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The SX280 Comes Out of Depreciation

Jan 25th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

SX280onHC317Deck500Wide.jpg

I’ve changed my mind again; take note, and remember that it’s good practice. I recommended the Dell SX270 here over the SX280 last fall. Having had some time to spend with a couple of SX280s, I’m thinking that the SX270’s day may be past.

I’ve been configuring and using Dell’s SX270 Ultra Small Form Factor (USFF) machines for several years now, and mostly I love them. They’re rugged, tiny, quiet, reliable, and come with a BIOS-locked version of XP Professional that does not need activation. (The disc can’t be installed on anything but a Dell SX270, and because every last SX270 out the door had a paid-for Windows instance on it, Microsoft figures they won’t lose anything by giving over WPA, and they’re right.) The SX270s were made and sold between 2003 and 2005, and given that they were almost entirely corporate fleet machines, five years later they’ve mostly been written off by their corporate owners and dumped on the resale market. That’s why they’re so cheap; a quick check of completed auctions on eBay right now shows dozens of units selling for between $60 and $100, and a few full systems (including flat panel monitor, keyboard, mouse, and the combo system unit/monitor stand) for between $100 and $150.

There are a nonetheless few downsides to the SX270:

  • They’re limited to 2 GB RAM. This can be an issue, depending on what you’re doing with them.
  • They use 2.5″ laptop IDE hard drives, which are more expensive (and less capacious) than the conventional 3.5″ drives most larger PCs contain.
  • Their integrated graphics systems are not meant for animated video games, and the slower machines (slower than 3 GHz) do not render video very well.

In 2005, Dell replaced the SX270 with the SX280 USFF, which is about 15% larger but still mighty small. The SX280 is a better machine in a number of ways:

  • It can take up to 4 GB RAM, though you have to be careful what you put in it. (More on this in a moment.)
  • It uses ordinary 3.5″ SATA drives, which means you can pack 1.5 TB into the little box for about $120.
  • The integrated graphics chipset is faster and more versatile–if still not quite versatile enough.
  • It opens up and field-strips a lot more easily than the SX270.

Until very recently, SX280s were fairly scarce and went for $250-$350 used. But a few months ago I noticed that SX280 prices were imploding, and they’re now as cheap (and in many cases cheaper) than the SX270, sometimes as cheap as $50. In fact, a week or so ago, a full 2.8 GHz system like the one shown above (which I will be installing in our parish office shortly) sold for $103, including the Dell HC317 17″ monitor on stand, mouse, and keyboard.

The SX280 is a little fussy about the sort of DDR2 DIMMs you put in it. Crucial has a nice lookup service for Dell (and many other) computers, and I ordered 2 2GB DIMMs from them. Go here and look for the Crucial Memory Advisor. If you buy the ones specified for your model, they’re guaranteed to work, and mine did.

Seeing SX280s cheaper than 270s is a little odd. It may be that the supply of workable SX270s is drying up; after all, they went out of production five years ago. Doesn’t matter; the SX280 is a better machine, and if you mount it on an HC317 stand behind the 17″ monitor, it’s no larger than the similar 17″ piggyback system incorporating an SX270. The HC317 stand is VESA compatible, so if you have a larger VESA monitor it’ll bolt right on.

The big downside, as I’ve alluded to before, is that neither the SX270 nor SX280 will display a native 16 X 9 raster under Windows. I’ve tried to coerce the Intel chipset to do 16 X 9 to no avail–which is infuriating, since Ubuntu detects my widescreen monitor and somehow drives the Intel GMA 900 controller at 1600 X 900 automatically, with no input from me.

Anyway. If you’re looking for a small and quiet officework machine for cheap, the SX280 just got cheap. Highly recommended.

