On Being Open

Apollo 17 moon landing site picture

2011-09-13T13:52:00.001-05:00

Awesome. Nuff said.

Small, Medium, and Large Tablets

2011-07-04T18:07:00.006-05:00

In 2007 I called the first generation iPhone a mini tablet. Since then I have had every iPhone generation (iPhone, 3G, 3GS, 4), and switched my personal phone a year ago to a Samsung Captivate (My office phone is the iPhone 4 now, replacing the much disliked-by-me Blackberry line).

All of them are small Tablet Computers. Not the Blackberries, the other ones. Apparently the Blackberries are "smartphones". Maybe when QNX comes out they will be tablet computers, or at least some of them will be, like whatever the QNX version of the Storm is. I like RIM, and I hope that they can get it together. At the time of this writing they are still not getting it and getting beaten to death by Android and Apple. But I digress.

I had an iPad 1, but that has moved to a Motorola Xoom. Now, another tablet has entered the scene: A Nook Color.

The means I while I am still a slacker in this department relative to some, I now have 4 tablet computers: The iPhone4, the Captivate, the Nook, and the Xoom. All rest on my nightstand when they need to eat:

Hungry Computers

I should say that I was a bit leary of the idea of a 7 inch tablet. It seemed too fine a split between the 4 inch Captivate and the 10.1 inch Xoom. My wife got one, and while she mostly uses hers as B&N intended, I.E. a reader, I was interested in the way the the little Nook pushed her iPad out of the way for most things. It was more portable. It was lighter to hold for long periods of time. It had a very nice, very readable screen, with good 169 DPI across its 7 inch, 1024x600 screen. Not as good as the iPhones 326, or the Samsungs 233 DPI... but better than the iPads 132 and slight better than the Xooms 160. DPI (or PPI if you prefer) are not all there is to a screen of course, as I have noted here that I prefer the saturated colors / viewing experience of the Captivates AMOLED technology screen over the higher DPI, less saturated, yellower iPhone. It is an interesting comparison point, and I am nearly certain that the iPad3 will answer the current iPad critic's with a higher DPI display. It pretty much has to. I am guessing they'll double it, like they did the iPhone, for about 264 DPI. But I digress....

(side note: Nifty DPI page on Wikipedia)

Small: Captivate: CyanogenMod Nightly build, Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). As of this writing its build 48, but that changes every night of course...
Medium: Nook Color (AKA Encore): CyanogenMod 7.1 RC1, Android 2.3.4. Nightlies for the Nook are actually higher than the Captivate, at Build 122 at the time of this writing, however as easy as the Nook is to install CM7 on, it takes almost that same process to update it everynight, so I settled in on just installing the release candidates for now. The problem is that the way the internal partitions are set up, there is not enough room in /mnt/sdcard to hold even one nightly build. But this works...
Large: Motorola Xoom, Android 3.1 stock.

Medium Tablet

Like my wife, I find I use the 7 inch NookDroid quite a bit. I prefer it for reading books over the Captivate or the Xoom for example, although the Nook app on Android is not as good as it was in the native B&N 1.2 OS release. That is a bit odd, since that was just 2.2/Froyo under the covers, so clearly B&N does not release the latest/best/most optimized version of the Nook reader to the Android Market. This compensated for by the fact that:

I can run any reader I want now: I like to shop all the eBook shops to get the best deals. I do buy from B&N when they have the best price.
The web browser options are much better (I mostly use Dolphin HD on it)
Most all the 'droid apps work on it, and most work better than they do on the Xoom for some reason: You would not think there was that big a difference for an app between managing the screen real estate of 1024x600 and 1280x800 but there is.
Gingerbread is rocking fast on this unit: Hardly any lag anywhere. The Nook 1.2 software was OK, but it stopped to go think about things all the time, for no apparent reason. My wife, who still runs the stock version most of the time is often frustrated by its lagginess.
I have the overclock kernel on it (The Nooks TI OMAP processor is amazingly flexible about speed) , and can watch video, although I prefer that on the Xoom (screen size) or the Captivate (color saturation). It's nice to have the option if it is all I have with me at the moment.

The things holding back the NookDroid are:

It really needs 3.1's tablet optimizations. I guess that really means it will get Ice Cream Sandwich when it comes out, since that will have source for the CyanogenMod folks to use.
I miss the GPS: The Xoom has an awesome GPS chipset, and the Captivates GPS works like a champ now with CM7. It's amazing how many things, like maps and navigation and whatnot, are used without thinking of their reliance of GPS.
It would be cool if the FM radio worked. As shipped from B&N, the radio chipset only enables Wifi, but it has Bluetooth and FM radio on it too, and the CM7 crew has the bluetooth going.

Still: It has convinced me that there is value in the 7 inch form factor, and at half the price of anything else out there, it is an amazing little unit.

Small Tablet

I have not talked here very much about the Captivate since I got it. I replaced the tiny 1500 MAh battery with a 3200 MAh unit (almost as big as the Nooks 4000 MAh battery), which has been a lifesaver, if looking slightly like a humpback whale. No heavier than the iPhone in its Mophie skin though.

I have been through quite a number of ROM's on the SC. The Captivate must be one of the more ROM'ed phones around. That is probably due, at least in part, to the hardware being great, and the OS, as shipped by Samsung... not so much. In addition to the stock 2.1 and later 2.2 releases, I have run all sorts of versions of Andromeda, Cognition, and Serendipity. Now CM7. Originally it was to get the AT&T apps off the phone, and get it to 2.2 fast than AT&T/Samsung were doing. Later it was to just replace the much slower version of the OS that ships stock.

After messing around for the better part of the year in custom ROM space, last month I went from a botched CM7 nightly back to stock AT&T Froyo (2.2). I wanted to know how much better 2.2 was over 2.1. When the battery started lasting 1/4 the time it was before, and the phone lagged and generally acted like there was sand in its bearings, I realized that I had no idea just how much better the custom ROM world, with its occasional hiccups, was to the stock world. It's like Samsung has no idea what to do with their own hardware. I read on and on in the forums, as I suffered through the long week on stock 2.2, about how bad the device drivers were, and why the aftermarket had created the "Lagfix" and so forth.

The minute I got back from that trip, CM7 went back onto the phone and in the 20 or so builds since has not had any major issues. Right now, on build 48, I have to remember to turn back on the phone ringtone because it is defaulting to vibrate for some reason. Nothing major though.

That being said, I am watching for what the next phone will be. Front runner right now is the Galaxy II S once it hits AT&T... and I see a CM7 build for it.

Large Tablet

The main thing to say about the Xoom at this point is that I wish Google / Motorola would get the lead out, and get the update that supports the SD card into place. As a "Google Experience" unit (and the reason I went with it instead of the A500 or a Samsung 10.1) it is weird to not be having the full experience. The forums go back and forth about why there is no SD card support, and in truth the reason no longer matters. It is just silly now. The ROM market has hacked a version that does have SD card support. There is SD card support outside the US in the stock OS. Why does not matter. It just needs to be fixed.

Ice Cream Sandwich can not come soon enough, except to get the merge between the 2.x and 3.x lines right. Seeing the seams around the edges of 2.3.4 on the Nook, it is clear that running a tablet benefits fro having an OS that "gets" the screen size. 3.1 is nice, but in small and medium spaces, I have seen the advantages of letting the community have the code and fixing the problems. The Captivate and the Nook are far better for the AOSP (Android Open Source) version for the code. The Xoom needs that too, because it is clear that Google / Motorola are not able to deliver feature / function in a timely manner.

None of this is to say I am ready to run back to the iPad. I'd be interested in seeing one with a high resolution screen, and the Android feature functions of iOS5 like notifications, but as I have said here before I am tired of the jailbreak cat and mouse in that space. I don't care about jailbreak for my iPhone 4 because it is really my employers and so it is bone stock. I use it for work things only, not most of my daily life. At this point every app I was using on the iPhone is either on the 'droid, or has an alternative that is as good or better.

Cables and Power

One thing that is interesting to note is the different ways that the phone/tablets go about solving their battery charging needs. The Captivate comes with its own charger that seems to talk to the Captivate differently. The phone does not report being on a USB cord when plugged into it It also seems to charge more quickly with it, probably because the Samsung Charger is 700 MA (Milli Amp) rather than a standard USB ports 500 MA. Still, to charge the 3200 MAh battery takes a while. The nice thing is that the cables can be standard, OTC, MicroUSB. Nothing special required cable wise. It will charge more quickly if I hook it to the Nook charger, or the 2000 MA iPad charger (I still have the charger), but I usually avoid fast charging it for fear of not knowing how well the internal parts can deal with the higher wattages.

The Nook has a standard looking MicroUSB cable, but closer inspection reveals it is longer: The shank goes more deeply into the socket. it turns out the cable is not standard (at least not currently standard), and has extra wires at a second depth. The charger is 1900 MA (1.9 amps) and that charges the Nook even while in use. If you hook a standard cable to it, it will charge slowly while turned off, or extend battery life while on, but the Nook uses more than 500 MA cables provide while on, so the battery does drain if it is, for example, hooked to your laptop USB port. I have no qualms about putting the Nook on the iPad USB charger, as there is not that much difference between them in terms of milliamps.

The Xoom has a MicroUSB port on it, so it can use the same cord as well... but only for data. The power comes in via a tiny barrel connector (or a couple pins on the docking station), The Xoom charges faster than either the Samsung or the B&N unit though. The special power cord means that they did not have to play USB voltage games, so the 6500 MAh battery of the Xoom, despite being the largest in the group, is the fastest to fill up. The advantage of 12 volts at 1.5 amps (19 volts at 1.58 amps for the docking station with speakers). That also makes the car charger for the Xoom pretty small, since nothing much has to be done with the voltage coming out of the cars accessories port.

I like that the Xoom charges so fast, but I would like a USB port option. As USB evolves to charge more and more things, I am wondering if the Nook USB design might go wider. I can see nothing in the standards about such a thing though. I am guessing that once the market is as full of MicroUSB devices as there once where MiniUSB devices, and the people that make cords need to make some more cords that we might see another standard emerge. If it does, at least it will solve the needing 2000 or more MA@5v on the USB cord problem...

Hopefully.

Tablets

2011-06-20T19:10:00.002-05:00

I keep hearing how Android tablets suck rocks, and how Apple owns the tablet market, and that this platform and that platform are D.O.A. and various other bits of breathless hyperbole.

That Apple is currently dominant in tablet computing is true. That tablet computing is eating up netbook sales is true (despite all the denials).

But what I do not get is all this stuff about how everything other than iPad is doomed. But then, I don't get the iPad2 as a device. More on that in a sec...

I currently have a Motorola Xoom, and I love it. When my first one was stolen out of my car (so I guess a Xoom is worth stealing in broad daylight), I went from Walmart to Walmart to Costco (Verizon ones only in stock: No thanks) to Walmart till I found another. Eight stores in all. The Xoom is about the same weight and thickness as my iPad1 was. It is fast, and has a different aspect ratio, but it more or less feels like the iPad1 in the hand.

I have held an iPad2, and I did not like it as well. It felt.. thin. I know from the teardown reports that the glass in thinner... and glued in. The screen resolution is the same as the iPad1. Yes, it was faster than the 1, and it had a front facing camera and all that, but I would take an iPad1 over an iPad2. Or, in my case, a Xoom.

If they can make them thinner with the same battery life and thinner glass, then how about the same thickness, the same serviceability, and longer battery life instead? 10 hours is not magical. If you can make it thinner and still run 10 hours, then keep it the same, and make it run for 12 or 15 hours instead. My preference anyway.

Motorola has apparently moved about 250,000 Xooms in the first three months, and that has been classified by the media as abject failure. Maybe it is: I have no idea if it is profitable at that volume or not, though I would think that it is.

It is being measured by the insanely profitable iPad I suppose, and that of course is where all the hype comes in. Anyone remember when Apple said it was introducing this phone thing and they would be happy with just 1% of the market?

I lived with my iPad1 for a year, and I handed off to its next owner in perfect working order. It was a nice unit, and did exactly what I wanted it to do for the most part. The Xoom does everything it did, only faster and in 16:9 instead of 4:3.

Drag and drop to load files. No iTunes involvement. I like the Xoom better in every possible way. It even has some of the same gripes. I did not like that the iPad did not use MicroUSB for data and power, and the Xoom uses a proprietary power cord too, though it does have MicroUSB for data. The Xoom charges way faster than the iPad did, so that is a plus for the special power connector. And having had a Xoom stolen, I have a spare now, which is handy.

There are not as many Xoom accessories, but all the ones that I had for the iPad I have for the Xoom, and then some. I always meant to get some sort of music base station for the iPad, and I did get one of the Xoom, and now it is the perfect alarm clock.

I have not rooted it yet, but I will eventually, if for no other reason than to get Titanium Backup running. But unlike the iPad, there is less of a feel of urgency because it feels like it is putting less restrictions on me.

I don't know what the tech media is smoking: They are only sharing with each other. The Xoom, the Acer A500, The Samsung 10.1, et al (and yes, I like the 10.1 inch screen size) are all fine units, and if they are not tearing Apples market share up, they are all pretty good units in their own right. Here is hoping that hype does not become reality, as it seems that what most of these folks would like to see at this point is a failure, so that they can trot out an "I told you so" rather than looking at whether the devices work, and are worthy.

Open Again

2011-03-11T16:57:00.000-06:00

Google released a new spam filter for the comments, and so I have re-opened the comments. No moderation at all.

I did not know that the moderation feature would not notify me that there were comments awaiting moderation, so there are a number of comments that have just been sitting there. Sorry about that.

iPad 2 Release Day

2011-03-11T15:17:00.001-06:00

... and no plans for me to get one. Weird. In my last post, "Tablet Future" I said this:

"The killer feature will be when a tablet has better than 300 DPI in a 10 inch or larger form factor. FWIW: I seriously doubt that iPad 2 will have a Retina display, at least not in 2011. "

If you are just here from your trip to Mars, you may not know that the iPad2 (hereafter just "2") in fact has no better screen resolution than the first generation unit (hereafter the "1").

Various wags have said that the 2 is really the iPad 1.5, and I have to admit that, as I watched the iPad 2 reveal, I was thinking the same thing. Since it would not be original to call it the 1.5 at this point, I won't. Nope. Never hear that from me.

The 2 is a nice unit. Just not compelling enough to make me want to trade in my 1. I already chaff at the restrictions placed on me by Apple: enough so that my next tablet is not likely to be an iPad at all. I admit: I was waiting. The killer feature would have been a high DPI screen, and I would have handed down my 1 and gotten a 2 if it had one. Oddly, it looks like they got the video hardware ready to handle a, with a 9x improvement in performance. I have to guess that they just could not source a "Retina" display in quantity for the price they wanted to pay at wholesale.

The Android tablets really have no better DPI to speak of. Different / better aspect ratios, but not DPI. So why go there? Why not just stay with the iPad?

The Xoom has all the same more or less speeds and feeds (dual core processor, good video card, big RAM), but also has SD card coming in an update (the slot is already there), has a better screen aspect ratio, and is not locked. Really: That one thing alone requires being supported.

Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 is near, and Samsung does *nice* screens as well. Also has the better aspect ratio like the Xoom. The announced Toshiba unit looks nice, and we'll no doubt see a Dell Streak come along in the 10 inch range.

In every Android case, there will be tons of updates and 3rd party ROMS (Android mis-use of the term ROM is pretty standard: They are not really Read-Only Memory, but software stacks that replace the kernel, apps, and other supporting bits that run the tablet. When I get a chance, I'll post about my ROM adventures on my Samsung Captivate).

In the Apple case there will just be whatever Apple supplies, and there will be the usual tug of 'ware between the jailbreakers and Apple. Kind of like a tug of war, but in software.

