onOkay, as mentioned previously, I greatly dislike Ubuntu 10.10. You may too! And if you do, I want you to check something out. Does your computer have an Intel-based graphics card? You said "yes", right? Okay, good. Because then I have some good news: apparently the Intel driver for Ubuntu sucks. Oh, wait, that wasn't good news, but this:
How to install an updated Intel graphics card driver for Ubuntu 10.10!
Since installing this new driver, stuff has stopped getting stuck on my screen. I searched for this driver after a particularly annoying incident with a random square on the screen that wouldn't invalidate, so I had to kill X. Note: this won't fix some of the other annoying bugs, like the super slow gnome-terminal, the mouse with a mind of its own and the multiple attempts to unlock the keyring when I log in.
Anyway, yeah, if you've been having troubles with Ubuntu 10.10 and are ready to install Mac OS X illegally but have an Intel graphics card, first, wait: try this. If it doesn't work, then you can illegally install an OS. Not really.
EDIT: After some more annoyed yelling, I discovered that my mouse problems are likely the fault of Ubuntu 10.10's touchpad driver. I found tons of errors like the following in syslog:
[69276.814022] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost synchronization, throwing 4 bytes away. [69277.333722] psmouse.c: resync failed, issuing reconnect request [69293.813324] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost synchronization, throwing 3 bytes away. [69294.826388] psmouse.c: resync failed, issuing reconnect request
I found some other people who have the same problem. We're having tea on Tuesday, wanna come? /jokewhat Anyway, I hope this gets resolved soon because December 25th is still like two months away.
on
It was a good idea. :P
onOkay, folks, as I mentioned last week, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat came out. I decided to use it for a week before writing a post about it (9.10's was a bit hasty). And, you know what? It's just getting worse. Kind of makes me happy that I like Macs now because Ubuntu is kind of starting to anger me.
Okay, first of all, the upgrade itself. The upgrade was fantastically easy. I'm telling you, the upgrades are getting easier, but the OS is getting worse. But last time, easy meant "torrent the alternative CD from Windows and install half of the packages from there". This time, easy meant "click Upgrade." Really, I went to Update Manager and I clicked Upgrade. And it worked. Wow.
Anyway, I then had Ubuntu 10.10 and was find that I liked quite a lot of things about it. First of all, as I mentioned earlier, the Ubuntu Font. It's just freaking awesome. It's used pretty much everywhere now and combined with rounder controls and a pastel-ish color scheme, Ubuntu looks prettier than ever. Not prettier than Mac OSX, though, but still, pretty nice.
The second thing I noticed was that the flashing problem had diminished. In Ubuntu 10.04, whenever I closed the lid of my laptop, when I opened it again, EVERYTHING WOULD START FLASHING. For a while. It was UNBEARABLE. Well, in 10.10, the problem is mostly gone. It now only flashes once or twice. Not as annoying.
However, the good things seemed to stop there and the whole experience started to get very, very annoying:
- I found that, with certain wireless access points, my computer absolutely refused to co-operate. It would (sometimes) let me connect and occasionally allow me to load a page or two, but it would be infinitely slow and it would just stop serving me pages. I eventually found out that blacklisting a bunch of alternate drivers for my wireless card fixed the problem, but still. Very annoying.
- Slow. SLOW SLOW SLOW. What has happened? For one thing, the mouse occasionally just gets "stuck". And by occasionally, I mean increasingly frequently. And sometimes, the mouse moves as if it had a mind of its own: the other day, the mouse was actually avoiding Drifty's name as I tried to initiate a chat with her (I eventually used the keyboard). Also, when I use the terminal, text appears very slowly.
- When you start to drag an image, and then let go because you've changed your mind, it gets stuck there until you restart X. Actually, it's not just images, random stuff in general can get stuck on your screen. An autocomplete popup is now stuck on my screen. I am very, very angry.
- Okay, for some reason, GNOME just went insane. Both the dock and the panel at the top vanished and a Nautilus window filled the screen. I found out that the display was semi-frozen--moving the mouse around changed the cursor and made popups appear and I could click on menus, but I had no clue what was giong on. I had to kill X. With all of this X killing that's going on, I'm losing a ton of work. This is really frustrating.
