Many people have been experiencing Eclipse crashes when trying to open a new project or modify an existing one.
The workaround is simple:
System -> Preferences -> Assistive Technologies -> Uncheck ‘Enable assistive technologies’
Restart your computer and Eclipse should be working fine.
USB 3.0
USB 3.0 finally seems to be making it’s way into consumer electronics, with the first officially certified USB 3.0 products set to hit shelves later this year. The specification, a fully backwards compatible successor to USB 2.0, makes use of a noticeably chunkier cable to offer data transfer rates of up to 3.2 Gbits (even with other overheads taken into account), an order of magnitude faster than the speeds USB 2.0 was supposed to provide.
While your standard USB 2.0 cables will still work on these newer ports, you’ll be unable to take advantage of the speed boost - and your new USB 3.0 cables will not work on older ports. Is investing in the new standard worth it? Sony, Apple and Intel would like you to think otherwise - they have been working on a completely different technology, dubbed “Light Peak”, that promises to offer faster speeds than USB 3.0 while connecting a much larger range of devices. Whether this will be enough to convince consumers to pay for the complete wiring overhaul that Light Peak requires is yet to be seen; there are no Light Peak devices due in the near future while USB 3.0 ready laptops from HP will be hitting shelves in the coming months.
Android
The growing maturity of the Android platform as an operating system for low-end computers and smaller devices was quite obvious at CES, with a slew of new Android devices announced. Aside from Google’s own Nexus One device, announced just before the start of the exhibition, AT&T announced it would carry 5 new Android handsets this year, with LG and Motorola also announcing new smartphones running the Linux-based OS.
The Android story didn’t stop there either, with HP, Dell and Lenovo announcing netbooks and tablet PCs running the system. The emergence of Android at what is traditionally a Microsoft stomping ground is very noteworthy - Android could prove to be what many die-hard Linux enthusiasts have been waiting for: a widely adopted, consumer targeted, open source OS promoted by a major company. With at least a dozen new Android products on the way (and more to be announced at the Mobile World Congress in February), the OS looks like it’s on the way to truly competing with Apple and Microsoft for market share across platforms.
Transparent Screens
Transparent screens will soon be making their way out of science fiction movies and into our lives, with a major story out of CES being Samsung’s new transparent OLED displays. Samsung’s new technology promises to offer up to 40% transparency, a large and very obvious improvement over older technologies. Samsung is planning to release an MP3 player and a phone that make use of this technology later this year. While the resolution of the OLED screens leaves much to be desired, Samsung is obviously betting on the novelty factor attracting customers, with the phone priced at 620 pounds even while lacking a camera.
While the technology unquestionably has applications in many fields, the most important being true heads-up displays in full colour, it’s questionable exactly how useful the technology is right now. The 40% transparency isn’t enough to embed them in automobiles, and being able to see through your computer monitor is more a detriment than anything else. A lot more work will be required before Samsung can market these products as anything more than a pricey novelty for early adopters.
These articles were originally published in felix, the student newspaper of Imperial College London on 15/01/2010.
This article was originally published in felix, the student newspaper of Imperial College London on 13/11/2009
The ethical issues involved in piracy have been in the news a lot over the decade. As the music and film industries tried to come to terms with an entirely new distribution format and a new generation grew up with Limewire and the Pirate Bay, conflicts sprouted everywhere as the industries attempted to strong-arm the file-sharers, only to be met with stubborn resistance. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the dust has settled a fair bit. The Pirate Bay lost their court battle against the recording industry, several large torrent trackers were shut down (with the fate of many more uncertain), and Limewire (along with all the adware that is bundled with it) has been consigned to history.
That said, it appears that the RIAA and the MPAA aren’t done yet. In a new piece of legislation that will come into force in the summer of 2011, persistent filesharers can be blocked from their internet connections as part of a “three strikes policy”, which as the name suggests is an American concept that coincidentally has previously only largely been used on murderers and rapists; never before on the average spotty teenager. The implementation of this law, therefore, raises some interesting questions. Is your average music thief banned from using the internet for life? What if he moves house? What about the people who move into his old house? Can he work somewhere with access to internet or is this an all encompassing burden he must carry with him to his grave?
The obviously confused man behind this new law, Lord Mandelson, had shown little interest in piracy and copyright issues until he flew to Corfu for a meeting with Dreamworks’ co-founder David Geffen (Dreamworks being the studio that churns out mediocre animated films that no one has ever really watched). Immediately after his small trip, Lord Mandelson saw it fit to attempt to push this law into existence, all the while denying the two events were linked, in the same way that me setting fire to my carpets and my house burning down would not be linked.
Aside from the political aspect of the law, there’s the issue of innocent users incorrectly being identified as illegal filesharers. The ISP TalkTalk, in a recent stunt, showed that roughly 34% of wireless connections in your average street have either little or no security at all. Wireless security hasn’t been able to keep up with the explosion in wireless internet; the average user probably has no idea about the differences between WPA and WEP, and probably doesn’t care. To cut these users off from the internet is rather like permanently banning a supermarket just because there was a shootout in their parking lot. It makes no sense.
Looking at the broader picture, one has to ask whether such laws are really required, and whether they add anything in the long term. The meteoric rise of Spotify has been a testament to the fact that financially viable free music distribution is possible. By pushing this new law forward as strongly as he is doing, Mandelson is taking away any incentive the recording companies have to innovate and giving filesharers an incentive to find smarter ways to beat the system, setting the stage for another round of long and bloody legal battles.
