Why Open Source Rocks (and the music industry does not)

If you ever looked for song lyrics online, you know how most lyrics sites are. Plenty of ads, popups, silly scrolling flash gadgets, bad punctuation, and no easy way to send in corrections. Why not apply to lyrics the same community-driven editing model that has made Wikipedia so successful?

LyricWiki.org has done exactly that, and more. They have provided an API, making it easy for media players to query the database and fetch the lyrics for a specific song. To get an idea of this project’s success, check out these stats. At the time of this writing, LyricWiki is the fifth largest MediaWiki in existence, and the largest wiki that is not a Wikipedia or Wiktionary. What an inspiring example of a community built around the ideals of improving content and making information available. What could go wrong?

Slow KDE / Plasma on Intel Integrated Graphics?

Got a laptop with an Intel GMA? Is Alt+Tab slower than you would like? Does Plasma take forever to move or resize an applet? Maybe you didn’t think it could get better?

Try playing with the options in xorg.conf. This is a good starting place.

In my case lspci shows ‘Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42]‘, and putting

Option  “AccelMethod”   “UXA”

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf has improved things significantly. UXA acceleration has been disabled by default in Ubuntu because it caused problems for some people, but in my case enabling it has made everything snappier, and also gotten rid of the drawing artifacts I used to see.

It also caused suspend to stop working (assert in X upon waking), but a recent fix to xserver-xorg-video-intel takes care of that. Distros might have released an update by now, but if you’re using Kubuntu and can’t wait, you can grab the packages from this ppa.

Snappy plasma, working suspend, happy user.

Update: Here is a post with another trick, using the -graphicssystem raster option of Qt programs. It makes switching tabs in Konsole faster, and it does wonders for long lines in Kate!

Two OpenOffice.org Writer Tricks

Trick #1: Stop AutoText from switching to Times New Roman

I often edit files in fonts other than Times New Roman, just because that font is so ubiquitous. And I sometimes use AutoText to insert frequently used phrases, or Romanian words in an English text (so that I don’t have to switch languages constantly). One thing that has always annoyed me is that after invoking an AutoText completion (F3), the next characters will always be in Times New Roman (even if the AutoText itself is in another font).

As it turns out, this happens because Times New Roman is the font of the Default paragraph style. So hit F11 and modify your style to use the desired font. In fact (and this is a topic for another day), styles should be used in most cases and formatting a selection of text (bold, italic, font, font size, paragraph indentation) should rarely be done by hand. This is very unintuitive to people who have been using text editors before the GUI era.

Trick #2: Insert Formula without switching into formula-edit mode

pv: Progress Bar for md5sum et al.

Tools that know they will take a long time often come with a built-in progress indicator, but there are other utilities on Linux that often leave the user frustratedly tapping their fingers, wondering how much longer they will have to wait.

Luckily, there is a nifty little tool called pv that will donate a progress bar to any program that can read from standard input or a pipe. pv probably stands for pipe viewer.

1. Simple example: figure out how long an md5sum will take:

pv eternal.avi |md5sum

will display something like

96.5MB 0:00:05 [25.3MB/s] [=======>                                    ]  9% ETA 0:00:48

HOWTO: Read Vista-burnt UDF DVDs on Ubuntu Linux

Recently I got my hands on a DVD which I couldn’t get to mount. The message that appeared consistently in dmesg was:

UDF-fs: No fileset found

Searching the forums I found out that this is a widespread problem. Vista uses some kind of non-standard UDF which only Windows can read. I was very tempted to run to the Windows PC in the other room and let it eat the disc, but I was curious if there was any other solution.

Many suggested mounting manually with -t udf, but that didn’t work. Another suggestion was patching and recompiling the kernel. I was obviously NOT in the mood to do that. Digging a bit deeper I found that there is actually a less greasy solution. The two relevant links are one and two. I will describe now the exact procedure I used to get my Linux box to recognize the Vista-burnt DVD. Note that, because of the rapidly changing environment, this will probably NOT work on anything OTHER than *Ubuntu Hardy with kernel version 2.6.24.