CaffeineFusion

An Open Vendetta Against The Norm

[caffeinefusion]

Five Lessons from Ubuntu 14.04

Turns out that my transition to Ubuntu wasn’t completely seamless!

Read on for a couple of gotchas to look out for.

So I've finally shifted to full linux on my home machines - A Dell Precision 360 and an Acer 5755G. Both are a couple of years old now.

I used the 14.04 Install Disk to set up Ubuntu.

Perhaps the first issue I ran into on my desktop was:

Linux doesn’t like FakeRAID

When I set up the Dell Precision 360, I RAIDed across the two hard drives, and created a partition for a Linux install. However, when I tried to install Ubuntu, the RAIDed drives appear as individual partitions rather than as the one. Reading through the interwebs, the general advice was not to use Dell’s FakeRAID on the Precision 360 with a Linux install. Unfortunately, I have data on it which I don’t want to lose.

Solution: Installed a new HD.

Upgrade those Graphics Drivers - Pronto!

So, you’re into your brand new machine, you’re setting up some initial things, having a play around... when the whole system freezes. Doh! You can’t change to a terminal session, all you can do is reboot.

Turned out that the Nvidia graphics card doesn’t play nicely with generic driver.

(Both of my machines have Nvidia Graphics cards - GeForce GT 540M && Quadro FX 3450) 

You’ll want to install that Nvidia driver as soon as you load in. Otherwise, you may not be able to login before it crashes next time. Instead, you’ll need to load into the command line only mode and install the package via that.

More info here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia

sudo apt-get install nvidia-304

Was the recommended  driver for my card.

Chrome bleeds

I love Chrome. Clean, crisp, responsive. Been using it for years. Installed it, was using it... and then it started to bleed through the face. Black artifacts in the window. Machine would slow to a crawl and then die. (~4-5 tabs open)

Looks like I’m back on Firefox until I can debug the issues properly. (Firefox doesn’t have the same issues. I currently have 20-30 tabs open and no dramas!!)

Considering the black artifacts - might be more graphics driver issues!

Fuji Xerox now hate you

Went to set up the Multi-function printer at the office... 6 hours later...

They have a linux driver on their website - and instructions! What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything.

I worked through the instructions (which were only half written from what I could tell). I fixed their package structure so it would run on linux. I hunted down the random dependencies for their installer. I even rewrote some of the code so that it would work. Nothing. No love. Seemed to be designed for a different print system than what Ubuntu has.

Someone had hunted down a 32-bit package from their Japanese website. I tried using that. Still no love. So I went and dug through their Japanese website and downloaded another version of the package. No love. Even when I did manage to get it installing on my 64 bit system, it died in flames.

I even went through hell - Trying to dig out the necessary file from their Mac Driver (which is apparently buried in there somewhere!). Nothing. (And never... ever... again...)

Solution: Get another printer

(Or write your own driver/find a generic driver that will work with it.  However, after 6 hours, my brain was more inclined to throw the MFC out the window)

The Unity loop of death

The most exciting bug, though, is when Unity gets stuck in an eternal loop whilst transitioning windows (and sometimes when you’re not transitioning windows!)

You’re just quietly Tabing through applications, minding your own business... when something goes terribly wrong. The Tab interface starts blinking on and off randomly, and quickly. Your input no longer works. You can click things, but all it does is affect the blinking of the tabbing interface. The only thing you can do? Reboot. Sucks to be you.

Solution: Install Xubuntu.

I decided that the Unity window manager wasn’t worth all the headaches.

I’ve now been using xfce for a few weeks and haven’t had any major problems. It isn’t “pretty” and slick like Unity. But you don’t get any strobbing eternal loops. That’s a win in my book.

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

[caffeinefusion]

Printer Woes

As part of setting up my fresh Ubuntu install, I needed to set up the print drivers for home and work. Simple task, no?

Well, turns out that it’s not that simple if the printer in question is a Fuji Xerox DocuCentre-IV 3370. 

Went to their driver site, pulled down their linux drivers... all good. Until I started trying to use them. After several hours of following all the steps in their help document, tracing dependent packages and attempting to debug the code (even remaking the entire package), I was still no closer to a working print driver.

So, I figured, all I needed was a Postscript printer description file (PPD). Digging around, I found out that there was one embedded, somewhere, in the Mac Driver (though not available separately). So another hour or two was spent mounting Mac folders, digging up various unzipping tools.... only to not be able to find the .ppd in the repository.