When I do not have an iPad anymore I will miss exactly one application that has not moved over to Android yet: BLASTR. Instead, I will have to read the SyFy website with the built in browser. Not sure why SyFy has not created an Android version of that. I wish they would....

Thin is In

The 2 will be thinner than anything in Android space for a while. The aluminum case clearly nicer. The price point competitive. If you don't care about variety of apps / rooting / jailbreaking then there is most likely no reason to consider leaving the iPad fold. The 2 will have more accessories. You'll be able to buy your 2 all sorts of little gifts over the next year. It is going to be the most portable / lightest for a while.

I have Flash on the Captivate now, and I have to say that Apple is not totally wrong about it. Its nice to be able to have the choice of flash or not, but so far the upside has not been all that great. More ads play now for sure. Forgot how annoying those were.

I am sure the 2 will do well without me. And I may even get a 3 or 4 or 7 someday. If Android tablets eat at enough share, maybe Apple will add in the missing features to try and compete a bit. Right up until now, they did not have to. For the last year they were running well ahead of the pack.

Funny: A year ago it was a one company show. It took only a year before the field was full of valid competitors. Not just Android, but the new WebOS unit from HP looks pretty nice too. With HP's announcement that all of its PC's will have WebOS built in, that OS might have a rebirth as well.

Its iPad release day. Time to fire up Pulse on the Captivate and see what is going on outside the Apple world.

Tablet Future

2010-12-29T19:22:00.004-06:00

A long time ago in a post far far away (OK: back in 2007), I mentioned that I viewed my first generation iPhone as a small tablet computer. Nothing about the 3G, 3GS. 4. or for that matter the Android powered Captivate really has changed my thinking about that. They are all still 3.7 to 4 inch tablet computers.

What has changed is that there are bigger tablet computers available now. The current king-of-the-sales-hill is of course the iPad. The Android powered tablets are going to come on strong this next year, so that by the time of the iPad 2, there will no doubt be 15 Android options. Like the iPhone to Android market of today (Winter Solstice Holidays of 2010 now) in total sales it is almost a sure thing that Android will have more unit sales.

Pick a number: About 8 million iPads to less than 2 million Androids right now (Including Dell Streak, Samsung Tab, B&N's Nook, and various others) will easily be 30 or 40 million tablets next year, with probably just less than half that market going to the iPad.

What that means is that, like the iPhone, all the cool cases and gadgets and tablet accessories are going to collect in the iPad end of the pool. I am working on this post right now on my first gen iPad, using the "ZAGG/mate with Keyboard", a birthday present from my wife.

The ZAGG folks were pretty smart with this design. Not to be too much of a commercial for them, but the built in bluetooth keyboard will sync with more than just an iPad: the design of the tray is such that I can stick my Samsung Captivate in it, and use it instead of the iPad. (Update: Bzzzt: I could if the captivate would, but it appears to not support bluetooth keyboards, at least not in 2.1. Who knows if there will be a 2.2 or not... ) That means that when I get an Android powered tablet someday, even if the ZAGG device won't work as a case, it will work as a stand / keyboard.

Most accessories are far too iPad specific though, and won't enjoy the cross compatibility. Apple ensures this in part by continuing to use the 30 pin connector when a mini or microUSB connector would do.

Maturity

One of the things that surprised the market was not that the iPad existed at all, but that when it came out it was already so mature as a product. Other than a wifi issue with the initial 3.2.0 release, it was feature rich, stable, and fast. Battery life was amazing. Lore has it that the iPhone was actually an outgrowth of the tablet research, and that Apple decided to introduce it first because they saw a bigger market for such a converged tablet / phone device. I would call them visionary except that I used to watch Star Trek in the 1960's, and ST:TNG in the 1990's and most everything the iPad is was there already.

On the other hand, I had a Pen Windows 1.0 device from Grid in the early 1990's, and have seen most every tablet attempt by MS and their partners since then, and the iPad was the first usable tablet device. It is not just concept. It is implementation, and there Apple really kicked it.

One look or test drive with the current crop of Android powered tablets, and it is clear that Android is not far behind. The Galaxy Tab is too small for me, but it drives nicely. A 10 inch version of that, at a better price point than the current unit would already have me switching. Say a 10 inch screen with better DPI than the current model, 64GB or better (or enough SD slots to let me add that much), for 700 USD or less. Wifi Only, although if it supported the Clear "4G" WiMAX technology that would be nice.

The killer feature will be when a tablet has better than 300 DPI in a 10 inch or larger form factor. FWIW: I seriously doubt that iPad 2 will have a Retina display, at least not in 2011.

I already have a small tablet: two of them in fact. The 7 inch midpoint does not hold any value for me personally. If I just had a feature phone, not a small tablet, then the 7 inch form factor as personal organizer would be very interesting.

Archos will have a 10 inch form factor out soon, but early reviews of it are that are that while it is inexpensive: Half the price of an equivalent iPad, it also feels like it will not last very long. I expect Dell, Acer, Samsung, and others will get into the 10 inch form factor game soon.

The other problem of the current crop of Android powered tablets is that that Android will not officially support the tablet form factor until version 3.0 is out later in 2011. We have seen 2.3 drop here at the end of 2010, but only on the Nexus 2. Many smartphones/mini-tablets, like my Samsung Captivate, are stuck at 2.1 or even older.

The problem is primarily the way the apps support the much larger 10 inch screen size: Current apps for the Android platform were mostly designed with the smaller 4 inch screen size in mind, and they do not all scale up well. Maybe the 7 inch form factor is a hedge against this limitation.

It is an easy fix, especially relative to getting all the other things right about a Tablet OS: being usable for touch and gestures is harder. Ask MS. Windows is still a mouse and keyboard OS, and while there is supposed to be a Windows for tablets someday, it won't be until there are hundreds of millions iPads and Android tablets out in the wild. If it is anything like the Win7 phone, the first release won't be feature complete either, meaning the market will have even more time to run away from them.

But is it a Computer?

The number one question I get: Can my tablet replace a laptop. Answer: yes, but it will be an Android one that does it, at least at first. The reason is simple and age old: Android tablets are not trying to keep other products in business. They won't need a tether. You'll be able to back them up and restore them to USB connected devices or the Cloud (I view Apples MobileMe as a hedge against the cloud). Solid State memory will continue to drop such that todays 64 GB tablet is tomorrows 256 GB tablet, and then the next years 1 terabyte tablet.

For right now, on the iPad, I can go days without a sync, and really only need a power cord. I chaff against the restrictions placed on me by the only browser available, but for short periods of time it is tolerable. Still, Chrome with Flash will be a welcome addition someday, if not on the iPad, then on the Androids that will follow it.

Yes: I know that Opera is available, and that there are other browser shells that front end Safari: none of them fix the simple fact that a lot of the InterWebs is Flash based.

As a book reader, a web surfer, a text composer, a research tool, a reference manual, and a non-flash media consumption device, the current crop of tablets are already replacing laptops and other special purpose devices. When dual core processors, integrated graphics, bigger solid state disks, and higher resolution screens arrive over the next two years, the question of "Is it a real computer" will give way to "When will laptops die or be marginalized?". We used to ask when laptop sales would eclipse desktop sales, and they did. This will be no different.

The current Macbook Air is a clue to that future. As much as I would love to have one, I can not justify having both it and an iPad. The Air is more of a "real" computer (though what that means is already becoming blurry), and would be my choice for an office computer, when rigged out with an external display, and external storage to stage all the things that do not fit in its 256 GB max disk size. My non-Air, 13 inch Macbook has a 500GB drive, and a 640GB drive external, and still I stage things off to other locations. I have a bad virtual machine habit.

Therein lies the upcoming split: as large laptops grow in power and screen resolution, they will continue to replace desktops: My office Dell M4500 laptop is more powerful than any computer I personally have access to other than the new 27" iMac quad core. They are not too far apart spec wise, and came in at about the same price point. As the high end of the laptop eats away at the desktop, the laptop lower end will be chewed away by the tablet.

All the things that are wrong / substandard / less than optimal on the current generation of tablets will be fixed within the next two years. Androids, not having to keep a 30 pin connector alive will support USB 3.0, SD cards, and all manner of standard storage and connections. They will leapfrog the iPad in that regard, and what will be interesting to see is if Apple responds with lockdown and lockout, or open up and set the iPad free to be the full blown computer is has the potential to be.

The market is Apple's to lose, but if the computing history of MS is any guide.... well, it will be interesting. If they stay in the game, then we'll all win.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Blackberry-less

2010-12-24T21:06:00.004-06:00

In my last post, "iPhoneless", I talked about trading in my personal iPhone 3GS for a Samsung Captivate. Since then I have traded in my BMC provided Blackberry Storm (1st generation) for... wait for it... an iPhone 4.

Bye Bye Blackberry... Storm that is

I have written here several times of my problems with Blackberries. I know there are those who love the chicklet keys, and go so far to call them "real" keyboards. I am not one of those people, and prefer the virtual keyboard, especially on a small form factor computer. Full disclosure: I am typing this on my brand new-for-Xmas keyboard/dock on my iPad. I like the virtual keyboard on the iPad just fine, but I am admittedly faster on this little jewel.

The keypad was far from my only problem with the BB Storm though. It was a wretched virtual keyboard, though the upgrade to OS5 made that somewhat better. The push=to=click screen was always a horrible idea though, and nothing about any OS was going to change that.

The web browser was/is garbage and even with Opera installed, it was still suboptimal, because there were some many things, like downloads, that required the BB Browser.

There was how slow it was (made somewhat better by OS5).

There was the OS itself, which always felt like a patchwork, even after the OS5 upgrade. I hear OS6 fixed a lot of this, but the 1st gen Storm will never know that. It's last OS version is 5, in part because the Storm does not have enough memory for 6, although the slow processor is also probably a factor.

The Torch is a Storm with a faster processor, a chicklet slide out keypad, and OS 6, therefore a better web browser. I played with one at the AT&T store but it still is not a nice as my first generation iPhone was. At least for me. I know others love love love the BB's. I do not miss mine even a little.

Best of Two Worlds

I will never have every possible smartphone there is in order to know which one might be the ultimate best one. WebOS has real possibilities for example, now that HP owns it. Having the Captivate and the iPhone 4 is a unique opportunity to compare the two leaders of the USA field though. Note that, unlike my personal iPhone, this one is BMC's, so it is the stock OS 4.1, and is not jailbroken. I can not upgrade it to 4.2 even, because the software that hooks it into our Exchange server over the Internet is not ready for 4.2. From everything I have read, 4.2 was no big deal for the iPhone anyway: It was mostly about bringing multitasking and folders to the iPad.

Screens

Much has been said about the beauty of the iPhones 300 dpi display. All of the good stuff is true. It is a pretty screen, and it works even in fairly bright light. The Amoled display on the Captivate is also amazing, especially while watching video: For some reason it almost looks 3D. It is also a battery drainer of the first order. I have started to be very careful to not use color backgrounds in things like email or IM as that saves power. Not enough though.

I actually prefer the Amoled display most of the time, in part because it is 4 inches rather than 3.7, and that extra little bit helps with my older eyes and fat fingers. In bright light, it is useless however.

Camera

Both the iPhone and the Captivate have 5 megapixel cameras, and here is proof positive that there is more to a digital camera than megapixels. the iPhone camera is better in low light, bright light... any kind of light, than the Samsung. The Samsung does have EV compensation though, so I guess it wins in backlight, or other situations where the meter has to be over-ridden to get the shot. The iPhoto app is also much better for organizing pictures, and this I do not get. Google owns Picasa: Where is Picasa for Android?

Virtual Keyboard

I have dissed the BB's keypad, and BB keyboards in general, so I guess I should note which keyboard I like better between the IPhone and the Samsung. The Samsung.. mostly. The Captivate comes with Swype, and that is an amazing way to enter text on a small keyboard. Just trace along the letters, never lifting your finger, and most of the time it figures out the words correctly. People that are good at Swype can apparently do 50 words per minute.

There are rumors that Swype is being developed for the iPhone, but I have a hard time seeing Apple approving it as an app. If they did this would be a toss-up.

There is nothing wrong with the virtual keypad of the iPhone: Beside the Swype keypad the Captivate has the stock Android one, and a Samsung one. Either of those is not quite as good as the Apple, mostly because the spacing and layout combined with the way the letters pop up as you type them. Those things together maker it a little easier than the non-Swype keyboards on the Captivate.

Speeds and Feeds

The iPhone is supposed to be about 800 Mhz, and the Captivate about 1 Ghz. Both ARM based processors. I can't tell the difference. Both clip along well. Both load and render web pages at about the same speed.

Radio / 3G / Voice

In a recent trip to New York, famed home of lousy AT&T reception (or so they say: my BB was never any better there and it was Verizon) the two phones worked about the same. Not scientific, but when one phone was out of range, so was the other. Occasionally the Captivate would have a bar when the iPhone had none. Most of the time they were in range. Most of the time they worked, although there was a pub I went to a fair amount where both were incommunicado.

I like the sound of the earpiece a little better on the Samsung, but the iPhone is way better at canceling out the ambient noises I am surrounded by, making it better for the person on the other end of the line. Meh. No difference.

Both sync up to my Plantronics Bluetooth earpiece without issues.

Wifi

I did not lump this in with the radio because there is a difference here. The iPhone pretty much kicks the Captivate's tush. It finds access points, and more easily stays connected to them. Its range is longer from the same access point, and it remembers passwords better.

Battery and Battery life

Another iPhone win, but mostly because the iPhone ecosystem is larger. I have a Mophie JuicePack on the iPhone, meaning it has an extra 1500 mAh battery at all times. There are no Mophie juice packs for the Captivate, and there is no aftermarket battery at this writing that is larger than the stock 1500 mAh unit. Do any serious screen time work on the Captivate, and that battery drains at an alarming rate. Since I like the Samsung display better, that means the Captivate is always drained more deeply than the iPhone. It can not pass a MicroUSB power cord.

(Update: Here in January of 2011, while looking for any news of a 2.2 update, I found aftermarket batteries finally appearing for the Captivate. Mine will be getting a 3200 mAh unit in the near future. It makes the phone look like a humpback whale rather than a thin slab, but with basically twice the runtime, and a bigger case so it is easier to hold on to, it is a no-brainer for me. Hard part will be finding a new belt-case for it. yes, I look like Batman with all this crap hanging from my belt. Better than carrying it in my pocket and risking microwave radiation in the nether regions though.)

The whole concept of the removable battery being better than the iPhone sealed in tight unit is laughable when one has a Mophie Juicepack. I do not have to plug in to A/C to switch out a battery for example. And the Mophie makes the iPhone into a MicroUSB connector, the same as the Captivate, so I only need one cable type: Nice.

The iPhone beats the Captivate to a bloody pulp here, and it is the fault of the Captivate not having a 3000 mAh optional battery. Really: I don't care if it is thicker: The Juicepack is hardly slimming. Smartphones eat batteries. Need. Bigger. Battery.

Buttons

I keep finding I have muted the Captivate, and I still don't know how I did it exactly. It happens all the time, and it is the ergonomics of the volume control buttons somehow. The Mophie does a great job protecting the volume controls of the iPhone, so there is no issue there.

On the other hand, I love the search, home and back buttons of the Captivate, and even more that those buttons on the Captivate are virtual, not mechanical. That is the hardest thing about switching back and forth between the two phones: I am always looking for those buttons on the iPhone.

App Store

The iPhone may have more apps in the app store, but with Apples censorship, they are not all that I want. Fewer apps, but more apps than I am interested in maps to the Captivate having a better app store. For example, until recently, Google Voice was not in the iPhone app store. It is now of course, but that was months I had it on the Captivate and not the iPhone.

