computer log.

I came back from my two-week vacation this week, ignored my overflowing inbox for two days, and then demolished it in under two hours. No stress, just 800 email messages gone and me getting back to work.

Here’s how I did it.

• Archive everything into a single folder and use search. In Outlook, I create a rule that puts a copy of everything that comes into my Inbox into a folder called Archive. I always have a copy filed away without ever having to think about it.
• Don’t manage tasks out of your inbox. Read each email and ask: do I need to do something here? Put it on your task list and then delete the message.
• Delete ruthlessly. Once you’ve extracted whatever information or tasks you have from a message, delete it. Don’t leave it hanging around in your Inbox taking up mental space — it’s already filed in your Archive!
• Read in Conversation view. Most Outlook users top-post (it’s the default), so any given message will contain the entire thread in it. Conversation view (or Threaded view) lets you delete the entire thread once you’re done.
• Work in chunks. Spending all day in your email is a good way to not get any real work done; process it twice a day and then get back to work.

I’m really a big fan of deleting my email. Deleting is satisfying. It says: I have extracted what I need out of this message, and it no longer serves any purpose. Deleting is also quick. It is a single button to push, a single action to take. There is no thought about where to file a message — just remove it from the queue.

My strategy is directly influenced from two places: The Best Outlook Tip in the World, and Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero series. I used to be a compulsive Ctrl-Shift-V email filer, but watching Merlin’s Inbox Zero video really changed how I thought about email.

This system may not be right for you. It’s not even always right for me.

But this week, it worked pretty well.

My PowerBook G4 is for sale.

I’ve been a big fan of Dan Pollock’s replacement /etc/hosts file for blocking bad things on the internet, but for one reason or another never got around to automating the update process.

I don’t know why, it’s pretty straightforward to pull together a shell script:


#! /bin/sh
tdy=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`

sudo curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts -o /etc/hosts.$tdy.tmp
sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.$tdy
sudo mv /etc/hosts.$tdy.tmp /etc/hosts


… and then add it to crontab to run every few days. This will create a backup of the previous /etc/hosts file in case anything goes wrong.

You can also switch ads back on by keeping your original /etc/hosts file around with:


#! /bin/sh
sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.tmp
sudo cp /etc/hosts.original /etc/hosts


I keep these in ~/bin/hosts, because I’m like that.

(Some days, UNIX actually works for me. Hallelujah!)

This is a somewhat obscure technical problem, but several ISPs have recently begun hijacking mistyped domains and directing them to ads.

This is bad on several levels. Wired has a story about how it’s even worse than you thought: it lets hackers (the bad kind) hijack any site on the web.

The hole was made possible by ISPs subverting the Domain Name System or DNS, which translates website names into numeric addresses. Instead of simply returning an error message to a user’s browser when a user typed the name of a website that doesn’t exist, Earthlink and others instead substitute a page of Yahoo ads and suggest alternate spellings for the non-existent site.

The ads are served up by a British company called Barefruit, which pretends to actually to be the non-existent domain when delivering the ads.

Due to unforeseen consequences and Barefruit’s failure to screen for rogue JavaScript code, that forgery allowed a hacker to create perfect fraud site imitating eBay that looked in the browser address bar to actually be legitimately hosted on ebay.com.

…

“The entire security of the internet is now dependent on some random ad server run by some British company,” Kaminsky said, adding that he’d talked this week to many internet companies who were pissed, though not at him.

“I can’t secure the web as long as ISPs are injecting other content into web pages.”

Known ISPs who are doing this: Earthlink, Comcast. Verisign did this a few years ago, but doesn’t anymore. (Instead they steal domains when you search for them, which is a different level of evil.)

The best solution is to not use affected DNS servers. If you are on Comcast or Earthlink, use OpenDNS instead. It’s reliable, very fast, and free.

Several folks contacted me this morning to let me know about more MacBook Air users who have discovered that underclocking their CPUs keeps the processors cool enough to avoid the core shutdown.

The author suggests an application called ‘Coolbook’ which purports to underclock the laptops CPU by lowering the voltage supplied to the processor and by more agressively throttling the speed of the CPU.

Knowing what the Santa Rosa platform is up to, this now makes a certain amount of sense: Rob underclockspowers the CPU by 20%, and further limits the CPU to 75% of max speed (1.2GHZ) while on battery, which in turn has a dramatic cooling effect while only minimally affecting performance. The cooler CPU avoids the shutdown threshold and therefore the UI is more stable.

It appears to be better to suffer 25% degradation all the time on battery, instead of 50% (or more) some of the time. The OS requires a certain minimum processing threshold, but it’s really the CPU threshold that’s of concern. Underclocking appears to keep the load and temperatures under that threshold.

At least one person who emailed me asked if I thought underclocking is a good idea. I honestly have no clue; I’d like to say no, always stick with the manufacturer’s specs. But in this case those specs suck, and if you can do something about it (and undo the underclocking if anything goes wrong), it may very well be worth it.

For more on the core shutdown issue, please see my MacBook Air Log. I’ll continue to post more information there as it comes in.

I’m tickled pink about all the visitors around this site. Thank you for coming! I’m really happy you’re here; please feel free to drop me a line or twitter me and let me know how it’s going.

I started writing about the computers under my care really for just one reason: so that I would have some record of what I’d done, so I could stop making the same mistakes over and over again.

I don’t know if I’ve accomplished that, exactly, but at least it’s been entertaining watching me try.

Since many of you are new around here, and this is an admittedly quirky personal site, let me point you towards some other computer logs that may interest you:

Commissioned

The following computers are currently in service.

• Eöl, my new Black MacBook running OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard).

  Eöl replaced Vinyamar.

• Tsiolkovsky, my wife’s Toughbook W2, continues to crunch numbers and hang in there, despite losing the “B” key to a toddler-related accident a few weeks ago. The lower left hand side keyboard is also starting to have some problems, but there are no new issues to report with Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

  Tsiolkovsky is slated for replacement in the next few weeks.

• Hithlum, my 17” PowerBook G4, is as lovely and elegant as ever, even if her PPC chip is getting a little long in the tooth. She still does great work, however, and is running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger).
• An unnamed Thinkpad T43, my work computer, runs Windows XP and is completely uninteresting to me as a computer. My company gave it to me to work with, I work with it. End of story.
• Tigana, a Sony Vaio 505-TR running Red Hat 7.2, has a busted power supply and no battery power. I will need to wipe the hard drive before I can consider her decommissioned.

Speaking of which…

Decommissioned

These computers have left the building:

• Vinyamar, my Macbook Air, went through two revisions before being sent back to Apple.
• Al-Rassan / Ithilien, a Thinkpad 1400 running SuSE 9.x.
• Arbonne (I) / Sarantium / Atlantis / Lórien, a beige 750MHz Pentium III tower I picked up from CompUSA which ran Windows 98, Windows 2000, and more Linux distributions than I really care to remember.
• Arbonne (II) and Gorhaut, two identical Linux towers who ran Red Hat 9.

You will no doubt notice certain themes in the names.

Each computer has its own category, some with more information than others. Hopefully you’ll find something you like.

Thanks again for visiting!

Cheers,
Brett

A month ago, I made a fateful early-morning decision to forego the MacBook Pro and get the MacBook Air.

This led to interesting times.

While waiting for the interesting times to end, I reconsidered my original decision and took a long look at the MacBook. I think it was a mistake to not seriously consider the MacBook before. After some consideration, I found it a good compromise between weight, size, performance, and value.

It is therefore a pleasant surprise to announce the arrival of my black MacBook named Eöl.

Eöl is named after the Dark Elf of Tolkien’s First Age, Thingol’s kinsman who traded the sanctuary of Doriath for the freedom of Nan Elmoth. Eöl had a rare friendship with the Dwarves of the Ered Luin, and his craft was well-respected.

Eöl (the computer, not the character):

• Entered service on April 4th, 2008.
• Has the 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (Penryn) CPU, which totally screams.
• Is equipped with a 250 GB hard drive, which suddenly lets me put everything on one machine again.
• Has been upgraded to 4GB RAM, because I can.
• Is running Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard).

I am suitably impressed by the speed and performance of the MacBook, especially compared to the Air. The dual core 2.4GHz CPU is like a Camaro … who ran over your neighbor.

Long-time readers will no doubt point out that Eöl, as a person’s name, falls outside my established nomenclature of using regions or cities. This is completely true.

My only response is that I was going to name it Khazad-dûm or Moria, but Merrystar said it was named Eöl.

I thought about it for a while, and decided that even with Eöl’s less than sunny story: yup, that sounds just about right.

(I’m supposed to be learning from my mistakes, after all. Not repeating them.)

The MacBook Air core shutdown issue is a result of the Intel Santa Rosa platform’s aggressive thermal throttling of the MacBook Air’s Merom chips:

The Santa Rosa platform comes with dynamic acceleration technology. It allows single threaded applications to execute faster. When a single threaded application is running the CPU can turn off one of the CPU cores and overclock the active core. In this way the CPU maintains the same Thermal Profile as it would when both cores are active.

So, by design, the Santa Rosa platform will throttle itself to keep the heat down.

I kicked myself for missing this while researching the problem. I should have looked at the CPU specs once I knew the core shutdown was responsible for the performance degradation, but I didn’t. Mea culpa. I was thinking as a consumer, not as an IT professional.

Please note: I do not think this excuses the problem. The UI freezes, stuttering, and slowdowns remain unacceptable. The CPU ruins the user experience, which is a bug. A feature that acts like a bug is a bug.

But it does explain it, and therefore allows us — consumers and Apple alike — to address it.

If the Santa Rosa platform is the problem, which I now believe it is, there are very few options available for MacBook Air owners. Either you live with the performance hits, and hope that it is fixed at a later date, or you don’t.

It boggles the mind when you consider the anecdotal return rate that units who don’t exhibit this problem may actually be defective! There are plenty of MBA users who are gambling that they’ll get one of those in the replacement cycle. But not me.

If anything, finding out that this problem is a design feature/flaw strengthened my decision to get off the Air platform (and increased my nostalgia for the PowerPC chipset, but that’s another story.) I am frustrated that it took so long to identify the root cause, but relieved to know that gambling on another unit isn’t worth it.

Since my case dragged on for several weeks at AppleCare, and therefore attracted a bit of attention from management, I used the opportunity to make a few suggestions to them.

1. Educate Support: Product specialists need to know about this behavior and be able to explain why it happens, and what benefits it brings (if any). First-tier troubleshooting should be revised to better diagnose real mobo problems.
2. Educate Consumers: Apple needs to address this issue publicly with a technote to stem the tide of replacements.
3. Fix it in the OS: You can’t change the chipset, but serious efforts can and should be made to reduce the effects of the core shutdown within the OS and better manage single core mode invocation.

The first two suggestions can reduce agent support costs and reverse logistics expenses, as well as improve customer loyalty. I’ve run customer service organizations before, and I know the band-aids you can apply to make support more effective.

The solution lies in #3, though: fix the damn problem.

Sadly, that’s beyond AppleCare’s ken.

Special thanks to Artifex and Mike Rose for publicizing this problem, Josh Kagan for his insight into the Santa Rosa platform, and everyone on Twitter who’s listened to me gripe about this for the past three weeks.

I spoke with AppleCare this evening to initiate the return of my MacBook Air Vinyamar. As a bonus I received the results of Apple Engineering’s analysis of my core shutdown crash data: the system is behaving as designed.

These past few weeks troubleshooting, reinstalling (twice, over Remote Disk, no less, which I can assure you is not speedy), waiting for replacements, talking with technical support — and dropping a core under load is expected system behavior.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Dropping a core under load is a feature, not a bug.

Therefore, since I’ve gotten so good at it, here’s my guide to shutting down one of your MacBook Air’s cores.

The Unfair Version

1. Begin with a clean, fresh MacBook Air.
2. Place it on your bed, a pillow, or lap.
3. Sign on to your network, and start downloading a nice big movie file from your NAS.
4. Open Activity Monitor, and make sure the CPU monitor is visible.
5. Open Safari. Watch a movie trailer or two, and then browse YouTube while waiting for the movie to download.
6. Play the movie with Quicktime or iTunes. Keep opening tabs in Safari. You won’t need more than 10, especially if they’re AJAX-heavy sites.
7. Turn on Time Machine and start a backup.
8. When the video starts stuttering or your UI getting sluggish, check Activity Monitor.

Voila! One of your cores has dropped. You’ve halved your processing speed.

Now, the activities described seem harsh, but they’re really relatively normal for someone futzing about on the internet. File transfers in addition to video seem to speed up a core drop, which presents a problem for anyone using Time Machine.

But there are those who will cry foul entirely because of #2. The Air requires some ventilation, and if you place it on a soft surface (even with the vents unblocked) the computer will heat up quickly.

Okay, fair. Try this one on, then:

The Fair Version

1. Begin with a clean, fresh MacBook Air.
2. Place it on a flat desk or marble floor.
3. Sign on to your network and open Activity Monitor.
4. Fire up a feature-length movie or two, either over the net or from the local disk.
5. If you’re feeling adventurous, open XCode and do a little hacking.
6. Read some documentation on Safari or Preview.
7. Work for about an hour or so.
8. Wait for the stuttering video and UI lockups. They’ll come.

Heat speeds up the process, but if you keep the CPU under a certain amount of load (doesn’t need to be pegged) it will eventually shut down one of the cores. After an hour or two of a big H.264 file playing in Quicktime, I could get the Air to drop its core under theoretically ideal conditions — on the marble floor of a cool bathroom.

Now, there are users on the Apple support forums who never experience the core dropping. I’m really happy that they don’t. I don’t know what to say to them, other than that whatever their MacBook Airs have, I wish mine would have caught it.

For me, this just hasn’t been worth it. It doesn’t matter how nice the Air is.

This will likely be the last post in my MacBook Air Log. I will ship the computer back to Apple tomorrow to return it classified not as a defective unit, but instead as buyer’s remorse. So shipping’s on my dime, naturally.

My only remorse is that I wasted so much time with it, wanting it to work one way, with those fancy dual cores, when all the while?

Behaving as designed.

Moving on now.

Immediately after posting yesterday’s decision to abandon the MacBook Air, I let the good folks on Twitter know about it. And, no more than a minute after tweeting, AppleCare called to talk. At 8:30 PM on a Sunday!

What the?

I must ascribe this to awesome coincidence, as at no time did either of us mention Twitter on the call. I’m not as fortunate as Michael Arrington to have attracted the attention of a Comcast VP in Philadelphia from his twittering in San Francisco.

Yet, the response was immediate, and at an awfully odd time. Wouldn’t it be great if companies monitored twitter like they do blogs, and resolve customer problems before they spiral out of control? It’s a nice thought.

But I have no proof, so I must assume coincidence.

Anyway, I had written an email on Friday that was the stated reason for the call, and I talked to the rep briefly about returning the Air, which required another call on Monday to coordinate with the Sales team. I set up a time and went back to my computer.

Where, in turn, I received an invitation to join the TUAW Sunday Night Talkcast to talk about my MacBook Air issues.

Wow, The Twitter is really something!

I accepted, and had an engaging time with the TUAW panel. You can hear the results on TUAW or in iTunes, whenever episode #37 comes out. I’ll be in at about the 10 minute mark.

Hopefully, I don’t sound like too much of a dork. We’ll find out in a few days, I guess!

I wanted to make this point last night, and I’ll make it again here: this is not an issue with Apple’s customer service. Having experience managing customer service teams, I found little fault with the behavior of the AppleCare reps. Most of them strived for resolution on the first call, and were willing to work extremely hard to help me diagnose and resolve the problem. My suspicions that this is a problem beyond their ability to solve would sadly be borne out today, which I’ll describe in the next (and hopefully last) post on this matter.

The point of this post is that you never know what a new technology will bring. If you ask me why I use Twitter, it’s an easy response: so my (non-twittering) friends around the country can see what and how I’m doing.

But the side effects are pretty cool, too.

“Thus Turgon lived long in bliss; but Nevrast was desolate, and remained empty of living folk until the ruin of Beleriand.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Like Turgon, my time with Vinyamar has come to an end.

Friday I received a replacement MacBook Air which suffered the same problem as the original. It’s now been nearly a month since I chose the Air to start developing applications again, and for all but a short period of time I’ve been frustrated by it. I want so very much to have repeated the delight of my experiences with my iPod, PowerBook, and iPhone.

But the MacBook Air has simply not lived up to that standard.

The physical machine is very nice. It is beautiful, compact, and a joy to handle. The failures of the internals should not be taken as a condemnation of the class design — far from it. The case is a tremendous success. The computer is a tremendous success.

If only the CPU could keep up with it.

I want, so very much, for the Air to be great. I want to enjoy using it. But I don’t. I work on it for a little while, do a few things with it, and then the machine locks up.

I am sure that future revisions will improve. By the time this machine hits its third generation, the core shutdown problem will be a distant memory. But the flaw in my Vinyamar is here, now, and I need a tool that works now. I can’t wait for them to fix it in six months.

So… I guess I’ll go get a MacBook or a MacBook Pro, instead.

Damnit. I so wanted this one to have a happy ending.

Vinyamar’s replacement arrived today. I unpacked it and didn’t even bother setting it up past logging into the wireless network and downloading a movie from the NAS. Five minutes later, I’d reproduced the core shutdown issue.

I updated the software, rebooted, and reproduced the issue again. It took a little longer under 10.5.2 than 10.5, but it still happened.

So now I really don’t know what to do.

I called AppleCare, and they had me capture data to send to the engineers. I should hear back early next week, but don’t know what they’re going to say that will actually resolve the issue.

I also spoke with one of the AppleCare managers who talked to me earlier, and he wanted to know what he could do to help. I felt bad, because I know that the key to getting good customer service is to know what you want, and ask for it. But aside from a Macbook Air that works right now, I don’t know what else I want that satisfies me. The MacBook is probably small enough, but lacks the three-finger scroll and incredible design of the Air. The MacBook Pro has the power, but with power comes size.

In my short time with the Air, I came to really like the way it was like a folio I could take with me and tuck into a chair next to me. I didn’t even get to travel with it, but I could see it becoming a constant companion. I would RDC into my windows laptop, and Share Screens with Hithlum, and still have two Spaces left over for working, without any problems.

Well, no problems except, of course, for the random freezes. Those admittedly sucked.

Part of me says: just accept it. It’s not that bad.

But the rest of me says: it is that bad, and don’t settle for something that doesn’t make you happy.

So I put Vinyamar II back into the box this afternoon, and left it alone. I don’t think I even renamed it from the default; it’s probably still “Brett Peters’s MacBook Air,” which always makes me wonder what the correct rule is for possessives for proper names ending in sibilants.

And so I wait. Maybe tomorrow will bring something new.

I packed up Vinyamar to send her on her long journey back home, in anticipation of the replacement Macbook Air arriving later this week. It’s with some relief that I returned to Hithlum.

I really should stop naming my computers. It makes me irrationally attached to what is essentially a highly advanced screwdriver.

Well, my plans for maintaining Vinyamar as a secondary machine lasted all of about an hour.

In my defense, I’m basically an idiot.

I’ve discovered the magic of Screen Sharing, which allows me to easily control Hithlum and manage all the music and movies stored over there. It’s really cool.

However, there are two flaws which I need to discuss with AppleCare tomorrow:

• Overheating: When the cores are under any sort of moderate load, one of them will eventually shut down. This appears to be a defect with the heat sink.

• N-Wireless: I got the Time Capsule set up today broadcasting an N network (instead of as a client on a G.) Vinyamar detects it fine, but drops the network a little while later and then can’t see anything without turning wireless on and off. This, too, is a known bug in the Apple Support forums, and a potential return issue.

There are plenty of other Air owners who aren’t experiencing this problem. Before I get too caught up in configuring this model, though, let’s make sure that we have a good unit.

I am happy to announce the arrival of my Macbook Air named Vinyamar.

Vinyamar is named after the capital city of Nevrast in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. “Vinyamar” is Quenya for “New Dwelling.” Built on the western peninsula beneath Mount Taras, Vinyamar was the seat of Turgon’s power before he moved to the Hidden City of Gondolin.

The nomenclature of Vinyamar’s primary network is based upon regions of fantasy novels. Macintoshes are named after lands in J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. Linux machines are named after countries in Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels.