- After another week of testing Ubuntu 10.10, I've found that a whole ton of things can get frozen on the screen accidentally. You can usually remove them by repeating whatever trigger caused them to appear in the first place. However, it's still very annoying and argh, Ubuntu 10.10 is just so slow. Today, the mouse suddenly froze for a very long time (about 5 minutes) while the wireless disconnected (though I was in a high-signal area) and refused to reconnect until I restarted the computer.
All in all, Ubuntu 10.10 really annoys me. Really can't wait until I get a Mac. :P
onWhile working on the rewrite of Four Island (go 3.0! :D) in Ruby on Rails, I hit a roadblock. Four Island, since perhaps Layout 3, has had an old concept of multiple layouts and since the Theme Switcher, has had the concept of being able to switch between them. How was I going to go about this in Ruby on Rails?
Well, actually, it's quite easy with the help of an awesome gem,
[themes_for_rails](http://github.com/lucasefe/themes_for_rails)
. Note that's the Rails 3 version, if you still use Rails 2 (and most people do), you'll need[theme_support](http://github.com/zedalaye/theme_support)
.theme_support
does technically work for Rails 3 as well, but I don't like it because you can only override views; if there's no corresponding view in theapp/views
hierarchy, it won't work. This annoyed me because my plan is to have the main site layouts inthemes
and have the admin panel inapp/views
because the admin panel never changes but, while pre-3.0 layouts share a ton of code, they are rather different.Anyway, this was going really well, but there were three things I had to know. First, did it support asset hosts? Second, did it support HAML? And third, did it support SASS? Asset hosts allows you to specify that all assets (javascripts, images and stylesheets) be loaded from an alternative, cookie-less subdomain. And yes, it worked. HAML is an awesome alternative to RHTML/ERB that is really elegant and organized. And yes, it worked. SASS, a sub-project of HAML that is used to generate stylesheets, allows you to nest declarations which I believe makes things make so much more sense. And no, it didn't work.
What? Why? Well, the way SASS works is at runtime, it reads your SASS file and converts it to a CSS file. Since my stylesheets were stored in the
themes
hierarchy, SASS didn't know where to find them and thus the CSS files weren't generated and my layout couldn't find the stylesheet. However, I wrote a small script that you can place into yourconfig/initializers
directory to get SASS working withthemes_for_rails
:# Adds Sass support to themes_for_rails themes = Dir.new 'themes' themes.each do |theme| unless theme == ".." or theme == "." Sass::Plugin.add_template_location( Rails.root.join("themes/#{theme}/stylesheets/sass").to_s, Rails.root.join("themes/#{theme}/stylesheets").to_s ) end end
And there you go! Sassy themes. It'll probably work with
theme_support
too, but you may need to modify it a bit.
on
While yesterday was quite a bad day, my luck today has turned for the better! For one, I'm not angry at geohot anymore. Nope, when I finally got home to my Windows laptop today, I plugged my iPhone 4 in, synced it and ran limera1n. And, you know what? It didn't work. :( However, I tried again, this time closing iTunes before jailbreak and guess what! It worked! :D
Once again, I kind of jumped around in excitement, screaming "OMG YAY JAILBREAK OMG SCROBBL I LOVE YOU" until people started staring and I realized that those "people" were the voices inside my head....
Anyway, I'm very happy to now be jailbroken because there are some really awesome things that you can do with a jailbroken iDevice, some I had used before, some that I only tried out today:
- Scrobbl - This may be the biggest reason that I jailbreak and that's because it's just so awesome. Without a jailbreak, to scrobble songs to last.fm, you have to sync your iDevice with iTunes and use the last.fm iPod scrobbler, which, as we've seen, doesn't work too well with iOS devices. I mean, seriously, last week, I scrobbled my iPhone and found that while a whole ton of songs got scrobbled, it somehow completely forgot to note that I had listened to the album Fantasies by Metric three whole times. It often gets things wrong and requires you to sync to scrobble, and is just so annoying. With Scrobbl, songs are scrobble AS YOU PLAY THEM. You can set it to only scrobble via WiFi and to ignore podcasts (which was another problem I had with the official scrobbler--who cares about the podcasts? I don't want to scrobble them!) and it's just fantabulous. One of my favorite jailbreak apps.