Posted in: Reviews.
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Odd Lots

Jan 24th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • Here’s a nice detailed article about how Linux treats hard disks and how Linux partitioning works.
  • We now have two major sunspots on the visible face of the Sun. I don’t remember the last time I saw that. (Most of the specks we’ve been giving sunspot numbers to in the last couple of years don’t count, in my book.)
  • The New York Times has finally shone their light on an ebook marketing technique that Baen Books pioneered years ago. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Version 4.0 of the FastStone Image Viewer is out, and well-worth having. It’s the best image browser I’ve ever used, and if you have to sort an SD card full of digital photos and cull marginal shots quickly, there’s nothing like it. Make sure you get the portable version; it lacks nothing and doesn’t make any changes to your system. Freeware. Highly recommended.
  • Rich Rostrom sent a pointer to a fascinating article on Moscow’s stray dogs. They’re going feral, but it’s a peculiar sort of urban feral that considers humans and all their gadgetry to be just another part of the landscape. They’ve learned how to ride the subway, for pete’s sake!
  • I’d read in a number of places that faces judged as beautiful are generally “average” faces, without a lot of distinguishing characteristics. Because I could never quite get a grip on what an “average” face would be, I always took the notion with a grain of salt. But this site, assuming it really is creating a “facial average” from a gallery of headshots, suggests that there’s something to it. Start with two faces, then add faces one by one, and see if the average face doesn’t become more beautiful (and distinctly ambisexual) as you go. It did for me.
  • Here’s a short interview with Bob Silverberg, describing his writing life during the Golden Age of Pulps. A million words a year…
  • Cracking ice in the surface of a frozen lake sounds like a blaster battle.
  • From the That-Certainly-Has-To-Count-For-Something Department: Behold the world’s largest disco ball.

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: · · · · · · ·

Kompozer Explained, in Recto-Verso

Jan 23rd, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

While checking to see if Kaz (Fabien Cazenave) has released Kompozer v0.8 (not yet!) I ran across a very nice free user guide to Kompozer written by Charles Cooke and released under Creative Commons. I’ve been using Kompozer for a couple of years now for all my new Web content, and although definitely unfinished, what’s there works very well. I figured it out by beating my head against it, but Cooke’s manual will obviate a lot of the beating if you’re coming to it for the first time. (The document is available in both English and German.)

And in downloading the PDF, I ran across a term I hadn’t seen in quite awhile: recto-verso. Most people use the term “mirror margins” these days, and that’s pretty much what it means: You lay out a book so that the wide margin is alternatively left and right on the printed sheet. Page 1 has the wide margin on the left, page 2 has the wide margin on the right, page 3 on the left, and so on. What this allows you to do is print the book on both sides of the sheet, so that the wide margins all end up on the left and form the “gutter” through which you punch the book for binding.

If you lay the book out in 2-page spreads, how this works is obvious, and most desktop-publishing templates for duplexed material take it into account. If you’re laying it out as single pages in something like MS Word, you have to specify “Mirror Margins” in the File | Page Setup menu and give yourself some space in the Gutter field. Cooke’s book is also available with wide margins on the left of every page, for printing on one side of the sheet only. The two versions are separate PDFs available from the same Web page; make sure you download the correct one.

One interesting thing about Cooke’s guides is that the PDFs are in color, with color highlighting, pale blue tips boxes, full-color screen shots, and colored arrows on screen shots to point out UI features. I guess it makes sense; almost everyone I know has a color laser by now, and I bought my first only about a month ago. I duplexed the recto-verso PDF, and made myself a duo-tang manual. I have quibbles with the layout, in that he packs way too much material on each page…but then again, with the cost of color laser and inkjet ink, printing only 61 pages is a lot cheaper than printing 150.

This was the first significant duplexed color job I’ve run on my new HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni. My one gripe is that there’s no fold-down single-sheet/duplexing tray in the front of the printer, as there is on the LJ2100 line. You can feed single sheets through a slot in the front of the printer, but for duplexing a stack, you have to pull the main paper tray and place the stack in the tray after you run the first side.

I guess that’s a nuisance, but the quality of the printing is very good, and in as dense a layout as Cooke hands us, the use of color does help a little.

Recommended.

