software

Karmic Koala and Grub

I twisted my neck funny earlier this week, and since then have had intermittent neck pain and nearly constant back-of-the-head headaches. If you haven’t heard from me here, that’s mainly the reason. Things are better now, but this neck thing is a serious issue. It doesn’t take much to much to set it off, and alas, flying kites and looking at the stars have both been implicated.

The pain hasn’t allowed me to get much writing done this week, but I did decide to take a chance and do an early upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. I usually let new major releases of OSes cook for a few weeks so that somebody else will spot the obvious bugs and fix them before I put my own arse in the line of fire. In this case, my neck hurt so bad that my arse didn’t care, and I said, Make it so, #2.

Others have complained of problems with 9.10, so I was gritting my teeth a little as the process proceeded. It took about three hours, but the install went without incident, as had upgrades to 9.04 and 8.10 previously. When nothing obvious blew up, I then spent a couple of hours just trying things: Showing videos, listening to MP3s, playing games, opening documents and spreadsheets, and so on. Having declared the upgrade good, I tried to run KGrubEditor…and realized that it was gone. Its icon was blank, and double-clicking on it did nothing. Apparently the upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic uninstalled KGrubEditor without asking me, leaving me an empty launcher on the desktop.

I thought this might have had something to do with Ubuntu’s moving from Grub to Grub 2 with the 9.10 release, but that’s true only for new installs: Upgrades to 9.10 leave Grub in place and only update menu.lst. So I don’t know why it happened, and I remain a little annoyed. Grub should already have a GUI settings manager/applet in the Administration menu; it shouldn’t be up to some guy to write an independent app to do the job. Editing menu.lst is one of the things I do so rarely that I don’t get good at it, which is precisely why GUI settings editors are necessary.

KGrubEditor is nowhere in the list of apps available through the Synaptic Package Manager, and when I tried to add the KDE4 PPA repository containing KGrubEditor, Synaptic could not access it for some reason. (It may have been an old URL; I’m not an ace at such things and don’t know how to be sure.) I eventually just went up and downloaded the damned thing manually and installed it, but the app can’t find its OS icons and doesn’t correctly set the default boot menu item. I guess I have to uninstall it and reinstall it, but I’ve killed enough time on it this weekend and will leave that task for later.

The takeaway is simple: As good as Ubuntu Linux is, it still has some gaping holes, and bootloader settings management is at the top of that regrettable list.

Am I Blue?

Oct 30th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

In a word, no. And yet looking at recent operating system UIs, you’d think blue was the only color there is. Everywhere I look, I see GUIs that look like they were carved from a block of sea ice. (I guess that’s why modern GUI designs are so…cool.)

I’ll be doing an immersion experiment with Kubuntu 9.10 once it’s out and has had a few weeks to yield up its birth booboos, since KDE deserves a second chance. (I tried version 4.0 last year and it gave me no end of trouble.) But…KDE is so damned blue. Ditto Windows 7, which I haven’t seen a lot of yet but will probably be using sooner or later. And Mac OS/X as well. Now, don’t tell me that these OSes can be themed in any color you want. I know that. But why is blue so pervasive in every big-time OS except Ubuntu?

Well, there’s another blue distro out there, which I finally burned onto a livecd and played around with yesterday afternoon. It’s Puppy Linux, which I tried in its first release years back wasn’t impressed with. Puppy is now four, and much improved. It probed the SX270 graphics system and monitor here, and set itself up to use the default 1600 X 900 resolution with nary a whimper.

Puppy is unique in several ways. It’s not derived from any other distro, but was created from scratch by Australian Barry Kauler and is maintained by its own community. It’s a “lightweight” distro and was designed deliberately to make use of the fact that mermory is much cheaper now than it used to be: It loads into memory and mostly stays there. This is true even if you install it on a disk partition (as opposed to running it “without a trace” from the livecd) and includes the major apps as well as the OS itself. When installed on the hard drive it still plays from memory, writing changes to a disk file but avoiding disk access whenever possible. This makes it feel snappy in the extreme: Click on the Abiword icon and pop! Abiword is there in front of you. Other preinstalled apps include the Gnumeric spreadsheet, the Seamonkey email client, paint and draw programs, and a lightweight browser created for Puppy Linux. (There are more; those are the major ones.)

