Trinitum

I’m a regular grep user, I use it dozens times every day, but I think I’ve found a program that will replace it in my toolbox. It’s ack and it claims to be better than grep.

Ubuntu 9.10 comes with Perl 5.10.0. I decided to upgrade it to the 5.10.1. This is usually not recommended to upgrade system perl, there are rumours that this may cause numerous problems if not render the system completely unusable, so accepted way is to install new perl into separate directory. Still I wanted to try and here’s description of how you can reproduce what I’ve done.

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I’ve got new 500G HDD for my Dell M1330 and reinstalled Ubuntu. After installation I experienced several freezes — notebook blinked with caps and scroll lock leds and didn’t respond to any keys but power off. Every time this happened while wireless was actively used. As I discovered, the source of the problem was STA driver for WiFi card. After I installed b43-fwcutter, removed STA, and switched to b43 open-source driver the problem went away.

After upgrading Perl to 5.10.1 at Friday I found that POE::Component::Server::PreforkTCP, which we use in one of our products, doesn’t pass its tests anymore. Perhaps it’s possible to fix, I don’t know yet (it was Friday evening…), but as module not updated since 2002 I decided to check if there’s some replacement for it. I’ve found POE::Component::Daemon, it looks very promising for now and I really like it. Here’s TCP echo service that I wrote as example while playing with this module:

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Another problem with Ubuntu 9.10 is that if you starting gvim from command line (and I do that quite often) you see following warnings:

** (gvim:5944): CRITICAL **: gtk_form_set_static_gravity: assertion `static_gravity_supported' failed

That’s rather annoying. The bug and the fix were known before release, but package is still not fixed. In order to fix the problem this patch should be applied.

Packages with patch applied: sources, i386, amd64

On Ubuntu 9.10 two-finger tap works as right mouse key, not as middle anymore. Addition of the following command into startup applications fixes this problem:

synclient RTCornerButton=2 TapButton2=2 TapButton3=3

And yes, now you can follow me on Twitter.