I don't use my computer to listen to Audio CD's, but I rip a lot of CD's on it. So every time I insert a CD to rip, GXine pops up and tries to CDDB it and starts playing it. It's incredibly annoying. Normal UBuntu instructions say to go to the Removable Drives And Media control panel in the system section to disable / change this behavior. I remember having trouble finding how to do this in XUbuntu 6. Since I upgraded to 7.10, it is still hard to find. By hard to find I mean it is not there :)

Heres what you do. Go to Settings -> File Manager -> Advanced -> Configure Volume Management.
That gets you to the removable drives control panel. The you can configure auto-run altogether, or just disable the Audio CD functino under Multimedia.

Settings (click for a bigger picture):

File Manager:

Advanced File Manager Properties:

Removable Drives and Media control panel:

Auto play audio CD setting!

I read this poem in a book called "Secrets of Super Achievers" (Philip Baker). It's credited to unknown, but (apparently) first appeared in the book "A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Athiesm" by Ravi Zacharias. I think it holds some truth.

Sense Of Hope

In the 1950's, kids lost their
innocence. They were liberated
from their parents by well-paying
jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that
gave rise to a new term - the
generation gap.

In the 1960's, kids lost their
authority. It was the decade of
protest - church, state and parents
were all called into question and
found wanting. Their authority
was rejected, yet nothing ever
replaced it.

In the 1970's, kids lost their love.
It was the decade of me-ism,
dominated by hyphenated words
beginning with self: self-image,
self-esteem, self-assertion. It made
for a lonely world. Kids learned
everything there was to know about
sex but forgot everything there was
to know about love, and no one had
the nerve to tell them the difference.

In the 1980's, kids lost their hope.
Stripped of innocence, authority
and love, and plagued by the
horror of a nuclear nightmare,
large and growing numbers of
their generation stopped believing in the future.

I had some trouble with Adobe Photoshop CS2 today. I was doing some mock ad banners for a client, and whenever I went to tag the banner with text, it wasn't visible. I tried changing the font to some really common ones like Arial and Times New Roman, but nothing seemed to work. All the display area showed was a dot and a line where the text was supposed to be when I edited it, and it wasn't visible at all after anchoring it! The text layer was still there though.
I found out, PS does this when the background color and the text color are the same, so you can see the run length of your text. Change the text color back to black, worky worky ;)
So if your text looks like this (when editing), don't waste an hour trying to figure out what is going on! :)

Well yesterday I upgraded my version of MacFUSE and SSHFS. I have to say, I'm much more impressed this time :)
Because I'm using a Powerbook, I close the lid a lot when I'm going away from the comp. Of course this puts the laptop into sleep mode, which means the network goes down. Upon opening the lid, the network is brought back up.

I was using MacFUSE 0.3 before, and upon the network connection breaking and being remade, it would randomly decide to either:
a) Prompt me for my password and reconnect
b) Rudely fail to reconnect, causing MacOSX to tell me that the mount had broken and would I like to force eject it
c) Fail to do either of the above, and just freeze the Mac Finder when the Finder tried to probe the mounted file systems

Sometimes option C would also cause the whole computer to freeze, depending on what program I had open that were polling the filesystem. MacFUSE / SSHFS 1.0 nicely fixes this, and now always performs option a if the connection is out for long enough for the SSH connection to time out. V.nice :)

I'm also blogging from Dashboard using the official Google Blogger Widget now, which is why there is a flurry of posts. Just hit F12 and blog :) I don't know how to edit the HTML (add links and images etc), or set the title from the widget though. Sigh. Still, it's easier to add that later than to make 100 posts on the fly :)

I swear sometimes the simplest things in Mac OS X are just...hard. I have a bunch of images (JPEG's) that I want to print. I open them all in Preview (in the same window), but it will only print 1 at a time! And preview does not allow Command or Shift-selecting for multiple thumbs of documents. I don't understand why this is difficult. Google was sufficiently uselss on this as well. I tried a bunch of image viewing apps...they were all more complex than they should have been. And none of them would print more than 1 page at a time (freeware apps). I guess I will have to resort to dumping them into an OpenOffice document and printing that. But even that is harder than it should be: I can't drag and drop them into an OO document, nor can I Command / Shift-select multiple images to insert! Big sigh. End rant.

I have a bunch of hosts in my backuppc configuration using Tar. I removed the SSH command because they all point to the local host IP (I use hostnames to logically separate backups).
One of my backups kept failing with this error:

"Tar exited with error 512 ()"

I Googled a bit and found it could relate to permission errors. This made sense, but the perms were all the same as another backup I have...which completes successfully.

I tried to find out more about GNU Tar and the errors it can produce, but the newsgroup posts I found were not very helpful (I wonder, is there any official documentation for these errors?). What I found was that Tar will exit with error 512 if there is a permission error OR a failure in following a symlink. I had some dead symlinks that were breaking the BackupPC tar command. Delete those links and all is good!

I found this out a couple of months ago: It *is* possible to uninstall programs in Linux, properly...if you use the Debian package management at least :)
So that means Debian and Ubuntu are good to go :)

Normally to remove a package you do this:

dpkg --remove package
or
dpkg --purge package
or
apt-get remove package

I usually use purge because it gets rid of the config files too :)
If you use apt-get remove though, you can then do this:

apt-get autoremove

And it will get rid of any libraries that are not in use by any packages. So if you install a package, and it ocmes with a bunch of libraries that nothing else uses, and you then uninstall that program...then autoremove gets rid of all those libraries too :)

Kind of like the old deborphan program...but built into apt :)

Neat huh?