Like Webilder but running lucid? There’s finally a fix for you.

Back in February I wrote a post about Webilder, a combination wallpaper manager/rotator and a great way to get new wallpaper images from Webshots and some Flickr channels. Unfortunately when I upgraded my system to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx I ran into a problem that killed any chance of running Webilder.

It turns out that the GNOME devs (or perhaps the Ubuntu devs?) split python-gnome2-extras into smaller packages. Unfortunately Webilder depends on python-gnome2-extras so Webilder couldn’t run anymore. I contacted the developer of Webilder and let him know and was waiting patiently for a fix.

Today I was finally getting caught up with my RSS feeds in Evolution and saw that GetDeb, one of the sources for getting Webilder packages, was offline yet again. Luckily jedd posted a comment that included information on adding a GetDeb mirror to your sources.list file. I added them in Synaptic and updated my sources, then just on a whim I did a check to see if I could install Webilder. Sure enough, there was webilder and webilder-gnome 0.6.5-1~getdeb3. I installed them and am very happy to say that I have once again retired Wallpaper Tray and have Webilder changing my wallpaper every half hour. Webilder still can’t change the wallpaper on system startup but it’s okay since if I really want a new wall that fast I can always for a new wallpaper.

Thanks to everyone who worked to get the update available, both on the Webilder team and over at GetDeb and it’s mirror. I owe you guys a round.

Before you click Submit, Share or Publish on a web form ….

I was listening to Talk of the Nation‘s Science Friday on WBUR last night and they had a segment on Protecting Your Privacy On Social Networking Sites and I was reminded that we need to be really careful about what we put online.

I think most people have heard of potential employers Googling applicants and finding things posted that we’d prefer not to be part of their consideration of whether we get offered the job or not, but now what we post is even making it’s way into our courtrooms.

FLATOW: So lawyers are using Facebook for – and – this stuff for just about everything.

Mr. UNDERHILL: Yeah, and that’s the thing that people should remember, is, you know, what they post there is evidence. And it’s maybe not admissible, but at least discoverable in pretty much any case.

Our online postings are also getting found when we go in for jury duty.

Mr. UNDERHILL: Well, that’s – you know, the people we’re talking about, potential jurors, here, and you – both sides are wanting to check whether somebody might have potential bias to one side or the other. And they do – you get a chance to interview them in court, and they also fill out a questionnaire. But we – you know, it’s not just us. I mean, everybody – it’s very common for both sides to be searching the Facebook profiles because, you know, people post things there that they do not reveal in a questionnaire.

Consider what a caller to the show discovered.

GRAHAM: I just had a comment about some of the privacy settings. I’ve opted out of virtually everything I can on Facebook. One of the things I found out, I was kind of upset about was my friends who use applications that I even don’t can those applications can search through my profile and even get my information, even after I’ve opted out of everything that I could to protect my privacy.

I know this may sound pretty scary, and Kevin Underhill (a partner at the law firm of Shook, Hardy and Bacon in San Francisco and author of the legal humor blog Lowering the Bar) boils it down into one sentence that you may want to put on a PostIt or something and stick it to your monitor:

Mr. UNDERHILL: Yeah. That’s actually what I had written down here as the lesson to take away, is – and like you’re – like Rich said earlier, if you don’t want – if you want to be sure that nobody sees it, including a lawyer, then you have to not post it there in the first place.

Please read the show’s transcript and you can listen to the segment through your browser on that same page. If you’re unable to do much streaming media thanks to your ‘net connection you can use the Download link to save the segment as an MP3 file and listen to it at your leisure. And please pass this along to your family and friends. It’s information that every newbie should get, and the rest of us need to get reminded about it from time to time as well.

DollyRock is … CLOSING???

I got an email from SecondLife telling me I had a new inventory note from Cherry Cheevers at DollyRock so I popped over to the DollyRock website to see what’s probably in the update. My heart immediately dropped when I saw the headline that DollyRock is saying goodbye.