As a last straw, I discovered that there had been a working rpm on their Japanese website. The old links had broken, so I dug through their website (kudos to Google translate!!!) and finally found the .rpm... only to discover that they only had a i386 version which I couldn’t get working on 64 bit Ubuntu - Argh!

So I have a decision to make - ignore (use a different printer), rebuild (recode their package), or retrofit (see if I can make one of the generic drivers work)? 

[caffeinefusion]

Jumping ship on Windows 7

I’ve finally done it.

Having watched my main computer getting progressively slower on Windows 7 and then having the latest Microsoft updates (GWX - that annoying “upgrade to Windows 10″ popup; and wicainventory.exe - that “upgrade compatibility helper” which was a resource hog and doing goodness knows what on files all across the machine) I decided it was time. Time to go full linux.

I’ve moved back to Ubuntu (14.04) on my desktop and lappy. Ran in to a couple of headaches:

- Turns out Ubuntu doesn’t play nice with Dell’s fake-RAID. I had setup a RAID array on my desktop machine using Dell’s software level RAID on a Precision 360. In my initial setup, a few years back, I had included a Linux partition so I could dual boot later. Unfortunately, Linux wouldn’t see the RAID config. Solution: Installed an extra hard-drive so that I wouldn’t lose any data on my existing RAID. Will have to do a proper data migration later on.

- The NVidia graphic drivers needed to be manually installed after the upgrade. Was fun diagnosing the issue as the machine would freeze randomly. Fortunately, I wasn’t the first to hit this issue, so the diagnosis and solution was well documented.

Still, I must say - it’s awesome to have proper package management and the unix terminal back. :-D

I think my next project will be playing around with the MEAN.io stack. Was one of the first things to get installed after the upgrade.

[caffeinefusion]

[caffeinefusion]

Jolicloud

I've been trolling the interwebs for some time now looking for different tools that might allow me to change and improve how I use the web. My latest excursus brought me across a web-based "cloud" tool - Jolicloud.

First up, apologies for the delay in blogging. Job hunting and what not really chews away at the time you have available for other things.

That out of the way, what is Jolicloud? (Note, the web desktop - not the OS)

Well, they say:

Jolicloud lets you manage all your Web apps, files and services, all in one place. It’s a portable online desktop that provides a continous interface for managing your entire cloud across all your devices. Now the cloud becomes simple, beautiful and easy to manage, wherever you go.

This sounded pretty tantalizing to me - an online desktop to allow me to manage my *entire* cloud? Awesome!

I immediately signed up to check it out, did your basic configuration changes, added a whole bunch of useful looking apps (and then proceeded to lose them all because I was logged in on two different machines)... Then I decided to look at how I could use the various apps in Jolicloud.

To my vast dismay, all of the nice "apps" I had just downloaded were basically URLs. What?!? I know all the URLs for my web tools - why bother then with Jolicloud? What happened to being able to "manage all your web apps [...] all in one place"? 

Jolicloud does have *some* capacity to do that - that is, if you are using DropBox or Google Docs... But apart from that, the actual management console idea is currently non-existant.

*sigh*

But wait!

Before you proceed to blot Jolicloud out of your collective memories - there *may* be a glimmer of hope for the functionality you were hoping for... There is a new Jolicloud Beta coming out soon (http://my.jolicloud.com/beta). From what I can glean from that page - it appears like they are improving their cross integration capabilities - adding Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, and Picasa integration. 

Hopefully they will open up the APIs (if they haven't already) to allow developers to create in-Jollicloud access to the tools and build cross-tool communication to allow for a truly "continous interface for managing your entire cloud across all your devices."

To cut the guys some slack - they are a 3 year old startup, so I don't expect them to have reached all of their collective goals yet. I expect we'll be seeing more developments into the future.

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

- Owen

[caffeinefusion]

Jumping into a cloud

The need for a centralised data store has been looming over my head for a while now. My current contract with work is soon to run out, and with it, my 1 TB hard disk would cease to be accessible to me. Where before I was permitted to use it as a centralised repository of everything I might need, with constant access allowed through VPN, now I'd have to carry everything on a thumb drive (Which means investing in a thumb drive with a better capacity).

But perhaps not. Equipped with Google, and a yearning hunger to enter the cloud, I set about to find what freebies I could capitalize on:

My needs are quite modest - I need to be access it from all of my current PCs and from my iPhone. It would need to be at least as accessible and easy to use as my current set up. And most importantly, for a tightwad like me - it needs to be free.