There are some additional FOSS packages available for download from the Puppy respositories, but in truth not nearly as much as you can get for Ubuntu and other major distros. There’s no apt-get; the Puppy installer format (PET) is unique, and if nobody put a FOSS package into Puppy’s PET format, you have to fool with tarballs etc. and do the install manually from the console.

There is also a mechanism (which I didn’t try) for repackaging changes to the Puppy system into distributable derivatives called puplets. Many of these can be had, always free. One makes Puppy look a great deal like Mac OS/X; others are tweaks to look/work well on hardware like the EeePC. Some come with a specific emphasis and preinstalled apps, like composing music or bioinformatics, of all things. In a sense, you’re creating an app installer that includes the OS along with the apps, which is an interesting idea. This can be done with other distros, but the Puppy remastering mechanism makes it trivial. Puppy or its puplets can be installed on a thumbdrive and will thus run on any machine that can boot from a USB device, with configuration changes written to the thumb drive. (Ditto a rewriteable optical drive, if the session wasn’t closed and there’s room on the optical disk for a change file.)

On the downside, certain simple configuation items hid well: I have not yet found the way to run apps from icons with a double click instead of the default single click. Nor did I find the way to add an app shortcut icon to the desktop for newly installed apps. I admit that I didn’t spend a huge amount of time with Puppy and probably won’t, but such simple things should be easily findable and obvious how to use.

So on Puppy I’m lukewarm. I don’t really need it for the sake of old slow hardware, but the idea of a lightweight RAM-based Linux on a bootable keychain thumb drive is fascinating, and I might download one of the puplets and try them in just that way. However, if you’re just looking for an easy-to-use Windows alternative, I think Ubuntu is a much better bet.

Odd Lots

Oct 19th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

There appears to be a new online scam that is a first cousin of scareware: Driver updaters. Drivers ride with hardware, and install with hardware, so unless your hardware changes or you do a major OS upgrade, drivers do not need to be updated. Every such updater I’ve researched appears at best to be adware and often much worse. Get your drivers from the hardware manufacturer (or built into the OS) and nowhere else.
While trying to determine if Chicago had ever had a radio station WYNR (it did, briefly, from 1962-1965) I ran across this exhaustive list of all broadcast radio stations that have ever operated in Chicago (both AM and FM) with brief discussions of their history.
There’s a downside to modern optical drives that spin discs at 50X Not all discs can take it–and when they go, they turn into daggers. I know it took the Mythbusters guys awhile to detonate a CD by spinning it on a Dremel tool, but one wonders if a disc accumulates stress fractures over time and one day just…lets go. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Among other things that Carol and I have been using since we were married in 1976 are a Realistic STA-64 30W tuner/amp, a Rival crockpot, and a Sunbeam 16-speed blender. Admittedly, we don’t use them as often as we use our flatware, but we use them regularly, and they all work basically as well as when they came out of the box, way back when I still had all my hair.
While not as old as our Rival Crockpot, I still have and use my TI-30 SLR scientific calculator, which I bought in 1983. Won’t do hex, but it’s handled every other piece of math I’ve ever thrown at it.
A nameless source in the filesharing community tells me that MP3s of every pop song that has ever charted on Billboard will fit on a single $50 500 GB hard drive. I have no way to verify this, but if true, it’s a good demonstration of what the music industry is facing, and perhaps why they’re as nuts as they’ve gotten in recent years. (I already have an external 320GB USB hard drive that slides into my shirt pocket–and disappears. For $125, I could have one containing 500GB. All of pop music hiding in one shirt pocket. Egad.)
From the Wines-To-Avoid-At-All-Costs Department: Pepperwood Grove Pinot Noir 2006. A whiff of galvanized iron is not a plus. (Dumped it.)

