Professional Geekism

This isn’t quite work-related, but I feel it is relevant to my performance during term-time…

I have happened across some statistics collected “for demographic reasons” by my University’s Students Union, as a result of their routine swipe of your student card whenever you show up for any paid night at the Uni bar. You wondered what it was for, right? Well now I can tell you!

The sample I’ve acquired is an excerpt of the statistics collected for ‘Project Friday’ at Legends, on Friday the 2nd May 2008:

Year of Study Attendees
1: 65 (52.42%)
2: 33 (26.61%)
3: 19 (15.32%)
M: 2 (1.61%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)

Gender Attendees
Male: 97 (78.23%)
Female: 22 (17.74%)
Data not current 5: (4.03%)

Department Attendees
Computing, Engineering & Technology: 111 (89.52%)
Health: 5 (4.03%)
Business School: 3 (2.42%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)

Study Site Attendees
STAFFORD: 116 (93.55%)
THOMAS TELFORD SCHOOL: 2 (1.61%)
STOKE: 1 (0.81%)
Data not current: 5 (4.03%)


78.23% male!

I’ve long-wondered what the ratio of males to females on the Stafford campus really is, but it appears that we truly are screwed: out-numbering the girls by over 3:1. What’s scarier is that 5 of the ‘patrons’ weren’t even identifiable as male or female.

One could suggest that this would be a blessing in disguise for the female minorities of Stafford, however, with an overwhelming majority of the male attendees being first-year Computing and Engineering students, it could quite possibly the reason why they don’t bother coming in the first place.

Oh, and one last thing: WHO LET THOSE TWO SCHOOL KIDS IN?!

(And no, I don’t care if they’re female!)

Like many Ubuntu nuts, I’ve recently upgraded my work and home systems to the latest and greatest release: 8.04, code-name ‘Hardy Heron’.

And as per the usual, I updated a little early. Not quite at beta this time; I managed to subdue the upgrade itch until a few days before the final release. The only justification I needed beyond that was that the mirrors always get raped come release day.

So I set about upgrading to the release candidate version (Alt+F2, and run ‘update-manager –devel-release’) of Hardy and let it do its thing. I had a small issue with /boot being full of old kernels, which just required a few ’sudo rm -r’ commands from a terminal, but nothing big.

However, I did encounter a few issues…

The first of which, was the Nvidia binary driver that I had installed for reasons of graphical goodness, but of course it wasn’t the maintained package, therefore the upgrade tool did nothing with it and I was stuck with X’s safe graphics mode. Neat, but genuinely annoying.

To make matters worse (and this one just wasn’t my fault) I was also stuck without any sudo access at all!

teh@snatch:~$ sudo su -
sudo: can't resolve hostname snatch.
teh@snatch:~$


Of course, if I checked out my /etc/hosts file, it looked like this:

teh@snatch:~$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 teh-desktop


Now I knew that was wrong (line #2 is a strange left-over from the default installation) but of course I couldn’t use sudo to elevate my privileges in order to change it! Frustration!

One live CD later, and I managed to alter the offending ‘teh-desktop’ line to read ‘127.0.0.1 snatch’ instead. Job done, and it works fine now.

The question is: why the hell does the /etc/hosts file matter? Curiously, I don’t know, but maybe someone will be willing to give a better explanation.

I left the Hardy upgrade on my home machine until a few days after the final release, due to a mortal fear of the upgrade tool nobbling dmraid and causing ‘unable to mount roof vfs’ kernel panics, but thankfully it worked without a hitch (more-so than my work PC, in fact – though it goes without saying that I checked /etc/hosts first! )

And now that I’ve been using it a little while, I’m quite impressed. There’s a few nice polishes here and there – to compiz-settings in particular. I can now use edges in expose!

However I’m a little baffled as to the whereabouts of my ‘New Tab’ button in Firefox 3b5. It’s there in the Windows installations I have, so why have they deemed it necessary to exclude it from the Ubuntu release? Well.. At least they have an RC and a final release to go yet, so hopefully this will be fixed.