aliencam dot net blog.

• Yay! Woot brought back the tag on their shirts that reads “not for use as pants.” #
• Headed back to school. Being home was good: amazing sheets, nice towels, and nobody turning the termostat absurdly cold. #
• Working outside in the shade (my laptop screen is not visible in sun) got too cold. I’m headed back to my room. #

I wrote a review of the Shoreline Greensmart Laptop Jacket from Kolobags for Maximumcpu.com, and it was published this morning. Here is an exerpt from it:

“Kolobags (based in LA, California) produces and sells many different styles of designer laptop bags. While many of the upper end bags they sell may be expensive, they do have bags for every price range, and all of them are very unique. The bag I got to review was the Shoreline Greensmart Laptop Jacket 15.4”, in black and green.”

I can’t post the full review here, but to read the rest of it follow this link:

Kolobags Shoreline Greensmart Laptop Jacket Review @ MaximumCPU

This essay was written for the Introduction to New Media class I am taking at ASU currently (FMS 110)
I release it under the same creative commons 3.0, attribution, share-alike license that this blog is under. You are free to quote, modify, repost, and do just about anything you like, as long as you give me credit for the original work and notify me.

Any comments on this would be appreciated, as I will be editing and significantly lengthening this essay for another assignment in the same class two weeks from now.

Before the popularization of the Internet, communication over long-distances for things such as friendships and relationships were limited to forms such as the telephone and the postal service. These methods of correspondence allowed for these relationships to exist, but only in limited form compared to what we have today. Writing letters takes time and dedication, and the message may take a mater of days or weeks before it is received on the other end. While the telephone is in many ways better than the forms of communication discussed in this paper (ability to better convey emotions, and one can hear the other person’s voice), it is used in a much more formal way than the methods discussed. This paper will not discuss email in depth, as it would require repetition of information that will be included in other sections. Likely the three most significant effectors of social change are online chat mediums, social networking, and personal websites.

One of the first online¹ social technologies that became popular to the masses is chatting. Online chats have existed since the beginning of the Internet, in forms similar to USENET (which was not implemented until 1979) and similar email lists and bulletin boards, however these traditionally were used by the technologically elite, who usually do not appreciate the mannerisms and behavior of new or casual users². The fist major online chat service, IRC brought dynamic chat rooms. These rooms allow people to chat in “realtime” with groups of people regarding nearly any subject. ICQ was the first Internet-wide chat service that had the chat rooms similar to IRC, but via it’s assignment of permanent UIN (identification) numbers, it promoted one one one chatting between users³. An online dating program being the driving force behind ICQ likely scared away many people who would have been users at the time, because of the negative popular opinion about online dating at the time. The next widely popular chat software after ICQ was AOL’s Instant Messenger, or AIM. This offered all of the features of ICQ, however with a focus more on talking to friends or people one might already know in the real world instead of on meeting new friends online.

These chat forms of communication allowed people to talk over long distances about anything they wanted to. The messages are transmitted and received instantly, however these mediums are less useful for archiving discussions (without extra software) than letters sent by post, or emails. Friends are able to have a “buddy list” of people they know, in order to see who is online and available to chat with at any time. This makes it possible to talk with people even if you may not necessarily know their schedule, and you can send a message without worrying about bothering somebody. Often, people activate instant messaging software every time they log onto a computer, making them available for long periods of time, and Some businesses use Jabber (now XMPP⁴) for on-site chat, because there is no centralized server. This allows for higher security, and makes for easier moderation of discussions.

The changes in social habits brought by personal websites are also evident. Many families and individuals have personal blogs. These blogs are websites where posts are made in a journal style, reverse-chronological order entries that are often about personal events. This type of communication was previously reserved for long letters to relatives or very close friends, and things like Christmas letters to friends. While neither of the previous two have been replaced by blogging, it allows for many more people to subscribe (this involves RSS feeds, which are beyond the scope of this paper) to your life and what is going on.

