The trick to finding the middle is to realize that the button “Random” is centered in the column and that the downward stroke of the letter D is the center of that button. Therefore just visually follow the downward stroke of the D in Random and that is the center of the strip. Here’s an example:

I don’t yet know a trick for finding the visual center of an image but I’ve never really felt compelled to do so, and I could always use a screen ruler if I did.

The program ‘Eclipse’ received an X Window System error.This probably reflects a bug in the program.The error was ‘RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)’.  (Details: serial 22386 error_code 172 request_code 152 minor_code 7)  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.   To debug your program, run it with the –sync command line   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

You’ll only see that in your console if you run eclipse from the terminal. Otherwise you get a pop-up dialog with too much information to humanly process.

The error is triggered when you do something that tries to auto-complete (or intelisense or whatever they call it) code for you. The eclipse bug spells out the solution. Basically you need to install xulrunner-1.9.2 and then start eclipse with a special command line option so that it knows where to find it.

The command to use is: (make sure this is all one line)

eclipse -vmargs -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/bin/xulrunner

The humorous part of this story is that the eclipse team marked this bug as not a problem with eclipse. Uhm, yeah, like people should just know this stuff.

For most users, an SSD is an extravagance. Until now. A typical consumer will be just fine with 30 – 60 GB of hard drive space. I base this on annecdotal evidence from those I know. A modern fresh computer installation takes about 5GB. A large photo collection adds 5 – 15 GB and a large music collection 10 – 20GB more. Documents, email and work often take under 1 GB but on a very busy person’s system make take as much as 5GB.

To put that into perspective, an iPad, which is a device targeted at media consumption such as graphics and video (the largest files a person will typically have on their computer) come in ranges of 16 – 64GB with 32GB likely being the sweet spot.

The exciting news is that now you can buy after market SSDs in the 30 – 60GB range for about $100. Alas, even though a budget computer for sale in retail could ship with a 60GB SSD, it would look paltry compared to a similar HDD based unit with a 250GB drive.

So the era is here, but it’s still primarily for the people who care enough about technology to upgrade their computer or those who are willing to spend the much larger sum for a high capacity model on a high-end computer.

But, as we’ve seen in many other areas, the adoption rate will grow now that we’ve hit this important price point.

In each of the cases below, the underlying premise is that God is the source of all wisdom and distancing ourselves from His council increases the chances of big mistakes. As a bonus, I’m including the notes from the follow-up class where we covered a few good examples to compliment the bad.

Israel and the Gibeonites – Joshua 9:3-6,14-16

³ However, when the people of Gibeon heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and Ai, ⁴ they resorted to a ruse: They went as a delegation whose donkeys were loaded with worn-out sacks and old wineskins, cracked and mended. ⁵ The men put worn and patched sandals on their feet and wore old clothes. All the bread of their food supply was dry and moldy. ⁶ Then they went to Joshua in the camp at Gilgal and said to him and the men of Israel, “We have come from a distant country; make a treaty with us.”

¹⁴ The men of Israel sampled their provisions but did not inquire of the LORD. ¹⁵ Then Joshua made a treaty of peace with them to let them live, and the leaders of the assembly ratified it by oath.

¹⁶ Three days after they made the treaty with the Gibeonites, the Israelites heard that they were neighbors, living near them.

What went wrong? They did not seek God’s council. (see below for how to get God’s council)

Beheading of John the Baptist – Mark 6:18-26

Just to be clear, it was not John that made the mistake, but Herod.

¹⁸For John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” ¹⁹So Herodias (Herod’s wife) nursed a grudge against John and wanted to kill him. But she was not able to, ²⁰because Herod feared John and protected him, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man. When Herod heard John, he was greatly puzzled; yet he liked to listen to him.

²¹Finally the opportune time came. On his birthday Herod gave a banquet for his high officials and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee. ²²When the daughter of Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his dinner guests.

