I heard a story the other day that reminded me how much decency is the glue for society:
The person I was speaking with told me the story of his father emigrating to Oregon. Back then (not too long ago) Oregon still did not allow black citizens to own businesses. His father wanted to start a company, but was not allowed to purchase the land or start the business. So he went to a prominent white business man whom he had never met, but had heard his name in town before. He brought him his life savings, plopped it down on his desk and said, “I need you to buy some land using this and establish a business. I’ll be the owner in all aspects except for your name on the deed and business registry.” The business man took the money, bought the land and set up the business.
When hearing this story from his father, he asked him, “how did you know you could trust the guy? He could have taken all your money or claimed the business when it became prosperous.”
His father looked him in the eye and said: “I didn’t know, and he didn’t take anything.”
Even though laws exist that govern so many aspects of society, they are no match to the power of decency.
After upgrading from Natty, when you boot, you may get the following in your boot script:
Waiting For Network Configuration <paaaaauuuuse>
Waiting up to 60 more seconds for the network configuration <paaause>
This is not a bug! It happens when one of the init scripts does not get a ‘return code’ that informs it to continue on, b/c the network configuration is done.
This absence of a return code can be for numerous reasons. There is a good likelihood that it is caused by an unnecessary configuration in your /etc/network/interfaces file.
Before attempting to delve deeper into the problem, potentially spending hours trawling through random articles/bug reports, try this:
before:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
after:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
# auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
reboot and see if the boot sequence still has the “waiting…” messages. If you still have them, then you’ll want to read up on the bugs reported to launchpad. There are some workarounds that might work for you… but most of the issues that are NOT to do with your /etc/network/interfaces file have already been fixed and patched into the main build.
The # sign is used to insert comments into shell scripts/configuration files. So you are turning each line that you put it at the beginning of into a comment rather than a command. It is a good tool to test configuration changes, rather than deleting items, b/c you can always go back and uncomment (remove the # sign) and you’ll be back where you started, rather than having to save deleted lines in a different file.
Why did the auto command mess things up?
The long story short: K/Ubuntu systems with wireless configurations usually use KDE’s or Gnome’s own network management system to configure wireless once the user has logged in and confirmed access to their password wallet. Setting your network interfaces to auto initialize wont work because you haven’t configured networking via this method — you’re using the windowing system instead(which is totally fine). The resource init scripts are set to wait until the network is configured, but since it never does, the pause has to time out. There are good reasons why this safety net is in there, and it is not a bug, though it indicates there may be one or that something else is wrong.
So you don’t need to auto-initialize anything via the interfaces file, unless you prefer that… but if you do, you probably know enough to not find this article useful anyway! :-)
The script is awesome. It’s going to be great.
(Source: kickstarter.com)
Some spam docs that come through google docs use sly methods to prevent the report abuse button from showing. However the code for it is there before the doc actually shows so you can get to it anyway:
1. Open the doc.
2. right-click (shift-click, mac-ers) on an area of the google docs bar at the top that is not a link, even if the document is stuck loading. choose “inspect element” or whatever your browser uses to open its page code inspector. I use firebug on firefox for this. If you don’t have this option, try View Page Source.
3. in firebug you can search for a pattern in the code using firebug’s search box. search for “abuse.” if your code inspector doesn’t have that ability or you just can’t find it, or you are using the View Page Source option, you cay type control-F or (I think) command-f on the mac, then type abuse and hit enter.
4. either your instance of abuse or nearby it should be a link which starts like this:
https://docs.google.com/abuse?id=
and then some big combination of characters that should match the comination of characters in the url bar — that’s the document’s id.
5. select, copy and paste that whole link into the browser’s url bar (make sure to overwrite whatever is in the url bar presently). then hit enter.
6. follow the instructions on the abuse page, and that’s that.
As of this writing there is no way to mark docs as spam or report them as abusive without opening them. Hopefully that will change.
To write an autobiography is to lie starting with the first sentence.
A Running list of Linux OS distributions that cater toward film-makers (and other media professionals). Please send me any additions.
OS Platforms:
Ubuntu Studio ~ Ubutntu-based, so Debian-based, uses Gnome as the primary windowing system. Easy package management (easy to find/install new software). They stylize Gnome a lot to look cool, and the Ubuntu kernel is compiled as a realtime kernel, which is good for editing tools and audio sequencing systems like Jack. Lots of community support.
64Studio - 64-bit specialized version of Debian (though they have a 32 bit version as well), which is, amongst other things, targeting the OEM market. Also realtime kernel for low latency. Very similar to Ubuntu Studio in many ways. They offer professional support on top of the community.
Suse Studio can be used to build a specialized version of Suse that can cater toward media development. Dealing with codec licensing is a lot easier due to Suse being a paid distribution. Note: ‘studio’ here does not mean for studios — it means ‘build your own flavor’ of Suse.
Naturally any standard Linux distro can be shaped into a studio environment. I mention these b/c they are a little easier for non Linux junkies to install and manage.
There is one time when you don’t want to have OpenGL active if you use the open source Radeon drivers on an older ATI card (linux), and that is when you are attaching a second monitor to your machine.
Currently (as of Kubuntu 11.04) the r300 driver will not do justice to supposed shared memory when in GLX mode. It’s best just to shut it all down while using multiple monitors.
Symptoms:
KDM keeps crashing and reloading when trying to switch to multiple monitors.
—and/or—
When you try to activate the correct resolutions/relationships you get a freeze or massively distorted screen. Sometimes when this happens and the “accept configuration” screen times out, it fails to revert to your previous configuration. If this happens you’re best off rebooting. You CAN try to drop to a shell and reboot KDM, but you can’t always get there (I haven’t tried ssh).
Do this:
**Sometimes it still crashes, but usually if you’ve done all of the steps then you’re good to go. If KDM crashes, you’re best rebooting. Not because you can’t recover KDM (sometimes it goes into a crash loop though) but because you may get access issues to your wireless (go figure). This seems to be a problem with wireless re-authing with kwallet after a kdm crash, and you CAN resolve it temporarily, but it takes longer than rebooting.
