[Wed Sep 28 09:03:38 CDT 2011]

Just ran into a peculiar issue on my Debian laptop. I recently moved back to Minnesota from Spain, so I had to change the date and time settings on my GNOME desktop. Since the GUI is there, easily available, I simply selected "System" from the menu, then "Administration" and "Time and Date" to proceed with the change. It was quite painless and the time and date widget in the upper right-hand corner of the desktop quickly displayed the correct time. However, things were different at the shell prompt. Whenever I ran the date command, it still showed the old time and timezone settings. The reason? It's stored in a shell environment variable:

$ printenv | grep TZ
TZ=Europe/Madrid

So, the fix is still quite easy to implement:

$ export TZ=America/Chicago
$ printenv | grep TZ
TZ=America/Chicago

Of course, in order for this change to take effect across the board, you will have to add it to your ~/.bashrc file. {link to this story}

[Fri Sep 9 15:09:51 CEST 2011]

The changes recently introduced by Canonical to the latest Ubuntu releases have been quite controversial. I must say that I don't totally like them myself. The Unity user interface may be the best invention since sliced bread, but I just don't like it. Perhaps I'm an old school type of guy, but I doubt it. As a matter of fact, I do switch my desktop environment or window manager every now and then just for the pure joy of trying something different. Actually, one of the reasons why I do it is because I think one ought to avoid falling into the trap of getting too used to certain habits. The world of technology changes too fast to be able to afford that. It's a good thing to run a not so familiar environment every now and then. It keeps you on your toes. Said that, there are user interfaces out there that I like better than Unity, to be honest. It's not only the way it looks, but also the fact that I'm not so sure it makes me more productive at all.

In any case, although I don't like Unity, I'm not sure I share the huge amount of criticism the folks from Ubuntu are getting these days. Overall, the new interface looks nice, sleak even. It could very well be that they are onto something. Who knows if, a few years from now, we will think of Canonical as the company that changed the way we thought of the computer interface and a true competitor to Apple. Here is a video put together by the folks at Web Upd8:

Like I said, I don't think it looks so awful. Besides, come on, guys, all you need to do is log out and log in using a different interface, which will then become your default desktop interface. It's not that difficult! {link to this story}

[Thu Sep 8 12:28:44 CEST 2011]

I recently had to back up my laptop into an external USB drive formatted with an HFS+ filesystem, since I use it both for Mac and Linux systems. All I had to do to view its contents on my Debian laptop was to plug it in. That's it. It automatically mounted, and it also opened the Nautilus window to show me the contents, which I could browse just fine. The problem, though, came when I tried to write to it. No matter what I tried (and in spite of the fact that the mount command clearly showed the the filesystem was mounted with both read and write permissions), it would show me an error that I did not have the proper permissions to write to it. Yes, this happened even if I used my root account. What gives? The problem is that journaling needs to be disabled ont he HFS+ partition and, as far as I know, it can only be done from a system running the Mac OS. Just plug it in, launch the shell and run the following command:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/diskutil disableJournal [device]

This document from Apple's own website gives you all the gory details. In any case, once I did that, I could read and write to the filesystem from Linux just fine. {link to this story}

[Wed Sep 7 12:05:30 CEST 2011]

I noticed an entry titled Why The Fax Machine Refuses To Die posted on Slashdot that can be read as a good example of why outdated technologies survive for so many years after they become outdated: because they still fulfill a niche need. In this case, for starters, as one of the readers explsins, it is far from clear that the technology itself, although perhaps outdated, is indeed inferior:

Sheet-fed scanners are ridiculously expensive, plus you have to save the file, attach it to an email, then, hopefully, the file isn't too large for the sender or recipient's mailserver. With the fax machine, one just drops the stack in, verify the fax successfuly transmitted, task complete.

Also, many people feel that snooping of phone lines is much less likely to occur than snooping of email, when is sent in the clear.