The king said to the girl, “Ask me for anything you want, and I’ll give it to you.” ²³And he promised her with an oath, “Whatever you ask I will give you, up to half my kingdom.”

²⁴She went out and said to her mother, “What shall I ask for?”
“The head of John the Baptist,” she answered.

²⁵At once the girl hurried in to the king with the request: “I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptist on a platter.”

²⁶The king was greatly distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he did not want to refuse her.

We see here that John was beguiled into doing something he would not normally have done.

What went wrong? two things: The influence of an ungodly spouse and having a higher regard for the opinion of his peers than for God.

Johoshaphat and King Ahab – 2 Chronicles 18 (select verses)

¹ Jehoshaphat enjoyed great riches and high esteem, and he made an alliance with Ahab of Israel by having his son marry Ahab’s daughter. ² A few years later he went to Samaria to visit Ahab, who prepared a great banquet for him and his officials. They butchered great numbers of sheep, goats, and cattle for the feast. Then Ahab enticed Jehoshaphat to join forces with him to recover Ramoth-gilead.

³ “Will you go with me to Ramoth-gilead?” King Ahab of Israel asked King Jehoshaphat of Judah.

Jehoshaphat replied, “Why, of course! You and I are as one, and my troops are your troops. We will certainly join you in battle.” ⁴ Then Jehoshaphat added, “But first let’s find out what the Lord says.”

⁵ So the king of Israel summoned the prophets, 400 of them, and asked them, “Should we go to war against Ramoth-gilead, or should I hold back?”

They all replied, “Yes, go right ahead! God will give the king victory.”

⁶ But Jehoshaphat asked, “Is there not also a prophet of the Lord here? We should ask him the same question.”

⁸ So the king of Israel called one of his officials and said, “Quick! Bring Micaiah son of Imlah.”

¹⁴ When Micaiah arrived before the king, Ahab asked him, “Micaiah, should we go to war against Ramoth-gilead, or should I hold back?”

Micaiah replied sarcastically, “Yes, go up and be victorious, for you will have victory over them!”

¹⁵ But the king replied sharply, “How many times must I demand that you speak only the truth to me when you speak for the Lord?”

¹⁶ Then Micaiah told him, “In a vision I saw all Israel scattered on the mountains, like sheep without a shepherd. And the Lord said, ‘Their master has been killed. Send them home in peace.’”

If you read on after this you find that Ahab and Jehoshaphat go on into battle despite the warning against doing so. As foretold, Ahab is killed – the only causality – but not in battle, an errant arrow pierces his armour.

What went wrong? Ahab and Jehoshaphat went through the effort to learn what God’s directions were and then promptly ignored them.

To summarize the mistakes:

1. Pray to seek God’s council
2. Avoid the influence of the ungodly
3. Seek the approval of God instead of those of your peers
4. Don’t ignore God’s advice

Counterpoint: Examples of good decision makers

Gideon and the fleece – Judges 6:33-40

³³ Soon afterward the armies of Midian, Amalek, and the people of the east formed an alliance against Israel and crossed the Jordan, camping in the valley of Jezreel. ³⁴ Then the Spirit of the Lord took possession of Gideon. He blew a ram’s horn as a call to arms, and the men of the clan of Abiezer came to him. ³⁵ He also sent messengers throughout Manasseh, Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali, summoning their warriors, and all of them responded.

³⁶ Then Gideon said to God, “If you are truly going to use me to rescue Israel as you promised, ³⁷ prove it to me in this way. I will put a wool fleece on the threshing floor tonight. If the fleece is wet with dew in the morning but the ground is dry, then I will know that you are going to help me rescue Israel as you promised.” ³⁸ And that is just what happened. When Gideon got up early the next morning, he squeezed the fleece and wrung out a whole bowlful of water.

³⁹ Then Gideon said to God, “Please don’t be angry with me, but let me make one more request. Let me use the fleece for one more test. This time let the fleece remain dry while the ground around it is wet with dew.” ⁴⁰ So that night God did as Gideon asked. The fleece was dry in the morning, but the ground was covered with dew.

