Second Look at "Official" XP SP3

Last post I detailed how I installed Windows XP Home SP3 on my long-distended Windows installation, only to find a couple rather major issues. Here's the follow-up.

I successfully removed SP3 (after clearing yet more space - it needs 376MB just to uninstall!). Upon the mandatory reboot, I first attempted to login to my limited user account, only to find that it had the same problem initiating explorer.exe, so I assume that that problem was present before I installed SP3 in the first place.

I logged into my Root account (still SP2, mind you) and found that I could use my themes as I wished. So far, so good.

I then went to the Microsoft Update website, planning to download the update through that. As the "download" progressed, however, I decided it was going too slow and did some searching for alternative means of installation. I found the Network Installation, roughly 316MB. Click the download link, select "run", and wait. When the download was completed, I went through the steps of installing SP3 and rebooted.

At this point, I didn't even worry about my virtually lost Limited User account; best to just copy it to a new account and get rid of it. Logging back into my Root account, I was pleasantly greeted with the Silver Luna theme (I had switched to the default Luna theme and changed colors to silver before installing). I located and downloaded a UXTheme patch for SP3, applied it, rebooted (again!!), logged in, and checked out my theming capabilities. I was greeted with full theming glory.

So, one of the most common Windows Troubleshooting Tips fixed my issues: "If it's messed up, reinstall."

Now that that issue's fixed -- back to linux!!! :)

First Look at "Official" XP SP3

A couple days ago, I booted into my Windows XP Home installation (yes, blasphemy, I know) in order to pull some pictures off of a Sony Memory Stick, since Ubuntu doesn't seem to recognize the card when I plug it into my card reader. In the course of performing the Windows Updates that I had long been delinquent on, the MS Update site offered to let me download and install Windows XP SP3. I had some free time so, heck, why not?

Since my switch to nearly-all-linux, I had shrunk my Windows partition down to the minimum to hold all the programs I had installed, the OS itself, and about 1 GB of free space. Seems my 1 GB had been reduced in my sparse Windows use; the SP3 download required roughly 370MB, and the installation another 370MB, and I had to find just a tad more free space. :)

After the install (and the ever-needed reboot), there were a couple major problems with my computer. Most major was the complete destruction of my theme capabilities. I'm quite fond of the infamous UXTheme hack; however, after applying the hack for SP3 (and probably before, but I'll have to check), I could not use any UI themes, not even the default Luna theme. I kept getting an error that the theme couldn't load because the file couldn't load...

As tragic as it is that I could not use any window themes, at least I can still use the computer. Well, my Root account, anyway; my limited user account threw an error when I logged in saying that explorer.exe couldn't initialize properly. Clicking the OK button continued the login process, only to login to a completely empty desktop. Explorer failed to load, which in turn kept the desktop, taskbar, etc from loading. I was able to pull up the Task Manager, but attempting to start Explorer.exe from the new task option threw the same error. I was able to "work around" this major issue by creating a new limited user account (which logged in perfectly fine), but I ended up running out of space while attempting to copy the Docs & Settings directory from the old account to the new account.

Turns out SP3 is placed in the Add/Remove programs list. I'm going to uninstall SP3, check if any of these problems reoccur under SP2, then try re-installing SP3 and see if it works any better. Maybe I messed something up during the install. Or maybe SP3 isn't ready for the masses yet.

Must-Have Plasmoid: QuickLauncher

KDE4 is great. I've always enjoyed the idea of widgets, ever since I discovered Konfabulator back on Windows. However, in the journey from KDE3.x (with panels) to KDE4 (with optional panels and plasmoids), one key component was lost: the quicklaunch menu.

For most plasmoids, you either get it with the default plasma installation, or you can install the extragear-plasma package. (As of Kubuntu Hardy Heron) Neither one of these has a replacement for the quicklaunch menu. The QuickLauncher plasmoid is available from the plasmoids section of KDE-Look.org. The author currently offers a source tarball as well as packages for Kubuntu Hardy (x86) and Mandriva (x86, amd64, and "source-RPM").

The plasmoid still has some quirks that require you to edit configuration files. Add it to your desktop, and it is initially empty, with no indication of its existence. I haven't tried using it with the panel, perhaps someone can enlighten me on that point. To initially populate it, open up a file manager to /usr/share/applications. This will have a bunch of .desktop files which link to various applications. It may also have one or two "kde" directories, which contain KDE3- or KDE4-specific applications. Choose your initial quicklaunch application and copy the .desktop file's path (like /usr/share/applications/kde/konqbrowser.desktop for Konqueror). Open a text editor, such as Kate, and open the file ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-appletsrc . Don't edit it yet. Press Alt+F2 to bring up the application runner, type "kquitapp plasma", press the Launch button, and don't panic. This will shutdown the plasma desktop (causing the plasmoids and panel to disappear), but your windows (and window manager) should stay where they are. Click inside the Kate window, and Kate should tell you that the plasma-appletsrc file has changed. Choose to reload it.