The rest of the Google suite: Maps and Navigation for example are still not iPhone options, and while the iPhone has a maps app, and it is even based off Googles, it is nowhere near as up-to-date. Navigation requires something like Tom-Tom on the iPhone. And while I play few games, the Angry Birds on the Captivate is ad supported, therefore free.

The cost of the better app store is that there is a ton of junk in the Google Market. Easy to filter through though.

The one app I really want on the Captivate that is not there is the SyFy "Blastr": formerly SYFY Wire. Not sure why they have not done a version of that, but I can read it on the iPad and the iPhone, so it is not horrible that it is not there.

I have five browsers on my Captivate. The built in one is OK, but Dolphin and Opera and Opera Mini and Firefox are all so very nice too... IPhone has Safari. Serviceable and better than the BB browser by so very far. Not Android good though.

OS

Captivate was supposed to get Froyo months ago, but so far it has not appeared. Looking through the forums is appears that this is sort of a Samsung tradition, and there are those wondering if it will ever appear. I have 2.1 Update 1 on mine, and it gets new versions of the apps pushed to it on a near daily basis. Almost annoyingly often: Every time I see the message that I have new software I run and check and no: No 2.2 for you.

I am hoping to see a faster, more responsive OS, and actual Flash: the bane of the Apple existence. But so far I have been denied, and it is starting to get frustrating.

If I jailbroke my iPhone, I would also find the iOS drop schedule full of grief, but from the other direction: How often new versions of iOS show up, and at times only closing jailbreaks. Right now, as I write this, the only jailbreak out for the current 4.2.1 requires the phone to be tethered every time it is booted. How to be sure that no one ever upgrades!

I like the iOS multitasking and folders, but of course I have all those things on the Captivate too. They do not work exactly the same, and I had to add the folders to the Captivate via Marketplace and Fabio Collini's "Apps Organizer" and "Folder Organizer" apps.

The pull down status tray is something I use all the time on the Captivate. The only way to have that on the iPhone is via jailbreak and the SBSettings app.. something denied me because the iPhone is not jailbroken.

iOS is like ... Windows in a way. It is easy, it works, it is updated often and not always for nefarious reasons. I would have no issue recommending it to a non-computer-technical person. For me, it is constraining. The editorial position of Apple is grievous. They are acting like Microsoft back in their heydays, and in the worst possible version of that. The vision that Apple has is clearly superior in many ways, but it is not the only vision, and locking out others who have ideas too is just not working for me.

Further, while the iPhone is easy, Android is not hard. If someone was not planning on making their Android based phone into an MP3 player as well, and they were non-computer-technical, android is also an easy recommendation. If music is involved, Nothing I have found in the Marketplace is as easy as the iPod / iTunes duo to use. Double Twist comes close, and even adds the wireless sync capability long missing from the iPhone. But it is not as easy to manage as the iPhone, and is much slower at syncing, wired or not wired.

Workphone

The iPhone is a perfect work phone. Its mail client is easy to use and much nicer than the one in the Storm. Ditto the Calendar. I was always late to meeting because the screen presentation of a calendar on the BB was just stupid. The iPhone is locked down and locked out and all those things, so I don't have to worry about things like the policies that Apple has that I do not like.

It is interesting to have the two competing phones and see where one is better than the other, but if I had to chose another personal phone, it would still be something Android based. Maybe with a 4.3 inch screen next time... and from a vendor that is better about keeping their OS up to date like Motorola or HTC. I love the Samsung's screen though, and they are the only ones doing Amoled right now.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

New Blog: "Green IT"

2010-11-17T14:32:00.000-06:00

I have taken on an additional role at my day job: That of "Green IT Spokesperson". To go with that new role, I have started a new blog called "Green IT" at communities.bmc.com.

I am still a Linux person, still a Mac person, still have an Android phone (and soon, my corporate phone will be an iPhone, replacing my BB Storm: Yea!!!), and I'll still be posting from time to time here and over at "Adventures in Linux": Just more writing, which actually I do not mind. I am hoping with practice to get better at it.

iPhoneless

2010-08-04T14:28:00.001-05:00

The thing that surprised me the most about getting a Samsung Captivate running Android 2.1 was just how apprehensive I was about it. After a bit of introspection, I realized I was actually worried about "leaving the nest": that the new experience would not be the match for what had come before it.

I was not expecting it to be the same: Just that I would somehow lose some functionality I had come to expect or depend on from the iPhone ecosystem. Further, the iPhone 4 is a beautiful piece of work. I have held one in every death grip I could think of, and got pretty much nothing. The same can not be said of my Blackberry which drops bars when held. But it is Verizon, and I get lousy signal at my house for Verizon, even though I get 5 bars on ATT.

I really wanted a Droid X, or an EVO, but neither of those phones was available on AT&T, and unlike the many that love bashing AT&T, my experience with them has been mostly positive. With a family plan and 5 phones on it, moving to another carrier was not financially feasible, and I also will not get anything but a GSM phone, and that let out the main units I was looking at.

Enter the Samsung Captivate.

ATT now has to really nice Android based phones: The HTC Aria, and the Captivate, which is the ATT version of the Galaxy S world phone. I was sorely tempted by the Aria: I have never seen a more pocketable phone, and it just felt really nice in the hand. But I wanted a big screen: Bigger than the iPhone if possible, and on AT&T, that is the Captivate right now.

Pushed from the Nest

Oddly, it was three things that Apple did that made me make the jump:

The constant cat-and-mouse games between the jailbreak community and Apple. Apple really wants to control what I put on my phone, and I really want to control that instead.
Related to point 1 is Apples policies around their App store.

I don't dig censorship, and I really hated that, for example, they had not allowed Google Voice onto the phone.
The Zinio magazine app was defanged and largely useless.
Then they went and bought a map company, clearly so that they could move away from Google even further.
Then there is the whole Flash thing. I am an adult: I can choose to eat my battery up with flash if I like. I totally agree that Flash has problems, but it is not for Apple to tell me how to deal with them.

The iPad. With it, I have access to all the things I care about. I like the iTunes store. I like the rental system. I like being able to grab TV shows when I miss them and forgot to set the DVR. I like Audible, and the new iPad Audible apps is very very nice. But with an iPad, I do not need and iPhone to consume these things.

Features

Even though I am a Linux guy, and Android was the premiere Linux based phone OS, I had waited, reading the trades, till appeared to me (as much as you can tell by reading) that ANdroid was more or less on feature parity with iOS4. Clearly it has always done multitasking, and such. I was more concerned around speed, stability, and size of the Android marketplace: Could I get things like Pandora there? My iPhone was ladden with apps, and I loved messing with them. I wanted that on my Android.

Another thing I have been waiting for is AMOLED screens to be feasible. The concept behind them is just too logical, and makes way more sense than LCD: Direct light generation, and no power used when a pixel is not on. The Galaxy S class of phones was the first that had the combination of size, maturity of execution, etc, to make me ready to switch. It is not the iPhone 4's retina display, but it is probably the second best display out there right now.

The camera has EV settings! I have wanted that forever on a cellCam. And it has a cool feature letting me tap on the screen for it to pick where to meter. All told, it is probably not as good an automatic camera as the iPhone 4, but it is a far better manual one.

Issues

There have been two problems of note so far:

The MicroUSB charge port
Syncing to my Mac

The charge port has a nifty sliding cover, but it also has the same issue as the first generation iPhone had with headphone: If your cord has a fat rubber grip near the microUSB connector, it will not easily slide in, and stay in. And there is no way to charge and talk at the same time, even with the provided MicroUSB cord. It just won't stay put.

In my MS Windowsless world, I never even thought to ask about sync to a smartphone. Everyone supports Mac these days... not. The Captivate / Galaxy S has no native way to sync to my Mac. To get media on Captivate, I have to put it into media mode, and turn on USB debugging. Then it appears to the Mac (or Linux) as a flash drive, and I can just drag content onto it. Its fast, and gives me ultimate content control, but I do miss iTunes.

Also, I would like a bigger battery option. The 1500 mAh is OK, and does better than my iPhone 3GS ever did, but that is damning with faint praise. I could not pass a charging cable with that phone, especially once it had iOS4 on it. But the 30 pin dock ecosystem is a rich place, and there is nothing like that on the Captivate. I would kill for a Mophie JuicePack. Barring that, a 2500-3000 mAh battery would be just the thing.

Probably more as this goes on: This is only day 4. But so far I do not, by and large, miss the iPhone, and I do enjoy having access to the Google world in a very high fidelity way. I set up Google Voice yesterday...

Nuts

2010-07-19T11:35:00.000-05:00

Well, I put up with it as long as I could. I believe that one should have open comments on a blog about being open.

But the spammers have worn me out with the deleting of the spam posts.

I have set the blog for comment moderation, at least until Google gets a better way to filter spam posts. I apologize to anyone in advance who thinks that this contravenes the concept of being open. I promise all non-spam posts will get posted.

Passionate about ... Operating Systems

2010-06-03T18:07:00.006-05:00

I have never been able to figure it all out. The Windows mavens that call Apple people names and insult their intelligence (and the reverse).

Maybe it is just me, but I care more about things like whether or not the place that makes my computer is so horrible that people are killing themselves rather than go to work, than what is actually made in the factory. Right now Foxconn is in the news in that regard, but behind that there are many many other sweatshops that are reportedly worse... I am thinking about the thing that pops up from time to time about where Kathy Lee Giffords clothing product line is made and the like.

If one is going to get passionate about an OS (as opposed to just liking to argue about it), how does one pick? When you get down to it, Linux, OS.X, and even Windows all can do pretty much the same things: They are all OS's, and platforms for OpenOffice, Firefox, Chrome, and other applications that are the things I really need. What would make me so passionate about it that I feel the need to post in forums that so-and-so is an idiot and her mother dresses her funny because she uses some other operating system than I do? Sure, I like center click to paste on Linux, and don't get why every OS does not have that.. but is that really the reason to question other peoples ancestry?

If one is serious about being passionate about the code that lives between the EFI/BIOS and the applications, then it seems to me that it comes back to the *way* the OS was generated and built. Was it built by a company that does good things: Is a good citizen of the world. Linux's answer to that is pretty easy. Linux is in and of itself a good work. It helps people the world over. You can learn how to write code from it. You can learn how an OS works from it. It powers things like the OLPC XO series of computers.

Still, you could point out that Apple makes green computers, or that MS donates money to charity..

Few enough people actually write the code that makes the OS's valuable that it is unlikely that the code editor or the debugger or the SDK is why folks are passionate about their OS. Sure, if you write code, whoever makes your life easier is probably your best buddy, but that seems insufficient for the wide-spread "Your OS sucks rocks, while mine just rocks" mentality.

Is it just that people feel the need to be competitive, even about stuff like what OS their computer runs? I don''t understand how I am supposed to pick my favorite baseball team either: I always just went with the fact that if I had been to a city and enjoyed it there, then I followed how well their team was doing: Thus I watch the SG Giants and the Boston Redsox with some interest, and don't follow Phoenix at all. The first day I was there it was 127 degrees.... yuch.

Maybe OS's are the same thing. Maybe it is not the OS itself, but whatever compels someone to line up on one side or the other that makes them pick an OS and stick to it.

Me: I just want something that works, and lets me do what I want to do, and right now that is Linux and OS.X. I may someday get over being angry about Code Red and Nimda, and the 2.5 weeks of my life I lost to them. It has been nearly 10 years and I have not so far. Not to mention all the infected PC's over the years I cleaned up for one person or another. I think it must be forget in order to forgive.

But even that is dislike, not the out and out name calling I see so often in forums.

I don't get it.

Ubuntu 10.04 and the Dell D600

2010-04-28T17:35:00.000-05:00

I have written here in this blog of my brother and his conversion years ago from Windows to Linux and Apple. He has four computers, two of which have Linux, and two of which a have PowerPC based OS.X. One of the Linux computers recently suffered a motherboard failure, so he was down one.

While it would not be quite true to say he was in the market for a new computer, since he does not spend much money annually on computers, he was looking for another computer opportunity. He was given a Dell D600 laptop by another relative, fulfilling that need.

The new-to-him computer had Windows XP, and ran....

...... very .....

.... slowly.

He asked me if Linux could be installed on it. I was pretty sure it could be, since I have it running extremely well on my D620.

The heritage of the D600 is unknown. It has a big orange sticker on the bottom saying it was reconditioned, but not by whom, or how. It ran hot as well as slow, and the battery was not a Dell part, and did not hold a charge. With a single core Pentium-M 1.4 Ghz processor ( because back then everything was single core ) , and 512 MB of RAM, it was not bleeding edge, but I thought Ubuntu 10.04, with all of it's optimizations and speedups would work well on it. The screen was big and bright and still a modernish 1400x1050 (SXGA+). It's 4x3 but other than that it looks as good as most any other modern laptop.

They wanted to keep XP on the hard drive as a just-in-case, which was a slight problem because the hard drive was a very un-modern 30 GB. Windows was consuming 14.5 GB.

I have seen MS WinXP installed on lessor hardware run better, so I am pretty sure that there is something wrong with the WinXP installed on the system, but I did not look into it. I booted Live version of Ubuntu 10.04 beta 1 from a USB fob, and checked for hardware compatibility. The only problem was the Wifi. It was a Broadcom part, but Linux would not enable it, and Ubuntu would not install non-standard hardware drivers on it either. I decided that I would just go the NDISWrapper route, and so told Ubuntu to install.

I do not know how long it took to resize the hard drive. I re-laid out the disk from 1 big to 4 various sized partitions. Post layout there was a 15 GB Windows partition at sda1, a 5 GB partition for sda2, a 2 GB partition for sda3 and a 7+GB partition for sda4. This was for /windows, /, swap, and /home respectively. I walked away and let the disk be worked over by the installer. The disk partitioning program that the installer uses gives no status as to progress as it resized, so I had no idea how long to wait. I went to lunch instead. That no-progress-status bug has been there for a while, but it does not affect the ability of the program to resize a disk, so I guess it is not high priority to get it fixed.

It was done shrinking heads when I got back, so I installed Ubuntu, and rebooted.

Everything was perfect except no WIfi. The Broadcom part (probably a Dell TrueMobile 1450 by brand) was not going to co-operate. I plugged in an Atheros based USB external 802.11 unit, and wifi popped right up, so I loaded up all the service, and rebooted. Still no Wifi. If Ubuntu does not support it out of the box these days, I usually don't mess with it. There may have been a way using fwcutter to get it going natively, but instead I just plugged in the Atheros, and loaded NDISWrapper and Ndisgtk, which is a GUI for managing NDISWrapper. I pointed Ndisgtk at an .inf file I also got from the Internet, and the card flew up and gave no further problems. Everything was configured correctly to survive reboots as well.

I had not seen the wireless issue when I installed Ubuntu on the D620 because it was Centrino branded, meaning it had Intel wireless, and that works natively in Linux these days due to Intel supplying support to the Linux community for their hardware. When I have a choice I use Intel or Atheros chipped Wifi for Linux laptops.

It would be nice if every single card out there just worked, and I almost bet that when the Mint version of Ubuntu 10.04 is out in a month or two that it will just work there, but I did not want to wait. While I did not mention my worry to my brother, I was concerned that the computer when running XP might be infected with something that would be working to steal his identity or similar. I did not want to take a chance. I wanted Linux up as fast as possible.

10.04 booted quickly, and ran quietly. No CPU fan most of the time. The D600 did not heat up. I loaded up Google Chrome for additional speediness, and surfed the web for a few hours. I tried a few games and OpenOffice 3.2 and a couple other things just to be sure that everything was running as it should be. It was just like any other Ubuntu 10.04 install I have done. Fast and quiet and everything working.