Gideon highly valued the direction of God and, as we see in chapter 7, obeyed him. But he didn’t trust himself and searched deeper to ensure he was acting in accordance with God’s desires.

What we learned: Understand God’s desires before you act.

Esther prepares to meet the king – Esther 4:10-17, 5:1-3

¹⁰ Then Esther told [her servant] to go back and relay this message to Mordecai: ¹¹ “All the king’s officials and even the people in the provinces know that anyone who appears before the king in his inner court without being invited is doomed to die unless the king holds out his gold scepter. And the king has not called for me to come to him for thirty days.” ¹² So [the servant] gave Esther’s message to Mordecai.

¹³ Mordecai sent this reply to Esther: “Don’t think for a moment that because you’re in the palace you will escape when all other Jews are killed. ¹⁴ If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die. Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?”

¹⁵ Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai: ¹⁶ “Go and gather together all the Jews of Susa and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will do the same. And then, though it is against the law, I will go in to see the king. If I must die, I must die.” ¹⁷ So Mordecai went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.

¹ On the third day of the fast, Esther put on her royal robes and entered the inner court of the palace, just across from the king’s hall. The king was sitting on his royal throne, facing the entrance. ² When he saw Queen Esther standing there in the inner court, he welcomed her and held out the gold scepter to her. So Esther approached and touched the end of the scepter.

³ Then the king asked her, “What do you want, Queen Esther? What is your request? I will give it to you, even if it is half the kingdom!”

What we learned: Earnestly seek God’s will

The Bereans – Acts 17:10-12

¹⁰ That very night the believers sent Paul and Silas to Berea. When they arrived there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. ¹¹ And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth. ¹² As a result, many Jews believed, as did many of the prominent Greek women and men.

What we learned: God’s plan never contradicts the scriptures, therefore always check to ensure your actions are in line with the Bible.

I hope this is helpful to you, the list of good and bad examples is short, share your favourite in the comment area below.

When I started at Canonical there was under 50 employees and the webmaster job description was quite broad. Over time as the company has grown and more people came on to help in various aspects my role became more of a marketing job, making content changes and running web reports. I was spending less of my time doing tasks where I excelled.

It’s kind of a lateral move. I’ll be switching to the team of developers responsible for managing our internal apps. I’ll continue to work on the Ubuntu.com infrastructure including Drupal, WordPress and Moin Moin as before. However this job is explicitly about developing custom application solutions. Someone else will be hired to take on the roles of managing the content and reporting for the website.

For those of you who are my colleagues in the Ubuntu community (i.e. not Canonical staff) our relationship will not change – I’m still the contact. As a matter of fact, there is a lot about my job that isn’t changing. I mostly get to focus on the parts I love.

This suits my tastes perfectly. I’m much more comfortable thinking about HTTP headers, reducing code duplication, CSS and the likes than I am hunting for typos, ensuring headlines are sentence case and keeping on top of web reports.

There will be a job post to fill the role of webmaster. If you’re interested in it, let me know and I’ll send you the details when they’re finalized by management. If you know me you know how to contact me privately and I think that would be the best method to express interest in the job.

Grounding Software, an Apple advocate, recently got a vague phone call from Apple saying their three-times-accepted app for the iPad was being withdrawn from the App Store because it did not conform to new, unpublished standards that were unable to be described.

The developers of the app had invested real money and real time following Apple’s guidelines to create an app for the iPad. People liked it. They were making money. But Apple changed their policy on what kinds of apps were going to be allowed and removed the app. And to make matters worse, the only way they were finally able to get an “answer” to why they were rejected was after they emailed Steve Jobs himself.

People have argued for a while that Android is fragmented. They say it is inevitable when you have 60 different devices with different hardware and different capabilities that you’ll get fragmentation. I have to admit to thinking this very thing when I heard the goals for the platform.