SX270 Windows XP Widescreen Driver Fail

Sep 25th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

10 comments

I’ve been using a Samsung 2033sw 20″ widescreen monitor on a Dell Optiplex SX270 machine since February, running Ubuntu 8.10 and later 9.04. I bought another SX270 machine for our church with the intention of putting a Samsung 2033sw on it, and discovered this afternoon that Ubuntu can do something Windows can’t: coax the SX270’s Intel Extreme Graphics 2 subsystem into 1600 X 900 mode.

A 1600 X 900 mode does not appear to exist under Windows, even with the latest version of the Intel 865G graphics drivers. Windows identifies the Samsung monitor and knows that its native mode is 1600 X 900, but it can’t match the monitor. And so Windows uses a different mode and looks smeary, as LCDs do if you don’t hand them pixels at their native resolution.

At this point I’m stuck, and will have to fall back to an older 17″ 4:3 monitor. These are readily available and fairly cheap on eBay, but I already have a brand-new Samsung 2033sw over at the church, and now have nothing to hook it to.

I guess it’s always been true that Linux works better on older PCs than the current version of Windows does, but I’ve never had my nose rubbed in this fact more thoroughly than I did today. I’m open to suggestions, but anything that involves a lot of work and time will be politely declined. For another $50 I can get a used Dell 17″ flat panel to hang on the SX270, and will consider the lesson well-learned.

Odd Lots

Sep 23rd, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Maybe I thought of it first. I don’t care. This guy did a great job. What He Said.
I was wrong about the Alice programming environment: There is in fact a version for Linux, though the developers admit it’s a little buggy and largely “proof-of-concept.” (Thanks to xuwande on LiveJournal for the tip.) To me, Alice looks a lot like the primordial Alto-based Smalltalk environment described in the seminal 1977 Xerox publication, Personal Dynamic Media, and I’ll install and explore the product (probably under Windows) as time allows.
And even though this is mostly a research project (with no promises or even strong hints that it will ever become a product) the Microsoft Courier looks mighty good to me from an ebook reader standpoint. The interface is a little busy for my tastes, but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe it would be a waste of the device to use it for nothing but reading ebooks, but I consider it my prerogative to waste whatever part of a device I don’t consider useful.
Maybe it’s not just me. As much as I like the Kodak EasyShare pocket cameras (Carol and I each have one) the EasyShare software is hideous and has given me nothing but trouble. This seems to be a trend. Can you imagine a new Mac app from a major vendor that still needs PowerPC emulation? Egad.
I guess it’s better for a church to be full of books than empty of prople, and these guys did not do a bad job.
Suddenly we have not one but two large sunspots visible at once, a situation not seen for over a year. Alas, I spun the dials earlier this morning, and 15 meters isn’t any livelier than it usually is here, which is to say, dead.
The Google Books Settlement may well be dead on legal grounds, something that doesn’t surprise me at all. What Google needs to do now is just publish an open invitation: “Anybody who holds rights to a printed work and wants the work to be posted on Google Books under the terms below, fill out this form. We’ll handle the scanning.” I’d be first in line in what I’m pretty sure would be a stampede that would sooner or later bring in all the the stubbornest skeptics. The key: I’m willing to admit that my out-of-print works aren’t worth much. 1% of a loaf is still better than no loaf at all.
ADDED 9/24/2009: Here’s a guy saying something that isn’t often said: Google Books is a fantastic research tool, and far from being evil, the Google Books settlement was just the first (now aborted) effort at something that simply has to be done.