- Backgrounder + MultiFl0w - Backgrounder is an amazing app that brings true multitasking to iDevices. Not iOS 4's fake multitasking (which, however, is in some cases more apt for the job because developers can specify actions upon task switching, like pausing your game), but true multitasking that can be enabled/disabled for certain apps at certain times. I really love this because it allows me to background Palringo and go watch a video and I'll know if someone's trying to talk to me because I'll hear a noise and then I'll go check Palringo and omg! Someone's talking to me! :P MultiFl0w is a replacement for iOS 4's task switcher and it's really quite pretty--it shows up to 9 open apps using an ExposΓ©-like display. Note, MultiFl0w does cost $4.99. Backgrounder is free.
- SBSettings - Short for SpringBoard Settings, (yes, that's what those SBs everywhere stand for), SBSettings is quite a useful tool for iDevice users. It allows you to swipe across the status bar (gesture customizable) from any app and have a screen appear with options and settings in it. The best part is the toggles: you can have a bunch of toggles sitting up in your SBSettings tray and when you want to do something like turn off Cell Data or turn on Bluetooth, you simply have to swipe across the top and tap the toggle. You can also download additional toggles: I downloaded one called Rotation Inhibitor which allows you to toggle whether or not the current app will rotate automatically--and yes, it actually allows you to lock rotation in landscape mode. Horray. You can also theme SBSettings--in the picture on the left, I'm using a theme called "Bold Retina" (there is a variant that works on non-Retina displays). Finally, for you iPod touch users who are want to see how much battery life you have left in percent (because this feature is built-in on iPhones), you can enable this under "System Options" in SBSettings.
- Infiniboard (and Infinifolders!) - Infiniboard, Infinifolders (and Infinidock) are a series of awesome, SpringBoard-enhancing tweaks by chpwn. Infiniboard and Infinifolders are great for organization. With Infiniboard, you can put as many apps as you want on one SpringBoard page and just scroll through them vertically. Infinifolders is very similar: it allows you to overcome the 12-app limit on iOS 4 folders and lets you scroll through folders vertically. They're both pretty great: Infinifolders has the advantage of having being a named group, but Infiniboard has the advantage of actually working on iOS 4.1. Currently, Infinifolders just blanks the screen if you open a folder with more than 12 apps in it. Ouch. These apps do cost money, but they're pretty useful.
- LockInfo - I am absolutely in love with this. I didn't even know about it until I noticed that TimTam tweeted using it. I looked into it and it's a whole lot more amazing than it appears! First off, the basics: the Apple iPhone mysteriously lacks the ability to show the owner any useful information besides the time and any notifications that have popped up (such as SMSes) on the lockscreen. Users have to unlock the phone to see stuff. It's confused me before; I can never remember if I just received an email or not. LockInfo allows you to display information on newly received email, upcoming calendar events, missed calls, SMSes... But it's more awesome than just that: there are plugins available for LockInfo that lets you see more information on your lockscreen; Twitter, for instance. Yes, awesomeness. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a plugin for Things, the to-do app I use. Splendid! But by far the best part of LockInfo is the InfoShield (pictured on right). While your iDevice is unlocked, simply swipe down from the status bar and the InfoShield will appear, containing all of the information that LockInfo shows on the lockscreen. It's like the notifications tray on Android phones. Very awesome. :D This app does cost money, though, but it's so totally worth it.
Some other awesome apps you should try if you're jailbroken are MultiIconMover (a convenient tweak that allows you to move multiple icons at once (note: does not work with folders)) and WinterBoard (allows you to theme your SpringBoard and lockscreen. Some would advertise this app more prominently, but I don't really use it that much).
