Another blog bites the dust

On the day of Ubunut 8.10 I’ve upgraded my work laptop (Dell D630) to Ubuntu 8.10. I’ve previously ran my home desktop on the release candidates and saw that all is well so I didn’t expect any specific issues with the upgrade.

After finishing the upgrade successfully I’ve encountered 2 problems.

The first was with the computer fan. It was workin on and off in full steam in 4 seconds cycles. Really annoying. A quick search in the Ubuntu forums led to this post saying I should upgrade to the latest BIOS version (A13 - at least at the time of writing this post).

Upgrading to the latest BIOS stopped the fan from cycling to full speed and full stop but it was still running a bit too much even when the computer was rather idle.

There was another post in the forums that suggested to go back to the older Nvidia drivers (version 173) instead of using the version which ships with Ubuntu 8.10 (177).

That managed to solve the fan issues for now as well as fix some strange repaint problems I was seeing when working with TwinView and extending my screen to another external monitor.

Thought it might help others who face these problems.

As I’ve previously mentioned, tomorrow I’ll be at the Google Developer Day taking place at Avenue Center near TLV airport.

If you want to me and talk or just say hi ping me.

About a year and a half ago I’ve written about Google Israel’s position in the Israeli development community (actually, there lack of) and that a company like Google should be more involved.

This was written around the time the 2007 Google Developer Day happened in more than 10 places around the world but not in Israel.

I opened my Email this morning and to my surprise I found an invitation to the Google Developer Day 2008 in Israel.

It seems there is a good schedule and a very interesting cast of lecturers. Some of the lecturers are Israeli Googlers while others are Googlers from Europe and the USA.

While most of it revolves around Google technologies (GData and the APIs, AppEngine, V8 JavaScript engine) or Google sponsored initiatives (OpenSocial) it’s a good start for a conversation between the Israeli development community and Google Israel (or Google in general for that matter).

I hope this is a first step in Google’s involvment in the Israeli development community, one that will lead to a more diverse and engaged community.

The event will take place on November 2nd at the Avenue convention center (near Airprot city). Currently registration requires an invitation.

I’ve already registered and if nothing else will change my schedule I will be there. If you also registered and know me (or don’t know me yet) feel free to drop by and say hi.

If you get the following error while running Synaptic:

Failed to run /usr/sbin/synaptic
Unable to copy the user’s Xauthorisation file.

Make sure to that you have enough space in your /tmp directory.

To check if that is indeed the problem run the following command in your terminal:

df -h

This command will show you each mounted volumes you may have including the one mounted to /tmp.

/tmp usually contains temporary data for applications while they run. It sometimes may reach a point where it 100% full (might have happened to me while I upgraded to Hardy Heron 8.04).

To clear /tmp run the following commands (BE CAREFUL NOT TO RUN rm -rf ON ANYWHERE OTHER THAN /tmp):

cd /tmp

pwd   # just to make sure you are really in /tmp

rm -rf *

If you are using Skype on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) on a Dell D630 and have the “famous” internal microphone problems due to the HD-Intel chipset, I’ve found a simple solution, sort of.

I recently bought a Plantronics .Audio 470 headset at Best Buy for $50. Its a nice headset with good sound quality and a good mic that is also fold-able for good portability.

That headset also comes with a USB adapter which allows you to basically get a USB based sound card so you can use that headset with machines without a sound card (or a problematic sound card/chipset…).

It seems that Ubuntu works well with that adapter. Ubuntu recognizes it as another sound device, as if you have another sound card attached. I attached it, run Skype and configured Skype to use that newly found sound device for incoming and outgoing voice chats and it just worked.

I managed to call people, they heard me well and everything was fine.

The only downside was that it works only in mono, for some reason, so I only heard sound on the left side (when its hooked to another Linux machine that doesn’t have a mic problem or a Windows or Mac machines the headset is working in stereo UPDATE: It seems that there were two devices, one was stereo and one was mono. When I switched to the second one I started hearing in stereo ). It’s still better than nothing and if you have a headset with only one left speaker you won’t even notice it

I’m sitting in Frankfurt Airport (FRA) waiting for my connecting flight to San Francisco which will let me attend Social Graph FooCamp 2008.

According to the cast of people assembled on the wiki it seems that its going to be lots of fun and hopefully very productive.

I’ll be arriving to SF after noonish. If you want to meet, say hi, or anything else, Email me through the contact page.

Since this is a FooCamp, I do have a very rough on the edges topic to discuss and bring up. I wanted to write a post about it before the camp but whenever I started writing the post I kept on hitting open issues (or at least issues that must be resolved before moving on). This eventually made the post very incoherent so I thought that the best way to resolve it is by putting up a session at the camp.

I’ll guess we’ll see what we will end up doing at the end

A couple of days ago I’ve talked with Eran Hammer-Lahav about an idea I had regarding his post about using Emails as OpenID identifiers.

During the talk another sub-idea came into light in regards to OpenID 2.0 Directed Identity and Emails. While I’m not sure if this has been discussed before (I didn’t have much time to go through old posts on the OpenID mailinglist yet) I thought about bringing it up here.

Directed Identity is a feature that allows a user to enter the domain in which his/her identity resides. This means that if I want to use my OpenID login at some site instead of entering the whole URL to my exact identity, I can simply put the domain name of my OpenID provider.

My provider will figure out all the rest including how to direct me back to the right site after I correctly login.

Yahoo’s implementation of OpenID 2.0 supports directed identities. At their OpenID site, they are educating users to write just “yahoo.com” instead of a full blown long URL to their profiles.