There are the usual contenders - Google and Microsoft. I don't have gmail (and don't particularly want *another* email account) so that ruled out Google unless I turned to Google docs (which I believe still only handles up to 1 GB!). Microsoft, on the other hand, already have skydrive integrated into my email account - so if I could get that to work with my iPhone, it would be a handy 15 GB!

Having a quick glance around, there seemed to be several packages which come highly recommended - Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) and iDrive (http://www.idrive.com/). But Dropbox will only give you 2GB before requiring payment, whereas iDrive gives you a much more delectable 5GB in storage.

Then I stumbled upon ADrive (http://www.adrive.com) - it has a hefty 50GB on their basic plan - SWEET! Unfortunately, you can only access it through a web interface, it doesn't have an iPhone app, and it doesn't handle ftp.

To further nuance my decision, it turns out that iDrive can act as a fully featured backup tool as well, plus you can increase your quota for free, by up to 50 GB via referrals. (So if you're going to sign up - please please please do me a favor and do it though this link - http://www.idrive.com/?uid=J8M6V7P6F4)

Unfortunately, even ADrive limits you to 2GB per upload, so I won't be able to store my roaming DVD backups (but 2GB certainly eclipses skydrive's 100MB limit!).

The Verdict?

Having looked at the packages that are out there, I'm actually going to implement 2 - iDrive, because I can run as an active backup of all my computers - AWESOME! - and ADrive, because who's going to sniff at 50 GB of free storage. For anything that's too big or only requires infrequent use I'll stick on ADrive. For files I want to access on my iPhone, or for my standard documents etc. I'll use iDrive.

Well - that's it from me today, I'll let you know how the apps fair once I put them under load.

- Owen

[caffeinefusion]

Google Sparks

It was inevitable.

Google needed something to keep people logged in to Google+, something that would get them hooked in all day. It needed to promote activity, and thereby encourage others to join in. In its initial form, there was little momentum... What would give it momentum? Games, of course. Angry Birds, for sure.

But that isn't the topic for this blog.

Instead I'd like to focus in on another new feature which I think is brimming with more potential. Partially, because it doesn't involve me spending all day firing birds at towers (and achieving absolutely nothing), but also because I can see it (as I said - potentially) being very useful : Google Sparks

So, what is Google Sparks?

Well, apparently it's about "nerding out" and exploring a topic with other people. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRkAdTflltc

However, I'm not so sure that the tool in and of itself has any joint-explorative factor that I can see. What it does appear to be is a novel approach to RSS feeds. Whereas we, in the past, may have collected together the RSS feeds from a few interesting blogs and track them. Sparks allows us to search a particular topic and save it for quick referencing. Like following a Twitter hashtag - but bigger - a larger aggregation.

The social aspect comes from the ability of the user to share the article, blog, etc. with the other people on their network. It's only social in the sense that it is integrated into the whole Google package. Rather than having to copy the URL and then paste it into, say, your facebook status bar, you can instead just click the share button and select which groups you'd like to share the site with.

Sooo... first impressions.

I wasn't too impressed actually.

It isn't particularly ground-breaking. Currently it appears to be a slimmed down version of Google's main search engine. I have yet to see any integration with my feeds. What it returns is a mere 1 page of articles.

But I said it had potential! And it does. Google needs to take this concept and amp it up if they want it to be more than a tacky extra. (I haven't had a look through their dev sites/blogs so I can't comment on what their plans are yet)

The potential comes through the other ideas that could be linked into this. If they expanded the tool to allow connections with people and groups via like interests, then that would be useful. Being able to catalog the articles that you like on a topic, and then having (somewhat of a mashup) available to other Google+ users who view your profile would be cool.

On a professional level, having rankings and alerts based on new content would be quite useful. If, say, I was following cloud computing as an interest, and a new article came up on a blog that has a huge spike in interest by viewers (contextualised by the standard viewings of their pages), then alerting me that there is a hot topic there and directing me to it would be extremely useful.

Another possibility is conversation based on the topic. Having a feed of comments on the topic - discussion on the topic - and allowing users to limit how that feed is filtered. I could look at what all Google+ users are saying, or just certain circles that I am engaged with.

So, my verdict - interesting, but what more can you do with it? I like the concept, but think it needs to have something *more* added to it.

Anyway, Owen out!

