If you’re like me then sometimes when you are look at an XKCD cartoon you wonder where the horizontal center axis of the cartoon is. For example, some strips are drawn in such a way that what appears to be the middle is not actually the middle.

The trick to finding the middle is to realize that the button “Random” is centered in the column and that the downward stroke of the letter D is the center of that button. Therefore just visually follow the downward stroke of the D in Random and that is the center of the strip. Here’s an example:

I don’t yet know a trick for finding the visual center of an image but I’ve never really felt compelled to do so, and I could always use a screen ruler if I did.

If you’ve tried out the just-released version of Eclipse Helios and within minutes of startup it dies with a RenderBadPicture error there’s an easy solution. Here’s the error message:

The program ‘Eclipse’ received an X Window System error.This probably reflects a bug in the program.The error was ‘RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)’.  (Details: serial 22386 error_code 172 request_code 152 minor_code 7)  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.   To debug your program, run it with the –sync command line   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

SSDs are replacements for common (aka old fashioned) hard drives. They’re better in every way except their cost. Even the lowest performing SSDs are twice as fast as hard drives and they have no moving parts so are more resilient in a mobile computer.

For most users, an SSD is an extravagance. Until now. A typical consumer will be just fine with 30 – 60 GB of hard drive space. I base this on annecdotal evidence from those I know. A modern fresh computer installation takes about 5GB. A large photo collection adds 5 – 15 GB and a large music collection 10 – 20GB more. Documents, email and work often take under 1 GB but on a very busy person’s system make take as much as 5GB.

Some people, maybe you, consider the Bible to be a source of good advice. However, there are also plenty of examples of bad decision-making. For the class I teach we covered a few good examples and how we can learn from them.

In each of the cases below, the underlying premise is that God is the source of all wisdom and distancing ourselves from His council increases the chances of big mistakes. As a bonus, I’m including the notes from the follow-up class where we covered a few good examples to compliment the bad.

I’m excited to share that I’m changing jobs at Canonical. I’ve been working as the Ubuntu.com webmaster for four years. I’ll be changing to a web developer on a different team. More specifically, I’ll be kind of a front-end web developer working on theming and the likes.

When I started at Canonical there was under 50 employees and the webmaster job description was quite broad. Over time as the company has grown and more people came on to help in various aspects my role became more of a marketing job, making content changes and running web reports. I was spending less of my time doing tasks where I excelled.

It’s kind of a lateral move. I’ll be switching to the team of developers responsible for managing our internal apps. I’ll continue to work on the Ubuntu.com infrastructure including Drupal, WordPress and Moin Moin as before. However this job is explicitly about developing custom application solutions. Someone else will be hired to take on the roles of managing the content and reporting for the website.

For those of you who are my colleagues in the Ubuntu community (i.e. not Canonical staff) our relationship will not change – I’m still the contact. As a matter of fact, there is a lot about my job that isn’t changing. I mostly get to focus on the parts I love.

This suits my tastes perfectly. I’m much more comfortable thinking about HTTP headers, reducing code duplication, CSS and the likes than I am hunting for typos, ensuring headlines are sentence case and keeping on top of web reports.

There will be a job post to fill the role of webmaster. If you’re interested in it, let me know and I’ll send you the details when they’re finalized by management. If you know me you know how to contact me privately and I think that would be the best method to express interest in the job.

Today I saw two items come across my radar that were unrelated but connected when it comes to the concept of mobile device fragmentation as it relates to software developers’ API stability.

Every release day is exciting in one way or another. Lucid’s was no disappointment. April 29th, 2010 was my 8th Ubuntu release as the ubuntu.com webmaster. Counting testing releases, betas and RCs I’ve participated in about 50 releases.

There are many aspects related to a release. I can only talk about my own perspective, as it pertains to managing the website. Usually, a week or so before release we’ve got a pretty good idea of what the website will look like and people are viewing it on a testing server. Invariably there are last minute changes, and I do mean up to the last minute.

Just to be clear, Adobe and John Gruber disagree on most of the issues around this “section 3.3.1″ incident, but they do heartily agree on the most important point.

First, to summarize what I’m referring to, Apple recently changed the wording in the contract developers have to agree to in order to develop apps for the iPhone. The wording prohibits developers from using tools other than Apple’s own sanctioned set which strongly steer developers towards creating apps that will only run on Apple’s products. This was done just a couple days before Adobe was scheduled to announce a product that allowed developers to create apps that run on a variety of devices, not just Apple’s. Developers, especially those at Adobe, got very upset and alarmed.

In short, you’re paying for the trust, not the actual encryption. Anyone with the appropriate software, which is widely available for free, can create their own certificate that provides encryption. However, using such a certificate will generate a browser warning when a user tries to create a secure connection. The warning will say something to the effect that “the connection is not trusted.” If you want to avoid the warning it costs something between $50 and $500. But there’s a justification.

I often keep tabs open for items on my todo list. So I get very upset if I lose my tabs. Sometimes I have two computers running or I dual-boot between operating systems and the tabs open on one are different than the tabs open on another. Xmarks now supports keeping these synchronized! I’ve just enabled this feature so haven’t played with it extensively yet but I’m excited about its potential.

In case you haven’t used XMarks before, it also supports synchronizing book marks between browsers. It works for IE, Chrome, Safari and Firefox. On some of these browsers you can also synchronize your passwords. Give it a shot at http://www.xmarks.com/