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My laptop is a second-hand X31 Thinkpad.

They’re an extremely durable and reliable device in my opinion. I love that it’s light-ish at 1.6 kilos but doesn’t compromise on the keyboard size. I actually purchased it just before the Netbook craze kicked into gear in 2007. Sometimes I wish it was lighter but I’ve read enough complaints from people regarding the keyboard problems on Netbooks that I’m happy.

I run Ubuntu on the laptop and it’s getting better with a couple of gripes. Originally in 7.10 there were some fan and wireless problems but now 9.04 has everything working except two parts broke that I’ll detail here.

• The external sound controls are no longer responding. Annoying but not too bad. I haven’t researched what has changed but I will update this post when I find out.
• A more pressing problem was a small change in the xorg.conf file. The result was a bizarre, sluggish effect on the entire interface of laptop that was worst when minimizing windows and scrolling a page in Firefox. By sluggish I actually mean unusable

The omission was (under the device section):

Option “AccelMethod” “XAA”

The responsiveness is back to normal with that inclusion.

I personally don’t need Compiz on my laptop (a waste of battery I find) so here’s my current xorg.conf file for anyone that’s interested.

Here’s a few lists of customisations I use in Firefox.

For web development:

• Firebug – All round awesome web development tool. Allows for on-the-fly alterations to CSS, the HTML DOM. Inserting break points into JavaScript, viewing any existing JSON objects in memory and providing a JavaScript interpreter for debugging.
• YSlow – Useful web profiler that adds itself to Firebug. Provides recommendations on how to optimise web pages as well.
• Web Developer Toolbar – I prefer Firebug overall but Web Developer has a few extra features like resizing the window for different screen resolutions.
• NoScript – Easy approach to enabling and disabling separate JavaScript files on a website.

My favourites:

• Compact Menu – Allows you to get rid of the regular ‘File’ menu in Firefox and provides either a small ‘Globe’ icon or the simply the word ‘Menu’ that’ll drop down and provide the regular Firefox menu when clicked. Saves a lot of screen real estate for the user.
• Fission – Turns the address bar into a loading indicator by representing how far loaded the page as a coloured bar spreading across the address. Similar to Safari’s address bar loading system.
• Download Status Bar – Does away with the regular ‘Download Window’ of yesteryear and provides information on the status of downloads on the regular Firefox window via a pop-up status bar.

An essential (but detrimental to this blog’s revenue!) add-on:

• AdBlock – Automatically hides (doesn’t even waste bandwidth on) adverts according to automagically maintained universal regular expressions.

Note: The ordering of the add-ons is not meant to indicate my preference or importance I place on them

Finally cleaned up my desk at home. Plus I borrowed my brother’s spare LCD.

Very nice having the additional screen real estate. Can’t wait to buy larger dual widescreens in the future. 30″ monitors anyone?

After developing an intensive JavaScript website in Firefox and testing with other browsers, including IE8 in compatibility mode I discovered IE8’s compatibility mode doesn’t simulate IE7’s JS.

Hence a JS bug was bringing all of IE7’s JS processing to a halt even on the initial page load.

A first step I recommend is temporarily deactivating any JS compressors you may have enabled as pathing problems can crop up from using them and cause issues for IE7.

Beyond that I discovered the major snag resulted in this error from Visual Studio:

Expected identifier, string or number

Unfortunately that doesn’t give too much information but I was discovering it in my callback functions within my jQuery. It turns out IE7 has a particular issue with the syntax of JSON:

$(".box").animate({
    height: "100%",
    opacity: "1.0",
  }, 600, function() {
    alert("test!");
});

While the above appears to be valid there is a deceptively simple issue that IE7 chokes on. The comma on the end of the third line. While most browsers recognise the empty slot after the opacity variable of the JSON array being passed into the animate function – IE7 gets really confused and starts complaining about the next semi-colon in your code (in this case part of the callback function).

Just an interesting issue that other browsers don’t care about but IE7 is really bamboozled by

So I installed Gnome Do (0.7.99.1-0) last night and it’s pretty awesome. One of the themes enables a full-fledged dock interface when not in search mode.

Gnome Do on its own is an equivalent to QuickSilver which is an OSX search and command program. By hitting the super key and the space bar on your keyboard Do will pop up a box to type a command or search term into. It’s got an interesting plugin system that enables it to perform tasks such as:

• Initiating chat with Pidgin contacts
• Quickly searching for a GMail contact’s details
• Searching files and folders on your PC
• Playing a particular song in Rhythmbox
• Searching your Google Calendar
• Searching for programs to call by via command-line

An example of initiating a conversation would be:

• Hit super key and space bar together
• Type ‘chat’
• Hit tab
• Type ‘Chr’
• Hit up and down arrows to move through Pidgin contacts containing the text ‘Chr’: Chris B, Chris N, Chris O
• Hit enter and Pidgin gains focus with the Pidgin contact conversation open

To install Gnome Do with the Docky theme available you’ll need to add Gnome Do PPA Repository to your sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Simple sudo edit

/etc/apt/sources.list

And append the deb lines to the end. Then open Synaptic and reload the manager. Then search for ‘Do’ and install Gnome Do.

Full example screenshot:

The only thing I dislike about the Docky theme is that it loses the listing of possible actions that Gnome Do normally provides as it autocompletes your typing. Try out the regular Do themes and then try Docky’s and you’ll see what I mean.

Otherwise it’s a pretty awesome app and much better than Cairo or Sim dock which I have tried previously.

Kudos to the Do team!

EDIT:

As David points out in the comments, Gnome Do can also (and apparently is optimised for) start its search process by object and then interact with it via its possible actions. In other words, I can type the name of a friend on my pidgin contact list, hit tab and then select to begin chatting with them. Or I could select to copy their email contact information.

Hence, any of the actions that are possible with that friend would be listed. Very cool stuff. Thanks for pointing this out David.

Personally I prefer the original approach as it relates more to English and feels like a more natural language processing flow for the user but that’s just me. I’m sure users in countries where the verb follows the object will be appreciative of the Do team’s efforts!