Wow, I didn't really expect to be reviewing all of my favorite jailbreak apps when I started this post, but at that point, I didn't even have LockInfo yet and I'm in love with it, so, :P. Anyway, the other reason why Sunday Is Funday is the fact that Ubuntu 10.10 came out today! The upgrade itself was pretty easy (easier than 10.04--nothing went wrong!) and nothing seems to be going horribly so far. I'll write a full post about 10.10 when I've used it for a bit and discovered any horrific problems that need to be ranted about (and besides, this post is plenty long already :P), but let me just say now: I really love the new Ubuntu Font. It's just so fantastic and pretty. <3 Ubuntu Font.
onIf you haven't been paying attention to the updates on my previous post, well, strange stuff has been happening in the world of iPhone jailbreak. A long-dead hacker named geohot famous for his blackra1n jailbreak has mysteriously reappeared a claimed to have a jailbreak named limera1n which will be released October 11th, the day after GreenPois0n.
Well, that seems to have changed. Because it's out. Now. Whut. There's only a windows version available (that's why I'm frantically trying to get a tiny netbook working with my iPhone--I don't have my Windows lappy with me), but this is just... wow. I know, I'm excited about jailbreaking my iPhone, but geohot is really placing the jailbreak community into an odd place. Chronic Dev now has to decide whether to burn SHAtter, or try to implement limera1n. It's kind of insane. And it's making me doubt that GreenPois0n will come out tomorrow. Which means that, if limera1n doesn't work for me, I will be angry. Very angry.
A FEW MINUTES LATER: It's not working. And I'm angry. Because GreenPois0n may not be released because of this and that means that geohot just took my jailbreak away. I'm annoyed. There better be a jailbreak that works by 10-10-10 10:10:10.
EDIT: I do not recommend trying limera1n. I've been trying to jailbreak for a few hours now and my iPhone is now stuck in recovery mode and I can't get it out using iRecovery. So, basically, I'm screwed. Wait until tomorrow and see if Chronic Dev does anything awesome. Don't try limera1n. Geohot is an a-hole.
EDIT 2: Okay, I managed to get my iPhone out of recovery mode using a Mac and I'm not totally screwed anymore, but I'm still going to wait until tomorrow for news rather than try using limera1n anymore. I'm angry at you, @geohot.
EDIT 3: iPhone Dev Team has just made the announcement: They're not releasing GreenPois0n tomorrow. I, for one, am disappointed. Thanks, @geohot, I'm angry with you. That is, unless, I get home tomorrow to my Windows laptop and find that limera1n actually does work. That'd be great! :P
onYES. YES. YESSSSS.
It may be a week later than I hoped, but IT'S TOTALLY COMING! This Sunday is a very special day for people who are obsessed with repeating dates: This Sunday is October 10th 2010. As in, 10-10-10. And something else special will be happening on Sunday. At 10:10 10-10-10, THE IOS 4.1 JAILBREAK WILL BE RELEASED! I AM NOT SPECULATING, IT HAS BEEN CONFIRMED! :D
Things have progressed to the point where we don't expect anymore roadblocks. ETA for greenpois0n is 10/10/10 at 10:10:10AM
FINALLY! :D I'm so excited, this is going to be great-tastic!
UPDATE: SHAtter will be for fourth generation iDevices only (a.k.a. iPhone 4 and iPod Touch fourth generation).
UPDATE 2: And it's definitely going to be untethered. This just keeps on getting better and better! :D
UPDATE 3: More info has come in! It appears that SHAtter is not technically untethered. However, Comex, the guy who brought us the awesome JailbreakMe jailbreak, has utilized one of his apparently large array of userland exploits to make GreenPois0n untethered. What this means is that on iOS 4.1, GreenPois0n will be untethered, but after Apple fixes the exploit, you'll only be able to get a tethered jailbreak. This isn't too bad, though! First, your fourth-generation iDevice is still jailbreakable for life. Second, Comex could possibly release another userland exploit if the current one is patched. Third, if you don't upgrade to anything above iOS 4.1, you'll be fine! :D
UPDATE 4: What is this? MORE NEWS! Not only is GreenPois0n going to be released on Sunday, but rumors AND CONFIMATIONS have come in saying that geohot, a hacker famous for the blackra1n jailbreak, has returned to the jailbreaking scene and is planning to release limera1n, a jailbreak based on a bootrom exploit completely unrelated to GreenPois0n's, on the day AFTER GreenPois0n is released. Most notable is the fact that limera1n should be able to jailbreak third generation iDevices (iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3rd generation) that were left out in between redsn0w and GreenPois0n's jailbreak windows.
