Making Canon LiDE 110 flatbed scanner work on Fedora 64 bit

Update: I will never know what was the actual the reason because I can no longer reproduce the problem. The scanner works with the same sane-backend rpms.

It has been bothering me for months as to why does the Canon LiDE 110 work fine on Ubuntu and Arch Linux but not on Fedora. However, I finally got around to spending some effort on it.

I downloaded the stable source from the sane project. Installed it on top of fedora's rpm's. It worked. However, it seemed surprising but may be fedora had made some changes. They hadn't.

I had made a silly mistake and installed the libraries in /usr/lib instead of /usr/lib64. So, I uninstalled it and rebuilt sane-backends with
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --libdir=/usr/lib64

Now, the scanner stopped working!

Uninstalled it, rebuilt sane-backends with
 ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc

The scanner was now recognized! So, it somehow needed some libraries to be installed in lib.

Ubuntu uses lib on x64 as well. And I was using 32 bit version on Arch Linux!

Why I prefer talking to Software

My wife suggested that I call the call center for a billing clarification. I prefer not to do so and this experience again reinforces my preference.

I got the clarification that the additional bill amount was some additional installation charges - it was too small for me to argue about it. However, the human insisted on telling me about a great 70% off promotional offer, which I declined politely without even listening to it. To my surprise my no was ignored. A few hours later, the offer was enabled on my set-top box.

This time I used the online complaint but the call center called back as I expected. He was going to delete the additional package but wanted to explain the offer to me. I got irritated - the f.. word got him off my back but ruined my mood.

I think it is in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater that Kurt Vonnegut raises the question - what's the purpose of humans on earth!

Goofing up with Miro - could the UI be smarter?

I have been using Miro for several years. So, it isn't that I was unfamiliar with the user interface. However, I am still bewildered that how did I remove all the TED videos I had downloaded instead of deleting the one sentimental video I intended to delete.

A major part of the problem was the poor response of Miro on the netbook. I had clicked the delete option on the video as it was playing. It did not seem to have worked. I deleted it from the video list and clicked on a menu option to confirm deletion. I clicked on the form several times as it did not seem to respond. I clicked multiple times because on the netbook, I often needed to click twice for Miro to queue my download request.

Since nothing seemed to be happening, I suspect that I must have clicked on remove podcast option absentmindedly. I am hoping that I had clicked on a confirmation screen after I clicked on remove podcast. It would have been a very unfortunate programming issue if one of my earlier clicks had been taken as a confirmation for the deletion of the podcast!

This is, obviously, nothing more than a minor 'disaster' or, more precisely, an irritation. It does raise the issue of how does the software UI behave in a sluggish environment. Can we code UI in such a way that the intentions of the user and their interpretation is not distorted by performance issues of the application?

We also need a better alternative to the confirmation screen. I doubt if anyone reads the confirmation screen before clicking after the first few times. So, how about a confirmation screen after the event with an UNDO button instead of an OK?

Creating a presentation for showing source code

Giving a presentation which has source code fragments has never been easy.

Normally, I have been pasting code fragments in an OpenOffice presentation. The effort in getting it right has been sufficiently irritating that I try to avoid it.

I finally used a process which I found very convenient.

1. Use vim :TOhtml command to get color coded source code. It was even easier using gvim.

2. Open the html file in OpenOffice. Change the font size to 16.

3. Create a new OpenOffice text document. Choose page size as A5 and landscape orientation.

4. Copy paste the fragments. Add comments, etc. Edit like a normal text document.

5. Export it to pdf.

6. Show it using the presentation mode in evince or  okular.

Overcoming Slow Boot of Fedora 16 after LiveCD installation

I had failed to upgrade Lenovo S10-3 netbook to Fedora 16 using yum as I have been doing for several years and successfully did on my desktop. The system became unusable under Fedora; so, I could not diagnose the cause.

I installed KDE livecd spin on the netbook. The boot time seemed to be ages in comparison to Fedora 15 and, especially, Arch Linux which I normally use on this netbook.

Searching the net for plausible reasons led to using "systemd-analyze blame". The top of the list was "udev-settle.service", which really is not the issue.

Anyway, I noticed that there were livesys.service and livesys-late.service which are not needed once the livecd is installed. The time shown for these by "systemd-analyze blame" was 290ms and 44msec respectively. Hardly something to worry about. However, disabling the livesys and livesys-late services resulted in the userspace boot time decreasing from 87 sec to 36 sec! The overall decrease was 97 sec to 44  sec :)

Now, "systemd-analyze blame" gave a little more useful details. The top entry was iscsi.service. Wikipedia entry indicated that this was not something I was likely to use. Disabling iscsi and iscsid services reduced the userspace boot time to 27 sec and overall time to 37 sec.

Removing mdmonitor-takeover and lvm2-monitor services did not make any significant difference.

Disabling httpd and and mysqld, which I normally do not need on the netbook, saved another 5 sec and the boot time now is 32 sec of which 22 is the userspace time.

Next step is to use bootchart to see if I can understand where the time goes before the system becomes usable.

Depressing use of technology

The parking lot at the Chandigarh airport is computerised!

You get a ticket on entering the airport - NOT the parking lot. If you leave within 5 minutes, you pay nothing. If you are in the airport longer than 5 minutes, you pay Rs. 25/ (50 cents) on exiting.

The problem - it is a small airport. There is only one exit from the parking lot and another exit in case you do not enter the parking lot.

It is pretty obvious that the traffic the arrival of vehicles will follow a statistical pattern but the exit is deterministic. People want to leave as soon as the plane arrives. Hence, the exiting from the parking lot is a pain! It is easier to exit if one does not enter the parking lot.

Technology has achieved the remarkable goal of making the life of people who park miserable while rewarding the folks who create chaos on the unloading/loading curb :)

Oh, well, at least the airport is using software and the two exit points and the entry point are even NETWORKED :)

Impact of OpenSUSE 12.1 on Tumbleweed

My major motivation for trying Tumbleweed was to have an Arch Linux like distribution but with delta packages. Although delta rpms were only available for the packages in the 11.4 repository and not in the Tumbleweed repository, I continued to be interested in seeing how the 'rolling' model will evolve along with the other distributions of OpenSUSE.

The release of 12.1 distribution had a larger impact on Tumbleweed than I had expected. It was literally a distribution upgrade, no different from 11.4 to 12.1. Tumbleweed repository was emptied and based on 12.1 repository. All packages were upgraded. I had hoped that the Tumbleweed distribution to be very close to the 12.1 and the upgrade should have been minimal even though I had wondered how they will manage versions across repositories.

In the current upgrade, I had to change the repository to point to the current repository instead of 11.4. The current repository is now a symbolic repository so in future no change in the repository information will be needed. However, at least at present, Tumbleweed does not really appear to be a rolling distribution. It is more like the base with some updates, so, not particularly interesting. It is better to use Ubuntu with ppa's.

I will keep watching and may be Tumbleweed will evolve into an interesting alternative. At present, I continue to stick to Fedora and Arch Linux at home and Ubuntu at work.