Posted in: Reviews.
Tagged: · ·

Synthesizing a Functional Cardinal

Jan 21st, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

I haven’t done any new fiction in over a year, largely because I took ten months out of my life to update Assembly Language Step By Step, and another three months to catch up on all the stuff that didn’t happen while I was doing the update. Today was the first day in ages that I had both a reasonably clear schedule and a solid night’s sleep behind me, so I sat down this morning after a bacon & cheese omelette to see what would happen.

Much good did. I got 2,000 words down on Old Catholics, which is about as much fiction as I generally crank out in an uninterrupted day. So far I’ve got 6 1/2 chapters completed, out of 18 planned, for a total of 32,000 words. The target is 90,000 words, with a hard ceiling of 100,000. I mean to impose whatever discipline is necessary to stay under that ceiling; I set myself the same ceiling for The Cunning Blood and ended up with 145,000 words of novel, which I don’t think helped me at the big presses during the five years that I shopped it.

The current chapter represents a difficult point in the telling of the story. I’m about to introduce the last of the major characters: Cardinal Peter Paul Luchetti of the Archdiocese of Chicago. The problem is that while I’ve met a fair number of Roman Catholic seminarians and priests, as an adult I’ve never been within striking distance of a Roman Catholic bishop, much less a cardinal. (It is true that Cardinal Albert Meyer came within striking distance of me when I was 12, as some of my Roman friends of a similar age may understand.) I generally design characters by drawing on people I’ve met and talked to, but in this case I came up completely empty.

The entire novel is an attempt to design and portray better characters than I have in my SF so far, in a setting where I’m unlikely to get distracted by gunfights, hyperdrives, or berserk nanomachines. Creating a convincing Roman Catholic cardinal is probably the toughest characterization issue I’ve ever faced, simply because cardinals exist. People can call me on the details. I can’t just make things up on a whim. It’s the issue SF people call “offending the known,” and, as I’ve discovered, offending the known is much easier in non-fantastic fiction set in the current day.

I did my best, and used a technique I learned from my SF mentor, Nancy Kress: I wrote a 1,500-word fictional dossier on the man. Only a little of that will actually make it into the story, but filling in the details of Peter Luchetti’s life forced me to consider his strengths and weaknesses and special talents and record them in a coherent way. I’m drawing on the few books I’ve found that speak honestly and in detail about cardinals without mythologizing them: Peter Hebblethwaite’s The Next Pope (1995) and I Am Your Brother Joseph (1997) by Tim Unsworth, a short biography of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who was by far the finest cardinal Chicago has had or probably ever will have.

Perhaps I should worry less. The book is a sort of fantasy, in that what I describe is whimsical, outrageous, and almost certainly impossible. That said, I’ve managed to work in almost everything I’ve ever learned about Catholic life, worship, and history, from Benediction, Tenebrae and Holy Hour to apostolic succession, Arminianism, and the Council of Constance (1414-18). Both liberals and conservatives within Catholicism will likely be annoyed at me, and if they are, I’ll call the book a resounding success.

As for the feeling of sitting down to write fiction again: Damn, it’s good to be back!

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: ·

Authors Get 70% Royalty from Kindle Sales

Jan 20th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Wow. This is big: Amazon just opened up an option for Kindle author/publishers under which royalty rates are 70%. (Some analysis here; ignore Jeff Bezos’ open mouth.) We’re now closing in on the sort of royalty structure that reflects the realities of ebook economics: No paper, no ink, no physical warehousing. (Server space is way cheaper than maintaining pallet loads of print books out in meatspace somewhere. Trust me on that one!)

To qualfy for the new royalty rate, author/publishers (funny how the two are now blurring together!) must satisfy a few requirements:

  • Ebooks must list for between $2.99 and $9.99
  • The ebook list price must be at least 20% below the cover price for the printed book.
  • The ebook is made available everywhere that the author/publisher has rights.
  • Author/publishers must agree to accept the full list of Kindle features–current and to come–without quibbles, pointedly including text-to-speech.
  • Although Kindle won’t demand an exclusive, an ebook’s price at the Kindle store must be at or below the price at other ebook retailers from which the ebook is available.
  • The 70% rate applies to in-copyright works only. Reprints of public domain material do not qualify.

