Thinkpad X61: Everything just works in Ubuntu

General,

Yesterday I received my new Lenovo Thinkpad X61. It’s the UX29DGE model, with Intel GMA X3100 graphics (gnome-device-manager says GM965/GL960), and 2.20 GHz Core Duo T7500. It shows up as Model 76739DG in gnome-device-manager.

After fighting with Windows Vista to reduce its partition size enough, I installed Ubuntu Hardy easily. I wanted to keep Vista around so I can look at it sometimes, but that short experience of it is enough to help me understand why people hate it so much. It’s as if they went out of their way to break all the basic principles of UI design, as if the managers had a running feud with the human interface department and wanted to outrage them. People who hate computers (most people), and who think that computers hate them, will not be surprised.

But it’s great to have a new laptop on which everything works. Even hibernation. I’ve never seen that work before and it’s truly useful. I wish my desktop could do it, in the absence of working session management.

I am a little disappointed that it’s almost as hot as my Acer. I guess this is just how all laptops are. How do people manage to use these things on their laps? Do we need a control panel to limit the CPU speeds, together with the internal temperature sensor, with options for “cosy”, “slow grilling” and “burning trousers”?

Openismus Will Euch Haben

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Our new hires (André, Karsten, Jan Arne) are nicely settled in now, so it’s time to find some more. There’s exciting development work to be done at Openismus using GTK+ and GNOME code. I think our employees like how we work. I try to keep them happy and not too stressed but you can probably track them down and ask them yourself.

As usual, we prefer people who live in Germany, or EU citizens who want to move to Germany. Please tell me about yourself in an email or grab me for a chat at GUADEC.

Scanning Old Photographic Slides

General

While I was in North Berwick, we went through my fathers stash of photos and found lots of slides made by my grandfather showing my father as a teenager and me and my sister as babies and young kids.

I bought my father a Plustek OpticFilm 35mm slide scanner and a Flickr Pro account. He’s using Windows XP (I don’t think this model works on Linux). The results are pretty good, though the Plustek OpticFilm scanner should make it easier to get better colors in its QuickScan mode. Its full scan mode can do better but its UI is incomprehensible to mortals. It can scan 35mm negatives too. He’s scanning a few each day, adding to his Flickr photostream.

We should remove this old 35mm slide from the glass to get better results, of course.

The older slides are glass-mounted 120mm (also known as three and a half inch) slides. I took those to Pyramid Imaging in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, who did a great job.

Some links to notable pictures so far:

Trying to File Bugs for Fedora Linux

General

As much as I dislike Ubuntu’s Launchpad bug tracker, Fedora Linux seems to have made something worse.I guess they want to discourage people from submitting bug reports.

For instance, I want to file a bug about the Glom package. Here are some things I tried:

Go to Fedora’s package page for Glom (I had previously found this and put a link to it on glom.org):

  • That page has a View Bugs link at the left but that’s not about bugs for this package. I would have to find Glom in a huge multipage package list.
  • The Bug Reports link at the top is more useful, but it just shows (no) open bugs without allowing me to report one.
  • There is a Login link at the top right. Maybe I could do more if I was logged in, but there is no way to register.
  • The Report Bugs link at the left takes me to a Fedora Trac on fedorahosted.org but that page tells me “TICKET_CREATE privileges are required to perform this operation”. There is a login link, but no way to register to be able to login. Have I mentioned that I hate Trac.

Go to Fedora’s web site like a normal user (I googled):

  • I see no link to file a bug.
  • I tried the Get Help link but only saw information about IRC, mailing lists, forums, and documentation.
  • I tried the Communicate link. In the middle of that page (after information about IRC, mailing lists and man pages) there is a link to bugzilla.redhat.com. Clicking Enter A New Bug Report takes me to a big list of Linux versions, mostly Red Hat. There’s a list of Fedora stuff that’s almost as big. I chose the Fedora product, found glom in the list of components, and managed to file a bug. But glom is also in the list of components for the Fedora EPEL (Extras) product. Should I have filed it there instead?

Booked our GUADEC Accommodation

General,

It wasn’t easy, but I found some accommodation for the 7 Openismus employees who are going to GUADEC in Istanbul. The recommended accommodation (The 2 Hotel Golden Horn hotels) was booked out and I guess it has been for some time. You’ll be lucky to even get a reply from those hotels.

We booked two apartments (Glorya Penthouse Terrace and Glorya Tower View, in BeyoÄŸlu near the Galata tower on the east side of the river.) from Istanbul Holiday Apartments, who are not cheap, but who speak (email) perfect English and are very straightforward.

I seem to have been completely wrong about the cost of accommodation in Istanbul, though it might be easier for individuals. I guess the city has boomed since my last visit. But over the last few years I have noticed that hotels everywhere have become increasingly unlike the places surrounding them. Most people who work in hotels could never afford to stay in them.

Replacing Travelmate 4100 hard drive

General

Dear Internet, I think this is the hard drive on my Acer Travelmate 4100. How on earth do I remove this metal plate thing and get to the hard drive itself, so I can put a new drive in? I’ve already broken the little tab of clear plastic by pulling on it.

Update: Nevermind. There’s a little screw to the right and then it slides across. I thought the screw was for something underneath.

Things I hate about Trac

General

I don’t know why some projects use Trac, though it’s been chosen by some people who I respect. It frequently annoys me.

For now, I’ll restrict my rant to Trac’s bug tracker. It fails to do the basic things that bug trackers should do: Make it easy to submit a bug, and make it easy to see a list of open bugs.

  • The bug tracker comments use Wiki Formatting, meaning your comment and its formatting is very likely to be mangled. This is hateful to regular users and probably annoying to most technical users. And enjoy guessing which flavor of wiki formatting it uses. Reading the formatting documentation might not add to your enjoyment.
  • There’s no way to see the bugs that I have submitted. The “My Bugs” report is apparently a list of bugs assigned to me (if I am a developer). It’s hard to know because it’s cryptically described as “This report demonstrates the use of the automatically set $USER dynamic variable, replaced with the username of the logged in user when executed.”
  • It sends me email even for my own changes to bugs.
  • It calls bugs “tickets”. Sometimes it calls them “defects”. This makes it hard for people to easily see where to file a bug.

Back from North Berwick

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I’m back from North Berwick where Liam met his grandfather and aunt. We’ll try to visit once a year.

The 2 hour flight wasn’t too stressful but my sister is moving to New Zealand which will be a little more difficult to visit.

On holiday, laptop down

General, , , ,

I’m currently on holiday in North Berwick. It’s been fun but not quite as relaxing as hoped. Liam has started waking at night again after two months of sleeping through the night.

I’ve been getting up early to do a couple of hours work each morning, but this laptop’s hard drive has started hard crashing after a few minutes. Hard drives fail too often. Hopefully it will give me time to finish this blog entry and hit Publish. I guess I’ll be offline until I get back on Monday.