Then today they released an anonymized copy of the data as a compressed CSV file. I took a quick look at the CSV and whipped up the following MySQL script to load the data.

CREATE TABLE `survey` (
 `id` int(11)  NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `year_submitted` year,
 `how_use` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `job_type` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_do` text,
 `c_cms_blog` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_customize` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_number` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_percent` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_done_with_wp` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `c_living` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_do` text,
 `d_cms_blog` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_customize` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_number` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_percent` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_done_with_wp` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_cost` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `d_living` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `u_do` text,
 `u_installed` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `u_installed_other` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `u_customize` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `u_living` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `x_living` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE = MyISAM COMMENT = 'WordPress 2011 Survey Results';

LOAD DATA INFILE '/var/lib/mysql/anon-data.csv'
 INTO TABLE `survey`
 FIELDS ENCLOSED BY '"' TERMINATED BY ','
 LINES TERMINATED BY '\r'
 IGNORE 1 LINES
 (`how_use`, `job_type`, `c_do`, `c_cms_blog`, `c_customize`,
`c_number`, `c_percent`, `c_done_with_wp`, `c_living`, `d_do`, `d_cms_blog`,
`d_customize`, `d_number`, `d_percent`, `d_done_with_wp`, `d_cost`, `d_living`,
`u_do`, `u_installed`, `u_installed_other`, `u_customize`, `u_living`,
`x_living`);

UPDATE `survey` SET `year_submitted` = YEAR(NOW());

This has only been tested on MySQL 5.1.54-1ubuntu4. It should work on any recent copy of MySQL, but YMMV. Also, I added 2 additional fields to the table. One is a simple ID field to make it easier to reference individual responses while the other is ‘year_submitted‘. I added the latter field; so if they reuse this survey next year, I can simply add that year’s responses to the same table and track the differences. If I find the time, I may try digging into the data to see if I can find anything interesting in it (but don’t hold your breath on me finding the time to do so).

State of the Word © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

	if ( $options['menuLayout'] == NR_MENU_SINGLE ) {

		add_menu_page('Now Reading', 'Now Reading', 9, 'admin.php?page=add_book', 'now_reading_add');

		add_submenu_page('admin.php?page=add_book', 'Add a Book', 'Add a Book',$nr_level , 'add_book', 'now_reading_add');

		add_submenu_page('admin.php?page=add_book', 'Manage Books', 'Manage Books', $nr_level, 'manage_books', 'nr_manage');

		add_submenu_page('admin.php?page=add_book', 'Options', 'Options', 9, 'nr_options', 'nr_options');

To read like this:

	if ( $options['menuLayout'] == NR_MENU_SINGLE ) {

		add_menu_page('Now Reading', 'Now Reading', 9, 'add_book', 'now_reading_add');

		add_submenu_page('add_book', 'Add a Book', 'Add a Book',$nr_level , 'add_book', 'now_reading_add');
		add_submenu_page('add_book', 'Manage Books', 'Manage Books', $nr_level, 'manage_books', 'nr_manage');
		add_submenu_page('add_book', 'Options', 'Options', 9, 'nr_options', 'nr_options');

Then Now-Reading’s single admin menu worked properly again.

Fixing Now-Reading’s Admin Menu © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

py2avi released! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

First up the minor problem, after rebooting into the new hotness of Ubuntu 9.04, I was greeted with a pop-up windo telling me “There was an error while performing indexing : Index corrupted.” The pop-up gave 3 options: “Ok”, “Cancel” or “Reindex all contents”. I tried all 3 but the pop-up kept coming back even after multiple reboots. The only thing I could initiall figure out to do was to kill the tracker
ps -ef | grep tracker
kill -9 XXXX XXXX XXXX

Yes, I know that’s probably a horrible idea but I rarely use the tracker’s search on my home PC so pbbbhhhhttt! A quick Google search later, I found a bug report on LaunchPad about it under which I found these instructions:
sudo aptitude install tracker-utils
tracker-processes -r

I apparently already had the tracker-utils  installed, so the first didn’t do anything for me. The second command above however shutdown the tracker and removed the indexes, so the tracker was able to recreate them cleanly. Since running those commands, the pop-up hasn’t come back.

Now on to the fun with the major problem. This was a case of network failure, specifically wireless network failure. While this is a desktop PC, I live in an old house without network cabling and my PC sits too far away from the ideal location for the router to run a cable. So I have a D-Link PCI wireless NIC in my desktop.  The NIC is based on the Atheros AR5413 chipset, Network performance has never been as good as a wired connection but it had been acceptable until this upgrade to 9.04 when the wireless stopped working.

