Tag Archives: software

TweetDeck and Blink182

I dunno, maybe it’s me. I use TweetDeck desktop client for Twitter. A while back I took one of their updates and blam! the colors went all butt-ugly and the sound went south. I’m not a Blink-182 fan, and it wasn’t a welcome change. I sort of dealt with it, and figured one day I’d bother to seek out another desktop client.

Well, today I accidentally found that the folks that make TweetDeck have realized that they made a mistake and have taken the high road. Check it out.

It’s fixed now and I’m happy again.

Now, if someone were to make a Frank Zappa theme…

Some Favorite Windows XP Registry Adjustments

Since I’ve been asked, here are a few of the registry adjustments I make soon after kickstarting an XP system. By no means is this an exhaustive list. No, it’s just the stuff that I consider a minimal start for all systems.

WARNINGDon’t come crying to me if you hose your system beyond belief, because for the uninitiated messing with the Windows registry directly is somewhat akin to performing open-brain surgery. In fact, I’m not going to tell you how to perform edits on the thing, back it up in whole or part or anything like that. You should already know how to do those things. If you don’t, well, please move along, nothing to see here.

With that out of the way, I’ll state what should be obvious. The registry keys mentioned below are each one line. Sometimes embedded spaces will cause wrapping that shouldn’t actually be.

The default responsiveness of the Start menu is designed for effect, not utility. Adjust it to your liking by adjusting the value here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay

This has a default decimal value of 400. 100 usually does it for me.  The ever-so-popular TeweakUI utility adjusts this, too, but it’s easy to just do it this way.

If you’ve got enough memory in your system you can pull the Windows kernel into RAM. Absolutely don’t do this if you’ve got less than, oh, 256 MB.  But who doesn’t have 2 GB or more these days?

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive

Choose one of these values:
1 = disable paging and run kernel from RAM
0 = normal, paged operation

It should be obvious that you want to set it to 1. You’ll need to reboot to make it take effect.

Did you know that NTFS maintains standard 8.3 file names that are compatible with DOS conventions? Those are the ugly looking all-caps things with the tildas and such that you may have seen in a file list every now and again. Creating and maintaining them is an overhead you can live without if you never have a need for this compatibility. Nice that you can easily disable it and keep your MFT a little less cluttered at the same time.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation

0 = enabled
1 = disabled

Set to 1 to gain some file system performance, at the expense of compatibility with that older file system you probably forgot about long ago. You’ll need to reboot to make it take effect.

Oh, and before you ask: no, I’m not sure whether it cleans up existing 8.3 junk or not. I never bothered to check, but I’d suspect not.

Windows XP helps speed its bootup with a prefetch cache, located by default at C:\Windows\Prefetch. Some folks say that every now and again you should delete the contents of that directory, and the system will rebuild it cleanly. I personally wouldn’t bother with that, just let Windows deal with it. But you can control what gets prefetched with this adjustment.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher

0 = disable prefetching
1 = prefetch application launch files
2 = prefetch boot files
3 = prefetch as much as possible

Setting this to 3, of course, is a good idea.

The Disk Cleanup utility doesn’t actually clean up all of your temp files as you might be led to believe. Instead, it checks the last access of these files and if it’s 7 days or less it keeps ’em around. Fortunately you can fix this.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Files\LastAccess

# = number of days of retention

Personally I like 0 days. One good reason is that it’s nice to have the slate as clean as possible when defragmenting. (But if you’ve got an SSD you might want to leave this one be, as small writes exact a serious performance hit.)

Add a Copy To command to Explorer’s context-sensitive menu, where it’s always ready for use.

Just add the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Copy To

with a default value of
{C2FBB630-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}

And, while you’re at it, add a Move To command as well. Add this key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Move To

with a default value of
{C2FBB631-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}

Of course, neither of these do anything for system performance but may help your performance.

Standards and Documentation

 

[This entry is lifted verbatim from a message I recently wrote in email to a good friend. We were idly discussing a bit of documentation that one of his technical writers had produced, when he commented that he created his own standards: whatever he said, so it would go. He concluded, “It’s good to be the king, sort of…”]

I was lapsing into the way things used to be. Once upon a time there were Standards for everything.

Here’s a funny story. There’s no real proprietary stuff here, but it sheds a teeny tiny bit of light on the seedy underbelly of a company that would probably prefer otherwise.