It’s no secret what’s going on here: Apple’s not-quite-top-secret tablet is really a game-changer ebook reader, and having seen how Apple basically created and still rules the market for individual music tracks, Amazon wants to make sure it retains its hard-won early lead in ebook retailing. This is certainly the reasoning behind Point #4, which basically prevents author/publishers from cutting sweeter deals with other ebook stores like Nook and whatever retail mechanism Apple eventually puts together.

If I hadn’t had to update my assembly book, my SF titles would be available for the Kindle by now, and this makes the effort all the more urgent. Looks like I have a lot to do this year–and maybe now I can expect a little more money in the bargain.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
Tagged: · · ·

The Night of the Monumental Fail

Jan 19th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

(And you thought I was talking about the Massachusetts senatorial election…)

Pulled down the Fedora 12 DVD ISO earlier today, burned it to disc, and turned it loose on my Linux SX270, which at the time had a 60 GB hard drive with a functional Ubuntu Intrepid partition on it. I’d been meaning to install Fedora for some time, and wanted to try a few things on which I’ll report in the near future.

Alas, things went what may be irretrievably bad, or bad enough to be irretrievable without completely wiping the hard drive, including my Ubuntu instance.

No, I don’t know what went wrong. It’s hard to troubleshoot a failed install of an OS. What happened went this way:

  • I used the built-in partitioner (Disk Druid, unless I misrecall) to shrink the existing 55 GB partition to 22 GB.
  • I allocated the rest of the drive to the Fedora partition.
  • With the shrink/allocation apparently successful, Anaconda dove in and started the installation. After installing 106 package files, the process stopped. The machine wasn’t completely frozen–the mouse pointer still worked–but nothing was happening, no disk activity, nada.
  • After watching it sit at file 106 for over an hour, I gave up and hit the power switch. The machine had only 512 MB in it, so I dropped my spare 512 MB DIMM into the second slot. I know that most Linux installers set a lot of stuff up in memory prior to the actual install, so maybe it just ran out of RAM.
  • When I booted back into Ubuntu to take a look at what remained in the wake of the crash, I saw the new partition, and saw that it did not have a file system. That seemed odd to me, since for all appearances it was copying files to the hard disk.
  • I rebooted from the install DVD and started the install from scratch. I tried to make use of the partition I had created on the first pass through, but nothing selectable allowed me to make use of the partition.
  • I booted back into Ubuntu and deleted the new partition. I then restarted the install DVD and told it to use the free space where the new partition used to be. Again, it stopped at the partitioner, this time telling me that there was no root partition defined. I defined the existing Ubuntu partition as root, and kept going.
  • Almost immediately it died and gave no sign.

Now, I have nothing irreplaceable in the Ubuntu partition. I could wipe the whole drive if I wanted to. But it makes me wonder if the engineers at the Fedora project ever took into account the (inevitable) event of an install failure. Is there any machinery in Anaconda to pick up the pieces when an install croaks and it has to start fresh?

If a Linux distro won’t install with 1 GB of RAM, I’m not sure it still qualifies as Linux. Or is there something else freaky about this machine? I don’t know, and don’t know how to find out. I have room on my slightly cranky 3 GHz Pentium downstairs, and that box is loaded. I’ll try again down there. Still, this counts as a very significant fail for Fedora. I’ve installed Ubuntu on SX270s at least five times, and never had any problem more significant than a video mode screwup requiring minor editing of xorg.conf.

Next attempt: OpenSuse. We’ll see if it can move into Fedora’s slightly scorched apartment, or if it needs to gut it to the walls first.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: ·

Sometimes Somebody Just Nails It

Jan 18th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

There’s a thread underway on Slashdot right now involving a slightly arcane issue in which the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is receiving 20-30 HTTP requests per second…from IP addresses owned by Microsoft. If this makes no sense to you, let it ride; it’s not important for the point I’m making. CPAN’s servers are so tied up honoring all those requests that they’re mostly inaccessible. The Slashdot discussion focuses on the question of whether Microsoft is doing this deliberately, or whether the torrent of requests is a side-effect of something else they’re doing. (A third possibility, that Microsoft’s servers have been badly hacked by DDOS bots, is possible but seems unlikely to me.) The question cooks down to whether all the action from Microsoft’s subnet is due to malice or incompetence.