(I have, admittedly, bent the rules slightly here by using the name of a city instead of the name of a region. But it’s my network, I’ll use whichever names I like.)

Vinyamar:

• Entered service on March 18th, 2008.
• Has the 80GB hard drive option, not the SSD.
• 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo processor.
• Running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Purpose

Vinyamar’s intended purpose is as a coding and work laptop, so Xcode and the iPhone SDK will be required. Graphics work will be light to support application development. It will be used as a business laptop, so some internet and encryption utilities will also be required.

My stated reason for choosing the Macbook Air over the Macbook Pro is that the platform embraces constraints and forces me to focus on certain tasks. Only time will tell if this is the right decision.

System Configuration

OS X is preloaded with nearly every tool that I need, so doesn’t require a lot of configuration to be useful. After working with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) for nearly three years on Hithlum, I’ve picked up a lot of modifications and applications that I “can’t live without,” even though I really can. I addressed the UNIX issues first:

• Update Hosts File: Replace /etc/hosts with Dan Pollock’s excellent replacement hosts file to block bad sites. I’ve considered automating this download, but have some reservations with messing around with root-owned files without looking at them first. (I should get over it, but I haven’t.)

  This replacement /etc/hosts file blacks out bad parts of the internet — malware sites, aggressive advertisers, data collection companies, clicktrackers — by telling your computer to direct all requests for those hosts to itself, instead of out to the internet. It makes for a much more pleasant computing experience, and I highly recommend it, no matter what platform you’re running.

• Disable SSH-1 and Force SSH-2: SSH-1 should only be used if you want to get cracked. I have no idea why it’s enabled at all in any default, but there it is in Tiger. I was happy to see that Leopard has SSH-1 off by default.

  (In /etc/sshd_config, change #Protocol 2,1 to Protocol 2 and restart sshd.)

• Change Default Shell: I’m generally happy with Apple’s Terminal, but there’s one default that I refuse to accept Apple’s guidance on: the default shell. Once you learn a shell, switching between them becomes a real hassle… and I learned on tcsh, not bash. This is changed in Terminal’s preferences.

  Also, pin the Terminal to the Dock while it’s open, and chose the white-on-black background for new windows.

• Configure Passwordless SSH: I do a lot of work with remote servers. To automate SSH connections to these machines, I set up passwordless SSH.

Those are the primary UNIX changes that I felt were absolutely essential. Next, I installed the development environment.

• Install Xcode 3: Xcode 3 is the development environment that comes standard with Leopard, though it is not installed as a default. This was remedied by a quick introduction to Remote Disk and installing Xcode from the Leopard disks.

• Install iPhone SDK: The iPhone SDK is available via a free download from the ADC site and is an easy install.

While that was installing, I took care of some remaining OS X preferences.

• Remap Caps Lock to Control: In the Keyboard and Mouse System Preferences panel, change the Caps Lock Modifier Key to trigger Control, instead. I don’t use Caps Lock, but I do use Control quite a bit.

• .Mac Syncing: I copied over a few key files from Hithlum’s home directory, and configured .Mac Syncing to take care of the rest of the data.

• Backups: I spent more time than was ever necessary backing up Hithlum. I resolved that Vinyamar would be different, so I bought a Time Capsule and pointed Time Machine at it. Done.

• Secret Preferences: Try as I might, there are still a few hidden preferences I seem to always tick off when getting on a new machine. I started off fully intending to switch from TinkerTool to Secrets to manage these preferences, with an assist from SmartSleep to handle the sleep and hibernation behavior, but then I got to thinking.

  I’m supposed to be embracing constraints, right? Part of that is living with the defaults. Changing hidden preferences isn’t really doing that. Do I really need any of these behaviors set:

  • Disable Dashboard
  • Turn off .DS_Stores on the network
  • Pin Dock to bottom right hand side (to keep the trash in the same location)
  • Turn off glassy Dock
  • Enable Twooshsound on 140 character Tweet

  No, no, I guess I don’t. So I didn’t.

After the development environment was established, I (cautiously) installed several applications. I debated going entirely stock configuration here, but decided there are some things that are worth it.

• Quicksilver: I seriously don’t think I can work without Quicksilver anymore. Buggy? Yes. But very, very useful.

• Instant Messaging/VoIP: In addition to iChat, I installed Skype. Merrystar only recently started using IM, and only with Skype, so it makes the cut. (The requirement of “Must be able to communicate with spouse” is implied, and trumps just about every other one.)

• Encrypted Email: Even if the rest of the internet seems to get by without it, I still need encryption, so MacGPG and GPGMail are essential add-ons, in addition to the X.509 Thwate Freemail certificates that should be in my Keychain.

• Multiple Email Accounts: All of my email accounts have migrated over to IMAP, so I won’t have to move local mail files. Signature Profiler is very helpful at managing signature files between the accounts, however, so it will likely stay.

• Password Management: In addition to the Keychain (which is already very useful), I’ve come to rely upon 1Password’s autofill mechanism. (Not to mention how it will have native iPhone password syncing…)

• Writing: MarsEdit is my weblog editor of choice, and everyone should have a weblog. It makes the cut.

  For writing local files, emacs is already installed. If I need full screen editing I’ll use it and GLTerminal.

• Graphics: I’ve come to like Pixelmator quite a bit in the short time I’ve used it. OS X lacks a decent default image manipulator, so I’ll keep this.

• Screensaver: I use just one: GLMatrix from the xscreensaver package. You’ll pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

Interestingly, there are some great applications that didn’t make the initialcut:

• Instant Messaging: In a complete about-face from my last ten years of using IM, I ditched Adium X (with its wonderful multi-protocol support) and went with iChat instead. I don’t need as many IM protocols as I used to and iChat’s iSight integration is very appealing. Between Adium and Trillian I’ve managed 10+ accounts over the years; I’m looking forward to cutting that to 3.

  At the same time, I’ve been trying out iChat on Hithlum, and it’s going to be a big change from what I’m used to.

• Twitter is both a great time suck and a great way to interact with Mac developers. Twitterific is the client of choice here, but I decided to skip it for now, and shifting everything over to iChat/GTalk instead. This will also allow me to mute specific chatty people I follow. (You know who you are.)

• RSS Feed Reader: I am seriously conflicted here. NetNewsWire is fantastic and allows me to keep up with hundreds of feeds.

  The problem is that I keep up with hundreds of feeds. I’m leaving it off for now, and will revisit it as the RSS withdrawal symptoms kick in.

• Full Screen Focus: I use Think on Hithlum to focus my attention on specific apps. By blanking out the background, it is surprisingly effective at doing this. My hope is that if I’ve done the rest of my job well, I won’t need Think. But if I do, then I can always go get it.

• Screencaps: I really, really like Snapz Pro X, but it’s a bit of a CPU hog on the Powerbook. I will leave it there for now and see how things go. (I suspect that Snapz Pro X will find its way on to Vinyamar soon enough; it’s too good.)

• Performance Monitoring: I admit that I like knowing what’s going on under the hood. iStat provides great visibility there. I’m concerned about getting too distracted by monitoring the hardware instead of working.

• Office Software: For now, I’m leaving iWork and NeoOffice off. I’ll reconsider this decision when the time comes.

Updates

If you are interested to see how Vinyamar performs, I invite you to follow along in her weblog, as future updates will be posted there. (There’s even a separate RSS feed.)

In a strange display of synchronicity, Merrystar and I both ordered new laptops in the last 24 hours.

• Merrystar’s beloved Panasonic Toughbook W2 Tsiolkovsky will soon be joined by, of all things, a Dell XPS M1330. The Panasonic rep really blew the sale and couldn’t get her either a W or Y series within her department’s budget, so she opted for a screamin’ fast dual 2.6GHz instead. After years of making ugly laptops, Dell seems to have finally gotten this one right.

  We’ll see how it looks in person when the Alpine White version (with pink hard drive and mouse, naturally) arrives later this week.

  I’m actually really excited to see how Ubuntu runs on it.

• I wasn’t planning on upgrading my Powerbook G4 Hithlum until its AppleCare expired in November, but the recent release of the iPhone SDK (which requires an Intel chip and Leopard to use) accelerated my timetable. The 1.67GHz Powerbook is the fastest G4 chip out there, but it’s now the punchline in recent Mac benchmarks.

  Let’s call it like it is: the G4 is dog slow running Leopard, and it’s not that much faster running Tiger.

  So, after convincing myself to get the 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro, I then did an about-face when I got to the ordering page, decided to embrace constraints, and bought what meets my needs now: the Macbook Air. Yes, the one I was waffling about.

  And you know what? I don’t regret it for a minute. $1000 less, featherweight, and fewer distractions? Done.

  It arrives next week.

While I’ll let you know initial impressions and put up new computer pages next week, Merrystar and I have important decisions to make while we wait.

Namely, what are we going to name them? A quick nomenclature refresher:

• Merrystar has two possible conventions to follow: laptop or dual-core. Laptops are named after science vessels in Star Trek: Oberth-class or Nova-class. (I think Nebula-class vessels are also allowed.) Dual-core machines are Excelsior-class. There’s a lot of options available.

• My convention is to use lands from science-fiction and fantasy: Macs use the lands of J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ve been going through a Beleriand phase, but might shift east over the Misty Mountains if the names are right. The areas of Númenor are also options, but not very melodic ones.

Hmmm. Lots of thinking to do here.

That can’t be good.

(This is for both my Tiger and Leopard external backups. Looks like “Ignore ownership on this volume” somehow got checked.)

Update 11:11pm: Found the bug that caused it in the first place. That’s the good news.

The other good news is that I can restore permissions to the Tiger backup with the next backup, which is currently running.

Bad news is that I’ll probably have to reinstall my test Leopard system on the external drive to fix it, but that’s less critical than having a bootable backup right now. (After I fix this one, I’ll retrieve the offsite one to see if that fixes it.)

Also, I don’t want to talk about the Green Bay game. That’s the last time I ever root for a team because of expediency. It backfired with Texas, and now it’s backfired with the Giants.

Having resisted the Office 2007 upgrade at work as long as possible, I have finally been dragged — kicking, screaming, cursing — into the latest circle of frustration.

Oh. My. God. Is it awful!

In my googling to relieve the pain, I’ve come across some great articles on other people’s experiences. Like,
why you should avoid Outlook 2007’s HTML email and switch back to plain text.

I’m going to give Office 2007 a chance, but only because I have to to get my paycheck. This is not something I’d choose to use otherwise.

Doesn’t this worry Microsoft a wee bit? I guess not.

I find it funny that in all the polarizing posts about the MacBook Air, the reasons why I didn’t recommend it to Merrystar are conspicuously absent.

Those reasons? Compared to her current laptop, the MacBook Air:

1. is heavier,
2. has a bigger footprint,
3. has a shorter battery life, and
4. is more expensive.

And for her, these are critical requirements. So the MBA is a no-go.

The MacBook Air looks to be a great, small Mac. It may be the best little Mac ever, although I think the iPhone is strong competition for that title.

It is not, however, the best subcompact notebook available right now. The MacBook Air needs to shed some weight and stretch some battery life before it can claim that. And since I’m talking about an Ubuntu to OS X switch, yes, this matters quite a bit.

I am confident that the MacBook Air will improve. Solid state drives will get cheaper, faster, and bigger, components will improve, etc. — but it’s just not there yet. But once you remove the necessity of running OS X, the field opens up… and there are honestly better options out there right now.

If you want the lightest, smallest Mac laptop you can get, then obviously the Air is a great machine. The protests about sealed batteries and non-expandable drives are pretty silly and you should ignore them as such. You want the SSD? Don’t worry about the cost, just go and get it (and please provide benchmarks for the rest of us!)

But if you want something even smaller, and aren’t committed to OS X, then you should probably keep looking.

I turned to Merrystar tonight and told her about the latest entry in the Mac laptop line, the MacBook Air.

Her: How is it?

Me: Meh, skip it.

Her: <raises eyebrow>

Me: Get the new Toughbook instead, and travel with your iPhone.

Aside from the ability to run OSX, the MBAir is just not as good as the Panasonic W7, let alone the R8.. For pity’s sake, it’s a full pound heavier than the R8! Solid-state drive or not, that’s ludicrous!

I fully recognize that four years next to a Toughbook W2 has spoiled me. It is a fantastic computer. It is the polar opposite of my airplane wing; light, discrete, but not fragile.

(In other words, perfectly suited to its user.)

I also recognize that I could be falling into the feature comparison trap, so often seen with the iPhone. Simply comparing features often misses so much of the user experience that makes a device better to use. Maybe I’m missing that part of the MacBook Air’s appeal, where the multi-touch trackpad, combined with OS X, improves the laptop experience so much that it blows away other laptops, much like the iPhone blew away other phones. But I don’t think I am.

The Toughbook W series is seriously well designed. It’s sexy, it’s light, it’s tough as nails, it has all the normal ports, it has an optical drive… and it comes with three years of service, standard. The AirBook is sexier, skinny, and.. er, runs OSX. That’s it.

I had hoped that I’d be able to welcome the coming of the Apple subnotebook with something close to the excitement of the iPhone. And maybe this is a device that you have to see in person to truly appreciate — I hope that it is.

But for a personal purchase, I’ll skip the MacBook Air and move to a plain old MacBook when the time comes to retire my current rig.

Meh.

Update 1/19/2008: I wrote a follow up to this piece, particularly on why the MacBook Air is decidedly not the right computer for Merrystar. After watching the videos on Apple’s site, however, I’m not as certain that it’s not the right computer for me.

I should probably avoid seeing one of these in person for a few months, eh?

If you’re a fan of the command line on OS X, I suggest you take a look at Visor, originally from the good folks at Blacktree. It’s a quake-style terminal window that instantly appears; I’m finding it even more useful than Quicksilver while working on shell scripting.

(So much for ‘sticking with the defaults.’)

Considering upgrading your Powerbook G4 to Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard)? After running with Leopard since its release, let me give you some unsolicited advice:

Skip it.

No, really. Just wait, and get it on a MacBook instead.

It comes down entirely to performance vis-a-vis Tiger. Here are Hithlum’s Geekbench scores:

• Leopard with updates (10.5.1) and Spotlight indexing complete: 804
• Clean Tiger install (10.4): 813
• Tiger with updates (10.4.11): 917
• Tiger (10.4.11) with Spotlight indexing complete: 942

While Spotlight performance in Tiger may be slower than in Leopard, overall chip performance is 17% better. I knew that 10.5 was optimized for the Intel chips, but that’s crazy to think that that sort of degradation is acceptable.

By way of comparison, machines with Intel chips running Leopard do significantly better than PowerPC chips. Most of the MacBooks are around 2500-3000, with some of the Mac Pros clocking in over 8200. Leopard seems to be a pretty good investment for Intel-based Macs.

But combined with the Disk Utility problems, random crashes, and overall sluggishness I’ve experienced with Leopard, the upgrade isn’t worth it on my older PPC machine. I’m certainly not going to upgrade my mother-in-law’s G5 iMac to it after this.

So, it’s back to Tiger for me on my Mac. Experiment over, back to work.

Anyone want to buy a Family Pack Leopard DVD set? I’ll trade you for Tiger DVDs…

I don’t know how I missed Primate Lab’s article on Leopard Performance, but it provides numbers that corroborate my own experience on my Powerbook G4 — Leopard is slower than Tiger.

Mostly, it just leaves me grumpy that I purchased the family pack. I’m not going to upgrade any of my family’s G4s or G5s at this point, and may very well go back to Tiger on Hithlum until it’s time for a new laptop in a year or two.

I borked another two hard drives today. Lost around 600GB of files.

Why?

Because Leopard’s Disk Utility is a piece of crap, that’s why.

I, for one, am seriously tired of reformatting hard drives on a Windows computer.

I recently added a HP Media Vault into my networking setup, with mixed results.

The Media Vault is a Network-Attached Storage device (NAS) that provides an always-on place to store data, supporting NFS, SMB, FTP, and even HTTP connections. In theory, every laptop on my network can use it for wireless storage, allowing each laptop to offload non-essential files, like our huge iTunes library. Given that I have Mac, Linux, and Windows machines to deal with, cross-platform compatibility is somewhat necessary.

My main goal was to point iTunes to use the Media Vault as the primary library location, which would let me reclaim 45 GB of disk space on my laptop.

In practice, this doesn’t work. Not. At. All.

It’s not that it can’t work. The setup to stream media over wireless is fairly easy. The drives can be automounted so the iTunes Library files always point to the right location. And the Media Vault works quite well as network storage for archives and nightly backups, a serious point in its favor.

But if you aren’t using Windows Media Center (which I’m not), then the streaming functions of the Media Vault don’t apply, and you’re left with the restrictions around transferring large files over wireless to watch movies. Video is the real trouble spot; audio is actually fine. Playback isn’t initially compromised by wireless network speeds, but it eventually fails. Badly.

Unfortunately, video is kinda important in this scenario. So you’re left with the previous options of splitting apart your iTunes Library, or continuously culling and managing your disk space. Which, in turn, is totally counterproductive.

See, one of the things I like about applications like the iLife suite is that they abstract filenames and location away from you. I just wish they could take it a step further, and abstract the physical filesystems used (like ZFS) so that you don’t have to worry about where the file is, it just goes and gets it for you. Local caching of frequently-accessed content, intelligent offloading onto network resources…

(Just think of what .Mac could be as part of a Apple ZFS strategy in this case. Yowza.)

The problem here is really one of expectations; I wanted one thing, but the Media Vault is something different. It looks to do what it does pretty well. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what I really wanted, so I have mixed feelings about it.

So, to sum up: I got a NAS. It’s cool. I thought I was going to use it for live media storage, but it turns out it’s only really good for backups and archives, so that’s what I use it for.

The end.

Ain’t broke? Don’t fix it.

Now, if only I could heed my own advice.

1. I was seriously considering upgrading the software that runs a few of my sites to Movable Type 4.x to allow the use of the the iPhone/MT interface plugin. Yes, you read that right: I’m considering installing an entire CMS to get an interface for my phone. This plugin makes posting from the iPhone very, very easy. And a clean install of MT 4.x is actually quite easy as such things go.

   But upgrading from an old version, with an extremely custom template and unsupported database? Very, very difficult.

   So difficult, in fact, that I gave up trying to upgrade the existing installation and instead evaluated how much effort it would be recode several sites on the clean install.

   And the answer? Way more effort than it’s worth.

2. I’m of a similar feeling of my second recent upgrade, of that to Apple’s Leopard on my G4 Powerbook, Hithlum.

   My first upgrade attempt resulted in an unbearably slow system. This was not the desired outcome.

   So, after several hours debugging processes, killing off all sorts of little performance-stealing problems, I opted for a clean Tiger (10.4) install and trusted my backups. Tiger was great in all the areas I remember, and weak in all the other areas I remembered (cough cough Spotlight cough).

   After a few days of that, I thought that since there were enough other people having success with a clean install, that I would give it a try with a clean upgrade back to Leopard. In other words, I lost my marbles.

   You know what? I have not been entirely happy with Hithlum since I started meddling. And really, there’s no turning back.

   Leopard may be faster than Tiger, but it doesn’t feel faster. The 10.5.1 update helped stabilize some of the applications, and I’m sure that on a newer machine that I would be happy as a clam with Leopard. But instead I ask, was this really worth the time, effort, and money I spent?

   I suspect that the answer is no.

So: Future Brett! Listen up! I will make this simple for you. NEVER UPGRADE! Okay? Never.

(I don’t know why I bother. Future Brett never listens.)

Yep, it’s time to inventory the Mac OS X apps I have running on Hithlum again. (Parts I, II.) I’ve added a few new programs to the mix.

• I’ve used Chicken of the VNC a bit to control some Windows boxes, but generally find Remote Desktop Connection or Fog Creek’s Copilot to be superior for desktop support.

• I tried out EtherPEG and think it’s an eye-opener. Literally.

• I’ve started using iMediaBrowser to find things quickly, but suspect this will go in the Utilities folder soon enough.

• NetNewsWire Lite has replaced Google Reader as my RSS feed reader of choice. Google Reader was just so slow.

• I’d already changed many of these system preferences via the Terminal, but TinkerTool provides a nice interface.

• I occasionally have Twitterific up and running, though I honestly don’t use Twitter enough to make it an essential app. (Usually I post through a Quicksilver+Applescript hack.)