Back in the 80s and before, there was a Standards Department. A handful of folks: a few writers, a few managers, a room of shelves with binders. (This was, of course, pre-LAN, pre-email, pre-all-the-stuff-we-take-for-granted-today. They walked floppies to a PC that was connected to an IBM line-printer. This was modern; not much earlier they used typewriters. The IBM ball-headed devices – were they called Quietwriters?  Selectrics – were still around.)

I hear you saying, “roomful of shelves with binders? Golly, what could they be documenting?”

Back then, every system, every subsystem, every sub-subsystem, every database, every data feed, every EVERYTHING was custom-built for a specific purpose – be it another system, a customer, whatever. This was before all the wonderful acronym-laden standards for such stuff we have today. (“I love standards – there are so many to choose from!”)

Anyway, time passes and in comes LANs and email and all kinds of magic and, one day, they went and dissolved the Standards Department. Figured that the Programmers could write their own documentation. Out went the writers, one by one. Then the managers. Their equipment was collected and taken away and their space was re-allocated. But not before I scoured their PCs for their documentation files. Thousands and thousands of Word docs. Stashed ’em away in a big zipfile, I did.

Then there was the room full of shelves of binders. A girl I knew, a minor manager, was given the mandate to keep the lights on.

So the years passed. Major systems were rearchitected to common standards. New products were created. The outsourcing wave washed upon the tech shores. And lots of old talent – along with the knowledge of how the proprietary systems worked – was shown the door.

Along came Y2K, at first just a glimmer on the horizon. With the massive technical audit that was undertaken to prepare for that event came the realization that quite a bit of the shiny, new, “self-documented” code was critically dependent upon… wait for it… bits of old legacy stuff that nobody knew anything about anymore.

“Wait!” someone said, “We’ll call the Standards Department! All this stuff is documented!”

Uh oh.

It took a while, but eventually it was realized that the Standards Department had been decimated the better part of two decades earlier. Some hand-wringing later they discovered the roomful of shelves of binders. It had been dutifully passed along from hand to hand through several reorganizations, relocated over 2-3 facilities moves, but there they were. Unmaintained. Disorganized. Dusty. Thick, blue, three-ring binders, labeled with crusty, cryptic strings of numbers and letters – if you were lucky. Some had fallen off with age. But descend upon the room they did, borrowing one volume or another as the analysis plodded onward.

I remembered the original room, the old Standards Department, and when I heard about this I smiled. But when I heard that as often as not the borrowed volumes weren’t being returned, my smile turned into a frown. I grabbed control of the room, had it locked, began to mediate access. Soon I was doing a brisk side business as a librarian. I blew the dust off the forgotten zipfile and got the content onto the network. After all, it’s way easier to content-search a tree of files than to traipse over to some other building an spend hours with those dusty old binders. Or sign your life away to the shaved-head dweeb that made sure you brought ’em back. Trouble is, the files and the binders ain’t exactly one and the same all the time.

And then, there’s the stuff that no one, try as they might, could find documented ANYWHERE. Several thousands of those entities were scattered across the organization. Little black boxes, you can see what goes in and comes out, but haven’t got an inkling of what goes on inside. Except when one little black box talks directly to or from another little black box, hmmm, then you don’t really know much about the interfaces either. Quite troubling.

Y2K came and went – rather uneventfully, actually. The world didn’t end. The systems actually came out the other side better than they went in. Life went on. Interest in the room and the files waned, but didn’t go away. As it turns out, Programmers, especially contractors, especially hourly contractors with lots of churn, aren’t exactly the best when it comes to documenting their work. And “self-documenting code” really isn’t, unless the reader is quite technical. The legacy stuff, well, the stuff that’s actually documented, turns out to be the best documented stuff there is. Created by people whose job it was to make it so.

Now here’s the punchline. To this very day, if you dig deep enough, through the shiny, new Web-enabled, SOAPed and serviced layers, you could very well discover dependencies upon some bit of legacy code or another that *nobody* understands, code for which there’s *no* source code, *no* documentation…

This is a good time to end the story, as we sit and sip our morning coffee, pondering the sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach of some poor sod somewhere whose unfortunate lot puts them near one of those bits of code.

