Author: chris

TweetDeck on Mandriva

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Because I like new toys, and because I am still not certain how to make sense of conversations in Twitter, I went looking for a better way to interface with Twitter. After a fair amount of searching, I concluded that TweetDeck would be as good as anything to try first.

I had a bit of a look around to see if there’s any specific mention of TweetDeck on Mandriva Linux.  I found several nuggets of information that helped me get going relatively painlessly.

First I downloaded Adobe Air for Linux from Adobe’s website.  I ticked the “Is executable” box under Properties in Dolphin.  Double-clicking on the .bin file in Dolphin didn’t work so I renamed it to remove the extension.  Then, just in case, I ran ldconfig as root in a console, as mentioned in this guide for Ubuntu.  I don’t know if it mattered.  I ignored all the stuff about libraries in that post, hoping that it was Ubuntu-specific and that my Mandriva setup wouldn’t present me with any such issues.  I lucked out.  The Air installer seemed to churn through all right.

Then, I downloaded TweetDeck itself.  This also seemed fine, until I tried starting it up and tying it with my Twitter account, when it presented me with the following error:

Sorry, Adobe Air has a problem running on this computer.

Luckily I had found one thread in the Mandriva forum pertaining specifically to problems with Adobe Air on Mandriva, with the following comment by user Cairn Mitchell that had specifically caught my attention:

“The wallet has to be enabled at startup for some AIR apps to work
Kde wallet that is.”

I ran KWalletManager from the Kicker menu and then ran TweetDeck again.  This time it ran smoothly.  TweetDeck seems to work fine.  KWalletManager asks for my password each time I run it though, which is a little bit annoying.  I don’t know if there’s a setting within TweetDeck or KWalletManager that would avoid this.

As for my opinion on TweetDeck: well, it’s a lot better than Twitter’s web interface for organizing information.  I don’t really tweet as yet, so I haven’t tested it as a conversation manager at all.  What it has highlighted for me is that some people must seriously be attached to some web-connected device all of the time.  Even more than I am!

Spider on a bike

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spiderweb on a bike

Not riding the bike.  My bike had a flat tire a little while back, and I took the wheel off to fix it, noticed the jockey wheels were worn into ninja throwing stars (I don’t actually know if throwing stars look like that, but I drew blood from my thumb picking one up, so they resemble weaponry in one important respect), took the chain off to fix the derailleur, tried to put the wrong size of jockey wheels in, and ordered some more of the right size.

Then it got chilly out, and I couldn’t face sitting on the concrete with numb fingers and a numb butt, fiddling with tiny bolts and chain breakers and tire levers, and the leaves fell off the trees and buried the jockey wheels on the ground next to the naked derailleur, and spiders started building webs on the handlebars.  It looks kind of disreputable, I have to say, kind of like a car left in the front yard until the tires deflate and the chrome and bodywork rusts (or the plastic fades), and weeds start sprouting from under the hood.

Parking the working bike ahead of the sad bike one evening, I spotted this spider in the beam of my back light and hatched a plan to get the tripod out and try to get a shot of it.  It took me about a week to summon up the hardiness to go back out in the cold and do it.

Focus was a problem in the low light.  I didn’t quite nail it.

I have ordered a bike workstand. I think this will help get my poor derelict bike back on its wheels again.  Right?