used this much yet (see below).
• Tonnes of apps thanks to Symbian. Decent ones include:
  • PuTTY for Symbian OS
  • Opera Mini
  • Google Maps for your phone
  • ??? (I'm sure there are more good ones that I don't know of yet, please let me know)

The bad:

• The firmware that it came with is, quite frankly, shocking. Crashes and bugs galore. The worst part of it seems to be the accelerometer – the screen redrawing when it detects a rotation is awful. Seeing half drawn applications in each orientation is not what you want to see on your expensive new phone. There's also some general slowness with apps taking a while to initialise, but I suspect this is inherent.
• The camera, despite being touted as excellent, seems to produce pretty grainy pictures to me. I hope it's just the way I'm using it, because I'm getting the feeling that "Carl Zeiss optics" aren't as good as Nokia try and make you think they are.
• iPlayer works great on wifi, but the videos never start over 3G.
• If you actually do stuff with it, the battery life can be quite terrible – just doing a bit of 3G internet use (SSH or WWW) is enough to drain the battery to nothing in a few hours.
• Closing applications on a phone is odd, and I keep forgetting to do it. Some applications close when you hit the red button, and some don't. I need to get used to this. Annoying the "Log" application doesn't close after you use it to make a call.
• Shutting the slider while on a call doesn't end it.
• I've had it freeze up while a call is coming in and refuse to answer it, causing me to miss the call. It was from a withheld number too, so I couldn't call back (not that I should have to).

There was a letter in the box apologising for the quality of the intial firmware so I'm quite hopeful that a lot of these issues will be fixed when an update is release. I don't know how good Nokia's track record is on this, but we'll see. All in all, I'm fairly happy with it, and when the bugs get ironed out it'll be awesome.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, hello Planet! Since I've been approved as an Ubuntu member, I figured this is as good a time as any to post some drivel. I'm Laney, and I am very pleased to have your attention. I am 22 years young and in a small number of weeks will be a PhD student at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.

I might as well use this platform to ask for your help. No, not for myself, for the Intrepid Ibex. Look at the picture up there, he needs you to help him. You couldn't say no to that, could you?

James Westby has made a much more comprehensive post on this, but I'd just like to retierate the testing part. If you feel you're able to recover from any problems that might occur (should not be too severe now we're in feature freeze) and your system is not mission critical then please do consider helping out. It was with some hesitation that I made the switch a week or so ago, and I've certainly found my fair share of bugs and have to live with a slightly more unstable system (particularly audio-wise), but it'll be worth it in the end when we ship an excellent Ubuntu 8.10. If you do test, I urge you to get involved in bug reporting, otherwise you're just putting yourself through pain for no gain. When you come across a problem, search Launchpad and the affected program's upstream bug tracker for the issue and see if you can add any more information. If there is no bug, or if you just don't have the time to be searching bug trackers then please do still file the bug on Launchpad and a triager will deal with it for you (maybe asking you for more information). As the ever wise Tesco say, "Every little helps". I've definitely come across a few bugs (probably some I've forgotten here):

• Banshee crashes on Last.FM login
• terminator crashed with AttributeError in get_first_notebook_page()
• seahorse crashed with SIGSEGV in IA__g_object_set_valist()
• file-roller crashed with SIGSEGV in find_image_offset()
• tracker-applet crashed with SIGSEGV in signal_emit_unlocked_R()
• Can no longer configure keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs

A lot of the bugs have a similar format: "x crashed with y in z". This is apport at work, an excellent tool which takes a lot of the work out of reporting crash bugs. Even just reporting these bugs helps to stabilise the system.

So, I urge you, please do run update-manager -d (Ubuntu users) or adept_manager --version-upgrade (Kubuntu), and get involved!

Ever since I switched to Banshee I've been a bit annoyed that I didn't know how to annoy others by advertising my currently playing song. I always knew the trick for Amarok which Theory posted a long while ago, but had no idea how to adapt this for dbus which Banshee uses. Now, thanks to kees, this has all changed.

In order to get at your currently playing song on Banshee from a SSH connection into your box, just run the following script:

#!/bin/bash

PID=$(pidof mono /usr/lib/banshee-1/Banshee.exe)

if [ -z $PID ]; then
    echo "Banshee doesn't appear to be running"
else
    export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\\
        \$(cat /proc/\$PID/environ | xargs -0 -n1 \\
            | grep ^DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS= | cut -d= -f2-)
    banshee-1 --query-artist --query-title | cut -d ' ' -f 1 --complement | \\
        sed -n '1h;2,$H;${g;s/\n/ - /g;p}'
fi

It will produce output like so:

laney@chicken:~$ banshee-np.sh
Rancid – Corazon de Oro

Now to get it working remotely, just follow Theory's instructions, replacing

command="dcop --user `whoami` amarok player nowPlaying"

with

command="/path/to/banshee-np.sh"

and you should be good to go!

This post brought to you by my burnt hand, which I have to return to the ice pack every 20 seconds or so. Ouch.

You can now call me Iain Lane BSc (Hons), oh yeah. I graduated on Friday, and managed to not fall over or anything. Man is that walking business difficult.

Roll on September, when I get to learn about the real stuff that they don't teach you.