A Pipe and a Keyboard

Here is the scenario…

I have a laptop, which has plenty memory and disk space.  It was bought with a licenced copy of Windows 7 installed.

I have repartitioned the hard disk into a Windows area and a separate area where I have installed Linux Mint.  It is of course a duel boot machine now.  The Windows area is hardly used at all now, and is there mainly as a fallback.

There are one or two programs that I like and am used to that only run under Windows, Windows Live Writer being one of them.  To avoid constant reboots, the obvious answer is to install a Virtual Machine within Linux.  This leads to my little question regarding ethics.

I need to install Windows 7 within the VM, as that is the whole point of the exercise.  Technically, under strict interpretation of the law, I should buy a new copy of Windows 7.  I see from Amazon, that this would cost me around $180, which is quite a lot for the privilege of running one free program.  However, I already have a licenced copy for this machine, which by definition cannot be used if I am within Linux.

Legally, I presume I should purchase a new copy of Windows, but ethically, I don’t think that should be necessary.

What do you think?

Filed under: Tech stuff on January 23rd, 2011 | 5 Comments »

I have mentioned before how I get occasional surges of traffic from Stumbleupon.  The page in question was posted in October 2007, but periodically it rises in the ranks of Stumbleupon.

Last Monday, at 4 in the afternoon, the latest ‘storm’ started.   I call them storms, as the usual pattern is a sudden peak in traffic before the page slides into obscurity again.

This time was different however.  What emerged over the last week is a quite remarkable pattern of traffic.  The Monday evening storm developed into one of the biggest since 2007, and instead of subsiding, it developed into a whole series of cycles.

Hourly traffic over seven days

For some reason, traffic drops to a minimum at around ten in the morning before rising to the next peak.

Daily traffic over thirty days

The decay in traffic is also quite remarkable in that it follows a mathematically precise curve.  I took the snapshots a couple of days ago, but the traffic is still following the same very precise pattern.

Monthly traffic over a full year

As the second illustration shows, the quantity of traffic is quite significant too.  In fact the site is receiving more traffic in one day than it would normally receive in a whole week.   Even more startling is that by the 9th, January’s traffic had already created a new twelve month record.

The traffic is still pretty heavy, but the rate of decay has slowed right down.  Mathematically, it is indicating that I can expect a permanent increase in traffic of around 500%.  However I recognize that is extremely unlikely which probably indicates why I’m not a climatologist?

Filed under: Blogging, Tech stuff on January 12th, 2011 | No Comments »

For various reasons, I decided to reformat my Linux partition recently.

One of the things I like about Linux Mint is its fast and reliable install.  I had my Mint 10 [Julia] 64-bit DVD already burned so it was simply a matter of banging it into the drive and letting it run.

Everything went as smoothly as I expected and I then set about installing all the applications I use. Again, with Mint, this is utter simplicity, and all that is really required is a little time.

I had forgotten about Adobe Air however.

For reasons unknown, Adobe have no 64-bit version of their Air installer, and any attempt to run the provided adobeair.deb will fail miserably.  However, I had done it before but hadn’t bothered writing down the instructions.  Big mistake!  What was worse, it was a nightmare trying to find the fix I had used before.

-oOo-

The rest of this article has become obsolete, as Adobe have removed Adobe Air 32 bit from their site.

I have an old copy of my modified Adobe Air 64 bit DEB file which can be downloaded from here.  It has worked every time for me so it should work for you!

If Adobe ask me to remove the file then I shall of course remove it, but in the meantime……….

-oOo-

I never did find my old fix, but have found a way around which works very well.  I am writing it up as a reference for the future, and it maybe help others in the same situation.

Download adobeair.deb from the normal location.  This is the 32-bit version so don’t try to run it.

Open a terminal in the download folder and create a temp directory -

mkdir temp

Next, extract the downloaded file into the temp directory -

dpkg-deb -x adobeair.deb temp

Now extract the control files -

dpkg-deb --control adobeair.deb temp/DEBIAN

Change the architecture from ‘i386′ to ‘all’ -

sed -i "s/i386/all/" temp/DEBIAN/control

All that remains now is to create a new DEB file -

dpkg -b temp adobeair64.deb

Now all that remains is to install the package -

sudo dpkg -i adobeair64.deb

It worked flawlessly for me, and I was immediately able to install Tweetdeck, amongst other things.

Filed under: Linux on January 5th, 2011 | 24 Comments »