If you haven't removed the "invisible" quicklaunch plasmoid yet, you should see a section near the bottom of the file that looks like this: [Containments][1][Applets][85] geometry=169,520,24,48 locked=false plugin=quicklauncher Note the plugin=quicklauncher line, telling you that this section controls the parameters for the QuickLauncher plasmoid. Paste the path to your .desktop file a couple of lines below this section, and add "iconUrls=" before it, like so: iconUrls=/usr/share/applications/kde/konqbrowser.desktop Copy the first line of the section you located, and paste it one line above the iconUrls line. Then add "[Configuration]" to the end. The final section should look something like this: [Containments][1][Applets][85][Configuration] iconUrls=/usr/share/applications/kde/konqbrowser.desktop Save the file, press Alt+F2 again, type "plasma", and click Launch. Plasma should load, and you should have the Konqueror icon sitting on your desktop, waiting to be clicked.

To add more shortcuts to QuickLauncher, simply re-open Konqueror to /usr/share/applications , and drag-and-drop any .desktop files on top of the existing icon(s) in the QuickLauncher. You can also drag-and-drop to re-organize the icons within the launcher. To remove an icon, right-click the icon and choose "Remove Icon" from the menu.

The configuration dialog for QuickLauncher allows you to choose how many rows it has and how many visible icons it shows. For a single-row quicklauncher, set "rows" to 1 (obviously enough). For a one-column quicklauncher (my current preference), set "rows" equal to or greater than the number of icons you have.

AdSense Videos Not Necessarily Good

In my last post, I "introduced" AdSense's new Video Units. I also railed against the size requirements a little bit in that post.

Now. Taking a step back, let me ask a question. What is the purpose of ads (AdSense ads in particular)? For most legitimate cases, the purpose is to enhance a page's content with topic-relevant alternative links, with the main incentive of earning a few cents per click. Note the word enhance, meaning "to add value to". You put ads on your site in the hopes that the links provided will provide enough potential quality that the user will click through. Now, another question: what do videos, the marketing tool of the Information Age, do by their very nature? They grab your attention, and they grab it hard! Have you ever found one specific video on YouTube, watched it, and immediately been pulled in to the "related videos" journey? Mm-hm. Guilty as charged :) . The "traditional" (if I may use the word here) ad system is to place a text block (which is easily skimmable, by the way!) within our content, where it sits quietly by in the hopes that some user may grace it with a mouse click. This new version? GRAB the user's attention away from the main content, and perhaps they might click the overlay ads in the process. These video ads, as big as they are, will steal the limelight from your content, if not placed appropriately. Really, I don't think the current sizes have an "appropriate" placement. You can either place them intrusively up front where they steal from your content, or you can place them out-of-the-way (long after your content) where they'll hardly be noticed.

Now, you'd think that's great, right? Grab their attention straight to the ad unit itself, no trouble? Well, it might be, if the overlay ads themselves were noticeable. I just added the mini player to my blog and played the first video on it, and the overlay ad was so annoying and detracting from my video experience so badly that I quickly hid it. That's right, there's a "close overlay ad" button. It reduces the entire money-making mechanism to a little "show ad" button in the bottom-right corner of the player. Now, how many people do you think, after having hidden the ad that was so darned annoying, will re-open that same ad to see if they want to click it? Certainly not me. I have more content to look through, and better things to do with my time.

Come to think of it, I might not even press the play button.

AdSense Videos

Seems Google has one-up'd their AdSense service to include full-on YouTube videos. You can embed a video player in your website which will play YouTube videos with overlay ads.

To create an AdSense video unit, you must first own both an AdSense account and a YouTube account. Following the links from within the AdSense website, you must link the two accounts together (fairly straightforward). Once linked, YouTube will put you on the video unit setup page, where you can add a name and description, color scheme (nine available at time of writing), size (Mini 400x415, Standard 500x510, and Full-Sized 780x560 -- yikes!), and content. The content options seem the most difficult part to figure out; a "keywords" field is offered, but all my attempts at using only keywords failed. You can also pick-and-choose from categories. Once a "search is successful", you are presented with a bunch of YouTube channels from which to choose your content. The "Channel Picker" offers the helpful hint "Click on a content owner to preview their information." The information? Their name, a link to their YouTube page, when they joined, how many channel views they've had, and, if you're lucky, a picture. Nothing useful enough to choose what content my viewers might enjoy. It does offer a "preview videos" button, which returns a table of video thumbnails with links you can click through to view the corresponding videos. Sorry, still not enough to accurately filter my content. Anyway. Moving on.

