Tag: geek

Chromium YouTube crash

For quite a while Chromium has been randomly crashing when i tried playing YouTube videos. To be more exact, those tabs with YT videos open crash (not just the plugin, nor the whole browser). Sometimes it doesn’t crash, sometimes it does.

I managed to narrow it down to that it mostly happens if i have more than one YT tabs open. True, sometimes it crashes with only one open as well, but a reload usually solves that. Also it often crashes tabs when i try to play embedded videos.


Aegisub 3.0 on Ubuntu

After the Ubuntu distro update to Pangolin of course more stuff broke at first than were fixed, Aegisub being one of them. I had 2.1.9 before, but since the svn trunk is already the 3.0, i rather grabbed that than the older version (r6737). Installing, I was (of course) again faced by the annoying wxWidgets errors during configure.

For 2.1.9 I just worked around it somehow, but this time something snapped and i just got wxGTK 2.9.3. If only it was that simple… I had lots of problems with both wxGTK and Aegisub, but after a day or so I managed to get it working with help from an Aegisub dev.

For wxGTK: ./configure -with-opengl -enable-debug -enable-debug_gdb -enable-debug_cntxt -enable-stc, then after the install also run ldconfig. Then for Aegisub: ./configure -enable-debug.

I had to use the debug options, because we were debugging it, but i think it should work without them.


As for SOPA

That’s the big topic now on the net. The american government and their stupid laws trying to stop people from violating flawed copyright regulations. Copyright and the whole patent system as it is now is fundamentally flawed, because their purpose is different from what it should be.

It might not have been that apparent before, but now that the internet increased the world’s information flow many many times, it’s obvious that regulations are not written to protect intellectual property (eg someone else claiming that they created something that you created) but to protect the profits of the people owning that property.


Ubuntu’s Unity, revisited

Now that the first waves of rage calmed down and i’ve been using Unity for a few days, it doesn’t seem that horrible anymore. I managed to tweak many stuff to my liking, and many still await, but now i can at least get stuff done without constantly being held up by the clumsy interface.There are stuff that disturb me still though.


Ubuntu’s Unity, revisited

Now that the first waves of rage calmed down and i’ve been using Unity for a few days, it doesn’t seem that horrible anymore. I managed to tweak many stuff to my liking, and many still await, but now i can at least get stuff done without constantly being held up by the clumsy interface.

There are stuff that disturb me still though. There is no simple way to switch between workspaces. In the classic Gnome, there was the handy workspace switcher applet on the tray, and it took only a click. In Unity, i’ve to click the icon in the launcher for the workspace wall to show up, and right-click on the workspace i want to move to. I can’t even use the “send to workspace …” options on the right click menu of windows, because it closes the window without warning or question. Not to mention that Unity is prone to crash without any real reason. In the past three days it crashed at least three times when i was just normally using the system and pretty much every single time i tried tweaking the settings. Luckily it restarts quickly, but it’s still annoying.


Ubuntu 11.10 PPPoE network fun

I have a DSL network connection, which is really nice fast, at least inside Japan, if it works. Luckily unlike my previous provider at the dorm, who would randomly cut off my net for days without warning if i left the torrent client on for a bit too long, there are no problems on the provider’s side. There are smaller ones on mine though. I have to manually connect whenever i boot Windows, but i never really bothered to look deeper into it, since it only happens once or twice a week. However, under Ubuntu the problems are quite different.

After i upgraded and then reinstalled the 11.10 o-something version, i faced some problems i couldn’t really handle. First it was the “waiting for network configuration” thing mentioned in the earlier post, but that went away after the reinstall and home folder wipe. But then there were other problems. It wouldn’t or only partially load certain pages (without any connection to each other, such as Rakuten and Tumblr) although i could ping and netcat them, it wouldn’t connect to MSN and in general it was slow. I rebooted to Windows to check, and found that everything worked all right, thus confirmed that it was an Ubuntu thing. I checked every setting in the network config manager gui, but none had any effect.


Rage mode on

So, again Ubuntu delivered a distro update, and with it, another afternoon of pure rage. First, why the hell do you need to remove Gnome if i already have it installed? I don’t give a flying fuck about Unity, i’m not using a tablet and i always have lots of windows open at once. But all right, if you want to install that pile of crap Unity, do so, but leave Gnome on. No, you must remove Gnome. Okay then, remove it, but let me reinstall it after the hour-long update misery is over. I was naive enough to hope it’d work. I installed Gnome, rebooted (of course the distro update fucked up my bootloader too), chose the Gnome session, logged in, and faced something that reminded me of Windows 98 in 8bit color mode with the monitor’s cable having serious contact problems. I thought maybe it didn’t reinstall some required Compiz stuff (which again is fucking stupid considering what’s the point of installing Gnome if it just won’t work), so i logged out, and tried to log in into the Unity session to install stuff. It wouldn’t load. Reboot. Wait three minutes for some kind of “network configuration” (implying this fucker erased even my PPPoE settings), and i couldn’t even skip it. Still neither Gnome nor Unity would boot. So now i’m burning the install CD and getting ready for erasing the system and reinstalling from scratch. For the first time in two years.


Move, move

I’m moving hosts. My site valerauko.net has been hosted at 27hosting.com pretty much from the beginning (if i remember correctly there was a few months’ time when i was still at a hungarian host), during which once they erased all my data and presented me with almost half a year of downtime (as apparent from the gap in the blog archives), and to top it off recently there has been quite a lot of downtime. I wouldn’t even mind if it was like five minutes or so every time, but often it lasts for hours and when i inquire about what’s going on, i maybe get an answer like “oh sorry we just had some problems restarting the MySQL server” or no answer at all. When last time the site was down for hours and i got no response, that was the last drop and i bought a hosting service at another shared host (iWeb). I know, i know, i should have bought VPS or something, but that’s more trouble than gain, as iPhantom and i experienced back last winter. I hope it’ll be all right now. The transition should go quite smooth too, i hope you won’t see any downtime.


COICA and the net

I hate it how the US tries and so far could control the internet. I wonder how many crazy laws they have to make to protect the record and movie industry lobby that would make Google offshore itself to some tiny island country where it alone would produce three times the GDP before.

It’s damn annoying that whenever i register on a phpbb forum i have to confirm i’m over 13 years old, because some american law requires that. How do i care?

Anyway, just now i was reading an Ars article on how copyright holders still cry for more tools to censor the internet. On the one hand it’s scary, because as the article points out, the law will most probably be passed, and i’d bet a substantial amount of money on that it won’t be as narrow-tailored as sen. Franken wishes, no, it’ll be as wide as the pet RIAA’s owners will want it. That would suck, because although they would get their beloved protection from pirating, but it’d cripple the net and not just the american part of it.

If it passes as they want it, i can foresee a mass of trolls heading out to politicians’ blogs, flooding them with links to russian warez sites. I wonder what they’d do then.


Microblog archives

It’s a shame how it’s pretty much impossible to check older entries on microblogging services. I use twitter and plurk, and every now and then i’d like to check my or someone else’s older entries. Right now i’d be interested about what all those tweeties going on so much nowadays about the riots and general unrest in the middle east wrote when there were riots in Europe (Britain, France, Hungary…). But manually scrolling back thousands of entries only to go back months in the archive? No thanks.