* Boot OSX and run the Disk Utility tool. Create a new partition using the free space in your HD. Don’t format it, just leave it as free space.
* Download and install rEFIt. Once you’ve done that, you can setup Linux as the default OS by editing refit.conf and uncommenting #legacyfirst.
* Insert Ubuntu’s CD and restart.
* Hold the ALT key while booting up so you are offered all boot options. Select Ubuntu’s CD and install.
* DONE.

No need for Bootcamp or anything, it’s as simple as that.

Just a note about how I’m installing Ubuntu these days. Read sometime ago somewhere (sorry, no link) about being able to reinstall Ubuntu without losing your data. It goes like this. When installing Ubuntu, choose manual partitions. You need to create 3 of them, in this order:

* System partition: pick up the space you want, but 15 – 20gb should be enough since it’s going to be for the system only. Select “/” as the mounting point.
* SWAP: select it on the combo and pick up at least the size of your RAM.
* Everything else, for the home partition. Select “/home” as the mounting point.
* DONE.

Now, next time you want to reinstall Ubuntu, if you follow the same partition scheme, you will boot up to the new system and all your data will be there. And with “all the data” I mean all the data: bookmarks, browser history, files, subversion sites and credentials…. Since in the Linux world all user data is (or should be) stored in your home directory, and you don’t touch that one when reinstalling, you boot up to a new system with your old data in place. I call that a “dirty” installation as opposed to a “clean” installation when I back up all the files and completely wipe out the hard disk.

As per Ubuntu on the MacBookPro, it’s going fairly well. Haven’t touched the console for the installation. Just used the proprietary hardware drivers manager (System > Administration > Hardware drivers) for the WiFi and the graphic card. Have to say that after trying the NVIDIA closed drivers I’m sticking with the default ones, seem to do the job for me. Only if you want the F keys to work as normal human beings would expect, you go through this (using the .conf file method).

Our current project at ustwo™ is a PureMVC-multicore application. Sounds really fancy, but it’s only a SWF loading SWFs.

To compile those SWFs we have some scripts using Ant, MTASC, SWFMill, Rhino and other tools. Updating from SVN and compiling 18 modules was taking around 90-100 seconds (that’s updating and compiling the whole project, you can compile single modules much faster).

Keep in mind that our compilation process is a little bit more than calling MTASC. We are running some pre-processing, generating exclude files and some other trickery to gain extra performance (we target mobile devices).

Anyway. Got a hint from one of our developers so I did some research to find a way to speed up compilation time. Since most of us have now dual-core machines we should be able to parallelize some of the work, right? Indeed we can.

Finding PPSS was quite easy but understanding how it to works was a little bit more complicated. I’m not going to bore you to death with the nitty-gritty, so this is the flow that adapted better to us:

* In bash parse the list of module folders and create a txt file containing the path to a script passing to it the path of the module as a parameter. One line per module:

* Feed that txt file to PPSS like this:

That’s where the magic happens. PPSS parallelizes each call to the compilation script using both CPUs. When you run it you can see they go all the way up to 80-90% usage, which is kind of the point.

We took some metrics and found a 40% speed improvement, sometimes even more. If you are a compulsive compiler like yours truly, this saves you quite some time.

Going from the serial approach to the parallel approach wasn’t straight forward. Mostly because I had to split the main script into several scripts and that caused some issues due to my bash programming limitations. This is what I learnt:

* If you execute a script from another, the child doesn’t have access to the variables defined by the parent unless you export them…
* … but arrays don’t get exported.
* Also, you can’t “escalate” exported vars from children to parents. The trick only goes from parent to children (security, I guess).

Anyway. Some more command line black magic under my belt, which is great. The console is a very, very powerful tool that can simplify and standardize daily tasks, which is a must when you are on a team of 10 devs. Not that it is the nicest programming language (actually, it’s pretty ugly), but its ubiquity makes learning it worthwhile.

Couldn’t help myself. One of my workmates bought it so I had the chance to see it in real action. After that, couldn’t help myself.

