Well, I decided to try a different solution, so the other day I installed the reCaptcha plugin.  This service, which not only keeps your site from being inadvertently associated with male-enhancement drugs, also helps Google to digitize books, with words OCR programs tend to have problems with.  (Think bad scans.)  Check out their site for more information, it’s a neat concept.

I’ve only had it up for a day, so I’m not entirely sure it’s working, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.  I tried using tesseract on one of the images, and here’s what I got.  First, the image:

And here’s what it gave me back:

Scyfhiflgcf

Now, when I cropped out ‘of’ and tried that separately, it got it – that’s how it works (check the link above), it gives you a known one and an unknown one; I guess you could fool it if you got the one correct.  It does check the other word with other sites, though.  (As a side note, I did put in the text given above along with ‘of’, and I was actually able to fool it.  My guess though is that if you did this from the same IP a bunch of times it would catch on.)

So I’ll see how this turns out, hopefully it’s not too annoying.

I liked Ubuntu, and still do.  But I had wanted to give Fedora a spin for a while now, and figured maybe this problem was distribution-specific.  So I went ahead and installed Fedora 13.  It didn’t solve the problem, the machine still shuts down.  But I have to say it’s not bad.  I’ll probably throw Ubuntu back on here soon, but in the meantime I’ll give this a spin.

My first exposure to Linux was with RedHat 8 – I couldn’t get X working at first (didn’t even know how to troubleshoot it), so I just started playing with the shell.  I learned enough to move around, and even set up an FTP server, followed by a Samba, followed by a Web server…  This was back in high school, and it was really cool to be able to share documents around the house and over FTP.  Of course, I was mostly playing, and ended up breaking the system a few times.

Over the years I tried different distros, including Fedora when it first came out, Suse, and Gentoo – the last of which I stuck with for a while, because it encouraged tweaking.  But while I enjoyed all this there came a time when I wanted the system to (forgive me for contributing to the overuse of this phrase) “just work,” and so I turned to Ubuntu.  I can’t say I remained a fan of RedHat based distros, though I used them occasionally.

Well, Fedora 13 is nice.  I’m used to Ubuntu by this point, but I’m kind of getting into it.  Gnome is not customized as much as in Ubuntu, and I’m not sure I’m crazy about the theme that it defaults too.  But I can see how this would be more of an ‘enterprise’ distro; during login you can select different authentication sources, so in theory it should be easy to get it going with LDAP/Kerberos (something I haven’t done yet myself, but plan to someday).  Also, Fedora gives you the option of full-disk encryption, which is neat.  I encrypt everything except the /boot partition, and I have to say it does satisfy my inner paranoia.  However it does require you to enter a passphrase at boot, which is a little inconvenient but not that bad (especially if you have trade secrets or something you’re trying to protect).  One caveat though is that home directories are not encrypted individually by default (you can do this, but there isn’t an install option to), so with default permissions one use can look in another’s home dir.  But for a single-user laptop it’s probably not that much of an issue.

This was never meant to be a review, just a little blurb.  If you’ve got the hardware, time, and curiosity, and you’re looking for a new distro (or OS?), give Fedora 13 a whirl.  I’ll probably end up reinstalling Ubuntu tomorrow, but if fate calls I may end up using a Fedora for something else in the future.  As for the suspend problem, I’ll look into that more.  Maybe even try to patch it myself (something I’ve always wanted to do).

Think about it like this: we drilled a well 5000 feet below the surface of the ocean.  Lots of them, actually.  Sure, we’re not very good at it, as this whole disaster shows.  But from a technological standpoint there has been progress.  I’m not trying to excuse BP here, nor our sluggish lust for black gold (yes, I’m guilty of it, and you are too, what with cars and such).  But it’s still an accomplishment, and who knows where we’ll go from here?  Maybe it’ll only be a matter of time before we’re drilling on moons, other planets (cue Armageddon reference).

Again, I don’t mean to make light of the disaster.  I only want to try to stay optimistic about our civilization, and who knows, maybe whatever we can learn from this will help us out somehow later on.  Welcome to the future.

I’d like to get going on some high voltage projects too…

The first half of the upgrade went fine, everything downloaded and whatnot.  However, as the update manager was actually installing a bunch of the packages I for one reason or another clicked on the workspace applet to go and do some stuff while the upgrade was taking place.  At this point the machine froze.

After a few minutes of trying to get the system to respond to respond I ended up using the Magic SysRq key to reboot.  The packages had been interrupted with about half of them installed.  When I had rebooted I noticed that the new purple (and terrible looking out of the box if you use proprietary nVidia drivers) splash screen seemed to go on forever.  I shrugged this off initially and switched to a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1), figuring that this had to do with the interrupted upgrade.  I restarted the upgrade and let it finish, and reboot.  However, to my surprise the booting did not progress beyond the splash screen again.

