Category: Software

After nearly 4 years since I bought my desktop computer and after complaining about constant thrashing I finally decided it’s time to give it a little upgrade. It now sports 8GB of memory instead of just 2, and the improvement is noticeable.

The big culprits for the thrashing turned out to be Eclipse and Unity. We have pretty large projects by now, and having the main ones open together requires no less than 2GB of virtual memory and nearly 1GB of actual memory. That’s a lot, and it doesn’t include at least one running Android emulator! Unity added quite a bit to that (I don’t remember the number) but switching to Gnome helped.

I’m still happy with this Core Duo, now very old, computer. It does its job well and I expect it to last a year or two more.

I gave Unity a good chance, but it was simply torture. Maybe it’s the over 3 years old hardware I’m running Ubuntu on, or maybe it’s the servers I’m running on my machine for the project I’m working on, but the hard drive kept thrashing to a point where it was unbearable. Sometimes just clicking a top menu or switching to a different window would take over a minute while the hard drive was grinding as if it was being benchmarked.

So I decided to go back to Gnome classic. The computer is way more responsive now and works considerably faster. My guess is that either Unity’s memory requirements are so high that I ran out (of 2 GB) and the memory had to be constantly swapped or it’s my relatively old 3D accelerated nVidia video card or Unity is doing too much disk access. Whatever it is, Unity does not work well on my machine.

I’m not so happy about reverting back to Gnome because I don’t like to be the kind of person who doesn’t accept change. But for the sake of productivity – I have to forget about Unity for now.

If you installed Ubuntu 11.04 and after a while the launcher stops auto hiding as it should, it may be because you did some dragging and dropping in an application. For example, if you use Konsole (like I do) and you drag one of Konsole’s tabs to reorganize their order, the launcher will suddenly pop up and will not hide itself automatically.

The easiest workaround I found is: right click the tab in Konsole and choose “Detach tab”, then drag the tab in the newly detached window back to where you intended to put the tab in the original window. When you’re done – the launcher will hide itself.

Excluding (some really annoying) bugs, is anyone else having difficulties with the new Unity interface? Or am I just too old for these kind of conceptual changes?

EDIT: This is a known and confirmed bug in Unity. I dutifully added my two cents.

Not too long ago I wrote in a post (How can we take back our privacy?) about the option of expiring our online data, and now some Germans decided to provide software called “X-pire!”, which expires images after a period of time. Still not solving the problem of saving the image and re-posting it, but “a journey of a thousand miles” and so on and so forth :)

Privacy has become a huge issue. We get free (or cheap) and useful services in return for information about us and the potential uses of this information are becoming more frightening over time. If you don’t have anything to hide you might think this is OK, but what if someday someone will make use of the information you shared to do something you don’t approve of? The problem is that you can’t take it back. You can’t have your information withdrawn to get your privacy again, not even if you give up on the services that you got in return.

So I’ve been wondering if there’s a way, without legal assistance, to create a software mechanism that would allow us to take back our privacy. For example, let’s say I decide to close my Google account. I would like then all the data Google has on me to become undecipherable to them or to anyone else.

Unfortunately my thoughts on this led me to realize that this is a lot like DRM, which has failed miserably so far as people find the keys required to decipher the information eventually. But I’m still wondering whether this could work somehow.