Welcome to the personal Web site of Rodney Gedda, a technology journalist and editor in Sydney, Australia. Here you will find a mercurial mix of commentary on IT, journalism, and marketing without the hype. Enjoy!...


Fixing Flash

I’m generally not on the lookout for flash content on the Web, but after upgrading to KDE SC 4.5 I was forced to take notice.

The upgrade went very well and I love the new KDE release. It’s packed with new features, is more stable and performs better than the previous version, and the option of using Webkit as a rendering engine for Konqueror (this post) is awesome.

Unfortunately there’s a nasty bug in Konqueror that seems to crash it when a flash plugin is loaded. Eg visiting skype.com would crash the browser when the flash video loads. I haven’t tested it with KHTML as I’m too addicted to browsing with Webkit.

Anyway, I then turned my attention to using firefox and naively assumed flash was working in Lucid as it had in previous versions of Ubuntu. The result? Of course it wasn’t.

The adobe flash package is there, the plugin file was there, but no flash functionality. I found the fix on the Ubuntu forums:

# ln -s /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so .mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

That link was the difference between the user experience of flash working or not. For the average user that is a big deal.

Is anyone able to explain why such simple regressions still slip through Ubuntu’s cracks?


Tax office chooses Ubuntu for AUSkey

I managed to get an interesting snippet out of the ATO last week. The tax office will base its AUSkey Linux port on Ubuntu. AUSkey is written in Java and in theory is cross-platform, but with tax testing it on Linux it should finally work without a whole lot of frustration. It ...


Compiz-like key bindings for KWin’s cube effect

If you've used the flashy spinning cube desktop effect on GNOME-based Linux systems running Compiz, you may be familiar with the ctrl-alt-left (or right arrow) key combination to "spin" the cube around in those respective directions. If you're a KDE user you already have compositing effects in KWin without the need ...


Regressions, regressions

So I "upgrade" to Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and in addition to my plasma panel getting nuked my notebook no longer suspended to RAM. I've manually added my panel back and upgrading to the 2.6.33 Lucid kernel fixed suspend to RAM. The default kernel with Lucid is 2.6.32, but there are ...


5 years of blogging

This week I chalked up five years of continuous personal blogging. No big deal. From memory I started blogging just as the hype factor became unbearable. Wikipedia has a page on the history of blogging (timeline). I had a few Web sites prior to this blog, but they were tied to ...


Optus Music Store – an open option

I've often wondered if there was a music store out there that fulfilled my (not unreasonable) needs. A few years ago I tried eMusic when it first came onto the scene, but didn't get into it much as I never really caught on to the subscription model. It wasn't the cost, ...


Alice in Wonderland in 3D

After reading its mixed reviews, we decided to go and see Alice in Wonderland in 3D. I won't spoil it for you, but if you can imagine a cross between the original Alice in Wonderland plot, The Nightmare Before Christmas' tone, Edward Scissorhands-grade humanism, and a mighty Lord of the Rings-style ...


Random desktop crashes stretch sanity

My desktop decided to spontaneously restart again today in a repeat of what happened a few weeks ago. The short-term memory replacement (Twitter) tracked the occasion: http://twitter.com/rodneygedda/status/8616389858 No warning, nothing. Badda bing, badda bang... blank screen, some hard disk seeking then KDM restarts. Good thing I save my work regularly and both Konqueror ...


February 3

I was on my way to a press event in the city today. Nothing unusual about that. In a busy week I can attend upwards of 10. Today something extraordinary struck me. As I paid the taxi driver and jumped out of the cab I looked up and the first thing ...


Android in da house

My SO picked up an Android-based mobile yesterday and I am soooo jealous. It's the HTC Magic that was launched in May last year. I had used the phone previously in testing, but now I can really play around with it. Only after a few minutes with the Magic you learn how ...