For the 20th birthday of the Linux kernel, Microsoft have made a video wishing Linux happy birthday.

My first reaction to this? That’s pretty nice, at the end of the day, there’s no reason we can’t be friends just because of a difference of opinion on the best way to develop an operating system. In fact, I’m surprised Microsoft was relaxed enough to let this out, good on them.

The top comment on the Slashdot post about the video?

It begins with, “I read this as a slight against Linux…” and goes on to say..

I think the general philosophy that has clearly been reiterated by the Linux community is there is absolutely no room for trust in Microsoft. They are a convicted monopolist and have called upon everyone to view Linux as a cancer. They continue to use their patents to extort payment from large and small with bogus insubstantiated claims against Linux. They are the company that uses embrace extend extinguish. This animation represents the same underhanded intentions.

Do these people ever turn off?

First stop is finegael2011.com, the official site of the 2011 Fine Gael election bid. Though recently, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it had been hacked, as on the front page there was a poorly coded flash game which seems to make fun of Irelands political figures, including Enda himself (link). Enda is the protagonist and his catchphrases, complete with dodgy Mayo accent, include : ”Tax that!” (to Labour candidates), “Cheapest bank bailout?” (to Brian Linehan) and my personal favourite, “It’s the economy stupid” to Gerry Adams. Bear in mind, Kenny spouts these when you kill other politicians by throwing Fine Gael logos at them.

This comes on the heels of the recent cringe worthy Valentines Day Fine Gael eCards that popped up on the site on February 14th. Create yours here. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when that one got approved.

Finally, and most egregiously, whomever manages the party’s Facebook page has been deleting posts related to the issue of gay marriage. Instead of coming out, if you’ll pardon the pun, with their official line and meeting questions head on they have fanned the flames of a controversy that the party scarcely needs at this important stage of the campaign.

It seems that Fine Gael has taken its first baby steps into the world of Internet canvassing, and with it has come eCards, flash games and censorship. Maybe next time around they’ll plan with a little more wisdom and try to use their online presence to engage with voters and invite some debate on policy and issues, instead of just on who can get the best score in their infuriating sidescrolling platformer.

1. Create your mount point, sudo mkdir/media/windows
2. Add a line to /etc/fstab, the one below is for a Windows HDD, with the main partition being sda2 (you can work this out by graphically mounting the partition through nautilus and then running df -h)

/dev/sda2 /media/windows ntfs-3g user,fmask=0111,dmask=0000 0 0

Save /etc/fstab then you can run mount /dev/sda2 to mount the drive. It should mount automatically at /media/windows from now on.

It seems most companies treat customer service and after sales support as a chore, when in reality it’s an opportunity. Too many companies see the sale as the end of the road, when it’s just the start. After sales is when a company should be showing a customer why they were right to buy whatever the product was, and turns a customer into a loyal customer.

The Wrong Way

This isn’t always the case however. Most people who know me, know that I’m not a big fan of Apple products. It may come as a surprise that I used to love iPods, and had an 40GB iPod 4th Gen. It suffered badly from the infamous ‘click of death’ and had to be sent back multiple times to have the hard drive replaced. It was massively frustrating. It was eventually resolved by the problem reoccurring a few days after the 30 day repair warranty, which resulted in the customer service reps refusing to even speak to me on the phone. I’ve haven’t bought another Apple product since (excepting picking them up for others in the US). These days I’m told that Apple support is now the best around, but that bad experience put me off their products and it’s what I remember.

The Right Way

On the other hand, I got a set of Shure headphones as a gift last Christmas (thanks Cian..) and loved them, for a year they’ve had heavy use. Last month though, they developed a fault so I contacted customer support. As it was a gift, I didn’t have the receipt, which wasn’t a problem, the serial number proved that they were still under warranty. Sent them back, and a brand new set arrived after about a week. Emails to the reps were answered quickly and the whole process was painless. I’m delighted, and next time I go to buy headphones, take a guess as to what brand I’ll be buying..

The Other Way

“Shane” I hear you cry, “Apple can’t be blamed for hard drive failures, they’re the least reliable of all computer parts.” I know, as an Electronic Engineer I understand that products have problems and break all the time. It wasn’t the actual failures that irked me, it was the attitude of the customer support who treated me as an irritant and didn’t seem to want to help. It is possible to handle hardware problems properly though.