Similar regular blogging, but used to a different extent, is microblogging. Microblogging is similar to blogging, however it generally has character limits of approximately 140 characters. This is often used for small insignificant messages that would not be appropriate for a regular blog, or a phone conversation. However, there are many very useful things people have done with microblogging, such as tracking insulin shots, diet, exercise, appointments, and quick notes⁵. Frequent posting is usually achieved via SMS messaging. Because microblog posts can be done without being near a computer, they are an amazingly fast way to send news to a large group of people. The most popular microblogging website is Twitter.com⁶, which allows you to have a list of people you “follow” (similar to a instant message buddy list) and if you choose, those people’s updates, or “tweets”, will be forwarded to your mobile phone, via SMS, and twitter client.

Social networking websites have, out of those mentioned so far, the greatest affect on modern social practices. The most popular social networking websites in North America, Facebook and Myspace⁷, are also a good representation of features offered by the majority of this genre of site. The basic structure of these sites is that you add people as “friends” at which point you can see pictures of them (posted by themselves, or by others who know the person), read about their interests, what they are doing, and communicate with people. Much time is spent updating one’s own profile, posting pictures and changing things like current status (very similar to microblogging discussed above.) This structure makes for constant updates and changes on each page, which means there will be very high page view counts, making this a perfect market for advertising⁸. Advertisements are what support and make these social networking websites free to their users, and they generate a very high income considering that all content is user generated. Myspace and Facebook both have had different consequences on social interactions today. Myspace generally encourages adding as many people as possible as friends, which creates many more opportunities for advertisement and unsolicited messages. This has affected many people in that they are now more worried about the number of friends they have, instead of worrying about quality relationships like people have in the past. However, this means that people are able to interact with many hundreds of people on a daily basis, people that they may never have met under normal circumstances. Differently, Facebook encourages only adding people you know or have met in person as friends. While it is possible to add people you have not met, if one indicates that they have never met the person it asks: “then why are you adding them?” This makes Facebook a more personal social networking site than Myspace is. While generally social networking websites require you to know a name, or find in a search people that you wish to add as friends, some networks offer a “people you may know” feature. This suggests people you may want to add as friends based on attending high school at the same time, or if you have a high number of friends in common. This enables people to find and keep in touch with casual acquaintances who may not have been a significant part in one’s life previously, but can become so.

Overall, the many opportunities the Internet offers for new kinds of social interaction do effect our social lives today. Social networking, blogging, and instant messaging offer ways for people to stay in touch with those who would have been forgotten if only the previous methods of communication were available. However, on the downside, it dilutes a friendship to something that is only as involved as pressing a few buttons on a website. While it does not prevent the propagation of meaningful relationships, it may over time cause many to forget how it is appropriate to act with those you do not know in person.

I found a couple blogs that said they got middlemouse scrolling working on a thinkpad, but none of their methods worked on my x61Tablet with 64-bit Ubuntu 8.10 installed.  This version of ubuntu uses evdev instead of the xorg.conf file that previous versions used, so it makes configuring the middle mouse button a little bit more difficult.

The first thing you should do (just for your own records) is this command:

xinput -list-props "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"

that will return the properties of your trackpoint.  (change “TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint” to “DualPoint Stick” if you have an X200 or  X61s.) I did not do this before changing settings, so I don’t know what the original looks like (if you do, please post it in the comments so I can have a record of it! I posted the final results of that command at the end.)

Now, what you will need to do is create a file, /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi with the following command:

sudo nano /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi

then paste in the contents with ctrl-shift-v:

<match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelTimeout" type="string">200</merge>
</match>

save and quit by hitting ctrl-x, then “y”.

To tell you what each line does:

EmulateWheel should be pretty obvious, you don’t actually have a wheel with a trackpoint, so it emulates one

EmulateWheelButton: which button pretends to be a wheel? the mouse buttons are numbered 1 2 3 in order, so “2″ is the middle one

YAxisMapping: which directions should the y-axis go? (4 is up, 5 is down)

XAxisMapping: which directions should the x-axis go? (6 is left 7 is right)

Emulate3Buttons: actually I’m not sure what this does in conjunction with emulatewheel. It probably allows you to use middle-click still (like to close firefox tabs, or whatever else middle click does)

EmulateWheelTimeout: if the button is held for longer than the ammount of time, it switches off the middle mouse click.  Essentially, this is what turns off “middle mouse paste” when you are trying to scroll.

