$ sudo apt-get install dconf-tools
$ dconf-tools

The relevant settings can be found in org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/power

$ junglediskdesktop
junglediskdesktop: error while loading shared libraries: libnotify.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory 

As suggested by JungleJason (http://askubuntu.com/a/84499), you'll need to symlink libnotify.so.4 to libnotify.so.1. The latest version of Ubuntu (11.10) apparently only comes with the former variant.

If you're running a 32-bit Ubuntu: 

$ cd /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ ; sudo ln -s ./libnotify.so.4 libnotify.so.1

If you're running a 64-bit Ubuntu: 

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnotify.so.4 /usr/lib/libnotify.so.1

There are no pre-compiled packages for Linux, so if you want to use Node.js, you'll have to build it yourself. It's easy enough though, and here's how.

Download and unpack Node.js Source

You can obtain the release version from their website or get an edgier version from their Git source repository. If you acquired it from the former source, you'll need to decompress it first, for instance to /usr/local/src/.

(optional) Install the build tools

If you haven't done this before, your system most likely won't have the required tools for software compilation. You can easily install them: 

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall 

(optional) Install openssl-dev

If you want to compile with SSL support (default), you'll also need to install the OpenSSL Development Packages, like so:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

Build Node.js

Open up a terminal witndow and navigate to the directory that contains the Node.js source, e.g. /usr/local/src/node-0.6.6. And execute the following commands in succession: 

./configure
make
sudo make install

If all goes well, you should be able to access the node command from any terminal window.

This year's buzzword has to be 'HTML5'. Everywhere I go, people are making a fuss out of building HTML5 'applications' (for the desktop too, now, with Windows 8's WinRT). However, I see HTML5 more blandly as 'HTML/JavaScript', and I make this pairing consciously, because in my opinion, there is no HTML5 without JavaScript and vice versa. Therefore it's important to know and master the intricacies of JavaScript before boasting your "HTML5"-skills to friends, colleagues and the world at large (using a <header> tag doesn't count as a skill). Don't be fooled by JavaScript's supposed simplicity. It's just that simplicity (read: lack of OO principles) that makes it difficult to use for building maintainable and enterprise-grade software. Languages like Java, C#, and even ActionScript (JS' cousin), provide the developer with a degree of standardization and structure that is severely missed in the JavaScript world.

• Jump right to the pom.xml

From my point of view, JavaScript has two weaknesses: its loose type system and its prototypal inheritance model. I know many people don't agree and opine that the points I just made are actually strengths. Point taken. It does have a couple of things going for it: ubiquity and a low barrier to entry.

Tacking a build process onto JavaScript, with Maven

If you're used to a more object-oriented development language/platform, with classes, interfaces, inheritance, strict typing, unit and integration testing, this all looks very scary. Many enterprise developers seek the assistance of Maven, Ant or other tools of that ilk to manage framework dependencies, build and test processes, and code quality metrics. And there's no reason why this can't also be applied to JavaScript development.

Yes, JavaScript can be tamed, you heard it right. With a limited amount of effort, we can let Maven take care of the following:

• compile and validate your code with JSLint
• compress and obfuscate your .js files in one fell swoop
• combine all of your compressed .js source files into a single JavaScript module
• integrate with the Jasmine BDD test framework for unit/integration testing of your JS code
• code quality reporting with JSLint
• generate JSDoc documentation

Prerequisites

Maven is a Java-based tool, so you'll need to get the latest Java JDK from Oracle. I'm still using JDK 6, but I guess JDK 7 would do as well. Other than that, you'll need to get the Maven 3 binary and unzip it somewhere. For your convience, you may want to consider adding it to your path (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu Linux). Fire up a text-editor (I like NetBeans for pom.xml and JavaScript editing) and a command-line window. You're good to go!

The pom.xml config 

Here's the full pom.xml configuration file. It's currently still a work in progress, but it implements all of the features I described above. In the subsequent section I'll provide more information on every section of importance.

• Download the pom.xml file

In depth 

Same file, with some extra comments.

