February 2012
1 post
Chromium is open source. Does it matter?
arun@dell: ~/src/chromium/src $ du -sh third_party/
4.8G third_party/
Out of the 95k commits, a mere 356 are from people outside of the google.com and chromium.org domains. Not sure how many of the chromium.org commits are from google employees.
PS: AUTHORS lists about 160 non-google employees, mostly sporting gmail.com email addresses.
I wish large open source projects that consume more open...
January 2012
1 post
Stop all the ads that follow you around the net
By periodically running a script such as this:
$ sudo apt-get install sqlite3
$ cat ~/bin/clean-cookies.sh #!/bin/sh sqlite3 $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/cookies.sqlite « EOF delete from moz_cookies where not (host like ‘%youtube%’ or host like ‘%google.com%’ or host like ‘%facebook%’); .quit EOF
Tested on Ubuntu 11.10 + Firefox9.
November 2011
1 post
Bank of America badness
Timeline:
10/9: Call to not mail me the shiny new BofA credit card. Rep closes my old account without permission
10/15: Payment due. Scheduled payment cancelled. My access to e-payment history removed.
10/18: New statement with a $22 late fee + $35 in interest
11/5: Angry phone call when I find out about the late fee.
11/9: I pay the full amount on the 10/18 statement that was due 11/15.
...
October 2011
6 posts
Firefox 7
Switched my default browser back to Firefox from Chrome after a few years. With Firefox 7, I don’t feel there is a significant performance delta between the two browsers. Competition was clearly good for consumers in this case.
Introduction to libunwind
Link.
libunwind 1.0.1 and google-perftools
Responded to a thread on this topic.
September 2011
4 posts
Dell C521 suspend/resume problems
I have a AMD based desktop from 3-4 years ago that’s working perfectly fine as a Linux desktop box - except that it doesn’t suspend to either ram or disk when I’m not using it.
I’m about to get rid of the PC, unless I can get this fixed somehow. Dell doesn’t have any more BIOS updates and the ubuntu bug has expired and no one seems to care.
Based on the bug trail,...
libunwind 1.0.1 is here
This was a minor dot release with a bunch of bug fixes for the 1.0 release. Download, enjoy and unwind.
MSFT vs Linux on desktop: still relevant?
10-15 years ago, a post like this would’ve gotten the slashdot crowd all riled up about free software and the “evil empire”.
I’d say it doesn’t matter any more. There is increased competition in the market and don’t know of anybody dual booting. I buy hardware to run Linux and if it allows only crypto signed kernels via UEFI, I’m going to buy something...
After 3 years
Things are roughly the same (including the pricing).
December 2008:
HP Pavilion dv5t Entertainment Notebook - Onyx - Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1 (32-bit) - Pentium(R) Dual-Core Mobile Processor T3200 (2.0 GHz) - 15.4” diagonal WSXGA+ High-Definition HP BrightView Widescreen Display (1680 x 1050) - FREE Upgrade to 4GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm) - Intel(R)...