Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

I’m using the current Ubuntu alpha – 11.04 as my desktop OS on my laptop, and on the same laptop I sometimes need to run VirtualBox to access an MS-Windows environment.

In the current Natty alpha this doesn’t work well. I have VirtualBox 4.0 installed from Oracle’s repository, but it doesn’t manage to compile the kernel module it needs – probably because of the “RC” nature of the current Natty’s kernel (2.6.38-rc4) as of this writing.

I’ve seen many posts on the internet about running Ubuntu 11.04 as a guest in VirtualBox, but couldn’t find anyone talking about my problem, which is the opposite – running VirtualBox on Ubuntu 11.04. So here’s how to get this thing working:

1. Install VirtualBox 4.0 (from Oracle’s repository)
2. Install the kernel headers package for Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install linux-headers
3. Edit the headers’ Makefile to declare the same version as the uname command: run uname -r and note the suffix after the version number, for example mine says “2.6.38-3-generic“, so I am interested in “-3-generic“. Edit the Makefile using sudo gedit /usr/src/linux-headers-<version>-3-generic/Makefile , and the fourth line should say something like “EXTRAVERSION = -rc4“. Change the value (in this case “-rc4“) to what you found out from uname.
4. add autoconf.h to the linux include directory, because it is missing for some reason:
   cd /usr/src/linux-headers-<version>-3-generic/include/linux
sudo ln -s ../generated/autoconf.h

Now you can run sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup and it should complete successfuly and allow you to start VirtualBox.

Related articles

• Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narhwal” Will Not Have A Release Candidate (digitizor.com)
• ‘Natty Narwhal’ Alpha Offers Peek at Ubuntu 11.04 (pcworld.com)

Ok, it might not be new – but it’s new to me: Ben & Jerry’s have managed to make a crunchy peanut butter ice cream! It is called Chubby Hubby and I can totally understand why its called that way – I can eat it all day 🙂

Related articles

• Next Android Version to be Called Ice Cream Sandwich (pocketnow.com)

Is because my laptop only has 2GB of memory.

OK – it sounds worse then it is, but with normal use Firefox is simply way too heavy for my – not too shabby – Thinkpad T61 Core2 Duo T7250 @ 2GHz with 2GB RAM. Its not a stellar machine by today’s standard by its less then 3 years old and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be able to run a modern browser.

But with both Evolution (that requires a couple hundreds MB of memory) and Eclipse (at ~ 600 MB memory) I can’t also run Firefox which with just a few tabs open takes up close to 1GB of physical memory (and tons of virtual). My system just comes to a standstill, and lets not talk about running – oh, I don’t know – a terminal!

So I’m using Chromium and while its developer tools are not as good as Firebug, at least it doesn’t hog up all my RAM and with a few dozen tabs open my system is still pretty responsive.

It may be the process separation in Chromium that is better, allowing the operating system to swap out completely tabs that are not used. I’ve heard some talk about having the same thing for Firefox (project electrolysis – though at this point it seems to be focused on the Fennec mobile browser) and I do hope they get on with it because Firefox’s memory consumption has grown in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years and unfortunately my computer’s memory has not grown with it :-(.

While filling in a silly personality questionnaire (you know the annoying type: If you’d have been X, what type of X would you be?), I figure out the most computer geeky personality question ever!

It was obviously way too geeky for the task at hand, so here it is now for you to answer – or better yet: invent your a worst geeky personality question:

If you’d have been a design pattern (or an anti-pattern), which design pattern you’d be and why?

I, for laughs, I’d say I would have been a Duff’s device – complicated and impossible to debug 😉

Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right

Its the first annual catholic conference on “Geocentrism”¹, where you’d find interesting lectures such as “Scientific experiments showing the earth motionless in space” and “Geocentrism: they know it by they’re hiding it”.

Brilliant, and just when you though its safe to walk outside.

Thanks to Skepticality, some brave fools are going to go there, possibly armed with t-shirts proclaiming their heliocentric beliefs. I probably would have put out something like “Galileo was right but all I got was this lousy t-shirt”. Or something.

1. The second worst thing after “flat earth” – those heliocentric, Copernicus worshiping fools are wrong and the earth is the center of the universe [↩]

Sometimes, when you try to develop things that work in Internet Explorer, you get to a point where you can just scratch your head and wonder “what the he*$ where they thinking of?!?”. This is one of those cases:

This is in Internet Explorer 8 when set to IE7 mode, but this is very faithful to the original as I’ve tested it on a real IE7 and it behaves the same. What happens here is that when you scroll the page down, all absolutely positioned elements (the two “combo boxes” which are a custom UI widget and the text “Dimensions:… at the top right corner”) get pulled down a few pixels. When you scroll up, they get put back in the correct place.

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As Intel confirmed, the HDCP master key has been leaked (using PasteBin of all things¹ ), and have been reproduced² around the web in blogs and forum posts.

One, more industrious, individual went a step further and reproduced the HDCP master key as a Python program to generate sink and source keys according to the leaked instructions – which is reproduced here fully for the purpose of mirroring (no copyright notice was added so I don’t know who to thank for this). More musings about the meaning and purpose of all this – after the break:

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1. Where it quickly went out of control, people don’t seem to understand the concept of  “mirror” or “offsite backup” 😉  [↩]
2. 1890 sources, total for today and not including this one [↩]

One of the neatest features of carrying a small Linux computer in your pocket, is that you have a machine to hack everywhere you go 😉

After getting a terminal application installed, you find that most stuff that you want to do require “root access” on your android phone – it appears that on Android they don’t really use “user permissions” but instead each app is its own user id with its own set of permissions (an ingenious way to handle different permissions per application).

To do most interesting things you need to make sure you can get root access. As a normal phone user you aren’t expected to need this so this feature is disabled on phones and to enable access to the root account you need to crack the phone’s security model. (more…)

While I’m maintaining RPMs for the Kohana PHP framework, as I discussed here, I thought it will be a good idea to track the stable “upstream” development.

The Kohana project have recently released an update to their 3.0 release, so I’ve integrated this back to the RPM distribution and you can now get an updated RPM package from the RPM repository here and a source RPM is as usual available here.