The smallest player, 400x415, is not "small". Granted, everyone has screens that are 1024x768 at a minimum (I myself use a 1440x900 notebook), but the browser no longer occupies the entire screen. I keep my FireFox window constantly at 1024x768 with the help of the Web Developer extension, and this "Mini" player is anything but mini. I suppose it does depend on your website's layout, of course, but seriously. 400 pixels wide is pretty "intrusive" by my standards; my current blog layout allows only 512 pixels for content width, and about 230 pixels for the sidebar content. Gimme something that's 200 pixels wide or less ("Micro" size, perhaps :D ), and hope it doesn't lose too much quality.

I know, I know, they've only just released it, more options will come with time and development, give em a break, right? Fine. I'm not really for the idea anyway, but that's another post.

Now, just because I'm not for the idea, doesn't mean I won't try it. I've added a "mini" sized player to the bottom of the blog, and we'll see how it goes. Enjoy the LockerGnome :)

Lists, Useful For More Than Menus

I came across a page recently that uses ordered lists for the entire layout -- not just the menu. The entire layout is in two parts: one ordered list for the header/body/footer, and another ordered list for the three columns inside the body.

I find this to be an interesting approach to multi-column layouts. Better yet, the author claims that it works in all major browsers on the three major operating systems.

However, are ordered lists the proper elements to use in this case? Is it "semantically correct"? What about unordered versus ordered lists? It'd be terribly simple to convert the layout to work with unordered lists, but which is more "correct".

Regardless of correctness, though, "no floats, no divs, no clears" is rather appealing.

Circular Menus and Usability

Circular menus. Ever heard of them? I'm not sure if they have an "official" or "common" name, but this name is pretty descriptive.

Circular menus are superior in usability to the typical rectangular slide-out menu. Why? Because, ideally, each menu item is the same distance from the initial pointer position as each other item. Look at the iPod buttons, for example. Play/Pause, the most common function, is in the middle, and the other functions are equal distances from there.

Also check out the SecondLife context "spin menu". The pie pops up surrounding the cursor, and all the available options are an equal twitch away from the center.

Submenus? Just expand the circle. For example, here's a quick mockup I made converting much of my current FireFox context menu into a pie menu:

But how feasible would such menus be inside a website? WebToolkit.info has a mostly-working demo that uses images exclusively. I tried substituting text for the images, but the menu simply disappeared.

Credit for image: iPod image and SecondLife image

Blogger Scheduled Publishing

Seems I'm a little late :)

Finally! Blogger now officially supports Scheduled Publishing! Simply create a new post, click the "Post Options" dropdown (next to the Labels field), set "Post date and time:" to a future date, and publish. The post will then be filed as "Scheduled".

To view your scheduled posts, go to the "Posting" tab, select "Edit Posts", and choose to show either "All" or "Scheduled" posts.

'Bout time :D

Migration tips?

For a while now, I've been considering migrating this blog from Blogger to WordPress. I've never actually used WordPress before, but I've heard lots of ranting and raving about this WordPress plugin and that WordPress plugin. I love FireFox and its extension capabilities, and the idea of using plugins for stuff on my blog is very appealing. Even better, WordPress has a New Blogger import tool, which claims to make the transition rather easy.

The main holdback I have is forwarding existing traffic. I already use Feedburner, so forwarding my RSS should be a snap. But what about Google traffic? What about all those blogspot-centric URLs I've scattered about the net? They will inevitably link straight here, but is there a way to automatically forward incoming links to the new location? And what about the ever-important (sarcasm) technorati ranking? Granted, I'm only rank 17 right now, but I'd rather not lose what little "credibility" I have.

Does anyone have any tips for a truly seamless Blogger-to-WordPress transition? Or at least some tips on maintaining my current traffic?

Maintain Your Linux Desktop Through a Fresh Install

This article assumes, for the most part, a reasonable familiarity with sudo, cp, mv, and other simple command line commands. It also assumes that you backup your important data, as any experienced computer user will tell you to. In addition to your important data, you should backup the new versions of the discussed system files, for the simple case that you mistype something and your Ubuntu won't boot, you can go in with a LiveCD and restore the fresh-install-version without much trouble.

With the release of Hardy Heron, many X/K/Ubuntu users will upgrade to the new version. Many already have. While an actual upgrade is possible, my preferred method of "upgrading" is through a fresh install. This resets everything to "factory settings", as it were, getting rid of any junk left lying around from your various tweakings. A fresh start, so to speak. But what about your already carefully-crafted desktop experience? In my experience, I've found that there are a number of things you can do to maintain your desktop through a fresh install.