Fighting The Good Fight

 

The amount of spam I’ve been receiving on this blog had been skyrocketing lately. It reached the point that it was pretty much an everyday chore to clear it out. So, like many before me I decided to activate the Akismet (version 2.2.1) plug-in.

All was well for a few days. But then, out of nowhere, Akismet began calling my attention to an unbelievable amount of trackback spam. By ‘unbelievable’ I mean several a minute, sometimes. Hundreds and hundreds overnight.

Now, that shouldn’t be a problem because they’ll go away on their own after a period of time. But what about legitimate stuff? There could be some of that, and it’s important to flag it so Akismet ‘learns’.  Um, that’s what they say, anyway. The trouble, of course, is that the longer the list of stuff to look over becomes, the harder it is to identify the good stuff.

This morning I logged on to see 17 l-o-n-g pages of it. Something would have to be done!

Here’s what a typical entry on the Akismet Caught Spam page looks like.

All instances share the IP address of 82.233.30.32 which is linked to a whois search. If I point my browser at the IP directly I see a typical Apache test page – the server the offending server is powered by CentOS. A reverse-DNS doesn’t give any more insight – no other host names. Google doesn’t have it cached, either. The IP is probably spoofed…

The text of the spam changes a bit, as does the host name. When I point my browser at the host name, though, there’s some kind of content for just the briefest instant, but then it quickly changes to a typical blog has been removed page. In fact, every one I’ve looked at is exactly like this.

Whaddya know, onlinecasino21.blogspot.com doesn’t resolve to the IP address I mentioned earlier, either. What a surprise, right?

Anyway, it would be nice if Akismet allowed you to filter the spam and apply a delete all to the result. But it doesn’t, so we’ll have to take more drastic measures.

Turning off trackbacks and pingbacks (same setting) would probably work but I’d rather not do that. Blacklisting the address in WordPress doesn’t work, Akismet still gets it first. Here’s what I did. In my .htaccess file I added these sections.

And that seems to have applied the brakes. I haven’t seen another instance of this spam for several hours.

Another thing that just might be worth mentioning. I run several blogs and when I was activating Akismet to mine I activated it on the others as well. But this – my personal blog – is the only one that’s been troubled by this onslaught of trackback spam. I don’t know who I pissed off out there, but somebody – or something – has latched on and it ain’t letting go.

Virtuality

Well, VMware Server 2’s been out long enough without panic-updates so I finally got around to upgrading one of the servers.

There were only five VMs on the target box; the backups – about 250GB worth – went quick enough, disk-to-disk. The VMware software on the Win2K host also went rather uneventfully. Then the fun began.

There’s no standalone management console now, all that stuff is done through a Web interface. I like the Web as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: it’s slower. I haven’t had any trouble with it – yet – but I’m waiting. Next, the remote consoles to the VMs are implemented as a browser plug-in. Fair enough, but try as I might I’ve been unable to get the plug-in to be called by Chrome. I thought I’d have to use IE (it installs fine on IE7) but then I found that one can generate a shortcut that calls the plug-in exe file (my laptop runs XP). The end result is that I can manage the host with Chrome and call VM consoles up as needed. Well, the Windows VMs, anyway. The Linux VMs are fine, as usual with SSH.

Then there’s the VM updates themselves. It’s a one-way process (another reason to have good backups!) and you get a reasonable warning before you proceed. Of course, when the VM’s OS wakes up quite a bit of the virtualized hardware has changed. That means driver changes and such, it’s as though you changed motherboards or something equally traumatic. In my case it all went okay, with one exception. A Windows Server VM would no longer start SQL Server 2000 for lack of a DLL: msvcp71.dll. As it turns out I had one handy – quite accidentally, I assure you – so I copied it to the VM’s WINNT directly and all was well again.

I generally use the VM Tools, too, so those were next. The updates were intuitive, but different. From the Server management interface, the necessary files are placed on the VM’s CD-R drive. Then, from the VM, you install from there. Now, there’s been one Ubuntu VM that I’ve never been able to install Tools on for some reason. Never could figure out why and it wasn’t important enough to pursue. This time I simply mounted the drive and everything went flawlessly. Go figure.

All the slogging complete it was time for some testing. I’m pleased to report that every VM is showing solid signs of performance increases across the board! Memory management seems significantly improved, as does virtual disk performance. It’s too early to be saying anything about reliability, of course, and I have yet to experiment with other new features. I may even eventually get used to the Web management interface.

