Chromium (google chrome) on linux - howto

You may have heard that the alpha version of google chrome is now available. Well google chrome is based on an open source project called chromium, so you can try out the latest chromium to test what will essentially be google chrome. This how-to will be done on Ubuntu Jaunty, in accordance with my Ubuntu Jaunty testdrive. Also, since I'm using Ubuntu, I may aswell do the how-to with all GUI tools, no need for a command line, no matter how much easier it would be with one ;)

• Right, the first thing you need to do is go to their launchpad site and display the sources.list entries from the drop down list. If you're using jaunty, you can simply use the following sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

• Leave that page there, now go to System->Administration->Software sources and click on the third party software tab. Now click the add button and add the lines of software repositories from the launchpad page separately. Your third party software sources should look something like this.

• Then right-click on this and click "save target as" in firefox and save it under any name, or click on that link and copy and paste the content into a new file. Then go back to System->Administration->Software Sources and hit the authentication tab. Hit import key file and select the file that you just made/saved. Your Authentication tab should now look something like this.

• Finally go to System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager and hit the reload button. Congrats, your sources are up to date. Finally, to install chromium, just click here and hit install. To launch chromium just click chromium web browser in the Internet tab. The broswer itself isn't near completion, but it's as snappy as chrome on windows, and looks to be on the path to success.

Ubuntu 9.04, day 1

Decided to install ubuntu 9.04 today. My current distro of choice is debian by default, but since I haven't used ubuntu since 7.04, and that was on a much slower machine, I thought I'd give it a try. I've only been using it for a few hours, at intervals, so I'll give a follow up over the next few days.

1st things 1st, installation has come on a long way, and is very user friendly. I had some troubles trying to format my hdd with ext4, as it kept complaining when I deleted the partition and then made a new ext4 partition (as I would normally do), but it would work when I cleared the contents of the current partition and then formatted the drive, sorted. That doesn't really matter anyway, as ext4 is considered experimental and most people wouldn't notice. The actual installation was over in no time, a much quicker isntall than vista, but then again vistas dvd has about 5 times the content.

Bootup is very fast, slightly faster than Debian, and much faster than what I remember ubuntu being. It was quite a low profile bootup though, in contrast to fedoras beautiful plymouth bootup, but this shouldn't really bother anyone, you only see ubuntu boot for about 20 seconds.

Next you get to the login window (GDM naturally)... Dark, fairly sums it up. Essentially it's a dark screen with Windows 7 toolbar at the bottom (ie wide transparent toolbar) and a login field in the middle. Exciting. I think the gdm theme was created at the stage when the ubuntu devs were going to stop the brown theme, before quickly changing there minds back with the desktop. Nah I'm only joking, it's not too bad, and there are loads of great GDM themes available online and for selection in the login window manager preferences. Another thing that you instantly notice (well, I do anyway), it recognised my screen resolution by default (unlike vista) and the free graphics driver actually displayed graphics (unlike debian)!

Physically logging in and loading the desktop takes surprisingly long though, which is slightly annoying. The startup music is still there though, hasn't changed since 7.04, no problem there. The theme is brown by default, naturally, but the themes available by default are actually quite good, and people who complain about the brown have a great selection.

A quick word on drivers, they've come a LONG way. Ubuntu recognised all my graphics driver by default, and prompted me to install the proprietary drivers instantly, which is a great feature that could really help new users. What really surprised me though is that it recognised my motherboards wifi driver by default, while even vista, with the given drivers, won't recognise it!

And next of course the notification for updates comes, this is before the new drivers have taken effect, and it is the most frustrating thing to move your mouse over to the notification to try and click, only to have it continually disappear on you. I knew that it was going to disappear, but my gut instinct told me to try and click the notifications. This is probably just me though, and after I restarted my system, compiz and the drivers took effect and you can really see how attractive the notifications are. As for updates, the update was a pleasant 44mb, much lower than I thought, and they were installed without a hitch.

I haven't had time to do much in 9.04, but I'm quite happy at the moment. All the sound issues I've heard about are non-existent on this machine, and I've even been trying to reproduce them. Enabling compiz by default after I updated my drivers is another great feature by the ubuntu devs, as things do look alot prettier, and it's still quite smooth. Actually, now that I think of it, the only bad unexpected thing I can find in this release, is that ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't seem to log you out (what's with that?). Oh, and fluxbox still has an annoying moving windows bug, but I think that's fluxbox's problem.