With a small change, a user can use his/her Email address to use directed identity, after all, users already knows how to enter an Email address in most sites to sign-in/up.

In the case of Yahoo, instead of entering “yahoo.com” to use directed identity, why not put your whole Email “myemail@yahoo.com”. The consumer OpenID implementation can simply cut off the domain name from the Email and use directed identity for the rest of the process.

I’m sure a lot of Yahoo users will find that entering their Email more natural and easier to comprehend than to figure out they should put the domain name.

The benefits for this idea is in its implementation. Providers that support OpenID 2.0 doesn’t need to do anything. The real change here is in the OpenID consumer libraries that supports OpenID 2.0. The consumer libraries only needs to use a simple regex to extract the domain name from the Email.

Do you know if this idea was previously suggested?

Do you think its applicable?

I certainly think it can make it easier for everyone and I’m thinking here in mother terms. I know my mother knows her Email and knows how to sign in to sites with it. I’m quite sure she has little understand as to what a URL is, what’s its syntax and why she would need to use it.

At IIW 2007b OAuth Core 1.0 Final was released.

I wish I could attend IIW but I had previous work related obligations that I simply could not get out of. I do hope to attend the next one (IIW 2008a).

Now it’s time to update the C# client to the latest and really final version of the spec.

Congrats to everyone involved with OAuth. It is a truly amazing group of people and I think we can all be proud of the outcome!

I know I’ve been very quiet recently but some of you know why. It took me a while to write about it but its true and it did happen.

Yedda is now part of AOL.

There are some very interesting things planned for Yedda inside AOL. You’ll just have to wait and see so forgive me if I’ll disappear for a while again due to some work related obligations.

Lately my 3rd generation 20Gb iPod battery started to die very early. It barely lasted for 2 hours. Changing a battery through Apple’s israeli representatives is not a very nice thing or easy to do and I didn’t want to wait for a replacement do-it-yourself battery from eBay so I’ve decided it was time for a new player.

In addition to that a 3rd gen iPod has only 32Mb of RAM (it optimizes the battery life by loading ~32Mb from the drive every time, thus reducing the need to go back to the hard drive every time) and Apple recommended to have files of 9mb or less for best battery performance. Being the semi audiophile that I am, my newer MP3s are ripped at 320Kbps and I was in the process of re-ripping my older ones for higher quality after setting up my home storage server.

It was getting harder and harder for my poor little iPod to handle these files.

There were a couple of factors I considered while evaluating players (not necessarily in that order):

• Battery Life - I want a good player with GOOD battery life at least bigger than 12 hours
• Battery replacement should be easy - this prolongs the player’s shelf life considerably (if the battery is reasonable priced)
• No stupid proprietary or any other software to load music and/or files to my player - I really hate iTunes and the other programs are simply annoying. Let me just copy god damn it!
• Linux support with a minimum to just copy music and files.
• Storage size - The bigger the better
• Physical size - The smaller the better

Taking all these parameters into account I had to choose if I want to go the hard drive way or the flash way.

I had to make a paradigm shift in my head and stop thinking I can take all of my MP3s with me all the time since they are getting bigger in size and quality and it will affect various parameters of the player itself (physical size, price, fragileness - hard drive based players seems a bit more fragile due to moving parts).

Seeing how my iPod degraded over a period of about 3 years (which is quite good for a hardware device) I’ve decide I want to go with a small, flash based player that has really good sound quality (the iPod is relatively good in that area, but has quite a few contestant in the sound quality department) and is relatively small.

I eventually settled on two devices:

• iAudio i7
  
• iRiver X20
  
  

The iAudio i7 is a very small and very good looking. It has 8Gb (there is a new version with 16Gb but it wasn’t available in Israel when I was looking) and its specs say it has 60 hours of play time which is VERY impressive. Even half of that is very impressive.

Both the iRiver X20 and the iAudio i7 has support for MP3, WMA and OGG as well as video support for most format (though some videos might need pre-processing using the player’s PC software or other software before showing correctly on the tiny screen). They have a microphone and the ability to record directly to MP3.They both support the ability to just copy files to them and work without a problem on ALL operating systems including Linux out of the box. I have tested it on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X (10.4.9), Linux - Gentoo and Ubuntu 7.10).

Having said that, there are 2 distinct and major advantages to the iRiver X20. The first is that it has a MicroSD slot so I can expand it with a couple of Gb. 1Gb and 2Gb MicroSD cards are relatively cheap and larger sizes keeps on popping in relatively low prices. The second is the fact that the battery is EASILY replaceable. You just pop out the back cover and take it out, the same as you would in your cell phone.

The sound quality is relatively the same in both player. If you have good earphones (and you should have good earphones, otherwise, why invest in a good player… ), they difference is really small.

I really don’t need a color display (it’s nice to see the cover album but not really necessary) and I’m really not going to watch movies on this tiny screen, but if I’m getting it and it doesn’t hurt overall I say “Why not?”

I eventually went with the iRiver X20 because of the MicroSD expansion and the easily replaceable battery.

Up until now (had it for about a week now) I’m quite pleased with it. The sound quality is good and the battery is holding out great. It even supports Hebrew characters, though its displaying it from left to right, but its still better than the stupid hack you need to do to make an iPod display Hebrew characters in ID3 tags and filenames.

I recommend it for anyone with semi (or full) audiophile tendencies that knows to recognize a good player when they hear one, likes to get enough features and quality per buck and good support on all operating system.