To Talk of Many Things

Ubuntu DVD burning problems

Vince Kimball — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:43:06 +0000

I’ve been having problems burning DVDs with Ubuntu 8.04 (the AMD64 version) for the past couple of weeks. I found the “all_generic_ide” fix online which seems to have fixed the problem when burning data DVDs from Brasero, but I’m still having problems burning isos from Gnome.

Ubuntu sees the DVD burner as “ATAPI: HL-DT-STDVD+-RW GSA-H31N, B109, max UDMA/100″

Update: Looks like the issue may have been the quality of the blank DVDs that I was trying to use.

Be careful buying ebooks from Apress

Vince Kimball — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:34:06 +0000

I was just trying to purchase “Pro Open Source Mail: Building an Enterprise Mail Solution” as an ebook from Apress. The price is quoted as $25 for the ebook but when I added it to my cart, I got a $34.99 charge. I looked at another book quoted at $20 for the ebook but when I added it to my cart, I got a $27.99 charge.

Hopefully they’ll fix the problem soon.

Update: I was told by Apress that the cart price was correct. It was the price on the website that was wrong.

Google Gears: No 64-bit version?

Vince Kimball — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:31:49 +0000

I’m disappointed to learn that “there are no plans for an official 64-bit version” of Google Gears. Makes it hard to use Google Gears with a 64-bit Linux. It’d also be nice if Google bothered to mention this in the system requirements, rather than burying the limitation in a discussion group.

Update: apparently there are ways to run Google Gears on 64-bit Linux. I’ll have to check it out.

Ubuntu 8.04 Questions

Vince Kimball — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:12:48 +0000

Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 has been less smooth than I’d like, but I do like the improvements in the new release.

The Canonical partner repository for Ubuntu 8.04 is empty, except for the Opera browser. Why have a repository that is not maintained? The vmware-server packages in the repository for Ubuntu 7.10 haven’t been kept up to date. Canonical claims that Vmware is their premier partner for virtualization and that Vmware Server is available from the partner repository, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I know I can manually install the latest Vmware Server.

Canonical’s press release claims “Over 500 maintained and supported server packages, together with access to more than 20,000 additional components built for 8.04 LTS.” but there doesn’t seem to be any list of the server packages which are supported for five years.

Downloading the upgrade was a lot slower than previous updates.

I especially like the updates in Firefox 3 beta 5 and in the Evince document viewer.

Upgrading Ubuntu and Vmware

Vince Kimball — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 04:35:05 +0000

I’m looking for the best way to upgrade my Ubuntu 7.10 desktop with Vmware Server to the latest version. I’ll try to update this post with what I find out and try.

I’m currently running the AMD64 flavor of Ubuntu 7.10 and Vmware Server 1.04 that I hand installed because there were no packages available when I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10.

Update: Installing Vmware server 1.05 and the any-any-patch116 was pretty painless.

Update: I had to re-run the vmware-config routine after the update to the 2.6.24-17 kernel.

What Gordon Ramsay can teach software developers

Vince Kimball — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 23:26:26 +0000

In Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay does make-overs on failing restaurants and turns them into respectable enterprises through a combination of cuisine guidance, managerial pruning, and loads of swearing when things fail to meet his standards.It’s a fantastic show that gives grim insight to the scary state of affairs of the chosen spots, but it also goes beyond the schadenfreude and saves these places from going out of business.

What makes Ramsay’s approach to restaurant revamping so interesting, though, is how applicable it feels to software design. The characteristics of a failing eatery ring remarkably similar to those of a poorly-run software product:

Everything to no one
Cook what you know
Passion for your environment

That’s just a small taste of the similarities. Ramsay has plenty of additional lessons to teach software creators about vision, simplicity, and executing on the basics beautifully. I highly recommend setting your DVR to pick up the American version of Kitchen Nightmares on Fox every Wednesday from 8pm. The original British ones from BBC are great as well. [via Signal v. Noise]

Starting to work with Aptana

Vince Kimball — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 23:20:55 +0000

I’m starting to work with the Aptana Studio IDE on my AMD64 Ubuntu Gutsy install. It seems to work as an Eclipse plugin.

Describing GTD

Vince Kimball — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 16:09:09 +0000

In a few sentences I walked her through the core of GTD:

- Collect and download everything that’s got your attention, especially the stuff you’re holding on your mind.
- Decide the very very next action you need to take on any of those.
- Organize it into a few key buckets:

a list of your outcomes (Projects)
a list for the things you need to do (Next Actions)
a list of things other people owe you (Waiting For)
a list of the things you might like to get to (Someday/Maybe)

- Look at it all on some kind of regular basis to make sure it’s still current (Review)
- So that you can always trust you are making the best choices (Do)

from Kelly Forrister’s Simply GTD blog

Sorry about the lack of posts

Vince Kimball — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 17:13:25 +0000

Work has been crazy for the past couple of months. Hopefully things are returning to normal.

Changes . . .

Vince Kimball — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 17:48:32 +0000

I’m in the process of changing this blog over to Wordpress.