A blog post today from Dan Morrill, Compatibility Manager for Google’s Android platform publicly addresses this concern. Each device that is given access to the Android Market is tested for compatibility through a suite of 20,000 tests. And software is forward-compatible, meaning apps designed for Android 1.5 are compatible with newer software releases.

Android’s compatibility guidelines are the same as Apples. In order to get the benefits of compatibility you have to write your app to adhere to the published SDK. No using secret or vendor specific API calls in your app. (and Android, with it’s open source platform, makes it a bit easier to discover)

The difference is that Android’s guidelines aren’t secretly changing.

There are many aspects related to a release. I can only talk about my own perspective, as it pertains to managing the website. Usually, a week or so before release we’ve got a pretty good idea of what the website will look like and people are viewing it on a testing server. Invariably there are last minute changes, and I do mean up to the last minute.

Wednesday evening the release manager starts the process of dispersing CD images to the corners of the globe so that when its time to go live they show up on the mirrors pretty quickly. I talk to him and plan a time for me to come online to prepare the website for release. This time we agreed I’d be online at 5:00 am (10:00 UTC), aiming for a 12:00 UTC release time.

There’s an element of risk in pre-seeding the CD images because the image testing happens in parallel. Normally its not a problem but this release a serious bug was found. I’m not sure of the details but it was bad enough that there was a “day-of” re-spin. When I came online at 5:00 the disks were being remastered.

This went OK apparently but a new problem popped up. We have a mirror prober application that checks our mirrors to see if they have the correct images. We do this by making HTTP HEAD requests to ensure the file name exists and the file size matches what we have. Unfortunately, the remastered disk images were exactly the same size as the defective ones. Exact to the byte.

We couldn’t tell which mirrors had the new version and which had the bad version. We use a protocol to communicate with our mirrors telling them which files to mirror. Therefore we updated the list to include a dummy file. That allowed us to identify which mirrors were up to date and which were not.

Finally, about 12:21 my time (17:21 UTC) we got the word that it was about time to “push the button.” I had prepared by opening up a bunch of tabs with the pages that were changing, updating the pages so that all I had to do was submit each form. The release team gave me some last minute changes and in the process of applying those I accidentally closed my browser window. If you were in central Iowa you may have heard me scream.

I’m an optimist, so I hoped that firefox would remember the tabs and values of the forms, but unfortunately our authentication system redirects you to an openid auth page when you first visit it. All was lost.

So I copy and pasted again while people constantly instant messaged me asking if it was ready yet. Finally, at about 12:46 (17:46 UTC) the website launched. I kid you not, multitudes of people open their browser to the homepage and refresh again and again waiting to see the site change. I hear someone in the Millbank office with a bottle of champagne waits until the website updates so that they can celebrate. Talk about pressure.

We’re fortunate that our intense loads are so predictable. It gives us plenty of time to beef up our infrastructure and plan appropriately. When we get slashdotted we usually don’t even notice (unless they link to our wiki). A release day is at least 12 times more traffic than when we hit the homepage of digg and slashdot. For a reference, check out this image. The big bump is a release day, the small bump to the left of it is when we hit some big news site.

After the site launches I get a rush of bug reports. There’s nothing like having a million people proof reading your site all at once. The next couple hours are spent doing low-priority updates and fixing little issues that show up. About 3:00 my time (20:00 UTC) I stepped away from my computer and took a nap.

And that is a release day.

First, to summarize what I’m referring to, Apple recently changed the wording in the contract developers have to agree to in order to develop apps for the iPhone. The wording prohibits developers from using tools other than Apple’s own sanctioned set which strongly steer developers towards creating apps that will only run on Apple’s products. This was done just a couple days before Adobe was scheduled to announce a product that allowed developers to create apps that run on a variety of devices, not just Apple’s. Developers, especially those at Adobe, got very upset and alarmed.

