Firefox suddenly doesn’t resolve names any more

After returning from vacation I was confronted with a really strange problem on my laptop. Firefox wasn’t any more able to load pages from certain domains. After a reboot it worked, but sooner or later it stopped working.

Fingerprint Reader Working Again!

I had some problems with my fingerprint reader for quite some time, probably since upgrading to Jaunty. It took multiple attempts to read my fingerprint

Upgrading to Jaunty

Recently I updated my laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.

It went pretty smooth; the only drawback was

Debug.Assert and Mono

On Microsoft’s .NET implementation on Windows a Debug.Fail() (which is equal to a Debug.Assert(false)) when run on a debug build displays a dialog box with the options Abort, Retry, Ignore. When run in the debugger it also displays the call stack.

On Mono however no dialog box shows; it behaves the same as when the user pressed ‘Ignore’. What’s worse is that it doesn’t display the call stack by default, even when run in debugger. This doesn’t give any hint if an exception happened.

IME and TSF and bugs when typing Chinese

Quite a while ago I investigated some problems we were having with Chinese IME with one of our applications. Since that was new stuff for me I made some notes but never came around to finish this blog entry.

Building MonoDevelop from SVN

Yesterday I managed to build MonoDevelop from SVN source. I had done it before but had forgotten how to do it, and there are no fool-proof instructions on what you need to build.

Upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid

Today I upgraded my Dell laptop to Intrepid. After downloading 1.3 GB of data it started the installation and asked about several configuration files it thought I had manually changed. Besides that everything went uneventful, and a reboot also worked.

However, not all things are working:

• Compiz is disabled
• Fingerprint reader no longer working
• Cursor keys not working; up-arrow key opens screen shot app

Distorted Video when Using RecordMyDesktop

Today I was looking for a screen recording application on Linux. I came across recordmydesktop (and it’s GUI gtk-recordmydesktop) which looked very promising. It is included in the Ubuntu repositories and it is easy to use: just select the window you want to capture and click on the record button. However, when I looked at the generated video the characters in the recorded window looked unacceptably distorted.

No Sound after Kernel Upgrade

After I upgraded to the current kernel version (2.6.24-21) the sound suddenly stopped working on my Dell D830 laptop running Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.

VirtualBox and Scim

I’m running Vista in a VirtualBox virtual machine that I have installed on Ubuntu 8.04. This all worked great until I recently enabled the support to enter complex characters in order to be able to test how some software behaves when using an IME. This morning when I started my virtual machine, it didn’t respond to any keyboard input.