Technorama

Encyclopædia Britannica must be kicking themselves now, they've all but completely lost their market share to Wikipedia -- if only they had updated their business mode back in the 90s, they could have controlled online encyclopædias, and profited from adverts on every page!

Instead Britannia pages like Brythonic languages, suffer popups which obscure the text every 10 seconds -- that's not going to win them any friends or users!

Labels: Future, Wikipedia

Here's my list of fixes I'd like to see made in Ubuntu during 2009:

1. Resize icon fix, a proper sized icon (not single pixel anymore) on all windows, including Thunderbird.
2. Font fixes, OpenOffice should be able to save documents with fonts like "DejaVu Sans", and have them appear correctly on a Windows machine as Ariel, at present they come out in random like Webdings. OO could even show "Ariel" in its list, even if it is rendered as DejaVu.
3. Stablity, if compiz or other drivers are flakey, they need to be fixed. Ship the distro with debug symbols and generate proper backtraces for us to submit bugs too.
4. Respond to bug reports, and don't just close them after not dealing with them because they are now out of date.
5. Fix the clipboard, still after closing an application window the clipboard contents has disapeared.
6. Install the clipboard history by default.
   

Let's hope Ubuntu QA improves too, I'll pay too if there is a plan to sort out the QA testing :)

Labels: Ubuntu

Ubuntu isn't ready for the lime light yet, it's still detecting my printer and setting up with a broken driver! The dodgy driver is "Foomantic/hpjis".

If you leave it like this, your logs will be full of:

Dec 24 13:56:24 laptop DeskJet_930C?serial=HU0B21G0G9JJ: prnt/backend/hp.c 496: unable to connect hpssd socket 2207: Connection refused
CUPS will display: DESKJET_930C (Default Printer) "/usr/lib/cups/filter/foomatic-rip failed"

The workaround, after Ubuntu detects the printer (after you plugged it in via USB) is to delete the printer and create the working setup:

1. Go into System->Administration->Printing
2. Select "Deskjet_930C" and click Delete.
3. Then click "New Printer", select the "HP Deskjet 930C USB ...".
4. Don't accept the [recommended] "Foomantic/hpijs", click the "Foomantic/cjd550".

I'd happily pay for a company to sort out the QA problems in Ubuntu releases, if 1,000 others would as well :) While Mark Shuttleworth is still sponsoring the Ubuntu project.. I'd hope he would come up with some funds too!

Other system lockups I've had this week are from some Compiz dodgyness:

Dec 20 20:47:12 laptop kernel: [ 1585.909259] compiz.real[6722]: segfault at 00004972 eip 08055a6d esp bfcdabb0 error 4

Xorg.0.log seems to have captured the flaw:
tossed event which came in late
mieqEnequeue: out-of-order valuator event; dropping.

Totem dodgyness is a whole system lock-up when playing a video file in Firefox, (totem-pl)ugin-viewer 2.22.1 or GStreamer 0.10.18 dodgyness?)

It's issues like these that will really put people off switching to Ubuntu, QA definitely needs to improve, and bug reports responded too when filed, not closed after six months (which I had recently on a crash I reported on launchpad -- why should we bother reporting..?).

Labels: GNU+Linux, Ubuntu