I spent some time crunching numbers about what should I do. Buy it unlocked or get a deal with a carrier? If so, contract or pay as you go? Which company? I think for the first time in my LIFE I created a spreadsheet. Put nice rows detailing contracts, pay as you go, companies, initial payment, minutes, texts, internet… Very boring indeed.

I finally decided to buy it unlocked from HTC (well, a distributor, 390 quid, sent in 2 days) and get a “Solo 30 days” contract with T-Mobile. Basically for 20 pounds a month I have more minutes and texts that I can ever use plus 1GB of internet on the phone, which was the important bit. Also this is not a long contract, I can go somewhere else only after 30 days.

It finally came on Friday and I’ve been playing with it since. Overall impression is that it’s REALLY good. Interface is second to none. Is fast, slick, responsive… integration with Google services is almost flawless (little bit scary privacy-wise, to be honest), GPS on Google Maps is really good, you can customize whatever you want, etc.

The things I don’t like so much are: proprietary mini-USB connector. As opposed to the Magic, this one has a standard 3.5mm jack but still the USB connector is HTC only. This is so bloody annoying and I hope the EU law to force a standard charger kicks in once and for all (NOTE: the USB port and charger is the same). I also don’t find very useful the button that opens a search box and takes you to Google straight away. I find difficult to believe that Google has forced HTC to put it there, but who knows. Whatever the reason, to me is a hardware button that I don’t need and I can’t remove.

An interesting spin from the Hero is it turns out Linux IS very ready and capable for the GUI/desktop space. So why don’t we see an interface as polished as the Hero’s on Linux desktops? Well, when you design for one and only one device it’s so much easier to get it right. Your testing efforts, UI design, drivers… all of them target and focus a single piece of hardware. And if you get 80-90% of the job done from Google already, you “only” need to put the cherry on top.

Android is lowering A LOT the the threshold to become a mobile manufacturer, you only need to put the hardware and testing instead of having to also build the underlying OS. I could be pretty wrong, but I think Android is going to be the base for a ton of devices in the near-ish future.

–

To wrap up, who said websites should not offer a “watered down” version for mobile devices? Fuck that! I’m loving the mobile version of these sites:

• Wikipedia
• BBC
• Google Reader
• Marca

They are the non-fatty versions of their big brothers, load very fast and most of them don’t even have ads, so you get what you are looking for quickly. And when you are out and about on a not-so-fast mobile connection you really appreciate succinctness. I’m all up for adding the extra value mobiles could bring to those sites (GPS location, for example, but there’re privacy issues as well), but please keep the mobile versions, thanks.

PS: Yes, it comes with a Flash Player installed. Which one? I don’t know. The beta of the Flash player 10 for mobile devices is supposed to come out late this year, and I don’t think this one plays AVM2 swfs. It does play Flash fullscreen (including YouTube), but I haven’t run any tests just yet. Will keep you posted if/when I do.

Another nice side effect of that is that you start writing your own scripts for your daily tasks. Time ago I wrote one to which you could feed a folder and would recursively look for images and create thumbnails. This was very handy after taking pics to be able to send some by email to friends and stuff (doing this CLI because as far as I know, there’s no way to do it in the GIMP, is that so?). Sadly, I lost it in one of the reinstallations. Well, not again.

I’ve just commited to the ZCode repo my LameScripts folder. So far it only contains 2 super-lame scripts to use my beloved Beyond Compare as a external diff tool for GIT and SVN.

If you are crazy enough to use them, just check them out somewhere in your home folder. Then edit your .bashrc file and add at the end:

Now you can call them anywhere you are on the console. Each script should have basic instructions if they need any. Needless to say:

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

I’ve been waiting for quite a long time for an all-in-one device that should enable me to browse, email, listen to music and take some pictures of my drunk friends, no rocket science required. The obvious choice would be the iPhone, but I’m so sick of Apple’s closeness that I just can’t think about it (rejecting an app on the AppStore because a top-less in page 3, WTF?).