It was interesting to see when OpenOffice starts that the Sun branding is already replaced with Oracle branding. It was also nice to see all the work done on Oo 3.2 had really helped it's load times. It starts very quickly: a matter of seconds. Since this was going to be in part a school laptop, having a working OpenOffice was key.

I delivered the laptop, and my brother fired it up and played with it for a while. At first he said "Wow". Then, after a bit "This is much better". Then after another bit "I can't believe how much better this is".

To be fair, the MS Windows that was installed was probably infected with malware or something. It should have run better than it was. I did not try and figure out what was wrong. I just shrunk it down to make room for Linux.

My brother will probably upgrade to 1 GB, and replace the battery at some point. And when 10.04 goes GA tomorrow, I'll have him do a quick upgrade to get totally current, but other than that he is good to go.

So, for that matter, is Ubuntu 10.04. Another strong release.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Is the iPad a laptop replacement.

2010-04-24T14:29:00.003-05:00

Short answer : No.

Slight more accurate answer : It could be, but for a few design decisions.

First off, the hardware. I love hardware. I love virtual keyboards rather than real ones. I love the screen and the form factor. I don't want or care about the so-called missing camera because the form factor is stupid to use as a camera. A forward facing iChat style camera would make more sense, but I don't use the one in my Macbook all that often so no big deal there ether.

The processor and the memory are fine: it was not all that long ago that I was running Linux on hardware with less memory and CPU power, and using it as my daily laptop. The hardware is responsive on all the apps I run, and that is the main thing. Clearly it is not a platform for rendering movies. No problem there: I would not do that on my laptop either.

The hardware supports standard USB, which is nice, and even if it will not charge off every USB port out there, I do not fault Apple for that. The 10 hour+ run time came from having big batteries, and big batteries at the 5 volts of USB means you need amps to charge them. The charger that comes with unit is 10 amps. Most USB ports are half an amp or less. This not Apple being dunderheads. This is Apple unable to repeal the laws of physics.

The Software

At the core of the iPad is UNIX. BSD, in the OS.X flavoring. In a word: Beauty. During the iPhone kick off, Steve Jobs mentioned, after talking about all the things an iPhone could do, that all the functional goodness and richness was enabled by having a real, full fledged operating system at the core rather than some stripped down special purpose embedded OS ( I am paraphrasing there. ). That concept applies double for the iPad. It's massive capabilities start by having one of the best operating systems currently going (other than Linux of course) at it's juicy center.

Layered over the base OS are all the things that make OS.X a lovely place to spend time. Things like the user interface, and all the optimizations for small form factors from the iPhone. Added to that are all the apps from the iPhone ecosystem, plus the new ones that are dual mode or iPad specific. That all adds up to having apps for just about everything I want. Almost.

The Problem

There are some flies in the ointment. First and foremost is the idea that the iPad is tethered to iTunes. I am glad it can sync to iTunes. It is a good way to load content. But at the same time it makes the otherwise independent OS and hardware dependent. ITunes and it's wired relationship to the iPad make it so that sooner or later, you have to come back. To a laptop or a desktop: does not matter. That sync cable is the iPads drug habit.

Not being able to sync over Bluetooth or wifi is frankly not a technical decision. it is just a way to make sure that everyone has to use the cable. the 30 pin patented cable. When that patent expires we'll either see a new cable, or we'll see wireless sync enabled. Or we'll see a USB standard cable. something that makes more sense than the 30 pin unit in any case.

Then there is the lack of a media slot, except via the 30 pin slot and an adapter. It is not that there was no room for an SD slot. That is just engineering. It is that controlling access to the iPad requires the 30 pin gateway.

The same things are true in various ways about media. the iPad could play a .avi if Apple wanted it too, if nothing else than via VLC. A browser that was better than Safari could be allowed. Something not so brain dead as to not be able to play Flash. The idea that Flash is a battery hog is hogwash. We are adults. We get it. We could choose what to do with our battery life. And Adobe could fix Flash. Chrome is a better browser than Safari these days, but by keeping everything gated we are prevented from having a better experience that we are currently having. It is not that what we have is not good. It is just at it is not as good as it could be.

The Good News

Unlike the iPhone, where Apple enjoyed at least 2 years of unchallenged dominance before Android finally stepped up the plate hardware and software wise, the iPad will not have nearly as long before there are viable alternatives. Those tablet alternatives will be Android powered too, and even if you never switch to Android, Android will make he iPad a better place to be.

Android will run Flash. Android will have more syncing options. Android will have SD slots and standard USB ports. Android tablets will function as laptop replacements, or at the very least make it so that you can run far longer away from the mothership than the iPad currently can.

Apple will than face the choice to try and sue anyone and anything that is better than them, which will not make them friends, and will not make them popular, and will make it so that they ultimately lose, or they will compete. The will add the missing features, and unblock the currently blocked functionality.

Then we all will win. I love my iPad, but I will give it to a family member and switch to something Android powered in a heartbeat if Apple does not get it right going forward. I moved my family off Microsoft systems years ago. I do not need Apple either, unless they treat me the way I want to be treated as a customer. I like Apple, so I hope they get that.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Testing: 1,2,3: can the iPad replace a laptop?

2010-04-17T08:50:00.000-05:00

We shall soon see. I am on a trip to Santa Monica, and so far the Macbook has not left it's case. At the same time, Safari won't work with Google Docs, there is no decent iPad version of offline blogging software, and so I am writing with with the iPhone app called iBlogger, blown up on the iPad to 2x. It is OK, but could be better.

More soon.....

OS 4 for iPhone / iPad

2010-04-08T15:54:00.004-05:00

One day after my last post, Apple pre-announced some of the features of OS 4 for the iPhone (and in the fall, the iPad will get the update).

I said (more or less) in the last post that I was waiting for something to make my socks roll up and down: make me really want to keep an iPhone. Tethering say...

The main win of the new OS 4 as far as I am concerned is that I'll be able to run Pandora in the background while I do other things. And since the iPad will be able to do that, that does not make the iPhone uniquely special. I am glad that they waited to do multitasking till it did not kill the battery: the iPhone needs no help killing its battery. Even with a Mophie juice pack, I barely get 2 days between recharges.

Apple did add the iBooks app to the iPhone, but I don't see why that is tied to OS4. Looks mostly like a breadcrumb to try and get me to move over. With Kindle, I don't need to move to OS4, and I already have books for the Kindle app. And no iBooks app for the Mac means it is not as multi-platform as the Kindle.

I imagine the other book readers out there are really going to be having problems though. I thought seriously about a Sony for a long time, but they are really being left behind. I just looked to e sure I had not missed an announcement there, and no: If you want to read a Sony eBook, you need their reader. That makes sense in a way: Sony is a hardware company. But the paradigm just shifted under their feet. Barnes and Noble have an eBook reader on the iPad (still the iPhone version right as I type this...), and that also makes sense, since they sell books, I.E. content, not readers.

Maybe the new iPhone hardware will be more compelling. Won't know about that till mid-summer. Right now, I am still seriously thinking about Palm Pre + and Nexus One.

iPodian

2010-04-07T21:45:00.003-05:00

iUnless you have been away, perhaps visiting another planet (a planet with no access to our earthy Internet or other news sources), you probably know Apple released the iPad. This had several immediate effects:

Apple haters went into a tizzy about how useless it was, and why only those who have been borged by the Apple would have one, and how the inital sales were all to "fanbois", and no self respecting microsoft person would have one, and on and on.

They cost too much.
They had no camera (despite the fact that the form factor is downright stupid for a camera)
The were too heavy
They were too light
They were too big
They were not big enough
They were closed (despite being Jailbroken in less than 24 hours)
There were no apps (even though every iPhone app I have tried works on it)
There weren't really netbook replacements (although I gave away my Netbooks upon getting an iPad)
etc

Apple Mavens went for them of course. Probably no point in even mentioning that
The middle grounders stood back and watched and commented. One guy at PC World who had pre-declared dislike of them played with one and changed his mind. Even the middle grounders are all over the place:

iBooks was cool
iBooks had too much extra fancy stuff. Kindle was better. Or Goodreader.
Kindle was great
Kindle was going to die soon
And one and on..

While many consider me an Apple fan... I guess because I replaced all my MS stuff with either Linux or Apple gear, I consider myself to be a middle-grounder. I like Apple stuff because it just works, and I love the design points, but I hate DRM and the closed nature of the ecosystem and the MS-like things that Apple does to keep people locked out and locked in all at the same time.

I have an iPhone. A 3GS. Jailbroken but *not* unlocked (because I like AT&T's service better than Verizon's, at least here where I live, and because the spirit of the contract with AT&T was that they paid for part of my phone in exchange for me using their service for a short while.) That being said, Apple may have screwed up with the iPad, and with me in particular.

If I have an iPad (which as mentioned I do), I do not need an iPhone nearly as much. What I need instead is a phone that lets me tether, and that is the Palm Pre + right now, or maybe the Nexus One: either of which appear worthy and which I would love to have. The Nexus more than the Pre because it does not have a chicklet keyboard. Hate those.

AT&T and Apple are on a timer now: unless the new iPhone is spectacular, my smartphone may stop being an iPhone. I previously noted here that the iPhone was a tablet PC. Now it is not the best tablet PC. iPad is.

Sidebar: Even my non-smartphone, the Blackberry Storm, can't tether, but that is because it is a work phone and they have not allowed it. Further digression: My old Sony Erricson on AT&T let me tether without issue. Slow to be sure: This was before Edge even.

There are two other smartphone players here that look like, from where I am sitting, to be willing to take better care of me. Since I have the non-3G iPad, I do not have cellular data or GPS... those two functions are still required in the smartphone. Having a Kindle app will also be a plus, since then I can read no matter where I am or which device I have with me. That is a hit against iBook: Only one platform. No Mac version even. No iPhone version. With Kindle I have it on my Mac, iPad, and iPhone, and they stay sync'ed. That may be the iPhones one smartphone-saving grace. Kindle is not on the Nexus One. As near as I can tell it is not yet on the Palm Pre either, though several forums seemed to think it might be coming because it appeared in a commercial.

So, my original Apple tablet is in danger of being replaced unless Apple and AT&T get tethering figured out soon. I pay 30 bucks a month x 5 phone on my family plan to AT&T for unlimited data on each phone. Enough is enough. I am not adding another plan for the iPad. I will go to whoever lets me tether my iPad.

The iPad is a netbook replacement, and it is largely a laptop replacement except when I am doing anything heavy duty, like editing photos. It is not a new category: it is just the Internet tablet finally done mostly right. So much more right than anything that has come before it that all previous attempts pale in comparison. I still have a Grid table with a 386-25 running Pen Windows 3.1. An HP-UX LX620. An NEC MobilePro 800. The Dell Mini-9 and the Acer Aspire One. Actually, I gave the Mini-9 to my mom, and the Acer to my son.

None of them are anything like the iPad, and all of them are replaced by it. My MacBook gets far less use as well, but is not totally sidelined. Ditto my bigger Linux laptops like the Dell D620 and the IBM T43. Still use them. Just not as much.

Not just for FanBois

I can not walk into a room right now without people wanting to touch the iPad and play with it. At one point seven grown men were passing it around, and then griping at me that I was a bad influence because now they would have to get one. None of them were / are Apple people. One did that very night, and then played with it all night, and then blamed me for his loss of sleep. His wife wants one too.

iPads are just fun, and they are hard to put down. I have been reading books on the Kindle app every night till well past midnight. Reading the news. Checking the weather just for the heck of it. I am sure all this will wear off, but for now it is quite the attention getting device. It would be easy to write books like how to pick up the opposite sex, using the iPad as the ice breaker.

Sure, the haters will maintain their distance. Some won't go near it because they do not trust themselves. Some won't go near it because they find it noble to do stuff like cut off their nose to spite their face. Either way, this thing is going to be big, but what I will be more interested in is what it does to the iPhone: the original Apple Internet tablet (not counting the Newton, which was cool, but not iPad or iPhone cool, at least where the Internet is concerned).

Tech is fun. Can't wait to see what happens next.

Worst Top 10 list of 2010 I Have Seen

2010-01-04T20:31:00.024-06:00

I am used to hyperbole. I am used to the idea that people run out of ideas, but just keep talking. Or that writers get assignments and their heart is just not in it. Or the people with a point of view write as if their POV was delivered wisdom.

I don't like it when such things are presented in absolutes and in places of influence such that people might think there is something to it. The eWeek article titled "IT Infrastructure: 10 Products That Must Be Killed in 2010" is the worst example of this I have seen this year. I have not seen them all: admittedly I peruse technical forums. There may be worse out there. Yes. Sadly, there may be worse depths to plumb. But this one goes deep enough for me. At best it is about 20% accurate.

First of all, it is not an article per-se, but a slide show, and there is no comment section so this is unopposed blather rather than just blather. Sure, comment forums can become pure snark fests, but this post is just flame bait, pure and simple. eWeek, and the articles author, Don Reisinger are either gleefully running because they love the commotion, or hanging their heads in shame, but I have no way to tell which.

Here are some of the gems from this bottom 10 list:

Palm Pre: "... Today, it's an also-ran on a network that no one cares about. It has to go."

You know: It may just go, and it may just take Palm down with it, but the absolutes here are amazing. The phone is not hurting anyone by staying. It is a great phone, and it is the only chance Palm has of coming back, even if the headwinds it faces are fierce. It is head and shoulders better than a WinMo based unit IMHO: Why must it die? Why must it go? Where is the urgency? If someone wants one, why should they not have it? Who is it hurting?

The statement about the network is absurd as well: Clearly *someone* cares about the network. The people the own the company. the people that work for the company. The people that use it, which can not be zero, or there would be no network in the first place, The people that make the phones that the network sells. Maybe Don does not care, but Don is not everyone, even if Don is unaware of that.

I have an iPhone, and I admit that one reason I would not want the Pre is that it does not run on AT&T (a network I like, unlike many). That is just me, and I know it. If Pre ran on AT&T, I would look at it. The unit itself is beautiful, even if it does have those chiclet keys rather than a real full function touchscreen.

Blackberry Storm 2: "... when the company released the BlackBerry Storm2 this year, it promised bigger and better things. It didn't happen. Get rid of the Storm, RIM."

World class dumb advice. I have an iPhone. I have a Storm. The iPhone beats the pants off the Storm as far as I am concerned. But I had another Blackberry before the Storm, and it was *worse*. Far worse. In essence, Don is saying to get rid of the only touch screen offering RIM has *before* they have something better! Completely cede the touchscreen phone market and hope that there are enough chiclet-key fans out there. Replace the Storm with something better? You bet. But don't drop it till you actually *have* something better.

Premise restated: RIM's touchscreen device is third rate relative to the competition, so no one stuck using a BlackBerry (say, for work) should have a one, but instead should use the more prehistoric units. Oh. yeah. That'll help RIM.

The Storm is, for a touch screen person like me, nearly as much better than an 8830 or an 9700 than the iPhone, Pre, or Droid is than the Storm. It. Is. Better. Than. Nothing.

Further: maybe the Storm is actually a profitable unit? Who knows? Don does not say. If it is, then why drop it? If it isn't, then it is a finger in the dam till something better arrives. Either way, terrible advice.

The iPod Classic: "... finds itself decidedly in the middle with a limited amount of value."

Just when you think the advice can't get any worse... So, again, not mentioned whether or not the Classic is profitable, or fills a useful niche still. Don would have Apple drop the Classic, I guess because he does not want one. Following that line of thought,: I do not want a touch because I have an iPhone. I guess the Touch should be killed too. I have a shuffle for working out, so I guess the Nano should also be killed. Because, well, as you know, if one person does not like the category, or must be invalid for all other people.

