equivocal ramblings

Before I forget how to find this article again, I’ll just blog it. By the way this works fine for a K850i too — Synchronising a K610i with Evolution.

I’ve been saying for years that I was going to get my drivers license. Well, I took the first step today and passed the highway code test (46/50, 1 point lost to colour-blindness section…) and what should happen the night before? Petrol prices increase from RM1.92 straight to RM2.70. In August we’ll see that increase again to market rates — about RM 3.50-4.

Oh well, at least I won’t be able to think back about the good old days of cheap petrol…

After many years, finally GNOME, KDE, and legacy applications can co-exist without attempting to kill each other everytime one of them needs to make use of sound for whatever reason.

I feel good.

Thank you Ubuntu, thank you pulseaudio.

Heron comes with all sorts of newfangled stuff including PulseAudio support. This is very nice, but there’s something that not everyone seems to be aware of — PulseAudio and Flash 9 don’t work together by default. You’ll have to install libflashsupport to get audio working in Flash:

sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

Best part of all this? Flash audio mixes in perfectly with any other audio without the usual hickups :)

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu’s new release — Hardy Heron (8.04) and I am impressed. From start till end it seems so much more polished than anything else I’ve tried (including Windows Vista).

From the new File Operations dialogue to the weather applet/clock/calendar integration it all just fits together so well. One thing in particular which I really like is this:

All this while it’s required the use of apt-spy or trial and error testing of repository speeds (Australia’s awesome on Streamyx^WSlowmyx) it’s nice to have automated tests against 200 mirrors. I can actually use the GUI tools rather than falling back to the CLI all the time…

Of course I’m sure there are niggling issues, especially for the laptop users among us. Thankfully I don’t have to deal with that pain yet :P

I was going to write an eloquent entry about how my life has changed in the past year, but after considering the changes I’ve been through, I can’t find the words. One thing is for sure though — change has been good to me.

You want to find out what version of Ruby you’re using? I’d like to present my rather simpler version:

seraph@aerie:~$ ruby -v ruby 1.8.5 (2006-08-25) [i486-linux]

Version, release date and platform all at once!

I’m just kidding, but I couldn’t resist poking at a Ruby fan :P

From Wikipedia:

Towel Day is celebrated every May 25 as a tribute by fans of the late author Douglas Adams. The commemoration was first held in 2001, two weeks after his death on May 11, and since then has been extended to an annual event. On this day, fans carry a towel with them throughout the day. The towel is a reference to Adams’s popular science fiction comedy series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. — Towel Day

I didn’t notice that it was Towel Day today, and yet, I’ve (coincidentally) been carrying a large towel around in my backpack all day long :) Unconsciously, I’ve fulfilled my duty to geekdom.

Much like jhall’s problems with the office 2007 trial, I downloaded the Office Standard edition 2007 Trial. Now, on the website it has this to say:

Trial programs contain the same functionality that you get when you buy the perpetual versions — but only for a limited time.

Well, something is seriously wrong with their activation process because even after activation, and getting an expiry date (sometime in July), I couldn’t do anything but view files, email etc.

How can they get something like this wrong? This is a really bad experience for anyone evaluating Office 2007 for their company (like I am).

Update: Well, it works now. Uninstalling it and reinstalling fixes the problem. Same thing on another machine. This is most odd. I quite like it so far though…

If you use a high resolution display, like me you might find your eyes starting to water as you read all these trendwhore websites that use tiny tiny body fonts, like Verdana at 10 pixels. I’ve always solved this by Ctrl + Mousewheel up or down, but doing that for each and every site is a tad bit tedious.

Enter No Squint. I’ve fallen in love with it. No Squint allows you to select a default zoom level (I chose 110%, a slight bump up) and also remembers if you changed the zoom level while browsing a website. So now pages with ridiculously large fonts, or ridiculously small fonts are tolerable.

The best part? I’ve not noticed it at work except that my eyes are less tired now.

Thank you Jason Tackaberry. You did a good job on this one — so much so that I had to add a new category to this journal to post this in: Brilliance.