I'm sure that most everyone has heard about the Phorm + BT/Virgin Media/TalkTalk debacle by now, but If not here are some useful links. The point of this post is to encourage you to sign this petition over on the PM's website. You'll at least get a response when the petition closes, if nothing else 
(which seems to be stupidly long for some reason, but hey…)
A little while ago I uploaded my first patch to Launchpad, closing bug 159727. This is one of the easiest bugs there is - someone even provided the icon file needed to fix it! Nevertheless, I'm still pleased to have taken my first small step in Ubuntu development.
<crimsun> Laney: thanks, uploaded.
ROCK ON!
This week has been great for me. Awesome things that have happened:
Phwoar!
A little while ago I blogged about problems that I was experiencing in Ubuntu, one of which was that the display would blank regardless of what was set in gnome-power-manager (System -> Preferences -> Power Management). I'm happy to report that I found a workaround for this, thanks to Michael Holloway on the ubuntu-uk mailing list. If you find that your display is blanking inexplicably, try appending this to your xorg.conf (hit alt-f2 and type gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf):
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection
Save and restart your computer (or log out and restart X by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace), and everything should be fixed. Play a video and leave it and marvel at how you don't have to move the mouse once every 10 minutes to keep it displaying! Also, I noted that on Xubuntu gnome-screensaver wasn't started by default, meaning that no power management settings would work any more. This is easily solved by going to Settings -> Autostarted Applications and adding an item to start /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver when you login.
Here's the launchpad bug for anyone interested in tracking the issue.
This is me joining in the new years fun. Here are my resolutions for 2008, unordered:
Not many, and not too ambitious, I hope. Except maybe the PhD bit.
Anyways, I'm really enjoying my eee so far. The only things that annoy me a bit are the small keyboard (with weird right shift placement, on the right of the up arrow key, wtf?) and the flakiness of the built in wireless manager, which just seems generally hard to use. Oh, and Thunderbird isn't very enjoyable on such a small screen. Usable though. The folks over at eeeuser.com seem to have done all sorts of crazy things with theirs, and it is fast becoming my first port of call when I want to do anything. After I get back up to uni tomorrow I'll be able to pick up my new SDHC card and RAM and install eeeXubuntu, which should (barring any problems) make it perfect.
Now I'm off to pack and revise. Oh, what joy.
Quick note to wish you all a Happy Holidays (for those who don't celebrate Christmas). Have a good time all, chillax and take it easy!
I've watched a couple of good Google talks in the last few days that some people may be interested in:
Laters. I'll be back tomorrow talking about my new eee that Santa may or may not be bringing ;).
Stealing the idea from Theory, I spent a little bit of time today hacking up some scripts to generate some nice graphs of my firewall statistics. The data is parsed out of ulog and fail2ban log files. Still could do with a bit of work, but overall I'm quite pleased with it.
I had originally planned on using the Google Charts API to draw all of the graphs, but it couldn't handle the pie charts; producing output with all of the labels cut off. Shame.
Code can be viewed here, and downloaded either at this tarball or by using darcs with darcs get http://darcs.orangesquash.org.uk/darcs/firewallgraphs/. darcs send any patches my way!
Edit: Fixed a couple of bugs that stopped it from working at all; now we actually have working scripts 
Unicef have just announced their photographs of the year for 2007, some of which are very striking.
© G M B Akash, 2007
This picture depicts child labour in Bangladesh. Interesting how some parts of the world can live so differently to what we're used to, yet we (or at least I) rarely spare them a moments thought.
Andy Lockran notes that the BBC iPlayer is finally available for non-Windows users, in a fashion - a Flash version which plays in a browser window. It notably doesn't support downloading of episodes, as the Windows version does, but it's definitely a step in the right direction - and shows that the BBC really are working to provide cross-platform support. Hooray for that. It seems to work quite well. Thanks to all those involved!
Edit: OK, seeking seems knackered. Grr.
Edit': The new flash version that was pushed out on Gutsy today seems to have fixed it!
OK, I just want to get this out there, since I just had this annoying problem. I installed Kubuntu using Synaptic to see if I'd like it any better than the default Gnome desktop. I quickly found out, however, that it didn't want to run nicely on my system - the mouse seemed to lag to hell - and since I can't be arsed with spending hours faffing around trying to get it to work properly I just went back to Ubuntu (I'll probably give it another try when KDE4 is released, with the benefit of knowing how to get rid of it later).
Uninstalling Kubuntu and all of the stuff that it brought in wasn't so straightforward, however. Simply removing the metapackage kubuntu-desktop with Synaptic or aptitude left all of the extra stuff that I didn't want hanging around. This thread gave a massive apt-get line to remove all of the packages, which seemed more than a little suspect to me (enumerating all packages is bound to be a bad idea; some will get missed and some that I could have potentially installed myself previously could be removed), but upon scrolling down I came upon a nice program called debfoster which purged everything nicely. Note: This has been deprecated in favour of using aptitude. I only had to use deborphan because I didn't install kubuntu-desktop with aptitude in the first place. Use aptitude to save yourself a load of hassle. If, like me, you didn't know to use aptitude and just used apt-get or synaptic, deborphan will save your bacon and even keep any KDE packages you've explicitly installed (Kile and KBib for me). Paraphrasing from the thread, these are the commands you need to run:
sudo aptitude install debfoster
sudo debfoster -q
sudo sed -ni '1h;2,$H;${g;s/kubuntu-desktop\n//g;p}' /var/lib/debfoster/keepers
sudo debfoster
(Note that there are four lines here - the "sudo sed" line ends with "keepers".)
Review the output to see if it looks like it's removing all of the unnecessary kubuntu packages, then press P to purge them all and Y to confirm.
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