I have a Dell XPS laptop,  the M1330, which contains the Nvidia 8400GS graphics chip. Do a quick google search for the words “nvidia dell” and you’ll see why this is a problem. Mine has failed 3 times now. This could be a big rant about how terrible this is, but Dell win back points by how they handle XPS support. When the laptop breaks, I phone Dells 24 hour XPS support line, and they send out a repair guy (we’re on first name terms now, nice fella) with the  replacement part and you’re back up and running in 24 hours. I love it, even if there are problems with the product, they fix it promptly and with minimum fuss. Since something like a laptop is so essential, you can’t beat a bit of piece of mind, I wouldn’t be able to function if I had to send it away and wait a couple of weeks to get it back.

If you want people to buy from you more than once, invest in your customer service. It’s not hard to gain lots of loyal customers, who’ll defend your products to the death and recommend them to all their friends. It’s something that in theory is relatively easy to get right. Common sense and empathy go a long way, couple that with prompt communication and you’re set.

This took a while, so it was late when I went to bed. That left me with a conundrum, I wanted to install Ubuntu as soon as it came out, but I also wanted to sleep… Hmm..

The solution? I wrote a script. The new Ubuntu release is immediately announced on the Ubuntu Release Blog as soon as it propagates through the mirrors.

So, I wrote a shell script to run on the CompSoc servers that wget’s the Ubuntu Release blog RSS every minute, computes an MD5 sum of the page and checks has it changed. Since the next post to be published would be the release post, I would know immediately when the release was official.

To alert my sleeping self to this fact, I had the script send a text message to my phone using the meteorsms program when it detected that the post was up.

I then set my text ringtone to be something particularly loud and irritating so as to wake me.

I knocked this together in about 5 minutes, so I was pretty surprised when, at 11.37, exactly 1 minute after the blog updated, I got the following text.

Immediate Ubuntu plus a Sunday morning lie in. Success.

Code for the script below and it can be downloaded at this link

#!bin/bash

#Delete any previous dw's
rm index.html?feed=rss2

#Get file
wget -q http://release-blog.ubuntu.com/?feed=rss2

#Compute first sum
oldsum=$(md5sum index.html?feed=rss2)

#Infinite while loop
while true; do
rm index.html?feed=rss2
wget -q http://release-blog.ubuntu.com/?feed=rss2

#Compute new sum
newsum=$(md5sum index.html?feed=rss2)

if [ "$oldsum" != "$newsum" ]
then
echo $oldsum
echo "changed to;"
echo $newsum
echo "at"
date

#Send text message
meteorsms -m "Ubuntu out!!" me
exit
fi
#If md5s are the same, sleep for a minute and try again
sleep 60
done

To transfer money from one account to another, you have to set up a ‘benificary’ on the site. The procedure was as follows; Enter all the details, then wait about 4 days for a letter to arrive in the post with a code to enter online.

Waiting for the letter to arrive means it takes ages to set up an account which is infuriating. That’s why I was delighted to see they’ve changed the policy when I logged in today, now instead of sending the code in the post, they’ll text it to you. Finally, they’re catching up with other banks online services. Great, saves loads of time.

So, I put in my phone details to register for the service. Now, to confirm my registration, they’re going to.. send me a letter.

The inspiration for this post comes from reading a similar post by my friend and former CompSoc compatriot Nathan Shaughnessy. You can read his blog post here.

Basically, there’s a few things that were nice to have in mind in relation to your final year project, and this is to pass them along to others that may be going through the same process soon. Since I did Electronic and Computer Engineering, this advice will likely be of most use to Engineering and IT students, as the procedures are for the most part very similar.

First thing to note, nothing changes when you go into final year, you don’t change. Looking ahead to 4th year, I expected myself to really start knuckling down more, going out less and generally becoming more studious. Wishful thinking to say the least.

Arguably the most important part of final year is your final year project. It is weighted differently in different disciplines, and for Civil Engineers, it most certainly isn’t the most important part, but in my case, the FYP is worth 12 out of a total of 60 credits. It’s the single most important subject that’ll be listed in your results, and because it is weighted so heavily, it is great to bring up your average.