John Gruber is a die-hard Apple fan. He will tell it like he sees it but has a tendency to defend Apple. He certainly did in this case. I don’t know John btw, but if you read this article you’ll see that he berates app developers who create cross-platform apps because they’re inherently lower quality and feel non-native but completely side-steps the fact that Apple creates cross-platform apps such as iTunes, Safari and Quick Time. Therefore I’m going to say that he’s not an objective reporter of facts, but instead is editorializing to support a group he likes.

Adobe (or it’s influential supporters and employees) has said some mean things about Apple on this subject. There is a clear division between the groups that are supporting either Adobe or Apple. It’s ugly.

There is a third group that is not getting talked about. This group doesn’t care about Flash and instead wants to create apps for the widest number of devices. Many think this #section331 change was aimed squarely at Adobe, but if so it hit this third group too. I’ll disclose that as a user of Appcelerator Titanium I’m in this group.

Considering Gruber’s support for Apple in the past I was quite surprised to find him writing an article that directly supported the view of this third group and certainly overlapped with the views of Adobe.

Either way, something terrible is going on. But worse than anything related to this specific case is the bigger picture: we don’t know.

…what Apple is losing are iPhone OS apps that aren’t being made in the first place by developers who aren’t willing to take their chances … violating one of Apple’s unpublished and heretofore unknown rules.

Keeping the rules secret may make things easier for Apple, but it’s weakening the platform.

This is a good piece and there’s no way a brief summary can get the full meaning, but you can see here the gist.

Adobe’s employee Mike Chambers has a similar feeling, though a bit more strongly worded:

Essentially, this has the effect of restricting applications built with a number of technologies, including Unity, Titanium, MonoTouch, and Flash CS5.

To be clear, during the entire development cycle of Flash CS5, the feature complied with Apple’s licensing terms. However, as developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at anytime, and for seemingly any reason. In just the past week Apple also changed its licensing terms to essentially prohibit ad networks other than its own on the iPhone.

Again, this is only a brief summary, the two articles each take you to different conclusions, but where they agree is that developers, especially those unwilling to invest themselves into a single platform, are afraid to target Apple’s iPhone OS.

There is fear that if we use platform agnostic development tools we’ll be suddenly kicked out of Apple’s app store. How would you like to spend months of time working on an app only to be prevented from sharing it with others?

A friend of mine made a snarky remark that we can still use HTML5. He’s right, of course. But right now there’s currently no marketplace for HTML5 mobile apps. I’ll be writing about this further soon but for now, if you want to commercialize or promote an app on most of the mobile devices you have to go through the Apple AppStore or the Android Market. And that means using a tool to create a native app.

I was in the process of developing an app that would be part of an article for a developer magazine and had to put everything on hold when this issue blew through. It appears Phone Gap has been given amnesty so I will proceed cautiously, hoping that Apple’s whim doesn’t change.

When you purchase a certificate you must perform some additional steps besides those to create a self-signed certificate. These steps help you demonstrate who you are. For example, it may require that you prove you can receive email at the domain you’re security, prove that you own the domain, talk to a person or use an automated system that calls you to verify your phone number and identity or even fax business verification documents.

Once you’ve performed the steps necessary to show that you are who you say you are you receive an SSL certificate. Of course you also have to pay money.

I’m not really in agreement that the fees associated with an SSL certificate are justified. The cost of verifying an organization that is purchasing a certificate are pretty much static and don’t vary depending on the number of servers they have. Yet you buy the certificates by the server. If it costs $50 to verify an organization and that’s how much they charge for one certificate and a businesses purchases 10 then you’ve got yourself a pretty good margin. If you don’t believe me, ask Mark Shuttleworth. I shouldn’t complain because his success at selling SSL certificates pays my salary.

In case you haven’t used XMarks before, it also supports synchronizing book marks between browsers. It works for IE, Chrome, Safari and Firefox. On some of these browsers you can also synchronize your passwords. Give it a shot at http://www.xmarks.com/