Now, the above configuration DOES NOT work for me, but it seems that it does for everybody else who has a blog (I can’t help but wonder if anyone actually tried it… so many comments just say it doesn’t work…) what happens is that the xinput list-props command shows the buttons as being mapped correctly, but nothing happens in xev or in real use.  I cannot find any errors in any log files to indicate why.

So, what I do to get it working is in the above file, change “YAxisMapping” and “XAxisMapping” to be misspelled by adding an extra “s” as such: “YAxsisMapping” “XAxsisMapping” (you don’t have to do this, you can just delete those two lines and the next step will cause it to work. I just mess up the spelling so I can change it back later easily)

Now, create another file.  This will be a shell script that is run at startup to map the horizontal scrolling correctly (If you don’t care about horizontal scrolling and only use vertical, just stop after you messed up or deleted the XAxisMapping and YAxisMapping lines).Use the following command:

nano /home/$USERNAME/.horizscrollscript

Then paste with ctrl-shift-v, or type in the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
#
#
# The following line sets the X-axis mapping to buttons 6 and 7 so that
# horizontal scrolling works.
xinput -set-int-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "Wheel Emulation X Axis" 8 6 7

then save and close with ctrl-X, then “Y”.  make the file executible with:

chmod +x /home/$USERNAME/.horizscrollscript

Now open the gnome sessions manager (System > Prefferences > Sessions, or alt-f2 and “gnome-session-properties”) and click “add”

for the “Name” field, name it something so you know what it does (I named it Horizontal Scroll Script).

In the “Command” field, enter the path to the file (/home/$USERNAME/.horizscrollscript)

The comment field is optional.  Save and restart, and everything should be working!

Please leave a comment if this does or does not work for you, I’m curious to know if I messed something up and that is why the first art of the tutorial doesn’t work.

To test everything, you should try this command:

xinput -list-props "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"

and it should return:

Device 'TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint':
Device Enabled:        1
Middle Button Emulation:        1
Middle Button Timeout:        50
Wheel Emulation Inertia:        10
Wheel Emulation:        1
Wheel Emulation X Axis:        6, 7
Wheel Emulation Y Axis:        4, 5
Wheel Emulation Timeout:        200
Wheel Emulation Button:        2
Drag Lock Buttons:        0

those bolded lines are what we were trying to get! now to test how your computer sees you use those buttons, ust the command:

xev

then you can hit keys on the keyboard and watch what it returns, or put the mouse pointer in the box that pops up and watch that as well.  You should be able to see that scrolling down is 5, up is 4, left is 6 and right is 7. (close xev with ctrl-z or by pressing the “x” on the box.)

The websites I used to formulate this approach are:
psung.blogspot.com/2008/09/scrolling-with-thinkpads-trackpoint-in.html
mvogt.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/xorg-evdev-and-emulatewheel/

–aliencam

The version of thinkfinger in the Ubuntu 8.10 repositories does not yet work perfectly.  You can install and configure it close to the same way that it was in 8.04, however with one (annoying) difference.  Previously, you could just slide your fingerptint and it would be entered automatically, however a bug in this version makes it so that you have to slide your finger and then press the enter key.  if this doesn’t bother you, or you want to wait for the “official fix”, the follow these instructions (directions that fix this are  further below):

sudo apt-get install thinkfinger-tools libpam-thinkfinger

tf-tool --acquire

If that gives you an error, “could not get USB device” or similar, restart and try again.  Now it will ask you to slide your finger three times, do so until it reads 3 successful swipes.Then,

tf-tool --verify

It will ask you to swipe your finger one time, to verify the data on file. You no longer have to do the “tf-tool –add-user $USERNAME” command, it has been replaced by the above two commands.

