So I’ve been experiencing issues with Pidgin randomly freezing, locking up, and behaving erratically in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. I looked into the issue and ran into this bug. If you’re unfamiliar, Canonical did some significant changes to libnotify in 9.04 and that bug seemed to tip me off to the problem.

I use the nVidia restricted drivers as well so it could be a problem in that arena, but if you’re suffering from the issue, until it gets fixed, you can just disable the Pidgin libnotify plugin (go to your Plugins menu and uncheck the “Libnotify Popups” plugin). This should fix the issue, I’ll correct myself if it doesn’t.

I seem to deal with the most obscure scenarios known to computing, and here’s another one.

So you’ve installed Ubuntu on your Mac running a dual boot with OSX, but you messed up and accidentally installed the bootloader to the MBR.  Well this will render your system useless as Mac’s use EFI and GPTs, rendering MBRs rather useless, outside of its MBR emulation mode that is.  However in order for it to function properly, it needs to be on your first Ubuntu partition, not in the whole disk’s MBR segment.

You could just reinstall, but that’ll will leave another icon of Tux just sitting there in your rEFIt menu.  Its a little annoying in my opinion so lets get rid of it.

Within OSX, pop open your Terminal (yeah, that thing that none of you Mac-heads ever use but us UNIX guys can’t live without).  If you’re running a Mac with only 1 hard drive then its pretty simple.  Just type in sudo fdisk -u /dev/disk0^{See note} and just type in your password and go.  This will write a new MBR to the proper segment and remove the extra logo from rEFIt.

If you’re running multiple hard drives with ZFS concatenation, or RAID, or whatever the heck you may be doing, you’re on your own, sorry

Note: Be careful in performing this action, because it does mess with your MBR. I don’t think your Mac is going to be that picky with the MBR since it uses a GPT by default but it still could render your system unbootable. As such I obviously take no responsibility for your actions. You break it, its your fault, not mine.

This message was originally sent to the Daily Oklahoman as a letter to the editor but I decided to post it here too.

Note: This letter was written to Oklahoman schools but its easily applicable to quite a few colleges, check your institution’s policies and such, they may be hard to find. Also, this document, like all content originating from me on this site, is Creative Commons, By Attribution licensed, feel free to use it in your efforts

Edit: Sent list:

• Sent to Gina Wekke, Director of OSRHE Campus Compact who’s duty is “articulating the importance of civic responsibility as an outcome of higher education.”
• Sent to Robert Lindley, Executive Directory of Community Outreach at UCO, on OSRHE Economic Development board
• Sent to Debbie Terlip, OSRHE Student Relations Liason — Response: “This is an institutional issue and the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education have no jurisdiction or ability to resolve it.”

Update: The Daily Oklahoman has expressed interest in this letter and would like to do an article on it, w00t!

————————–Begin Message———————————-
Dear Oklahoma Colleges,

I’m writing on a seemingly small, but in actuality a large, concern of mine regarding the conduct of local colleges in regards to intellectual property.

The issue starts at my own alma mater, where I am a computer science major, after trying to petition the school to simply sign a form stating they had no intention to sue a non-profit organisation under which I was working on a well known open source compiler in my own spare time. The institution not only put up a strong resistance to simply verifying that they would not claim ownership of code I own and have the right to do with what I will, but also informed me that in working in the project, if I wrote code for the project and used it as classwork this would qualify as plagiarism. Further, the very concept of me having any ownership of school work, such as my graduate thesis, was simply preposterous.

Now these concepts seemed to strike me as absurd. First, why would an institution put up such resistance to simply signing a 1-page waiver acknowledging that they would follow their own policy and allow me to retain ownership of code written on my own time? Are they wanting to reserve the right to change their minds if one of their students comes up with the next big thing?

Second, how is reusing one’s own work in multiple places plagiarism? Did I not do the work myself and adequately met the requirements of the assignment? I’m not sure where these institutions get off, but it would seem infinitely more logical to not reinvent the wheel. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be held responsible to learn important concepts, but if I’ve already done the assignment once, it seems counter-productive to do it again. It seems to me again that the institution wants to reserve themselves the right to claim ownership of code.

Third, I’m not sure where these institutions get the concept that my own ownership of my hard, uncompensated, work is not my own. I hate to inform these institutions but if I’m going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an education ultimately to be compensated with a simple piece of paper, I find it only logical that I also retain ownership of works I create myself without significant support of the institution (any and all knowledge is paid for by my tuition and the government, as is the case in public institutions).

My ideology of backlashing against these concepts may seem absurd to some, but its really not. The above ideals are those practised by top engineering institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and others. If one reads into the history of Silicon Valley, they’ll find out that two important components for its success are both research into practical arenas (originally electronic warfare), and University support of students. The second is a little vague, but Silicon Valley institutions participate with students turning entrepreneurs in arenas such as licensing of intellectual property, better policy on collaboration and ownership of university collaborative projects, and allowing professors to consult for these new institutions.

Now forgive my prudence, but as far as I’m concerned, universities first concern should be to educate their students and promote innovation, but it seems as if a large majority of institutions have a adopted a corporate-like policy of furthering profits. While profit for institutions is by no means a bad thing, doing so in an ineffective manner that compromises the degree of education given to the students is inherently bad.

I think that universities locally have a superb opportunity to improve the economy of our state and locality, and further greatly progress technology, and create a new stream of businesses in our area. Is it a coincidence that some of the best places for technology based startups are Silicon Valley, CA, Cambridge, MA, and even Austin, X when these locales are located right over top of some of this country’s top engineering institutions? Doubtfully.

I love Oklahoma and especially living here and its honestly a shame that I may have to move away to not only get a competitive education but also move into an institution that has policies meant to encourage innovation. Until then, I hate to inform my alma mater that I won’t be doing anything spectacular that could make them any money, because of the level in which I disagree with their policies.