Launch date: March 2012

Links

• Minervation.com

Launch date: April 2012

Links

• GMC’s Learning disabilities website
• Minervation news item

Launch date: March 2012

Links

• Healhtyliving award
• Minervation news item on site launch

Mouse speed

I find the default mouse speed much too fast. And even after reducing both speed and acceleration to a minimum it is still too fast. Some googling through up this handy hint:

http://patrickmylund.com/blog/lowering-gaming-mouse-sensitivity-in-ubuntu-9-10/

So I ran these commands:

xinput --list --short
xinput --set-prop "Device name or ID" "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 2


View hidden files in browser: CTRL+H

List only directories: ls -l | grep ^d

This, if I understand it properly, takes a list in “long” format, pipes it through grep and includes only lines starting with “d”. d being the directory indicator.

Windows Manager

To get the Compiz working in Ubuntu, install CompizConfig Settings Manager: sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Moving window to next screen (on dual monitor): CompizConfig Settings Manager -> Window Management -> Put -> Bindings (tab) -> Put To Next Output (keyboard shortcut)

Handy shortcuts

http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/04/31-useful-ubuntu-1104-unity.html

Default programs/extensions

Useful info here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/16580/where-are-file-associations-stored

Associations are located here: ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
Mounting Windows drive on startup

This is done using fstab, see here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/46588/how-to-automount-ntfs-partitions

Also had to prevent auto-mounting by Nautilus: http://askubuntu.com/questions/89244/how-to-disable-automount-in-nautiluss-preferences

What has this got to do with Google searching? Well my requirements for installing Ubuntu were quite specific but not unusual (or at least I thought so): Ubuntu needs to be on a separate hard disk and not touch my Windows 7 hard disk in anyway, whatsoever. My entire work life is on my Windows hard disk so I couldn’t risk it being corrupted in anyway. I have used Ubuntu using their excellent Wubi installer as well using Virtual Machines, but that was not what I wanted. My aim was a clean install as the main OS on a separate hard disk on my PC with a bootloader to choose which OS to boot into.

So I downloaded the iso file for my system from the Ubuntu website and burnt it to a CD. I then started to search the web for instructions on how to achieve what I wanted. My main premise with anything technical is always that someone has:

a) already solved this problem
b) written about it in on the web

I am not so foolish to believe that I am the first one to come across my specific problem.

So I started searching the web with searches such as:

install ubuntu windows 7 on separate hard disk

This led me to lots of useful links about installing Ubuntu, but interestingly most of them would mess with my Windows 7 disk in order give me the option to choose Ubuntu on starting the PC. I really didn’t want to touch that hard disk. After reading through lots and lots info I came across this link:

http://forums.techarena.in/operating-systems/1258191.htm

Where the final comment by Rudra.J suggested exactly what I was looking for:

…just change the disk boot priority and make the ubuntu as the first disk. Now boot into ubuntu and run the following command

… [example code to edit GRUB]…

I am considering there are two hard disk and on the first one, you have installed Ubuntu and Windows 7 on the second hard disk after changing the disk priority. Ubuntu is the first disk here and Windows 7 is the second disk so for ubuntu the disk is hd0,0 and for Windows 7 it is hd1,0. This above will let to add a boot entry in Ubuntu’s boot loader [grub] without making any changes to any disk’s MBR. This means even if there occurs any problem in any of one disk, the other OS will remain intact.

All the other suggestions were to have the Windows disk with highest boot priority, but this would involve messing with the MBR on the Windows disk. This I really did not want.

So it was time to install Ubuntu. Many posts also suggested disconnecting the Windows disk whilst installing Ubuntu and I decided this was prudent. So I disconnected that disk, placed my Ubuntu CD into the cd drive and rebooted. The installation went smoothly and took about 15 minutes.

I then reconnected my Windows 7 drive and set it to priority one to check that Windows was still working. It was. Reboot again. Set Ubuntu drive to priority one and log into Ubuntu. Obviously I didn’t want to switch drive priorities in the BIOS everytime I changed OS. So I ran the example code in the above comment and rebooted. And landed straight back in Ubuntu. I was given no choice to switch to Windows. Not ideal.

I then noted that the comment was from a couple of years back and might be outdated, so I started searching for GRUB and Ubuntu

ubuntu grub

After reading through a bunch of info on this it became clear that there is now a GRUB2 and that this the default in Ubuntu for quite some time:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

So I refined my search to:

ubuntu grub2 Windows 7

This had lots of useful info and led me to this thread:

Grub2 won’t load Windows 7 (which is on second hard drive)

Which was exactly my situation. Lots of info in here about editing files and whatnot, but hidden away amongst them was this gem of a suggestion by Mark Phelps

Did you try just letting GRUB2 find Win7 and add its own entries?

I have multiple drives, with Win7 NOT on the first drive, I boot from one of my Ubuntu drives — and GRUB2 found the Win7 OS just fine when I ran update-grub.

So back in an Ubuntu terminal I ran:

sudo update-grub

And, hey presto, I now have Windows 7 as an option when my PC boots up and I never touched the Windows 7 hard disk. Mission accomplished.

And a big thanks to all the bloggers, forum frequentersm documentation writers and of course Google for helping me accomplishing my aim.

Launch date: January 2012

Links

• NSUHR

Recently I’ve been investigating this measure for some of our sites and was quite surprised at how long Google thinks it takes our pages to load. Page load times as measured by Google were several seconds above the one second it takes for our largely static pages to load from the end users perspective. I measured this from several remote locations on different continents and our pages appear to load in about a second. Crucially the time measured by Google is also above their recommended maximum page load time. Why the difference?

Google doesn’t just measure the time it takes the main content to load, but also how long it takes all the Javascript to process and potentially load other bits and pieces.  On our pages, a lot of this extra loading doesn’t really affect whether the user can get on with reading the content and using the site. We try to make use of progressive enhancement as much as we can.  A further detailed look at the load times showed that the main culprits where actually all the social networking add-ons such as Facebook Like, Google +1, ShareThis and ShareThat.  I am now a little worried that Google may be penalising our sites unfairly. I don’t consider social networking buttons as being vital to the proper functioning of our site.

On the other hand I can see why Google have introduced this feature and why they take the approach that they do. All sites nowadays are filled with Javascript and Ajax calls. On the ones who do this properly you won’t really notice.  But on lots and lots of sites the page gets reformatted slightly about 2 seconds after it initially got displayed. This is really annoying if you’ve just read the first sentence and then text text shifts. Or you’re about to click a link and then the text shifts so you click another link. Both of these have been happening more often recently, especially when browsing on my six year old laptop. And I must say: It is really annoying.

So I can fully understand why they are measuring this.  I do hope though that their algorithm is clever enough to evaluate what the consequence of the extra loading to the end user is. Do they take into account how quickly the initial content loads? Do they measure how the text displaces after the Javascript has finished? I sure hope so.

Launch date: December 2011

Links

• Maggie’s CancerLinks

Coming more from a software engineering background I see similarities here with the Agile Manifesto that was formulated about 10 years ago. So here’s my initial attempt at a Future Friendly Manifesto:

Great content over good looks
Accessible usability over functionality
Web based applications over device specific applications
Open standards over proprietory implementations

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

Comments welcome via Twitter: @rmassart.

Launch date: December 2011

Links

• The IDEAL Collaboration