Ubuntu and sensitive touchpads

My current environment is a MacBook Air 13". The hardware is great, light, fast, good battery life and big touchpad. Unfortunately my typing style means that I'm continuously putting my palm close enough to the touchpad to change input focus. I tried to change the sensitivity with gpointing-device-settings however it didn't suit my needs.

Enter touchpad-indicator: It sits in the background and disables the touchpad whenever a mouse is plugged in, and re-enables it when the mouse is unplugged. For me this is a much better solution as it completely removes the problem of accidental mouse clicks, and I use the mouse automatically if it is available.

The current version seems to have a timing problem that causes it to miss mouse-remove events (see Bug #1111784), and doesn't handle the mouse being plugged in or out when the laptop is suspended. I've created a branch that resolves both of these issues at: https://code.launchpad.net/~akgrant0710/touchpad-indicator/akgfixes

Congratulations Canonical

Congratulations to everyone at Canonical!

After installing Ubuntu 13.04 daily build on two machines over the last week or so, a VirtualBox VM and MacBook Air, and using it as my primary environment for the last few days, my stats are:

Packages and libraries installed via apt-get:	21
Packages and libraries built from source code:	10
Number of issues / crashes:	0

And the new icons are shiny as well. :-)

Canon iP4200 grayscale printing fails

Printing to my Canon Pixma iP4200 has never worked properly in Ubuntu 12.04 and its finally got to the point where I decided to do something about it.

My preferred default settings are grayscale, two-sided, and it looks like I've been bitten by a bug with grayscale printing.  The result is either a row of dots near the top of the page, or a group of dots further down the page.  The effect is similar to what would happen on an old ribbon printer when the ribbon was dry or running out of ink, you can see that it's trying to print letters, but they're unreadable.

Ubuntu 12.04 uses gutenprint 5.2.8-pre1 and the bug appears to be specific to that version as I've been able to work around the issue in two separate ways:

1. Manually install the 5.0.1 driver from http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Canon/Canon-iP4000
2. Build the 5.2.8 driver from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-print/files/gutenprint-5.2/5.2.8/ and manually replace the link to libgutenprint.so.3.0.0.

Obviously neither of these are ideal.  What I'd like is one of a patch for gutenprint 5.2.8-pre1 that fixes the problem, or supported upgrade to 5.2.8 or 5.2.9.

I've submitted a bug report: Bug #1151207 @ Launchpad.

10 Mar 2013: And a post in Ubuntu Forums: Re: Cups seems broken under 12.04 LTS...

Blog Reboot

My blog has obviously been languishing with only a few posts.

Time for a reboot, with a focus on "Adventures with Ubuntu".

I'll be using this as a bit of a log of tips, tricks and resolving issues in Ubuntu, starting with some printing problems I'm having in Ubuntu 12.04.  The goals are:

1. Have a place to log what I've done so I can reproduce it in future.
2. Hopefully help others that are having similar problems.
3. Maybe get some assistance back.

Enjoy...

Yarra Bend Park Flying Fox Bats

Going for a walk through Yarra Bend Park with my beloved we discovered a colony of Flying Fox bats. Apparently they've been living there since 2003, having been moved from Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens, via various other parks, a crematorium, a girls' school and golf courses. The story of their move can be found at Same colony, new neighbourhood.

From Yarra Bend Bats

Apparently up to 30,000 bats stay here, depending on the time of year, heading off at night to feed, travelling up to 50km.

From Yarra Bend Bats

More information can be found at the DSE Website.

Getting past job requirements

As part of my job hunting I've joined an excellent weekly Job Search group run by Lee Hecht Harrison. This week we were discussing ways to get past job requirements that one doesn't meet. We came up with a number of suggestions which I subsequently found, and more, in Dave Willmer's article IT Careers: Bridging the Qualifications Gap, posted on cio.com.

ABC Radio's All In the Mind hosted a couple of interesting podcasts on the morals of robots, particularly with the young, the old and in war:
Do you read me HAL? Robot wars, moral machines and silicon that cares - Part 1 and
Part 2. But no mention of Frank Herbet's "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." :-)