Anyone that’s had this happen to them will notice that you literally cannot find/retrieve these basic add-ons with via the Add-ons store, and most searches online bring back results related to the Google toolbar (not helpful).

Eventually I tracked-down this post and I am eternally grateful to the poster because, not only did it it allow me to fix the issue myself (copy the missing .xml files from /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/ to the corresponding ‘en-GB’ folder) but I have also finally found a method to send my queries to google.co.uk instead of google.com… Just edit the appropriate .xml file, changing .com to .co.uk.

So no more having to deal with American shopping results!

Today I’ve been informed (by my darling girlfriend) that her buddy icon was out of date: she’d changed it a while back, yet my client was appeared to be stubbornly displaying the old icon, even weeks later. As I couldn’t find a method for forcing the buddy icon to update within the program itself, I navigated to ~/.purple/icons (finding approximately 1,660 cached icons!) and deleted the lot.

Since restarting pidgin it’s taken a while for the buddy icons to repopulate for some reason, but after a few tests, it does appear that they’re updating properly when changed by the other party. As a side effect, I believe I’ve found (and fixed) the cause of pidgin’s leak/loop/error! Hopefully someone else will find my serendipitous bug-squashing useful.

I may even launch a bug report, given that I couldn’t find one. Now all I need is time to do so…

You could regard this as a possibly moronic statement at first, but there’s a little evidence to back it up. Firstly, I’ve been using the ‘adobe-flashplugin’ package provided via the Canonical Partner repository for some time. I think it works a heck of a lot better than Flash 9, and I’ve been much happier with the experience. That isn’t to say that it’s perfect, but at least Firefox doesn’t crash with every 3rd/4th Youtube video I play.

By standard of course, the Canonical Partner repository is disabled within a fresh Ubuntu installation. So when my girlfriend mentioned that the videos on Llewtube.com weren’t displaying, I wasn’t surprised to find that she was using the latest version of the ‘flashplugin-nonfree’ package:

sudo dpkg -l | grep flash
ii flashplugin-nonfree 10.0.22.87ubuntu1~intrepid1 Adobe Flash Player plugin installer

Given that I could view the videos on the aforementioned website without a single issue, I went to check my plugin version:

ii adobe-flashplugin 10.0.22.87-2intrepid1 Adobe Flash Player plugin version 10

So we’re supposedly using the same version of the Flash plugin, but from different packages. Would anyone like to explain why one package works and the other does not?

Getting around the problem was a simple task for her: simply enable the Partner repository by navigating to the Software Sources configuration utility (via System -> Administration -> Software Sources) and (after giving your password) checking the two ‘partner’ lines under the Third Party tab. If you don’t have them, you can add them (one at a time) with these two lines:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner

(If you’re reading this, and you’ve not yet upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10; the bulk of this guide should work with 8.04 also. You will, however, need to swap out ‘intrepid’ for ‘hardy’! )

When you’ve enabled the partner repositories (check the boxes) it’s a matter of closing Software Sources and letting it reload the package sources when prompted. After that, simply open a terminal and paste in the following:

sudo apt-get remove --purge flashplugin-nonfree && sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin

If you restart Firefox, you should now be sorted. If in doubt, search in Synaptic (System -> Administration -> Synaptic) for ‘Flash’ and see what is (or isn’t) installed.

Even so, due to the impressive compatibility of the Sony Ericsson K800i and Linux, and the subsequent lack of the same DHCP/CDC USB Ethernet adapter functionality in the K850i, I thought it’d be quite cool to see if the K800i could be configured as a back-up WAN interface within m0n0wall.

So I fish my K800i (now retired, although I wish it wasn’t) out of its resting place, find a USB cable, and plug it into the back of the m0n0wall machine. No new interface appeared on the ‘assign interfaces’ page, so I restarted it. Still no new interfaces. Upon checking the kernel messages in the log, I found these lines pertaining to the CDC USB Ethernet device:

Jan 4 20:28:06 kernel: device_attach: cdce0 attach returned 6
Jan 4 20:28:06 kernel: cdce0: could not find data bulk in
Jan 4 20:28:06 kernel: cdce0: Sony Ericsson Sony Ericsson K800, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 2

Which, as a Linux geek, confused me somewhat. Google turned up a number of results for ‘cdce0′ problems or ‘attach returned 6′ regarding various other drivers, but only one really addressed the issue in particular, albeit for a much older SE phone. You’ll notice that there haven’t been any replies, either.

A former colleague pointed me in the direction of a patch that was submitted around October 2008 which enables the proper handling of the CDC USB device within the Nokia N80. Hopefully it should help, but it may be some time before the patch filters down to m0n0wall.

This is just one of those times when I wish I’d followed the world of software development a little more.

So here’s an experiment. A phrase that I know yields no results on Google (as of this posting date):

Rachel Jennison Harper.

I’ll update when Google does..

Edit: Google has now updated! In no more than 19 hours, too.

In addition to this, I appaer to have made a mini celebrity out of Miss Harper. Given the continued existence of this blog (and the long-standing back-up of Google’s search listings) she won’t be forgotten any time soon!