In the latest Ubuntu, the team have made the decision to move the window buttons (minimize, maximize and close) from the right to the left. I don’t agree with this change, so thankfully it’s not a difficult one to reverse.
To relocate the buttons back to their rightful place on the right, follow these steps. Continue reading »
I occasionaly get asked why I am so hostile to religion. Well. It’s things like this that turn my stomach.
The leader of a religious cult was “outraged” when a 1-year-old boy did not say “Amen” before a meal and ordered her followers to deprive him of food and water until he died
I mean what the heck?! The cult is now defunct, thankfully, but this child should not have died. It is because of someones religious beliefs that this child suffered and died. Meaningless. It’s just sickening.
Just a quick post here, if you use Ubuntu, there are a few places you can keep up with the latest news, most popular and often mentioned is Planet Ubuntu, which aggregates Ubuntu members blogs. It’s often a little too developer heavy and in depth for normal users.
I recently found a great blog solely for users, it highlights the latest updates and news about applications and is a great way to discover new cool apps, like Ubuntu Tweak, Docky, Gwibber and loads others.
That blog is OMG! Ubuntu!, I’m not a huge fan of the name either, but the content can’t be beat. It’s updated several times a day which is incredible, I never knew there was enough Ubuntu news to fill several posts a day!
Anyway, check it out, you won’t be disappointed – http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/
Since its exam time, of course I’m spending my time doing anything but studying. So, I’ve completely redone my Ubuntu desktop.
For a long time I’ve been interested in tech podcasting, I’m an avid listener of these fine shows, http://bol.cnet.com and http://twit.tv.
I was recently asked to join the panel of a radio show being broadcast on my local college radio station, called ITFreely, the show is a continuation of a podcast that is now being recorded in a proper radio studio and being broadcast on FlirtFm, at 12.30 every Wednesday. So far there have been 2 shows broadcast, which are available online here and here
Running parallel to this, I also started to contribute to the Tech In Hiding Netcast, a podcast by bloggers on the TechInHiding.com website. I’ve done one episode so far, and it can be found here
So, if you want to listen to me blather on about technology, check the links out, and leave some feedback. I’m new to all this, so any comments are appreciated.
I love Songbird, it’s a great music playing program and I’ve been using it since it hit it’s 0.6 release. Anyway, today I discovered 2 cool little things that have made my Songbird experience much better.
UPDATE – Tyler in the comments notes that this is also a problem in 32 bit versions, so I’ve modified the title accordingly
Last night I performed a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10. One of the first things I did was to install the BOINC manager so I could continue contributing to the World Community Grid
I fired up the BOINC manager and for some reason, the blasted thing wouldn’t connect and download new jobs. I switched to ‘Advanced View’ and had a look under the ‘Messages’ tab. There was the following error message -
"Scheduler request failed: peer certificate cannot be authenticated with known CA certificates"
What the hell does that mean, well, I found some information on this really helpful site.
The issue appeared to be that the file ca-bundle.crt was not included on the installation of the BOINC software.
So, the instuctions were to download the file, and add it to the BOINC data directory. Where the heck is the BOINC data directory? Well, after a little poking, I found it. This is only an issue if you installed the package from the repositories, otherwise, the data directory is easy to find, as it’s in your home folder.
To fix the problem,
1. Download this file
2. Copy the file to the BOINC data directory,
sudo mv /path/to/the/file/ca-bundle.crt /var/lib/boinc-client
3. Now, to get the client to recognise the new file, you need to stop the daemon, restart it, then restart the manager. If this all sounds like a pain in the arse, just reboot your PC and it will do all this for you. If you don’t want to reboot, run
sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client restart
Then start the BOINC manager again, you should be up and running.
Recently I sent a letter to the office of Dermot Ahern TD, expressing my concerns regarding the new Defamation Act and the articles contained referring to blasphemy. You can see the letter I sent here
After quite a long wait, apparently due to some email routing problems, I received a reply from Conor R. Savage, Private Secretary to the minister, who writes that….
This is a simple piece of information that may save some of you some time.
There are a few reasons that you would like to build a single kernel module in FreeBSD, and thankfully it is easy to do.
Firstly, find the module you need.
cd /usr/src/sys/modules/YOURMODULE
Often there will just be one file, a Makefile in these directories. That’s not a problem, just run
make
Now you will be left with a load of files, the one you need is the *.ko one.
To load this onto a running system, use the
kldload
command.
Done and done! To check your work, run
kldstat
Alot of people subscribe to a mild form of creationism, although they would not call it as such. They don’t believe in Adam and Eve and all that bulls**t, but I often hear the argument that our planet is somehow ‘tuned’ to permit our existence.
This is an argument from design, the circumstances of life on Earth seem to be an amazing coincidence, so therefore, it points to a designer who ‘tuned’ these conditions to allow life to evolve here. It is certainly true that conditions here on Earth are astoundingly fortunate, liquid water, energy from the sun, it all seems to be almost too perfect.
I totally reject this argument. It’s narrow minded and childish. If I take a guitar and drop it, the tuning gets knocked off and it sounds horrible, how horrible depends on the mechanics of the fall, how hard it hit the ground etc. If I drop it again, it will go to a different tuning, again, seemingly random.
What if (assuming my guitar is made out of adamatium or something similar) I was to drop my guitar millions of times? Is it not conceivable that on one of those millions of occasions, the bang knocks the guitar INTO tune perfectly? In fact, even with millions of possibilities, the odds of that happening become quite high.
How does this fit in with the ‘Earth is tuned’ argument? Well, estimates put the number of galaxies in the universe in the hundreds of billions. The number of stars in our own galaxy is estimated at roughly 100 billion. If you have 300 billion galaxies, all containing 100 billion stars that could potentially have a rocky planet orbiting at a favorable distance you get 1×10^22 (or I with 22 zeros following it) possible solar systems.
Thats a hell of a lot of chances for life. In fact, the more you think of it, the more likely it seems that there is life on other planets that happen to have the same favorable conditions as our own.
But theres more, all this revolves around the assumption that life as we know it is the only way that life can exist. What if there are other planets with conditions not conducive to carbon based life forms but perfect for other types of life? Creatures and forms we cannot begin to imagine, living happily in seas of methane or rivers of mercury. Taking this into account, it seems almost probable that we are not alone in the universe.
There’s nothing special about the Earth in the context of all the other planets in the Universe, yes it can support life, but, it seems likely, so could millions of others. The Earths special features are not a miracle of God, but a miracle of coincidence.
I wonder have those other life forms created religion to explain things they don’t understand like we have done.