By the way, Blue is the best color, so all other colors should be removed. Not of iPods, but from everything.

The Classic unit that holds more music and video than any other in the line. The unit that has all its R&D fully paid for and it probably the most profitable per unit. Don says it must die. Doh.

I have a Classic. I love it. I had a wall full of CD's (now a box full of CD's), and they are all on the Classic, but they won't fit on *any* other iPod. If I ever lose or break the Classic, I want to be able to replace it! Don would deny that option because it does not match some preconceived notion he has about where music players are used. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

Windows Vista

Sigh. I use Linux and Macs mostly, but I have used Vista and Windows 7, and I have to say that Vista with all its service on is not that much worse that Windows 7, and is actually more compatible with some software. Win7 is just Vista evolved a bit, and not much more than Vista Service pack W7.

Vista has a bad rap out there, and it is undeserved. It was no worse than XP was when it was first released, and is less prone to infections... the reason I dropped XP all those years ago! But eWeek appears to be on the "Bash Vista" bandwagon, and they are hardly alone there. Other popular causes they might want to join are the AT&T is worse than Verizon bandwagon, since it is irrelevant that Verizon uses the archaic CDMA protocol, and a Verizon world phone has to have both a CDMA and a GSM radio in it if you want to travel with it. Or that AT&T may have less 3G coverage, but where they have coverage they are faster.

None of that matters because the cause celebs do not require much in the way of actual facts, and just need bandwagons. "Vista Bad" is a nice safe bandwagon to be on, even if you thought that maybe a technical publication would be fact based (or at least label their puff pieces correctly)

The really funny part here is that they think they have to tell Microsoft to try and get people to migrate. What a hoot. By any measure, MS is its own worst enemy when it comes to new releases of things, trying to get people who are happy where they are to move. Or at least comfortably miserable. Look at how hard they are trying to get people of XP and how slowly that is going....

Google Wave: ".. It still has a modicum of promise, but Google should focus on Chrome OS and forget about Wave."

Contradicts itself inside the sentence even! If it has promise, why drop it? Is Google in danger of going out of business because they are experimenting with something new? Can they not afford to fund the Wave?

I have a Wave account, and I'll admit that it is not ready for prime time, and it may never be... but it just got started! Look how many years MS funded the Xbox at a total loss before it even broke even!

Windows 7 Starter Edition: "... it doesn't even make sense for users to want it."

I agree, except that if users do want it, and it is the only product MS has that will run on a Netbook, why would MS cede that market to Linux? Is this advice that MS should just forget Netbooks, or is it that MS should drop the price of a more fully featured version of Win7, and also slim it down enough to run on a Netbook?

Ain't gonna happen. MS made some really bad choices in how they went about doing the video compositing: they are utterly dependent on higher end graphic hardware than what the current Netbooks have. The choice here is leave the half-ass Win7 in place, extend XP's life even more (and this clown wants to advise them to work hard to get people off Vista), or just let Linux have Netbooks. I think I know what MS will do. It won't start with taking this advice, but it might start with removing some of the restrictions on RAM and hard drive size that Starter Edition has, as those are utterly arbitrary.

Google Nexus One

Kill the Nexus because other Android using phone manufacturers might be unhappy about the competition. Yep. They might be. Seems like Google's problem to me.

The smart phone market is changing so quickly that however it is stacked up now will not be how it is one year from now. Right now, Motorola, a company that was on the brink of exiting the phone market has used Android as a lifeline to return from 1% market share to 13%. they are supposed to just get all huffy because Google is entering the market? They may not like it, but they are not likely to drop Android they they have something better. Ditto all the other Android using Manufacturers. It is not like they would suddenly all switch to WinMo, and it is not like Apple is going to license OS.X Mobile.

From Google's point of view, they may want a pure Android version out there. One that no one has messed with because it was open source and they could! Either way, I think Google is a big kid now, and history says they might even know what they are doing. History of this top 10 list also says Don doesn't.

JooJoo: " .. If you ask me, it should be killed before it's even released. Let's wait for the lawsuits to be hashed out before either company moves forward."

I have watched the Crunchpad / JooJoo thing with interest, and I think that it is probably true that the JooJoo is going to implode. It feels a lot like one of those stores that opens in a "location of doom": you just know it is not going to make it.

But it might, and that was the palace intrigue around the device that led to the people that at least co-created the JooJoo-when-it-was-CrunchPad getting screwed.

The thing is that the Apple device is coming, and not getting out there now means letting Apple define the category for years to come. That will probably happen anyway.

This is the least bad of the "Must be Killed's" though, to be sure. The moral issues here are strong enough that I would be comfortable saying it should not be released. Just because Apple is going to crush the market segment does not mean you get to crush the people you were working with, which is what we are being told happened with the JooJoo.

The Ultraportable Notebook

Coming strong off the JooJoo win, the list is dropped right back into the ditch from whence it came.

Just because the category is sandwiched between two other categories, it must die? Again, nothing about profit is alleged: We are told to assume that the people making these things don't apparently know that they are losing money making them.

What about Tablets? what happens when there is a market switch again, and say tablets eat a category, like say Netbooks. What if there are left people that want small computers with real keyboards? Seems like the Don-ster does not look around at trends much, and is not comfortable with others placing bets that he has no skin in.

Here is mine: Acer. Eee PC, and the other Ultra-Portable manufacturers are trying to be sure that if this market takes off, they are the one that is there first, with the name recognition. No one wants to be the last to enter the market segment again, and be left out in the cold when the shipments are counted. See Netbooks for details.

Blackberry OS (In its current form)

OK: 2 for 10. As long as it is stipulated that they actually have to have something better before they just go kill BBOS. BBOS (or whatever it is called under the covers) is a mess. It really does need to be tossed for something like Android with the email bits that make the MS Exchange and remote management stuff work ported / rewritten / modernized.

The funny thing is that Don appears to think this will be his least popular recommendation. Weird.

Moon over West Texas

2009-11-30T11:10:00.000-06:00

One of the things I love about West Texas is how dramatic the scenery is. So much more interesting than any other place in texas that I know of (though Austin is a close second). The clean, clear sky, and how often the moon appears over mountians. This was taken with my iPhone no less....

The iPhone 3GS and the Storm

2009-10-20T23:03:00.006-05:00

I am sure there are about a million posts on the Internet comparing the iPhone to the Blackberry Storm (and soon, the new Storm 2). This, as they say, is one of them.

I have an iPhone 3GS as my personal phone, and I recently got a BB Storm as my work unit. It replaced a much unloved Blackberry 8830. I did not expect to like the new Storm as much as the 3GS, and I do not. It has been pretty much exactly what I thought it would be. It is better than the 8830 in most ways though.

Chiclets

At the core of my dislike for the 8830 were two things: Crummy (small) screen and tiny mechanical keys. I am firmly in the virtual keyboard camp. I had a slight hope that the Storm's virtual keyboard would be better than it is, even though none of the reviews supported that hope. I based it off one thing: That every review I read of the Storm virtual keyboard was that it was *not* a mechanical one, like a proper BlackBerry should have.

I had not really realized it till I was reading about the Storm ahead of getting one but there is a huge contingent of people that like... even prefer... mechanical keyboards on their cell phones. Watching someone that is really good at the BB keyboard is pretty amazing, I have to admit: Their thumbs blazing at what is probably 50 or 60 WPM.

Getting going that fast on the 3GS would be a real challenge, and doing it in the Storm would not be possible. The Storm does have a virtual keyboard, but it is hampered by several things:

The processor is too slow / the OS is too slow. I do not know which it is (I have the 3rd release of 4.7: The latest Verizon has issued), but there are pauses and herks and jerks that keep the keyboard from being a fast-to-register-a-keystroke affair.

The entire screen has to be pressed to register the keystroke. the Storm 2 is supposed to fix that. I supposed the idea was to make the virtual keyboard more like a real one, and it utterly missed the point *of* a virtual keyboard.

The idea of the feedback to register the keystroke was the illuminate the key being pressed is blue, with a slight halo: All well and good, except I have wide fingers and I can't see it.

For all of this, I prefer the Storm keyboard to the 8830. I can at least read the markings, and the blue backlight of the 8830 was useless in the dark: I had to find a strong light source to use the keyboard.

The 3GS keyboard is more or less the same as it has been since the Generation 1 iPhone, except that more apps work in landscape mode, and in landscape mode I can fairly fly on the iPhone. Not as fast as the Mini 9, or the Macbook, but not too bad either.

Screen and Flip

The Storm display is very nice, and reading email on it is *far* easier than the 8830 every was. It is not just the size of the screen, or its better colors and backlighting, although those are all huge helps: it is also that the email app uses a better, more readable font, and when you are looking at letters that small, that really helps.

The apps listing is OK: Readable, if not easy to configure. The 3GS's way of allowing icons to be re-arranged is infinitely better than the setup process you have to use on the Storm, but at least it can be done.

The Storm 2 is supposed to add inertia to the screen flips, and that is sorely missed. Having to page up and down the screens on the storm is far slower than being able to flip your finger on the 3GS and the faster you do it, the faster and farther then screen rolls, in a very intuitive way.

Looking at pictures on the Storm is way better than the 8830, and nearly as nice as the 3GS, but pan and zoom are horrible.

Smile

The quality of the 3.2 MegaPixel camera is OK, and not that much worse than the iPhone (in bright light), but once again slowed either by the OS or a slow processor: it takes forever to focus and snap a picture on the Storm. Movies looked more or less the same on either unit though. The Storm overall seems to favor slight overexposure of the images relative to the iPhone.

In low light, the Storm camera is far better than the iPhone's, other than having to wait forever for it to focus. It also has a "light", which I have never used, but should mean that the Storm is good for even lower light situations than those I have tested: Places where the iPhone would not work at all.

Going to the Store

This really has very little to do with the Storm per-se, since the same App StoreWorldthingy is on all BlackBerries. It is easier to "shop" on the storm, with its superior-to-keyboarded-BB's screen. If this comparison was to any other BB, then Storm would be killer here. However, the 85,000+ apps of the iPhone, and the far better in-phone store app, not to mention the iTune Store shopping option just make the BB's couple of hundred apps appear quite feeble. Wimpy. Not even trying.

The few apps I have loaded are also pale shadows of their iPhone brethren. The Facebook app for example is truly wretched on the Storm. I can not imagine what it is like on any of the smaller screened BB's. The new 2.x iPhone version is in some way better than the web interface.

The Web

The built in browser on the BB used to be a joke. The one on the Storm is actually not too bad. It is slow, and does not render everything the 3GS built in Safari will, but it is light years ahead of the old browser. I put Opera on, and that helps, especially for things like zooming in on areas of pages to be able to read them.

None of them use the gestures of the iPhone, and in Safari, with flicks and pinches and amazing speed, the web is still more accessible on the iPhone.

Maps

Really RIM? Why did you even bother? The built in Map app is a complete waste. No OS integration. No gestures. No resolution in the maps. No composite views. No GPS or Compass integration. Low resolution. Slow slow slow. Not even trying. The Storm 2 or at least OS 5 *has* to have a better map app than this... right? Or at least Google maps in the app store?

This app is the very definition of a checkbox exercise:

"Hey! They have a map app! Do we have a map app?"
"Yeah Boss: We got a map app. Got it right here. See, It says 'Maps' on it and everything."

I went to our office in Minneapolis this week, and I was told that people with Tom Toms and other GPS had gotten utterly lost because of how weird it is to get to the building. I'll have to admit that the iPhone Maps gave me some choices about possible locations, and the first one I went to was not it: but the second one was, and it knew the weird route to get to the building. All the really means is that Google knows that route though, and that is what the BB needs: Google Maps.

(update: I have been told by some that there are Google Maps for the BB. They are just not in the App Store. You have to manually install them.)

Verizon and AT&T

My Storm came from Verizon, and of course the iPhone is AT&T. I have to say that I do not understand anyone that says that AT&T's network is not as good as Verizon's. I can not imagine where that is. It is no place I go.

At any given place, and at any given time, the iPhone and the Storm have about even chances of having or not having a signal. And I can move two feet, and have signals invert in strength between the two, especially in downtown areas.

Standing on Fishermans Wharf in San Francisco, both are strong. In North Beach at Rogue Public Ale House the BB is weak, and the iPhone slightly degraded. Up the street towards Chinatown, the BB gets a slightly better signal for a few blocks.

Most places they both have 4 or 5 bars. Same in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Dallas, Alpine, Fort Davis, Marfa .... on and on. Neither one is obviously better than the other, with this single exception: when the signal is weak, and the phone is powering up its amplifier to pull in the weak signal, the Storm, and the 8830 before it, will eat its battery in a matter of a few hours: Far faster than the iPhone will. Not that the iPhone won't eat its battery fast: it does. Just not as fast.

This inverts when Bluetooth is the radio in question. If the iPhone can not find the Bluetooth ear piece, it will burn through the juice in the matter of less than 8 hours, where as the Storm and the 8830 seemed to not obviously use any more power when their paired earpiece was off or out of range.

(Update: Actually, the Storm does appear to use battery far faster when it can not find it's headset. Still not as bad as the iPhone, but the 8830 was the king here.)

As for speed: There is no comparison. As long as I have digital service the iPhone is far faster. the iPhone in Edge is about the same speed as the Storm on "1XEV'. That probably means the high speed EVDO is not the bottleneck more than likely, but the speed of the OS and the hardware is.

Smart Phone

If there had never been an iPhone to compare it to I would be amazed by the Storm, but the fact of the matter for me and my virtual keyboard loving ways is that it is not as good a design as the original iPhone was, more or less the 3rd generation iPhone. I assume the Storm 2 will be better on all points, but I also assume from some early reviews that it will be only reaching some sort of parity with the Generation 1 iPhone, and still be a long way from where the iPhone is today. If nothing else the push-the-whole-screen-to-register-a-keystroke thing is gone.

I rode in an elevator the other day with a man who had a Storm. I asked him how he liked it. He shook his head, and said "I had a Google phone before this one. I wish I had it back".

On the plane the other day I sat next to a man with a Palm Pre. I watched with interest as he flicked about the bright, beautiful screen. It looked very iPhone like, at least until he opened the keyboard. Gaah! Chiclet keys! What were they thinking?

Still, from what I can tell, the Storm is not as good as iPhone's, Palm Pre's, and Android based phones. It is not just a hardware problem either: the OS is a mess. It feels like three of four different OS's crammed together. Configuration screens don't match in style or function, and are spread all over, The Apps are weak, and un-unified in look, feel, and OS integrations. The Storm, running WebOS or Android would be leaps and bounds better, and not having the push-to-click screen of the Storm two would fix the Storms major weakness: Really: That idea is like New Coke. It may have tested well, but in reality it is a pain.

I'll have this Storm for another two years I guess. Hopefully by then RIM will get it right. In the meantime, it *is* far better than the 8830 that came before it, so I am not ungrateful. And the camera isn't bad.

The Dell Mini 9 Rides Again

2009-10-14T23:12:00.006-05:00

I read today that Michael Dell does not like Netbooks. He thinks that people buy them as notebook replacements and then are not happy when they don't work well as notebook replacements.

This is at direct odds with the fact that Dell brought back (even for a limited time) the Mini 9 after killing it off because so many people still wanted one, including me.

I can't see using a full size notebook on the two foot diameter table I am sitting at right now at Elevation Burger (one of my favorite Austin eateries) either.

I suspect Netbook's days are numbered though. If Apple or MS ever ship a real tablet PC in this form factor, and even better, use a virtual keyboard like the iPhone's, then the reason for a Netbook will, at least for me, have passed. I can blog from the iPhone of course, but I'd rather use the Netbook for screen and keyboard reasons. Here is a case where the Netbook beats the next smaller form factor (smartphone) all hollow, as well as the next larger (notebook). Sure: I'm a wimp: There are people that have written entire novels using a old cell phone and t9 text entry. Airplane tray tables are another place a netbook wins over a regular notebook.

