Since I will have to do a fair amount of traveling in the next year I was in need of upgrading my trusted workhorse of Toshiba Qosmio F60 to a more portable option that will be easier on the shoulders during long travels. After doing some research in the available options it came down between the Intel i7 variants of Samsung Series 9 and the Toshiba Z830.

Thanks to these sites for some useful content:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/
• http://www.linlap.com/wiki/toshiba+portege+z830-10f
• http://blog.stevenocchipinti.com/2011/12/toshiba-portege-z830.html
• http://www.bestultrabooks.co/

In the end it came down to Toshiba having full-size VGA, HDMI and Ethernet connectors at the rear of the unit (no need for carrying adapters) and getting a very decent price rebate for the Toshiba.

The first and only task in the included Windows 7 OS was to create a recovery USB drive using the Toshiba included utility (on the desktop). You need a 12GB USB stick (found out the hard way after buying an 8GB version with the unit on advice of the sales guy).

After booting from a USB stick created from the Ubuntu 11.10 ISO (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download) with Ubuntu Bootdisk Creator (or alternatively UnetBootin) I opted to wipe the whole SSD drive. If you are not sure that you want to stick with Ubuntu it might be safer to try running from USB or dual-boot.

Note: you need to use the USB3 connector on the right-hand side of the machine to boot (not the rear USB2 connectors). Press the F-12 Function key when turning the unit off and choose the USB Boot option.

It always gives me strange pleasure to wipe a pristine new machine from all the rubbish that manufacturers pre-install and start with a clean system that I can customise to my needs (without having redundant stuff cluttering the system and waste valuable resources).  So enjoy that part

The Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) installation was extremely smooth. As predicted by the previous research all the hardware was detected automatically. Even Bluetooth and Toshiba Function keys (screen brightness and display switching) work without any tweaking.

I am currently looking into some SSD specific tweaks thanks to this article on ZDNET. I will post future updates on further experiences when it comes to battery-life and other day-2-day issues.

Update: I have made a tweak to improve disk I/O parameters to improve SSD performance

Disable the ‘elevator’ I/O scheduler in the kernel by editing the default Grub config (/etc/default/grub)

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash elevator=noop"

Looks like this unit is definitely a good option for people looking for Ubuntu Notebook / Ultrabook hardware. Well done Toshiba ! Now I just want a refund for the wasted Windows license….

Enjoy your OPEN Ultrabook !

Scanning of barcodes

Google Googles will scan most standard barcodes and provide information on the product scanned.

Here is an example from the Google Mobile Blog:

Let’s say you’re reading a magazine article you really like and want to share it with your friends. Just point Goggles at a part of the page, and instantly find a link to an online version to share immediately or read again later. You won’t even need the entire article in the frame. Goggles will also pull up more information from pages around the web where that text is mentioned, so its easier to learn about what you’re seeing.

Text recognition

You can use Google Googles to take images of printed text and have the result converted to text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Whil the results may vary our own test have shown good results on newspaper and magazines.

To download Google Goggles you can scan the QR code below

Google Goggles are currently available for both Android and iOS phones (just install via Android Market or Apple App Store. See http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/ for further details.

The Open Governance Index measures the true openness of eight open source projects – Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux and Eclipse – and analyses how governance, and not licenses, tell the full story of a project’s openness, across transparency, influence and control.

The full report can be downloaded free (email required) here.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl

Recent developments have only confirmed this suspision:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/08/08/facebooks-privacy-issues-are-even-deeper-than-we-knew/
• http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ln2e0/facebook_patent_to_track_users_even_when_they_are/

Instead I will concentrate all of my content inside this blog (including as a backup for other social services I create). I believe the control over my own content is important enough for me to warrant the extra effort.

Facebook Delete

As the saying goes: ‘You are not a Facebook User – you are the Product’

  by  cogdogblog 

The whole disaster began with an email we received in early August that our (Business) AdSense Account has been disabled.

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

Hello, After reviewing our records, we've determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we've found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google's share of the revenue will both be fully refunded to the affected advertisers. Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the effectiveness of Google's advertising system, particularly the advertiser-publisher relationship. 

We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation. If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we've taken, how you can appeal this decision or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153. Yours sincerely, The Google AdSense Team

We have had our AdSense Account for quite a number of years and it had accumulated the enormous sum of ~$50 over the last few years (I do have no way of checking this figure since we have not been able to log into this account since it has been disabled). The auto-generated email contained a single link to a FAQ which lists some generic options on what could have possibly been happening.