Odd Lots

Sep 21st, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

When I was a (much) younger man, I wanted a ’59 Chevy. Having seen this, I guess it’s just as well that I didn’t get one. (Thanks to Todd Johnson for the link.)
Micropayments may not allow small creators (like me) to make money. They may not allow big huge monstrous media outlets make money either. They may not allow anybody to make much money at all. Bummer. I did have hopes…
Oh, and the Long Tail may not be as long as we thought. Double bummer.
Has anyone reading this ever played with the Alice language/GUI system for teaching programming? (Alas, no Linux version. Triple bummer. ) Any opinions? I have nieces who are growing up so fast…
From Pete Albrecht comes word that Chicago’s Kiddieland is closing. My father took me there in 1955 while my mom was working. We had pizza and I went on all kinds of rides. That night I puked my guts out, and my mom thought I was coming down with polio. (They don’t call it the Scrambler for nothing.)
Here’s another thing I thought I might have imagined: World Of Giants , a b/w TV show from 1959 that went into syndication and used to run just before the 4:00 PM monster movie on Channel 7 in Chicago, circa 1965. At least two people must have watched this, and the other one must have been Irwin Allen. (And the guy who created the show must have read Richard Matheson.)
Although the sun’s face has been devoid of sunspots for 18 days running (and 212 days this year) there is a major sunspot on the other side of the Sun, which may rotate into view sometime tonight. I boggle a little to think that we can image a sunspot on the far side of the Sun. How this is done is interesting, and has little or nothing to do with light. Flying cars or no, we are living in the future!
From the Not Too Clear on the Concept Dept: I just nuked a spam message pitching “herbal testosterone.” Right.

Odd Lots

Sep 4th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

On Monday I returned the last third-pass page proofs (of a very gnarly part of the book, the partial instruction reference) and if the publisher’s schedule is to be believed, Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition goes on press tomorrow. Real books should be out of the bindery and in the warehouse by September 22.
We came within a few hours of having a sunspot-free calendar month in August, but then very late Monday night, a barely visible sunspeck showed up, ruined the run, and then immediately started to vanish. The sunspot minimum appears to be heading for a double bottom, and there are people at NASA suggesting that deeper mechanisms are changing within the sun, and we may be a long time before seeing anything like a proper sunspot peak. So much for DXCC on 10M.
Cory Doctorow speaks up on cloud computing, the goal of which, he says, is to allow companies to make money in a mature computing market by charging you month by month for computional facilities that you already have at home. So tell me: How many people actually collaborate in the Cloud, as a percentage of people who actually compute? I think it’s in low single digits–which suggests that the Cloud as an idea is something like 95% scam.
If you’re following Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad project, the CrunchPadFans blog is worth a visit every week or so. It’s a little sparse, but there hasn’t been much news generally on the long-awaited gadget in recent weeks. I intuit that it would make a jack-fine ebook reader, if software to handle the major formats is included or installable.
And speaking of ebook formats, Sony has announced that it will be supporting the EPUB format in its new reader products, days after Google’s announcement that it will be doing the same within its Google Books system. EPUB is a reflowable open standard not controlled by any particular firm, and if I had to finger a winner in the ebook standards wars (at least for primarily textual works) this would be it.
Further relevant to ebooks is a reader app I’ve been fooling with on Ubuntu: Okular, which is nominally a PDF viewer but can open and display lots of other formats, including DjVu, CHM help files, Epub, Plucker, MobiPocket, and a few others. Although it’s a KDE 4 app, I’ve had no difficulty making Okular run under GNOME. Okular on a suitable handheld Linux-enabled device could make a helluvan ebook reader.
And Okular led me to the KDE on Windows project, which aims to create native-code ports of KDE apps to Windows, with an installer to make it easy for non-techies. It’s early and the product doesn’t look as easy as it should be, but then again…it’s early.
I’ve discovered a much higher-resolution photo of the old Turtle Wax building at the Ashland/Ogden/Madison intersection in Chicago here. We would pass that building on the way to my grandfather’s house Back of the Yards back in the late 1950s, and my mother would always point out the 25-foot tall turtle on the top of it. Cool building, too, turtle or not. Gone now, alas–the turtle and the building both.