Since the project is worth so much, it’s important to get it right. This isn’t just about writing up your thesis in second semester, it starts from the 1st of September. By now you’ll likely have a pretty good idea as to what you are good at and where your interests lie, it’s crucial to find an FYP that you’ll like and won’t hate working on (in general at least).

You do this by first of all deciding which supervisor you want to work under. Talk to older students and ask them how they found a particular supervisor. Things to look for in a good supervisor are, you get along, s/he’s committed to meeting you at least once a week, s/he will keep you on your toes and their area of interest is something you find interesting. In general, heads of departments are too busy to make good attentive supervisors.

When you’ve picked your preferred supervisor, email them and ask to meet with them. Find out what they have in mind for final year projects. Make sure it is very well thought out with real, concrete goals. Ask yourself, if I take on this project, and sit down tomorrow, how do I start? In my case, I was approached by a supervisor with a suggestion for project that sounded very interesting, but it wasn’t very clear exactly what I had to do. I didn’t really know how I’d start it, and neither did the supervisor, so I decided against it. Instead I went with another supervisor and a project that had clear goals. I knew that I had to go out and use a particular code library to develop a particular algorithm. I could start right away.

Project goals always take longer than you expect. Always. Don’t aim to have your project work finished on the last day. Ideally, aim to have most of the work completed by the start of the second semester. It sounds early, but there will be delays, and the end of March creeps up really quickly when you get into second semester.

Once you are given the goals for your project, it seems like a massive job altogether. The way to get through all of it is to give yourself a goal for every meeting with your supervisor. Every week, have a few things you want to get done, and do them. You aren’t going to get ‘in trouble’ for not sticking to them, but if you do, your supervisor will be happy, and you’ll stay on track. Start each meeting going over what you have done in the last week, and don’t leave the meeting until you have a very good idea of what you need to do for next week.

In my case, this meant many late Sunday nights trying to get stuff done before my meeting on Monday morning. I got much of my best work done at about 2am on a Sunday, which isn’t ideal, but it worked.

Setting and meeting weekly deadlines is difficult, because problems crop up. The most important thing to do is not to cover up your difficulty. Lying and telling your supervisor that things are fine is the worst thing you can do, as you’ll just fall further behind. You aren’t going to lose marks for getting stuck, and your supervisor is an expert, they’ll be able to help you work it out.

At the start of the year, figure out what the deadlines are for various reports and presentations and note them. This way you won’t be caught, as most of our class were, with a couple of days in which to do a progress report after Christmas.

On the topic of Christmas, exams are over, in many cases, you’re finished with subjects for good and you should have a relatively small workload. Use this time to get a load of project work done. I took the first week and a half off, and then worked on my project for a few days I literally got about 75 percent of the project finished in that few days. It left me in excellent shape for second semester and my write up.

Your thesis write up is quite daunting at first. Looking at a couple of old theses that ran to well over 100 pages didn’t help. Don’t worry too much about quantity. Mine ended up being around 50 pages, and it was fine.

Your supervisor is essential in your write up, let’s face it, you have no idea how to write a thesis, I didn’t either. I still don’t. Your supervisor, on the other hand, does. They see several every year. Go to them early and get tips on how to go about writing up, layout, sections etc.

In conclusion, the key to a successful FYP is steady and consistent little bits of work. There’ll be slow weeks and weeks where you get loads done, but if you keep chipping away, it’ll work out in the end.

I got pretty lucky, I enjoyed my project (most of the time), had a great supervisor and had loads of help from some very knowledgeable post grads, I was encouraged to submit an actual research paper to a conference and somehow it got accepted. Then to top it off, I won the best final year project award for ECE. The 85% grade helped bring up my final grades immensely.

There are some crucial things at the start that you need to get right for your FYP to work out well, most importantly, pick something you want to do, and a supervisor you can work with. Get those two basics right and you really have no excuses not to get on well.

Well, the release was delayed at a very late stage, due to a show stopper bug found in the installation process. The bug can be found here – https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/570765

Basically the problem was with the migration assistant which helps carry over settings from already installed OSes. If the migration assistant found some material to carry over to Ubuntu, the GRUB menu would appear without entries for the other operating systems on the PC. For new users of Ubuntu, this would be a scary experience as they’d believe that their other OS was gone. There are a couple of easy fixes, but it was decided that the best fix was for the new version not to ship until this bug was fixed.

