Monday, September 22, 2008

Ubuntu Hardy issues

Just a place holder for stuff as I hit it.

  1. Hibernate / Resume has stopped working. Damn, now it takes me 10 minutes to start up and shutdown at the end of the day. That's time my employer is losing. With Gutsy, Sleep was great. Just shut the lid and leg it out at the end of the day to beat the traffic and pick up the kids. Now I have to stop writing code early. Tracking this, but I'm don't have an idea of when I might get the old functionality back.
  2. Thunderbird with Lightning 0.8 stopped understanding iCal, VCALENDAR and all remote and local Calendar data disappeared. I eventually narrowed it down to this. With libstdc++5 installed locally, a reinstall of the lightning 0.8 plugin brought all my calendars back. Might be moving more of them into the cloud from now on though.
  3. IO seems a slower, or the disk is getting spun quite a lot more. That's just a subjective impression though, and I don't have any Bonnie(++) numbers for my laptop before the upgrade.
  4. Network Manager seems to have a hard time with roaming now. At work, I'm on a LAN all the time. At home, I'm on my LAN or WiFi. Switching at home seems a lot more troublesome that it used to be, and /etc/init.d/dbus restart as my usual brute force approach seems to stop the NM applet from getting put back into the System Tray. No bug report for that yet, since that sounds a little woolly!

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Java Triple DES example

I had to do this recently, and the examples that I found through Google seemed a little lacking. So a pointer to others:



UPDATE

Changed to use a gist on github. That will probably dilute the search ranking of this post (which is reasonably popular) but gives me nicer formatting!

Monday, September 08, 2008

Environmental influences

Thinking back to leaving Yorkshire also popped into my head how we learn things. I left Yorkshire just before I was 10. When I left, I said "Ow" when I fell over. Within a couple of months of living in Warwickshire, I said "Aie-Yah". WTF? Call it mirroring, blending, whatever. I had changed my behaviour from what was previously defined to suit my new environment.

We've recently had cause to consider how the kids are being raised, after being exposed to some new ideas and rejecting them. That's not what I want to directly talk about now though. It's more how things are learned. We think Connor has a very high tolerance to pain. Obviously, this isn't a boundary that most people want to find the limits of, so I say that based on watching him when he was smaller, and how he'd happily fall over when learning to walk, and had no fear. When I say fall, face-plant would be more accurate. He never seemed to learn to put his hands out, because nothing hurt him, therefore he never used to cry. But he's learned. Callum is much more vocal when he's upset, even if it's just a flesh wound. I think Connor has learned to cry from Callum even though he's not hurt, or in pain to the level where it causes him discomfort. But if he falls over, he's learned that he should cry. Interesting.

Crystal tones

Al's been pointing out a few occasions when I lapse into Northern; e.g. "Look at them cars, boys!". Not the greatest grammar in the world, and the kids have started to pick up on it. It reminded me of my own childhood, when my folks used to find mine and my brother's habit of dropping our H's quite painful. I often wonder if a contributing factor to leaving Yorkshire was to correct our speaking before it became an insurmountable problem. "'Ow do Fred, what's tha 'aving fer t' tea?". Whereas personally I find it problematic that our kids are currently growing up saying 'glarse' rather than glas. Oh well, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.