A chap on Slashdot named Lloyd Bryant pretty much nailed it: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. See Government, US.”

Hoo-boy. Somebody please give that man the Nobel Prize.

Posted in: Daybook.

Victoria Duntemann’s Home-Made Beef Barley Soup

Jan 16th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

My mother was not a fantastic cook (as the youngest of eight kids, her older sisters did all the cooking and hence all the learning) but certain things she did very well. One of these was beef barley soup, and in her honor I made a pot of it today, according to her recipe as I best remember it, with only minor tweaks. My sister Gretchen pitched in on the remembering, reminding me that mother used tomato soup instead of diced tomatoes, but having imbibed a little too much of it in the early ’60s, I cannot abide tomato soup.

So here’s the recipe. It works, though it makes a lot, and in dinner-party portions probably serves 10 or 12. Carol and I will feast on it for a day or two and then freeze the rest.

  • 1 pound stew meat
  • 32 oz beef stock or broth
  • 6 cups water
  • 1 cup pearled barley
  • 1 large onion
  • 1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes
  • 2 large carrots
  • 3 large stalks celery
  • 2 tblsp salt

Cut the beef up into small chunks, suitable for spooning. Mix beef chunks in a bowl with flour to coat all pieces. Melt a little butter in the bottom of a suitably large pot and brown the beef. Once the beef is browned, add in the broth, the water, the salt, and the barley. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 or 20 minutes to give the barley a good head start.

Add the vegetables. Simmer for another 45 minutes to an hour, or until the barley gets soft enough for you. (If you need to shorten the cooking time, use quick-cook barley, throw everything together at the beginning, and cook for only half an hour or forty minutes.) If you like pepper (we don’t, not that much) grind a little in.

Note that I prefer “hearty” soup, which means you can stand a spoon up in it. The recipe sounds like it calls for a lot of liquid, but barley is half-sponge, and when you’re done you’ll have something about 40% of the way from soup to stew. For thinner soup, add water or cut back a little on the barley. Nothing critical about the recipe; more meat would work, and you can leave out the onion if that’s an issue.

And there you have it. We ate simply but well when I was a kid. The evidence is in the pot.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: ·

Steampunk Home-Made Tubes…and Transistors!

Jan 15th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

tennis1.jpgWhile ragchewing with Joe Flamini earlier today, we got on the topic of whether or not it would be possible to make a usable transistor in your basement. It’s not a cakewalk, but a fair number of people have made their own vacuum tubes at home. I myself have made a sort of point-contact diode using a chunk of galena (lead sulphide) crystal and a piece of #44 wire–it’s what the old guys used to call a cat’s whisker detector. Like a lot of guys, I added a second whisker and thought it might become a point-contact transistor, but I didn’t know how to test it. (And that was in 1964.)

There’s a kind of early junction transistor called a “meltback” that starts with a small germanium bar. You heat one end until it melts a little, and as it hardens and recrystallizes after heat is removed, P-dopants gather somehow in the zone between the melted and unmelted germanium, and what results is an NPN transistor. I read years ago of somebody making meltback transistors in his basement, but I can’t find the reference now. I guess the hard part is just laying hands on a piece of germanium with both dopants in it. This article describes a number of ways that transistors are made, including the meltback method. None of them seem difficult from a lab technique standpoint, but there’s always the question of just where you get a little indium when you need it.

While researching the question I came across the Web site of H. P. Friedrichs AC7ZL, who wrote a book some years ago about making tubes and transistors at home. The book is called Instruments of Amplification, and used copies are available for about $25 on Amazon. I don’t have it yet, but I want to call your attention to the author’s online photo albums, which show some of the devices that he’s built. They’re beautifully photographed, and definitely show some steampunk influence. Here’s Album 1, and Album 2.

