my next OS: elementary

as ubuntu 12.04 brings yet another buggy release (see the comments here), I'm all the more excited about elementary's upcoming Luna release.

elementary, for those of you who don't already know, is everything linux (and any operating system) should be. it's crisp, clean, and most importantly, consistent! the team at elementary have created a desktop environment and suite of applications that adhere to a common set of interface guidelines. it's evident they care more about a great UX and UI than cramming more bells and whistles into an already inconsistent and unstable UI (ubuntu's unity).

for those of you suffering through another buggy ubuntu release with the lackluster unity desktop environment, I highly recommend elementary.

less is more.

Powerbook G4 not enough disk space

Solution:

Set the date and time.

Details:

So I had an old Powerbook G4 lying around that someone had given me. I hadn't used it in a while, and I turned it on, plugged a USB drive in, and tried to copy some files. I got an error message saying there wasn't enough disk space. Strange, as there was plenty of space, on the hard drive and the USB drive. I ctrl-clicked on the hard drive, clicked get info, and the space wasn't even reporting. Even more strange.

Well... turns out it was the fault of my own laziness. When I first booted the laptop, it said that the date had been reset, probably because the CMOS battery was dead. The error said that I'd probably have problems until I fixed the date, but hey, I just wanted to copy some files off, nothing serious.

Well, while I was putzing around, I decided to go ahead and set the date and time. Lo and behold, my problem went away. If I hadn't been so lazy and paid more attention to the error message I wouldn't have had the problem in the first place. Lesson learned? We'll see... :)

problems overriding android compatibility methods

I had a class that extended android.support.v4.app.FragmentActivity. I wanted to override onRetainCustomNonConfigurationInstance, and I ran into the following error, indicating FragmentActivity didn't have that method:

The method onRetainCustomNonConfigurationInstance() of type ... must override or implement a supertype method

here's how to fix it:

1. open the android SDK manager




2. update the compatibility package




3. copy the updated compatibility package to the /libs folder of your project. see here for where to find the compatibility package: http://developer.android.com/sdk/compatibility-library.html#SettingUp

that last part's what got me; I assumed updating the compatibility package would update it in my project :P