In this post I described how to change the Firefox filepicker (Save/Open dialog) from the new GTK dialog (which I don’t like so much) to the older one (which is much better). The method was kind of complex, but worked.
Today, I found a much simpler method. Thanks, Gentoo Wiki.
1) Type about:config into the address bar.
2) Search for ui.allow_platform_file_picker
3) Doubleclick it, changing the value to False.
4) Enjoy your improved file chooser without having to edit Firefox core files.
I have not been able to successfully boot a custom kernel lately, no matter how hard I try.
Every time I try to build one, even from an existing kernel (for example, Ubuntu’s kernel image), I get a kernel panic on boot indicating that it cannot access my drive. From what I can see, it has something to do with the PATA interface my motherboard uses (a standard Intel one, from what I can tell) and not being able to get at the drive after the initial bootstrap takes place.
It frustrates me.
I completely reinstalled Ubuntu because of this, thinking there may be some issue with the install, but now I’m stuck on the latest Ubuntu kernel with the libata kernel interface which slows access to my drives to a crawl. I even tried to use another distro, momentarily, thinking it was just Ubuntu. It wasn’t. Every other recent kernel simply will not successfully boot on my hardware, while I have never had issues with it before.
I seriously believe that it has to do with the new libata interface in the kernel, that it has somehow completely messed up access to my drive via the older, more reliable ATA/IDE method, which doesn’t work either.
Yeah, I’m frustrated. Times like these when I want to throw Linux away and move to *BSD. I then remember how frustrating BSD can be and stay, hoping things will work out.
EDIT: Well, I did something that made it all right, finally. Boots up fine, drives show up as /dev/hd* as they should, and hdparm shows them properly using DMA and optimized access to the drive as they should, which they could not do under sd* (libata).
Happy again.
See? I told you this before, and now someone else has made a site out of it. OOXML is not an open standard, despite how much Microsoft lies to try to convince people to make it so. It is proprietary binary data contained in an “open” XML format, and just because part of something is open doesn’t make the whole thing so.
ODF, the Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org and many others, is truly, 100% open, meaning you are not tying your documents down to a single company’s product. If you believe that making your documents subject to Microsoft’s whim is a good idea, you seriously need to rethink what is important in computing.
Strike down OOXML. Use open formats. Microsoft, just support ODF and abandon your proprietary format, and we’ll be happy to support your product. Until then, even if there’s a plugin for your product that supports ODF, it’s much easier to stay away from your products and use ones that truly embrace open standards.
Apparently the Open Content Alliance has opened some sort of site for public domain books. Not really impressive. You have a few books available via hard-to-see (except for HTML mouseover text) titles and no real listing, and the book content itself is low-res and has a silly AJAX page-turning effect for scanned, low-res images of each page. The full book can be downloaded in a couple of formats as well, which apparently increases the readability, but I didn’t bother.
Why? Project Gutenberg, that’s why. They’ve Wikified it since I last visited, and the Wikification (is that even a word? Eh, who cares) has made the site nicer than it was even before, which was still nice. Full book texts in multiple formats, a decent listing of books in order, easy to navigate… what’s not to like? And there are thousands of books to choose from, unlike OpenLibrary’s — what, a dozen or so?
It’s always nice to have a choice, but at least make the choice stand out in some way in quality or quantity. OpenLibrary, unfortunately, does neither.
I definitely have not felt like writing anything lately. Call it a long period of depression, writer’s block, and a simple “I don’t care” attitude. I’m still using Ubuntu, given that I really don’t want to change to anything else. It’s serving me very well, and I’m sticking with it.
But yeah, I’m going to write again. Probably just as a therapeutic thing, to get my words out there on the state of Linux these days. It’s really frustrating me, the whole schism between those who follow Stallman’s absolutist philosophy on software and pushing GPLv3, which to me seems unnecessary given the much clearer and simple v2. I suppose their fear of Microsoft and other companies “embracing and extending” Linux got to them, but they don’t seem to understand that Linux is bigger than that now. We should be past fearing Microsoft and others coming to get us while we sleep. There are way too many lawyers and judges and too much legal garbage thrown around Linux these days; we should be at a point where we are secure with our way of thinking, and if anyone tries to cross us, we can easily defeat them. This may sound overly optimistic, but I like careful optimism much more than insane paranoia. If a few people want to skirt the absolute letter of the GPL while still playing nice (NVidia, for example), let them. There’s no harm, and they know that crossing Linux users would mean losing a lot. And when someone comes along that doesn’t play nice (SCO), let them try to fight us; as we have seen, there is no way they can win due to the nature of the way we do things.
It seems to be a rocky road ahead, but I really think that if we concentrate on the code instead of fighting pointless legal battles, things will be much smoother ahead of us. I’ll be ignoring GPLv3 and any code I release with be GPLv2 only until Stallman & Co. can figure out the simple truth that the GPL’s strength lies in simplicity.