A fair number of people were stumbling around in the dark pursuing solid-state active devices as early as 1910; here’s a good overview. So not only was it possible for the Edwardians to make transistors, some actually came pretty close to doing it. The problem was not even access to materials–pure germanium had been available since the late 1880s–but simply that the physics was still obscure. A suitably intuitive scientist who understood electricity as well as it was understood in 1890 could have worked out PN junction physics. The fact that nobody did could have been simple bad luck: The right guy with the right background and the right obsessions working in the right lab with the right tools and the right materials just didn’t turn up.

While we talking steampunk, few are aware that a purely steam-powered biplane flew successfully in the early 1930s. It had a interesting characteristic: It was quiet. Internal combustion is nothing more than a continuous series of explosions inside a piston. Generate your pressure some other way, and the sound level goes way down. There’s some period b/w silent footage on YouTube. The engine could be quickly and easily reversed, though it’s not clear to me how valuable that would be in a biplane.

Steam-powered aircraft interest me because there’s nothing essentially electrical about a steam engine. In my novel The Cunning Blood I suggested that all aircraft on Hell (a prison planet seeded with nanomachines that homed in on and destroyed electrical conductors) would be either Diesel or turbojet powered, simply because I didn’t think you could make a steam engine that was both powerful enough and light enough to fly. I guess I was wrong.

Heh. I love to be wrong!

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: ·

A Tree For the Ages

Jan 14th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

NewBalsamShoots.jpg

Not everything gets done on time, but at our house, at least, most things come in at or under budget. Carol and I budgeted an afternoon to take down and pack all of our Christmas decorations, and that’s about what it took. We’re certainly not on time (I had planned to be done a week ago) but a buzzing swarm of minor irritations got in the way, and it wasn’t until suppertime yesterday that the tree came down–and that only after everything else in the line of decorations was gathered in from the eight corners of the house and repacked in six cozy Rubbermaid totes.

And boy, what a tree that was! We put it up on December 10, which means it was on duty for almost five weeks. It had dropped some needles on the floor, but nothing I’d call a torrent, and when we got to picking ornaments off the tree’s high precincts, we discovered something else: The tree had been growing. On the very highest branches, there were new pale-green needles emerging from the branch tips. Those had certainly not been there when we brought it home back in December. This is not a trick we’ve observed in any other tree we’ve had in 33 years of marriage, nor with our respective families prior to that. We’re not sure how we managed it, but we’re going to buy our tree at the same lot next year and hope we get lucky again.

OrnamentsBox.jpgWe broke only one glass ornament this year, and it wasn’t one of the old ones. It was perhaps ten years old, the sort of worked-glass item you see artists making in real time with a blowtorch at home and garden shows, out of thin glass rod. When Carol touched it to take it down from the tree, it literally flew apart in her hands. (There were internal stresses involved, as we vacuumed up fragments six feet away.)

A lot of our ornaments were inherited from Carol’s family, especially after we sold her mom’s house in 2006. Many are old, some extremely old, judging by the fragile cardboard boxes that had held them on store shelves decades ago and still serve in 2010, taped and patched though they may be. What I found remarkable was a price tag on the box shown above, from the venerable (and now extinct) Weiboldt’s department store in Chicago. The tag reads two for fifteen cents.

WeiboldtsTwoForFifteen.jpgWow.

Maybe it was a clearance sale price for the day after Christmas. I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I bought anything enduring for less than ten cents. (Hamfest junkmongering doesn’t count, though the junk certainly does endure.) Even the Hi-Flier kites I flew in 1962 cost me a dime. This may take us back to the early 1950s, and possibly to the late 1940s. Carol’s parents were married in 1947. We wonder if this box could be among the ornaments they bought for their first Christmas together.

I snipped off the branch tip shown in the photo at the top of this entry, and put it in a glass of water, just to see what happens. The tree is now out in the garage and will go to Rocky Top in the next day or so. The decorations and the Lionel trains are back in the Harry Potter closet downstairs. I gave Carol a hug while we moved the furniture back into its accustomed places. Christmas is over, but there’s still a little sparkle in the air, and I’m dealing well with the ordinary gloom of winter.

Mission accomplished.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: · ·

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