First the minor issue: When I launched FF3, my fonts were messed up. Some pages looked normal, others had ugly huge fonts. Maybe the big fonts are a problem with Ubuntu's Freetype config. Maybe it's a problem with the nVidia drivers. I don't know. Thankfully, I found a workaround. In Firefox about:config set layout.css.dpi to 96. (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=706788&page=2)

Now my bigger gripe: I don't like the new rich urlbar. Back in FF2, I could open most of my favorite sites in 4 keystrokes or less. By increasing the amount of data the new urlbar searches, the Firefox devs have decreased the unique identifiers for each link. So far, I haven't found a fix. It isn't just the slow loading or the giant waste of space, the most important detail is the sorting algorithm. I know abou the oldbar plugin, unfortunately it's only a cosmetic fix because it doesn't include the old FF2 sorting.

Hopefully I'll find reasons to like FF3, but for now it feels like Firefox has taken two steps back.

Git is in a class of its own. Feature-wise, Git is a swiss army knife to everyone else's single blade. (CVS: A butter knife. Subversion: A steak knife. Arch: A switch blade. Bzr: An X-ACTO knife.) Whereas in the past I've had to shape my workflow around the tool, with Git I could decide on the work flow I wanted and pick the Git commands necessary to achieve it. I love that. It's the Unix way.

Unfortunately, Git was also a bear to learn. I've been using it for 5 months now and don't want to give it up, but the first couple weeks were pretty confusing. Which is why I was excited when I found out that Travis Swicegood is writing a git book for Prag. Prog.

Perhaps you've seen this problem yourself. I created a PDF with landscape orientation and carefully measured layout, but when printed it would be scaled smaller with an extra margin (and sometimes even switched to portrait). I tried every print option and program available. I started with evince. Then I switched to acroread and tried configuring scaling, rotation, Postcript level 2, Postscript level 3, every option I could find. I even tried lp and lpr. No matter what I tried my margins were incorrect.

Finally I realized that if every program was wrong, it was probably the print driver's fault. Sure enough, CUPS, the most common Linux printing system, was performing the scaling.

From the command line: /etc/printers.conf

One way to eliminate the extra margin is to edit your /etc/cups/printers.conf and disable the fitplot option.

Option fitplot false

Using a GUI: system-config-printer

On Fedora and Ubuntu, system-config-printer can be used to configure CUPS. If you're more comfortable using a GUI, I've included a screenshot showing the option I'm referring to.

Updated 9 Aug 2007: John Barkhurst wrote today to claim credit for this image and answer an age old question: "Where does putty come from?"

Need I say more?

Fast forward a few years and I'm in the market for a new laptop. Lenovo's T61 is almost perfect, but I've gotten used to my current laptop's 1920x1200 screen. I refuse to move backwards. Rumor has it the T61p will be available in 1920x1200, so for the last couple of months I've been eagerly awaiting its announcement, but Lenovo appears to be in no hurry.

I'm tired of manually checking for new announcements. Thankfully, IBM periodically provides a file named tabook.pdf with a list of Thinkpad models. So I wrote the following script to periodically check for new versions and email me the latest as soon as it's detected:

#!/bin/bash
URL='http://buscaluz.org/robots.txt'
EMAIL="spam.spam.eggs.and.spam@buscaluz.org"

# Detect and send new copies of $URL to $EMAIL.
# $LOG timestamp is used to detect new $FILE.

FILE=$(basename "$URL")
LOG="${FILE}.log"

function log {
  printf "%s: %s\n" $(date +%F) "$@" >> "$LOG"
}

if [ ! -f "$LOG" ]
then
  log "Created log file."
  touch -t 197001010000 "$LOG"
fi

wget -N "$URL"
if [ "$FILE" -nt "$LOG" ]
then
  printf "A new copy of '$FILE' was discovered.\n\nurl: $URL\n" | \
    mutt -s "New $FILE" -a "$FILE" "$EMAIL"
  log "Sent new copy of '$FILE'."
fi

You'll notice I designed the script to be easily adapted. If you want to use it yourself, you'll probably also want to see the crontab entry that runs it:

15 0  * * *  cd /home/sjansen/tabook && ./tabook.sh &>/dev/null

dig +ttlid buscaluz.org @ns8.zoneedit.com

Next I wanted to monitor my local DNS server as the old entry expired.

watch -n 30 'dig +ttlid buscaluz.org | egrep ^b.*IN.*A'

Man, I love Linux!

for I in {1..20}
do
  ssh root@station$I dmidecode | grep -A 3 'BIOS Info' | grep Version
done

And that is why I love Linux!

I recently downloaded and tested a proprietary, third party extension for Ruby called "Uncharted". When I tried to run its example scripts, I got the error: "cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied". Looking at /var/log/message, it was obvious that SELinux was causing the permission denied.

People unfamiliar with SELinux would probably just turn it off at this point. Hopefully you, my gentle reader, have been getting more comfortable with SELinux and would instead try the same thing I did:

This didn't solve my problem because most libraries in /usr/lib are labelled with type lib_t. I did some googling and came across a solution that did work:

But wait! Before you try this yourself, please read what I discovered.

Curious about the implications of type textrel_shlib_t I did some more research and came across an email with links to documentation by Ulrich Drepper:

I was impressed by how well written the information was. I've included below the conclusion of the second link because I feel it is important:

Using the eu-findtextrel it is in most situations relatively painless to determine the culprit(s) for the text relocations easily. There is usually no reason to not fix the problems. While a programs with text relocations can be made to run by relaxing the SELinux security this is a bad idea. The kind of permissions which have to be granted to the program create a gaping hole in the security policy. Attackers will be able to modify the memory as well. If this is not the case a program can enforce a strict W^X policy. I.e., no memory page is writable and executable at the same time. And more: SElinux can also enforce that no writable page can be marked as read/exec-only. With these provisions an attacker has no room where to place his/her exploit code. This is a huge win. So, always fix all text relocations. We've made it as easy as possible.

Unfortunately, this is one of the disadvantages of using proprietary software. If Uncharted were F/OSS, I could do the work myself and submit a patch to the developers. Because it is proprietary, I can only try to provide a bug report and hope the issue will be fixed. Which is a real shame because I'd like to be able to recommend their product. Until this important issue is fixed, however, I don't feel I can.

Update: Less than 12 hours after I contacted them, the creators of Uncharted contacted me with a correctly compiled version of their product. As you might be able to guess from the name, Uncharted is a charting library with bindings for Ruby, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, and C++. Although their API feels like Java with a Ruby wrapper, I'm impressed by how quickly they responded to my report. If your looking for a charting library, give Uncharted a try.

Thanks to Technocrat I discovered that Magnatune is a great company to buy music from. Thanks to Magnatune, I discoverd the wonderful sound ofBeat Under Control.

The best part? Magnatune provides high quality WAV, MP3, OGG & even FLAC and encourages customers to share a copy with three friends. Share! The entire album! Magnatune is not evil. Magnatune is very not evil.

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Of course it does, that's why I jumped at the chance. It's only now as I prepare a travel packet for tomorrow that a million little realities rear their ugly little heads. Did you know they that they drive on the left in Ireland? I'm sure you did. Did you know that they have traffic circles in Ireland? No big surprise. Did you know I'm going to have to drive left through traffic circles? I bet you didn't think about that.

If you never hear from me again, you'll know why.

Sigh.