I thought that this was the new boot splash program, Plymouth, at first.  I actually ended up disabling it,  but this did not stop anything – the boot messages displayed, and I was still not presented with a login screen.  I was able to still switch to a virtual terminal, and running startx got me my desktop.  Figuring it was a GDM problem, I tried typing sudo gdm at the virtual terminal.  This is what I got:

me@host:~$ sudo gdm
**
ERROR:gdm-settings-direct.c:157:gdm_settings_direct_get_boolean: assertion failed: (entry != NULL)
Aborted

After trying a few different things, I ended up reinstalling GDM, making sure to purge (so that the config files would be wiped):

sudo aptitude purge gdm

In doing this it complained that the packages gdm-guest-session and ubuntu-desktop depended on GDM, and thus would be removed.  I went ahead and agreed, and GDM was nuked.  Next, to reinstall, I did this:

sudo aptitude install gdm gdm-guest-session ubuntu-desktop

It complained again about some empathy-related packages being broken, and wanted to remove some.  I don’t use Empathy for messaging (I prefer Pigeon), so I just went ahead and did this.  Now, starting GDM from the command line worked.  Rebooting brought me to the graphical login prompt.

Lucid is pretty nice, and I would encourage you to upgrade.  It’s very convenient on modern GNU/Linux distros to be able to upgrade by just clicking a button, but be warned that things can go wrong.  I advise not messing with your machine while the upgrade is taking place and, if possible, upgrading on a non-critical machine first to see how it will go.  Keeping an eye on the forums/mailing lists isn’t a bad idea either, as is waiting a few days after the new version comes out.  And of course, remember to back up any data you care about beforehand .

It still is, but now it has become clear that the site has basically turned into a big content sponge.  All that information, and the statistics that come from it are worth tons to FaceBook and their advertisers.  And of course, people willingly give it all to them.  Well, it appears there is an alternative (found on Slashdot today).  Diaspora* aims to be a distributed social networking medium, where you get control of the information you put up.  They hope to get it released at the end of the summer.

Of course, they’re not the first to come up with a decentralized, linked means of sharing information, but maybe this will be be attractive to the average person.  You still have to be careful, of course, as obviously people will still be able to read what you make available.  But the idea of a decentralized social networking medium is appealing.  I will be checking it out, and I encourage everyone else who uses social networking to as well.

And at least it’s warmer.  Soon it will be summer.  And I think more and more of when I’ll be out of here…

I don’t really have much in the way of a revelation right now, but I do have some venting.  Namely, this concerns OpenOffice, which I use in place of MS Office (GNU/Linux user that I am).  Now, back when I used Word regularly things would frustrate me regarding how exactly one would go about laying out a page of text, especially with pictures.  I remember times when I’d have to fight with the program to make it do what I wanted.  Now, I accept responsibility for part of this, not being as familiar as I could have been.  But still if you want to do an advanced layout, Word isn’t the best choice.  In fact, word processors in general aren’t.  It’s really better to use a typesetting language like LaTeX, something I’d wished I’d gotten the hang of earlier on.  But I never did.

Now, for my lab reports and such I dutifully use OpenOffice Writer.  Which works, but now I’m running into similar problems as I did with Word back in the day.  Now, specifically I mean having my entire document rearranged just trying to move a picture up slightly.  Sometimes I couldn’t move an image a little too the left or right.  This started to get on my nerves, but after a little searching I think I can offer this bit of advice to people with similar frustrations: right-click on the image, and play with the anchor settings.  If it doesn’t do what you want in one, try another.  I think pictures are anchored as “As Character” by default, try playing with it.

Sorry for not being able to provide more info, but hopefully this will save someone a little time.

I have my /boot folder, where the kernels are stored so the boot loader can take them and boot them, on a different partition.  Said partition is sized at 64 MB.  Now, when Ubuntu installs a new kernel it does not remove the old ones.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; if a new kernel doesn’t work for some reason you can just boot into an old one.  And, of course, by default the installer does not set up a separate partition for /boot.  So over time things build up.  I checked, and sure enough, this partition was almost filled!  The fix is easy.

First, go into a terminal and take note of the version of the kernel you are using.  Just type this:

uname -r

Remember this (leave the window open in the background).  Next, open the Synaptic Package Manager (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager, enter your password if prompted) and search for ‘linux-image’ (no quotes) in the search bar.  When a list comes up, sort it by which ones you have installed and take note.  You’ll probably have several kernels highlighted (I had 4).  Select them all and mark them to be removed completely – this way you can be sure those files under /boot will be deleted.  Be sure NOT to uninstall the kernel you are currently using, as your system needs that to run, obviously.  You might also leave the previous version just in case something does go wrong, along with any custom or non-standard kernel you have in there (such as linux-rt, the realtime kernel for audio work).  Now hit apply, and let the package manager do its thing.

When it’s done try running your update again, it should succeed (or at least that error should go away).