• I’ve started using WriteRoom as a composing tool instead of JDarkRoom, and am generally happier with it.

• Visor is a quick half-screen Terminal window that I’m trying out. It’s faster on the command line than invoking through Quicksilver, but may require some adjustments.

• I’ve tried out the excellent DEFCON Globe Screensaver from Ambrosia Software, and it’s a keeper.

Still in use:

• Quicksilver
• MacGPG and GPGMail
• SignatureProfiler
• jUploader
• xscreensaver
• Backlight
• Adium X
• Mac The Ripper / HandBrake
• DynDNS Updater
• Excel
• X11 + The Gimp
• GLTerminal
• iTunes XHTML Playlist
• MarsEdit — I liked this one enough to buy the license.
• OTR Proxy

Rarely used, but still useful:

• Audacity and the LAME codec
• Colloquy
• Crack Attack
• Facebook Exporter for iPhoto
• ImageWell
• iStat
• MonoLingual
• Nocturne
• Stuffit
• Telekinesis

The following were installed, but have recently been ploinked:

• Apple Backup
• Camino
• Cocoalicious
• Entourage
• Firefox
• Flip4Mac
• Google Earth
• JDarkRoom
• Keyword Assistant (which I really liked, but was replaced by iPhoto 7.)
• Mail Stamps
• MailFollowup
• Mail Tags
• MacSaber
• pearLyrics
• Stellarium
• Think
• VLC

Jackson Bohlender asked me for an interview earlier this week about my thoughts on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and my computing background.

(I admit, it was a little startling to realize that I got my first computer 25 years ago.)

The interview is now up at his site.

By the way, iPhoto 7 was totally worth the wait.

Over the past five years I have grown to grudgingly respect Outlook as a mail client. The way that it integrates schedules, tasks, and email together is really well done, when done properly.

(In particular, Ctrl-Shift-V is totally slick for clearing one’s inbox.)

And while I have a long list of gripes (contact and email searching are laughable, .pst archive size limits are a total hassle, and why must you hog all my bandwidth for mail?) I’ve never really thought that the flaws were malicious. Quirky, reflective of a bias towards all-things-Exchange, but never downright mean.

That is, until I tried to set my father up with an IMAP mail account today. Outlook’s support for IMAP is worse than you’ve heard. And you’ve probably heard how bad it is.

My father had set up his personal email account on his iPhone without a problem. I’m not a huge fan of IMAP, but the iPhone got me to switch from POP3 because that’s what the iPhone does. It does IMAP mail really well.

But after setting Dad’s Outlook up to use IMAP in addition to his Exchange account, any goodwill I felt towards Outlook is gone.

• Want to connect to the server? Restart your client.
• Want to store Sent mail on the server, and not locally? Create a custom rule. (You want a simple preference to do that? Dream on.)
• Want to delete your messages? Better expose a control buried several layers deep. (Instead of moving deleted messages to a separate folder and hiding messages marked for deletion, Outlook helpfully crosses them out… and leaves them there. This is actually representative of the actual server behavior, but not terribly useful.)
• Want to use SSL on your SMTP connection? Hope you remember that it’s port 465, because the port won’t change.
• Want to stay connected? Hope you like the IMAP timeout dialog popping up every few minutes, because it’s better to notify the user than it would be to simply reconnect when they need to use it again. Obviously.

Listen. I know that Outlook/Exchange helped Microsoft get where it is, and totally killed Lotus Notes. I don’t fault companies for making their products work really well together. Outlook is a good mail client, especially with Exchange.

But it sure looks like Microsoft went out of their way to make a really good mail client work really poorly with an open, competing mail standard, at the expense of their users.

And that turns what could have been a great thing into something really sad.

I did it. I succumbed to the dark side.

It’s called “jailbreaking,” and it’s the process by which you can add third-party applications to your iPhone.

I feel dirty, but I’ll get over it.

The iPhone may be my first phone in years I don’t hate. And it might be the first one you don’t hate, too.

Custom 404 page seen on the twitter site, which is almost always under heavy load these days:

Nice, funny, and to the point.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had roughly the exact same conversation with about five different people. Paraphrased, it goes like this:

Me: I’m glad drive prices are dropping. I just got another hard drive for my laptop.

Them: Oh, you’re upgrading?

Me: No, backing up. This will make it three total.

Them: Why not just burn everything to CD or DVD?

Me: Er, because they fail and take your data with them?

Them: What?

Me: Gesundheit.

I then follow up with my tragic story of how I archived my entire digital life to CD/DVD, but when I got my Mac and started loading everything back, I discovered the sad truth: CDs and DVDs will degrade over time, and you don’t know it’s unusable until it actually goes. About half of the disks I made within the last five years were gone, so I resolved to go with a strategy with visibility, redundancy, and easy access: everything on a hard drive. CD/DVDs are only throwaway backups or installation disks in my house. The conversation would usually end with me talking again about the cost of hard drives coming down, me realizing I’d just spent 5 minutes ranting about the failure rates of optical media, and then a polite change of subject.

Now, I admit, I haven’t handled this conversation particularly well. I feel particularly guilty for having had it with my Mom and not immediately following it with concrete, practical, written advice as to what you should do to prevent data loss. It’s complicated by my running on a Mac, and nearly everyone else I’ve talked to using Windows. It’s further complicated because I think of my Mac as a UNIX box, so I can’t just say “go download X program and set it up.”

Instead, I have to say something stupid, like, “I have a series of interlocking scripts that automatically archive critical files and rsync incremental backups between external and offsite drives to ensure that the data lives in as many protected places as is practically possible.”

In other words, I’m part of the Command Line Ninja Brigade of Mac users, which appears to exist in a different online world than the Sweet Delicious GUI Army of Mac users. I don’t understand why this divide exists in the online Apple community, but it seems like you’re either for the Terminal, or against the Terminal, and never the twain shall meet. The opinions each hold are strikingly different, yet the crossover between the two is so easy. That’s why it’s a Mac!

I honestly don’t understand it. But there it is, Horatio: yet another undreamt of thing.

So.

Here’s my concrete, practical, written advice for backing up stuff, no matter what you run, or how you personally feel about the command line.

• If you run Windows, I recommend Gina Trapani’s excellent Lifehacker article Automatically back up your hard drive for advice in both software selection and how to set up a schedule of backups that will save your butt when Murphy’s Law strikes.

• If you run a Mac and don’t want to mess around with the Terminal, there are a lot of programs out there like Carbon Cloner or SuperDuper that you can use. I’ve not used any of them, but there’s a Mac Observer tutorial on backups that covers them in some detail.

• If you run UNIX, or are a member of the Mac CLNB, perhaps you’ll find my backup strategy useful inspiration for polishing your own data archiving obsession.

I even wrote the backup script in haiku. Just for you.

Since I seem to always be forgetting them:

• ⌘ = Command Key
• ⌥ = Option Key
• ⇧ = Shift Key
• ^ = Ctrl Key
• ⎋ = Esc Key
• ⏏ = Eject
• ⌫ = Delete

As you were.

I was recently updating my about page when I realized that I’d really not kept up with the good things on Hithlum, only the bad.

And that’s unfortunate, because my Mac really rocks. I’m glad that I left the switching-distros-solves-problems world of Linux behind, even though I look at Tsiolkovsky with an admittedly covetous eye.

(But if Apple put out a ruggedized subcompact MacBook Pro with an optical drive? I am so there.)

So I thought I’d start by revisiting my original list of software that I’d posted a year ago and see what I’m actually using, versus what didn’t work out for me. A lot of these applications have been good to me. Maybe you’ll find them useful, too.

Here are my standards, the applications that make Hithlum a joy to use:

• Quicksilver remains the only application I run all the time. Every week I learn something new about how to use it. I remapped my Caps Lock key to Control just so I could trigger Quicksilver even faster. Oh, and there’s command line interaction, so I don’t even need to keep Terminal open!

At the time, I said: “Holy holy holy. Quicksilver changes everything.” I stand by that and can only add more emphasis.

• Safari and Camino are currently vying for my affections as web browsers. Safari had speed problems when I used it as a RSS news reader, but the font rendering is incredible. (I’ve since switched to Google Reader for news.) Camino feels snappier and doesn’t bog down after its been open a while, but it doesn’t do as good a job with text. We’ll see who winds up on top.

• Mail continues to be my main mail client. Hawk Wings has been a great resource, pointing me towards all sorts of useful (and not so useful) add ons. I use MacGPG and GPGMail in conjuction with the built-in x.509 certificate support, Mail Stamps, SignatureProfiler, and MailFollowup. That’s actually about it — I don’t use Mail Tags as often as I used to, but I keep it around. I end up using the ⌥⌘T command to file mail quickly and let Spotlight sort it all out later.

• iPhoto. I spend a sizeable part of every night working in iPhoto, processing pictures and whatnot. I’m still on the iLife ‘05 package but will happily upgrade to ‘07… whenever it actually comes out. I have gripes about the ‘05 version that I know are fixed in ‘06, so now it’s just a waiting game.

• I upload photos to Flickr and Zooomr with jUploader. The various plugins and dedicated uploaders just haven’t done it for me. I keep hoping, though…

• Preview. You know what? This simple application is fantastic and is the unsung hero of OS X 10.4. How do people get by without it?

• Emacs is my primary text editor, but I use neither the Cocoa nor the Carbon versions. I, uh, use the default terminal one. Do I lose points for that?

• xscreensaver. What can I say? I love me some GLMatrix action combined with Backlight. Mmmm, green and black desktop goodness.

There are a few other programs I use on a regular basis, just not every day, which I consider essential.

• Address Book. Does what it’s supposed to do. Syncing problems with Entourage, though, led me to resort to manual imports and a lot of backups.

• Adium X is still in the Dock, used fairly often but not every day. iChat didn’t have a chance.

• I wish iCal integrated better with either Google Calendar or Exchange. I love the interface, but not the syncing.

• The Mac The Ripper / HandBrake combo sees a lot of use, as I rip movies to watch on iTunes. I watch a lot of movies in iTunes these days — much more than I listen to music.

Then there’s a large group of specialized programs that are useful in one way or another, but not part of my normal mundane computing existence. Or, I haven’t grokked them yet.

• Audacity for audio processing. I use it to rip old cassette tapes to MP3. (Don’t forget the LAME codec.)

• I’ve only recently downloaded Cocoalicious, a del.icio.us bookmarks manager. Still figuring out if I need it or not.

• Colloquy. IRC client. I’ve used it twice, works.

• Crack Attack, one of Merrystar’s favorites.

• DynDNS Updater, to keep my dynamic hostname associated with my Mac. I haven’t looked at it since I installed it, which is how it’s supposed to be.

• Entourage does all sorts of bad things when I try to sync it with both Exchange (for work) and iCal (to publish my calendar for my family.) Don’t like the mail interface at all, ditched it very soon after I tried it out. There was also an incident that reinforced the importance of keeping work and play separate, so I don’t do anything work-related on the Mac anymore. Entourage’s days are numbered.

• Excel, on the other hand, continues to blow OpenOffice’s Spreadsheet out of the water. Sorry, but until you can do pivot tables, you’re not in the game. Possibly the best part of MS Office.

• Firefox is only installed for those rare occasions where I’ve needed to get into a site that didn’t work with Safari and didn’t recognize Camino. I may discard this one soon.

• Flip4Mac, plays windows media files.

• I finally installed X11 so I can run The Gimp for image manipulation. Works just like I remember, maybe a little better.

• GLTerminal, a full screen terminal. Cool but clunky.

• Google Earth remains very cool, but its utility is debatable. (It was helpful when looking for a house, but that’s over now.) Bandwidth hog.

• I use iTunes XHTML Playlist 4.2.3 to now publish my iPod playlists, although I’ve got an AppleScript that can do it too. Looks like version 5.0 has been a while in coming.

• Every time I try iWork, I like it. But I so rarely use it, it’s not worth buying. (Yet.)

• I like JDarkRoom, a full-screen simple text editor. The fonts are great, it’s easy to write in… but I don’t use it very often anymore. It is a great creative writing tool, something to really focus you down on what you’re doing. It’s also readable from across the room. (Perhaps I’m just shy? I bet that comes as a surprise.) GLTerminal has more old-skool cred with the flicker and arc, but JDarkRoom is a clean, straightforward app.

• I have a PowerBook with a motion sensor. I therefore have MacSaber. It’s inevitable. (It’s also been used exactly once.)

• MarsEdit, tool for offline posts to weblogs. I haven’t decided about this one - I haven’t even really tried out the trial version.

• OggDrop X, for converting OGG music files. I, uh, don’t use OGG anymore. Everything’s MP3 or AAC.

• OTR Proxy might see some use, if I ever IMed with someone who used it too.

• pearLyrics is still around, but I haven’t used it in ages.

• Stellarium, planetarium software. Sweet.

• Think is another one that I’m trying out that I’m not sure if I’m going to keep. It blacks out everything but what you’re working on, which is nice. A separate app to do it, though… I’m not sure about this one yet.

• VLC for those media files that Quicktime can’t hack. Haven’t had many of those.

Finally, we have the discard pile. These just weren’t for me, thank you, come again.

• Growl may come as a surprise for the die-hard Mac readers, because it’s an honestly good program and wildly popular. I’ve simplified my routine, though, and when I’m on my Mac I don’t need notifications about every little event. Mail arrives? I’ll get to it. New song plays? Okay, I’ll listen to it. This is definitely a “good, but not for me” program. <ploink>

• Seamonkey, Shiira, and SunriseBrowser were all deleted a while ago. <ploink ploink ploink>

• I tried out Flock and liked it well enough (Camino + Flickr + del.icio.us is a good combo) but got a little wigged out by the unknown TCP/IP traffic I saw going out of it. So: <ploink>

• Armagetron and Armagetron Advanced, Tron Cycle games. <ploink>

• Battle of Wesnoth, still great, I’m still not playing. <ploink>

• Browsejour. Why did I think I needed this? <ploink>

• Disk Inventory X. It was useful when I was searching my old drives. Done now. <ploink>

• Flickr Uploadr, er, uploads files to Flickr. Replaced with jUploader. <ploink>

• iPodDisk. I have a 512 MB first generation shuffle. I don’t need this app yet. <ploink>

• IPScanner. Never used it. <ploink>

• MyTunesRSS. Great idea, not for me. <ploink>

• NeoOffice, the OpenOffice.org port to OS X. A 350+ MB app is not a utility. No need, so: <ploink ploink>

• Yahoo Widgets, too much memory required. I’ll use them on my Windows machine, but not on my Mac. <ploink>

• XJournal, offline posting for LiveJournal. Don’t use LJ, so no need for this one. <ploink>

• XNmap. Never used it. <ploink>

Next up, I’ll have to document my love affair with the command line.

Here’s a question: what goes chirp, chirp, CRUNK, chrip chrip, crunk chirp?

If you guessed Tsiolkovsky’s hard drive, you’d be sadly correct.

First, the Ubuntu side gave us this wonderful message:

I think this is really quite an excellent way to put it: “…and this disk drive is probably not expensive enough for you to risk your time and data upon it.” Good advice for a bad situation.

Then, tonight, the Windows side gave us this gem:

Less informative, but just as ominous.

(Fortunately, Tsiolkovsky is still under Panasonic’s excellent warranty. But only for six more weeks.)

Last night I stumbled upon BackLight, a free program for the Mac that allows you to pipe any screensaver into your desktop. While it’s not perfect (it’s a GL layer on top of the existing desktop, so there are issues with Exposé, for instance), it allows for some great effects. Want to run Matrix-style effects in the background while you work?

No problem. (GLMatrix is part of the xscreensaver package, now available for Macs, too.)

Don’t get me wrong; this is totally useless. Screensavers aren’t the most practical things. (When was the last monitor you owned seriously susceptible to burn-in? 1986?) But this is very cool eye-candy. This one goes in the ‘keep’ pile for now.

Updated: Found another way that doesn’t require an additional application:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &

Will try it out and see how it works.

Merrystar’s finished restoring Tsiolkovsky to operating condition, having installed obscure dependencies required for 30-year-old astronomical software and restored data from the ill-fated HissyDrive backup fiasco.

And because of Ubuntu, it’s turned out much better than before. No, honest.

• The Windows XP side of Tsiolkovsky suffered chronic driver crashes from the on-board Centrino wireless card; only disabling the card and using a Netgear pc card stopped the computer from crashing. The drawback was, of course, that the power consumption was huge and battery life was cut in half, if not more. Ubuntu natively recognized and supported the Centrino A/B card, so we’re back up to the 6-8 hour battery life we were used to. (Yes, you read that right.)

• Speaking of power management, Ubuntu fully supports ACPI; hibernate and suspend work like they’re supposed to. Amazing!

• While some of the package managment is confusing (especially the contents of the devel packages, and what’s up with not including make?) apt-get is vastly superior to SuSE’s yast. Sorry, but it’s true.

• Gnome seems to be trying to integrate the best UI elements of Mac OS X and Windows XP (albeit without all the chrome of Tiger/Vista), and succeeds. How well? Good enough to convince a long-time KDE user to switch.

• System stability, good UI, and unix commands at the ready? You better believe that Merrystar never boots into Windows anymore. While there are a few reasons to keep the partition (Adobe Illustrator, for one, and some web-based tools that require IE), it sees little to no system time. Quite a change, actually.

So, I confess. I’ve grown a little bit jealous. I want a brown system! I want to see the OS that Just Works! I want to use it!

Oh, wait. I run Mac OS X and have all of that, minus the brown part. Okay, I really just want to tinker around with Linux again… but know better than to mess up Merrystar’s system this close to Valentine’s day. So I downloaded Xubuntu for PowerPC and ran it on Hithlum, instead. (I’ve long been interested in the XFCE window manager.)

It was nice: fast, UNIX-y, snappy. Not as nice as OS X, but I can now say I’ve gotten Linux to boot on my Mac without frying the system. I could get used to it. But then I remembered that I really didn’t need to do any of this. I have a perfectly good OS now, and I don’t need to go re-learn Linux ‘just because.’ Ubuntu is pretty simple and looks to be low-maintenance, so my technical support duties will likely be light now. Aside from helping to clean up the Windows partition — a reinstall may be in order, because, you know, the Registry doesn’t scale — I’m out of a job on that computer.

Bravo, Ubuntu. It Just Works, like it’s supposed to. Nicely done.

Merrystar upgraded Tsiolkovsky to Ubuntu today from SuSE 10.0. Normally, I wouldn’t phrase a distro change as an upgrade, but this one qualified. Even though my first experience with SuSE was positive, the honeymoon was soon over, and recent events have been less than satisfactory. (Then there’s that whole Novell-Microsoft deal that still makes me go Whaaaa?)

Initial impressions of Ubuntu are very, very good. Wireless works out of the box, power management is great, and “Gnome doesn’t suck,” to quote the primary user. More details once we resolve the hissing backup disk drive issues (note to self: why did I not get out my noise cancelling headphones today?) and AIPS is functioning again; Tsiolkovsky’s Linux writeup could use some refreshing, especially considering how many hits it receives every day.

Did I forget to mention that Hithlum is back from Apple? I guess I did. Well, she’s back, but can’t read any data from the hissy drive, and if you think I’m letting Tsiolkovsky anywhere near that thing? Steve Jobs is more likely to use a stylus.

I know enough to not tempt computer karma: copy the data off the hissy drive as fast as the network will carry it, but don’t mess with the settings.

One small victory today is enough.

I knew I was a fool to hope that I’d get Hithlum back by tomorrow, no matter what Frank From Austin, TX told me.

Tonight I received the following email from Apple:

…Thank you for your email.

We are sorry for the delay in servicing your PowerBook G4 and apologize for the inconvenience it may cause.

Your PowerBook G4 is currently at our repair facility. We are waiting on a part to complete the repair. This part (17” Display) is scheduled to arrive on Jan 4, 2007. We expect the repair to be completed in the coming days. Once the repair is completed, your product will be going through a series of final tests, and should these tests be successful, the computer will be
shipped back to you.

Your patience is greatly appreciated.

What I find most frustrating is that, in all the time my PowerBook was awaiting a part, no one could tell me what that part was. Knowing that the problem requires a new LCD screen actually eases my mind, because it validates the original AppleCare purchase. $350 for AppleCare or $800 (or more) for a new screen? Easy math. I may not be happy about the delay, but at least I don’t feel like I’m getting no value out of the extended warranty.