yes, the news about geohot is true, the day after we release ETA he decides he wants a piece of the #pie
and yes it is a different bootrom exploit, he wants us to use it in GP, but there's no way we'll make our ETA if we do
We are not changing our release date. If we can implement @geohots before 10/10 we will use that, otherwise we're using ours. #roadblocks
UPDATE 5: There's been a lot of controversy surrounding the suddenly announced limera1n jailbreak. The Chronic Dev Team, for one, are not amused. Specifically, they're pissed. The dilemma is that if GreenPois0n and limera1n are both released now, Apple will be able to fix both holes by the next generation of iDevice (or sooner :O) and two perfectly good bootrom exploits will have been "burned". The current state of things seems to be that Chronic Dev is trying to implement geohot's exploit as quickly as they can, but if they can't do it before tomorrow, they'll release GreenPois0n. This is mayhem! Depending on who you listen to, everyone's the bad guy, but apparently, geohot discovered his exploit months ago and was sitting on it until Chronic Dev announced an ETA for GreenPois0n. Some say that he thinks that SHAtter is better than limera1n and is trying to save it for later by forcing Chronic Dev to not release, some say that he's a a-hole who's just trying to get some publicity. However, his timing may actually just be coincidence--October 11th 2010 will be the one-year anniversary of his famous jailbreak blackra1n.
What's going to happen? Who the candy-cane knows? All I hope is that I'll be able to jailbreak my iPhone 4 tomorrow morning and that nothing will threaten my jailbreak-happiness.
onAnother update on the iPhone jailbreak situation. Things are getting more exciting as the dev teams work on their jailbreak and we can now expect to see a release within days, not weeks. Yes, days. How do we know? Someone on Twitter asked a pod2g for an ETA (wow, no kidding), and actually got a response:
@Pod2G the release date be count by days or week ?
@asendari I would say days.
HOW EXCITING IS THAT? :D Of course, this doesn't guarantee that the release will be out soon, but I'm fairly hopeful for a SHAttering release this weekend. :)
The other thing I wanted to write about was the type of the jailbreak. If you didn't know, there are two types of jailbreak: tethered and untethered. Untethered is what you JailbreakMe folks are lucky enough to have; tethered, which seems to be more common, means that you have to jailbreak your iDevice every time you turn it on. Ouch. Anyway, as this jailbreak is not even out yet, we have no clue which type it will be, though some believe it will probably start out tethered. However, there is still hope. I did some poking around The iPhone Wiki (an official source for jailbreaking information) and found this gem:
Until Apple patches the bootrom in these things, (which is probably 5-6 months away...) their whole SHSH system becomes irrelevant and defeated (and lolz) because now the ramdisks can have all that SHSH+ECID crap patched out of them, allowing arbitrary downgrades all the way to 4.0 on a 4.1 (or later) out-of-the-box iPhone 4. But because Apple will eventually patch this, Saurik's SHSH system will always be important.
Don't get it? What this possibly means is that even if this jailbreak turns out to be tethered, you should be able to use the jailbreak to downgrade to iOS 4.0.1 and then use JailbreakMe there to get an untethered jailbreak! I asked about this on the discussion page and someone confirmed that this could indeed be possible. So, don't worry about the type of jailbreak this will be; you'll probably end up with an untethered jailbreak anyway. :D
Anyway, there has been a lot of plot advancement in the iPhone jailbreaking world in the last few weeks! Let's just hope that this jailbreak is finally released this weekend, which would totally be great. :P
onYeah, I'm just going to borrow a few minutes of your time to rant about something that annoys me for a reason I cannot fathom. There's a myth going around that ketchup is a brand name (like how adhesive bandages are almost always called "Band-Aids") and that the substance as actually called "catsup." You know what I say here?