[caffeinefusion]

Crossrider and pimping Google+

In a similar vein to my previous blog article, another tool that I've stumbled across in my search for web-integration is Crossrider.

Sick of having to have all those different pages open for your various social media feeds? They may very well have an answer.

Crossrider, from what I understand, is a framework for developing plugins for your web browsers. Rather than needing to develop one for each browser, Crossrider allows a user to develop one tool and have it intagratable with all browsers.

What this allows you to do is integrate javascript into an existing webpage without needing any control of the website or its code. For the average joe, this doesn't sound particularly impressive - so what eh?

Well, take a look at this:

Yes - you see right. That's my Google+ page with both Twitter and Facebook! To demonstrate the capabilities of their development platform, Crossrider has released a free plugin that adds your facebook to your Google+ account.

Further, the community has taken it up and developed a twitter tool.

To be honest, these, in and of themselves, are still not particularly useful. I still can only view one feed at a time. It's the equivalent of tabbing except handled on the webpage rather than on the browser. What's more, it's somewhat limited. The facebook tool allows status updates, and allows the use of your main feed (such as liking etc.)... but that's where it appears to stop in terms of functionality.

The twitter feed is slow and has issues (at least in firefox) - such as requiring you to refresh your Google+ feed before the twitter feed will disappear.

But what this does represent is the tantalizing possibility of more powerful tools and further upgrades in functionality. Crossrider is still in beta. The tool sets are still new... if this is what it can do now, I wonder how much more useful it will become in the future!

Could we see more powerful aggregation tools, or rearrangeable pages which effectively integrate all of our social media?

Make sure you check it out: http://crossrider.com/

- Owen

[caffeinefusion]

ifttt and reining in the interwebs

Before I delve into the meat of this blog post, let me start by christening this blog!

With that out of the way, expect to see the format on this blog change as I iron out the bugs in my themes and page layouts. This has only had a few moments of initial thought put into it - and it shows! But that's okay, I expect it to slowly metamorphosis over the coming months (and years - hopefully!).

Also, background reading for this blog is: www.xkcd.com and www.cad-comic.com. For those uninitiated in nerdy web comics - you may see terms like "blag" and "interwebs" (to name some of the less technical jargon) bandied around - you have been forewarned!

With those initial tidbits out of the way, let me introduce the real hero of this first blag post - ifttt (http://ifttt.com/)

For some time now, I've lamented the copious quantity of social media/news sources/blogs/mail accounts I use. To be quite honest, I really do not like mess. I like to have everything organised, in its own place, accessible according to its use, and just generally neat. So to me, my browsing experience is annoying. Tabs did much to improve it... but still - annoying.

What's more is that there's a certain level of input needed for each site in order to maintain it at a useful level of activity. The larger the quantity of social media etc. the higher the level of data redundancy, of time required to maintain the content that I post, of patience needed to sift through everything. This has led to some sites just not really being used. Twitter, for example. I never was able to fit Twitter into a routine. I could post updates, but the feed would just come through too fast - the information that I wanted was too easily buried... most of the content was irrelevant to what i wanted... so it has been collecting cobwebs in the corner...

Enter ifttt.

Ifttt is a tool that allow users to link different platforms together. You set up rules. Ifttt then waits for the triggers that you define (eg. a new blag post like this one) and then does something with it (like post it to my facebook page).

What this means for me is that I can keep content fresh and active, without having to come up with a new set of content, or manually reenter content, for each page that I maintain. That, my friends, is elegance.

Now, rather than having to update 3-4 statii manually, I can let my collective of networks know what's going on with but one update. It takes the pain out of maintaining varying social networks.

What's more, you can customize how the data is transmitted, append links, add hashtags... etc.

That said, ifttt is still in beta. It is still expanding and growing. I'm hoping to be able, in the future, to use it to create a dashboard (/aggregation) of all the various tools that I use. That means neatness! YAY! No more tab-flicking, update missing, information losing... For the neat-freak such as myself, to be able to set up a page and customize the feeds that I need to see on the day, whilst simplifying how I keep others up to date on all things... Wow!

Well, that's enough for this kick-off post.

I hope you are all now keen with a insatiable hunger for this tool brimming with potential. If you'd like an add to the beta for the site, let me know. I have some invites left.

For more information, check out the ifttt blog here or check out their explanation at http://ifttt.com/wtf.

Until next time,

Owen

[caffeinefusion]

Pity the white suit is hidden by the trench coat!