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The LXDE-based Ubuntu release for low powered systems will be officially supported by Canonical according to this announcement

I’m not certain if this is good or bad. There are some things that I’d like to see updated in Lubuntu , but I definitely don’t want to see some of the new features without a way to fall back to the old way.

Some advice for Canonical – remember that people use Lubuntu for stability first and lower system resource requirements. Any changes that impact those 2 main items need to be carefully considered.

You may want to try out the 11.04 Lubuntu release.

I like the latest Ubuntu Natty 11.04, but it doesn’t like my system. It locked up much too often to be used here. That’s too bad because I became addicted to the quick launch using keyboard shortcuts. Addicted.

So after the last crash running unity-2D, I gave up on Unity, 11.04, and started using my LXDE-based Ubuntu 10.04 again. I missed those built-in keyboard quick launchers enough to look up how to create them. It was pretty easy to add them to LXDE. I suspect it is possible to do similar settings for Gnome-based desktops, but the examples below will not work for stock gnome.

So I was watching the HNN show for this week and near the end they showed a list of companies and the counts for unpatched, yet known vulnerabilities in their software. Below is the list. Not surprising me, but Adobe is at the top … again.

What does this information tell me?

• Stop using Adobe software. I think Adobe needs 3+ more years to create software that includes security by design aspects. Patching their old code-base, which is what they’ve been doing, doesn’t help. The design flaws from a security perspective are too large.
• I’m pretty impressed that Microsoft is so low with their huge number of software products.
• Oracle has never been very good at pushing patches for their products, IME. Their tools tended to be used on internal networks, not on the internet, so being lax wasn’t as big a deal. With the purchase of Sun, Oracle really needs to step up their patch fixes.
• I don’t use any Apple software … but they are involved with CUPS (UNIX printing) in some way.
• The HP issues seem to be mostly connected to backup software that I doubt most people have or use.

A first look at Natty Narwhal, aka Ubuntu 11.04, under VirtualBox 4.0.6. I’m coming from this as a daily user of Lubuntu 10.04 LTS. I don’t use Gnome much as I find it bloated and slow.

I’ve been using Natty for about a week. In general, I like the new interface. It isn’t nearly as big a change as others would have you think. It is easy to change to a different interface like the old Gnome or even the Unity-2D for the graphics impaired machines, like mine. Give it a week and learn the keyboard shortcuts, I think you’ll like it. I found myself trying to use them on my non-Natty systems and missing those shortcuts when they weren’t available. That says something to me.

It seems just like yesterday when the Space Shuttle Endeavour had her first mission in space. That was 1992. Those of you who know me, know that I worked as a NASA contractor from ’89 – ’96 writing GN&C software for the space shuttle fleet, writing applications for the mission control centers around the world and laptops used onboard the shuttles and space station. Thousands of other people have similar, if not closer, connections to Endeavour.

Endeavour was the first shuttle to fly with an upgraded nose-wheel steering. This is particularly personal for me, having spent about 9 months implementing the software to take advantage of those upgrades. Many thousands of lines of code and some Karnaugh mapping to speed the boolean decisions. Many thanks to Henry for pointing this dumb ASE to that logic simplification technique. I recall during the code review at IBM-FS that nobody had checked those lines of code for 100% accuracy due to the complexity. They announced it. A peer on my team had validated it by creating exactly the same equation himself (thanks BW!) and we tested every possible combination of inputs to validate we met requirements 100%. It passed. Running that many tests was a major team effort with all the other coders jumping in to save me from missing the deadline for weeks. I doubt anyone has touched that code ever since.

I have fond memories of walking around building 30, working on the FCR computers, servers and working with the different flight controllers. This week, I found myself re-watching the HBO From the Earth to the Moon series. It brought back more memories even if some of the places aren’t 100% accurate. I also recall watching the Apollo 13 movie on opening day, surrounded by NASA flight controllers at a local movie theater on NASA Rd 1 in Webster, Tx. Yes, we saw it during work hours. Together, we changed the world for the better.