Wow, this is a hard one to write. {deep breath} I’ve decided to close DollyRock. After almost 4 years, I think it’s time to move on, although, no doubt it’s going to leave a gaping hole in my life. There are going to be some big changes to Second Life over the coming months, so I’m going to take some time out and learn new skills and maybe return with something new and fresh. Alternatively I might get to finish the book I’m writing or just blog and twitter 

DollyRock is where I got some of my all-time favorite outfits and even though I didn’t get a chance to buy some of the new things that I liked it’s still one of the locations I always make a point of visiting on those rare occasions that I actually fire up SecondLife.

With the exception of items in the 50L store everything has been marked down to $75L so if there’s something from Cherry that you’ve been meaning to buy you’d better get over to DollyRock and buy it while you can. Her blog post doesn’t say when the store will close if you wait too long you may miss out completely.

For all the details read the announcement on the DollyRock website. Then fire up your SecondLife viewer and head on over to DollyRock while it’s still there.

Now I have to look at the budget for this week to see just how much money I can turn into $L to buy outfits with. Then I think I’m going to cry because I know it won’t be nearly as much as I need it to be.

There’s little joy in Beantown this Mothers’ Day…

… and it has nothing to do with how well any batter does at the plate or who may or may not be in the Dodgers’ lineup.

I got a call from back home in New Orleans last night letting me know that Nanci’s and my mother passed away last night. As a result we’re looking at heading home for the funeral so we may be offline for a bit. Either way please don’t  be surprised to see us not posting much of anything for a spell.

UPDATED 8 9 May: It turns out we will be heading to New Orleans for my mom’s funeral. It’s going to be a tough trip for a host of reasons, but I’m glad we won’t be stuck in New England Tuesday. We’re heading down Monday and we’ll be coming back late Wednesday afternoon. The blog will be down for the duration, but we hope to have a more complete report with pix when we return.

Please bear with us while we do a little renovation

Nanci and I are looking at some new themes for the site before we post a very special update. Unfortunately too many themes are requiring us to actually apply the theme while we check some color scheme and layout issues. We hope to decide on a theme shortly but in the meantime you may find that the blog’s colors and layout may change from page load to page load.

Please bear with us while we work on this. We’ll try not to let it take too long.

Chromium Daily works again

If you’re like me and use the daily builds of the Chromium browser you undoubtedly discovered that several sites, including Gmail and the issue tracking section of the Google Code project hosting site, flat out refused to load. At first I thought it was due to Issue 40221: Incessant “Page unresponsive” errors in latest published build (Win, Mac, Linux), but it turns out that was a Chrome issue, not a Chromium issue, and Chromium users were referred to Issue 43042: Latest Ubuntu chromium-browser broke Gmail and news.google.com. The problem in a nutshell is that build 46027 of version 5.0.393.0 broke something important and was unable to render pages. I also found Issue 43013: [regression] Chromium 5.0.393.0 will not load http://www.google.com, that displayed the same misbehavior.

While we were waiting for the fix to come down the pipeline some of us rolled back to version 5.0.391.0~svn20100428r45775 while some of us switched to the ‘dev’ build channel, which combines the joy of testing code without the possibilities of brand new untested code committing sexual crimes against canines. Either choice is better than what some of us consider the barely acceptable option (at best) of switching back to Firefox.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the daily PPA to see when an update was available, especially since yesterday I wouldn’t help notice that it was being reported that version Chromium 5.0.395.0 (Developer Build 46223) Ubuntu was resolving the issues from  build 46027 although newer builds on the PPA were failing. All day yesterday I was waiting for i386 packages for build 46539 to build, wondering if it was supposed to take over 3 hours for the packages to build. This morning the updates were ready for me to install and I’m very happy to say that I’m finally back to using current nightly builds of the Chromium browser without problems on any sites I’ve tried. Gmail works, Google News works, the Chromium issue tracking site works, and even Twitter works.

I am running Chromium daily builds on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx, but I have a few issues to track down before I post my thoughts on it. I will say it’s working fairly well, but a couple of instances are being a royal PITA. I want to say they’re fixed, or at least identified better, before I post my review of the upgrade.