I docked myself at my Workstation and started downloading an ISO. Once finished, I burnt it and rebooted my Thinkpad. One of the great things about Ubuntu’s installation (which has existed for a while) is the Live CD - you get to boot into Ubuntu without having to install anything. It works well and is a great feature for new users who aren’t sure what they’re doing, or whether they want to risk installing Linux. What’s great is that the hardware issues of old are long gone: . Unforunately I found the boot-up process to be volatile: it was taking a long time and things didn’t look great. I eventually got into X and played around. Amazingly I had all my Thinkpad buttons working; suspend, hibernate (suspend-to-disk) and even the back & forward buttons for the browser. It worked flawlessly.

Naturally I decided to install as I was very impressed. So I fire up the installation procedure by clicking ‘Install’ on the Live CD’s desktop and go through the motions. Clicking ‘Forward’ after the username setup freezes, and my laptop performs a hard-shutdown…WTF?? I try again - the same thing happens. What’s going on? I decided to get an alternate ISO and try that. Thankfully it installed, but I was a little concerned that nothing was going to work…

After finally booting into X after my little ordeal, I decide to run `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade` in a shell. To my surprise, as soon as it starts upgrading packages (a Kernel upgrade) my shell gets spammed with “The system is going down for a reboot NOW!” and Ubuntu shuts down. Ouch. This isn’t good.

I’ve had overheating issues in the past, but this is beginning to worry me. Anything even remotely CPU intensive (scrolling the wireless network list, apt-get upgrade, etc etc) causes Ubuntu to force shutdown, and I’m left looking very cross at my X31.

Some googling produces thread after thread on the Ubuntu forums about this, but things seem to be getting ignored. There’s no issues, and people are talking about the exact same problems in Gutsy and Feisty - that’s three or more major releases ago. I’ve tried these things:

• Adding the following to /etc/rc.local:

  echo -n “90:80:60:75:70:65″ > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/trip_points
  echo 2 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/polling_frequency

•  Appending these modules to /etc/modules:
  battery
  ac
  thermal
  processor
  acpi-cpufreq
  cpufreq-userspace

No luck. Furthermore, with each futile attempt, I get hard-rebooted or even worse: no init 0, just a hard shutdown. It’s frustrating and furthermore it is very likely that this is damaging my hardware. I’ve been monitoring `acpi -t` output, top and more but nothing’s helping. Even running /etc/init.d/gdm stop and trying the apt-get upgrade in a shell doesn’t help: same old hard shutdown.

I don’t know what to do. I’m a big fan of Ubuntu as it’s bringing Linux to the masses, but I can’t keep doing this to my poor old Thinkpad X31 - it won’t last much longer.

Anyone out there have any ideas?

Update: I’ve filed a bug report here

I’m not sure what demographic it’s pandering to, because although the game’s very impressive and it’s got a huge fanbase, it is all very scripted. There’s no open-ended outcome. You’re just going through the motions, doing as you’re told. You have no real affect on the overall outcome. Perhaps I’ve been playing too much Fallout 3 for my opinion to remain biased. It does feel however that some parts just don’t require any thought whatsoever. You can’t play intelligently or manipulate your environment to better your situation. That said though, it’s still very fun.

The longevity of the game comes from its online offerings. The co-op and deathmatch side of things cannot be knocked, and I hope to see online co-op play emerge in other games too.

1. Open ‘Software Sources’ by following these menu choices: System -> Administration -> Software Sources
2. In the Software Sources applet, select the ‘Updates’ tab
3. In the section at the bottom entitled ‘Release Upgrade’, select ‘Normal’ from the dropdown menu.
4. Click the Close button, and let it update your apt package lists

After following these instructions and opening Update Manager, I was still not seeing the release upgrade button. I ensured that my packages were up-to-date, and upgraded anything that needed it, restarted several times, but still no release upgrade button! Ahhh!

Thankfully the solution is simple, you just need to start update-manager with the -d flag in a shell:

user@box$ update-manager -d

This will open up the manager and after a clicking the ‘Check’ button (to update the package list), the upgrade button was showing. Hooray!

It’s  0901 GMT on the 4th of November 2008. I sit here with a copy of The Independent newspaper; its headline “America Votes”. I write this in anticipation that the majority of US voters will elect the most promising and insightful presidential candidate in decades - Barack Obama.

As a British national, therefore an ‘ally’ of the US, and someone who is a keen follower of world politics and the like, I deem this moment to be pivotal in the construction and direction of our futures, and something that will shape generations to come.

I must admit, however, that due to the ridiculus result of previous elections (Bush 2004, Bush 2000), I will not show any surprise if you so happen to elect  John McCain.

Therefore, we leave it up to you, the American People. We the world hope that you put your creed, colour and prejudice asside, and vote for what matters: neutrality, honesty and hope.

Sincerely,

The rest of the World.

[…] 538 popularly elected representatives who formally select the President and Vice President of the United States.^[1] In 2008, it will make this selection on December 15. The Electoral College is an example of an indirect election.

