Getting TweetDeck (Adobe Air) to use your default browser in Gnome

This has been a bit of an issue in the past. See this lifehacker article, which was inspired by Roy Tanck's blog post.  Currently, I am using Adobe Air 2.5.1 on OpenSUSE 11.3 - i386 (Yes, I have a crappy Atom powered net book).  Every time I would open a link in TweetDeck, it would open in Firefox rather than Chromium.  To make matters worse, the place in Chromium where I could set it as the default browser, the button is grayed out, and it says "Chromium cannot determine or set the default browser."  Bummer.  But fear not, as the solution is somewhat simple.  If you have the "custom menu bar" (not the default one which ships with OpenSUSE) you can do System->System->Preferred Applications, and change the default browser there.  Alternatively, you could run "gnome-default-applications-properties" in your shell to get the dialogue box opened up.  Once I got it open, on the "Internet" tab, I dropped down the menu under "Web Browser" and selected "Custom".  Then I put in /usr/bin/Chromium.  You would obviously replace that command with the browser you want to use.  And that's it!  I didn't even have to restart TweetDeck.  It just worked from there on out.

How to change Epiphany default search from Google to DuckDuckGo (Gnome)

I have been playing around with two new toys lately:  The Epiphany web browser, and DuckDuckGo search.  I might write more on these another time, but for now I want to show you how you can change the default setting for search (in Epiphany) from Google to DuckDuckGo, by using gconf-editor in Gnome:

Fire up a shell, and enter:

gconf-editor

A dialogue box will pop up.  Click on apps -> epiphany -> general

You will see a list of things on the right.  Scroll down until you see 'url_search'.  Click that, then right click, and select 'edit key'.  In the new dialogue box that comes up, paste the following into the 'Value' field:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Click, 'OK', and then close gconf-editor.  Now when you open up Epiphany and do a search, you should be looking at a result page from DDG, instead of Google.

Happy DDG'ing!

Humorous AMD Video

With CES looming, and news of AMD winning the International CES Innovations 2011 Design and Engineering Award for its Fusion APU, I have to say I am pretty excited to see Fusion finally coming to fruition.  Anyway, since Fusion is upon us, here is a funny new promotional video from AMD about fusion; watch for AMD President & CEO Dirk Meyer at the end:

How to build Dillo on OpenSUSE 11.3

Dillo is a small, fast, and light browser.  In order to build it on OpenSUSE, you will need some pre-requisites.  This article will cover how to get the source code for Dillo (and associated libraries), as well as the software build tools you will use to compile the Dillo browser.

How to change Gnome login background image.

Update: For OpenSUSE 11.4, see this post.

As root, enter the following into your shell:

gconftool-2 --direct \
  --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
  --type string \
  --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename some_picture_filename.png

Of course you will need to change the bit in red, "some_picture_filename.png" to the one that you want as your background image on the login screen.

It seems that the method for doing this has been evolving.  What worked even six months ago does not appear to work now.  As of this writing, I am using Gnome 2.30.0 with OpenSUSE.  I found the information here.

Excellent AMD Bulldozer Blog

Many of us have been patiently waiting for the release of the AMD Bulldozer processor. As the date draws nearer, more details about the chip are starting to emerge. Today I came across this interesting blog, Patent based research regarding AMD's future MPUs. The title gives a little idea of what the blog is about, but keep in mind that there is more there than patent research. Indeed, there is a lot of info there.  The author also comments on the AMD Llano and Bobcat processors.  Check it out for yourself!

Misconceptions

Last night I was fiddling around with some really simple code; the object of my program was to test a positive integer, to see if it was odd or even, and then print the result.  There is more than one way to do this, some being more expensive than others.  I thought I would run some tests to see what sort of differences, with regard to program execution time, I could come up with.  I had three methods of checking for whether a number was odd or even.