So I did a search and ended up with this description of installing Java under Ubuntu which says pretty much what I was doing, except using the graphical package manager instead. “How lame would it be if you needed to install Java using the Synaptic package manager instead of the command line?” Not lame enough to discourage doing it apparently. If you’re looking to install Java under Ubuntu you might have to use the package manager instead of apt-get in order to do it. Next time you see Java people throw rotten fruit at them to let them know how you feel about that.

Normally I use a plugin for spell checking, but it stopped working a few updates ago. Firefox or the extension claims that they are no longer friends. So I was very happy to find the development preview of SpellBound, which not only works with the current Firefox releases under Ubuntu, but does inline spellcheck. Double w00t to that one. I have it installed at home, as long as it doesn’t cause any problems I’ll put it in here at work too.

This output is human-readable, meaning items like the datestamp are displayed using a textual representation instead of something more obscure (such as the number of nanoseconds since the Tasty Freeze guy drove by).

Just about the only thing that didn’t work the way I wanted was the random selection from the url list file. I wanted to replay a set of traffic in order, so I hacked up an -orderedurls option to select from the url list sequentially (repeating the list once you get to the end) instead of randomly choosing. Reading the whole file in and parsing it probably isn’t the way to go for this particular usage, so I’ll have to clean it up when the traffic segments I’m playing get into the millions instead of just the tens of thousands. But it works great for now.

Currently I’m leaning very heavily toward the Thinkpad X41 tablet. It looks like there’s good X support for a bunch of stuff that’s traditionally a pain in the ass under Linux. Screen rotation seems to be working (without restarting X, thank god), the input driver for the touchscreen, power management (including frequency scaling), and wireless using ipw2200. Anyone out there with an X41 tried Linux and care to toss in some comments before I pick one of the things up? It’s hard to tell from wiki postings just how painful is it to get the thing actually setup, and there’s always the chance that the instructions on the wiki are wrong or incomplete.

On a very much related note, anyone know a good shop in the San Francisco Bay Area that could come up with some Pimp My Ride style dashboard mounting and wiring hookups for my car?

…it’s monster machine, meets hovercraft, meets huge sculptural creatures, meets fire.

What better way to spend a Friday night? I have just one question.. tickets through Ticketmaster? Is that part of the tongue in cheek techno-social commentary? That despite the rapid advance of technology in general the only way to throw a huge ticketed real world event is to use Ticketmaster? We’ll have to work on a project for the next one that fixes that issue.