Froggy chilling on moss
Voting abroad and document distribution chaos.
In Turkey we are approaching a referendum for a major constitutional change. I’m not going to write about what the change is and how it impacts citizens’ lives, that’s my father’s job 🙂 Instead I’m going to write about how voting abroad for Turkish ex-pats is handled.
I’m only living abroad for ten years and I know before I left Turkey, there was a concept of voting on the border (which includes consulates and physical borders.) About ten years ago us, the Turkish ex-pats, were not allowed to vote anymore for any elections or referendums in Turkey. It looks like this is changing now for better I hope.
For the last few months emails are being forwarded between ex-pats, some major Turkish political, cultural organizations, web sites are spreading the word about this new right to be able to vote abroad. But the way this “spreading the word” is done in such a weird way that I am feeling very uncomfortable to follow what is really going on.
So far I got 4 different emails pointing to 4 different web sites and none of them are official government web sites. When I go and read the content of the news about this, none of the articles are pointing to an official governmental word about voting abroad. Instead they unanimously talk about filling a form, and mailing it to your local consulate or the General Directorate of Civil Registration and Nationality of Turkey.
The distribution of that form is the main issue here. You are filling a National Form that requests every bits of your identity. Especially this form has to be distributed by only Turkish Government. How can I trust a form that I download from any site?
All the sites I mentioned above, host the form and link to their version of the form. One site hosts it in MS Word format as a .doc file, the other hosts it in Adobe Acrobat format as a .pdf file. One site has a version with pretty graphics, the other one with straight text format… Come on!
(When I was trying to find different versions of the form on different web sites I realized one of those web sites was already hacked by a Turkish hacker group. Now can you trust this?)
I worked pretty much 4 years of my life trying to fix that type of issues with the Turkish government between 2000-2004, it looks like nobody learned anything on electronic government practices.
It’s time for Turkish government to create a central, secure repository for documents, and standardize all government related paperwork. Anything close to this is e-Konsolosluk web site (which was down when I was writing this entry) and that is only for consular services. How to do this is another topic which I will be writing in the near future.
Lotus Notes 8.5 on Ubuntu 10.04
If you need to run native Linux client for Lotus Notes 8.5 on Ubuntu 10.04:
1) After installing your ibm_lotus_notes*.deb files, drop the following files under /opt/ibm/lotus/notes
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
libgdk_pixbuf_xlib-2.0.so.0
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0
You can get the files here.
2) Install msttcorefonts package: sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
3) Go to File -> Preferences and choose Windows and Themes on the left pane. For Theme, choose Operating System Theme. This way most of the fonts in the UI look much better.
The Beast
Heavy HDR. Picture of the evil clown thingy in Seattle.
Gnome and the glslideshow screensaver setup.
First of all, setting up screensaver configurations in gnome is a total mess. I don’t know why they decided to release and use gnome-screensaver instead of using xscreensaver. And I don’t want to know either.
My ubuntu setup is an archaic one. It’s an upgrade over an upgrade over an upgrade. I probably upgraded 4 or 5 times. So my config files might be overwritten, wrongly upgraded, etc… But I was having this horrible issue of not being able to setup my glslideshow settings.
You can search this online. Mainly people are complaining about how to setup the directory from where glslideshow reads the images, also how to set it up so that it doesn’t idiotically show the same images 5 times over and over again. Well I’ll repeat these in this blog post and some more which are not covered.
Initial Setup:
First of all to setup the directory to read the images go to your home directory and create/edit file .xscreensaver like the one below:
imageDirectory: /home/username/Pictures/Slideshow/or/wherever
This sets up your screensavers that are using images, to use this directory instead of /usr/share/backgrounds (the default directory). Some people on the internet tells you to symlink it to your directory, but I think this is a far better way of doing it.
If you read the glslideshow manual (RTFM), it tells you that by default glslideshow pans an image for 6 seconds (Ken Burns/Pan Scale effect) and displays it for 30 seconds. This means that the glslideshow will idiotically display the same image 5 times. (30/6=5)
In order to fix this issue, you will need to tell it to pan it n seconds and display it also n seconds. So the command should be:
/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glslideshow -root -pan 6 -duration 6
(-root means display on the root window which is the way screensavers work)
The configuration for this resides at: /usr/share/applications/screensavers/glslideshow.desktop
Go ahead and edit that file as root and change the line that reads:
Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glslideshow -root
to
Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glslideshow -root -pan 6 -duration 6
Now you are ready to have a slideshow that displays with pan/scale each image for 6 seconds.
And it all doesn’t work…
This is where the shit hit the fan for me. No matter what I did, my glslideshow was still running as /usr/lib/xscreensaver/glslideshow -root (ps aux | grep glslideshow)
After a stubborn and painful few hours I discovered that these settings were being cached in a file called: /usr/share/applications/desktop.en_US.utf8.cache (This is WTF number one)
If you look at this file, it’s a 56 KB cache file of all the settings gnome is reading for all of it’s applications!! I guess it should have been setup to delete it on restart but for some reason it never got deleted…
After renaming this file (never delete them, always rename them 🙂 ) the slideshow started to run as I wanted it to be.
WTF number two was that when I tried to add new images to my slideshow directory, glslideshow never picked them up. At the end of another painful search I found that the list of images are actually cached in a file called .xscreensaver-getimage.cache under /home/username/tmp/ (username is your username). I got rid of that file…
So now, it looks like I have a slideshow screensaver which kind of works. And hopefully you too…
Fire jumping
Fire man, originally uploaded by Emre Saglam.
This is a street performer jumping a fire rope while standing on a ball @ the Baltimore Harbor.
White squirrel?
Printing envelope on a Canon MP620
I successfully printed my first envelope on my Canon MP620. I used Open Office and this wiki article from openoffice.org. Al I needed to do extra is to choose the orientation icon like this.
The rest was just to feed the envelope from the manual feeder 😉
Easy and recommended!
Nokia n900 new firmware is out.
Nokia released a 16 MB minor release for the n900. The firmware version is: 3.2010.02-8
I had some issues with the update. I basically ran out of rootfs disk space. The update application complains as: Not enough space in location. For me disabling all the extra repositories and running apt-get clean; apt-get autoremove did the trick.
This looks like a bugfix update, and might be paving the road for the PR1.2 release. Still official changelog is a mystery. For more info check this thread on talk.maemo.org.
Also the update takes another ~3 MB on your rootfs. 😉
Better news on the n900 battery
I am starting to believe that my battery issues were 2-3 isolated incidents. Lately the phone is staying a full 13-15 hours without any issues with moderate usage: 3g/wifi browsing, media player + FM transmitter and the rest.
One thing I did is to remove the RSS applet and empty the RSS feeds. I almost never use them anyway. The other one is to shutdown the phone, remove the battery, hold the power button for 10-12 seconds, put the battery back and start the phone. I don’t know if any of those had an effect on the battery life.
I also contacted the Nokia support, since I still believe that there is an issue with my phone battery. They will send me a new battery. I will have a chance to compare the new one and the old one.
I had a chance to chart a “normal” usage and the deep sleep mode for the phone looks like working pretty good. I’m hesitant about posting more charts to my blog, but I’ll do it anyway to be fair to the previous post. Here are the charts.
As you can see: the system load is way better:
