The World of a Penguin

After reading this I have started drooling to run Gutsy on my laptop. I love to use the dynamic configurations of the screen. But most of all I love each minute of longer battery time I can get. The article talks about empirical test given 33% more battery time. Guys, I would still love you if its only were 3%. The question is; can I wait until the final release?

As I wrote a few hours ago it would be nice to be able to have a keyboard shortcut to enable/disable the touchpad. So when I started eat a chocolate cake I decided to fix the problem for Ubuntu and MSI S271. It should work in most GNOME-based Linux distributions and for most touchpads. First I wrote a script to toggle the touchpad ( download here ): #!/bin/bash if lsmod | grep "^psmouse " > /dev/null ; then /usr/bin/sudo /sbin/rmmod psmouse ; else /usr/bin/sudo /sbin/modprobe psmouse ; fi No rocket science here. Put the script some where on your harddrive, like /usr/local/bin. Add the following line in the end of your /etc/sudoers file: ALL ALL=(ALL)NOPASSWD: /sbin/rmmod psmouse, /sbin/modprobe psmouse This gives all users the right to enable and disable the touchpad. Register your the script as a keybinding command in gconf: gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 "/usr/local/bin/toggle-tp.sh" Register in the same way...

I have sometimes been frustrated on the high sensitivity of the touchpad at the MSI S271. Since its not a synaptic I have not had any way to disable it, I thought. Stupid me, it is very easy. I read this blog today and got annoyed why I did not thought of this my self. To disable it: sudo rmmod psmouse You will still be able to use any USB pointer device. To enable the touchpad again: sudo modprobe psmouse I have verified this on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), but it should work on any modern Linux. Once in the future I will connect this to some key combination.

One of my biggest problems when working with Eclipse were until now that I did not know how to be in two different places in one file at the same time. For you that know emacs, C-x 2 and then have the same file in both windows. But to night I stumbled up on the solution . Right click on the editors tab and select New Editor. The file appears in two different editor tabs. Now right click on one of the editor tabs again and select the Move submenu and then Editor. Drag your framed window until you are below the editor frame. This will definitely simplify my development in Eclipse.

Red Hats Colby Hoke tells here that they introduced yum to solve the dependency hell. He continues: "Red Hat led the way [...] to solve a customer problem the dependency hell." He missed totally that they were more or last the last of the major Linux distributions to solve this problem. Or does he means that they were the first suits that talked about that they had solved a problem, other Linux users didn't have. To lead does not mean to just be in front of Solaris and Microsoft, it means to be in front of all. Does he knows that Y in yum stands for Yellow Dog, which is a Linux-distribution Macs. The dependency hell was one of the reason why I left Red Hat and Fedora in favor of first Debian and later Ubuntu.

It will be an exciting week in front of us. On Monday the European Union will decide in the antitrust charges against Microsoft. As all of you may know, SCO filed for Chapter 11 this Friday, so on Tuseday there will be a hearing to decide if SCO will get bankruptcy protection or not. These decisions will affect the Open Source community. I guess that the decisions can not hurt the community, just gain it. The question is how much?

I continued the day by listening to a re-run of Ivar Jacobssons talk, which where I missed yesterday due to the room got full before I got there. It was the most interesting talk at the conferens, even if it wasn't about Java. As you may know Dr. Jacobsson is one of the three gurus behind RUP . He admitted during the talk that RUP and Objectory were too heavy and why throw out everything if only one part of your process fail. Instead he have broken down processes into eight practices . Practices are parts of processes which more or less all processes include in different forms. Example of practices are teams or architecture. There are not only one way to implement a team, so there will be several practices that describes teams and you should select the one that fits your organization. Jacobsson have one way to implement each of the eight practices. Other will present others, in total there are 100s of practices. Each practice is documented as ten to twenty cards and then some page...