So there you have it. Not bad for a couple of hours of work. VMware Server 2.0 is a free download. If you’ve got a spare box hanging around and always wanted to play with virtualization, go give it a try.

Laptops and Hard Drives

My wife’s laptop was getting full. NTFS, as you probably already know, begins to suffer performance-wise when it crosses the half-full line. And the default MFT size is kind of small to begin with. Presently that all-important area was about 98% consumed and the drive itself had only 20% or so free space. Her last install of a Sims2 expansion pack brought another round of complaints.

Easy enough to remedy. Head out to Best Buy for a replacement drive. But how to get the new drive installed and set up as pain-free as possible? Usually it’s a fresh IPL, but I was looking for the easy way out.

I have this neat device from CoolMax. The CD-350-COMBO is a multi-headed cable that plugs into a raw IDE or SATA drive and presents to your system as a USB device. When your laptop is your workbench this device is worth its weight in gold. Soon the new drive was partitioned, formatted, and tested. (For good measure, I allocated a much larger MFT as well.)

With that problem solved I turned to the task of cloning the existing drive. I recently read of something called XXCLONE, which promised a file-by-file copy (including all the locked stuff) from a running Windows system, with the ability to make the destination bootable. This would be a good time to try that out.

The install to the wife’s laptop was easy enough: unzip and copy a file. I used the CoolMax adapter to cable up the new drive, the destination for the copy. I set XXCLONE to task and went away. The copy would take a while. When I returned it was finished. I made the new drive bootable with a couple of clicks, uncabled and shut everything down. It took a few more minutes to physically swap the old drive for the new one.

The first boot took a little longer than usual. Windows was a little confused, I guess, because the drive change triggered the New Hardware Wizard. But soon things settled down. Between these two tools, a usually-tedious job was turned simple!

There’s one other thing I should mention. The XXCLONE documentation claim that because it makes a file-by-file copy, it defragments the destination drive automatically. I run Diskeeper on all of our machines, and it reported the drive as heavily fragmented. I needed to run the boot-time defragmentation job before the new drive delivered its expected performance.

Additional stuff, 17 December 2008: There were a couple of nagging issues following the drive cloning. I’m not sure if it’s XXCLONE or if it’s integral to the cloning process itself, but some applications installed with the MS Installer were no longer accessible through Add/Remove Programs. Instead there would appear a dialogue:

“The patch package could not be opened. Verify that the patch package exists and that you can access it, or contact application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package.”

The solution, while a bit of a pain, is to obtain and install the Windows Install Clean Up utility from Microsoft. Run the utility and select the errant application from the list, then clean it up – which amounts to removing it from the installer’s database. Finally, re-install the application.

In my case it was Office 2003, which called for finding the license number and install media as well as a few rounds of patches and service packs. There were a few other applications as well, but that was the most substantial.

Chrome

The Internet is absolutely all over itself lately about Google’s new browser, Chrome. It’s only a beta, but when you think about it, what product of Google’s is not beta? When I heard the news my first reaction was one of distrust. After all, nobody really knows what data Google is collecting about their users. But I decided to give the browser a try anyway after reading their comic book, which describes the technical attributes of their new-from-the-ground-up browser design.

Wow is Chrome fast! Page rendering is absolutely blazing! Compared to any other browser I’ve ever used, Chrome is the absolute fastest by far. That alone should compel you to give it a try.

Because of the way Chrome spawns individual processes it clearly uses more system resources than other browsers. On today’s modern systems that shouldn’t be a problem and the benefits of enhanced resource management are clear. [Added later on the same day: It still crashes, though, despite process isolation. See the EvilFingers site for an explanation and demo of the flaw in v0.2.149.27. https://www.evilfingers.com/advisory/Google_Chrome_Browser_0.2.149.27_in_chrome_dll.php

Chrome Crash
Chrome Crash

As usual, the masses are very quick to point out flaws. The first thing that I heard of was Chrome’s vulnerability to drive-by security problems. Downloads occur in the background, and it could be easy to accidentally launch an executable. It shouldn’t be a problem if you’re careful.