The Ubuntu release team, wisely in my opinion, decided to respin the official ISO’s for Ubuntu 32 and 64 bit so that this bug is not present in the final release.
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IncidentReports/2010-04-29-Late-respin-for-bug-570765)

This means that the release has been delayed for a few hours, but will still happen at some point today (Apr 29th). By all accounts (watch http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1463554&page=1
for up to date info) we’re not too far off an official release, so get your torrent clients ready, and please seed generously.

The question that most people are asking is, is this the new iPhone?

Well, it’s looking like it is at least a late prototype. According to Gizmodo, the phone belonged to a certain Gray Powell, an Apple engineer. They claim to know this based on the fact that his Facebook account was set up on the device. Secondly, the phone was contained in a specially made plastic case which made it look like an iPhone 3GS, so people wouldn’t spot it was an unreleased device. Thirdly, when taken apart, many of the components are Apple branded. Finally, and most damning is, Gizmodo have reported that they received a letter from Apple looking for their device back.

All that sounds pretty much tightly wrapped up, case closed. Some people however, are skeptical.

From the outset, I’ll state that I think it’s real, but it could be fake.

There are a few reasons for this. The only source we have on this is Gizmodo. They could be making it up. They could have a Chinese knock off iPhone that they are touting as the real deal. The problem with this is that the build quality looks great, and not cheap. Also, the Internet as a whole is great at debunking scams, and I reckon we’d have heard someone cry shenanigans by now if it was a Chinese fake.

Something that many people have an issue with is that the design doesn’t look very Apple like. A friend of mine Charles Doyle called it “pretty crappy” and disappointing. This point is pretty ridiculous, I think it’s much nicer than any iPhone before it, but then again, I’m a fan of industrial design. Just because it’s more of a change than the iPhone -> iPhone 3G doesn’t mean it’s not Apple designed.

All in all, it seems like this thing is legit. From first glance, it seems that the mighty Apple, famed for their secrecy, have made a huge blunder. This leads us to the next question. Is it a PR stunt?

No. No it’s not a PR stunt. Lets look at this objectively. PR stunts are done to generate buzz and interest in a product. This is Apple we’re talking about. People camp out to buy their products. They’re not a company who needs something like this to generate buzz. Apply Occam’s Razor here people, conspiracy theories are attractive, but this one doesn’t make any sense.

Another strange point about this saga is the way that Gizmodo are handling the coverage. Instead of keeping quiet about their source and just reporting on the device, they have posted a series of posts discussing the employee who lost the phone in detail, which is a little puzzling. Why do we care if it was Grays birthday when he lost the phone?

It makes sense when you think it through, and Gizmodo have likely saved Mr. Powells job. Considering the strict policy of secrecy present in the Apple ethos, as demonstrated by alleged suicides at Chinese manufacturers, it’s likely that Gray isn’t Steve Jobs favorite person in the world at the moment. By very publicly identifying the employee, ironically Gizmodo have protected him. If Apple fire the employee in question now, they will be in for a shitstorm of bad publicity.

What will be interesting now is to follow what Apple does from this point onwards, if this is real, and every sign points to it being genuine, it is a very late prototype. Prototypes don’t make it out of the lab until they are almost feature complete. Apple will have to acknowledge the leak, and how they react will show us a lot about how Apple work. If you know anyone who works for Apples PR team, don’t expect to see them out of the office in the next week. Balls in your court Steve, your move.

1.Install Applications

First thing I do is head on over to the Ubuntu Software Centre and install the following applications.

Gnome-Do – Seriously, if you are not using this, start. Pressing <Super><Space>  (Super is the usually Windows key on most laptops) brings up the Do window, into which you can type the name of a program and it will launch it for you, the screenshot below indicates what I’m on about

The amount of time that this program has saved me over the past weeks and months is unreal. I get frustrated if I sit at a PC that doesn’t have Do installed. It’s just great.

Shutter – Shutter is a great screenshot taking tool, in fact, all of the screenshots take in this post were done using Shutter.

Guake – Guake, when running, allows you to pull up a terminal window at any time by hitting F12. Simple, but brilliant.

Conky – Conky can show all sorts of info embedded into your wallpaper. This old post may be of interest if you’re getting going with conky.