At the time the account was disabled I did not think much of it as I thought it might be related to some work our developers had done in preparation for a new free service we were launching for the online learning community (http://ims2moodle.brightcookie.com) and we were wondering if we could use this as some way of getting a bit of a return for this service. We also made some changes to our account to reflect a recent change in naming and emails. However I immediately contacted Google AdSense using a form linked from the support forum. I filled in the form to lodge an appeal asking Google to please provide us with an explanation as to what had gone wrong so we could take actions to prevent this from happening in future. We received an auto-reply that the appeal had been received.  On the 16th August we received the following.

Hello,

Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you've
provided, as well as your continued interest in the AdSense program.
However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your
feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we're
unable to reinstate your AdSense account.

As a reminder, if you have any questions or concerns about your account,
the actions we've taken, or invalid activity in general, you can find more
information by visiting
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Another copy & paste response. This was the last we have heard from Google AdSense. We have not have had a single response from Google Adsense since despite repeated attempts.

Since we had launched our service in the meantime we decided to create another AdSense Account using another GoogleID and after a week had this declined with no information as to why. I had also created another (personal) AdSense Account to use with this blog. This account was created and I was able to create an ad-channel for this blog (you might still see the empty spot at bottom of this entry (which I will remove in the next days or so).

However after roughly 2 weeks I received another email advising that my personal AdSense Account has been disabled as well – NO EXPLANATION. After another one or two emails over the next month to the above suport account which yielded (surprise !) no reply I decided in my despair to ring Google’s Australian Office in Sydney as a last ditch effort. As soon as I even mentioned the word ‘AdSense’ the person on the phone interrupted me an rattled down some script that there is “no support for Google AdSense available” (NO KIDDING !). After 10 minutes or so of repeating myself and feeling my adrenaline levels rise to unhealthy levels I decided to give up and do as the (not so) friendly person on the phone told me – send another email to – your guessed it – adsense-support@google.com with the familiar auto-response message. As per all the previous correspondence (or more likely monologue) I have to this day not received a reply. At that point in time I had given up on Google AdSense and started to look at alternative services.

However after receiving some excellent help from another member of an unrelated Enterprise Support in Sydney (hereinafter referred to as ” GoodSupportPerson“) on another (totally unrelated to AdSense) matter, which was taken care of in an exemplary manner, I got asked if there was anything else I needed assistance with. Poor GoodSupportPerson probably regretted asking this polite rethorical question at the end of a customer support incident

GoodSupportPerson forwarded my (in the meantime grown to 4) Case Numbers to the local AdSense team (even though he could have just rattled off the official AdSense “no support available” script). And GoodSupportPerson also followed this up personally with a reply after he got internal feedback (which if nothing else reveals there is human life within AdSense after all). He seemingly got a similar enthusiastic response from them [this is reading between the lines - as he obviously did not state this directly].

Apparently some ”highly sophisticated pattern-identification technology” was the reason for disabling our account. If we would have gone to this degree of sophistication for fraudulent purposes surely this would just be ridiculous. We only had a couple of thousand hits on these sites over years (without major changes). Any monkey could create more than that just by doing random clicks by hand.

And if this was not caused by myself (which if this is really the cause I could say with certainty) why can I not even create a new account ?

Now I certainly do not blame Google for taking fraud seriously to protect their clients – to the contrary – I would expect nothing else. However I would at least expect there to be some procedure to address legitimate errors where activity turns out to be either in error or caused by a third party (with possibly dubios intent). Specially since this Service is obviously related to Google’s holy cash cow – AdWords (and I be damned if I ever use Adwords after this experience).

I was not asking to see proof of the alleged illegal activity. I would have even been happy to return any credits that from the time of discovery even though we have not been able to find anything wrong on our end.  I also do not care about the technology used to discover this. However we are a reputable business with for over 10 years in the web-application game. I think as a Google client that has been recommending Google Services for years I think we would deserve the courtesy of at least having a chance to continue using a service if we did not do anything wrong.

At the end of these conversation GoodSupportPerson basically suggested giving up on AdSense and was hoping the experience would not cause me loosing faith in Google.