Odd Lots

Aug 25th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

I just missed seeing a nice article on the current sunspot dearth before posting my entry for August 20, 2009. The longest stretch this solar minimum is 52 days back in 2008, and we could well exceed that come early September with no additional spots. (We’re now at 45 consecutive spotless days.)
I’m practicing rolling my eyes for the latest showing of the Mars hoax. On August 27, multitudes of people who are rumored to posess something close to human intelligence are claiming that Mars will appear the size of the full Moon. (This does the email rounds every couple of years.) Note well that if Mars were the size of the full Moon in the sky, we’d be living a disaster movie, so be very glad it’s a hoax.
Stanford University reports that media multitaskers do not in fact multitask very well. I liked this refreshingly straightforward quote in the article: “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn ‘t find it.” More details here from the Beeb.
ZDNet reports on a virus, named Win32.Induc, that pulls a trick I’ve never heard of before: It looks for the Delphi programming environment, and infects Delphi such that any apps built by that copy of Delphi will carry the virus. I can’t quite see how this manages to propagate in a herd as thin as the Delphi programming world has become, unless Delphi programmers tend to use a lot of Delphi utilities obtained from places like Torry’s. (I know I did, so that’s my theory.)
Maybe you had one: A die-stamped thin steel rectangular lunchbox, usually (but not always) with completely inane artwork, often branded to TV shows, toys, and other pop-culture phenomena. The Denver Westword has a “10 worst” feature on tin lunchboxes that’s worth a look. I never carried a tin lunchbox to school (we used paper bags from Certified) but I have one now very much like #1, purchased at a hamfest years ago, filled with FT-243 ham-band crystals. I’ve always wondered why the boxes always had little vents punched in the short end sides.
Here’s an interesting 2-tube minimal broadcast-band superhet, using 12V space-charge tubes. It’s interesting enough that I might even build one, though my own holy grail is a 2-tube FM receiver. I’ve got the schematic (courtesy John Bauman KB7NRN) and lack only the time to hack it together.
I’d never heard of morning glory clouds, probably because they mostly happen in a certain part of Queensland, Australia. The bigger question is why they get all the truly great Weird Stuff down there, and we have to settle for minor-league weirdness like Michael Jackson.

Odd Lots

Aug 13th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Sleep seems to be key in allowing the brain to infer big-picture relationships from scattered facts–and by implication, memories. I’ve never been a strong sleeper, and I wonder if some of the “fails” in my older memories stem from inadequate deep sleep.
Also from Wired Science: People who don’t get enough sleep are touchy and angry. (Not like that’s news to anyone who’s prone to sleepless nights.) Could this explain the peculiar unpleasantness of the political blogosphere? I’ll vouch for the fact that peace, love, and tolerance of people who disagree with you is much easier on nine hours’ sleep than five.
If you’ll forgive the expression, here’s a long, beefy article on why everybody thinks animal fat is a bad thing (hint: it’s because a Right Man cherry-picked his data to confirm his hypothesis) and why, to the contrary, animal fat may be very, very good for us.
Maybe this will bring the issue of bad patents to the top of the queue. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht and numerous others for the link.)
From Jim Strickland comes a link suggesting that your family dog may be smarter than the average toddler. (Your dog, maybe. Mine, probably not.)
I was wrong about it coming from a Kum & Go store; while sorting my charge card receipts I discovered that Fat Dogs (see my entry for August 7, 2009) is a small chain of Conoco-franchised gas station/convenience stores limited to Western Nebraska. They had some water private-labeled by Sandhills Water, and put their wry corporate motto on the top of the label.
Lileks takes on the Sears Catalog for 1973. I remember that catalog. Fortunately, my clothes came from Goldblatts. And did real, human, breathing girls wear these things? Maybe the girls in Hoffman Estates did. In my neighborhood, well…no.
From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: juiceboxer, a young, arrogant, high-status preppie-type. Their parents got their juice from bottles. And their grandparents mostly got it while it was still inside the fruit. Juice as a product is a relatively new thing; keeping juice from fermenting is difficult and one of the unappreciated miracles of our modern age.

