This was my response to a comment on a Hacker News thread. I’ve added proper links and rounded off a few rough edges and presented it here as it’s rather OT there. The issue I’m addressing mainly is whether it is fair, as Pat Robertson has claimed, to say that Haitians made a “deal with the devil” when they initiated the bloody revolution against their French oppressors.

My heart yearns for peace for those Haitians afflicted with such great loss at this time and I urge you to give wisely of your charity to help as you see able. UK Donations to the Disaster Emergency Committee can be made through BT.com; other countries try Google’s Haiti relief page.

Haiti’s political foundations

“the superstitious claim that the misery in Haiti is a direct result of a pact with the devil”

[excerpt from the Original Comment; my response follows]

I’ve heard this name Pat Robertson a few times on the ‘net. I assume he’s in the USA? Can anyone give an audio/video link to his talk where he suggests Haiti’s slaves shouldn’t have overthrown their French masters as they did?

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TIL about testing DNS (link to Google’s DNS primer) to find the fastest nameserver for your computer to shave those precious milliseconds off your DNS resolution time.

DNS/nameserver benchmarking for fun and profit

For the unitiatiated DNS resolution is the time it takes for a domain name to be matched to its current IP address; this allows your computer to communicate with a computer on the ‘net using the retrieved IP address.

I used “namebench” which has been developed at Google by one of their smart cookies, Thomas R Stromberg, in the famous 20% time that Google gives.

Namebench results from a TalkTalk UK account using OpenDNS

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Fotowall is a graphics application for creating simple mixes from multiple images with text manipulation and easy image transformation and compiling. More information on the fotowall site or at KDE-apps.org.

Compiling fotowall from source on Ubuntu

Fotowall screenshot

Dependencies

Here’s what I needed to do to get it compiled (from a basic Kubuntu 9.10, although some of the installs may not be required as I tend to strip out build apps and things I don’t need):

• sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev, in order to get uic-qt4 so that qmake would work; this installed about 20MB of dependencies
• sudo apt-get install g++, in order to complete the make; this installed another c.20MB of dependencies

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How to configure the quicklaunch plasmoid (aka widget) so as to fix a problem with missing icons and other issues.

.desktop files in kde4

First it seems that the quicklaunch keeps a link to several desktop files – the desktop icons and quicklaunch configuration are pretty opaque really but I do like the idea that kickoff (application menu) items, quicklaunch icons and desktop icons all share a common pool of files that are simply linked elsewhere. This means that searches in the K menu (application menu) will find .desktop files (application launching files) that aren’t actually in the menu.

Quicklaunch config

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Gah! I’ve upgraded to 9.10; then on a subsequent reboot I was “slimming down my system” more on that later and have messed up “mountall” causing it to error on boot in standard and recovery mode. Won’t boot, not even to a console.

Mountall error gives status 127

I’m sure I’m guilty of this but I wish people would say “I don’t know” when they have no clue what they’re talking about .

This has absolutely nothing to do with X windows.

The system is failing to mount the drives properly (access the hard drive partitions) – the only fix I’ve seen is to use a rescue disk (your Kubuntu install disk will do). Then:

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If you’re being bugged by the kres-migrator wanting to move your resources over to akonadi, but like me are not using the KDE PIM apps (KMail, KOrganizer, KContactManager, KPilot, etc.) then here’s what to do.

Prevent akonadi running at boot

Open a terminal (Alt+F2: “Konsole”, for example) and enter the following string:

kwriteconfig –file kres-migratorrc –group Migration –key Enabled –type bool false

That should fix it. It does for me.

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