Economy of Effort

This isn’t about the Jaunty 9.04 -> Karmic 9.10 Ubuntu upgrade so much as it is about running Eclipse on 64-bit Linux. But I encountered it on my upgrade path, and so it gets posted here.

I was having an error with the Subclipse SVN plugin for Eclipse. Specifically, when I tried a merge operation, I got:

SVNClientException: org.tigris.subversion.javahl.ClientException: svn: Cannot create new file '/tmp/(blahblahblah)...'

The problem was that Subclipse only comes with the 32-bit version of JavaHL. I confirmed JavaHL was not present by going to Window -> Preferences and browsing to Team -> SVN. In the SVN Interface dropdown, it said “JavaHL(JNI) Not Available”.

If you’re on 64-bit Linux and using a 64-bit JVM, you need to provide JavaHL yourself. It can be installed by:

$ sudo aptitude install libsvn-java

… but you have to tell Eclipse to look at the location where the JNI will be installed (/usr/lib/jni). This can be done by editing eclipse.ini and adding the line “-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni” under “vmargs”.

So the eclipse.ini file would look something like this:

(... some junk ...)
-vmargs
-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni
(... possibly more junk ...)

Basically, you’re looking for the line “-vmargs” and inserting the “-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni” as a new line immediately underneath it. If you actually paste “some junk” into your eclipse.ini file, tell me about it and I will laugh at you.

Save and re-launch Eclipse, and you should see the JavaHL version in that SVN Interface dropdown box.

Reference: Subclipse wiki page.

It looks like a generic, default WordPress install. But that simple page provides a great tool for turning crappy partial text RSS feeds into actual, worthwhile (read: full text) feeds.

I’ve used this for two sites so far: the Freakonomics blog and Rock Paper Shotgun. Great sites, but their crappy RSS feeds (Freakonomics’s especially) caused me to read them far less than I should.

It doesn’t work on every partial feed, but it works on many of them.

Partial text RSS feeds are the biggest affront to the Internet since the <blink> tag and ActiveX. They are not to be tolerated.

Up until today, I had three “gaming news” blogs in my Google Reader subscriptions: Destructoid, Joystiq, and Kotaku.

I had been meaning to cut these down to just one. After reading yet another stupid Michael Pachter story on Joystiq, I knew my criteria for choosing one: perform a quick “Pachter” search, and whichever one is the most Pachter-free is the winner.

The results?

Destructoid fared the worst by far. It looks like they post every time Pachter sneezes. Joystiq was better than Destructoid, but Kotaku was the best. So far, they have not even posted the idiotic “Pachter guesses what price Natal will be” story at all. They also don’t include a Photoshopped image of Pachter with a crystal ball in the stories they do post. Finally, about half of the search hits that his name does appear in are just in reference to a GameTrailers video series which one of the Kotaku people participates in, along with Pachter.

The search was far from scientific, but the lack of the obnoxious Pachter image, plus the presence of Stephen Totilo (whom I thoroughly enjoyed reading when he wrote for the MTV Multiplayer blog), makes Kotaku the winner.

I’ve found that I need to be more picky with my RSS subscriptions. When I have three blogs covering the same thing, I actually read less total in that group than if I have just one to focus on. My RSS feed culling has only begun.

5000+ views and over two dozen posts to an Adobe forums thread regarding Adobe AIR crashing on Linux machines with AMD CPUs, and there’s hardly a peep of response.

One tweet linking to that thread, and I’m getting invited to test the prerelease AIR builds.

Twitter delivers.

Problem I had when upgrading from Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 to the Karmic 9.10 beta:

Eclipse (and Aptana) exhibited a number of UI issues. Buttons clicked would perform no action. The update/install new software window would be blank where it was supposed to show the options of software to install (you could click where the options should be and see their text description appear below, but you could not see what you were clicking on).

The solution, at least for now, is to create a script like this:

#!/bin/bash
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true
/opt/eclipse/eclipse

Remember to “chmod +x” that script to make it executable. Setting the GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS environmental variable to True will fix those UI issues, at least while we wait for newer Eclipse/Aptana builds that work better with GTK+ 2.8.

Problem I had when upgrading from Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 to the Karmic 9.10 beta:

When booting, I would not get the Xsplash screen, and X would not start. Instead, I would see the text boot, which would rapidly flicker.

The solution was to boot into recovery mode, and as root, run:

dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-185-kernel-source

This built the NVIDIA kernel module which the upgrade process, for some reason, decided wasn’t important enough to build itself.