FALSE!
After about a minute of looking around Wikipedia, I found the answer. But before that, just think for a minute. What is ketchup? Really, what is it? Those in Australia know this better than we do in America because it's not often called "ketchup" there. What's it normally called in Australia?
Tomato sauce.
Yeah, if you've somehow forgotten, ketchup is tomato sauce. No, it's not the same tomato sauce you put on your spaghetti, but seriously, it's a sauce made out of tomatoes. It's not like sausages, where you don't know what it's made of; ketchup is tomato sauce. Really.
As for catsup, I think I'll let the Wikipedia article speak for itself:
Ketchup (also spelled catsup, catchup, ketsup) is a condiment that in modern times is usually made from tomatoes.
Catsup is simply an alternate (and obsolete) spelling of ketchup. They're the same exact thing, and neither one is a brand name. So there.
I guess now you know how silly I get when someone is wrong, somewhere. Oh well. :P
onOh freaking God! So, there was a bit of unnecessary stress tonight. You may not have noticed it (especially if you live in Australia), but Four Island was down for a few hours today. But, no, it wasn't a usual outage involving a virus or a total creator failure. No, this one was pretty scary and most of you probably didn't even notice.
It started while I was in my house, surfing Four Island. Obviously, because Four Island is hosted in-house, I have to use a custom DNS server to be able to type in "fourisland.com" and related sites and actually get where I want to go. So, therefore, I was completely oblivious to the fact that Four Island was down until I received a call from my cousin, telling me that all attempts to access Four Island resulted in a parked site. You know, one of those annoying, stupid sites frequently used by domain squatters that almost always look exactly like this:
Yeah, Four Island had one of those. With the same annoying girl smiling in that cocky way. HOW DARE YOU SMILE! YOU STOLE MY WEBSITE! Anyway, after walking through the problem with him, me thinking that he misspelled the domain somehow, we realized that something else was happening because he wasn't doing anything wrong. As I was sheltered inside my house, protected by the magical DNS server, I couldn't see the problem, so I tried using the data service on my iPhone and I finally saw it. EVIL. PARKED. SITE.
WTF?
I dug deep into the problem, relaying as I researched things for my cousin to try to access (as I didn't want to cut too deeply into my data service) and every subdomain was also parked. Even my Tumblr was blocked! Caption'd, which is also hosted on Tumblr, was not blocked, however. Interesting.
There was only one thing that could've happened:
I lost fourisland.com.
Does anyone remember what yesterday was? Hm? The third anniversary of Four Island. But, hey, didn't I say earlier that Four Island actually existed for a week prior to September 22nd, but under a different name? Well, if you go back and read the actual post, you'll see what September 22nd is really celebrating. That's the day that I registered fourisland.com.
Yeah, that's right. Somehow, the domain lapsed and went back into the pool.
I seriously freaked out then. I was running around the house, screaming that my domain had been stolen, but simultaneously wondering out loud "WHY WOULD SOMEONE BE WAITING TO STEAL FOURISLAND.COM WHEN IT LAPSED? WHO CARES ABOUT ME??!!?!?!" Well, after I calmed down a bit and did some more research with Yahoo, my registrar, I finally discovered that the credit card on file used to automatically renew Four Island had expired some time between last year and yesterday. Yeah. And apparently, it's standard procedure at Yahoo! to park the site a few days upon lapse before putting the domain back into the pool. Oh yeah, and completely canceling accounts while forgetting to send any emails whatsoever that may have notified me of this. Thanks, Yahoo, you've been a big help.
Anyway, after some credit card action, Four Island was back under my control! Horray! I set up the nameservers and within 72 hours, Four Island should be back up for everyone. Yay! And just like that, the day I lost Four Island passed like any other. :P
Domain Name.......... fourisland.com Creation Date........ 2007-09-22 Registration Date.... 2007-09-22 Expiry Date.......... 2011-09-22