I'm continuously looking for things to add, so any suggestions are welcome. Also, I'm maintaining this project on BitBucket, here. 

It seems Diaspora* is still alive and kicking (what's with the * anyway?) and about to hand out alpha invites. I received this e-mail recently:

Dear Friend of Diaspora* -

Thanks for your interest in being part of the Diaspora* community. You may not have heard from us in a while, but we’ve been working hard, head-down. We’ve built the first stage of a new social web, one better than what’s out there today: a place where each of us owns our own information, where each person controls his or her own privacy, where no-one is a product, and where we all control our own destinies.

We’re sending out alpha invitations now, as quickly as we can. If you haven’t gotten yours yet, you will receive it by the end of October.

There's been big news in the social networking world recently, and we can't help but be pleased with the impact our work has had on two of the biggest developments. We're proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles. And now Facebook is at last moving in the right direction with user control over privacy, a move spurred not just by Google+, but more fundamentally by you and thousands of other donors, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who've lined up to try Diaspora* -- that is, by all of us who've stood up to say "there has to be a better way." We're making a difference already.

And aspects is just one of the many ways we're pioneering the future of the social web.

Here's a quick preview of some of the other ways:

• We'll make the social web more fun than it is today.
• Our distributed design gives you the security of owning your own identity and data.
• This also gives you the freedom to do what you want online.
• Our ecosystem provides the commons, the connective tissue for an evolving social web.
• We're not gatekeepers, so our ecosystem will always support the latest apps.

We’ll tell you a little more about each of these points in the weeks ahead.

And we’ll keep working to get your alpha invitation to you just as quickly as we can.

Until then, thanks again for your interest in Diaspora*.

Sincerely,
- Maxwell, Daniel, Ilya, Sarah, Yosem and Peter

The Diaspora* team
Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Do we have room for another social network besides Facebook, Twitter and Google+? Interesting enough, regardless of whether this initiative has potential or not.

Fortunately, free software comes to the rescue. Console2 is a software project hosted on SourceForge and describes itself as (citing their project page):

Console is a Windows console window enhancement. Console features include: multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles

Yeah, Console2 adds everything Command Prompt lacks, and it gets better, because we can configure it to use PowerShell as its shell to create the ultimate Windows command-line environment.

Here's how.

Download & Install Console2

Get it from its project page at SourceForge, here.

(optional) Download Windows PowerShell

If Windows Update hasn't already installed PowerShell on your system, you might want to fire up Windows Update manually and enable it. If you're running Windows XP, you can get it manually.

Configure Console2 to use PowerShell

Open up a Console2 instance and open the settings dialog via Edit > Settings.

Use the browse button next to the Shell field to select powershell.exe from its installation directory. On my system (a Windows XP machine, issued by work..), I used a system variable to reference the PS executable, like so:

%SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe

Hit OK.

I've been using this setup for a couple of months now and I'm extremely satisfied with it. The combination of PowerShell and the features Console2 adds, I'm in CLI Nirvana whenever I need to use it.

That's all folks!

Fortunately, there is a way to disable this feature (or set the timout to something more usable).
Here's how.

Image courtesy of Flickr user guineves

In recent months, Adobe has formally dropped Linux support for it's Eclipse-based Flash Builder IDE. Eclipse itself is cross-platform, however, so it was undoubtedly an artificial measure. Adobe probably figures the Linux developer community is just too small to support. And hey, they may have a point.

I know a lot of developers have a least one foot in Linux-land, still, so when I found out someone ported Flash Builder 4.5 to Linux, I was fast to try it out. It requires a some tinkering, as is customary with Linux, but it's not too bad. Here's how.

fb4linux

fb4linux - a straight port of the Flash Builder Eclipse plugin - is an open source project that resides on Google Code. The project is has medium activity, and supports Adobe's latest release of Flash Builder, i.e. 4.5 "Burrito", which is actually quite surprising. Being an unofficial port though, some features are disabled or don't function properly, e.g. the network monitor and the profiler. These features don't even work decently on a supported platform, so unless you really rely on these features, it's not a big deal.