So, I’ve been waiting for the HTC Magic, also known as the G2, an Android-based device that promised a lot. Today I popped by my local Vodafone store to see it in action and left happy. It’s slim, light, the screen is responsive and the Internet plan is only 30 quid a month with enough texts and minutes.

Came back home and started looking for comments on the Internet, and that’s when the disappointment began. Being based on Linux, you would’ve thought that it would come with software for synchronizing it in Linux, right? WRONG. The HTC Sync software requirements are:

** Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) or higher or Microsoft Windows Vista
** Microsoft Office Outlook 2000/2002/2003/2007, Windows Address Book (Outlook Express), or Windows Contacts

Not even Macs for fuck sakes. The alternative for Linux is SynCE, but I just don’t fancy expending hours reading blogs and forums to try to make it work.

Let’s move on, what about the music? What capacity does it have? Answer: 512mb. Yeah, that’s right, you read it correctly: 512mb. You can, however, expand the memory by using microSD cards. Ok, not nice but not a huge deal, I can buy a 16gb card anywhere for 40 pounds. But, oh, wait, what about the headphones?

HTC ExtUSB™ (11-pin mini-USB 2.0 and audio jack in one)

That means no standard 3.5mm jack, you have to buy from HTC yet another stupid cable when you have another thousand headphones already.

I don’t know, maybe these issues are not as big as they look now, but while I was coming back from the shop I was a happy geek thinking “I could buy it tomorrow” whereas now I might wait until June when new Android devices are expected from other manufacturers.

I hate companies.

Asses the demand of Linux versions of different pieces of software is tricky and a chicken ‘n’ egg situation. There’s no Linux version because there’re no users or there’re no users because there’s no Linux version? A mix of both, but FB being based on Eclipse and Eclipse being already crossplatform, what’s actually stopping Adobe from doing the port? Could it be that they are not ready to give customer support to Linux users?

Being a Flash developer on Linux is not easy, I can tell you that. But I think the biggest deal at the moment is NOT the lack of an IDE, it’s the FLA format. I already have a compiler (Flex SDK) and I already have another IDEs (FDT, even Scite) but when I get a FLA file from a designer I’m screwed, there’s nothing on Linux to handle it.

I’d rather have Adobe investing time on the XFL format (ZIP & XML based, easier to edit from any platform) rather than investing on Flex Builder for Linux. If there’s an open format that the super-geeks can play with, I’m sure sooner or later they will come up with an editor for Linux. See gTalk for example, no Mac or Linux official client (boooo), but there are a ton of Jabber clients already (yay!), so no big deal. [Talking about formats, Office 2007 SP2 implements ODF support and even allows to set it up as its default format. Great. News. Indeed.]

Anyway, if this is a big deal for you and you want to be heard, there’s a bug opened, vote for it.

Since my favorite diff tool has now a Linux version I thought it was about time. It didn’t take me long to find out this post.

#1 Install Beyond Compare for Linux

#2 Create this script and save into /usr/bin:

#3 Edit ~/.subversion/config adding this into the Helpers section (not at the end of the file):

#4 Done. Now when you type svn diff /path/to/file it launches Beyond Compare.

Sweet.

I’m not sure where I heard about Crunch Bang but got the Live CD, tried it for 3-4 days on a VM and yesterday finally decided to give it a go. Although the change is big, is not massive because CB is based on Ubuntu. So, same package manager, same forums, things go pretty much on the same folders, etc.

What has really, really surprised me is the desktop. CB doesn’t use KDE or Gnome, it uses OpenBox, a very lightweight and minimalistic window manager. Check it out:

Sweeeeeeeeeet. You might be thinking though that the desktop looks very clean just because this is a fresh installation, right? Nope. It’s stays like that forever. How? Simple, you can’t have anything on it. I mean, the Desktop folder exists but its content is just not displayed. I have to say that I usually have a rather tidy desktop anyway, but opening up your machine and getting nothing but a beautiful picture is just relaxing. And yes, you can do that by yourself, but I don’t know many people with that amount of self-discipline. So the pile of temp files and rubbish is still there, but hidden.

