Monthly Archives: September 2006

Lenovo Battery Recall

So it seems that Lenovo has decided to join in on this battery recall fad. It turns out that the main battery in my X60s is one of the explosive Sony variety (the extended life battery isn’t though). I rang them up to organise the replacement, which will be arriving in 5 weeks.

Even though he hasn’t asked for it yet, I sent the details to Richard Hughes. It looks like the battery model numbers are exposed through HAL, so gnome-power-manager should be able to detect the bad batteries.

If you have an affected Thinkpad, check your batteries.

Impossible Triangle Sculpture

Saw this interesting sculpture while cycling through East Perth:

Of course, it can only be appreciated when standing in a particular location (Here is what it looks like from another angle). I wonder how many people pass it and don’t realise what it is or how you are meant to look at it?

Update: the sculpture can be seen on Google Maps in the centre of the round about. You can clearly see the arms of the triangle going off in different directions.

Politics imitates The Simpsons?

John Howard: You know what really aggravazes me? It’s them immigants. They wants all the benefits of living in Springfield Australia, but they ain’t even bother to learn themselves the language.
Kim Beazley: Hey, those are exactly my sentimonies.
From episode 3F20

I wonder if this is just setting the stage for the next federal election?

Microsummaries in Firefox 2

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One of the new features in Firefox 2 is Microsummaries, which essentially allows dynamic bookmark titles. This is useful when bookmarking volatile pages, since the title can reflect the current state of the document rather than the state when the bookmark was created.

The system works by registering XSLT transformations that generate a simple text string from the page content. The registrations are either done via a <link> element, or matched via regular expressions. The system is designed to target users (who can register their own microsummary generators), website owners (who can suggest a generator through a <link> tag) and 3rd parties (who can provide generators for other sites to users).

For Launchpad, I’d fall into the second category. It would be nice to provide microsummary generators for bug pages, so you’d get an indication of the status of the bug, plus an up to date bug title. Now while all this information is available in the page content, we can provide it in a much more efficient manner (if we know the user is only interested in generating a microsummary, why send them the 100 comments on the bug every time the bookmark title is to be updated?).

Being able to specify a transformation for the bookmarked URL that would be used instead for generating the summary would be one way of solving this. This would reduce the bandwidth requirements and processing time on our end. Another way would be for Firefox to include something in its request that would allow a site to know that the page was being retrieved for microsummary generation so it could ommit information.

Overall it looks like a useful feature, but I do wonder if it will suffer from the “RSS effect” and cause lots of needless traffic to web sites until people work out how to achieve the same effects in a less resource intensive fashion.

–create-prefix not needed with bazaar.launchpad.net

When outlining the use of team branches on Launchpad previously, I used the --create-prefix option when pushing the branch to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net. This was to make sure the initial push would succeed, even if the /~username/product directory the branch would be created in didn’t exist.

To simplify things for users, we made a change to the SFTP server in the latest release, so that --create-prefix is no longer necessary. This does not affect the allowed branch directories though: the structure is used to associate the branches with products, and decide who can write to the branches.

Another change included in the rollout is the ability to rename branches and reassign them to different owners through the web interface. So for instance, you can give ownership of a personal branch to a team your project grows to multiple developers. This should be used sparingly, since it will change the published branch URLs which can confuse people using your branch.