Dell was very clear that the Mini 9's reprieve was to be very short term. Looking at the web site right now I do not see it any more, though my new Mini 9 arrived yesterday. Even if the M9 is the oldest unit in the lineup, it is also the asiest to upgrade things like RAM and SSD. Dell did not aparently learn anything when they designed the Mini-9, because the 10/10v are much harder to work on. Hello?

By MS's definition the new M9 is not a netbook: it has (gasp) 2GB of RAM. Not allowed. Since the new unit has Linux on it, not Windows, what MS defines is not relevant.

My new Mini 9 came about because I gave the last one to my wife, my Acer Aspire One to my daughter, and so made room for a new Mini 9.

Since this was going to be the last chance to get a Mini 9, I splurged on a few options, adding the 1.3 Megapixel webcam and internal Bluetooth, thus driving the system cost up... to about 229 USD. My Apple Bluetooth Mighty Mouse sync's up and works like a champ. The 2GB 533 Mhz PC5300 memory stick added another 25 USD to the price.

I'll put in a 32GB SuperTalent or Runcore SSD in the near future to replace the 4GB unit it came with. Something far faster than the factory default unit.

That 4GB unit looks like it is having problems anyway: Ubuntu's Palimpsest utility keeps issuing messages that the hard drive is failing: That the hard drive is being used "outside design parameters", although it passes self test. Whatever. I bought this unit knowing that the SSD had to go.

I put as 32GB SuperTalent unit in my wife's Mini 9 and it is *much* faster, not to mention handy to have the extra space.

I never booted the pre-installed Ubuntu that Dell put on this M9. Ubuntu 8.04.1 is just too far back level for me, not to mention that when I booted it on my wifes Mini 9 a while back it was slow slow slow. I love that Dell gives me the option to buy Linux, but I wish it was a more current version, and a better, i386 version, build. The "lpia" binaries of the default install are just suboptimal.

It's an easy fix. I loaded up the current Beta of 9.10 (which GA's this month) and while it took a while because of the slow SSD, it is fast now that it is down. I watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer off Hulu last night without too many frame freezes. That is the point of a netbook after all: look at Net stuff. Well, that, and actually be of a size that you might have it with you at odd times when you need a computer for something but don't have one. Emergency idea documentation. Blog ideas that strike while at lunch. Etc.

The Broadcom Wifi Card required activating a non-opensource driver via Administration/Hardware Drivers. No big deal, but I did have to plug in to the wired Ethernet long enough to have the tool go get the drivers.

With 9.10, and Bilbo from KDE installed, the 4GB drive is nearly full: /dev/sda1 3423336 2891716 357720 89% /. I have a 2GB SD card in the slot to give me some elbow room, and use flash drives to store and move things around.

No fans: The little unit is disorientingly quiet. Unlike the Acer, there is no temptation to play with the power management. It just works. 46C is about as hot as it ever gets.

Like the Acer before it, I imagine I'll get the 8 cell battery at some point (The Acer was a 9 cell actually). Going all day between charges is just too nice.

One of the reasons people do not like the Netbook form factor is the small keyboard, and like any small keyboard, the Dell Mini 9 takes some getting used to. The Acer Aspire 1 keeps the key size ratios the same across all the keys, and more or less just shrinks the keyboard. The M9 went a totally different way. The Alpha keys are nearly full size. numerics are slightly smaller. Punctuation are smaller still. There are no dedicated PF keys at all. It is very weird. It is probably why Dell is pushing the 10 and 10v with its its more normal layout and 92% of full size keys, although the fact that the 10/10v cost a bit more probably helps too.

Time to watch some more Buffy....

Your Problems Are Fixed in the Next Release: Mint 7

2009-06-29T15:56:00.008-05:00

Back in January I posted about installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my dad's HP DV9000 laptop. There was also a followup to that post about DOSBOX .

At the end of the Ubuntu Install, and after using it for a few weeks, there were three issues:

Wifi: it worked, but with a work-around
DOSBOX was slower than DOSEMU, but DOSEMU required manual setup: Another workaround
On reboot, Dad had to hit enter about 30 times to get past various hangs being caused by the oddball ACPI on the DV9000. If I understood this correctly, it only showed up as a problem when the AMD CPU's were being used in the DV9000. Those are what Dad had of course...

I had tested the first two points at length with my research into Ubuntu 9.04: I knew that once I upgraded Dad's computer that those two issues would be resolved. I do not have an HP DV9000 though, so I had no way of verifying that the third point would be taken care of as well.

If you noticed the infrequency of my recent posting (both here and at BMC), you might have guessed I had been kidnapped by space aliens, but the truth is I was just working 70-90 hour weeks getting ready and implementing a data center migration. With that in the past, it was time to rest, and then to catch back up on all the other things I had been letting fall to the side.

In the mean time, not only had Ubuntu 9.04 GA'ed, but Mint 7 after that. I took both on USB fobs to Dad's house, and test booted both. Both worked fine: no ACPI hangs at all.

I talked about it with Dad, and we decided to put in Mint 7: Same as my brothers Linux system will be getting soon.

The install was straightforward, other than the install complaining about not having a swap partition. with 4GB of RAM, I just did not want to have to add an LVM to the boot disk in order to get the 5th partition on it. Dads disk already had 4 partitions: 2 NTFS (Vista and the recover partition) and 2 Linux: '/' and '/home'.

I set '/' to format, '/windows' as ntfs, and '/home' as ext3, and both to mount at boot. Once the gparted was done, it took about 4 or 5 minutes to install Mint 7.

Once up, we updated the packages, and installed DOSEMU.

DOSEMU, as delivered, configured the 'D' drive as /home/dad already, and the vbdos programs were already installed there, so it was a simple matter to cd to D, then to the programs, and then to run his NASA stuff.

What DOSBOX takes 30 seconds to run, DOSEMU takes 3. And it is graphical data, so Dad was interested in how to print it and screen capture it so it could be emailed. It turns out that this is easy under DOSEMU as well: Just full screen by clicking the center box on the upper right hand corner, and then fn-prtscrn, and Gnome pops up the screen, all captured and ready to save. A quick trip through GIMP to crop out the tool bars and the graphical display on the DOSEMU screen is ready to email or print to be added to a report.

One interesting thing: If we full screened the DOEMU window *before* we ran the program, then it would run more slowly: Maybe 20 seconds rather than 3. Faster than DOSBOX still, but much slower than EMU was normally. Dad made the easy decision to always run the programs first, then to full-screen them.

Everything works:

Display: Mint prompted for the install of the NVidia drivers, and we told it to go do it.

The Wireless stuff just works now.

We plugged in the HP printer, and Mint saw and configured it instantly. We also tried a Lexmark multifunction (resold by Dell), but that did not. I did not expect it to, since Lexmark printers are one of the few anymore that ship without Linux capabilities from the vendor.

Sound: The Altec Lansing speaker make all the right sounds: I am not sure that Altec Lansing should be claiming these speakers as theirs, but that is another story. They sound equally tinny on Vista. I fired up Rhythmbox and we listened to some Internet Radio for a bit.

Boot Speed: Fedora 11 is making a lot of noise about their new 20 second boot speed. I tested it, and on my desktop Dell 945, it is 30 seconds: Same as Mint 7 on Dad's DV9000.

Battery: This dv9000 is only 9 months old now, but Linux reported that its battery was only able to charge up to 80% of its design capacity: Something Vista was reporting as 100%.

And so forth: What a difference 6 months makes in Linux land. Dad was thrilled with the computer, and said that, other than to play a RealArcade game called WordSlinger, he did not see ever having to go back to Vista. I tried briefly to get that going under WINE, but it was acting very weird: Another thing to research!

Out and about with the Acer Aspire One and Ubuntu 9.04

2009-05-03T16:03:00.007-05:00

Please bring your netbooks to the upright and locked position...

As I type this, I am winging my way to the San Francisco Bay Area. The Acer Aspire One (AA1) is in its natural habitat, i.e., a tray table on a crowded 737-800/900 (it does not say which...). All seats are filled, and there is no spare room for anything, much less a large laptop.

Since I last traveled with the Acer, I have made a few changes to the AA1. I upped the RAM to 1.5 GB, so that for a simple edit session with OpenOffice WebWriter, I am only using 11% of the memory. 38% is in use as cache, and the rest is just waiting for something to do. Don't get this wrong though. I am not sorry I upped the RAM, even it it was a real PITA relative to something like the Dell Mini-9 or even an Apple Macbook. If I could have gone 2GB, I would have. On the plane I am trying to conserve power and only have OpenOffice WebWriter open. On the ground, in a library, or at Starbucks I might have seven or eight things going at once, and then the RAM is handy. Besides, on any notebook computer, I like as big a disk cache as I can get to "speed up" (I.E. cache) the writes to the typical 4200 or 5400 RPM disk.

The other big change is that the netbook is running Ubuntu 9.04 GA, and while I experimented with it for a while, I have taken off the Ubuntu NetBook Remix (UNR). Mostly this was because I use Gnome desktops on all my other Linux systems right now, and while I like Netbook remix, I prefer to be able to window the desktop from time to time, even on the tiny netbook screen. Sure, I could use the desktop switcher to run over to classic mode, and then pop open a window and tell Maximus to stop maximizing everything.. but then I'd have to undo all that when I switched back. Ultimately I decided that the eye candy of NetBook Remix was not worth the hassle. I can always turn on Compiz if I want eye candy. What is still impressive to me is that this little unit can do the eye candy with Linux and not be noticeably slowed by it. I will probably replace the XP install on this unit with the GA of Windows 7 at some point, and it will be interesting to compare those two on the same box. Hard to see the Aero effects (even of the tweaked out Win7) working very well, but who knows? Linux can do composited graphics on a netbook. Surely MS won't leave that gauntlet tossed to the ground forever.

Heat and Noise

I experimented around with the 'acerhdf' kernel module, and it worked more or less as advertised, at least as far as keeping the CPU fan turned off most of the time, but I did not like how warm the AA1 became when it was installed, and the Wifi would start to act flakey after a while, so I disabled it for now. Fan runs more especially when on A/C power, but the systems stays cooler to the touch and the Wifi has not wigged out since. I assume without sensor data or thermal scans to back me up that the Atherosw Wifi card was getting too hot.

The main problem that the acerhdf was trying to address was how noisy the AA1 is, but if I am listening to music on the iPhone, or typing blog entries on an airplane, I can not hear the fan at all, so why take the chance of heat damage (further heat damage?). It was all really Dell Mini-9 envy anyway, because that little unit runs dead quiet: Does not even have a fan. Might as well face it: The AA1 is not the Dell, and if quiet is key, get the Mini-9.

A disappointment so far as it relates to heat is how few sensors appear to through ACPI to the lm-sensors code. I run the Gnome applet to monitor that and all I can see are the hard drive (42C right now...) and another one called 'temp1' out of 'libsensors', but it always reads 0C, so whatever that is it is not being accessed correctly. Whatever temp1 is, it did not even appear under Ubuntu 8.10, so I assume someone is working on getting the AA1 sensors mapped correctly. The best computer I have ever had in this regard was the IBM T41: It had a whole raft of instrumentation. CPU, Graphics, batteries, various memory, i/o busses.... the works. I gues you could make the case that the IBM was a top of the line (at the time) business computer, and the AA1 is a 300 USD or less consumer unit... but really: Do thyristors cost that much? Would one on top of the CPU and another on the Wifi card really jack the price up that much? If so, then how about Intel and Atheros just build that stuff in to everything they make?

Battery Park

When I bought the AA1, most of the units being sold had 3 cell batteries and 120GB hard drives. As I noted here in past posts about the AA1, the box my unit came in said it had 120GB HD, but it was really a 160GB, and that is de rigueur these days for the Netbooks with mechanical hard drives.

The 3 cell battery that came with the unit has 2200 mAh, and was good for about 1.8 hours of usage. Another reason I was interested in the acerhdf module was to keep the fan off as much as possible, and make the battery last as long as possible. 1.8 hours is barely more than one meeting, and does not even come close to one Austin to San Francisco plane trip, or one Houston to Alpine train trip.

Backing up for a sec to the heat thing: it should be noted that the fan does run less often when the AA1 is not plugged in. It appears to do a better job dialing itself down, and running with less heat when unplugged, It does this without any obvious slowing of the computer, so I am not sure why it does not manage its power/heat a little better when on A/C.

Acer had 6 cell batteries as an option for the AA1, but I had never seen one at retail back at my time of purchase and come to think of it I still have not. In fact, one Fry's ad at the time noted that they had the 120GB / 6 cell config, and when I went there they had the 160Gb / 3 cell config. Only way I have seen to get a 6 cell battery from Acer as the stock install is to order it that way. That is just my experience, as I have read accounts of people finding them in the wild.

No matter what, the 3 cell I had was just not going to get it done. Even my Macbook Pro from three years ago has longer battery life (and I have not been deeply impressed by the MacBook Pro's batteries, but that is another post). I decided to order a 9 cell, 7200 mAh replacement. There are several makes and models out there, and I found a manufacturer in the US that makes a 7800 mAh unit … right after I had ordered mine. Doh.

Mine came from Global Laptop Batteries, and it appears to be a decent unit. See picts. Ignore the Apple logo. That is just dreaming... or a Dell Mini-9 converted to OS.X. Not the Acer. It is a bad OS.X candidate, not even counting EULA's and all.

Overall the Global buying experience was mixed. The battery shipped almost immediately from Hong Kong, according to the USPS, but from then on it was never really clear where they were. The steep 20 USD in shipping did not buy any sort of enhanced tracking, and the battery was two weeks in arriving.

7200 mAh gives 6+ hours of power cord free time, especially here on the airplane with the Wifi off. Probably closer to seven, but I am not measuring it with any precision. I have used it for three hours messing around and writing this, and still have 4 hours runtime left according to the battery meter. Wonder what that 7800 mAh would do...

If this ebay deal is any good, it would run rings around the deal I got.

The 9 cell battery is tall, and I rather like that, as it angles the keyboard towards me on the tray. Much nicer to type on with the tall battery installed. Cuts less into my palms at the edges of the keyboard, as there is no real 'palmrest' on something this small.

It is a big battery: I have not weighed the AA1, but it is probably 3 pounds now. It is a good tradeoff, especially as the battery is shaped such that now the AA1 has a nifty handle on it, although before carrying it all over the place with the 'handle', make sure the battery lock slide is engaged! I'm just sayin'....

With the 'handle', any extra weight is not really noticeable, and I do tend to carry it around sans bag and power cord now, so I am probably saving weight overall.

Ubuntu 9.04 GA

Ubuntu 9.04 itself is a thing of beauty. The performance on the Acer is crisp until I start trying to manipulate photos. That can insert pauses and make the fan run a bit. Firefox, when pointed at a page with a lots of Web 2.0 stuff like Gmail will also crank up the fan, although the browser stays fast. I run the FF 3.5 beta 4 rather than the Ubuntu sourced 3.0.10 though. One of the things Beta 4 brings to the table is better speed in Javascript, which helps all the Google apps. Except one. Google Gears is not yet updated to support it, so I can not run offline Gmail or Docs without reverting to 3.0.10. No problem: I have both Firefox versions installed if needed.

One app that does not run well is Google Earth. it just needs more CPU/graphics mojo than this little Netbook has. Maybe a Linux native version would work better, but not this boxed WINE version.

