NerdHappens.com

A soapbox for musings, code, and other technical nonsense

Pidgin and Yahoo IM connection problems
6/19/2009 at 9:40 a.m. (2 weeks ago)

Can't connect to Yahoo IM using Pidgin suddenly this morning? Here's why.

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/8853

It seems that Yahoo has decided to slowly retire the protocol version used by Pidgin. There is also a bug in libpurple causing it only uses the first login server returned by the query. Some time yesterday evening Yahoo deprecated the old login protocols on that first server returned.

As a workaround, you can change the "pager server" field under your Yahoo account's advanced tab to 66.163.181.179, which is a known working server at this time. It seems they upgraded that server too. Go to http://pidgin.im to get the latest version that fixes this ...

Tags: Pidgin, Yahoo
Cook your carrots whole, then chop them
6/17/2009 at 8:41 a.m. (2 weeks, 2 days ago)

"Scientists found 'boiled before cut' carrots contained 25% more of the anti-cancer compound falcarinol than those chopped up first."

"...in blind taste studies the whole carrots also tasted much better."

"Eight of ten people favored the whole vegetables over those that were pre-chopped."

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8101403.stm

Tags: Cooking
Disabling update-manager popup in 9.04
4/30/2009 at 2:25 a.m. (2 months ago)

In Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty), the new default behavior of the update-manager window is to pop up minimized when critical security updates are available. This differs from the previous behavior of adding a notification tray icon when any type of update is available. This is presumably to nag users to apply critical security updates, similar to something Microsoft did in XP a few years ago.

I personally think this is a very bad decision because it is annoying and also assumes that Ubuntu users are too lazy to apply their updates promptly. In any case, as documented in the Ubuntu 9.04 Release Notes, here is how you fix it.

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

Tags: Ubuntu, Linux