The main thing you'll want to do is create a /home partition. PsychoCats has an excellent guide on moving your existing home directory. On my system (60GB hard drive), I have allocated about 5GB to my root ( / ) partition, various small amounts to a couple of other partitions, and the rest to my /home partition. Currently (using Kubuntu Gutsy and after installing/uninstalling several programs), I use about 4GB of that 5GB. The benefits of a separate /home partition is that, since all your personal settings and files are stored there, you can safely leave that data untouched during the install.

The next thing to do is to backup all your system-wide settings. This includes your wallpapers (if you're into that sorta thing), sources.list, xorg.conf, fstab, and possibly your grub menu.lst. These are the main things that normally need reconfigured after a fresh install. You can create a new directory on your desktop (which won't be erased if you have a separate partition for it), and put all the backups in there, so they're easy to get to when you're ready to restore them.

If you're into collecting wallpapers, you'll likely want to backup your collection. Whenever I switch to a new wallpaper, I first put it in /usr/share/wallpapers. If you do the same, you can simply copy this folder to the new folder on your desktop. For the rest of the backups, just copy /etc/apt/sources.list, /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/fstab, and /boot/grub/menu.lst to the folder on your desktop. You can use the folowing commands to do it all relatively quickly: $ cd ~/Desktop/ $ mkdir backups $ cp -r /usr/share/wallpapers /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/fstab /boot/grub/menu.lst ~/Desktop/backups/

A quick explanation of the files to backup: the sources.list tells apt-get where to search for available software. I use several programs which are not in the official Ubuntu repos, and this usually involves adding third-party repos to my sources.list file. I like to back this file up so I don't have to go hunting yet again for the repo info.

The xorg.conf file holds your display settings and other settings relating to on-screen display (such as mouse configuration). Every time I reinstall on my notebook, I have to go in and manually modify the xorg.conf file to enable horizontal scrolling on my synaptics touchpad. Backing up the file allows for quick and easy editing, instead of trying to remember my settings.

Fstab specifies automount details for various partitions. I have two partitions other than my root and home partitions that are setup to automount, as well as several Windows shares that are specified in fstab so as to automate mounting them.

You really only want to backup your grub menu.lst if you have manually modified it for whatever reason (for example, if you have a dedicated grub boot partition). If you normally let Ubuntu auto-config the boot options and don't touch it afterwards, you probably don't need or want to back it up.

Install X/K/Ubuntu as normal, specifying your home and root partitions, and ensuring that the installer does NOT format the home partition. You will be required to format the root partition. During the install, you will also want to create any user accounts that you had before, in the same order that you previously created them. User recreation can also be done after you boot into your fresh install, by using the useradd and usermod commands.

After the install, boot into your shiny new installation. Since you'll need to use root privileges (sudo) to re-integrate your files, you may want to log into a fail-safe desktop. This will give you a command line window, but no window decorations, panels, etc. You won't need them anyway, yet. To view the contents of files, use the "nano" text editor. Do not simply copy all the files back to their original positions. When a distro is upgraded (or reinstalled), system files have a tendency to get modified (case in point: your sources.list). What you want to do is compare the differences between the old and new files, and make changes as appropriate.

First, move your wallpapers back. You can do this without deleting any new, "official" wallpapers by running the command $ sudo cp -r ~/Desktop/backups/wallpapers/* /usr/share/wallpapers/

For the sources.list...well...I don't know of any good way to check for updated repos, other than to change the "gutsy" to "hardy" for each repo line, and run "apt-get update". If the repo doesn't exist, you'll get some output like: Ign http://repo.freecreations.info hardy Release.gpg Ign http://repo.freecreations.info hardy/freeverse Translation-en_US Ign http://repo.freecreations.info hardy Release Ign http://repo.freecreations.info hardy/freeverse Packages Err http://repo.freecreations.info hardy/freeverse Packages 404 Not Found From there, you could try to pull software from your previously-used gutsy repos, but I really have no clue how stable that would be :)

Moving on to xorg.conf. Simply look into your backup file, find out the settings you want, and add those to the appropriate places in the new xorg.conf. You will need to use sudo to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf with root privileges. The same goes for your grub menu.lst.

For fstab, unless you made some change to your partitions between backing up and reinstalling, you should be able to simply "sudo cp" your old fstab over your new fstab. Of course, you should backup the new fstab, just to be safe, and compare all the numbers afterwards to make sure everything will work after your next reboot.

Now that you've restored all your settings, you should be able to reboot, log into your normal session, and enjoy your familiar desktop experience under the new distro. After reinstalling all your software, of course :)

If you find any part of this guide to be lacking in detail, first use Google, secondly email me at eternicode at gmail.com or post in the comments. As of this post, I have not, myself, aupgraded to Hardy, but I did use this very method to upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy, and I believe this process to still be good for the current distros.