Next one. Do you see the start menu? Don’t look for it, you can’t see it. It’s hidden under your right click mouse button and it looks like this:

You can of course edit it to your needs, something that I’m yet to do. And last but not least, have you noticed those statistics on the top-right corner? That’s Conky , a very light, very configurable system monitor. And look at those little beauties below: tons of shortcuts ready to use! If you are a shortcut-aholic like I am, you’ll be delighted.

So far so good, although I’m sure it will annoy me at some point. Now I have to finish the installation (this has been a full re-installation, usually isn’t, but I’ll talk about my experience with Linux installations other day) and I also have yet to discover what I’ve lost during the migration. Because no matter how many systems I’ve reinstalled in my life, I always forget to backup something. If you hear me screaming in a month, now you know why.

People need to get it through their thick skulls that Linux is a kernel for a unix-like operating system. The primary purpose of Linux is not to become a replacement for the Windows desktop, or to become the latest gadget PDA system. Its purpose is not to be a fancy, shiny, eyecandy competitor for OSX. Its purpose is to be an extremely versatile, scalable, and portable kernel for a unix-like operating system.

*Linux has succeeded as the number 1 OS of choice for HPC and supercomputing applications.
*Linux has succeeded as being a very popular OS for Internet-connected servers.
*Linux has succeeded as being the OS of choice for many embedded systems, home entertainment applications and DVR systems.
*Linux has succeeded as a powerful development environment.

Linux has succeeded in so many areas that it would be tedious to list them. Primarily, though – Linux has succeeded far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams in its original goal: to be a viable monolithic kernel for x86 systems, so that x86 users can enjoy unix.

Linux is not going away. In fact, since the day GNU/Linux has been available, it has done nothing but grow and increase in usage. And not only has it grown, it’s grown wildly… from hacker OS, to mainstream OS, to a laughable nuisance to Microsoft, to a downright huge challenge to Microsoft’s vitality in the server market. From where I stand, I’ve never even seen a dip in its growth. It’s only growing more, and it will continue to grow. Linux has succeeded, and will continue to succeed.

I fully agree and I’ll add my bit. For me, a key success of Linux is “forcing” compatibility so everybody can use whatever OS the hell they want. I’m a Linux user myself and honest to God I don’t give a shit if you want to use Windows, incredibly annoying Macs or you connect to the Matrix via a mobile phone. But what I really care about is when I get a Word document I cannot open, a video file with a non-free codec, an audio streaming I cannot listen to. That is a problem for me, not if you use Mac or Windows.

And same as a big Firefox success is forcing all websites to follow standards, a big Linux success will be forcing standards on the desktop too: ODF, OGG, SVG, etc. File formats that anyone on any OS can read and write without patents and royalties.

Many people think that only Linux users have this problem with proprietary codecs but do you know that at least the first versions of Windows XP could NOT play DVDs? Windows Media Player gave an error and when you asked for help you were taken to a MS’ website with a list of partners to buy a DVD player.

Anyway. The Linux year has been already. Linux will continue to grow. And that is very good news not only for Linux users but also to everybody else. Whether they know or not. Whether they care or not. Whether they acknowledge it or not.

I think he and many others are right to think that targeting Windows is the most effective way of spreading a virus because it’s present on most computers out there. But the more Linux and Macs grow, the bigger the reward will be for whoever cracks them down. Same old story as with Firefox.

But what the article doesn’t say is that out of the 3 one is Open Source. And that’s a big deal to me. Finding bugs in Open Source projects is indeed veeeeery easy. You can either go to their bug tracking system, check out the change log or simply diff the latest version with the previous one. Piece of cake. Now you know what security bugs they’ve fixed so the only thing remaining is finding out previous version already installed and you are good to crack.

So, what you think it’s more secure, Firefox that makes all this information publicly available or IE with its security through obscurity? I have no doubt.