But it took over two weeks for Apple (and 3 escalations from me) to tell me which part they were waiting on to get to this point.

Perhaps my next laptop really will be a Panasonic Toughbook. (Pity I can’t run OS X on it.)

Sometimes, it’s good to know how to repair an .ost or .pst file in Outlook .

Well, isn’t that interesting?

This morning I emailed Apple to let them know that they hadn’t called me back as promised in their support email.

I just got off the phone with Frank at Apple in Austin, TX, who let me know they’d escalated the problem and expected repairs to be complete by tomorrow (as long as the unit passed QA, of course.)

Dare I hope that I’ll have Hithlum back by Thursday?

Sorry, Patrick.

I’m right there with ya.

It’s now been 19 days since my PowerBook G4 Hithlum’s LCD failed. Let’s recap.

• Times I have called Apple: 8
• Times I have spoken to an Apple rep over the phone: 3
• Times I have emailed Apple: 1
• Emails I have received from Apple: 1
• Times I have visited an Apple store, 160 miles away: 1
• Status updates received from Apple via website: 1
• Hours spent waiting for Genius Bar Appointment: 1
• Escalations through customer service: 3
• ETA: still pending.

• Approximate time spent dealing with support-related issues: 20 hours
• Days primary personal computer unavailable: 19

Let’s compare and contrast with Merrystar’s experience with Panasonic and her Toughbook Tsiolkovsky, shall we?

• Total calls to support: 1
• Total calls to Fedex: 1
• Total emails: 2, both status updates from Panasonic’s logistics company
• Total website visits: 2 (1 to look up phone number for inital call, 1 to FedEx to confirm delivery)

• Approximate time spent dealing with support-related issues: 1.5 hours, including packaging (excludes backup time.)
• Days primary personal computer unavailable: 2.5

The Panasonic support rep was knowledgable, efficient, and thorough. The Apple reps — with the execption at the Genius Bar, to be fair — have not.

What’s worse is that I’m paying $350 to Apple for this service for 3 years. Panasonic’s cost? $0 for the same period of time. I’ve used it three times and each time has been this easy.

This is seriously leading me to question my next laptop purchase. Perhaps it’ll be time to switch back to Linux?

For the last few months I’ve been in a weird sort of RSS feed-reading state; I moved from Safari’s RSS reader (because it was really slow whenever podcasts showed up) to Newshutch, a web-based feedreader I’d read about on 37 Signals. It is beautifully done, simple, and easy to work with.

But (you knew this was coming) it’s slow. It presents feeds one at a time (like Thunderbird), which is conceptually slow, and it’s AJAX/Rails slow to deliver content, which is technically slow. I think it would really be great with a few feeds - say less than 50 - but more than 200 causes it to choke.

I found myself missing Safari, and was about to switch back over the Christmas vacation when disaster struck. Argh.

Well, with my PowerBook in limbo, I went on a quick search and revisited Google Reader. It’s fast and has the ability to read Rivers of News, instead of individual feeds.

And you can share stuff!

But…

It’s Google. That Google.

You know, the one that is about to wander the selva oscura where the straight path was lost?

The one with the goatee?

Damnit.

I miss my Mac. It was so much easier when I just had Safari to blame/tame.

(I knew we were running slow tonight.)

Merrystar’s Toughbook W2 Tsiolkovsky is back from the shop today. She sent it in on Tuesday. In the afternoon. Got it back today. 3 days from door to door.

Panasonic’s support continues to impress.

Apple’s? Not so much. (15 days and counting. I called their support again today, and they have no idea what part is needed or when it will be in. Sigh.)

Well, the holidays have come and gone, and I’m still without my PowerBook. 14 days without my Mac, which means my computer has now spent more time in the shop this year than my car.

You know, the car that hit a deer? Yeah. It took less time to repair that than it has to get the part for my 1.25 year old computer. (With extended AppleCare, I might add.)

The best part is that when I call up to talk to someone about it, the call centers are all closed for the holiday. You know, I’d like to be able to kick back and use my mac over my vacation, but instead I’m stuck processing photos BY HAND without ANY WORKFLOW AUTOMATION, that’s more that 100 a day, thank you very much.

Not that I’m bitter, or anything like that. Because I’m not.

Even if it’s been two weeks.

I think I start to see why Cory at BoingBoing always purchases two of any computer he’s going to use. One will, inevitably, be in the shop when you need it the most.

We are not amused, Apple!

ext3 can still bite me.

And the part for Hithlum? Backordered. No ETA.

Man, I miss my PowerBook.

Oh dear.

So, whatever good computer karma I have have acquired by religiously backing up my own data was negated yesterday when I tried to back up Merrystar’s data.

Last night was spent rebuilding her partition table — by hand, mind you — and then reinstalling Linux on Tsiolkovsky.

If you’re wondering how a backup could have gone so wrong that it would require rebuilding a partition table, well, that makes two of us.

(Fortunately, there is a backup of the drive now.)

Since I’m going to be stuck on my Windows machine for at least a week, time to get the screensavers installed:

• System47, a very nice LCARS-style display
• the electric sheep screen-saver

Both of these were first observed at work. The electric sheep one is really interesting, as the ‘sheep’ evolve. No, really. Your screen saver freakin’ evolves.

Still not as good as xscreensaver or the “OS X RSS Screen Saver” — and let’s face it, nothing beats pictures of your wife and kids floating across the screen — but still, very good and worth having.

Interesting. SLAX fits on my USB keychain. Nice!

Finally! Time for me to experience Apple’s Customer Service first hand. Up to now it’s all been ordering and whatnot. But now I’m having video problems on my 17” Powerbook G4. Joy!

Last night, Hithum’s screen wouldn’t light up upon waking from sleep. I opened the lid, and … nothing. She was obviously on, but I couldn’t see anything. Huh.

This has happened a few times before, but closing the lid and reopening it usually fixed the problem. So that’s what I did. Still nothing.

Maybe a restart? Well, I was in the middle of a backup, so I just let that run all night. I could SSH in and shut down lots of processes, monitor things, make sure that the backup went as scheduled.

But after the backup completed, I rebooted… and got the black screen. I can see — very faintly — the details of what’s on the screen, but there are no lights. The apple on the back also doesn’t light up. Everything else is good.

Okay, so off to the internet I go. Zap the PRAM? Check. Reset the video card? Check. Nuke the PMU? Check.

Turn it on… and black screen. Argh!

Fortunately, I got the extended AppleCare protection plan, and I’m one of the <10% who have automated backups, so I’m just irritated at the inconvenience, not freaking out. So I called Apple this afternoon.

Oi.

They asked me what I wanted to do. Well, I’ll be in The City on Monday, so I can drop it off at the Tyson’s Corner store. But only on Monday. Otherwise, I’ll ship it in and have you ship it back.

“Well,” the helpful agent said, “I can book you for 3pm, 4pm, 7pm or 8pm tonight, would that work?”

“No,” I replied, “Monday is the only day I can do it. I’m on the other side of the state from that store.”

“Oh, okay. Let me put you on hold for a minute.” I’m on hold for 4 minutes. Dum dee dum.

“Are you an ProCare member,” he asked upon his return?

“Nope.”

“I’m sorry, sir, then I can’t make appointments for you on Monday then. I can only make same-day appointments for you,” he said.

“Whaaa?” I said. I think I actually said that, too, with my voice going up and all.

“I’m sorry, sir. But you can call the day of and make an appointment then.”

“Okay. You’re 24×7, right? No problem. I’m up early.”

“Actually, sir, you can only make a reservation starting at 9.”

“For a store that opens at 10?”

“Yes sir.”

(You can see we were getting along brilliantly. At least he called me sir.)

So: Off to a wonderful start, as you can see. I will call from the road on Monday morning, set up an appointment, and drop off Hithlum at the store to get fixed. I expect that I will have a short temper by the time I am all done.

But still.

At least I have backups.

Dear ext3,

I’d like to thank you for the fantastic improvements you’ve introduced over ext2, like your ability to render deleted files completely unrecoverable due to your wonderful ability to zero out all of the inodes.

I understand that this helps you recover better from crashes. Congratulations!

I also understand that this makes all of those pesky user errors, where someone types the wrong rm -Rf command, which never happens, absolute. When a user makes a change on an ext3 system, that change is made! Huzzah! And you’re the default on most new Linux installs! Good for you. Glad to see you’re getting ahead in the world.

It’s probably a good thing that they don’t mention that files are unrecoverable from you when they install you, right? I mean, that would be embarassing. And we can’t have that!

Now, instead of using all of those ext2 utilities - you know, those ones that all those linux distros swear will still work with you - I can learn to make peace with watching loved ones lose years of work in such a way that even throwing thousands of dollars at the problem will not solve! Now I get to learn how to scrape the binary off a disk, once we determine what the header and footer of obscure astronomical data files are and talk to the very nice developer of PhotoRec to please add them into the supported filetypes.

Because, you know, I really was getting kinda bored, what with the life and job and family and whatnot.

Thanks again!

Cheers,
Brett

P.S. I‘m switching everyone I know to HFS+ or ZFS. Even FAT32 is lookin’ pretty good in my book now. But don’t take it personally!

(Crossposted to my LiveJournal, because sometimes I actually do want comments and advice. That’s why I have a LiveJournal.)

With the upgrade to iTunes 7: Hazards and Surprises with iTunes 7 Cover Art is a worthwhile read.

Bingo! 100 gigabytes of storage. $199/year.

I may need to reconsider my offline backup strategy.

I have to say, jUploadr is really nice. Even better than the Flickr Uploadr, methinks.

(I am so ready for Web 3.0, when e comes back from his vacation.)

From the ever-useful Alistair Frost — every icon in Outlook 2003.

JWZ: Spotlight continues to blow.

So, Spotlight is (again) not indexing everything. I did the thing that fixed it the last time this happened (reboot, mdutil -E /, wait over night) and that seemed to only make it worse. Then I tried

find / -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 mdimport

and that seemed to help somewhat, but there’s still a ton of stuff missing.

Dear Mail.app.

Thank you.

Don’t ever do that again. I’m actually becoming fond of you, and the thought of switching again made me use language I’d normally avoid. I’m sorry, and thank you for returning my mail.

Still: NOT FUNNY.

Cheers,
Brett

Mail.app did a bad, bad thing last night.

It lost mail. Everything from 26 July to 2 August.

Mail.app, don’t you know I’m vindictive and petty when it comes to software? That I might like your pretty interface, but if you fuck up the core thing you’re supposed to do, it won’t save you.

I have a pipe wrench, and so help me, if you don’t give me back my last week of email, I’m going to use it on your GUI. You won’t be so pretty after I’m done with you.

(Off to check my backups tomorrow. So. Pissed. Why did I stop using Pine?)

I’ve been looking for a counterpart to PDFCreator on the Mac. CUPS-PDF might be it.

Now trying: Democracy, an internet TV player.

(Via Boing Boing).

Tim Gaden over at Hawk Wings reminds us that today is iCal day, the date displayed by default on the iCal icon. He offers some timely add-ons to make iCal better to celebrate.

Oddly enough, I just noticed that I mention calendars in all of today’s posts.

In lieu of the longer post about Mail and iCal I promised yesterday: MailTags makes sense and is immediately useful, Mail Act-On is less so. I’ll give it a few days and see if I ‘get it.’

(It took me easily a month to get Quicksilver, so I’m willing to give things a little bit of time before ploinking them now.)

It’s been a while since I switched from Linux to Mac OS X, and a week ago I got a new Windows laptop at work which needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. So: it’s time to review some software.

Mac OS X

I confess: I use a lot of the default Apple software. I started out fresh last November and gave the prepackaged software a try before switching back to my Open Source standbys.

• For Mac alchemy, only Quicksilver will do. Holy holy holy. Quicksilver changes everything.

• Biggest surprise, next to Quicksilver? Safari. I was surprised by how much I liked Safari’s RSS news reader, and how seamlessly it integrated into my workflow. It’s snappy (with some exceptions, of course) and the UI is slightly easier to use than Firefox. Firefox is my current third-string browser, edged out by Camino — both Gecko browsers, but Camino is noticiably faster than Firefox. I tried out a few other browsers along the way: Seamonkey (the old Mozilla suite), Shiira, SunriseBrowser. None of them stood out enough to dislodge Safari or Camino.

• Mail, aka Mail.app. It was good enough to get me to switch from Pine, but its IMAP problems caused me to switch to POP3, which made me become a religious reader of jwz’s Mail.app posts. I like the interface (especially how I can color-code messages) but would like some tighter integration with iCal for tasks. This AppleScript baloney is … baloney.

• I plunked down the cash and got Mac Office, so I use Entourage for my work mail. It works well enough, but the UI? Not so much. Still on the fence with this one. (Mail and calendaring will probably be another separate post.)

• Emacs is here, in both Cocoa and Carbon versions. I’m using the Carbon one more and more, but still waiting for XEmacs to make the leap.

• I am really impressed by Mac The Ripper and HandBrake, the ultimate Mac DVD backup combination. MtR copies your DVDs onto your hard drive (*excellent* for watching while travelling, save your batteries!) and HandBrake compresses them from 7GB to < 1GB.

• Adium X is an instant messaging client that blows iChat out of the water. To be fair, if iChat supported more than 3 protocols, I might be more willing to give it a chance. But it doesn’t. Adium does, and does it better than Trillian.

• For audio processing, I use Audacity. It’s as good as you get outside of an Amiga. (Don’t forget the LAME codec if you want MP3 support.)

Utilities:

• Browsejour, a handy app to spot other items using Bonjour in the area.
• Disk Inventory X gives you a visual representation of a directory. Eh. It was useful when I was searching my old drives.
• DynDNS Updater, to keep my dynamic hostname associated with my Mac.
• Flickr Uploadr, er, uploads files to Flickr.
• Flip4Mac, plays windows media files.
• GLTerminal, a full screen terminal.
• Growl notifies you of events. I haven’t decided if this is a good thing or not. It adds key functionality to applications that miss it, but sometimes it’s too intrusive. I’m on the fence here.
• NeoOffice, the OpenOffice.org port to OS X. With MS Office installed on this machine, I only use it to read OpenDoc format files. Hard to think of a 350+MB app as a utility…
• OggDrop X, for converting OGG music files.
• pearLyrics, a handy app that scans the web and adds lyrics to your iTunes songs. Unfortunately, Warner/Chappell Music sent a cease and desist, and you can read the rest.
• VLC for those media files that Quicktime can’t hack.
• Yahoo Widgets, for traffic and weather. I was using it for stocks too, but that just got too depressing. (There’s a reason I go with index funds.)

Encryption and Security:

• MacGPG and GPGMail, for encryption.
• OTR Proxy, for off-the-record encryption.
• XNmap, a front-end to nmap. Just because.
• IPScanner. No reason.

Amusements:

• Armagetron and Armagetron Advanced, Tron Cycle games.
• Battle of Wesnoth, which I have deleted off my machine so I can remain a productive member of society.
• Crack Attack, one of Merrystar’s favorites.
• Google Earth. Google Maps on steroids.
• Stellarium, planetarium software. Sweet.

Windows

Yah. I still use Windows at work. Here’s what I’m using these days.

• PuTTy for SSH and SSH tunnels.
• 7-Zip for file compression (removing WinZip along the way. WinZip is not free, people!)
• PDFCreator” for making PDFs.
• Irfanview for image manipulation.
• Firefox, though I don’t really use it at work anymore. (I visit reporting sites and control panels that require IE… that’s about it. How sad has my life become?)
• Trillian for instant messaging. I tried out Gaim again and still didn’t like it on Windows. Slow, clunky, UI is odd.… just couldn’t warm to it. So, back to Trillian I go, despite its lack of address book integration. (Adium X is definitely ahead of Trillian here.)
• Eraser, for secure file deletion.
• Yahoo Widgets, for weather and traffic.
• Skype hasn’t been put back on my machine, for obvious reasons
• AppRocket is close to Quicksilver, but can’t manage the tight integration with the filesystem. (This is the filesystem’s fault, not AppRocket’s.) Makes the Thinkpad almost bearable now.

Okay, lazyweb: let me know what else I’m missing!

Aha.

While composing a different post, I ran across jwz’s problem with loading images in Safari, which sounded eerily like my own issues.

Seems to be related: I have a single River of News button that gets all my daily RSS feeds. When I hit it, it can take forever to load, and when it’s loading, all my other tabs are FUBARed.

No fix.

Foxtrot!

If I have not mentioned it before now, let me take the opportunity to say:

I LOVE FIREWIRE.

I don’t just like it. I LOVE it. It’s reduced my backup times to practically nothing. 7GB DVD files? Yeah, transfered in 5 minutes.

I have been using the MacAlly PHR-100AC USB 2.0/Firewire external drive enclosures on 250 GB Seagate 7200 Barracudas as my backup drives. One was running USB 2.0 only (due to a misset Master/Slave jumper, which I think causes most of the problems for people upgrading) and one running Firewire 400.

It was really sad to watch the same backup routine finish so much faster using Firewire. Firewire! Firewire! Huzzah, Firewire!

(Did I mention Trip is teething, and my sleep patterns are somewhat disrupted? Probably should have said something about that before.)

(Yes dear, I’m going to sleep now.)

Helping Merrystar get Flash off of Tsiolkovsky when I ran across this page on the Adobe/Macromedia site: How to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control

Due to recent enhancements with the Flash Player installers, you are now only able to uninstall by using the Adobe Flash Player Uninstaller (below). To uninstall Flash Player, simply download the appropriate uninstaller for your system and follow the instructions listed below.

When did they stop including an uninstaller in their distribution???

You know what I like best about this cool little USB lamp?

That’s right. The Panasonic W-2 in the background. (Hello, sailor!)

Hmmmm.

Restarting Safari doesn’t fix it.

Neither does restarting the Mac.

Hmmmm.

(Maybe this is a good chance to try out the other browsers on this machine?)

Dear Fellow Mac Users,

Anyone else having problems with Safari not loading pages? I certainly am.

This started yesterday: Safari goes along for a while, merrily loading tabs, until some sort of threshold is reached and it decrees no more pages for you. I then have to restart it. Usually I end up launching Camino and copying the open tabs over there.

Anyone?

Via the ISC and the nmap-hacker’s list, top 100 network security tools.

Merrystar has taken over Hithlum (my 17” PowerBook) for a project she is working on. It’s always amusing to watch her using it, because it is wider than she is. The proportions are all wrong.

Some of this is due to her own choice in laptops; her 12” Panasonic W2 (Tsiolkovsky) is very small, very light, and very well suited to her size. (Very pretty, too! she will no doubt add, when she reads this.) Merrystar has an excellent sense of proportion.

Which is why, as I’m now using Tsiolkovsky, I am left wondering two things:

1. How can she put up with these god-awful jaggedy non-anti-aliased fonts?
2. How do I put up with them every day at work and not notice them?

Don’t believe that they’re a problem? Let’s review.

Exhibit A:

Here is how this site looks on Hithlum using Safari. The font is different (Lucida Grande), but even with the default Trebuchet MS, the anti-aliasing and smoothing is really apparent.

Exhibit B:

Now, the same site, but on Tsiolkovsky using Firefox. Notice the jagged fonts.

Can you see the difference? Does it bother you?

In Merrystar’s case, and I’m completely speculating here, it’s that she spends most of her day using Linux, so Window’s font display is on par with the environment she’s comfortable with. Or, and this may be more likely, Windows is so alien that it just fades into the background of strangeness. It is very odd living with someone who doesn’t equate CTRL-X/C/V instinctively with the Cut/Copy/Paste sequence. (When I asked her how to paste just now, she couldn’t answer until I specified the program and OS.)

In my case, I think it’s because there’s such a division between my work and personal computer use. Everything is different between the environments; not just the OS and hardware, but the sites I go to, the applications I use, everything is different. I assume that the sites I read at night just look better.

Isn’t that odd?

I’ve tried changing some of the display settings on Tsiolkovsky to make it better. Changing smoothing in the Display Control Panel from Standard to ClearType helps, but turns all the type fuzzy. I can see why it’s not the default.

Were properly-proportioned fonts part of my decision to switch to a Mac? Not at all. Is it one of the small things that turns me into a passionate user of my glorified screwdriver?