With 1.5 GB of RAM, having both browsers running, plus OpenOffice , Rhythmbox (for Internet Radio) , and a few other things is no problem. Everything launches very quickly as well, and relaunches from cache are even better. OpenOffice has been rapped over the years for its slow initialization, but I just re-launched the WebWriter and it came up in 3 seconds. Netbooks may be minimal hardware by todays standards, but Linux is still lean and mean enough to make them seem pretty crisp most of the time... as long as you are not running the a mini-9 with Dells default LPIA Ubuntu 8.04 build... You listening out there Dell?

Aside: I have read that Win7's most basic version will limit one to only running three things at once. With Ubuntu 9.04 on either the Acer of the Dell Mini-9 with its 2GB, I have never hit the limit for how many apps I can open. Either machine stays responsive well past three things running at once. That limit is clearly not being imposed by the hardware. In my testing of Win7 Beta I have seen that while it is faster than Vista, it is slower than XP SP3. Win7 RC is supposed to be faster than the Beta, So I assume that the limit is just there to make people want to install XP SP3 again.....

Do You See What I See?

Even Internet video does not work too bad on this AA1. With Flash 10 installed, I can watch Hulu or MSNBC's news programs while on the road. The screen is bright and beautiful, the contrast ratio better than the new MacBook (but not the new Macbook Pro...), the wide screen perfect for movies. This puts a lie to the recent statement by Apple that Netbooks are 'junky'. Don't believe me: Go in to the Apple store. Fire up iPhoto on a Macbook, and a Macbook Pro. Navigate to the same picture on both, and one with good contrast and lots of black. The Macbook.. the brand new cadillac carved from a block of aluminum Macbook... has dark gray on the screen rather than black. Sorry: no room to be calling Netbooks junky till your own house is in order there Apple.

Video is the leading edge of the Netbooks 1.6 Ghz Atom CPU though: pretty much nothing else can be happening on the computer if you want the video to be smooth. When in a hotel room on the road, the little AA1 is perfect for sitting in the bad and watch programming till ready for sleep. Here is a place where the AA1 appears to slightly exceed the Dell Mini-9.

AA1 to Dell Mini-9 Comparisons

I can watch video on the Mini-9 (when my wife lets me see it) as well, but its screen does not appear to be quite as bright, and since the unit is fanless it feels like it dials itself down to stay cool far faster. It may just be that the Dells stock SSD is just slower. I am looking at the high performance (appears to be mostly from RunCore) and larger stock speed SSD's available for the 9 because while Ubuntu 9.04 does fit in the 2GB SSD, it leaves little room for growth or patching. The SSD price points are shifting so quickly right now it is hard to determine what the best deal is. As i write this, a 32Gb SSD at stock speed is about 80USD, and a RunCore high speed SSD is about 130USD. The main difference is that the write speeds are about 4x faster. Read speeds are a tiny bit slower. For standard writing and web browsing, I am not sure the performance is worth the price.

One of the things I like to use the AA1 for is to listen to Internet Radio. Mostly stations like WBUR, KQED, or Air America, While Rythmbox is a great app for that, the AA1 speakers suck rocks. Here is another place where the Dell exceeds it, as it has tiny but fairly usable speakers at the base of the monitor, facing forward towards the listener. If you are going to have a fat bezel around a monitor, why not use it for something? What a terrific idea! Plenty of room on the Acer monitor bezel for speakers... but no. Music on the 9 is passable as long as it is not serious listening, just low volume background. 'All Things Considered' or 'The Rachel Maddow Show', being mostly speaking voice, come through fine on the Mini-9.

The AA1 by contrast has speakers mounted facing downwards, just under the 'palm rest', and the 9 cell battery tips the unit forward, closing out some of the air space between the speakers and whatever the AA1 is sitting on. I invested 10 dollars in a pair of battery powered speakers, and while they are not great, they are portable, tuck in luggage nicely, and bring the AA1's sound back to at least as good as the Dell mini-9's. They also will run off the USB port for power, so the batteries inside the speakers last a good long while, even though they are AAA size. For really good sound, I have the Altec Lansing portable speakers that I use with my iPod.

Back to Ubuntu

One of Ubuntu 9.04's new features is the unified message center. It took me a bit to get used to that, especially as the NetManager icon sits in it, and when I upgraded one of my test machines to 9.04 I had lost the icon for the NetManager out of the Gnome toolbar, and it was driving my nuts trying to figure out how to get it back. FWIW, should this happen to you, it is called the 'Notification AREA' in the 'add to panel dialog (right click on tool bar to access). Ubuntu also moved the power down / suspend / hibernate button to the notification area from the 'system' menu. Took me a couple times to figure that out. Now that I know what it is, what has been centralized there I like it. It is a very clean way to present all of these functions. Avahi Autodiscover reports what it finds there as well.

Herein lies another reason I switched back to the classic menus from the Ubuntu NetBook-Remix. I keep my tool bar stocked with all sorts of applets: launchers for terminal and Firefox, remote console access, sensor and system performance data, weather, and so forth. NetBook-Remix only displays some of these things, because it re-tasks part of the toolbar for the top of the currently focused window. I get it. It makes great use of the screen real estate, and lets the focused app fill the screen. If I were building a NetBook for a Linux neophyte, I would install NetBook Remix as the default. When I handed the Mini-9 over to my wife, I had NetBook-Remix as the default in fact. It was the first thing she turned off. I assumed that, since she is primarily a Mac user these days she would like UNR better than Gnome. Nope. Her UNIX system programmer genes reasserted themselves immediately. She wanted multiple windows available. She wanted drag and drop to the desktop. UNR was making everything too simple. Oh well. The desktop switcher makes short work of flipping back and forth, though I note she never does. She has left Maximus intact though.

One of the funny things about the AA1 (and probably most netbooks right now) is how often when I am using it out and about at someplace like Starbucks or Taco Bell that people stop and ask me questions about it.

How well does it work?
Which one do you have?
Did you look at any others?
Are you glad you got it?
Was it worth the price
How well does Linux work on it?

Can you really use Linux to replace Windows?

It's kind of fun to be able to talk about it with people, and, unlike some things, no one appears to find you too geeky or perhaps even a little elitist (a unfortunate common reaction to an Apple MBP). People seem to get that this is a computer that almost anyone can afford. In fact, based on some of the conversations I have had recently, I think there is a great unmeasured consumer group out there: Those who have wanted computers but never thought they could afford one before now. Those for whom this will be not be an ancillary, special purpose computer, but their first and only computer.

Acer Aspire One, Ath5k, and Ubuntu 9.04

2009-04-02T17:33:00.003-05:00

In my last post about the Acer Aspire One (AA1) and Ubuntu 9.04, I mentioned that everything was working in Ath5k land. In retrospect, that post did gloss over a few details, so I thought I'd put up a special AA1 / Ubuntu 9.04 / Ath5k post to clarify a few things.

First off, in a fresh install, it probably just works. Maybe. Maybe not. I have not tried it yet. The AA1 I have started as Alpha 6, and has been doing near daily dist-upgrades to pick up new service along the way. As it pertains to the Ath5k module, new kernels and kernel modules. 2.6.28.11.14 is where I am at right now on the AA1. I saw a new kernel come down on a different test box earlier today, so I need to update again.

Previously on the AA1, under Mint, I was using ndiswrapper to get the wireless going, and when I first got the Ath5k stuff going there were a few tricks to it. First, I had to turn *off* ndiswrapper of course. That was easy: I have installed ndisgtk, so in the GUI, I just removed the driver. Same thing as 'sudo ndiswrapper -r net5416' at at command line

At that point, I could *not* see the wireless any more. This is because of the module 'acer_wmi'. The only problem acer_wmi causes on the AA1 is in the ability of Linux to see the Ath5k... but that is bad enough. A netbook without WIFI is not doing what it is supposed to be doing.

If you read through that bug, it says that the very latest kernel has the patch required to fix this rfkill issue. Will try and update this in a bit.

In the meantime: Simple solution is to blacklist it in /etc/modprobe.d. One line file:

steve@kara:/etc/modprobe.d$ more blacklist-acer-wmi
blacklist acer_wmi

You could also just rmmod acer_wmi, and then 'modprobe ath5k' but blacklisting makes acer_wmi stay out between boots.

Ubuntu 9.04 with ath5k on the AA1 is a lovely thing. Wifi recovers from standby without any issues so far. Under Mint/ndiswrapper about 1 out of every 10 time the WIFI would go away some place, and require severe measures to get it back. It also seems to be faster finding and syncing with WAP's now.

Update

It's working. Mostly

I did an 'sudo apt-get update | sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade' and a new kernel came down: 2.6.28-11.39. if you were to look with 'uname -a' you'd think this was the same kernel, since uname drops the '.39'. Have to do a 'dpkg -l | grep -i 2.6.28-11' or something similar to see what is installed. I then erased my blacklist of the acer_wmi in /etc/modprobe.d (see above)

After the service I rebooted, and it still did not work. I manually did a 'modprobe ath5k', and it started working. puzzled, I looked in /etc/modprobe.d and wondered if the ndiswrapper file there was interfering. I did not put it there: Pretty sure it was created when I installed ndiswrapper. I deleted it (sudo delete /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper) and rebooted.

Instant success. Even see the hidden wireless where I am right now.

The wireless blinking LED is not lit though. Not sure why, and don't really care right now. That is a problem for another day. I am just happy to have the Acer_wmi loading so I can see if that makes a difference in how much the fan runs.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 6, the Acer and the Dell

2009-03-26T14:27:00.005-05:00

Since I last posted here, there has been a lot of work done on Ubuntu, getting ready to ship next month. What has changed on my end is two things: The addition of a Dell Mini-9 to the mix, and getting Alpha 6 working on the Acer Aspire One (AA1)

The Dell Mini-9

The Dell Mini-9 came into my hands, albeit briefly, last week. I bought it as a gift for my wife, although she does not know it yet. It shipped with Ubuntu 8.04.1, and a "special" low power version of it at that: All the complaints I have seen about the speed of the Mini-9 can be traced directly back other fact that it is *not* an I3/4/686 version of the binaries, but a special compile for the low power version of the Atom called "lpia". It is not horribly slow at that, but it is not great ether. The Acer with Mint 5 on it ran rings around it side by side, and the Dell has 2GB where the Acer has 1.5 GB. Neither are memory constrained, yet the Dell was slower.

Backing up for a second: the Mini-9 came with 512MB, and when I plopped in the 2GB chip, it made very little difference to the speed. A very undramatic upgrade. The good news there is that Linux still runs great in 512MB....

The "lpia" version of the Ubuntu 8.04.1 has another problem: Not much appears to be compiled for it, so if you go into a tool like "Synaptic" and try to add things, rather than the 26,000 some odd packages, that are far less: Forgot to count. Already installed over it. Worse, even with software sources set to do all versions, not just LTS (System / Administration / Software Sources) it still would not update to 8.10.... Because Dell has not done an lpia version of 8.10 yet and released it. The Atom can run X86, so lpia had to go.

For all the trouble with software upgrades, the Dell beats the pants off the Acer for hardware upgrades: The hatch on the bottom opens with two screws, and there is the memory slot, the SSD slot, the WIFI slot, and an empty one labeled WWAN on the mainboard silkscreen. The Acer required taking nearly the whole thing apart to get at the same bits.

Then there is that capability to take a 2GB memory chip (in my case a Patriot PSD22G8002S, or PC-2-6400 800 Mhz). The BIOS on the Acer can only take a 1GB unit. Phooey. And now I have another 512 MB chip to find some use for. Someone needs to make chip stackers again....

The next upgrade the Mini-9 will get will be to replace the 4GB SSD. I tried to get one from Fry's, but all they had were the full length, EEPC style units. The Dell has a half length mini-PCI slot. A quick look around the Internet, and it appears I won't have any problem finding something. Probably a 32GB SSD. Linux does not need that space: It fits easily inside of the 4GB, but as I learned, it is really easier to keep /home on the SSD too and sync it to the SD or USD Flash drives later for backup. More on that in a sec. Coming from the Acer's 160GB moving-parts-hard-drive, it is a very different world.

I created a USB stick with Ubuntu Alpha 6 on it (same procedure as in "Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One") and booted the Mini-9 off it. My first pass was to put in a 2GB SD card and make that /home, but that caused all sorts of issues with suspend / resume and reboots, where apparently the MMC driver was not being installed soon enough in the boot so that /home was not available. Grrr.

One thing about the Ubuntu 9.04 installer: They changed the Time Zone selector. Much much much better. Now you just see the 24 time zones. Neat world map too. Thank you Ubuntu folks!

I guess I could take the mount of the SD card (/dev/mmcblk0p1) out of the /etc/fstab and put it in rc.local or something as a mount, so that everything would be up first, but I'll let my wife figure that out. I am not really sure what she'll do with this unit. Another option would just be to have Conduit (very nifty app!) sync the SSD version of /home with the SD card from time to time.

Even though the Dell has a Broadcom Wifi card, Linux loaded it up and it worked right out of the box: In fact, everything did. Install was dead easy if slightly slower than I would have expected. SSD's are slow on write.

I went ahead and installed the Netbook-Remix while I was at it to see how that compared to the Netbook desktop that Dell had provided on the default 8.04.1 install. The answer was that the Ubuntu Netbook stuff is IMHO far better. If nothing else, faster since it is X86, not lpia. But I liked the whole setup better: I imagine Dell will at least think about using the Distro default version at some point rather than continuing to maintain their own version of a desktop, whenever they get around to supporting 9.04.

Turn off Compiz if you use the Netbook desktop. Compiz will load by default, and even works on the little netbook fairly quickly, but the Netbook launcher and Compiz hate each other. Very frakkin ugly.

I tweaked out the Mini 9, and basically have it ready to give to my wife, so now I have to quit playing with it. Its bad enough I opened her present I guess, but Ubuntu 8.04.1 really had to come off there first, or she would have thought the Mini-9 was not so frelling great.

There: A Farscape and BattleStar word, and not half done! Geek Points!

Acer Aspire One and A6

The AA1 may not be as easy to upgrade, hardware-wise, as the Dell, but it is still a nifty little unit. There are two things about it that beat the Dell: The screen is better a little better (brighter, deeper colors), and I like the keyboard better. The AA1 keyboard has slightly smaller keytops, because it has 6 rows of keys rather than five. The Mini-9 drops the PF key row, and embeds those as fn- keys (Like fn-a is F1) in the regular keyboard. Further the Mini-9 messes around with where the single and double quotes are, and the vertical bar, which I use all the time on Linux, is also a fn- type key. PF11 and PF12 are just gone. The Mini-9 BIOS uses regular letters at boot to control getting into setup or changing the boot order.

I liked that the keys were a little bigger on the Dell, so while I prefer the Acer, I could live with the Dell. it will be interesting to see how my wife, a blindingly fast touch typist, adapts to the Dell.

The Acer has my normally prefered Atheros Wifi card, but with Ubuntu and 8.10 and the mess around the "ath5k" drivers that has actually favored the Dells Broadcom chipset. Weird.

Once I had the Dell dialed in with Ubuntu 9.04 A6 and the new Netbook desktop, I liked it so much I wanted the exact same thing on my Acer. As I wrote here back in January about Alpha 3 ("Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 on the Acer Aspire One... briefly"), the Wifi mess was still not sorted, but I was ready to try again. After all, GA is next month! This had to be close I thought.

It is, but it was not easy like the Dell.

I booted the USB, and installed Ubuntu 9.04 A6 for the second time. It installed more quickly than on the Dell, because the SSD drive is slower on writes than the round-and-brown of the Acer. Actually, last time I took apart a disk drive, the platters were silver now, not brown. But I digress...

It booted up, and my misery started. There were two issues, but it took me a while to find them:

1) acer_wmi module has to be blacklisted, or you can not use the Gnome desktop network widget for connecting to Wifi. I had to hand code 'iwconfig' statements at command line till I figure that out. No biggie, but the widget is so much better.