At this point, there (thankfully) is a script that edits /etc/pam.d/common-auth so we don’t have to. Execute the script with the following command:

sudo '/usr/lib/pam-thinkfinger/pam-thinkfinger-enable'

At this point everything should be working, just restart and you will be able to login and sudo using your fingerprint reader (keep reading to set it up to work on wake from suspend or screensaver).

If you do not want to have to press enter every time, before you install thinkfinger-tools and libpam-thinkfinger, you need to add the following sources to “Third Party Sources” under “Software Sources”:
deb ppa.launchpad.net/jon-oberheide/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src ppa.launchpad.net/jon-oberheide/ubuntu intrepid main

Now, in order to have the fingerprint reader work to wake up from suspend or screensaver, use the following steps:

create a group “fingerprint” with the following command:

sudo groupadd fingerprint

then create a file with:

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/60-thinkfinger.rules

Then paste in the following lines (use ctrl-shift-v to paste into terminal):

#
# udev rules file for the thinkfinger fingerprint scanner
#
# gives access to the fingerprint reader to those in the “fingerprint” group
#
# Taken from:
# www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader_with_ThinkFinger
# which was taken and modified from:
# article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.thinkfinger/329
#

# SGS Thomson Microelectronics Fingerprint Reader
SYSFS{idVendor}==”0483″, SYSFS{idProduct}==”2016″, SYMLINK+=”input/thinkfinger-%k”, MODE=”0660″, GROUP=”fingerprint”

# the also-needed uinput device
KERNEL==”uinput”, MODE=”0660″, GROUP=”fingerprint”

Exit nano with ctrl-X, and save by hitting “y”.

Now, edit /etc/pam.d/gnome-screensaver with:

<code>sudo gedit /etc/pam.d/gnome-screensaver</code>

and add the lines:

auth sufficient pam_thinkfinger.so
auth required pam_unix.so try_first_pass nullok_secure

Between the two existing lines. save and exit.

Now add each user who has a fingerprint profile, and change the file permissions with the commands:

gpasswd -a $USERNAME fingerprint
chmod +x /home/$USERNAME/.thinkfinger.bir

Restart the computer, and it should work.  If you have any more problems leave a comment and I should be able to help you, or check out these other links that may help:

www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader_with_ThinkFinger

and the bug report for the bug that requires you to hit enter:

bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thinkfinger/+bug/256429

There is one problem that I don’t know how to fix, every time I boot, I get an authentication box telling me that the application “Do” (I assume gnome-do) requires that the gnome-keyring be unlocked.  This only happens when you login with the fingerprint, not when you type in the password. There is no pam_gnome-keyring.so file, so I don’t know what else to add or change to get this to stop.  I will file a bug on launchpad when I get a chance.

I hope that works for everyone, it did for me!

–aliencam

NOTE: I did this yesterday, and today I noticed the fingerprint reader was getting really hot… I saw a mention of a bug that causes this on thinkwiki, but I think the problem only occurs when I am plugged in instead of on battery. I also know that turning on USB Autosuspend does solve it, and powertop will enable that for you… I will investigate further later.

further note: the problem did not persist. Enabling USB Autosuspend once seems to have fixed the problem indefinitely.  Use the powertop program and it should ask you to enable USB autosuspend if you have this problem. If not, read the thinkwiki entry on thinkfinger, and it should help. If that doesn’t help, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

“Kaolinite clay has the formula Al₂(Si₂O₅)(OH)₄ in which the silica tetrahedral layer, represented by (Si₂O₅)^2-, is made electrically neutral by an adjacent Al₂(OH)²⁺₄ layer.” –Fundamentals of Materials Science and Engineering; William D. Callister, Jr. & David G. Rethwisch

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

I got “tagged” by Ubuntu Tutorials in my RSS reader. Everyone who does this should post a link to their post in the comments!