You betcha.

(Merrystar, are you done yet? I miss my fonts.)

At work, I have been issued a Thinkpad R51 that has - to put it mildly - seen better days. It’s not a bad machine, but it runs Windows, and that (through some unseen force of nature) means that it has problems.

And when I mean problems, I mean Blue Screens Of Death. All the time. So my Help Desk people have tried to fix it, but without any noticable success. I don’t blame them for this; Windows is like that. (This is one reason I switched to Linux and Macs.)

Yesterday, however, they did something so unspeakably diabolical, so fiendishly clever, that my mind boggles. They took my computer away to install some drivers, and when it came back…

… it was clean.

Not just a little clean, mind you. Clean clean. Sparkling clean. Screen was clean, case was clean, keyboard was clean…

Dumbfounded, I tell you. It’s like when you go in to get your oil changed and they wash and clean your car; everything about the car is better, even though it’s just had some fluids replaced.

As an aside, why did dealers stop doing this? VW Springfield only does this if I blow a whole bunch of cash on repairs, and if they had time. Back in Texas no dealer ever let a car off the lot if it wasn’t washed first. It was something that just wasn’t done.

Apparently, different rules apply in DC.

Now here’s the telling thing: even though the computer is still broken, I am completely happy to work with these guys as long as it takes, because they’re giving me things that I didn’t realize I wanted.

Like, a nice, shiny computer to show off that BSOD.

(It’s the little things that make us happy.)

Still looking at new photo gallery options, because, you know, if it ain’t broke, I gotta fix it.

(Please reference the gallery’s death warrant as to why it must die.)

• Stick with Gallery, because it’s too much damn work to upgrade?

  pros: no more upgrading work, EXIF data already there. cons: lots of uploading work, need to manually rotate photos, bitter about upgrade woes.

• Export from iPhoto and rsync to web host?

  upside: simple, forces me to tag photos before putting them into iPhoto, potentially more space available if I keep it off the web host. downside: forces me to keep photos in iPhoto, with the attendant database hell.

• Write my own perl script to generate the code manually?

  good: perl or python, I could use more experience. bad: hello, time? EXIF data hard part.

• Move to Flickr?

  +: popular, lots of features, privacy controls. -: popular, public, none of my family actually uses it, so privacy controls are worthless, limited bandwidth.

Choices, choices. Hmmmm.

(Did I mention that I figured out a way around Gallery’s uploading wonkiness? FTP/rsync. Good old fashioned file transfer. Duh.)

So, my gallery software signed its death warrant tonight.

I recently upgraded (when will I fucking learn that this is not a worthwhile activity???) the gallery software to fix some bugs and “improve performance.”

Lies, lies, lies. I fixed some of the display problems — but at the cost of being unable to upload files in batches. All of the various upload tools are broken, except for the single-file HTML upload. And it can’t find ImageMagick anymore, even though nothing had changed. Brilliant.

Did I mention today is my son’s birthday? I had over 50 pictures to upload tonight, with grandparents awaiting with bated breath. Still not done. Seriously started looking at other solutions, including rolling my own scripts, because you know what? Screwing around with photo gallery software that people don’t bother to QA is a serious fucking waste of time.

I’ve been on the fence about Gallery since I installed it; I like a lot of the features (particularly the EXIF data and random image block) but there are other things that are just plain awful. It’s overengineered, too hard to modify, and strange things break all the time.

And I’m not just taking about the upload applets and remote gallery applications.

Well, right now I am talking about them. But don’t pick nits.

It’s too bad, because I had someone look at the gallery just last week and comment how cool it is. It is cool, but when it breaks, it breaks hard. Time to find a better way to share photos.

(Suggestions on new gallery options gratefully accepted.)

Ever notice how this website never lets you go to http://www.brettpeters.org? You always end up at http://brettpeters.org?

Yeah. I’m sneaky like that. Add the following (with appropriate substitutions) to your .htaccess file:

# kill the www prefix:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} "^www"
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301]


Once I switched, it was only a matter of time.

I have been wondering this for a while too: jwz asks if Filevault is worth it?

(My initial impression is no, use GPG to encrypt the important stuff, as Filevault has too many risks. But the discussion around it is moderately interesting — for those so inclined.)

My new love? Yahoo Widgets.

There are only a few things I want to be able to look at at any time of day - weather, traffic, and pictures of my family - so being able to glance over and see my kid’s big grey eyes while I’m working is priceless.

My only complaint is that the fantstic Sol widget:

is only available for the OS X Dashboard, so I have to run two widget engines at once. Someone, please port it to Yahoo!

Wireless is now working on the Linux side of Tsiolkovsky. How, you ask?

I upgraded my router to an Airport Express and it worked. Buh-bye, D-Link DI-524!

(Now if only bluetooth would work again, my happiness would be complete.)

First official waste of freakin’ time on OS X! Bluetooth no longer works to connect my Mac to my phone. And after an hour, I still don’t know if the problem’s with the phone or the computer. Argh. Grrrr.

The more things change…

I’m retiring my bookmarks file. Migrating from Firefox to Safari rendered it obsolete, so I’m replacing it with a smaller, more targeted links page.

Still, not bad for a file that has been online since my very first web page in 1994!

Today was one of those tough, fast, hard days at work: everything seems okay until it really, really isn’t. And then? Shit → Fan. Not pretty.

So, in response, after losing myself in my family when I came home, it’s now time to kvetch about computers. It’s either that or move furniture around, and there’s a sleeping baby to consider there.

I got a lot of responses to my switch to a Mac, mostly positive. I think it’s worth making the point that once you’ve switched off Windows for Linux, you’ve already gone through the cognitive gauntlet of a foreign OS. That Windows → Linux transition is missing all the nice pretty shiny parts that OS X brings to the table. Aqua is definitely a step up from KDE or Gnome.

That said, I still have some issues with the Mac. (Why are you not surprised, dear reader?)

• My only hardware-related complaint is that the trackpad on the G4 Powerbook isn’t 100% reliable. Occasionally it decides to take a break. Following a tip on the net, placing your palm across the pad surface resets it and gets it going again. Unfortunately, the wrist angle is all wrong on that move for it to ever be comfortable.

• I’m having a damnable time getting the OAR/Address Book sync to work, so I can share contacts between work (Exchange) and home (Address Book). I suspect there may be something disabled on our server.

• I don’t even want to talk about the iCal/Exchange integration woes. iCal looks beautiful and easy to use. But without Outlook syncing, ploink.

• Passwordless ssh. I’ve spent hours trying to set up passwordless ssh between the Powerbook and my Linux server. I can go to my webhost without a problem, but for some reason the SuSE 10.0 box won’t allow it in that direction. (The other direction - server to laptop - is perfectly fine, so I just need to switch backups from push to pull.)

• iPhoto. Okay, I’m seduced by the square footage and photobooks, but not only is iPhoto doing bad things to my photo organization, it’s slow. That may be its death knell. I think my previous folder-based organization was actually better than trusting some big scary database. I’m not ready for Photoshop CS2 - yet - but I wouldn’t mind giving it a test drive.

• Adium wins the chat battle hands down after Trillian hosed my carefully-annotated contact list. The best part? Address Book integration. Rename once, apply the alias everywhere. Now when I work from home I leave Adium running and don’t bother with IM on the Windows boxes. That said, it still sucks when trying to actually remove people from your list. I just want to get my contact list below 500 people, people! Is it so much to ask that I not have multiple accounts on a single provider just so I can see who’s online?

And now for the heresy:

• I like Safari and Mail.app better than Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. Much better, in fact. The RSS features in Safari have changed how I read online, and I no longer read all my email in pine. Perhaps it’s the punk rock reaction to popularity (I knew those apps when they were cool and outside the mainstream and buggier than a bayou, and now you young whippersnappers get all your fancy extensions and a million downloads!), but it’s more that I just don’t care anymore. Mozilla used to be miles ahead of the pack, but it’s lost ground again, and on the Mac it’s not quite the same experience, and hey! I have other things to think about these days.

See? Much better than talking about work.

Firefox tops PCWorld’s top 100 products of 2005. Mac OS X.4 (Tiger) is #3.

New Flotsam: switch.

I finally had had enough of trying to get Linux to work on 6-year old equipment. The problems I’d been having with Arbonne were the last straw. So, last weekend I went out (with Merrystar’s encouragement) and got a Powerbook (17-inch) and couldn’t be happier with it.

Of course, my network decided to retaliate against the interloper:

• My POS replacement wireless router (D-Link DI-524, which I do not recommend) stopped talking to the cable modem. Hours wasted with hard resets and reprogramming and more hard resets finally resulted in a working internet connection.

• I rebooted Arbonne to restore her wireless connection - yes, I know that you shouldn’t have to reboot a Linux box, but this is the only thing that worked to solve whatever Netgear MA301 - DI-524 wierdness was going on - and she lost her boot loader on the reboot. Four days later, with numerous attempts at installing from the same CDs that would work on Tsiolkovsky, I dragged her upstairs and did a network install of SuSE 10.0.

• Tsiolkovsky’s upgrade? Not so good. Installer barfed in the middle and the computer was down for a frantic 24 hours as I tried to restore the bootloader so Merrystar could use the Windows partition.

• While playing around with the bluetooth on the Powerbook, I wiped my phone’s address book clean. Oops.

That was last weekend, which I am never doing again. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.

Anyhow:

• Tsiolkovsky has been upgraded from RHEL 3.0 to SuSE 10.0 OSS. USB now works, though the wireless and automounter are still flaky. The Windows partition is now readable in Linux, which is a huge improvement.

• Arbonne has been converted into a headless server (no monitor, no desktop manager, no graphical environment) and has been renamed Lórien accordingly. Lórien is running SuSE 10.0 OSS, and her network problems continue - I couldn’t get the D-Link G card working at all, and the MA301 continues to fight with the wireless router. Also, I misbought a second 250GB drive, so I’m still running the 40GB drive for /. and the 250GB for /data. Oh, and I can’t access the internet from her for more than 10 seconds after boot with the wireless card. Grumble.

• Hithlum is my new Powerbook. She’s purty. I had originally named her Hísilómë, but all the accents didn’t translate well in the scripts and shells.

• My phone address updated flawlessly once I imported my contacts from Outlook to Address Book.app.

• Tigana remains as she ever has, running Windows 2000 and Red Hat 7.3. She slept through the whole debacle.

:: Reviews : First Look at SUSE 10.0

Finally getting over a bad cold I got in St. Louis last weekend. A few (geek-related) updates:

• A problem with the photo site that cropped up in the last few days has been fixed; Michal updated some of the apache security modules and a misspelling in my .htaccess file was no longer passed over with equanimity. If you’re still having problems, you may need to restart your browser session.

• Most of my recent activity has been over at Trip’s site, not here, but there’s been an intermittent problem with connections to the photo galleries on Arbonne dropping without reason. I suspect that the cause is some incompatibility with the Netgear MA301 wireless PC card and the new D-Link D524 wireless router I recently got, some wonky problem that will take weeks to find. Restarting network services doesn’t restore the connection; a full reboot is required, which is ridiculous. So I went out and got a faster D-Link card that I’ll upgrade to eventually.

• Speaking of upgrading Arbonne, I got another 250GB hard drive so that I can increase the size of my RAID 1 array from 40GB to 150 or so. (I back up other computers on my Arbonne, so this will function as further backup for them.) I’ve pretty much filled up the 40GB with my CD collection and photo galleries. However, as this upgrade involes the disk with the OS on it, I’m much more worried. Should I copy everything and restore it? Copy some and upgrade to SuSE 9.3? Fresh install time? Questions, questions. I’m sure I’ll dither about this for some time and then do a fresh install.

• The move to a G network has gone smoothly, for the most part. I installed a print server — why did I wait so long to do that? — and the new G cards work well. I still have problems with Tsiolkovsky’s built-in Centrino A/B card, but that’s Intel’s fault. No news on the RHEL 3 → FC 4 conversion; now that Merrystar’s back at work, I’m reluctant to touch any machine that actually works.

And that’s all the network news.

Hee. The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security.

Wired talks about Google Talk.

Update: getting Google Talk to work with other IM clients.

Further update: updated my contact page.

Wireless router just stopped working tonight. No reason, no idea why. It loads a page, or two, and then … stops. Nada. Zip. No page for you! Thank you, come again.

Fortunately: I have a really, really, really long ethernet cable.

Unfortunately: I have a really, really, really long ethernet cable stretched across my house.

I was actually only kidding about downloading another linux distro. Looks like I’ll have to do it anyway, as Novell frees SUSE Professional under new branding:

Novell is renaming SUSE Professional and releasing it as 100% open source. Novell spokesman and director of public relations Bruce Lowry says his company is “pushing” to make SUSE Linux available to anyone who wants it. According to sources close to the company, SUSE Professional is to be rebranded as OpenSUSE.

Lowry says Novell is will make SUSE freely available, starting with the 10.0 beta, at the Linux World Conference next week. “We really are focused on pushing Linux adoption as aggressively as we can, and think opening up SUSE Linux to users and developers is a good way to do this,” he says. “We’re opening up the development process up front.” Sources say Novell hopes its flagship Linux product, SUSE Enterprise, will benefit from community development.

Now that I’ve got several gigabytes of photos that I’m trying to present every day, I figured it was time to go ahead and learn some batch conversion commands. Links from my search:

• ImageMagick
• Graphics from the command line
• More graphics from the command line
• Examples of ImageMagick Usage

mogrify looks the most promising so far. mogrify -format png -sample 100% *.jpg -comment "Copyright 2005 Brett Peters" may do the trick.

Cisco, ISS file suit against rogue researcher.

In what universe does suing people who point out major security holes in the backbone of the internet sound like a good idea?

Some things I just don’t understand. Sorry.

Slashdot | Tear Down the Firewall

Damn hax000rs and their SSH intrusion scanners. Fortunately: DenyHosts, an SSH Server Attack Denial Tool.

Also useful: SuSE Security FAQ.

To noone’s surprise but my own, I ended up downloading Fedora Core 4 anyway this weekend. Merrystar’s work computer is still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, which still hasn’t fixed the USB problems that prevent the wireless from working, which in turn diminishes the machine’s utility tenfold.

Maybe I should download SuSE 9.3 — just in case.

Previously, I did this:

• Move pictures from camera;
• Create “date-name” directories for each session: e.g., if I shot a show that had three bands on June 1, the directories would be 2005-06-01-foo, 2005-06-01-bar, and 2005-06-01-baz.
• Put all the photos of each subject in a RAW/ subdirectory (e.g., 2005-06-01-foo/RAW/). Never touch those.
• Copy */RAW to */EDIT. In the EDIT subdirectory, delete the junk, and color correct and crop the rest.
• When publishing to the web, copy some subset of EDIT, and resize and post the copy.

I don’t think I can easily do this with iPhoto. iPhoto seems to want to obscure the actual location of the files on disk from me: it wants me to access my photos only through the iPhoto UI, using its notion of galleries. It always stores files on disk in its world in directories like YYYY/MM/DD/, which is close to my layout, but I want my “keywords” in the directory names as well, not solely in some undocumented metadata file off to the side somewhere.

Fedora Core 4 is out, in the usual places.

I started downloading it before I stopped and asked aloud, whatsa meesa thinking?

Looking through this log shows me that this is the last thing I should consider. I may as well fire up Civilization and Battle for Wesnoth! At the same time!

So, I killed wget and am now going to bed, saved by my weblog.

My wonderful webhosting company is offerng lifetime hosting and has a few slots still available.

Though I don’t talk about it much in this log, I’ve been really happy with Cornerhost. Michal’s service has been fantastic, and that’s made all the difference in the world. There are plenty of companies who could learn from his example.

Anyhow, the deal is $400 for lifetime hosting. Check it out.

Alternate styles are reenabled for this site. (I was feeling nostalgic for the Enterprise theme.)

Slashdot | Write Down Your Passwords.

SuSE Professional 9.3 is out. Worth a try?

I really need to try the new version of Gronk.

Updated: email stats.

Spamassassin 3.0 has finally been trained up again so my inbox is relatively clean. You can see the percentage shifting out of Inbox and into Spam (which is back at ~75%).

So what I take away from this browser speed comparison site is very different from the author’s conclusion: Lynx remains the fastest browser out there. Hooray!

Updated, after some delay: email stats.

jwz - the interminable Linux USB/CF saga.

Build vs. Buy?

Ubuntu.

Slashdot | MS AntiSpyware vs Ad-Aware vs. SpyBot

Sub300.com

While burning Fedora Core 3 disks for Merrystar’s lab, I cleaned up my docs page a bit and updated the entry on Tsiolkovsky.

Now that’s the Linux I’ve come to love.

Whilst upgrading Tsiolkovsky from RHEL 3 to SuSE 9.1: Serial ATA problems! No patch available!

Sheesh.

Fedora Core 3 vs. Suse 9.2 Professional - OSNews.com

Off-the-Record Messaging

More open source software for Windows at the GNUWin II project.

The Open CD 2.0 release is out:

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of TheOpenCD v2.0. The disc contains old favorites like Mozilla, OpenOffice, AbiWord, Gimp in updated versions, but also has some noteable additions like Firefox, Thunderbird, Blender and Gaim. The CD browser technology is also new this time, and is based on Gecko (see screenshots). This approach should make it simpler to make derivatives, including localized versions, some of which will be out shortly. We have timed the release to be out just before the holidays so you can fill the stockings of friends and family with Free and useful software. Get a copy from one of our FTP mirrors or on Bittorrent.

Updated: email stats.

linux:

Operating systems matter deeply to programmers, but in the big picture, they’re old news. It’s all about the network, and the applications that let you get benefit from the network. Using a computer isn’t an end in itself, it’s merely a means to an end. The focus must always be on the task that the person wants to accomplish, to communicate, to learn, to create, to be entertained. Insofar as the computer itself makes itself known in this process, the computer is an impediment. Do What I Mean! Be humanistic, don’t get bogged down in the details.

Top 75 Network Security Tools

nmap @ insecure.org

Well, I don’t think this bodes well. I just spent entirely too long searching the Novell/SuSE sites for their product downloads. Specifically, their free versions of Linux.

I don’t blame them for obscuring the free downloads, but I don’t have to like it. And if it gets too much worse, I’m happy to use a different distribution.

In the meanwhile, the FTP site is at ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current/.

So the last entry of the Disciples of the Inner Flame has been generating a lot of comment spam lately, which will in turn inflate my inbox numbers by 65 this month. I disabled comments by renaming the cgi script, but is there a better way to handle it? Anyone use the MT Blacklist plugin? One reason I don’t have comments enabled on my personal site is exactly this reason, but if there’s a reliable way around it I’d be willing to try it out.

I spent a few hours Saturday morning taking stock of my network, because it’s what I do at 5:45 on a Saturday morning when I can’t sleep. Merrystar is good about not killing me when I wake up obscenely early and march downstairs to engage in my computer drama issues.

Arbonne, my PIII-700 desktop, is now running SuSE 9.1, from the 9.1 Personal CD. I downloaded apache, rsync, and emacs before figuring out how to configure YaST to install from an FTP site. Overall I’m quite pleased with SuSE, but I’ve read some things about Novell’s changes that may not bode well for a lasting relationship with this distro. The configuration was really easy compared to Fedora and Red Hat, but I’m now wary of corporate meddling after Red Hat’s Enterprise debacle.

Anyhow, Arbonne is functioning as the primary server again after a few weeks of being hosed by my yum update from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 2. (Mostly due to the change between XFree86 and Xorg, I think. I’m not going to go back to try to replicate.) I was rereading my installation notes for Red Hat 9, and they begin:

“Unplug the machine and move it to wherever your cable modem and router is currently located. At this time, that means take it upstairs, Brett. You cannot activate your wireless network card with the packages installed off the CD, and you will have to update your kernel as well. While you’re lugging a desktop up the stairs, reconsider. By the time you get to the monitor, I bet you’ll have thought of a better way to spend your weekend.”

Good advice.

Al-Rassan, my Thinkpad i1400, made a brief reappearance this weekend. Her screen is stil dead, but I plugged her in to my work Thinkpad’s power cord (no recharge, but at least she turns on) and Arbonne’s monitor and confirmed that everything still booted and that all data was off of it. (Yes, and yes.) I have been toying with the idea of making Al-Rassan the primary public computer and isolating Arbonne more; after looking at her again, this might not be a good idea.