There is a phrase that’s been going around lately to describe privacy enhanced browsing, the so-called ‘porn mode’. I object! There are many, many reasons why one might wish to take advantage of enhanced privacy while they browse. Why not use a less antagonistic label, like ‘privacy-enhanced’ or ‘privacy-mode’? (You’re welcome. I’m omitting a rant about how language kills.)

Cookies and pop-ups seem to be handled more intelligently as well, although those that pay for pop-up ads may not agree. Pop-ups are minimally displayed in and the user needs to choose to see it. This can trigger a billable event without the (benefit?) of the user ever seeing the pop-up. As a user I’m pleased with this behavior. As a business owner with Web properties I’m also pleased, because I’ve long believed that using things like pop-ups and cookies to track my customers is poor behavior on my part.

There’s been quite a bit of speculation about which direction Google may take Chrome. Some are even saying that this could be the beginning of the end for desktop operating systems altogether. Can you imagine this thing sitting on a bare metal hypervisor, without the overhead of an operating system? Exciting times are ahead.

Smart Scanner

I had a great percent-off coupon from Best Buy that was about to expire, so I used it to buy a new scanner, a Canon 8800F. Once I had it set up I decided to have a little fun. Onto the bed went a $1 bill. No problem. A $5? Again, no problem. $10? Nope. It and a $20 – the largest bill on hand – get part way through before giving up with this informative message.

So much for my career as a counterfeiter, I suppose. Do you suppose the guys with the earpieces and dark suits will be at my doorstep come morning?

 

Game Your Way to a Nobel Prize

We’ve all heard the stories about young doctors, with plenty of computer-gaming hours behind them, wielding laparoscopic surgical tools with skill far beyond older, game-deficient peers. And the military adaptations of gaming engines to develop software-based training exercises. But this is about the most accessible game-to-real-world stuff I’ve heard of. Foldit purports to turn protein folding into a competitive sport. This Univeristy of Washington article compares Foldit to Tetris, a dinosaur fart of a game that my son’s discovered lately and seems to play quite well. Maybe he can get famous. Maybe you can, too.

Computer game’s high score could earn the Nobel Prize in medicine

Mobile Phone Adventure

Verizon Wireless, my mobile carrier, has been pestering me lately. An equipment upgrade offer was pending. My pair of old Motorola RAZR V3c handsets serve me quite well so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to add a third number and a new handset for my son, something we’ve been talking about for a while. Yesterday we stopped at one of their local brick-and-mortar facilities to get that done. I don’t know about you, but every time I have to physically show up to do something with my mobile phones there is trouble of one sort or another…

I’m an unusual wireless customer. I use my phone to make and receive voice calls. For email, Web, music, pictures, videos, ad nauseum, I’ll reach for a more appropriate piece of equipment. I’m not thrilled with Verizon Wireless’ closed network, either, or the way they nickel-and-dime you for every little thing. But their performance – at least where I use it – is second to none. I cannot recall the last time I had a call drop or not go through. Each ‘line’ (an archaic term in the wireless world) draws from a single pool of enough minutes that we use it without thinking and never need to buy extra, thanks to a reasonably priced grandfathered contract, sans enhanced services, that they haven’t offered in years. I’ve been a steady customer for better than a decade and a half. I’m an unusual customer.

We found a handset my son liked and made our way to the counter only to learn that the upgrade offer applied only to my V3c. But nothing’s carved in stone and after some discussion we found a way: a temporary upgrade. I buy a new handset (an LG VX9100, free after the promotion) and move my number to it. I buy an additional ‘line’ for my son, and assign the new number to my old V3c. Finally, the next day, we would swap the numbers between the two handsets, under the auspices that I’m unhappy with the new handset. Normally that swap would be $20 a pop, but there would be no charge. And everybody would be happy.

A while later we discovered that my V3c didn’t respond on the new number. Things went downhill fast from there. Tech Support reported that the new number belonged to a Blackberry belonging to Merrill Lynch, that my contract shows only two numbers, and that my V3c ESN no longer exists. Oops.

Back at the store they tried to get me to just replace the handset, “Just take the best we’ve got, no charge!” No thanks, I want the one I’ve got, please fix it. They finally managed to install a dummy ESN onto it and assign the new number, and get my contract to recognize them both. But because of the dummy ESN the handset doesn’t do anything, it’s a brick. Tomorrow, they say, they will be able to finish straightening it out.