–aliencam

In Ubuntu 8.10, Inrepid there is no obvious way to create a keyboard shortcut to run a command or open a program or similar.  However, I like to have the terminal on a keyboard shortcut (super ~) so, here is how to set up creating a keyboard shortcut in ubuntu 8.10.

press alt-f2 to open the launcher, and launch “gconf-editor”

then go to Metacity> keybinding_commands

choose any of the commands (I didn’t have any taken already, so I chose command_1) then set the value to the command you want to launch (so for myself, I changed the value to “gnome-terminal” to launch the terminal)

Then go to the folder Metacity > global_keybindings

select the “run_command_*” equivelent of the command number you chose in the first step (I would select “run_command_1″) and change the value to the hotkey that you want to launch that command.   So for my command, I want it to be the windows key, and the tilde (~) key, I set it to “<Super>dead_grave” the windows key is always “<Super>” and because I use the international (with dead keys) keyboard layout, I had to set it to “dead_grave” instead of regular “grave” or “tilde” (grave is the ` character, or what you get when you press the tilde key without a shift)

You could also set this in compiz general keybindings, but I prefer to use the gconf-editor because I can make a key run any command I want, and I don’t need to have compiz installed/running for it to work.

Note: this will only work in Gnome, to do a similar thing in any or all window managers, follow this guide: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=79560

–aliencam.

Installing Mathematica in Intrepid does not work easily, I figured out that the problem is that you need libstdc++.so.5 installed. So, you should already have getlibs installed if you have a 64-bit system (if you do not, go to ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790 and install it from there)

If you have a 64-bit system, in terminal enter:

getlibs -64 libstdc++.so.5

and if you have a 32-bit system, you just need to remove the “-64″.

After installing Mathematica 6.0 in Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10, the bugs in Mathematica 6.0 are still causing the same problems.  These are: when you open mathematica, you get two blank windows spawned, and anyhting typed does not show up at all.

A solution to the extra windows spawning is to go to Edit> Preferences > Advanced, then click “Open Option Inspector.” In there go to Notebook Options, then Winodw Properties, and change Window Frame to “Generic”.

Then you can solve the problem of the text not appearing by always launching mathematica with the command “Mathematica -defaultvisual”, however it is annoying to type this every time, so here is a fix so that you don’t have to do that:

hit alt-f2 to open up a launcher, and launch “gksu nautilus” now be VERY CAREFUL, because you are now browsing the computer’s files as root and you can easily mess up everything.

Go to /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux-x86-64 (or /Linux if you are 32-bit) and rename the files “libQtCore.so.4″ and “libQtGui.so.4″ to “libQtCore.so.4.backup” and “libQtGui.so.4.backup”.

then close that window, open a terminal, and enter:

getlibs -64 libQtCore.so.4

getlibs -64 libQtGui.so.4

(removing the “-64″ if you are using a 32-but OS)

That should be all, Mathematica should work correctly from now on.

Of course, if you have Mathematica 6.0.1, there aren’t any of these problems anyway, but ASU’s license does not include the updates (nobody cares about us Linux users!)

–aliencam

okay, I am really tired, and I could not focus at all, so here is possibly the worst piece of writing that has ever come out of my fingertips (wow can we say that now since we type stuff?)

The topic of the essay was “analyze the unique architecture and functionality of the Internet.”

the following essay was written for my FMS 110 online class at ASU. it kind of follows the rubric, but mostly it is just horrible writing.

let the public humiliation commence… after the break:

Read More »

there are a few tweaks in firefox’s advanced configuration (about:config) that I always have  to do to get it to work the way I like it to.  Here are the ones that I have done this time:

Go to about:config, click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!”

gfx.color_management.enabled  set to true   Enables “color profile” making pictures look better in firefox.

layout.spellcheckDefault set to “2″  Makes it so that spellcheck works in all text boxes, including ones with only one line.

browser.blink_allowed set to false  Makes sure that any websites with the horrible evil < blink > tag do not work.

browser.search.openintab set to true  This makes the search bar at the top right corner open your searches in a new tab.

middlemouse.paste set to false  This makes it so that the middle mouse button’s click does not act as “paste” in firefox.

I also move all of the back/forward/reload, address bar, and search box to the top line, remove the “edit” menu, and move “preferences” to “tools” using the addon “Menu Editor”