I had been using ndiswrapper to load the windows driver for the card but that suddenly stopped working. I could see all the wireless networks in my neighborhood, but couldn’t connect to any of them (either networks secured with WPA or wide open ones). I started doing some research into the problem using other computers with working internet connections. I found that my router was getting blacklisted while my desktop was trying to connect and then it would timeout without ever making a network connection.

Also while researching the problem, I found out that there was now a new, open source driver which should be working with my wireless NIC (ath5k).  So I removed ndiswrapper, and tried out this new driver. Alas it wans’t particularly stable, dropping connection ever couple of minutes. However since my wireless NIC uses an Atheros based chipset, I had another option. I installed the madwifi driver via jockey-gtk (Ubuntu’s tool for installing restricted modules/drivers).  For whatever reason, activating the driver via jockey-gtk didn’t actually get it up and running. To test it, I used:

sudo modprobe ath_pci

To actually get the driver to load on every boot, I edited my /etc/modules file to include ath_pci.

The madwifi driver doesn’t appear to make as strong a connection as the ath5k did; the gnome network manager applet shows the connection under madwifi usually has ~45–55% signal strength (under ath5k & ndiswrapper I could get as high as 70%). However I’ve yet to lose a connection to my network while using the madwifi wrapper whereas ath5k would drop connection every couple of minutes and ndiswrapper would usually drop the connection at least once an hour (back on Ubuntu 8.10 where it actually worked for me). Also the madwifi driver allows me to connect to my network on boot-up; unlike ndiswrapper which always took some time to connect after I was booted up and signed in. So overall, I’m pleased with my new networking setup but would have been more pleased if the changes I made could have been done automagically by the upgrade process or if the upgrade process at least warned me that it might break my networking setup.

Jaunty Upgrade After Effects © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Please use the google addons.
Right now google addons is more in sync.

Sometimes I use my personal googlecode just to back stuff up, or sync it between my home computer and the one at work. Anytime I’m ready for you guys to try something out I’ll just stick it in the google addons svn & if it’s broken I’ll just revert it.

Which is a good tip as the thread has links to a wide variety of versions of the plugin scattered throughout its 45 pages.  Unfortunately the tip does not really clear things up in my particular case.  As I stated previously I’m using a copy of the plugin from xbmc-hulu. The developer who made the above comment is recommending people use the version of the plugin from xbmc-addons instead of his personal version at rwparris2-xbmc-plugins but makes no mention of the version at xbmc-hulu which shows that developer’s username as one of the project owners.

Bah.

I suppose I’ll just have to download the xbmc-addons version of the hulu plugin, try it out and compare it to the xbmc-hulu version.  As soon as I’ve had a moment to do so, I’ll post my results.

UPDATE: I’m not seeing any difference between the xbmc-addons & xbmc-hulu versions so far.  However after reading the thread on XBMC Forums, I did go through the trouble of configuring the plugin (under the XBox version -> Videos -> Plugins -> Hulu -> press the white button on your controller).  Setting a default video quality makes using the plugin much nicer (cuts out 2–3 button presses when trying to watch a specific video).  You can enter your Hulu account username/password but there doesn’t appear to be a benefit to doing so yet.

UPDATE2:Per the XBMC Forums, xbmc-hulu has been removed in favor the version available via XBMC SVN Repo Installer and the SVN Repo Installer pulls from xbmc-addons.

UPDATE: Per the XBMC-Hulu plugin release thread, there is no currently working version of the plugin.

XBMC-Hulu Update © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

The side effect of Nautilus working so poorly was I had time to do a little googling.  I’ve heard good things about the Hulu website for watching TV shows I’ve missed.  Thing i I hate sitting at my computer for long periods of time when I’ve got a comfy couch¹ and a much larger TV than computer monitor. So as I said, I started googling and looking for a XBMC/Hulu plugin and I did find one in the XBMC Forums.

Unfortunately the 0.2 release mentioned in the first post of that thread didn’t work so well for me and there were 38 pages in the thread.  I did some more searching and found an article over at LifeHacker.  The article seems to be talking about the same plugin but links to a newer release of it.  I kept looking to see if there were anything else out there and found what appears to be the main site for the plugin, xbmc-hulu.  That last site doesn’t provide a simple download, but you can use subversion to checkout the lastest copy of their plugin.

And that latest version is pure gold, which is to say I’ve not run into a single problem watching any videos via the plugin.  Now I can sit back on the couch and watch Colbert Report, The Daily Show and all sorts of other good stuff that I don’t get with my cable TV package.  If my sinuses clear up and this cold goes away, I could be really happy.

