Saturday, December 11, 2010

The Internet is full!

Relax. It's not that bad yet, but may well be if you believed what you saw on this screen:This rather frightening (or silly, depending on how you look at it) message came up more than once when I tried to use the Go-go in-flight Internet service on some of the Delta Airlines planes. This season (Nov. 20th, 2010 to Jan. 2nd, 2011) Delta and Google had a good idea together on how to promote their wares - letting people use the in-flight Internet service for free, "Happy Holidays from Google Chrome!" What a nice thing to do! No one really wanted to think about the pesky issues like bandwidth and throughput until people started to take on their offer. I guess Delta only had two choices: let users languish with the connection slower than a crawl, or ration it so for those who're lucky enough to be on, the connection is still useful. No good option here, and they chose the second one for whatever reason they had.

I encountered the screen about half of the time I tried. With that kind of rejection rate, it becomes harder to tell if this is a promotion or an effort to turn people off. Call me naive, but someone needs to take some heat for this negligence, or there is no justice in business. :)

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Getting Input Method to work on Lucid

I installed the Chinese language when installing the OS, but it's not available when I tried to use it. Here are the steps I went through to get it:
  1. Checked "Language Support" under System > Administration. It said "Some languages are not installed completely". So, let it finish as prompted, and verified the languages I wanted are indeed there.
  2. Switch the keyboard input method system to "ibus" in "Language Support". The default was "lo-gtk" for some reason.
  3. Still, no joy when trying "Ctrl-Space". So, checking System > Preferences > IBus Preferences. It said "ibus daemon not started". Let it start as prompted.
  4. There seemed to be no additional input available in IBus Prefs other than English. Added what's needed.
  5. Now Ctrl-Space brought up the Panel icon, but still no input UI.
  6. Just out of curiosity, checked the ibus daemon process and noticed there's a defunct ibus-daemon process. Considering the battle of killing a defunct process, I simply restarted - gasp, bad PC habit! :)
  7. After logging in, rejoice!