I’m really not sure what to think about this release. There are some interesting initiatives from the projects commercial sponsor, and some other things I haven’t learned about in detail yet. The most significant change appears to be the new branding and themes.

The new branding materials look nice, but I’m struggling with the new theme. The change that appears to have received the most attention is the relocation of the windows controls (close, minimize, maximize). I personally don’t have much issue with the change, but the new controls are very small and thus difficult to hit with the pointer. (The “x” on the close button is also obscured by the light effects, but that’s a minor issue.)

Ubuntu has a new set of colours, the warm brown/orange scheme has been replaced by purple with a bit of orange. The overall colours are very dark and Gnome menus are kind of monochrome. In application windows the menubar and the titlebar are now the same colour which doesn’t appear to change when a window is inactive.

I don’t know how to explain my problem with the new theme colours. If I’m looking at the screen for longer than a few minutes my eyes begin to feel sore, and I can’t quite focus on things. I’m not sure if its contrast (like this bug) or something else. The same colour menu and titlebars do seem to make distinguishing where the menu is much more difficult. The old Ubuntu brown themes were criticized, but I always found them easy on the eyes. Or, as easy as a computer screen will ever be.

There didn’t seem to be any reference to what the valid values might be for this field, or what the codes indicated. I’m pretty sure this field is used for interfacing with self-check machines which is a function that won’t be used with the catalogue I’m working on. However, I figured it might be useful to know in any case so I went looking for a reference.

I was able to find a list of the 3M media types on this PDF document at the Library and Archives Canada website.

Valid values from the 3M Media Type scheme

000 Other
001 Book
002 Magazine
003 Bound journal
004 Audiotape
005 Videotape
006 CD/cdrom
007 DISKETTE
008 Book with Diskette
009 Book with CD
010 Book with audiotape

I still have some questions, particularly about the scheduling for rural areas given the use of vague terms like “majority of the population”. I’m also curious about tower coverage and how that may or may not effect the holes in coverage of both MTS and Rogers. There are some areas where both networks have poor or non-existent coverage (especially in the border areas) and more where one or the other has poor coverage.

Such questions aside, this looks like a very promising development. The official word on this will emphasize new technology and higher speeds which is all good, but I’m also hopeful the shared infrastructure will improve simple coverage in at least a few of the problem areas. The mobile networks in my area are not as good as they could be, and it seems obvious that building an excellent shared network is a better solution than building multiple not-so-good ones.

Simply put, the confidence in the government’s ability and willingness to honor its obligations was non-existent; it is not for nothing that, in Hebrew, “sending one’s money down the drain” is derived from a term whose original meaning was “public treasury” (Greek timaion).

(The quote is from page 55 of the paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-521-65629-0.)

I think it might have been something to do with a video card but I’ve never had a lot of luck messing around with anything related to graphics. The system was continually locking up: i.e. display frozen with an unresponsive mouse and keyboard leaving me with one option: hard reset the system. It was really frustrating, and a fresh install from CD (originally I had used the Update Manager) didn’t seem to resolve the issues. I couldn’t find anything in the release notes but I could have missed it.

Anyway, I really need my PC to be working right now, so I was going to revert to 8.10. I didn’t have an 8.10 install CD available so I downloaded the current 8.04 ISO and made a new CD from that. I moved my PC to another location where I could use a faster Internet connection and other computers to burn the CDs and got 8.04 up and running. At the other location, I had statically configured the network IP address via Network Manager. For reasons I don’t understand very well that appears to have cause a broken Network Manager once I had completed the upgrade to 8.10. The network connection worked but Network Manager had no defined connections (“No valid active connections found!”) and would not take over management when I defined one through the applet.

I found some threads on the Ubuntu Forums but still wasn’t getting anywhere. I also found this bug in Launchpad. I’m comfortable with Linux but not an expert by any means so it took me a while to resolve the issue. In the end I commented out any reference to eth0 in /etc/network/interfaces, purged Network Manager (apt-get purge network-manager), and rebooted my computer. Then I reinstalled network-manager and rebooted again. Might not be exactly the right procedure but it seemed to work. Just making changes to the configuration files and logging off and back on didn’t work. Doing that caused other problems like not being able to launch the Terminal app.

The whole process was made more frustrating because now I have to reinstall and reconfigure many of the bits and pieces of my working environment (apache, vmware, etc). I also accidentally deleted my archive of podcasts and downloads somewhere along the line. Obviously, that’s not all the result of trying to install Jaunty but it does more or less guarantee I won’t be trying the upgrade again.

I was trying to use the Web Feed icon that appears in the address bar to add a feed to Google Reader. Normally, this should not be difficult given there is an option to set Google as the default handler for Web Feeds in Applications tab of the Preferences. (I have Web Feeds set that way.)

The problem appears to be caused by the Delicious feature that hides the regular Firefox bookmarks menu. This feature also replaces the “Live Bookmarks” feed subscription option with a command to add a Delicious bookmark. That’s fine with me, except that no amount of changing Web Feed preferences will replace the “Live Bookmarks” command attached to the Web Feed icon with what I want.

(If I disable the Delicious Bookmarks add-on the preference does effect as expected and clicking the Web Feed icon redirects to the default reader.)

Update: Turns out this is a known issue and that a fix is being worked on.

The current incarnation of Garth Turner, MP was a lightning rod for criticism and political chatter of all sorts from the beginning. (I wrote “current incarnation” because I know almost nothing of his previous turn in Parliament before the Liberal landslide of 1993.) Anyway, from my perspective this is often a good thing for the individual member (especially a backbencher with a wee bit of wit and some stage ability), but it rarely does much for the party. A party on the Opposition side may be the exception but that’s certainly not always the case.