I need to digress with some history… Verizon Wireless was probably the last carrier on Earth to add the incredibly popular – and profitable – Motorola RAZR handsets. The reasons were two-fold. First, the CDMA chipset was physically larger, and Motorola had some difficulty making it fit into the small package. Second, all Verizon Wireless phones (at the time) sported an external antenna, which helped them to provide their outstanding network performance. The RAZR’s antenna is internal. As for me, I wanted the small size but I was unwilling to switch carriers. So I waited it out. Eventually Motorola got the hardware into the handset and got the antenna performance good enough to pass Verizon Wireless’ performance testing (it took several rounds of testing which led to yet more delays). Finally they were set to roll ’em out. Just in time for Christmas! Well, sort of.

In the mobile phone industry, a hardware manufacturer will develop a new handset and the base software to make it the features work, as well as an SDK. A carrier will take that and develop their own software layer, which in turn becomes the set of services and capabilities that differentiate one carrier from another. In the case of Verizon Wireless, with their closed network, part of their software development is to lock down the handset. The customized RAZR software, due to the Christmas sale deadline, was a rush job.

Watching all that unfold, I bought my handsets a day or two before they became available at the stores. My handsets are not locked down. The best thing about this is my Bluetooth profiles include OBEX. And that means I can add custom rings I make myself, get images and voice recordings on and off, use the crappy little camera (when needed and nothing better is available), use it as a wireless (or wired, via USB) modem with the laptop, and so on, all without incurring Verizon Wireless charges.

And that’s why I don’t want to give up these handsets or upgrade their firmware. Whenever I need to explain this, the representative smiles and understands. [Ed. 6 July 2008: My wife, OTOH, never really understood why I held those capabilities so dear. That is, until the latest bill arrived. My son had bought a ringtone. $2.95, no big deal, but the browsing charges, the megabyte charges, and the fact that he tried the Web browsers on all of our handsets by the time he was through, had brought the cost of that stupid ringtone to near $20. When I explained how billing works, and had real examples to use, the lightbulb went on.]

So today I will see whether they can get this mess straightened out. I’m nervously optimistic.

Upgrade

WordPress 2.5 has been out for a while now and I’ve been wringing it out offline. There have been lots of complaints about the back-end changes for this release but y’know, I rather like it myself. It’s a rainy Friday, and I’ve been up to my ears in paperwork for much of the morning. What better thing to do than mop up the test stuff and do the darned upgrade already? There, I feel better already.

As usual, if you notice anything gone kerblooey please let me know! And a big THANKS to the WordPress team for a job well done.

Ubuntu Adventure

I’m not sure what made today different than any other day. Maybe it started yesterday, in the evening, as I fiddled with the bike. I didn’t do much – just some handlebar adjustments and bleed the rear brake. But it felt good to have a wrench in my hand, something I do less of in the winter. I guess the feeling spilled over into today.

So I burned a Ubuntu 7.10 desktop install CD, hauled one of the old laptops – an HP ze5170 – up from the basement and booted XP on it one last time – just to make sure it still worked. It was destined to get a new lease on life!

I began by yanking the rug out from under Windows and booting from the newly burned CD. It liked the display and keyboard as well as the native pointing device, a Synaptics touchpad. I started the installer and went to hunt up an Ethernet cable. I cabled it to the network. I read the Release Notes. No showstoppers there so I pressed on. I was surprised to find the default location selected was acceptable – New York. Had it figured that out from my network or was it coincidence?

Using my personal laptop I logged onto my DHCP server and found that the target box had acquired an IP address and called itself ‘ubuntu’. I saw that a bit of network configuration would be necessary later on. Machines here get named for life, so this one would need its old name and IP. Eventually I would – I hope – configure the old PCMCIA wireless card, but for now the cable would suffice. I turned to the install.

I decided take the guided entire disk option and banish Windows once and for all. I set my name, my login name and password, and chose the machine name. Ooh, what’s this Advanced button on the confirmation screen? Oh, just the boot loader stuff and a survey checkbox. Maybe later. Let’s get the show on the road!