When I ran yum to update the Fedora Core 2 installation, I ran out of disk space. I had 3.3 GB used and only 650 MB free - without any data files. I got rid of some of the bigger packages I was pretty sure I’d never use on it again (openoffice.org, for one) and was able to update everything, but I’m still running low on space (about 900 MB free.) For a server, this is a real weakness. One way around this would be to accept the screen death and uninstall X and all the user-friendly GUI programs. This would free up about 2 gigs of space, if I remember the Fedora Core installs right.

But turning Al-Rassan into a non-graphical machine means I’m only using it as a server, and that’s already handled by Arbonne - and Arbonne has about 33 GB free, even with all my data files. So I’d either need to abstain from graphic and sound files, or get a bigger hard drive. Neither option is appealing. I already have a server set up that takes up enough of my time. If I want to use Al-Rassan on an ongoing basis, I’m already going to need to replace the external power pack. Do I really need to get a new hard drive, too?

I could install another, smaller distro on Al-Rassan to free up some more space, but that avoids the real question - what’s this computer for? I now use Tigana as my main puttering laptop. I don’t need another laptop - at least not one that’s slower and bulkier and louder and has no screen. And as a server, I’ll have to invest some money - not a lot, but some - to get it working again. Like many folks, I initially thought a laptop would make a great server because of the battery backup in case of power failure. It’s true, it will save the computer from crashing. But you’re still offline, unless your modem and router are both also on battery backup. Mine aren’t, and I don’t see putting them on it anytime soon.

But as I was working on Al-Rassan, I thought, you know, this might make a good guest computer. Just put a monitor, keyboard, and mouse on it and it’s a low-profile, small desktop. For guests it wouldn’t matter that there’s not a lot of disk space, and it can still handle things like web browsing and email. I’ll keep this in mind as I get more spare parts - I’ll want to replace Arbonne’s monitor eventually.

Tigana, Merrystar’s old Vaio 505-TR, continues to run Red Hat 7.2 just fine. I’ve patched it with the latest updates from fedoralegacy.org, and wireless with WEP works on it now, which is really all I ever needed to switch over to Linux. There’s a Windows 2000 installation on it, but I only boot into it to occasionally install some critical security updates. I manually installed Mozilla 1.7, since Firefox requires GTK and I’m not willing to install a whole bunch of things on a system that already just works. I don’t mess around with it, it doesn’t mess around with me, and that’s what I tell myself everytime I think I should upgrade it to 7.3.

The T key still falls off occasionally, the space bar doesn’t always work, and one of the mouse butons is kaput. But it’s sub-3 pounds and just works, so I won’ be replacing it anytime soon. I mean, if someone wants to get me a Panasonic R3, I’m not going to turn it down. (Far, far from it.) But I’m not really ready to go blow a couple grand on yet another computer. (If I do, the next machine name to be used is probably Sarantium, although Soryyia is a close second.)

So now you’re all caught up on my sysadmin drama.

Damnit. Just because my contact list has about 350 people, I’m going to have problems?

Typical.

Trillian Discussion Forums - AIM contacts appear offline.

The maximum buddy list size for AIM is 200…

HOWTO: Upgrade to Fedora on a Laptop with no Floppy or CD Drive

I’m not sure that I really care anymore, but: Slashdot | Fedora Core Release 3 Released. Mirror List, Bit Torrent links.

I may decide to resurrect Al-Rassan (currently loaded with FC 2) so that at least I can keep up to speed with Fedora. Not sure that I want to, but there you have it.

What the hell am I thinking?

I came upstairs last night, cursing like a sailor. Merrystar raised an eyebrow.

“I just installed SuSE. I can’t believe I wasted so much time on Red Hat and Fedora,” I said.

Her eyebrow didn’t move.

“There were no problems. It detected the network card immediately. All I had to do was enter the SSID and WEP key and it was online. It installed mostly everything that I wanted, and not very much that I didn’t; and getting emacs off their site wasn’t difficult at all. Damn it!”

“That’s nice, dear,” she said. I think she’s used to this by now. I stomped back downstairs to continue cursing at something that actually worked out of the box, instead of requiring hours of configuration to get it running.

This morning I came downstairs and everything was still working on Arbonne. I installed rsync so I could reload our home directories off of Tigana. I changed a few of the window behaviors because I wanted to.

Argh! Linux is supposed to be hard, not easy! Especially to configure!

SECURITY UPDATE: PuTTY version 0.56 is released ----------------------------------------------- All the pre-built binaries, and the source code, are now available from the PuTTY website at

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

This is a SECURITY UPDATE. We recommend that _everybody_ upgrade, as soon as possible. This version fixes a security hole in previous versions of PuTTY, which can allow an SSH2 server to attack your client before host key verification. This means that you are not even safe if you trust the server you _think_ you’re connecting to, since it could be spoofed over the network and the host key check would not detect this before the attack could take place. The attack can allow the server to execute code of its choice on the client.

Gizmodo : Letsnote Lineup To Include All Colors of the Rainbow:

Panasonic has announced their newest “Letsnote R3” notebook will be available in a total of 14 colors, online. Featuring your favorite shades such as “Glassy Black,” “Peach Blossom,” and even world-renowned “Cocoa Brown,” surely something here will suit your tastes.

On the inside, you’ll unfortunately find your standard notebook PC. But wait a minute - Panasonic is offering a service called “Romaji Neat Keyboard” which will omit Japanese characters from your keyboard (as these are only available in Japan). That’s right; you pay $30 and to have something removed from your computer. This makes perfect sense to me, because Japanese people rarely (never?) type Japanese using the Japanese character set as depicted on their keyboard. Most Japanese people simply type, for stereotypical example, “sushi” on their keyboard, and convert it to Japanese using software.

Kemplar :: Panasonic Let’s Note R3 :: Tech Specs:

Whenever Panasonic rises to the occasion and throws its hat into the ring of the sub-notebook world, we are always pleasantly surprised. The Panasonic Let’s Note R3 is yet another example of Panasonic going above and beyond our expectations. Not satisfied with simpy releasing one of the most durable subnotebooks ever, Panasonic has introduced their rather excellent new Circular Scrolling Touch Pad as well. The R3, the smallest unit of this new line, is ultra-portable ccomputing at its best. Light, durable, fast, and sleek: the R3 offers a powerful package with an outstanding battery life: up to 8 hours! A clever litttle product from an ingenious manufacturer, the R3 is sure to be one of the biggest hits in both Japan and the select subnotebook users of the U.S.

I’ve finally got everything mostly on Tigana the way I want it, thogh it would be nice to have USB support so I could use a mouse instead of the gimpy trackpad. Haivng GTK so I could run Firefox would be nice, too; even though I’m using KDE on Arbonne, I’ve gotten used to the really nice fonts. So perhpas I should see how Fedora 3 works and try some of the kernel boot parameters to see if it installs correctly.

Wait a minute. Whatsa meesa thinking?

My dearest Merrystar,

I love thee so much that I will spend my evenings trying to get your wireless card working under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, then trying to get the USB pen drive recognized under RHEL 3, and then trying to get an ethernet connection under RHEL 3.

And when that fails, I will direct thee to the following websites, to download drivers, and tarballs, and other assorted installation items, so that even though I could not aid thee in thy quest for wireless access under the great bloated behemoth that is really Red Hat Linux 9, but rebranded and patched for a $179 license that your employer would rather pay, I will present thee with divers instructions as to how I think you can install ndiswrappers around the included Windows drivers and activate your divinely sweet portable computing device’s intrinsic radio networking capabilities.

Why? Because I love thee, my darling, my beloved, and nothing - not even the havoc that Red Hat hath wreaked upon our lives - will keep me from faithfully serving you, my angel, my evening star, my ashke. I will be thy Teleporno, thy Celeborn, grandson of Elmo the ticklish, for all the days of my life. Except without the dirty name.

And now, the promised instructions.

1. Download the NdisWrapper tarball.
2. Locate the windows drivers for the Intel Pro 2100 3B wireless card. These are either on the original source CDs that came with Tsiolkovsky, or you can get them from the web at ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/TravelMate_80x/driver/winxp/intel2100b.zip.
3. Follow the installation instructions.
4. Configure the wireless card according to some of the notes on the distros page. I would set wlan0 to eth1. You’ll need to specify both the WEP key (in /etc/syconfig/network-scripts/keys-eth1 and ifcfg-eth1) and ESSID, but I’ll send those to you under separate cover.
5. Ping rice.edu.
6. Do a little happy dance if it works.

Love,
Your Luke

I was going to shout Huzzah! again, because I’ve completed upgrading Arbonne to Fedora Core 2. The standard http downloads took too long and timed out frequently, so I ended up mounting the ISO images I got off Bittorrent (thank goodness for the torrent) and copying the RPMs into a yum repository as the base. Actually, that was pretty sweet. If nothing else, I’ve learned a lot about yum and package management this week. Last week it was networking - always something to learn when you’re running Linux.

So, I finally updated all the packages and was pretty sure that I was ready to try rebooting and launching into Fedora Core 2 and the 2.6.x kernel, especially since my screen went blank when I logged out this morning. I sshed into Arbonne from Tigana, did a quick shutdown -r now, and watched the screen come alive with the standard scrawling text.

Then when I got to the point where the X server starts up, I got a blank screen. Argh! C’mon, Charlie Brown, kick the football!

So there are some hopeful bug reports out there that may have some clues as how to fix this, and when I reboot into the 2.4 kernel it works fine. Also, I’ve had Fedora Core 2 working on Arbonne before, so it’s not a hardware issue. I’ve got everything kinda configured so that I can use Arbonne (webserver’s down, though, not sure why yet) but I have to ask myself, is it really worth it? I asked myself that earlier this week, but I dodged the question at the time. Now I’m writing this on a computer running Red Hat 7.2 that just works. End of story. (Okay, the T key is flaky, and I’d like to get the second mouse buton working again, but those are hardware issues.)

So then, once I finally get X running and log in, everything’s just slightly - off. The icons are all smaller. The font looks different, even though it probably isn’t. I am dismayed at all the little things I’ll need to change. And that doesn’t count all the big things! But oh look, the user icons are all cute! (Copy those to my home directory… ) Don’t I have other things to do?

Am I bored wth computers that aren’t broken? Do I somehow actually enjoy this?

What a horrifying thought.

Huzzah!

All of the twisting and turning and pulling and cursing to get the wireless interface running on Arbonne finally paid off - not on Arbonne, who has been up for a week or two, but on Tigana, Merrystar’s old Sony Vaio 505-TR that is still running Red Hat 7.2. (Newer distros don’t recongize the old Sony PCMCIA CD-ROM drive.) A few changes to the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file and the netgear card finds the WEP key on bootup.

Of course, my yum addiction continues, thanks to this handy page at the Fedora Legacy Product. Why switch off 7.2 now? USB support? Poppycock.

Huzzah!

I think I’ve lost whatever computer sense I had. The path to the dark side is so easy!

I know I said I’d wait until November to upgrade Arbonne to Fedora Core 3. I know that there’s no absolute pressing need to upgrade. I know Fedora Core 2 let me down, and the constant upgrade path bit me in the ass before. (Actually, now that I think about it, most all the entries in this category are from disasters along the upgrade path. Damn hamster wheel!) I know all of this.

But all of that pales before the simplicity of editing /etc/yum.conf to point to the Fedora repositories, running yum -y upgrade a few times to find all the dependencies, rpm -e to all the dependencies, and then yum -y upgrade one last time. Wait a few hours, or maybe a day or two to download everything, and realize that a watched upgrade doesn’t finish. The excitement! What new things will I get? Will it work? Will I need to rebuild my system? Will I leave a smoking hole in my office? I don’t know, but it’s fantastic!

Whatsa meesa doing?

Am I some kind of moron?

Maybe: Upgrading from RedHat 8/9 to Fedora Core 1.

There’s been all sorts of computer drama around the ol’ homestead these past few weeks.

It all started the day before I left for Ryan and Sarah’s wedding. I hadn’t learned my lesson yet:

Even now, I don’t know what actually happened. The GRUB bootloader on Arbonne — then called Yorktown, and temporarily named Al-Rassan in a fit of nostalgia — couldn’t find the recently-upgraded kernel and, therefore, couldn’t boot. My efforts to get around this little problem all failed - even the boot disk I’d created could only get me to a terminal prompt to make sure the home directory was still intact. I left for vacation with a busted server, which was a worry I could have done without.

I came back and the vacation had done me good, though it had not gotten Arbonne (as I now thought of it again, having recognized my mistake of having named it after one machine that had already died) back up in service. I figured out how to get the DVD-ROM working again - did you know there’s a little bridge in the back that sets it as a master or slave? I do now. The CD-ROM is still kaput, but now that I had something that could read a CD I could at least try to reinstall GRUB, or some other bootloader.

Long story short: Fedora Core 2 disks still don’t work, but Red Hat 9 disks do, therefore, Red Hat 9 won. Despite my grumbling about it, I would have rather had Fedora Core because everything was already configured for it. And updates are easier, when they don’t shut down your whole system.

Now that things are running right again, I should remember the lesson I learned: not broken, don’t fix. It took three weeks to get back to where I was before things went wonky, and I don’t know if it was because of something actually going wrong or my tinkering. I’m inclined to think it was the latter, as I have no proof otherwise.

But somehow, despite all of this, I think I’ll still upgrade to Fedora Core 3 when it’s released in November. Some people never learn.

Uh oh - I think I have one of these adapters for Al-Rassan.

IBM Recalls 553,000 Laptop Power Units Worldwide

Security update out for PuTTY:

2004-08-03 SECURITY HOLE, fixed in PuTTY 0.55

PuTTY 0.55, released today, fixes a serious security hole which may allow a server to execute code of its choice on a PuTTY client connecting to it. In SSH2, the attack can be performed before host key verification, meaning that even if you trust the server you think you are connecting to, a different machine could be impersonating it and could launch the attack before you could tell the difference. We recommend everybody upgrade to 0.55 as soon as possible.

Brief internet outage at my house, now resolved. For some reason, my cable modem and wireless router decided they were going to go on strike. After waving a dead chicken over them and powercycling them in a sequence full of numerological significance, they are back online. I honestly have no idea why they just stopped working on Sunday night. Voodoo, maybe.

I do know why I can SSH into arbonne from work, but can’t see the web server - even though I can see it on the network. Cox Cable blocks port 80, the bastards. I’ll have to reconfigure to port 8080 or somesuch nonsense to get it working.

Foolishness!

I can finally check off “set up webserver” from my network to-do list. Thanks to dyndns.org, I’m now able to not only SSH into Arbonne from work, I have Apache running and serving pages to the outside world. Finally! High resolution graphics that won’t eat up my relatively small web storage space!

Ah, the power.

Sweeeeet.

(Now I just need to finish changing Arbonne from Fedora to Slackware…)

Sometimes, I amaze myself with my stupidity. It masquerades as stubbornness, but really it’s stupidity.

See, to celebrate all my recent work in my garden I decided to see if my computer kung-fu had improved any and try to get Tigana back in tip-top shape. For those following allong at home, she had the following problems:

• Installing any windows update causes a catastophic OS crash, requiring hours of reinstalling DLLs to fix.
• The left mouse button no longer works, so we use a small optical USB mouse now. However, Red Hat 7.2 doesn’t support USB mice.
• The wireless card works normally under Windows, and can work under Red Hat, but not with WEP enabled.
• Any recent Linux installation (Red Hat 9, Fedora X, even Slackware 10) runs into problems with the PCMIA CD-ROM drive on the 505TR. The web advice (assigning an ide2 value) hasn’t worked.
• The ‘T’ key is loose and comes off every once in a while.

So, because I’m an idiot, I though I should spend some time actually trying to *fix* these problems. Stupid, stubborn, idiot. I decided to tackle the problems one at a time, first reinstalling the Windows partition. This did not go well. Not that it went poorly, but it took about 4 hours all told, and then before I connected to the internet I reinstalled Norton Personal Firewall.

NPF worked for all of one boot before an error dialog kindly informed me that my security settings were all FUBARed and I should reinstall the software. I did so. Twice. Thrice. Five times I reinstalled that software, eventually deleting every Symantec-related file I could find.

No luck.

So here I am, stuck without a firewall on an unpatched win2k box. I know that there’s no way I can patch it fast enough before it’s compromised. So I turn to my old nemesis, ZoneAlarm. I download it quickly, turn off the wireless card, and get it set up and running. So far, so good.

Then I notice that the USB mouse - you know, the one that’s required to make the damn machine work - is flaking out and freezing up. The touchpad still works fine, but not the external mouse.

While I’m running Windows Update I check it out on the web, and sure enough other people have had problems with ZoneAlarm causing USB weirdness. I don’t know which I’m more pissed off at now - ZoneAlarm, for making such an intrusive program, or Microsoft, who shipped Win2K without a firewall. It’s perhaps the only benefit I see to running Windows XP.

So now I’m presented with a dilemma; firewall and flaky mouse, or no firewall, insecure box, but a working mouse. These are not the sort of choices I like to make. So I turn to the Linux side to see if maybe I can salvage some shreds of adminisrative dignity. (The smart admin would have gone outside and built another garden bed. I’m not so smart.)

The WEP appears to not work because the Wireless Exensions package is version 11, and I need version 15. That appears at least fixable, with a little research. The USB problem likely requires rebuilding the kernel, which I don’t have the source code for. But I remain hopeful that if I can upgrade the distro, it’ll all work out.

Of course, every disro I tried - with the exception of Red Hat 7.2, which is already on Tigana - failed to load the proper CD-ROM driver and barfed the install. Some of them (Fedora, cough, cough) spewed code all over the screen before I terminated Anaconda. Others just sat there and waited… and waited… and waited…

Got old, quick.

All the while I’m lusting after Tsiolkovsky, happily playing DVDs right next to me in bed. Is that wrong?

Dealing with computers is so unsatisfying.

/.—Slackware 10: First Impressions:

And now for the verdict. Slackware 10 is a well-rounded distribution that will continue to make a first-class Linux server platform. Changes in the new release are incremental, not radical, and Slackware remains one of the most stable, reliable and flexible distributions available today. True to tradition, Slackware 10 is refreshingly free of the convoluted and confusing “enhancements” often added by other Linux vendors that can make straightforward system administration tasks a real pain if you don’t use their GUI tools. If you build and manage Linux server systems, I certainly recommend trying a Slackware solution!

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

Fedora Core 2: Making It Work:

Getting FC2 to a state of usability in a home or office environment requires a great deal more labor than I believe should be required. However, my complaints were put into perspective last week when I visited a classroom to start getting it ready for summer term. I walked in on a cursing, overworked desktop support tech who was griping loudly about the inordinate time it takes to install and patch Windows on a roomful of computers — in an organization that will not pay for disk imaging software or an in-house Windows Update server. “You don’t need Microsoft Office installed on these, I hope?” he asked through a fog of sweat and frustration. I acknowledged that I did not. Then he wanted to know if I needed HP printer drivers installed, with a cynical groan about how it would “only take a few more hours.”

I used to supervise people who support Windows on the desktop. I had forgotten how bad Windows really is. Suddenly my gripes about Fedora seemed petty.

More email stats:

Category	May	June	Total
Accounts	10	13	23
Inbox	246	183	429
News	420	371	791
Spam	2818	2129	4947
Tech List	219	757	976
Total	3713	3453	7166

Percentages:

1. Accounts: 0%
2. Inbox: 5%
3. News: 11%
4. Spam: 62%
5. Tech List: 22%

Compared to last month, tech list volume is way up and spam is down. Inbox volume remained about the same.

New Flotsam: fed up wth Fedora.

Looks like Trillian has a patch out for Pro 2.0. Nothing for 1.0 yet.

The fuckers at Yahoo did it again! I’m trying to work here!

Oh yeah - if you actually use Yahoo Messenger, you better upgrade your client soon, or you’ll find yourself in my boat as well.

Slashdot | Yahoo Changes Protocol, Blocks Third Party Clients:

…Yahoo is once again blocking connections from Trillian (the alternative multi-protocol client). Yahoo tried this a few times last year and it looks like they’re trying again. … A quick fix discovered late this evening: Change your Y!IM host from scs.msg.yahoo.com to scs.yahoo.com, port 5050, and it should work. This is on Trillian 0.74H, not Pro.