Rather than directly voting for the President and Vice President, United States citizens cast votes for electors. Electors are technically free to vote for anyone eligible to be President, but in practice pledge to vote for specific candidates^[2] and voters cast ballots for favored presidential and vice presidential candidates by voting for correspondingly pledged electors.^[3] Most states allow voters to choose between statewide slates of electors pledged to vote for the presidential and vice presidential tickets of various parties; the ticket that receives the most votes statewide ‘wins’ all of the votes cast by electors from that state. U.S. presidential campaigns concentrate on winning the popular vote in a combination of states that choose a majority of the electors, rather than campaigning to win the most votes nationally.

An indirect election is, for all intents and purposes, election by proxy. You vote for someone who’ll represent your vote when the Electoral College selects its candidate. There’s nothing that says “you vote for representative A, you’ll get candidate B”. It’s all down to trust, and you know what that means in today’s political climate…pretty much sweet FA.

So how does this work in practice? Is this the very reason John Kerry and Al Gore weren’t voted in? Am I missing something?

Kudos to jquery.com though, who listened to their critics and removed the image. Right now, the site’s looking cool but still a little out of place. This is a Javascript library, not a corporate website. Anyhow, I digress.

Another element of the homepage that thoroughly annoys me is the tooltips on the three links titled “Lightweight footprint”, “CSS 3 compliant” and “Cross-browser”. To me, Web-2.0 (I’m sorry for using that phrase) style UI elements are largely about usability and common sense. jQuery seems to be an embodiment of that, and allows developers to enhance their sites greatly with a small amount of effort.

Shocked and awed I was then, when I moved my mouse around the page while reading only to find these terribly intrusive ‘tooltips’ that show when you hover over the aforementioned links. Right out of how-not-to-do-widgets-school it seems. Those elements on the page go against the original intentions behind underlining text (denoting a hypertext link). Not only are the tooltips pointless, but as widgets they’re very annoying to use. Hovering over them can sometimes show another (unrelated), as well as them hiding text around them - forcing the user to have to move their mouse again, only to find that they’ve set off yet another tooltip. They’re too large, unnecessary and bad-practice.

Whilst I can see the usefulness of such a plugin, I think it’s a perfect example of how not to do it. I can’t sleep at night because it annoys me so much.

Seriously!

What I’m Running

Here’s a rundown of what sites I’m running and the software used.

• beplacid.net - Apache 2, Django (Python framework), MySQL (one instance)
• blog.beplacid.net - PHP 5, MySQL, Wordpress
• readingcamra.org.uk - Apache Tomcat 6, Java 5, MySQL
• readingbeerfestival.org.uk - As above

Wget - the Swiss army knife of HTTP command line tools

Wget’s one of those tools you really take for granted. It’s versatile, reliable, simple and most importantly - it does its job very well. One of its nicest features is the –mirror option. This allows you to…mirror a given website. I initially thought of running multiple instances of wget at the same time. I started small at first: one instance running to mirror the entire site. I ran the following in a shell:

alex@prometheus:/tmp$ wget –mirror beplacid.net/

It’s simple: mirror beplacid.net. Watching the processes and CPU usage on the server, it became apparent that  this wasn’t going to do much. The CPU usage didn’t exceed 5% on its first core. I had to rethink. Then ab sprung to mind.

ab - Apache benchmarking tool

This is another useful tool. It’s simple to use and allows you to quickly and easily hit a given hostname with HTTP requests, all tailored to your specific needs. To do all this, however, you need to be running as root. A noble security measure.

I wanted to generate some traffic that would put the server under some strain, so I started with 50 requests and 5 at a time:

prometheus:/root$ ab -n 50 -c 5 beplacid.net/

Now things started to get fun. This peaked CPU usage to 94% on one core, the others were between 60 and 80. I was starting to see some real stats. I doubled things - 100 with 10 per request:

 prometheus:/root$ ab -n 100 -c 10 beplacid.net/

This was a little more representative of a heavy amount of traffic. Perhaps akin to slashdot or a reddit. Put simply, that’s 100 requests with 10 each sent each time. Still nothing major, so I went all out:

Concurrency Level:      10
Complete requests: 1000
Total transferred:      4856792 bytes
HTML transferred:       4687792 bytes
Requests per second:    4.99 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       2002.453 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       200.245 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          23.69 [Kbytes/sec] received

To summarise, the server took 1000 requests with an average of 5 per second, each returning just over 2 seconds. Not bad, considering what I’m running.

I’m pleased with my setup. It can take a punch and it’s still running. My next task is to hit both beplacid.net and the blog, with perhaps some traffic mirroring readingbeerfestival.org.uk too.

The web’s abuzz with talk of Google’s new venture - Chrome. My workplace is no exception; in fact we’ve had numerous discussions about it, spanning from “should we support it” to adoption paths.

One of Chrome’s highlights is its isolated tabs. The idea is that tabs run as separate processes, so if one lags, the rest still operate correctly. Therefore, it was quite a surprise when a colleague emailed me with this nifty trick to crash Chrome:

 Type this into a Chrome tab’s address bar
:%

No need to press enter, it happens as soon as you hit %. Here’s a screenshot:

Again: so much for isolated tabs.

Note: I’ve submitted a bug report here

- atc