Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.4 Linux is out.

I’ve got it installed on all my boxes, except may be a shoe box. I am thoroughly thrilled about its looks, apps, performance, features and stability. After testing it for some time (ever since alpha 1 version was out), installing and reinstalling it numerous times I  have to say – it’s a great operating system! All the devices worked out of the box on all the computers, even the brand new, fresh smelling Radeon HD 5830. It boots in an instant, it has all the apps you’ll ever want (for free) and, with the Compiz eye candy, it looks even better than OS X. In fact it was the OS I was waiting for, from the times I’ve first installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on my laptop back in, well, 2008.10. Yes, Jaunty 9.4 and Karmik 9.10 offered a great ride, but they are not the LTS.

Lucid Lynx is a long term support release (LTS) that means that the Ubuntu folks spent lots of hours working out kinks and quirks of the previous release (9.10). They’ve fixed [most of] the problems and will provide fixes in a future for 3 more years.

Is it for an average user? I think so. The install process is trivial (pop the cd in, run the installer) and quick. The user base and the all the forum/wiki support that comes with it is enormous. In fact it is so big that when I need to google a linux related topic, it get more relevant results by using the work “ubuntu” instead of “linux”.

So, if you are still thinking about Windows 7, stop. Start thinking about a better alternative, that will cost you $0.

I’ve moved this post to the more appropriate section of my website, the Tech Knowledge Base Wiki. 

Looks like the mass media is making a big deal of the fact that new iPhone (and the new iPhone OS 4.0) will support multitasking… They either are technically challenged or too superficial (probably both). As it stands now, iPhone OS 3.1.2 is multitasking. In fact, it has been multitasking since the very conception of the iPhone OS. And so has every mobile OS from the times of Palm and Handspring.

To prove it, here is the list of services (ps -ef) iPhone runs simultaneously at any given time.

What the media perceives as a lack of multitasking is the fact that the iPhone’s application launcher (SpringBoard) forces an app to exit before showing an home screen where you can launch another app. In doing so it merely makes sure that the apps do not eat up your battery like termites, while not interacting with the user.

So, ignore all the fuss and just know that iPhone OS 4.0 will not force an app to exit before lauching another one. That is it.

My favorite Internet browser, Opera, has just been released for the iPhone. It is free and means that Apple is finally relinquishing some control over their famed mobile platform. Opera is awesome on the iPhone! It is faster, smoother, has tons of navigation options, including the speed dial and the full screen, and can be configured just the way you like. Now Safari is collecting dust, much like IE…

The secret recipe that makes Opera blazingly fast are the Opera’s mini servers. Opera on the iPhone relays all its traffic through the mini servers. The servers proxy and cache all the requests, translate webpages, css and javascript into a more compact format and downsize images. They also use SOCKS protocol for maintaining a connection with the iPhone. That allows them to provide push updates to the iPhone and  helps to do away with all the HTTP/REST overhead while keeping connection handshake/teardown to a minimum.

PS. Yes, there is a catch. The mini servers terminate SSL before it reaches the phone in order to cache and downsize encrypted pages. Why they made that sacrifice is beyond me, but this means that there is no end-to-end encryption in the Opera Mini browser. So, if you plan to do banking on your iPhone and are slightly paranoid you might what to stick to Safari. Just remember, it is still going through AT&T’s mobile data network.

Despite the nefarious acronym I decided to give the KDE version of the new Ubuntu a try. I’ve lived in a Gnome environment all my Linux life, but used certain qt based tools, like Yakuake and Opera on a daily basis. Having heard of all the the good things about KDE, I wanted to see the first hand what the buzz is all about. And what I found exceeded my expectations. KDE is very controllable environment that still retains user-friendliness. It’s an environment for the folks with computer skills that does not punish by usability problems in the GUI department, that are ever so often found in the UIs designed by developers. So if you like to set up your system your way in every-which possible way, try KDE. On the other hand I’ll still keep gnome around for my wife. It is plain and simple and does not seem overwhelming to a normal computer user.

Some time ago our dishwasher quit. It gave out a smoke (actually a very nasty smell of the burning plastic) and stopped draining water. “Never fear”, I said, whipping out my trusty Bosch drill and turning off the circuit breaker. Half and hour later I’ve noticed something black and twisted in the guts of the dishwasher’s underbelly, resembling a piece of plastic poo. Bringing it to the light of day showed a wire canister with a metal core, also known as solenoid. The core popped out of the canister, heated up and distorted all the plastic around it. So, it looked like it was time to go to the magic place, also known as the internet. After quit a bit of searching, with google being quite uncooperative I’ve stumbled on a blog that pointed me to repairclinic.com. They had the part but it was a bit more expensive than I would have expected for such a primitive component. But I had no choice, other sites sold it for even more. Ten days and $30 later I had the part in my hands, still in it’s genuine GE plastic wrap. What I saw next surprised me even more. The part was sold without the necessary plastic arm, the springs and the core (can you technically call it a solenoid if it does not have a core?). Why would they sell a part of a part? May be because the other parts of the part were also available for sale for equally outrageous prices? Quite possible, but I did not agree to it. I took the heat gun and melted the remaining plastic off the old core, molded the old arm back into it’s original shape and stripped the springs off the old part, stuck it all on the new canister I was sold under the name of a solenoid and stuck it all back into the bowels of the dishwasher. Viola! The dishwasher dishwashed perfectly.
Two things I’ve learned (besides the fact that a burned solenoid can be caused by a malfunctioning timer motor if you care to know):

• GE (maker of the dishwasher under the Kenmore brand) uses cheap and sub-par components to make its dishwashers
• GE sells parts for profit. Shameless profit. And they price the parts to get all the money they can from these who own their appliances.

So if I have a choice, I will stay away from GE as far as possible (the dishwasher came with the house by the way). As usual here is the photo of the offender, happily clicking away in its native habitat:

Update: the adventures continued when, after a month of good work, the second solenoid quit. This time it was fried in the closed state not letting any water enter into the dishwasher. Internet says that two fried solenoids in a row point to a malfunctioning timer (even though when I measured it earlier it was showing the correct resistance). The new one costs $120 so I am going to buy a new dishwasher this time.

A month ago my iPhone has started doing weird stuff. It wanted to shutdown every second. It had blackouts while being booted. It randomly lost microphone input on the headphones. It wanted to raise the audio level to the max. Ok, I thought, you need your brains wiped and so I did. I’ve re-flashed, re-loaded and re-hacked all of its OS content, but the phone still had issues. I then noticed that it did not really like being squeezed. When squeezed it immediately presented a shutdown screen as if the power button was pressed. Now, I know, there is not a squeeze sensor in it, so it all naturally pointed to a hardware failure. And then I heard a rattle. A faint rattle, just a bit when I shook the phone in a certain way. That could not be good, I thought, so I took the smallest screwdriver I had, a suction cup and in two minutes the iPhone was split open, like a black oyster shell. Lo and behold, the cause for the hardware failures was immediately apparent. A small screw came loose inside the case and fell onto an IO board, shortening it. I took the screp out, put the puppy together and voilà – no more brainfarts! Two things I do not understand thought. How could a screw inside a case, those intent in life was to tie a MB to the case, could become completely undone? And then, how could the screw not fry the iPhone guts completely while on the loose? So, I guess, electrical engineers at Apple are good, mechanical are not so much. Here is the photo of the offender.