Reflection Time – what can be learned from this experience

Serious

1. For me this raises a serious question about the fact that some corporations are getting bigger than whole countries. These companies are able to make up their own rules without accountability  and get away with behavior most would consider highly unethical. What else could you call cancelling services and ceasing of funds without any possibility of any explanation ? When is big TOO big ?
2. From my working perspective also has highlighted some of the dangers of placing your business in the hands of a third party (outsourcing / cloud-computing). It is something that I have always mentioned to my clients when discussing cloud-based services. I think that after this first hand experience I will probably have to put more emphasis on this when looking at risk management for these types of projects
3. Don’t bet your business on Google Adsense – they won’t give a damn

Other

1. This puts a whole new meaning to the Google Motto “do no evil” – if you do nothing (ignore everything) it not hard to do no evil …
2. I might have cursed the support teams of similarly sized 800 pound Gorilla Corporates Microsoft and Sun in the past – i have done you wrong. YOU GUYS ROCK compared to Google’s AdSense Team
3. Don’t waste your time trying to get any support from Google AdSense adsense-support@google.com is obviously just a pointer to /dev/null masked by a confirmation receipt
4. The person responsible for setting the “non-SUPPORT” guidelines deserves an award. You seriously could not have made this s..t up even if you tried really hard
5. It’s time to explore other options for (might write this up after some research)
6. Don’t waste you time trying to proof a principle to a corporation of this size
7. if you ever need an example on HOW NOT TO DO SUPPORT – try Google AdSense, you won’t find much better
8. I never knew writing blogs can be such a cathargic experience (and a good way to kill 2 hours on a plane flight).
9. I might need to get a life. Time to move on …

Hopefully this will help some bloggers that are seeking to find some way to get a return for the hours spent writing. I would be EXTREMELY hesitant to put my faith in a company that behaves in the way described above. I don’t care about a the few dollars Google ‘cancelled’ without any way to even get an explanation. But if somebody really needs this as some income – don’t waste your time like we had to learn the hard way – have a good think and consider some alternatives.

PS: Again my personal thanks go the member of the unrelated Support Team within Google Sydney, which has gone out of his way to try to forward my issues to the Google AdSense Support. That does give some hope that there are obviously people within Google that do understand what the word SUPPORT means. THANK YOU !

I discovered that I have audio issues on some Ubuntu Linux machines and found the following to fix the issues.

1) Install alsa-aoss

apt-get install alsa-oss

2) Save the Elluminate Java Webstard (.JNLP) file to a local folder – DO NOT OPEN IN BROWSER
3) Launch Elluminate using this command (in the folder you saved the JNLP)

aoss javaws meeting.jnlp

Thanks go to all people involved in this forum thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1081899

EDIT:

1) This assumes you are already running Sun (Oracle) Java JRE not the default OpenJDK as apparently Blackboard Collaborate does not play nice with the default OpenJDK. I have described the install on 11.10 here.

2) Make sure you have updated the alternatives for javaws (install only sets the java alternatives).

update-alternatives --config javaws

After some digging everything seems to be still via .desktop files in /usr/share/applications/

1) Create the desktop file

vim /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop

2) Copy the following into the file (Note: adjust application name and path)

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true
Icon=/path/to/application/icon.xpm
Name=Eclipse
Comment=Programming IDE
Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 /path/to/application/eclipse
Categories=Application;Development;

3) Update the desktop database

update-desktop-database

UPDATE: According to this article: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/11/ubuntu-desktop-designers-clarify-on-configurability/ the Ubuntu developers have confirmed some more reconfigurability in future releases.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

After two weeks worth of helpdesk emails from Avos I got this (which does not sound very comforting that these guys well ever get it sorted):

--------------------------------------------
Although we have several engineers, the main guy dealing with API coding has been out with the Flu so progress on this issue is slow. Ever since our launch last week all our engineers have been working and pushing really hard trying to fix bugs so hopefully we can get to this issue soon.

We have a community based thread going on at http://support.delicious.com/delicious/topics/api_related_bugs_and_questions
If you post this up, one of the engineers or other users may be able to chime in. Hope that helps for now. Sorry for any inconveniences.
--------------------------------------------

NOTE: if you only need a simple HTML export go here: http://delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export

After some digging I found the IP Addresses of the OLD DELICIOUS SERVERS (on Yahoo – which luckily are still live ! – as at 13th Oct 2011)

Edit you hosts file and add:

98.139.50.166 www.delicious.com
76.13.6.190 secure.delicious.com
76.13.6.209 static.delicious.com
98.139.50.166 api.del.icio.us

(this can be found on /etc/hosts on Linux or C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows).

After editing this file you can again go to: https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all and you will get ALL your bookmarks you had added to Delicious before the takeover (less the ones you added on the new Avos Server)

Another lesson in what can happen if you let other people take care of your information for free. You get what you pay for. Thank you to Yahoo for making this a nice service for years. But time to take control of my bookmarks again using SemanticScuttle.

Good bye Delicious – it was nice working with you. But I don’t think I like where you are going …