As we drift along into 2010, it’s worth recalling a relatively small music sharing service that operated between June 1999 and July 2001, Napster. Facing a massive set of lawsuits from big name record labels at the turn of the millenium, Napster declared bankruptcy and slipped into oblivion. Yet the practice of filesharing wasn’t affected much as users simply moved on to different technologies. 10 years on, it appears that the film and recording industries have learnt little if anything from the past – and with laws being drawn up by politicians who apparently have no understanding of the underlying issues, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to the vicious cycle.
Last week, Finnish lawmakers passed a law that entitles all Finnish citizens to 1Mbps broadband. The law, which comes into force in July 2010, is part of a broader Finnish broadband policy that should eventually see 100 Mbps internet being a legal right by 2015. This comes at a time when a growing number of mainland European countries have begun classifying internet as a human right – meaning that it is a responsibility of those countries to provide internet access to all citizens. The situation in the United Kingdom, however, is rather dire.
As Imperial students, we are used to exceptionally fast internet. On a wireless network in the library, you can get speeds up to 20 Mbps. A wired connection in residences on the South Kensington campus reaches speeds of ~95Mbps. Yet the situation just a block away from campus is very different. A recent survey of global broadband quality placed the UK 25th out of 66 countries surveyed – broadband here was qualified as ‘meeting the needs for today’ and nothing more. South Korea (the leader in the survey, along with other Far East Asian and Scandinavian countries) is already promising all it’s citizens 1 Gbps internet by 2012. The Digital Britain Report 2009, presented to Parliament, only aims to achieve 2 Mbps countrywide internet by 2012, 500 times slower than Korea and 50 times slower than Finland.
Broadband accessibility isn’t just about speeds, however. Basic modern internet delivery infrastructure hasn’t been created yet. Apart from Virgin who are pioneering their optical fibre network, all truly futuristic broadband options in the UK are still under construction. The situation is set to improve in the near future, but there is a long way to go before we catch up. BT received the go-ahead for it’s new optical fibre network this March – the construction of which will only be completed in 2012. In the meanwhile, most of the UK remains connected using copper cable/3G mobile networks.
Fast and reliable internet access isn’t just an issue of how fast you can stream movies. Countries with good internet infrastructure have been able to sell themselves to investors whose profit margins depend upon quick information transfer. The London stock exchange is planning a major systems overhaul to cut down transaction times from 2.7 ms to 0.4 ms – a good indicator of how important speed is with respect to technology. Positioning the UK as a leading country in terms of broadband proliferation could attract a sizeable amount of investment and would hopefully reduce the (currently ridiculously long) wait for a broadband line.
This article was also published in felix, the student newspaper of Imperial College London
Those of you who have recently upgraded to Ubuntu Karmic may be having issues with popping/crackling noises from the speakers whenever you try and play any media. The issue is related to an alsa power saving feature that doesn’t seem to work too well with Intel HDA sound cards.
The workaround for this is easy:
Open up gedit from the command line:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
Edit this line:
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
so that it looks like this:
options snd-hda-intel power_save=0 power_save_controller=N
And restart alsa/your computer. Things should be fine again.
I decided yesterday that I would try out a tiling window manger, so I installed awesome window manager on my Ubuntu laptop. Although everything seemed to be working, pressing Mod4+Enter (the Super/Windows key on most keyboards) wasn’t opening up a new terminal as I wanted (and the respective “spawn new terminal command” wasn’t working on dwm/wmii/xmonad either). So I thought I’d put this micro-guide out there just in case anyone is having the same problem.
1. Download and install awesome using apt-get the normal way: sudo apt-get install awesome.
2. Log out of your GNOME session - you should be seeing GDM at this point.
3. Click on the Session tab and select awesome, and login using your username and password. (GDM will ask you whether you want to select awesome as the default window manager from now on - it’s a decision that’s easy to change and entirely up to you.)
4. At this point, if pressing Mod4 + Enter brings up a xterm, you’re set and can skip the rest of this guide.
5. If Mod4 + Enter doesn’t do anything, log out of awesome using Mod4 + Shift + Q and log back in to your GNOME Session
6. Open up a terminal and enter sudo update-alternatives —config x-terminal-emulator
7. You should see a list of terminal emulators. Select xterm (usually the very first option) from the list - this sets xterm as the default terminal emulator for the system.
8. Log out of GNOME and log back in to awesome - Mod4 + Enter should spawn a new terminal emulator now. You’re done!
Just a sidenote - from recent experience, a tiling window manager on a small monitor is pretty useless. With four windows open, there wasn’t any space to view any one window properly. That said, on a large monitor I completely understand how a tiling window manager would improve productivity - awesome window manager really is pretty awesome.
As you have probably realised by now, you’ve reached ferozsalam.com. I’m Feroz Salam, an university student in London who has a habit of buying narcissistic domain names without considering whether he has any use for them first.
With some luck, this “blog” (the word sounds rather yucky to me) will soon contain more material, but what with university, designing the actual ferozsalam.com website, and real life - it may be a while.
You can always find me on Twitter though, and if you’re a particularly close friend who I’ve lost touch with, it would be great to know how you’re doing on Facebook.