Anyway, Godspeed Endeavour. Here’s wishing that you only exercise the nose-wheel steering and elevon flight control code that I implemented for smooth landings and none of the other code – mostly for when really bad things are happening.

The launch is scheduled for around 3:47 pm today. I always hold my breath (not really) during a launch. Going into space is a dangerous business the way we currently do it.

Sure I’m a little late, but I recently discovered the Panucci Resuming Player for Nokia N800/N810/N900 internet tablets. I’ve tried music playback programs and have always been disappointed since they didn’t support 30 second skip forward, backwards or resume after power off exactly where I was previously. Panucci does all these things.

Last week (4/12/11), Microsoft pushed out a bunch of patches. I didn’t really notice most of the changes, but one changed the way that the mouse snaps to an open window. Yuck. I alt-tab to change programs all the time – all the time – and even the alt-tab moves the mouse over the center of the screen where the program selection window is temporarily located. Some of my automatic scripts open and close new windows. When those windows are opened, the mouse is moved, but when they close, it doesn’t go back where it came from or set the focus back to the prior window. Not good.

Anyway, just typing “mouse” into the superbar under Windows7 offered Change how your mouse works with a checkbox to Activate by hovering …. Uncheck that choice and the mouse behavior works the way I need again.

Why would a patch need to alter this mouse behavior?
Perhaps some security issue with auto-focus?
I dunno. Perhaps it was just there to frustrate UNIX/Linux people who use focus follows mouse.

Gnome3 was released this week. I usually don’t try new releases, since I prefer to let others find the issues, report them and wait for the fixes. After reading an article over at LifeHacker and seeing all the unknown questions about gnome3, I decided to grab an ISO and give it a try. Below is a very short look.

With the release of Gnome 3 and pending next version of Ubuntu running Unity, there are many things changing in the Linux GUI world.

When you run a business, you will probably need to scan documents and store them into a document management system. Often, those document scans become completely unsearchable since the text is not included for the DMS to index. Entering metadata for each document becomes critical, especially keywords that someone else will likely use to find the document later.

Xsane for Scanning

I’ve been scanning using xsane on Ubuntu/Lubuntu for a few years. The Brother All-in-1 MFC-240C in my home office is used for faxing and scans. It was found and worked just as expected. It runs as a normal user, not root and no sudo needed. It is a great, home-use sheet fed scanner.

Improved Scanning + OCR With gscan2pdf

Installation was uneventful. The standard install method for Ubuntu/APT worked and brought in necessary dependencies.

sudo apt-get install gscan2pdf

Next I tried to run the application as a normal user – I wasn’t hopeful, since whenever you connect to hardware, there are probably group permissions that need to be worked out. Since I’d already been scanning with the same user using xsane, I was cautiously optimistic. It didn’t work – got stuck scanning for the scanner hardware and properties. Ok, so perhaps it needs the first run to setup the hardware as root –

sudo gscan2pdf

As each page was scanned, a thumbnail was displayed in the left border and the main page area showed the scan for page 1.

OCR – Optical Character Recognition

I don’t recall whether the OCR was a checkbox or automatically included in the job. I do recall there were choices for where the text would be placed inside the resulting PDF. I chose to place the text under the image for the page, other options were before or after. With that choice, text searches would locate the correct page. At the bottom of each scanned page is an area with the text results of the OCR process. For the first page, the word accuracy was about 90% with many consistent mistakes. 90% accuracy sounds better than it turns out to be. To correct 10% of the words on a page takes longer than I would have liked. There is no spell checker built into this tool, so I copied each page of text into LibreOffice and used that spell checker to correct the problems. Some of the OCR created words that are in the dictionary, but didn’t make any sense in context. This is a common issue for OCR. The good news is that the PDF file has the fairly high resolution scan which definitely shows the words just as you’d expect.

The Results

I’ve found a new scanning tool. It works and creates image-based PDF files. At this point, the only drawback is that running this tool without elevated privileges doesn’t work, at least not so far. For most home users, this is a minor issue.

I forgot to mention that I ran this program over an ssh -X connection. No issues.