Installation

It looks like the installation instructions on the project's website are out of date, but with a some common sense, you should be able to get it rolling.
Note: I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity.

Install Eclipse from Ubuntu Software Center

Open 'Ubuntu Software Center' and type eclipse in the search box in the top right corner.

Eclipse installs to /usr/lib/eclipse by default. This is an important location, since we'll be pasting files into this directory later on. Note that you can find out install locations easily by using the Synaptic Package Manager. Just search for an app, right-click its entry and select Properties from from the contextual menu. The information you need will be under the Installed Files tab.

Get fb4linux

Download burrito4linux here and unpack it. The unpacked archive contains the following top-level directories:

• /eclipse
  • /features
  • /plugins

Paste /features and /plugins

The next step is to paste the /features and /plugins directories in place into /var/lib/eclipse, overwriting any existing files. In order to accomplish this, however you'll need to sudo. Open up a terminal and enter (disregard the warnings you may get in the terminal window after Nautilus opens):

sudo nautilus

Navigate to /var/lib/eclipse and paste the aforementioned files/folders from the unarchived directory. Make sure Eclipse isn't running, just to be on the safe side.

That's all folks! You should now have a functional Flash Builder. I haven't gotten around to testing all features, but on first look, things looked just fine and functional. I'll update this post if I find any critial bugs.

Linux support is becoming more important to me because I'm currently evaluating whether Ubuntu 11.04 could become by main operating system (I'll most likely stay in a dual-boot environment). In the light of these evaluations, I installed JungleDisk Desktop on all my Ubuntu-based systems. Installation went smoothly thanks to the pre-compiled .DEB packages, so did the initial setup wizard. Great. So I put the JungleDisk Desktop icon in my Unity dock for easy access..

Problem

However, clicking the icon causes the following error dialog to pop-up consistently:

Background Service Error

Jungle Disk Desktop is running in standalone mode and has detected the service is already running, or the service network port is in use. 

Please stop the service, or run Jungle Disk Desktop in non-standalone mode.

I tried running it from the terminal, and looked into JungleDisk's CLI parameters with the --help switch, to no avail. After searching high and low, I decided to contact JungleDisk support, as there was no mention of this behavior anywhere on the net.

Cause

It turns out this behavior is specific to Ubuntu 11.04's new UI shell 'Unity'. Normally, JungleDisk puts an icon in the system tray in the top right. Clicking on this icon opens the Jungle Disk Monitor app, which in this case, can't be accessed because Unity hides the tray icon for some reason. 

Workaround

The workaround to this issue is to install dconf-tools and use it to allow the junglediskdesktop app to install itself into the tray.

First off, fetch and install dconf-tools by firing up a Terminal and entering:

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

Then, open dconf-editor using the same terminal (don't sudo!). 
In this dialog, drill down the tree to: / > desktop > unity > panel

Here, append the string 'junglediskdesktop' to the systray-whitelist enumeration (see screenshot). You may need to end any existing junglediskdesktop process and restart it to get the tray icon.

That should remedy the situation! I hope I've saved someone some time by documenting this, it wasn't at all obvious to me that the hidden tray icon was the culprit, as I was assuming that using the application shortcut would bring up the JungleDisk Activity monitor. 

I'd like to thank JungleDisk for their speedy, friendly and to-the-point support on the matter. They helped me find the solution to this problem in a day's time. Good job.

Disabling the password prompt after sleep (suspend) is not clearly surfaced in the settings pane, however. It can easily be disabled by use of gconf-editor. Here's how to go about it: 

1. Open a Terminal and enter gconf-editor
   
2. In gconf-editor (Configuration Editor), drill down the directory tree on the left: / > desktop > gnome > lockdown 
3. Uncheck the box with label disable_lock_screen

That's it. I wonder why this setting wasn't exposed in the regular settings UI. It's a potential security/privacy issue, but a valid option to set in case your computer is in a safe environment with no risk of being accessed maliciously when left alone.

Note: Using the disable_lock_screen option will also grey out the checkbox in the Screensaver settings dialog.