Links

• The Pragmatic Programmer Quick Reference Guide
• The Suck/Rock Dichotomy
  

More Ubuntu 9.10

Earlier I noted that Ubuntu 9.10 reported my laptop hard drive was going
to fail. At first I discounted this as (1) it was reporting a crazy and
impossible 500,000+ bad sectors and (2) the drive seemed to be working
fine and other metrics didn't indicate a problem.

Well, yesterday my file system came up dirty for the second time in a
week and I reluctantly concluded there was a problem with the drive.

I got a new drive and went about restoring from a recent disk to disk
backup. All went well until I was getting ready to edit /etc/fstab and
/var/boot/menu.lst to change the UUID of the ext4 file system and
discovered the vol_id command no longer seems to be part of Ubuntu.
You really need this to restore from a full backup.

Workaround: The needed information is available at /dev/disk/by-uuid.

GRUB 2: Live CD Install Guide documents how to install GRUB into
the MBR... worked for me.

Ubuntu 9.10 vs. Eclipse

After upgrading Ubuntu to 9.10 on my computer at work, I noticed a lot
of dialog buttons weren't working. In some cases I could work around by
hitting return which is the same as clicking on the highlighted dialog
button. Or it was possible to navigate around within the fields and buttons
of a dialog using TAB and Shift-TAB but that was pretty slow and painful.

Fortunately there's a fix.

Ubuntu 9.10

Just upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. Here are some observations.

• It came up with wireless working. I never had to plug in to ethernet.
  
• My X display used to lock up if I left xscreensaver running for long periods. That seems to have cleared up.
• In spite of MySQL being updated from 5.0 to 5.1, my MySQL databases survived untouched.
• I was able to load my SlashEM saved game after the upgrade.
• VMware Player initially didn't work but after I updated it from 2.5.2 to 3.0 it was fine.
• Glxgears went from around 500 to around 1600 FPS. There's a noticeable performance improvement in some of the OpenGL screen savers in xscreensaver.
• One disappointment, 'buoh' (application to retreive and display newpaper comic strips) is gone.
• When I log in I get a pop-up saying that my hard drive is failing. There's a widget in the Gnome panel that says the drive has many bad sectors. When I click on it, it informs me that the drive has over 500,000 bad sectors. The disk seems to be working fine with no errors being reported in syslog. 'smartctl -H /dev/sda' says 'PASSED'.
  
• Hibernate works. One time resuming from hibernate the display was so dim I could barely make it out, but I was able to correct with Fn-F10. Since then the display has come up at normal brightness.
• I expected to have to reload libdvdcss since the upgrade disables medibuntu, but when I popped a DVD in the drive it started playing.

IntelliJ IDEA goes open source, sort of

Cool, now I may actually invest the effort to learn this.
The Most Intelligent Java IDE — Now Free and Open Source
Unfortunately the FOSS version has a lot of limitations.
Feature comparison