Note to self: when upgrading and the sound suddenly stops working, check to see that the volume hasn’t been turned down to zero.

Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG Driver for Linux:

This project was created by Intel to enable support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection miniPCI adapter. This project (IPW2200) is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available).

Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO:

How to get various proprietary and restricted multimedia Damned Things (Flash, MP3, Java, MPEG, AVI, RealMedia, Windows Media, Adobe Acrobat) working under Fedora Core using your normal package-management tools. Includes Mozilla-plugin instructions.

In honor of the new computer on the network, I’ve updated my old network document.

Merrystar’s new computer (“Tsiolkovsky,” what a great name!) arrived today, so:

Fedora Core Linux on a Panasonic CF-W2

Now with even more data: my email stats. See how much spam I’ve gotten this month!

In case anyone is wondering, the breakdown for May is:

1. Spam: 76%
2. News: 11%
3. Inbox: 7%
4. Tech Lists: 6%
5. Accounts: 0%

Fortunatey, I see almost none of that spam — spamassassin lets maybe a dozen through a month, if that.

Configuring the Wireless Interface RH 7.2:

Start the network configuration tool by looking for “Network Configuration” in the desktop menus or else start the tool by typing neat at the commandline. Under the devices tab choose wireless and configure your wireless card. The configuration information including the wireless key will be written into the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 assuming that your Ethernet card has already been configured as eth0. The information in this file is read at boot in Red Hat 7.2. The root user can take eth0 and eth1 down and up using the commands ifdown and ifup.Configuration information is read from the files ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1. The ONBOOT=no option in the ifcfg-eth1 file does not work. Interface eth1 always comes up at boot.

If you use the cardctl command to eject and then insert the card, configuration information is read from the wireless.opts file (see the previous section) but the interface eth1 does not get updated properly and so does not work. The scheme option for the cardctl command does not work. So there is no way to switch between a home scheme and an office scheme. It appears that RH 7.2 new networking approach is not compatible with the Linux wireless tools. Having configuration information in /etc/pcmcia and in /etc/sysconfig is a mistake. These bugs have been reported to bugzilla. Note also that the command iwconfig eth1 txpower off is not support by wavelan2_cs or by orinoco_cs so it it not possible to turn the radio off as you can in Windows 2000.

Someone else having as much fun with a Thinkpad I1400 as I am:

July 2002. The connection between the AC adapter and the computer has become loose. The design stinks. Other laptops connect the AC cord to the computer using a connector that can swivel. Not IBM. Their connector juts out strait from the computer. If you actually use the laptop machine on your lap, its only natural that it gets banged and pushed. Eventually the connection deteriorates. Think of an arrow in a target. The way you remove the arrow is to jiggle it left and right and up and down. This is exactly what happens over time to the AC connection to the computer. Now it often disengages and the machine runs on battery power. Since the battery is old (see above), this is something I prefer to avoid. Miserable design. An accident just waiting to happen. My ThinkPad dates to 2000. I recently saw a new one and the design has not changed.

Update1: A reader of this web site has the same problem. Their battery won’t recharge because of a faulty A/C connector. They write: “The problem is where the AC plugs in … the tiny dart like connecter is loose and is not allowing the battery to recharge. It is not making the connection. Ultimately, I won’t be able to use it at all.” September 26, 2002

Update2: Another reader of this page reported that his ThinkPad stopped working off the a/c plug. He can’t charge the battery without a/c power so the machine is dead. And out of warranty. However, with an electrician friend, he stripped the ThinkPad down to pieces, found that the a/c plug had broken its connection (the center pin in the plug is a pressed in unit at the back, not soldered to the main housing that runs down into the board itself). They re-soldered and built it up, put it all back together, and the computer now works. The dis-assembly and re-assembly was scary though, lots of little pieces to keep track of. October 26, 2002.

Update3: Another reader says the problem seems to be that the power supply connector runs hot. It runs so hot that the solder connections on the plug receptacle eventually become what is referred to as a cold solder joint and a bad connection. He had to completely disassemble the notebook and re-solder the connector three times. The problem has also trashed two batteries. He warns that disassembly of the ThinkPad is not for somebody that is faint of heart! February 25, 2004.

My computer kung-fu continues to suck.

Al-Rassan now doesn’t want to boot and her battery is competely dead. I assume that the screen still doesn’t work, either. I haven’t done anything since the last time other than turn her off and charge her battery. Then the battery drained over the course of a few hours.

Argh!

Looks like I’ll have to install Linux on my work laptop after all. Now I just need a name…

My computer kung-fu has failed me.

I brought home another Thinkpad power supply from work to test on Al-Rassan, and sure enough it worked fine. Only problem was that when I turned her on, the screen didn’t light up. I thought it was completely busted, but then I peered closely and saw that the images were still on the screen, just without any light.

In case you’re wondering, this makes it very hard to see what the hell you’re doing.

The worst part about it is that the screen worked before I opened up the case. It survived the multiple falls without a problem, but not my meddling. I did this, and that makes me kick myself. Hard. Often.

Redhat 7.2 on Vaio GRX 570

And — Redhat 7.2 USB Mouse Installation Guide

For Tigana: ATAPI CD-ROM Problems on RedHat 7.2

Shoot. Power problems reared their ugly head with Al-Rassan yesterday.

Things were going so swimmingly, too - things were really starting to come together on that machine. Then I dropped it and caused the AC adapter to stop working. Everything else was fine, but the battery stopped charging and I couldn’t get it to come back on. I cracked open the case to make sure there wasn’t anything loose, but didn’t find any problems. So finally I sealed her up and figured I’d wait to see what I could do.

This morning, on a whim, I took the power pack from my work Thinkpad and tried it. Voila! Worked fine - thankfully. So now I’ve just got to find a replacement on eBay to get Al-Rassan back up and running.

In the meantime, I tried once again to upgrade Tigana to a more recent distro than Redhat 7.2: this time, Fedora 2. No such luck. Still can’t get the CD-ROM to be recognized (even though I boot off of it.) What the heck is up with that? My next trick will be to try to install 7.3 on it and see if that gives me network/USB support.

In the meanwhile, I’m getting reacquainted with Arbonne. She’s still a good machine, after all these years.

Added Yum and Fedora Legacy support to Arbonne.

Well, I haven’t figured out the power / kernel problem yet, but I did get Firefox and Thunderbird installed. Modified the binaries to include the following:

moz_libdir=/usr/lib/thunderbird-0.6/thunderbird

Installed them into /usr/lib and put symlinks in /usr/local/bin/, changed the preferred browser and mail applications in KDE, and we’re good to go. Now to put my favorite extensions back in Firefox…

So I’m poking around, trying to find out why my battery applet won’t start, when I get this:

Your computer seems to have a partial ACPI installation. ACPI was probably enabled, but some of the sub-options were not - you need to enable at least 'AC Adaptor' and 'Control Method Battery' and then rebuild your kernel.

Ug.

Trundling right along with getting Fedora Core 2 working on Al-Rassan, my IBM Thinkpad i1400. I switched over to KDE and had problems with the keys ‘sticking’ - turned out the default key delay was set to zero, so a quick visit to the control center fixed that.

Another issue is that I couldn’t find the desktop switcher tool to set KDE as the default session. Fixed that by going to /etc/sysconfig/desktop

DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"

That seems to have done the trick.

I’ve been installing some of the multimedia packages described in Greg Gulick’s Fedora Core 2 Tips and Tricks. Setting up multiple repositories for up2date was easier than I thought, and reenabling mp3 support was quite easy.

APM support appears to be disabled in the 2.6 kernel. What’s up with that?

So, Fedora 2 boots - after some uncertainty - and works, kinda. Monitor isn’t probed right, nor can I get the Netgear MA401 wireless card working right.

In that vein, Slashdot has a Fedora Core 2 Review. Some good, some bad, some warnings about installing it with Windows XP.

A few changes to things around the old network:

1. Added to arbonne:/etc/rc.d/rc.local to get the netgear MA311 PCI card to work on bootup:

/sbin/modprobe orinoco_pci

2. Got BitTorrent working to download Fedora Core 2 following these instructions:

• Download bittorrent:
  local rpms for rhl 7.3, 8.0, 9 and fc1
  from the homesite
• install bittorrent
• Open up ports 6881-6999/tcp so other clients can contact you for bits
  First forward those ports on the router
  Then open up the ports in your /etc/sysconfig/iptables file
• To download run: btdownloadcurses.py --max_upload_rate 350 --url $torrent-URL-here
• Once your download is complete please leave your downloader running so it can help upload to the other clients. This is what makes bittorrent efficient.

3. Having completed the download in record time (no comparison to HTTP or FTP, they both stalled out last night - BitTorrent took less than three hours) and having left the upload running all day, I shall now attempt to upgrade al-rassan to Fedora Core 2.

Slashdot | Fedora Core 2 Officially Available

Mirrors - Linux From Scratch

Fedora Extras Home Page

Slashdot | Red Hat Linux 9 Reaches End-of-Life

White Box Enterprise Linux:

This product is derived from the Free/Open Source Software made available by Red Hat, Inc but IS NOT produced, maintained or supported by Red Hat. Specifically, this product is forked from the source code for Red Hat’s _Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3_ product under the terms and conditions of it’s EULA.

There may be remaining packaging problems and other odd bugs. These are solely the responsibility of the White Box Linux effort and should not in any shape, manner or form reflect on the quality of Red Hat’s commercial product. In fact, if you need a fully tested and supported OS you probably should go buy their box set.

Just got a Netgear MA311 working on Arbonne — huzzah! Got it on ebay for $20 — huzzah!

Next up: installing SELinux on Al-Rassan.

Huzzah!

Fedora Core 2 test2 is the first release of Fedora Core to feature full support for SELinux. The Fedora Core team has worked hard to provide a useful implementation of SELinux. To accomplish this, we have written a tunable policy, and have set up the tunables by default into a relaxed policy. SELinux has two modes it can run under, enforcing or permissive.

Took a step towards solving Al-Rassan’s power problem by getting a new battery on ebay.

Hooray for eBay!

Local Area Security:

Local Area Security Linux is a ‘Live CD’ distribution with a small footprint. Containing over 200 information security and administration related tools. As well as a full desktop environment and office productivity applications. With such a small footprint L.A.S. Linux can be optionally loaded and run from physical RAM (assuming there is 256MB or more). We currently have 2 different versions of L.A.S. to fit two specific size requirements.

One bug, two bugs, tar bugs, su bugs,
  grep bugs, mew bugs, old bugs, new bugs.

This bug has a little hack,
This bug has a broken stack.
  Say! What a lot of bugs to track.

Yes, some are in tar, and some in su.
  Some are old. And some are new.

Some in sed, and some in jed.
  And some are even in parted.
Why are they in parted, jed and sed?
  I do not know. Bugs should be dead!

Some in jpeg, and some in TIFF
  This TIFF one has an attached diff.

>From there to here, from here to there
  Test release bugs are everywhere.

Fedora Core test 2 is available for
 x86 and x86-64
It should not be installed where production is hot;
 use it only for test, as we say quite a lot.

If you install with the default
 SELinux will be the result
SELinux is a form of MAC
 For more answers, check the FAQ [*]
By explicitly stating what apps can use
 Unwanted accesses it will refuse

[*] http://people.redhat.com/kwade/fedora-docs/selinux-faq-en/

So please test test2 in this mode;
 and please test it with your code.
Plus it comes with a new GNOME;
 can you test that in your home?
Also X.org is new,
 replacing XFree, test it too.
And 3.2.1 of KDE
 We need to test, test, test, you see!
So we will test it on our box.
 And we will even test out sox.
And we will test it in our house.
 And we will test it with our mouse.
And we will test it here and there.
 Say! We will test it ANYWHERE!

Problems with Fedora Core 2 test 2 should be reported via
bugzilla, at:
 
   http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/
    
Please report bugs against 'Fedora Core', release 'test2'.

For more information on just what the Fedora Project and
Fedora Core is, please see:
 
   http://fedora.redhat.com/

A quick guide to Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA and Netgear MA311 PCI wireless cards under Debian GNU/Linux

Using Cisco products? They have a backdoor, you know…

From /.: Cisco products have backdoors —

A default username/password pair is present in all releases of the Wireless LAN Solution Engine (WLSE) and Hosting Solution Engine (HSE) software. A user who logs in using this username has complete control of the device. This username cannot be disabled. There is no workaround.

Fedora News Updates #9

So, problems on the laptop front tonight.

Tigana / Lower Corte’s battery has been going more and more quickly. I originally wrote that there wasn’t much life left in it, but then Merrystar looked over and corrected me - she said she’d been working for an hour and a half and running the usb optical mouse and wireless card. So I sit corrected.

However, my laptop’s a different story.

Al-Rassan’s battery’s been all but dead since I got her. In and of itself, that’s not a problem; I don’t take my laptop outside the house, so I just use the power cord. But now the cord’s getting flaky, so I have to balance Al-Rassan and hope that I don’t let the orange power light go out.

So.

Why can’t things just work and keep working?

elm RPMs for Fedora Core 1! Huzzah!

Ooo, shiny.

For Al-Rassan: tpctl homepage.

Fedora News Updates #6:

Memory usage sky-rocketing?

Seems to be a very common question on the lists, it seems. People tend to wonder why their memory usage has sky-rocketed, and they have very little free RAM left. Rodolfo J. Paiz answers it nicely at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-February/msg00840.html. In short, Linux uses up all its available resources rather than wasting it sitting there idle. Mark Mielke clears up issues with regards to the swap file, and its growth. So don’t worry if memory gets used up - its just an efficient usage of your resources!

Security-Enhanced Linux

After many, many defeats, a small victory! Tigana (on Red Hat 7.2) is now wireless.

From Red Hat Wireless LAN Network Setup:

Below is an example of a wireless PC Ethernet (802.11b) card we recently got for a laptop. The product in this example was a Netgear MA401. It only was claimed to be support Win 95/B, 98, Me, NT, 2000, and XP. But we wanted it to run under Red Hat Linux, too. So here’s how we got it to work. This example can be applied to various wireless PC cards with little or no modifications.

Cardctl
Cardctl is the Linux program to identify PCMCIA devices. To see a list of PCMCIA cards type the command “cardctl ident”. As shown below, the sample computer has a Netgear MA401 11Mbps PCMCIA Wireless Card in it.

It’s important to make a note of the line that begins with “manfid”. The first set of numbers is the manufacturer number, followed by the unique identity of this card model. These are the numbers Linux uses to configure the card during setup.

[root@localhost root]# cardctl ident
Socket 0:
product info: "NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC", "Card", "ISL37300P",
"Eval-RevA"
manfid: 0x000b, 0x7300
function: 6 (network)
Socket 1:
no product info available

Getting it to work…
Sometimes it takes a little digging around on the Internet to find out what driver to associate with a particular card. And sometimes it just takes some guesswork. In our case we decided to try the popular orinoco_cs driver. This driver works with many popular Wireless PCMCIA Ethernet adapters. However there are others, too, such as the pcnet_cs driver. Be sure to find out what your card needs… or try taking a guess!

We created a file called /etc/pcmcia/netgear.conf. In that file we put the text that follows:

card "Intersil PRISM2 11 Mbps Wireless Adapter"
manfid 0x000b, 0x7300
bind "orinoco_cs"

This was the equivalent of putting the text in the /etc/pcmcia/config file, but keeps things a bit more organized. (The /etc/pcmcia/config and all files that end in a .conf extension are all interpreted as one big file during startup.)

Now when our system boots up it will detect our Netgear card with the manufacturer ID 0x000b, and the product ID 0x7300. According to the netgear.conf file, it knows to recognize this card with the orinoco_cs driver. Provided the network configuration is set up properly, your card will be loaded up as eth0.

Additional Notes
Some PCMCIA drivers are still in development and may have slight quirks. Under Red Hat 7.2, our Netgear card ran fine, until we did very heavy transfers. At that point it would drive the softIRQ process crazy, and the card would lose connectivity. An upgrade to Red Hat 7.3 cured the problem. (Of course you can realize equal effects by installing a newer kernel on an older version of Linux.)

Ah, more network drama. So after writing the above post last night, I thought I’d update some of the most egregious patches from last year on Tigana (Lower Corte), once again demonstrating that I’m an idiot. I thought, in some sleep-deprived haze, that if I just avoided the patches from February I’d be okay.

I was wrong.

So, I left fixing Tigana (Lower Corte) for this morning, which I did with some dispatch. I turned off automatic updates, ran disk defragmenter a half-dozen times, and then turned her off.

Arbonne, on the other hand, never finished finding hardware and had remained frozen where she was all night long. I powered her down and decided to try a complete reinstall of Fedora Core. That didn’t work - still hung on the hardware search. I then tried a minimal installation with the same result. So I chucked Fedora and reinstalled Red Hat 9 on Arbonne.

At some point this becomes rewarding, right?

Wow, what a waste of a day I could have spent sleeping.

So it turns out that Lower Corte’s problems weren’t due to some worm, but rather a conflict between Norton Personal Firewall and one of the recent Microsoft updates. I only have a hunch that it’s Norton Personal Firewall — I have no proof to support it, nor do I care enough to actually acquire such evidence.

Last night I went ahead and took a look at it again while Merrystar was cleaning up; it took about 30 minutes to boot into Windows from the CD and attempt the repair steps outlined in the aforementioned links. (Actually, this step took about 2 hours, because of some wonkiness with Tigana’s boot process that wouldn’t let it go from CD boot to CD boot, but instead required a boot into Linux). That didn’t work, so I tried it again (old stupid Windows habits die hard). Then, I deleted six *.dll files to force Windows 2000 to replace them all, which it did, and I could finally boot into Windows after another hour or so. An installer kept popping up asking for Norton’s Firewall disk, so I tried uninstalling it; unfortunately, something happened with the Windows Installer software and the program wouldn’t uninstall.

So, had I been really smart, I would have just reinstalled the firewall without even attempting to update anything. But no, I’m an idiot, so I decided to run Windows Update to fix the problem with Windows Installer.

Idiot.

So, there I am last night having spent 4 hours to get right back to square one. (Although, at least I knew how to get off square one: “Turn on the light.”) So I put away Tigana/Lower Corte and spent the rest of the evening with Merrystar.

Right. Today, Merrystar leaves on a trip, so I figure I’ll put on Stargate SG-1 Season 4 and see if I can get this piece of *($)#)*#$!!! working. (Note: I do not blame the machine; I blame the operating system. This is probably unfair. I don’t care. I want the time I spent back.) I go through the hoops and finally get Lower Corte booting again. I install NPF right on top of the old one and the error messages stop. I check connectivity and firewall and shut it down.

Now, a smart man would have cut his losses here and gone and painted a fence or clean the gutters or something.

I am not a smart man. (See idiot note, above.)

Instead, I thought I’d upgrade Tigana to redhat 9 (thus finally getting the USB optical mouse and wireless card to work) and Arbonne and Al-Rassan to Fedora Core 1. Let’s take them one at a time.

Al-Rassan was actually the easiest of the three, as she was already running Red Hat 9 and I could (and did) easily back up my home directory to Arbonne. The biggest problem was how long it took - I started it around noon and it finished around 4. The next biggest problem was that the background changed from the bluecurve to the fedora blue flower picture.

If that’s the second biggest problem in an upgrade, I’ll count it going pretty darn well. (Of course, I’m trying to run up2date and it’s taking hours to complete - that could be server problems, or something more serious.)

Once I’d established that Al-Rassan was okay, I took on Arbonne. Last weekend I yanked Windows off Arbonne, and the only real data on her was the home directory from Al-Rassan, so if everything went really wrong I could just reformat the drive and start over. The Fedora update also took some time, and everything seemed to be going well until I tried rebooting; at that point the boot seemed to hang on searching for new hardware. Arbonne is still trying to boot - I’ll give her some more time, but it’s been 42 minutes.

Tigana - ach, Tigana remains stubborn. She doesn’t have a built-in CD-ROM, so she needs a driver to boot from CD - a driver that’s mysteriously absent on the RH9 disk, but present on the RH7.2 one. Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

So. I think I’ll leave that one for another day.

Current count: Computers 3, Me 1. Ah, the drama of system administration.

Time to call it quits.

Hmmmm.