However, Mr. Turner has also recently represented himself as politician with certain strong principles and his actions today muddy that water quite a bit. He presented fairly sensible arguments for why joining the Liberal caucus does not violate his stated principle against MPs joining other parties without going back to the electorate. And, given the opportunity this move provided to challenge the government over its own late arrivals, today’s announcement was an effective political tactic. But, Mr. Turner’s actions, no matter what he says, do not represent a triumph of principle (at least not the one about MPs and party membership).

It is my contention that in politics principles are guidelines at best, rhetorical frosting at worst, and usually something in between. I don’t have much interest in arguing whether this is bad or good, but rather to establish a base of reference. This is a reality that I find is often obscured by proselytizing for one partisan side or another, and indeed for our civic religion itself, i.e. the idea of democratic government as the saviour from all ills. With that said, before today I would have placed Mr. Turner well over on the guidelines side of the political principles continuum and nothing I’ve read today has changed that.

My interest here is not to besmirch Mr. Turner (even if it were my opinion of him is quite irrelevant) but to elevate the bar of principled action and to make a point about politics in general. Being truly principled is very nearly impossible (I personally fail to be so every day), but I would appreciate if more politicians acknowledged that directly. Often an unequivocal statement is made, possibly with good intentions or maybe just to make a point in a verbal joust, and then later some circumstance requires that this be mediated or abandoned. There are times when I would accept an argument that such turns of events are evidence of hypocrisy, but despite my cynicism about politics I’m unwilling to say that’s always the case.

I’m not sure how I would have approached this situation if I were to be in Mr. Turner’s place. It seems to me that he made his decision by giving more weight to other considerations, in particular his desire for more influence in Parliament, which is entirely valid. And, I can’t say with certainty that any of the alternatives would have improved my view of today’s events. (I’m most certain Mr. Turner will be criticized no matter what he chose to do or say; as I said earlier he is a political lightning rod.) Would it have been better if he had simply announced his intention to seek the Liberal nomination in Halton? How many people would appreciate the nuance of an Independent MP joining with a Parliamentary caucus without joining the party itself?

In the final analysis, I think Mr. Turner’s statement on this comes very close to acknowledging the distance between his earlier statements and today’s announcement. It may just be that in the dirty world of modern politics everything gets dragged down into the muck. And so, I remain a little bit disappointed and just as cynical and pessimistic about this whole politics thing.

Just for the record, I dislike most of the politicians I’ve actually met in person, I’m firmly in the non-partisan camp, and I generally don’t vote. However, following the sometimes amusing and occasionally horrify spectacle that is politics in Canada (and it’s fellow democracies) is a guilty pleasure. You should need no further evidence than that to convict me of hypocrisy.

The Tories (who have a lot of money to spend on such things) have created an ad campaign that tries to sell the fact that Grit leader Stephane Dion is not decisive enough to do the job. It would appear they’re trying to raise the specter of the Tories’ greatest asset from the last round: Mr. Dithers, a.k.a. former Liberal PM Paul Martin. From my perspective, the party machinery is trying to strengthen their base before the official campaigning starts. Once the election is called they can come out with their focused five (or whatever number they choose) priorities message and appear more positive. And, the truth is, it will probably work out very well for them. That’s regrettable, but that doesn’t mean much in politics.

There’s been some commentary about how this is an American-style campaign. I disagree that the Americans have a monopoly on this stuff; I think this is a very Canadian-style campaign. The only thing that might make this an American-style campaign is if the Conservative Party were to run these ads (and only these or similar ads) during the official election period. Negative personal attacks have been common enough in every election I’ve experienced. The only difference in the US elections is that down south nearly every ad is a personal attack whereas here in Canada the parties seem to prefer mixing in more of the warm and fuzzy positive messages.

I don’t disagree with the fact that past negative campaign ads have ad little or even negative effects, but there have also been other factors at play. For example, in 1993 I think the Tories were cooked no matter what they did.

All of that aside though, I still hate these kinds of ads; they always strike me as incredibly juvenile and arrogant. Like a lot of political statements and Question Period “questions” it tends to come out sounding like a middle school playground. Did too, did not, did too, etc. And, on top of that, these particular ads come across very elitist. That is, the common folk are not able to figure out on their own whether Dion is a good leader or not. As for the flip-flops: every politician in a prominent position (and who wishes to hold onto said position) has done some flip-flopping. It’s the nature of our system.

Oh well, no one has yet convinced me it’s worth my time and energy to vote whenever they do get around to calling another election.

I installed nspluginwrapper using alien as described at MozDev.org (making sure that linux32 was already installed via Synaptic). I downloaded the Flash 9 installer and put the enclosed libflashplayer.so in /usr/lib/browser-plugins. And, again as described at MozDev.org, I ran nspluginwrapper with that file.

The Firefox about:plugins page indicated that the Flash 9 plugin was loaded. However, when I tested it on a site with Flash (in this particular case it was MPtv) the movies played fine but there was no sound. I wasn’t sure why that was because Flash 9 uses ALSA and so does Ubuntu.

I searched around on the web a bit, but didn’t find any solutions that really fit my problem (or were within my level of expertise). I decided to look in Synaptic to see if maybe I didn’t have all of the ALSA packages installed. This led me to the lib32asound2 package which is labelled as a 32bit version of the ALSA library. Once that was installed the Flash sound worked perfectly fine.

So now I’m able to properly waste time with YouTube and its many siblings.