At the moment, ubuntus come a long, long way, and really surpassed my expections for a mainstream OS.

Coded Penguin

Amazing the things you can find with stumbleupon :)

http://www.100mb.nl/

Online roulette - the mistakes

1st blog post, may aswell talk about the 1st thing on my mind. I randomly came across the world of online roulette about a week ago, I have to admit, it does look extremely promising, and if you're lucky, it is.

I first got caught up with the Martingale System, the system basically involves betting on the 1:1 bets (for example, bet a number will be a red, an odd, in the 1st half of the board etc) and doubling your money if you lost. So for example, you'd bet 1 on black, and red would come up, so you'd bet 2 on black, and red would come up again, so you bet 4 on black and continue doubling your money until it lands on your colour. Sounds great on paper right? If theres a 50:50 chance it's going to land on black, what are the chances of it landing on red 6 times in a row (that would be a $32 bet)? The answer is alot higher than you would think. You need to consider that in an offline casino the casino has a 5% house edge for having a single 0 on the roulette wheel, but on an online casino the casinos add a further 2.7% to this house edge. This leaves almost all the roulette spins extremely biased, and this is something you'll notice immediately.

So, I still went down to business, I started with just $20 and hit a winning streak, within 15 minutes I'd made $150. Needless to say, I got cocky and lost the lost in another 30 seconds.

Second go, I decided to start betting on the opposite colour after another colour came up 3 times. Sounds safe, and I got quite lucky, making $400 in 2 hours. I however foolishly thought that the more money I had the safer I was, and with $400 was practically invincible. So I hit a horrid losing streak, 13 reds came up, and I lost it all. I don't think there was anything I could have done to stop this, except to stop doubling when I had to bet $64 to keep going, after that I honestly do think the house edge increases the more you bet. This was awful disappointing though, and I'd felt I'd had enough, there was no reliable way of making money this way, and you could never know when to stop. You may think this is obvious, but making money can be so ridiculously easy you start to take it for granted.

Finally I wanted to recoup my losses. I deposited $50 and tried a different, purely luck based system. I bet 2 $5 bets on 2 rows, and hope it didn't come up on the row I hadn't covered. Doing this I win $5 each time, but lost $10 if I didn't win. Surprisingly I made $150 and completely recouped my losses.

I've stopped now as I don't think it's reliable, however if anyone's interested I'd thought I'd give you a few tips so you don't make the same mistakes I made.

• Firstly, 13+ reds/backs, highs/lows, odds/evens have come up in a row more than 20 times when I was playing, so yes, although the odds of that happening are 0.002% (without online house edge) it DOES happen.

• Don't bet more that $50 on a single bet. The largest bet I made was $180 and if I won I would've made a profit of just $2.

• If you ever think to yourself "well it HAS to come up next time", just stop. Take a break, come back in 20 minutes, you've made a loss, move on, and don't make it worse.

• For every $20 you make, withdraw $5. I find that this is the best way to guarantee a profit at the end of it. Or you could do something like "withdraw every win after $200", just make sure that if you lost it all you'd still make money.

• The only roulette gambling system available that flips the odds in your favor without increasing your bet is the reverse roulette system. And I wouldn't recommend that unless you have a $1000 starting balance (I paid for the reverse roulette system, I won't link as I don't want to advertise for it, it's a good system, but you need a high starting balance). Don't pay for roulette software, most of it is useless. Always look up torrent sites first, if not there then ebay.

• Only use REPUTABLE casino sites. This is very important, as many of them are illegitimate. I recommend http://888.com . They're one of the oldest online casinos available and deliver the money to paypal within 5 days, no fuss, no need to verify your identity.

Well, that's a short review of online roulette. It's not all bad, you can make alot of money easily, just remember, you CAN lose it all alot quicker than you can make it, but if you follow some of the tips in this blogpost, you should be If you're reading this after trying roulette, I'd love to hear your comments and tips, might give me incentive to give it another try ;)