Well, that didn’t work.

Is it bad that when things keep going wrong my first instinct is to figure out how to back everything up and reformat the partition? (Nothing like reinstalling Windows over the weekend to make me deleriously happy.)

What a colossal waste of time. I believe I am about to swear off all further Windows updates.

So after updating Tigana with the latest round of Microsoft security updates, I rebooted last night into the following error:

The Logon User Interface DLL msgina.dll failed to load.
Contact your system administrator to replace the DLL, or restore the original DLL.

Restart.

Great. Just fucking great. How long is this going to take me to fix?

Fortunately, I just turned off the computer last night and didn’t lose any sleep over it, but still - argh.

Right. So, here’s a possible explanation from Microsoft, if you ignore that the computer in question already had SP 4, not SP 3, and here’s a potential fix. If that doesn’t work, there’s an another way to do it.

It was precisely because I was tired of dealing with shit like this that I deleted Windows off Arbonne this past weekend.

pronunciation guide for unix:

! EXCLAMATION POINT, exclamation (mark), (ex)clam, excl, wow, hey, boing, bang#, shout, yell, shriek, pling, factorial, ball-bat, smash, cuss, store#, potion&, not*+, dammit*#

Useful windows utility: TheOpenCD - Verifying files with md5sum.exe.

So, I’ve been watching the Adobe Photoshop’s currency filter brujahah with some surprise. Reading this Wired article, there’s something that I thought would raise much, much more outcry than it has - Adobe admits to putting code that they don’t know what it does into their products. Forget copying money - I don’t have any desire to do that. But running code that hasn’t even been checked by the vendor?

This is supposed to make me want to use their products?

Never upgrade old copy of Photoshop: check.

Well, I finally got wireless working on Sarantium (my desktop) under Red Hat 9.0 using a Netgear MA301 adapter with a MA401 PCMCIA card. I finally gave up on the GUI, Googled on “netgear MA301 ‘red hat’ linux”, and went for the following:

su
/sbin/modprobe hermes
/sbin/modprobe orinoco
/sbin/modprobe orinoco_plx
/sbin/iwconfig eth1 essid NETWORKSSID
/sbin/iwconfig eth1 enc WEPKEY

I then checked in the redhat-config-network gui and - huzzah! - the card was active. Hooray for the command line!

I really have begun to hate IM. More specifically, I’ve come to hate the IM networks - Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

Why? Because they keep changing their protocols and breaking third-party clients. I’m not going to argue that they don’t have the right to do it - they do - but I don’t have to like that they do it.

See, my company uses AIM. Another company I work with uses Yahoo Messenger. Other companies I’ve worked for have used ICQ, and most of my family uses MSN.

Except, of course, my sister, who uses Jabber, because she’s cool. Jabber doesn’t change. Why? Jabber is an open-source, standardized rock. That’s why.

So to keep up with all of this I use Trillian at work and Gaim at home to connect to all these networks, partly because I don’t want to run 6 different programs for something I don’t even really like, and partly because some of those networks don’t have Linux clients. (C’mon, MSN! You can do it!)

This setup works okay, but not great. I usually don’t have to think about it too much. But every two or three months, somebody does something to fuck it all up. Like Yahoo.

See, in their latest releases they decided to change the login server their service uses from scs.yahoo.com to scs.msg.yahoo.com. They upgraded all their clients and left third-party clients to figure it out on their own. But they didn’t take scs.yahoo.com - they just made it so that it couldn’t communicate with scs.msg.yahoo.com. This meant that for the last week or two, I could see Yahoo users who were using Trillian or Gaim or Fire. But not Yahoo Messenger. Unfortunately, this included all the people who I needed to talk to in the first place, the ones for whom I had legitimate business reasons to IM.

It took me two hours of experimenting last night to figure this out.

Of course, even changing the login server isn’t enough; one has to patch the client, as well.

Thanks, Yahoo. I really fucking appreciate it.

I think my wife has the right idea: only use email, preferably with a mail client that’s at least 15 years old. (She still uses ELM - I’m a heretic - I switched to PINE.)

My CD Burner Software is Junk

Network reference: cornerhost server fingerprints.

CERT Summary CS-2003-04

Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka: A Life, In CVS.

I keep my life in a CVS repository. For the past two years, every file I’ve created and worked on, every e-mail I’ve sent or received and every config file I’ve tweaked have all been checked into my CVS archive. When I tell people about this, they invariably respond, “You’re crazy!”

After all, CVS is meant for managing discrete bodies of code, such as free software programs that are worked on and available to a lot of people or in-house projects that are collaboratively developed by several employees. CVS has a reputation of being a pain to deal with, and it has a lot of crufty bits that regularly drive users up the wall, like its mistreatment of directories. Why inflict the pain of CVS on yourself if you don’t have to? Why do it on such a scale that it affects nearly everything you do with your computer?

…

It only took a few more weeks before the advantage of having a history of everything I’d done began to show up. It wasn’t a real surprise because having a history of past versions of a project is one of the reasons to use CVS in the first place, but it’s very cool to have it suddenly apply to every file you own. When I broke my .zshrc or .procmailrc, I could roll back to the previous day’s or look back and see when I made the change and why. It’s very handy to be able to run cvs diff on your kernel config file and see how make xconfig changed it. It’s great to be able to recover files you deleted or delete files because they’re not relevant and still know you’ve not really lost them. For those amateur historians among us, it’s very cool to be able to check out one’s system as it looked one full year ago and poke around and discover how everything has evolved over time.

The final major benefit took some time to become clear. Linus Torvalds once said, “Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror it.” I’m not a real enough man to upload my confidential documents to ftp.kernel.org though, so I’ve been wimping along with backups to tape and CD and so on. But then it hit me: take, for example, one crucial file, like my .zshrc or sent-mail archive: I had a copy of that file on my work machine, and on my home machine, and on my laptop and several other copies on other accounts. There was another copy encoded in my CVS repository too.

I’m told that the best backups are done without effort--so you actually do them--and are widely scattered among many machines and a lot of area so that a local disaster doesn’t knock them out. They are tested on a regular basis to make sure the backup works. I was doing all of these things as a mere side effect of keeping it all in CVS. Then I sobered up and remembered that a dead CVS repository would be a really, really bad thing and kept those wimpy backups to CD going. But the automatic distributed backups are what keep me sleeping quietly at night. Later, when I left that job, the last thing I did on my work desktop machine was: cvs commit ; sudo rm -rf /. And I didn’t worry a bit; my life was still there, secure in CVS.

Huzzah! With a lot of help from the TCSH man pages, I have achieved a small victory. I have written a shell script to download selected files on my web server to my local computer.

I knew it was possible to automate the process, but working in Windows I had no idea how to do it. Writing batch files is an arcane science, and I could never get them to work, let alone work with a scheduler. I admit this may be due to my own ignorance, ineptitude, or simply not knowing how to ssh into a linux machine and pass arguments to find files a certain date or older on a Win32 machine. If you know, why the hell didn’t you tell me before?

However, this task was something I always knew I should be able to automate, even if I couldn’t (and that knowledge really stuck in my craw.) Instead, I stuck with what I knew; every week I’d boot up a graphical FTP client, find the files I wanted to back up, FTP them down to a selected directory, and then maybe clean them up - or maybe not.

But no more!

I've been dying to set this up - backing things up is so fucking tedious, and so fucking unnecessary for a human to do. The next step will be to automate the ssh login, so I can put this as part of my login script or schedule it with crontab - but that's research for another night.

I will now cross off one very small line item on my network todo list and go to bed a happy man.

Ah, choices, choices: redhat.com | Which Linux is Right For You?

Building A Budget Storage Server

Editing GNOME2 Menus in Red Hat Linux 8.0 and 9

Fuck:

• Slashdot | Red Hat Linux Support To End
• Slash Site | Reasons For Switching From Red Hat Linux
• Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat

Ach, what a hassle.

Just back from vacation, and what do I see?

[brett@scandium ~]$ mailstat -st .procmail/pmlog
 305093      57 /var/spool/mail/brett
  25811       9 lists/M-W.WORD-OF-THE-DAY
   2991       1 lists/MERCHANT-amex
   5124       1 lists/bbspot
 100079      32 lists/innercircle
  56379       5 lists/jobs
   8501       1 lists/line6
  40947       5 lists/monster
 110930     100 lists/myia
  33415       7 lists/open-source-now-list
 679634     129 lists/securityfocus
 696487     155 spam/cutter
  58782      19 spam/inner-flame
 475768      78 spam/spamassassin
[brett@scandium ~]$

Of the 57 delivered to my inbox, 40 were spam. Will have to analyze why - after I unpack.

Holy moly, there’s a lot of spam out there.

A few weeks ago, I started delving into the black arts of procmail and spamassassin - programs that filter mail before it ever hits the inbox. Procmail filters the mail, spamassassin heuristically evaluates it to see if it’s spam. I’ve inserted a line in my .login file to read the log of activity since my last login. Here’s an example from this morning:

[brett@scandium ~]$ mailstat -st .procmail/pmlog.old
 110840      5 /var/spool/mail/brett
   2852       1 lists/M-W.WORD-OF-THE-DAY
  50656      14 lists/innercircle
  14584      11 lists/myia
  44776       7 lists/securityfocus
  97508      22 spam/cutter
  11000       5 spam/inner-flame
  76397      12 spam/spamassassin

That’s 72 messages I didn’t need to see immediately (39 spam), and 5 that I did, in one evening.

I think I’ll comment out that line in .login and see what it’s like after a whole week.

Sony VAIO TR1A Review

Unfortunately, still having problems with getting the fonts to display in Mozilla (any build other than the one that came with Red Hat 9.0). Some helpful links atRe: Mozilla fonts.

Over the past week or two I’ve been playing around with procmail and spamassassin to eliminate spam from my inbox - I’d finally got tired of hitting the delete key every morning (and afternoon, and evening). So I put robots in place to do it for me, and it was working really well.

Well, it was working really well, until last night. I’m pleased (and somewhat embarassed) to announce my first false positive! A friend sent a legitimate email that was a tad too enthusiastic, and into the spam folder it went. (Fortunately, I’ve been directing things into a spam folder and not deleting them outright.)

The fix was easy - I just whitelisted her address in the ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs file so no matter how exuberant future emails might be, they’ll always get through.

Man page of PROCMAILRC.

Filters that Fight Back.

John Clark’s Procmail Recipies

I should make a damn CD of my own already:

• Slashdot | Top 10 Software Titles Every Home PC Needs?
• The OpenCD

OpenOffice.org 1.1 is out - go get it!

Finally got WebCollage working - from Bug 76244 - XScreensaver WebCollage doesn’t work, I went:

[brett@al-rassan ~]$ su
Password:
[root@al-rassan brett]# mv /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/webcollage-helper /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/X-webcollage-helper

And there you have it.

I have to admit, the vidwhacked version really does look cool.

Well, that’s quite a difference.

Spent tonight setting up cable modem and wireless network. I’ve been grouchy about the whole project for some time - I didn’t want to spend additional money on something that only I’d really use - so finally I cut my cell phone bills by $20/month and will cancel the dialup account (also $20/month), which gave my conscience the permission it somehow needed to get a high-speed wireless connection.

I have strange hangups. I admit it.

My biggest concern was with the cable company - I don’t trust them, even though they’ve been less apt to price gouge than, say, my cell phone company. I really hate dealing with my cell phone company, and can’t wait until LWNP (local wireless number portability) goes into effect this November. But, overall, it was much more pleasant dealing with the cable company.

Did I just say that? Someone please hit me.

Right. So. I drag my tower (Sarantium) downstairs to where the live cable outlet is early this evening and hook up the cable modem. I do this because I’m not letting the cable company’s software anywhere near Merrystar’s laptop, Tigana. You will in fact have to shoot me before I let them mess with her internet settings litke that. But, and this is wonderful, there’s software that you need to run once to register, and it only runs on Windows - actuallly, I could have said I have a game box or something like that, or pressed the point about a non-Windows solution, but I didn’t - well, I thought it only ran on Windows, so I drag the tower and monitor downstairs to watch Merrystar play Atari whilst I get the cable modem working. Soon it is, and then it’s the wireless router’s turn.

Nothing worked. Absolutely nothing! Argh! Then I had a flash, put the install CD back in the drive, and reinstalled the router software. I had to reset the router twice and get rid of all the stupid changes I’d made before, but eventually everything was conifgured. I got Sarantium’s firewall set up to handle the new configuration, and then - as I’d just reinstalled the operating system(s) last night in a sucessful attempt to get the computer to recognize itself on the network - proceeded to do the Windows Update dance. So much faster now! I can almost remember what it was like to just have a list of software sites and download whatever the latest versions were. (Almost.)

While Sarantium was patching, I got Al-Rassan out and ran up2date on her. Then I browsed the web until Sarantium finished and I rebooted her into Linux, where she got the up2date treatment, too. I then disconnected everybody from the network and dragged them upstairs again, reassuring a somewhat concerned Merrystar that Sarantium wasn’t going to live permanently in our kitchen.

So.

I’m in bed, a floor away from the router, typing away. I’m not so grouchy anymore about high-speed access.

Just don’t ask me about my cell service provider.

Ah, security: Generating a Revocation Certificate.

Whilst contemplating finding and installing a new firewall and then systematically rooting through the damn registry to remove all the ZoneAlarm keys, I thought I’d read a little jwz drama to cheer me up:

And — let me emphasize — I do not enjoy this! Oh sure, you say, why do you keep doing it? I don’t know. I think I still enjoy writing software, usually. But what I end up spending almost all of my time doing is sysadmin crap. I hate it. I have always hated it. Always. If you made a Venn diagram, there would be two non-overlapping circles, one of which was labeled, “Times when I am truly happy” and the other of which was labeled, “Times when I am logged in as root, holding a cable, or have the case open.”

And like all relationship-drama fuckups, I seem to be incapable of just walking away. I finally got it together to leave that cesspool we call the computer industry and what did I do? I filled my nightclub with computers, and with insufficient budget to make them be someone’s problem other than mine.

I’ll be standing over here in the column labeled “DON’T”.

That’s it! I’ve had it with ZoneAlarm! It is so out of there!

It’s time to find a new personal firewall for Windows.

I spent part of last evening (the part where I wasn’t watching Queer Eye, of course) updating Al-Rassan with the Red Hat Network and getting familiar with GNU/Linux. I am enchanted with it - Merrystar asked me what specifically I liked about it, and I could not answer her. (The best I could come up with was “I like the filesystem,” which is pretty lame, even if it’s true. I like having the same drives mean the same things on different systems (Al-Rassan and Scandium, in this case). I like the Bluecurve interface, though I’m sure it draws flack from UNIX diehards. I like that the battery monitor works better than the Windows one - and that the battery seems to last longer, but that’s not been rigorously tested yet.

But all these things aren’t quite it - which is why I’m enchanted.

I’ll think about this some more today and see if I can explain it any better.

May have found answer to prayers: eBay item 3428656168 (Ends Sep-03-03 10:31:31 PDT) - Sony VAIO PCG-505TR Laptop Notebook PARTS. May be able to fix Tigana after all.

Further adventures in Linux: couldn’t get Al-Rassan’s Winmodem working last night. The wireless card works perfectly, though. Will have to start documenting the actual steps of what I’m doing with this thing - otherwise, I’m just spinning my wheels.

Spinning, spinning, on the launchpad.

Boy, do I feel itch today.

Tigana’s left mouse button remains broken. This is the second time the mouse has broken on this computer (a Sony Vaio 505TR), but this time it’s out of warranty. Took the case apart last night but couldn’t get the buttons out of the top plastic casing. Curses!

Maybe one will show up on eBay.

Installed Red Hat GNU/Linux 9.0 on my old IBM Thinkpad 1400i (now al-rassan). Space prevented me from installing with existing windows partitions, so I backed them up to Atlantis and wiped them clear. 9.0 is much improved from previous installs - RH detected the Winmodem, sound card and video card without a hitch. Minor problem with the display was fixed by increasing the resolution from 800x600 to 1280x1024.

After long discussion with Ryan last week about network nomenclature schemes (weapon names, Tolkienian weapon names, starships), decided to stick with the established use of Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantasy worlds. Renamed Atlantis to Sarantium. Renamed Ithilien to Al-Rassan. Two other machines waiting in the wings: Arbonne and Gorhaut. It will be some time before we run out of names.

Anyhow, back to the linux installation. Wireless card was easy to configure with the drivers already present - connected to my Windows desktop (sarantium) via Samba.

Nasty surprise - Red Hat removed MP3 support. Was aware of it in the back of my mind but still unexpected. Still, gives me a chance to reburn entire CD collection. Add to todo list - find MP3->OGG converter. WMA not an option.

Add to the home network todo list: quiet fans, more quiet fans.

From: Brett Peters
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 11:24 AM
To: Help Me
Subject: Data recovery/lost documents

Greetings:

I have lost a lot of data I worked on yesterday, most specifically an excel document with the results of a partner investigation. I had AutoRecover turned on, and saved my work regularly yesterday. Today, I find that the document has reverted back to the state it was in on Wednesday. I cannot find it in either C:\Documents and Settings\Bpeters\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\ (the AutoRecover save location), nor in any of the other locations. Several other documents are exhibiting similar behavior - changes I made yesterday afternoon have disappeared, even though I know I’d saved and closed them before leaving for the evening.

I was also prompted for a full login this morning. Did something happen last night? Is there any other places I can check to recover my data?

Cheers,
Brett

------
From: Brett Peters
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 10:30 AM
To: Help Me
Subject: FW: Data recovery/lost documents

Greetings:

This problem has recurred. The project that this problem is affecting is becoming critical because of it.

On Friday, after Mike installed the latest patches to Word, I was eventually able to actually recover the data from Thursday and continue working. I don’t know what it was that I did specifically that recovered the document, but after I rebooted twice and started Excel the AutoRecovery offered me a version of the document - last saved by user - that contained the missing data. I proceeded to save the document and work on it for the rest of Friday afternoon, adding in new data. I then saved it and closed all applications before leaving for the weekend.

This morning, this document has reverted to the state is was at on Wednesday, again. Restarting has not solved the problem.

Please help.

Cheers,
Brett

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From: Brett Peters
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 11:46 AM
To: Help Me
Subject: FW: Data recovery/lost documents

Greetings, once again:

First, my apologies for my tone in my previous email; I’m considerably upset at the software on my computer, which is irrational behavior in and of itself, and I hope I didn’t give offense with my curtness.

I found the missing document in a hidden folder within the temporary internet files folder, C:\Documents and Settings\Bpeters\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLKA4D. I did this by searching the existing visible *.tmp files with WordPad, scanning through the gibberish, determining that the above folder must exist even though I couldn’t see it, and then searching for OLKA4D. I have no idea why the folder remains hidden, even though I have selected “Show Hidden Files and Folders” in the folder display. Also, I have no answer as to why searching for either the filename or the text within the file did not return the correct file. I am very, very unhappy with this and, for my own peace of mind, would appreciate any insight you might offer as to these unexplained behaviors of Office and Windows.

There’s no chance that I could have Linux with OpenOffice installed on my machine, is there? No, I didn’t think so.

Please close this ticket.

Cheers,
Brett

I’m currently helping Merrystar move from her apartment in Alexandria to our townhouse in Springfield. Her parents are coming up this weekend with a pickup to help us with the big things, and I was in there early today to let all the utilities guys in to turn things on.

The last time I moved it took a month to get the gas turned on, and two months for the phones to be straightened out. It’s strange to have everything taken care of before moving. It makes the lifting heavy boxes of books up and down stairs not too bad.

So.

After about three weeks, my computer at home is finally rebuilt. I learned a few things:

• Upgrading Win98 to Win2000 will solve some of your problems. Because it feels guilty for having done so, it will introduce a host of additional problems to make up for it.
• Triple-boot systems, no matter how cool they are in concept, can be rather tricky to set up. This is especially true if 2/3rds of your system is written by Microsoft. Your hard drive may collapse under the boot weight.
• When your hard drive crashes, the period of panic is much shorter when all your data is on CDs you burned the week before.
• Lotus Notes is wonky no matter what OS you run. It is a fundamental axiom of this world.

So my apologies to all those to whom I owe email responses; they’re coming, honest. I’ve been restoring files from CD and should have my inbox back in the next day or two or three.