This is a good time to talk a little about what I’d like to ultimately accomplish. I want some kind of Linux running native on the hardware. And some kind of virtual environment – probably VMware – with XP installed, for those times when I need to use Windows. After all, I’ve got quite an investment in good Windows-based software… And run the whole ball of wax with one of those encryption packages that encrypts the entire disk. If I accomplish all that, then I’ll invest in a new battery and use this as my travel laptop for visiting clients and stuff like that. My personal laptop is overkill for that job, the 10 lb desktop replacement that it is. But if this experiment goes well I may just cut over to something like this full-time…

Since presumably laptop would need to boot the new install it seemed like a good time to prepare the network. Ah, I see that there’s a new rev of router software to deal with at some point, too. I thought for a minute that I’d be surprised by a lack of need for a restart. But no, there it was. The elapsed time? Twenty minutes from jamming in the install CD. Not too shabby.

The install CD wouldn’t eject, perhaps because it’s running the OS from the CD now? Yup, that was it. The blank screen during the restart was a little unnerving and seemed to take a while. I checked the network from my personal laptop and watched the DHCP sever hand out its new address. Turning back to the still-blank screen, I poked at the keyboard and the screen came to life.

Holy guacamole! There were 196 updates to be made. I’d be damned if I’d bother to examine each one, just do ’em, dammit. And I went to the kitchen and put on another pot of coffee, the second of the day. The quarter gig of updates downloaded fairly quickly. The updater kicked into the install phase and warned, “[…] this can take some time.” And it did. Another twenty-five minutes in total. And then it wanted another restart, which was a little disappointing. Windows does that when you look crooked at it. I was hoping for more, er, less. Well, there were quite a few updates, and it had been a fresh install.

The blank screen while restarting was still unnerving. And again it took a while. I wondered which boots faster, this or Windows? This was three minutes, clock time, to a login prompt, and another three-quarters of a minute to the desktop.

Thus began a couple of fun hours of messing around with Ubuntu 7.10. I didn’t get very far trying to connect to the network printer. I didn’t get too far configuring the wireless card; driver issues, it looked like. It talked nice to a USB thumb drive collecting dust on my desk, but didn’t play the AVI file on it all the way through without losing audio and getting choppy. It still boots slowly, really, on par with XP on that box if I recall correctly, maybe a little slower. And hibernation, an obvious thing to attempt, made for some really interesting looking (but quite useless) stuff on the screen when it attempted to come back to life. The only sign of life besides that and the running the fan was the caps-lock indicator blinking.

I noted my login credentials for future reference, shut it down properly, stuffed it back into the carry-case, shuttled it back to the stack of stuff in the basement. For a rainy day, I figured. It had been a pleasant diversion, but there was real work yet to do.

emacs in the Oddest of Places

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m part of the ol’ ’emacs and make’ camp.

I’ll leave out the gory details. Either you know what I mean or I need to write way too long in order to explain. I discovered emacs when I was regularly working on multiple computing platforms and tired of having to reprogram my fingers each time I set out to do some editing on one or another. Installing an emacs on each allowed me to type the same way no matter where I sat. It didn’t take long for me to realize that if there’s anything at all to do with text, either emacs could already do it or one could teach it how. To this day, while it’s not true emacs, Lugaru‘s epsilon product runs on each machine I touch regularly. In fact, I’ll use it to turn these words, typed in Microsoft word, into words that WordPress will digest and present to your eyes nicely. It’s one of the precious few products for which I’ll buy the latest revision without thinking.

Anyway, when I hear emacs mentioned my ears perk up. This was definitely one of the odder ones.

Before the day before yesterday I never heard of “Emacs.Net”. Apparently, this is something going on inside Microsoft. What, I don’t know. I found a few spots of coverage in the press and, other than that, not much except for this blog entry. [link removed because it died]

Can anyone point me to more information? I’m curious, really curious. I mean, two things I don’t associate naturally are Microsoft and emacs. Go figure. But then, when you’re done,  please come back and tell me what you figure.

Giveaway of the Day

A friend recently pointed me to Giveaway of the Day, a site that’s giving away – as in free – a licensed commercial software title every day. All you need to do is hit the site, download and install.

So what’s the catch? You need to download and install the title on the day of the offering. In other words, the title that’s available today won’t be available tomorrow. And what you download today you need to install today.

And I’m not sure what happens if you need to re-install at some point in the future, say, when changing machines or something.

I think it’s worth checking out.

Giveaway of the Day