The Cloud in Your Pocket

Jun 16th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

We’ve been getting rained on a lot this week, in more ways than one. Carol’s garden is going gangbusters, and I’ve never seen an explosion of wildflowers along my accustomed hiking paths as I’m seeing right now. There’s a bee shortage somewhere in the country, I’ve heard, but the little buggers are thronging the wildflowers here. Temps are deliciously cool, for June, which seems to be a trend this year.

On the flipside, some dorks broke into my hosting directory a few days ago and inserted porn spam links into all my static HTML. They tried to modify the PHP in my instances of the Gallery photo manager for purposes unclear, but Gallery stopped working and I had to delete both instances. (I have backups of all the photos and captions and will reinstall as time permits.)

That whole adventure happened while I was on deadline reading copyedits on the first five chapters, and it did not endear me to cloud computing. I’ve had some time to think about the whole sorry mess, and some larger questions arise:

How do we keep crap like that from happening? (This is a mostly rhetorical question; I’m not sure that we can.)
Apart from portability (i.e., accessing your data on the road) what’s the real value-add in cloud computing? Remember to figure in the cost-benefit of having to find and sometimes pay dearly for a broadband connection to use it.
And if portability is the only value-add, why screw with something as inherently pricey and dicey as the Cloud?

Why not put the Cloud in your pocket?

I just ordered my very first 32GB thumb drive. I skipped the 16 GB size entirely, because my trusty and much-missed 2001 Thinkpad X21 had a 32 GB hard drive, and I never filled it up. It contained all my major apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, MapPoint, InDesign) and all my Internet apps, plus a scattering of smaller utilities. It also contained a great deal of data, including everything I had written electronically since 1979, though in truth much of the bulk lay in MP3s. Document files are remarkably small.

One of the most significant trends of the last two years is the explosion in “portable” apps, meaning software that does not require a formal installation process beyond unzipping it into a directory. Nothing goes into the Registry, nor into \windows\system32. The whole app lives in a single folder. What a brilliant idea! (Wait…all software used to be like that…)

There have always been portable apps, but for the last fifteen years or so it’s been seen as declasse to produce them. Why? Think for a second: Once installed, a conventional Windows app can’t simply be lifted out of its folder and copied to another machine. It was one of the earliest forms of stealth DRM, invented, I suspect, specifically to keep MS Office from wandering.

No more. There are now lots of portable packages, many or most of them completely free. See PortableApps and 100 Portable Apps for Your USB Stick. You can get OpenOffice, the Gimp, Thunderbird, Firefox, Kompozer, and just about anything else you might need in portable versions. You can unzip them into directories on a thumb drive, and execute them from File Manager. (There are also portable app managers like CodySafe that give you a separate UI for your portables and stick data.) Portables run like conventional Windows apps, except that they don’t crap in your machine.

I got into portable apps while thinking about degunking for Windows. The Registry is Gunk Central, and much havoc is caused by duelling and mis-versioned DLLs dropped like softball-sized hailstones into the system32 directory. When I got my new Core 2 Quad last summer, I resolved to install only what conventional apps I absolutely needed, and use portable apps for everything that I could. The results? I have a cleaner-running machine that boots fast and has a remarkable lack of line items in Task Manager’s Processes tab. I’ve tried to stick with FOSS apps, because commercial apps are always down there in your taskbar popping up nag balloons, trying to upsell you or force updates down your throat.

It’s worked very well. What I want to try is having a single largish thumb drive containing not only data but also the programs used to manage it. Other people have been doing this for years, and it’s time I gave it a try. In the meantime, my view of the Cloud cooks down to this:

Take from the Cloud what can only be had from the Cloud–and keep the rest in your pocket.