I’m a member of the UKUUG, and I just came back from their Spring Conference, which was held in Birmingham this year. It was a great conference! I met lots of other Unix/Linux people and learned a lot simply by chatting with people in the corridors! I will try my best to make it to the next one, which I think will be held sometime later this year.

In any case, I was asked by Alain (UKUUG Chairman) to write a few words about one of the tutorials that I attended on the first day of the conference. It will be published in the next UKUUG newsletter. I will make sure I post a copy of what I write here.

I’ve just installed Compiz Fusion on my 3-year old ASUS laptop which is running Ubuntu Feisty. I’m quite pleased at how stable it is. I tried Beryl a few months ago and it was not usable at all on the same hardware.

I did run into one problem, though and I couldn’t find any solution to it on either the Ubuntu Forums or anywhere else on the net. My top Gnome panel had a strange white bar under it and all my context menus had white borders. Maybe my google-fu wasn’t very good yesterday, but the only solution that I managed to find after about an hour was this on a Gentoo forum:

This is a known issue. Go to ccsm->Window Decorations and add the string !dock to the value Shadow Windows. I had to enter 2 !dock. First disabled shadows of the context menus and the tool tips, the second stops shadows for the gnome-panel.

I’m just putting this here in case it helps someone with a similar problem.

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Fedora 7 is released!: I really liked the last Fedora release, but I believe it was slightly plagued by problems with some of it’s package management utilities. I have already installed this release and am quite impressed. Wireless now works with WPA out of the box and their new re-spinning feature is something I will try out someday.

XML Parser benchmarks: I have always had my own suspicions of which XML parser model would be faster (Sax or StaX), but I’m glad to see this benchmark done by the O’Reilly folks.

Fear and loathing at Cupertino: Jeremy Allison’s terrible experience while trying to prepare a talk for his Apple WWDC presentation. Jeremy works on Samba, along with Tridge, who they all call “the smartest man in Australia” Jeremy works at Google now. Smart man.

I’m going to occasionally post links here that I find particularly insightful, interesting or geeky.

Three things that caught my interest today:

PowerTOP: Released by Intel, this utility builds on work done by kernel developers to make the Linux kernel power-efficient. PowerTOP gives you a snapshot of what apps are consuming the most power. Turn off these apps or modify their behavior, and you’ll notice an instant increase in the battery life.

The Linux SLAB Allocator: Traditional heap memory managers suffer from fragmentation, among other issues. The SLAB Allocator in Linux, inspired by a similar implementation for Solaris and various embedded systems, allocates memory as fixed sized objects and uses caches to reduce fragmentation. It also has options to enable hardware cache alignment which allows objects in different caches to share the same cache lines, thus improving performance.

Advanced Linux Programming: After many years of coding mostly Java, I’ve been meaning to brush up on my C, Assembly and general Unix programming skills. I found this excellent book freely available online and it seems to be getting a lot of praise from reviewers on Amazon so I downloaded it. It has a lot of topics that I’m very interested in, like IPC and threads, and it even has a few assembly oriented chapters. I will definitely be reading this one

I helped out yesterday at the Greater London Linux Group’s meeting, held at my old alma mater, the University of Westminster in New Cavendish street. It was a blast going back after so many years, I met one of my best teachers, Sean Tohill who always had an open mind and a keen intellect. The whole event was organised by Simon Morris.
A lot more people than we had anticipated turned up for this meet! There were easily more than 100 people that showed up. Simon had installed SLED 10 on several desktops there and I got Debian running VLC on a big projector screen, playing a movie in a continuous loop.

A few people, including me, volunteered to give short presentations about certain aspects of SLED, and I was giving a short talk and demo of XGL under SLED. I demoed it to about 20 people and they were all quite impressed with it. Along they way I managed to help out several people with their linux problems.

I absolutely loved this meetup and I hope I can attend many more in the future. There are more details and pictures here.

LinuxWorld started yesterday here in rainy London and I had a great time! It was the first time ever that I wasn’t a visitor, but was helping out at the Jokosher stand. I did several demos of the app to tons of people and we managed to distribute more than 130 Jokosher flyers to interested people.

I was quite surprised at the level of interest in the app, and we managed to solicit a great many feature requests from people, some of which will hopefully end up in Jokosher someday, making it rock even harder! I will definitely try to help out at more of these events in the future
You can find the photos I took with my camera phone at my flickr photo page.