GIMP – The popular GIMP imaging program was removed from this release of Ubuntu, something I don’t really agree with, but it’s a simply problem to rectify, it’s easily installable through the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Cheese – The simplest, best webcam program.

VLC – The swiss army knife of video players. Throw virtually any video file at it, and it will play.

Ubuntu Restricted Extras – Another essential install, this package installs a multitude if very important codecs for playing various media files. If you are having trouble with some multimedia files, I’d recommend this guide to help sort you out.

Flash – Again, essential. It was a huge pain to install this in 9.10, but in Lucid, using the Flash package in the software centre worked a treat.

Nvidia Binary Driver – I needed to install this proprietary driver to get compositing enabled on my laptop. If you’re having trouble with it, a reboot usually helps.

Eclipse – The best cross platform multi language IDE around, in my opinion.

BOINC Manager – This little program is used to attach to and manage, distributed computing projects. I currently contribute to the World Community Grid and encourage you to as well, your spare CPU cycles can help scientific research.

2. Key Firefox Extensions

Next, fire up Firefox and get all your favorite extensions set up. I’ve listed a couple of my favorites below.

XMarks – Another utility that everyone should be using. This nifty little extension keeps your Firefox bookmarks synchronised across any instance of firefox you have it configured on. So, when I boot into a Windows VM, or dual boot into Windows 7, the bookmarks in Firefox across all the different platforms are the same. Changes are reflected across all platforms. A really great thing is, if you do a clean Ubuntu install, you don’t need to worry about your Firefox bookmarks or passwords, as they’ll be sychronised back as soon as you install Xmarks.

Greasemonkey – Greasemonkey allows you to customise webpages with little pieces of Javascript calles “User Scripts”. It allows you to download little scripts that people have written that change the way certain webpages render. For example, it’s often difficult to follow the thread of comments on a site like Reddit, due to the way the comments are structured.

It’s very difficult to follow the thread and replies of the comments shown on Reddit above. A simple User Script makes the comments look like this.

Much nicer.

3. Sort out social networking

One of the best new additions to the new version of Ubuntu is the inclusion of tools for social networking right from the off. You can very easily set your Twitter, Facebook, Identica (these are referred to as “Broadcast Accounts”) and others to update from the in built integration of the Gwibber client. You can also set up chat accounts for Facebook, Google Talk, AIM, MSN, Jabber etc to all reside in the one IM client. To set up your social networks, use the menu accessed by clicking your username.

Now you can easily update all your statuses from one place, simply click your username and use the box provided.

4. Move the buttons back to their correct place

In the latest version of Ubuntu, one of the more noticable changes is the relocation of the minimise, maximise and close buttons from the right hand side of the window to the left. This has caused all manner of debate and outrage, but they are the way they are and will be staying that way for the foreseeable future.

This annoyed me so much, I did a seperate post on how to get the buttons back, which can be found here.

5. Install googsystray

I use Google web services quite alot, Gmail handles mail from several addresses, I sync my phone with Google Calendar, read all my feeds with Google Reader and I do….something with Google Wave. The problem is, keeping up to date with all these services can be a pain.

Googsystray is a little program that lives in your Notification Area, and appears when you have new email/feeds/waves. It means you never waste time checking any of these services to find you have nothing new.

The great thing is, in the email tray you can select to mark an email as read, archive it, or delete it, all without bothering to navigate to Gmail. In the example below, I’ve seen this Facebook post, so there’s no need for me to read the email notification about it, so I just click Archive, and it’s gone, dealt with.

6. Install Ubuntu Tweak

I love to set up little keyboard shortcuts and things of that nature to make my life easier, and thusfar, I have not found a better and easier way to do that than using Ubuntu Tweak. It’s a great app for adding repositories, keyboard shortcuts, configuring Compiz and loads more. It’s really a must if you’re into tweaking your OS to work how you want it to. It’s not in the repositories yet so cannot be gotten through the Software Centre, it can be downloaded and installed from here.

Edit

An extra tip from JEANJEAN in the comments. From within Ubuntu Tweak, in the section labeled “Source Center”, you can enable the Flash 64-bit PPA, as shown in the screenshot below. This means that you’ll always be kept up to date with the latest 64 bit Flash plugin