Here at HelloFresh (my new employer since Jan 5th) we sometimes need to change the system date in order to reproduce bugs. Doing so is easy with the date -s command and in order to keep the current time, one can re-use the date command itself to perform substitution:

sudo date -s "2014-12-25 $(date +%H:%M:%S)"

sudo cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime

Having just recently acquired a brand new Toshiba Satellite Z30-A-130 laptop and after booting Ubuntu 14.04 on it, one thing I immediately wanted to disable was the touchpad. It seems way too sensible and I keep touching while typing, taking the focus away. Turns out it wasn't super easy, at least until I figured it out.

The first obvious idea was to check the System Settings panel for Keyboard and Mouse hoping for a "disable touchpad" option but none was to be found on my fresh Ubuntu install.

$ xinput list

...didn't show the touchpad entry either, even though it was working alright. The idea was to disable it via CLI:

$ xinput set-prop [device number] "Device Enabled" 0

But having no device and hence no device number, I couldn't do it either. The final bit that led me in the right direction was:

$ synclient -l
Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?

So, a bit more poking around and it turns out linux-kernel 3.13 may not be the best bet for driving these touchpads. Someone reported success with 3.17 and it does have indeed much better support. My days of recompiling infinite numbers of kernels everyday (by hand, mind you) were long gone and it's been a good few years since I last had the need to try a different kernel. But I quickly learned that Ubuntu has a kernel team and they wonderfully package every release in all .deb glory. They even package the -low-latency variant too, which I immediately chose over the -generic one. :)

$ wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.17-rc7-utopic/linux-headers-3.17.0-031700rc7_3.17.0-031700rc7.201409281835_all.deb
$ wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.17-rc7-utopic/linux-headers-3.17.0-031700rc7-lowlatency_3.17.0-031700rc7.201409281835_amd64.deb
$ wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.17-rc7-utopic/linux-image-3.17.0-031700rc7-lowlatency_3.17.0-031700rc7.201409281835_amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i *.deb
$ sudo update-grub

And presto. One reboot later and I now have full control over the touchpad, even from the system settings which makes sense as all that was missing was a proper synaptics driver.

Update 2014-10-04: Turns out linux 3.17-rc7, despite fixing the synaptics driver issue, is a bit quirky when it comes to the wifi driver, as the connection suddenly drops and won't reconnect. -rc1 seems to be OK and it's the first version to feature synaptics support for my touchpad, so that's what I'll be using for the time being.

Interesting how having a couple of technical notes to jot down immediately brought this place here back to mind. Even more interesting, at least for me, to look back at the past few entries, how they always seem to be written in pivotal moments in my personal (and professional) life. This present one doesn't deviate from that. More on that (perhaps) later.

So after falling off the end of the contract with my previous employer, I now find myself unemployed and looking forward to the next step. That also meant handing in my work laptop and considering how archaic my own Macbook Pro now seems to be, I felt it was the time to splash some hard-earned money on a new machine. Having had a regular Intel machine for the past few months at work - a Dell Latitude laptop as it was - that meant another stint using (Ubuntu flavored) Linux both for work and fun. Having lived quite a few years (almost a decade) in Macintosh land, I didn't entirely leave the Unix world but it's just not the same thing, from a developer's point of view. I guess I was still pining for the days of Slackware Linux and how tight a grip I had over everything that I thoroughly enjoyed going back to a scenario very much resembling it.

Faced with the task of acquiring a new machine, this meant going back to a Mac was out of the question for now, the plan being to extend my stay in the familiar surroundings of Linux. The work laptop had an Intel Core i7 quad-core processor and, most importantly, an SSD hd. Meaning: fast. Some shop browsing both on and offline yielded my current machine, under 1k€, a 13.3" Toshiba Satellite Z30-A-130, boasting a lesser Core i5 cpu but featuring a 256GB SSD hd. Getting used to it, the natural ongoing process of adaptation, but very happy so far with it.

Which leads us to the next post...

Being on the verge of getting employed by a new tech company seemed like the right time to resume writing here.

I'm still working out details with my future employer, and it will probably be official today, if all goes to plan. I have already been assigned a task, in order to test my capabilities as a developer, which I have been doing for the past week. This, by the way, was a jQuery-based date picker to narrow the presentation of some values over time.

In order to help me get acquainted with the codebase and getting my bearings, the company's lead developer has been of invaluable help for these past few days. It's always a great experience when you're able to learn from someone you respect and who proves to be very knowledgeable about the problems at hand.

What I'm NOT knowledgeable about, and which has honestly been a bit discomforting, is being a Git fool. Reading The Git Reference is something I'm about to do.

More news about this step of my life as I get them...

Oh look, after so long, Advogato is still here. Maybe I start jotting down some notes again, why not?