ZenLinux Blog

Now that I’m settling back into some serious Rails development, I’ve been increasingly annoyed by this bug where the Compiz window manager (which provides all the fancy 3D effects on my Ubuntu system) causes dialog boxes in Java applications (e.g, NetBeans) to appear blank on an intermittent basis. Thankfully, it’s been fixed! You simply need to run jre 6u10.

This fixed version of Java is packaged by default in the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex repositories. For those of us still running Hardy Heron, I can confirm that using the Intrepid packages works without problems. There is also a bug filed in Launchpad lobbying to have 6u10 included in Hardy as an update.

I have the misfortune of living in a town where there are no good coffee houses. In fact, there are no coffee houses at all (although we have four Dunkin Donuts and a couple of drive-through coffee kiosks – bleh). A Starbucks appeared for a year but ended up being the only Starbucks in New Hampshire to be closed down during their recent company reorganization. This didn’t surprise me, because every time I went in there I never saw more than a few customers at a time.

For a while I’ve coped with this situation by enjoying fine teas. The simplicity of preparing tea is wonderful – pretty much all you have to worry about is the temperature of the water and steeping time. Cleanup only takes an extra minute or two.

Lately, though, my interest in tea has waned and my attention has turned back to good coffee. So I pulled out my grinder and french press and have been enjoying coffee. The thing about making a good cup of pressed coffee is that you have to become pretty obsessive about the process. Now I spend nearly as much time cleaning my grinder and press pot as I do enjoying the results.

Is it worth it? Certainly for the time being. And when I head to the Pacific Northwest next month I can compare my results with some of the masters.

With the release of Firefox v3.0.4 the other day, I was hoping to see the inclusion of the mjpeg bug fix. Unfortunately it was not included with this release, but the bug report mentions that it is being planned for inclusion in the next release, v3.0.5. In the meantime I guess we’ll have to do another patch and compile.

My plans are shaping up to visit the incredible city of Portland, OR next month.

Portland Bike Box

My plans currently don’t involve renting a car because the public transportation and bicycling infrastructure is so amazing there. The one downside is I’ll be there during the rainy season (defined as October through May), but I’ve become hardcore enough about bike commuting that I already have some wet weather gear I’ll bring along with me. With plenty of bike shops that rent bikes, I’m really looking forward to exploring the city on a deeper level than my previous visits.

I’ve spent the better part of this week doing battle with a pesky problem in Firefox v3. The bug report on Mozilla’s bug tracking system (along with a patch to fix it) can be found here if you’d like to read all the gory details.

The product I’m putting the finishing touches on at work is a touchscreen-based appliance that can, among other things, display video streams from IP cameras. The lowest common denominator for IP cameras it supports is the motion JPEG protocol, so early on in the project (many months ago) we did some testing and found that Firefox readily supports displaying these streams, and that we could also use a video player plugin for better system performance. Sounds like an easy feature to add, yes?

Nope! It turns out that the bug I referenced above means that once you display an MJPEG stream, it never stops running. If you browse away from the stream you still take a performance hit, and Firefox eats up the CPU and network bandwidth resources as if the stream was still being displayed. This became a critical problem on an embedded platform that needed to display up to four IP camera streams at the same time. Additionally, the camera streams are not the focus of the product (its primary purpose is to control multiroom audio systems).

So onto “Plan B” – the mplayer video plugin for Firefox. As a bonus, this plugin makes use of hardware video acceleration to display streams, resulting in significantly lower CPU utilization. Have we found a winner? No, again. The plugin did its job well, until you went to unload it from the page. This process turns out to take an indeterminate amount of time due to various complex interactions between the plugin and the independent mplayer process that also needs to be shut down. The delay would amount to several seconds regularly – unacceptable for the product’s requirements. Various aggressive methods of killing the plugin to avoid the delay only resulted in killing Firefox along with it. And through communication with one of the open source developers of the mplayer plugin, we confirmed that this was a inherent design problem that could not be overcome.

So what now? All I can say is we are very, very lucky that the Mozilla team fixed this bug. Although it is not yet released into the mainline Firefox, I was able to apply the patch cleanly to the sources and compile a custom Firefox that meets our needs.

It’s been a long week, but in the end I am still grateful that we’re using open source software as our technology foundation. It may have its problems, but if you put some effort into searching through the infrastructure that’s publicly available on the web (i.e, bug tracking sites and mailing lists) you can usually understand and find the solutions to your problems.

For years now I’ve maintained my own rsync-based shell scripts to “synchronize” my web browser bookmarks and email client address book between the various computers I use at home and at work. The scripts didn’t actually synchronize changes – they were more of a way of pushing or pulling changes, and I’ve developed a diligence in keeping track of what’s most up to date to avoid clobbering the data I want to keep.

Recently I started using the Foxmarks Firefox extension for managing my bookmarks, and it has worked flawlessly. This free plugin does true synchronization – meaning I can add or delete bookmarks at will on any machine at any time and distribute my changes without losing any data. This kind of bookmark sync service has been around for a while, but Foxmarks allows me to store my data on my own server – a key feature I had been waiting for for some time. All I needed to do was add WebDAV support to my Apache setup. It even works with https and authentication.

So checkout Foxmarks if you need to keep your Firefox bookmarks synchronized. I believe it also supports sync’ing password data too, but I’m too much of a security geek to keep passwords stored in my browser.

This blog is starting to become pretty heavily-themed as a cycling blog. I suppose it’s because things at work have been pretty hectic, and at this point all I do is work and ride (especially to relieve work-related stress). 🙂

Anyway, I went on a ride this morning with a friend and took some photos. Enjoy some of the fall colors of New Hampshire:

Last weekend was a bike-filled one. On Saturday I rode 100 miles in the Tri-State Seacoast Century. This is the same ride I did last year, when it was my first-ever century ride. This time it was my third (having done my second one in late July).

Hampton Beach

Rye Beach

Former Naval Prison

For once, I’m glad to say it wasn’t a dramatic experience. I rode on my own for most of the ride, but shortly after mile 80 I managed to hop on the back of a decent-sized paceline and enjoyed a nice draft for the rest of the ride (when it counted the most). I finished in 6 hours, 55 minutes of time on the bike. I felt really good after the ride, better than I ever have before. My new Salsa Casseroll is turning out to be a great investment in the type of riding I do.

Nubble Lighthouse

On Sunday I rode with a buddy out to see the Portsmouth Crit. We arrived just in time to see the men’s Pro race, though I could tell there was so much going on that it would have been worthwhile to make a full day of it.

Portsmouth Crit