Yet another reader also points out how it is still extremely useful for all sorts of legal transactions, since signed documents that are faxes are considered legally binding by courts of justice:

Judges think that. Not because they want to, but because it has been accepted by the courts. It takes years to get a new technology accepted for the purpose. It's expensive, complicated, and very difficult. New technology can still be used even if it hasn't got blanket acceptance, you will just need to pay hundreds of dollars (possibly several thousand) to have an expert testify to how the technology works.

Since the fax machine does the job for legal purposes, even if it sucks somehwat, it doesn't suck enough to warrant the effort of getting a court to accept the new technology. That and the new technology (even though faxes have these problems, they can be ignored —remember, they are accepted already) easily has security holes unless you get pretty specialized (as far as lawyers are concerned). That means it isn't one size fits all. That means it's dead before it gets off the ground.

Do you know how difficult it was (and may still be) just to get a court to accept a digital picture? Because they can be "faked" (not that "regular" photos can't be, especially since printing process can often be digital anyways). Even REALLY low standard courts like traffic court, I've seen them reject digital photo evidence. Getting a court like that to accept, say, a iGPG key? Not a chance.

In conclusion, the whole discussion makes for an interesting read if you care about technology and its social use. {link to this story}

[Sat Sep 3 09:46:24 CEST 2011]

I recently borrowed a few movies from a friend who had bought them in the USA, and experienced some problems watching them on my British Dell laptop running Debian. For whatever reason, as soon as I inserted the media in the DVD player, the computer mounted it successfully and I could browse its contents from the file manaer. However, any attempt to view the movie using Totem, MPlayer or xine would end up showing a "could not read from source" error. Yes, I did try changing the region configured on the player using the regionset command, but that didn't help. As it turned out, though, the problem had nothing to do with Debian nor the DVD region, but rather with the need to install the libdvdcss2 package:

# apt-get install libdvdcss2

{link to this story}

[Fri Sep 2 19:28:46 CEST 2011]

For whatever reason, all of a sudden, and right after I had installed a few updates, when I log into my GNOME desktop I notice something weird with the theme and, as soon as I try to run check the Preferences menu I notice an error warning me that the gnome-settings-daemon is not running in the background. I check and, sure enough, the process is not running. So, what to do? The temporary workaround is as easy as actually running the command from any terminal window:

$ /usr/bin/gnome-settings-daemon &

Needless to say, that doesn't do much next time you log into your desktop. Not only that, but certain Nautilus processes that were started before you ran that command (for example, the one that takes care of drawing the background and all its icons) still cannot communicate correctly with the daemon, which still ends up causing some minor problem. So, how do you solve the problem for good? I have only been able to find one way: rename the following directories from your home folder, log out and log back in:

~/.gconf
~/.gconfd

Well, at least that did the trick for me. Of course, use this as the last resort, since it will also remove plenty of settings you already had in your GNOME desktop. {link to this story}

[Fri Sep 2 12:17:43 CEST 2011]

OK, here is a little insignificant configuration issue that has been bothering me for the last couple of days or so. I just configured Evolution to access my Google Mail account, so that I can also have my Google calendars and contacts in one place (although, for the most part, I still use mutt to do most of my email). Well, the thing is that I wanted to do something as simple as configuring the program to automatically add my own email address to the BCC field (I like to be able to read the whole email thread, including original emails and their replies). However, it proved to be far more difficult than I expected in Evolution. I just couldn't find where to configure something like this. Somewhere in the "Sending Emails" tab, one could imagine? Well, no. Once you open the preferences ("Edit", then "Preferences"), select the correct profile and you will find the option under the "Defaults" tab:

{link to this story}

[Fri Sep 2 12:06:56 CEST 2011]

I just had to connect this morning from my Debian laptop to a website that relied on a Java applet to run an application and the proper plugin was not installed. How to solve it? Easy:

# apt-get install sun-java6-plugin

After you do that, simpyly restart the Iceweasel browser. {link to this story}