UPDATE: I appear to be getting quite a bit of traffic (for me anyway) on this post, so thanks for stopping by! Also I’ve finally read through the entire 40 pages (at the time of this writing) in the XBMC Forums thread about this plugin.  From reading that thread, there appears to be a lot of confusion on where/how to get the plugin to work.  So for the record, I’m running xbmc-hulu 1.0 (SVN copied checked out on 26 January 2009) on top of T3CH’s 2009-01-25 build of XBMC (rev17349) on an original XBox (softmodded using Mech Assault via ProductWiki’s instructions).

UPDATE: Per the XBMC-Hulu plugin release thread, there is no currently working version of the plugin.

¹ Someday I will have a comfy chair!

XBMC + Hulu = GOLD! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Good

• The actual upgrade process completed without errors.
• The computer was successfully upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10 without any manual intervention on my part.
• Desktop effects (aka compiz) are very fun.  I’d tried them in the past with less than stellar results (too buggy) but they seem much more stable now.
• The extra buttons on my trackball finally work righ with Firefox under Ubuntu (back/forward).

Bad

• The upgrader removed and did not reinstall the restricted kernel modules.
  • For my less technical readers, basically the upgrade broke both my wireless connection and 3D acceleration.  I could live without the 3D, but this computer relies on wireless to connect to my home network.  Fixing that took a couple of hours of digging around in the log files and using another computer to get the files I needed.  Major headache.
  • I understand why the modules were removed and not installed after the upgrade, but I wish the upgrader had been smart enough to realize I needed them and would have at least downloaded them to be available after I rebooted to complete the install.
• KDE 4.x is the new default desktop environment for Kubuntu.  KDE 4.x does not play nicely with Nvidia graphics cards.  Like the one in my computer.  Meaning the lag between clicking on a the K menu and the menu popping up was about 2 minutes.  *ugh*  I could disable the Nvidia drivers to get normal performance back but then I’d lose my 3D acceleration.  *sigh*  So I’ve switched over to using Gnome, which will probably make at least one person I know very smug.
• The network shared drives I had setup to be automatically mounted on every boot are no longer mounting.  Gnome has an easy way to connect to those shares, but I really don’t want to have to mount them manually every time.

Update: For those of you stopping by looking for instructions on how to do this upgrade, you can fine the complete instructions (with screenshots!) over at Ubuntu’s Community Documentation page for IntrepidUpgrades/Kubuntu.

Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

// Now-Reading Plugin: Get the display name of the book's reader
function mlm_book_reader( $echo=true ) {
	global $book;

	$user_info = get_userdata($book->reader);

	if ( $echo )
		echo $user_info->display_name;
	return $user_info->display_name;

}

This grabs “Display name publicly as” from the user’s profile and displays it on the page. I put the function in the functions.php file of the theme I’m using (so any automatic upgrades of the plugin won’t erase it). Then I put < ?php mlm_book_reader() ?> into my custom single.php template and viola!

Note: this has only been tested on WordPress 2.6.2 with Now-Reading 4.4.3.

Now-Reading Tweaks v2 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I’d also like to take a momemt to thank AWelkin & Bryon for the gifts they brought back from Japan for me. I’ve now decorated my cubicle with 3 Tachikoma gashapon. *yeah!* Also a quick thanks should go out to my buddy/ex-coworker Eric, he mentioned more than once I just needed the right motivation to get into programming¹.  Well I recently had some slow time at work and wanted a way to parse some badly formatted data; so I wrote a Python script and while doing so certain things that have never clicked in my head about programming started falling into place.  I’ve since started working on another Python script for a different project at the office, so perhaps there’s some hope for my coding-fu yet.

¹ I do a lot of computer stuff, but have never been much of a programmer.  Usually I just learn enough to hack somebody else’s stuff together to do what I want in rather ugly hacks.

Quick Note © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I’ve been running Gutsy for a day now and the apps I normally use¹ seems to be working fine. A couple of tweaks I made almost immediately after upgrading to Gusty:

• Removed Strigi. From what I understand Strigi is supposed to be some sort of indexer to allow for quick searching of your computer. Only I found it had a horribly impact performance. Everything became extremely sluggish.
• Switch the default file manager to Konqueror from Dolphin. Dolphin looks like it might be useful and it did feel faster. But I’m used to Konqueror and don’t feel like making the switch right now.
• Installed Compiz. I found it interesting but different enough from my normal preferences that I’ve disabled it for now. Though I do plan to look at it more another day.

¹ Kontact, Firefox, Konsole, KMyMoney, Kaffeine, Digikam, and Amarok

Upgrade Complete © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.