Linux: Free has a cost

I'm running Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS (Long Term Support) on my HP DV6-3010US laptop. Works pretty good for the most part.

EXCEPT, every once in a while, the entire desktop freezes.
No response from mouse/keyboard.
Requiring the infamous 3 finger salute, ie a reboot.

This seems to be a known problem with the 10.04.
Here's a bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/647993

Still digging into this issue.

Linux: Updates myth busted

There's one Linux myth that I'd like to knock down for good. Updates.

One of the rants of the anti-Windows crowd is on updates. Long story short, its a bogus argument that Linux is any more stable/bug free/secure than Windows.

Having been running Ubuntu Linux for about 2 months now, I am prompted with updates almost every day or every other day. And many of these updates are security related, dealing with buffer overflows, denial-of-service attacks (yes I have Apache running on my Linux box) etc. Here are some examples of recent updates:

Version 0.6.25-1ubuntu6.1:

  * SECURITY UPDATE: denial of service via invalid DNS packet
    - debian/patches/CVE-2010-2244.patch: fail gracefully on corrupt
      packets in avahi-core/socket.c.
    - CVE-2010-2244

  * SECURITY UPDATE: denial of service via invalid DNS packet
    - debian/patches/CVE-2010-2244.patch: fail gracefully on corrupt
      packets in avahi-core/socket.c.
    - CVE-2010-2244

Yes, there was a time till atleast Windows XP days when updates were painfully apparent. But with the auto-update feature in Vista and Windows 7, all that is transparent now. With the occassional polite bubble telling me that my system was rebooted as a result of updates.

Bottom line, Linux (atleast the Ubuntu distribution) is no more update free that Windows. And I would go so far as to say that the updates are much more and much more frequent.

Getting autocompletion to work in a bash terminal on Ubuntu Linux

Been playing around with Ubuntu/Linux for a while now, and my memory of working on HP-UX is slowly awakening.

One thing that has happened lately is that I'm using the terminal (command window in Windows parlance) more and more. And one of the things I've come to use without thinking on Windows is the autocompletion feature in the command window.

By default, autocompletion is switched off on Ubuntu (not sure on other Linux environments). The way to switch it back on is to uncomment the following lines in the bash.bashrc config file:

# enable bash completion in interactive shells
#if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then
#    . /etc/bash_completion
#fi

Restart the terminal window, and voila, autocompletion now works.

Going for a Linux laptop

So for the heck of it, I thought it was high time I explored things outside of the Microsoft bubble, and therefore decided to get myself a laptop running Linux.

Did the usual internet search for Linux based laptops but found that the only ones available were custom ones that were pretty expensive. Dell had one for $579, but overall wasn't too impressed with the specs.

So I decided to get a cheap regular Windows-based laptop, and convert it to Linux. A random visit to the local Staples store revealed a bunch of HP laptops for less than $500. I finally decided on the HP DV6-3010US which has a dual-core AMD CPU, with 4 GB of RAM and more diskspace than I'll ever need.

I'll do another blog post that provides details on converting the laptop to Linux, but overall it was a breeze!

The laptop is now running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), is connected over wireless (which took a bit to setup), with a few apps I installed later like Eclipse for development purposes.

On the whole I'm pretty impressed with Ubuntu. Happily, Ubuntu's borrowed many of Windows GUI and usability aspects, so using the OS was easy enough.

A quick note on the HP DV6-3010US. Without a doubt it's a cheap laptop, and the cheapness is very evident in the quality of the materials used for the laptop (think Kia or Hyundai quality years ago). The processing horsepower with memory is decent enough, though. The most irritating part of the laptop is the mouse-pad which is close to impossible to use, and if you touch it wrong, does all sorts of wacky things (like suddenly highlighting and deleting all your text as you type). I clearly need to get a wireless (or wired) mouse before the mouse-pad drives me nuts.

The Feynman lectures, courtesy Project Tuva

Microsoft Research has a cool video player that showcases interesting videos on science topics. I found the Feynman lectures to be facinating.

Link is: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#data=3%7C6b89dded-3eb8-4fa4-bbcd-7c69fe78ed0c%7C%7C

Netflix Culture

This is a popular set of slides from Netflix outlining their corporate philosophy. There are many timeless nuggets within those slides.

Culture

Creativity

I'm currently on a quest (for want of something better to do) to get a better understanding of the creative process. As always, I start by reading and learning from whatever I can get my hands on on the topic.

1. http://www.goalsys.com/books/documents/DESTRUCTION_AND_CREATION.pdf.This article is just mind blowing stuff. It's one of the few known articles by an ex-fighter pilot known as John Boyd. Boyd was an extremely interesting character. He was legendary as a fighter pilot known as 40-second Boyd. The reason for this moniker being that he could beat any fighter pilot in a dogfight in 40 seconds or less. Jockness aside, Boyd also developed the Energy-Manueverability (E-M) theory that revolutionized air combat and fighter aircraft design for the American military. Somewhere along the way, Boyd started thinking about the creative process.
2. "Borrowing Brilliance: David Kord Murray" Murray states that innovation and creativity is really the use of existing ideas, but combined in a unique way to solve a specific problem. The process starts by gaining a good understanding of the problem from many dimensions. Murray is also a good storyteller making this book an enjoyable read too.
3. Ken Robinson's talk at the 2006 TED conference, titled "Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity"
4. "Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention", Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Mihaly is a psychologist who has studied the creative process for decades and came up with a theory called Flow to explain how individuals are able to unleash their creative side. A very interesting read.