xvnkb for Fedora 10 users

I have just dumped scim-unikey in favor of the old xvnkb. This time I did a plain installation using the traditional ./configure; make; sudo make install for xvnkb from the 0.2.9a source package.

It's normal that after installing, my dear Gimp stopped working. xvnkb and Gimp seem not to play well together and the reason may be that some of the system calls which were overrided by xvnkb preload so don't work with Gimp and cause it to crash.

As noted by Tinh in the installation of xvnkb for Arch, the workaround is to disable xvnkb.so overriding in case of launching Gimp.

The method to disable overriding provided by Tinh does not work in the case that xvnkb is installed using make install. This is simply because the installation script actively disabled the preloading method using env variable. Instead, it created its own entry in the /etc/ld.so.preload for loading its so. With this method, temporarily emptying the LD_PRELOAD variable does not prevent the system to preload the xvnkb.so.

The workaround's workaround is to roll back into using the environment variable based preloading method.

To do this, you have to first remove any xvnkb related entry in the /etc/ld.so.preload file and then put this in a file named xvnkb.sh in the /etc/profile.d

export LD_PRELOAD=/lib/xvnkb.so.0.2.9a

To fix the Gimp problem, in your root terminal, do this:

# cp /usr/bin/gimp-2.6 /usr/bin/gimp-2.6-orig

Create a text file at /usr/bin/gimp-2.6 and put this into that file

#!/bin/sh

export LD_PRELOAD=""
gimp-2.6-orig $1

Go back to your root terminal, add the execution permission to the file

# chmod +x /usr/bin/gimp-2.6

Reboot your box and both xvnkb and Gimp will work (but not together, unfortunately!)

Vi$ta Usability #2: UAC

This tells you how good Microsoft UAC is:



(and also selinux)

Vi$ta Usability #1: Data listing

Copying some files in Vista using the explorer:



So which file is being copied?
The ugliest data lister working at M$ show me bunch of info but not the simplest thing.

Is this a movement for cost reduction or software freedom or both?

VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Information and Communications has issued an instruction on using open source software products at state agencies.

Accordingly, by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software; 100% of staffs at these IT divisions must be trained in the use of these software products and at least 50% use them proficiently.

Original post is at http://english.vietnamnet.vn/tech/2009/01/822425/

Việt Nam!

Duo acoustique, by Lull

Found this album today on Jamendo.

It's been 4 years since Lena and Arnaud began to play together. They come from south of France and now live in Paris where they play as often as they can. They are working on a first album and are still looking for a label.

An independent benchmark of JS engines

An independent benchmarking result is posted today revealed the fact that in a close-to-real-world usage test, Chrome's V8 arrived at the 6th place ahead only the poor IE6's engine. This is totally opposite to the result provided by Google when benchmarking using their own tests.

This is interesting!

(Please note that even with JIT turned ON in FF 3.1b the performance was not improved. This is just because the test concentrates mostly on DOM manipulation, which is much used in real world applications, but the current TraceMonkey doesn't do any JIT for DOM calls.)