2) And this is the one that really killed me: For reasons I do not know, my repository sources were set to default to Chile. I could not figure out why Synaptic / apt-get update were taking so long to refresh, and why I could only see about 6,000 packages after they had refreshed. It was making me crazy! Lost at least a day to this. The reason I lost part of this time was that until I found the note on an Ubuntu forum about blacklisting acer_wmi I thought I was fighting a network problem with the ath5k stuff still.

As an aside: I am not sure not that I look at it that the problem I was having with the AA1 and the Wifi with Alpha 3 was not the "acer_wmi" thing. I did not dig that deeply then. This time I was determined to make it work.

Next up, the AA1 fan runs way more than it used to under Mint 6. More like the way it does under XP. I do not know why yet. I loaded up "powertop" and had it crank back the write-back settings, and that seemed to help, but it still runs more than it used to. It might be that without the acer-wmi loaded something is not connecting up in power management, but if so, I'll just wait for that to be fixed. I love the Wifi widget too much to lose it. The fan shuts off when the system is unplugged, so it also appears that it is just staying CPU cranked up when it has bounteous electrons.

It all seems so noisy compared to the dead-quiet Mini-9.

The battery life on the AA1 is not great either, and about 2 hours, but it never has been. The battery is just too small. The Dell has a 4-Cell unit, and it good for about twice as much time as the 2-Cell Acer. I should have bought the 4-Cell Acer I guess: I am looking in the after-market at a couple options. The AA1 2-Cell has got to go. It was amazing how much nicer it was to carry around the Mini-9 and not be worried about it running out of power during the day.

Because the AA1 had Mint 6 and a full Gnome desktop on it, I had to clean up the Gnome config files to get the Netbook desktop to look right: Rather than spend a great deal of time thinking about it, I just torched .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome2, and .gnome_private, and restarted Gnome, and the Netbook desktop appeared.

Well, once I turned off Compiz. Boy those two hate each other!

While waiting about today for some lunch, I wrote part of this post on the AA1 in the text editor (since Bloggers interpretation of HTML is kinda sucky) and it was really nice to have the AA1 up on Ubuntu 9.04 with the Netbook desktop. Fast, full featured, and if the usage is slightly different, much easier once used to it on the 1024x600 screen. Several people stopped by to ask about the unit and see how it worked... although one of them was because I have an Apple sticker on the lid. That would be nice: an Apple Netbook. Everything I have read says that is not going to happen though. In the meantime, this all works pretty well. Finally.

Next upgrade to the AA1? I am guessing Mint 7.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 on the Acer Aspire One... briefly

2009-01-29T23:39:00.005-06:00

... or, thank goodness for LiveCD's

In truth, when I tested Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3, it was not with a CD at all. Be kind of hard on the Acer: It has no CD, or DVD. With the price of USB Flash drives, does anyone really need CD's or DVD's any more?

I put 9.04 onto on of my flash drives, and booted it to the LiveCD. it booted quickly and without drama. And without Wireless.

This is an Alpha, so no hard, no foul here. I did not like the decision tree that made it so that new Atheros based wireless cards were pretty much cut off in Ubuntu 8.10, and that was part of why I tried this. I wanted to know if this situation had been worked out yet.

No.

Dmsg showed an error in the HAL when it was looking at the Atheros card. They have not gotten here yet. Even though this is kernel 2.6.28, not 2.6.27, this is still broken for now.

Will keep watching, and keep testing. 9.04 still has most of three months yet before they release GA. Based on Alpha three so far, there is a lot left to do. As Richard Meyer suggested here: I may have to try Fedora again....

In the meantime, pulled the Flash drive, and booted back to Mint 6.

Change-up

2009-01-27T22:21:00.005-06:00

I have had a blog knocking about in the back of my head for a while. It involved the fact that nothing stays the same in tech: That one can not cling to Windows XP forever for example. It has been a general theme of most of my writing and teaching over the years that one can jump from MS Windows to Linux to OS.X and not suffer serious brain injuries. I came across this article today over at OSnews.com: Don't Blame Windows and KDE for Your Own Aversion to Change by Thom Holwerda

Well, for the most part, there is one post I won't have to write.

Change is not good or bad in and of itself of course. Change just is. It happens, and you deal with it or you don't.

I have famously not been a big fan of MS Windows for a while now, and my reasons have nothing to do with change per se. I just did not like losing large portions of my working life to fighting massive virus outbreaks, or rebuilding computers six months after I had last rebuilt them (Win 95 / 98), or dealing with the garbage that is the Windows Registry. These were all things that were the results of changes, that were, from my point of view, bad.

At the same time (and this will surprise some) I have also been watching Vista closely, and one of my office desktops is Windows 7 Beta. I even kind of like it (but not its registry: Still there). I do not understand the why of some of the changes. They seem arbitrary: What used to be in one place is now, from my point of view, randomly moved to another place. Not sure why. But can I learn where they moved stuff around to and become functional again pretty quickly? Sure. Besides, these days most of the OS is just there to run the web browser, and Firefox and it's brethren are also something that change over time. 3.1 of FF is working far better on my Mac than 3.0.5 was, so change is often very good.

Thom's points about KDE 4 are really well taken. Linus Torvalds famously left KDE for Gnome recently (and here is another post I won't have to write, because Bruce Byfield already wrote it, dang it), and with all the same kinds of bluster that Thom points out about Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols in his piece.

My problem with KDE 4 was not that it was different, it was that it was incomplete. Functionality was not moved, it was just plain missing. Stability, long a hallmark of KDE, was also gone. KDE 4.0 was a beta. KDE 4.0 felt like what Ubuntu 9.04 (last post) feels like right now: A work in progress.

In point of fact, I use Gnome more than KDE not because of anything about the environment and everything about one application: Evolution. This is a work related thing. Evolution is how I read my email and my calendar off MS Exchange, and Evolution is a Gnome project. Evolution, at the moment, works better under Gnome than KDE. That has changed back add forth many many times over the years. And if KDE had a working MAPI interface to their PIM environment (Kontact), I would switch back in a heartbeat.

Some things change, for better or for worse, but one thing that has not changed yet for me is my need to know when my meetings are at.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 First Impressions

2009-01-26T17:18:00.001-06:00

With Linux making slow, tiny, incremental inroads all over the place: In Netbooks, phones, embedded appliances, in the BIOS, not to mention Splashtop, and being credited (over credited I think, but whatever) with the recent malaise at Microsoft (although I liked this interview with Jim Zemlin about the issue), it seemed time to have a look at see what Ubuntu was cooking up for its next major release.

I rarely start this early in a release, but there are a few things cooking at I am very curious about right now. Issues in the current Linux versions that I want to see fixed or software features I need added.

DOSEMU

First up is DOSEMU. In Ubuntu 8.10 it is busted, and the problem is not actually DOSEMU but they way in the Ubuntu 8.10 sets up security (SELinux strikes) for the application. DOSEMU. See bug 216398 for details.

I wanted DOSEMU to work, because according to my benchmarking it is far far faster at running VBDOS programs than DOSBOX. One of my dad's programs (see previous posts) takes 20 seconds in DOSBOX takes 3 in DOSEMU.

As of Alpha 3, DOSEMU is fixed!

HP DV9000 Boot Hangs

Next, there is my dad's HP DV9000 itself. It does not boot well under Ubuntu 8.10. Poorly in fact. It appears that the AMD 64 bit Turion processors, a high precision timer, and the HP BIOS all get together for a timeout party that requires keyboard interrupts to get past. Like about 24 of them to finish a boot. Ick. Appears to be this AMD C1E issue, as documented over at Kernel Trap. The workaround is to add noipic noirqdebug, irqpoll, and perhaps some other stuff to the boot line in Grub. Nice guide on changing all that here. This nastiness appears to have entered around kernel 2.6.19, and is still there in 8.10's 2.6.27. Right now 9.04 has 2.6.28, and so I am hoping it will fix some of this without having to do workarounds on the boot options. I will, but that is not the same thing as it working the way it should.

Quick aside here: This DV9000 appears to have been a particularly problematic model of computer for Linux. In point of fact, it was recalled (at least some models) for BIOS issues, so it was no great shakes for anyone for a while. I don't know why Vista does not hang on boot like Linux does, but I assume without any facts to support this that it is because Linux is seeing hardware features (like the high precision timer) and trying to use them, where Vista does not.

I do not yet know what will happen on the DV9000. I installed it on a Dell D620, and there it boots in under 30 seconds.

Netbooks and MAPI

Those are all reasons I wanted to see where Ubuntu 9.04 was going for my Dad's sake. I have another couple. Netbooks. and MAPI.

As noted here, I have an Acer Aspire One, running Mint 6 right now. I like Mint and all, but there are now and again some issues with certain Gnome dialogs being larger then 600 pixels in length. The account set up for Evolution is one of them. Rumor has it that the new version of Gnome, 2.26, that will ship with 9.04 is more Netbook friendly.

The MAPI thing is for work, and revolves around the fact that we are moving to MS Exchange 2007. I will be losing WebDAV access to email, which means I'm back to using IMAP. That is fine as far as it goes, but my calendar will only be on the so-called Outlook Web Interface. So far, Microsoft has not looked at any lightweight web mail clients and ported them to MS Exchange, meaning I have to use the heavy client they supply for calendaring. Double Ick.

Fortunately the EU has forced MS to publish information about MAPI, and the Evolution folks are working hard on making its namesake work against MS Exchange using the same protocol as Outlook. All this is supposed to ship in Ubuntu 9.04, but as of Alpha 3 Evolution is still back level at 2.24.3. 2.26 (same as the Gnome release number these days) is where the MAPI functionality should ship. There will more about all this over at TalkBMCin the near future.

Other General Impressions

It would not be fair to deeply judge Ubuntu 9.04's current state at Alpha three as being totally indicative of what it will be in April when it releases. Everything that is in is working, and smoothly. The boots seem faster. I'll give it a whirl on the Acer Aspire soon, and see how it works there, but I expect that it will be faster than the current Ubuntu 8.10 based Mint 6 is.

I was slightly disappointed when Ubuntu 8.10 shipped without OpenOffice 3.0, and that has been fixed in 9.04. Firefox, at 3.05 is current, but since FF 3.1 is at Beta 2, hopefully it will be at 3.1 by Ubuntu release day. This is probably less critical on Linux than on OS.X. I have not had any real issues with FF on Linux. The Mac is a whole other story, and a whole other post...

Dosbox followup

2009-01-10T16:56:00.001-06:00

A quick followup to my last post.

Dosbox has not been a 100% troublefree for my dad. The main problem was that the cursor would go away, never to return, after a screenshot. This did not happen on my Acer, so I could not recreate the issue.

Before I made an on-site visit we tried one thing: installing ksnapshot. That fixed it.

I don't know what the problem was, but ksnapshot is better in any case, because it allows just the window under the cursor to be captured, and without the window borders. No editing required.

It is funny in a way that the KDE screen capture works better on Gnome than the Gnome one does, but that is the beauty of interoperable open standards: best of both can be used.

The other problem is that a new mouse he bought is not working. A Microsoft wireless mouse.

I don't have one of those at home to test either, but I do at the office, and that one works OK. I am thinking bad hardware here, but if he trades it out I hope he gets something I have: Kingston or Logitech. Easier to do remote support when I can replicate the environment. That's why our labs at the office are so big!

Ubuntu 8.10, DOSBOX, and the single HP dv9000.

2009-01-01T02:02:00.013-06:00

It would be fair to say that my dad is an intimidating person. Not because he is 6'3", an athlete, or any of those things. Because (to my way of thinking) he is brilliant. Rachel Maddow Brilliant, but without the liberal side. He is technically intimidating. He has 22 patents, and has filed for another 10. Normally I could care less about such a thing, but his are non-obvious patents, and deserve the protection of a patent and the patent system. His are the reason that there even is a patent system. He is not trying patent goofy things like mouse clicks on menu items but very technical stuff, like how much microwave energy, and what kind of antenna (size, shape, power) is required to fuse moon dust to a particular depth.

I knew growing up that I was never going to equal my dad in technical accomplishment. It was not something that made me sad or anything. I was always too much a mix of my parents (Mom being a Nurse, and very brilliant as well) to ever be one or the other. Mix the two and you get a Linux / Open Source person, more or less.

Over the holidays I was at Dad's house and I came to ask him about some programs he had written and how they were backed up. It turned out that the following was true:

Dad had a series of engineering programs
The programs were in VBDOS
VBDOS barely worked in Windows 2000, less well in Windows XP, and not at all in Vista.

Visual Basic has left DOS way behind, but VBDOS did everything Dad needed it to do. Why waste time learning the new program, and all its goofy new things. VBDOS worked. VBDOS was a tool. A means to an end. Visual Basic 6 offers nothing that VBDOS did not, at least as far as Dads programs are concerned. Dad needs to know that then X amount of power is applied via an antenna of a particular design, how deep is the moonrock melted? Nothing in VB 6 adds to that. Taking time to learn the new programming paradigms of GUI based VB is time taken away from pursueing the knowledge.

Enter DOSBOX. http://www.dosbox.com/

With DOSBOX (and probably but not tested, DOSEMU), VBDOS lives on.

The Acer Apsire One

While at my dads house over the holidays, I asked him how the project to keep VBDOS running was going, and how he backed up his programs. The answer was that his program directory from his Windows 2000 computer was copied to a Windows XP computer, and a new Windows Vista HP laptop, and a USB fob. With XP the VBDOS programs ran but did not print. With Vista, they were just dead.

I asked for the fob. I copied them to my Acer Aspire One (because, is not the point of having the AAO that you always have it with you?). I then installed DOSBOX, and read the install info for it quickly. Mounting Dads programs in DOSBOX, they ran at once, without issue, and were printable. Editable screen shots via GIMP even.

I have never tried to convert my Dad to Linux. He has always run Windows, and while I have rebuilt his computers a few times when they were infected with things, in general it seemed wrong to try and get Dad to convert. He is much smarter than me, and an engineer par excellence. If MS Windows works for him, then there is no need to convert him.

I had watched the VBDOS stuff over the years and had wondered is MS was going to maintain their compatibility... and while I doubted it, there was no need to talk about it as long as it worked.

The HP dv9000 changed all that.

Dad bought the dv9000 with Vista Home Premium. He had no choice in that matter, or at least he thought. Vista worked for email, and Flock worked for browsing (Dad knows better than to use IE) but his VBDOS programs were busted. Dead flat broken. VBDOS had left the building. It was an Ex-programming language. 20,000 volts would would not revive it.

Dad saw the Acer running the programs. He asked if his HP dv9000 laptop could do the same. 20,000 volts: No. Linux / DOSBOX? Yes.

The DV9000 was new: less than 3 months old. It had a AMD Turion 2.1 Ghz dual core 64 bit processor, and an Atheros 5007 chipset for wireless. The latter bit was the same as the Acer Aspire One. I said it probably would work and was put to the test two days later when I came back over to install it.

dv9000

The HP dv9000 has a 1440x1024 screen, a ton of USB slots, an NVIDIA graphics card, and other fun things. I looked it over and decided to try Ubuntu 8.10 as my first pass. All Dad needed was DOSBOX, but I wanted it all to work. I was going to set it up as dual boot Ubuntu 8.10 / Vista, but I wanted Ubuntu to be all Dad ever needed. Mint 6 was also an option, but I was worried that it might barf on the recent hardware. In my recent experience, Ubuntu had done better than Mint on new hardware.

According to things I found on the Internet, the dv9000 used to have, in older configurations, Broadcom wireless cards. HP has recently embraced Linux though, and it appears that part of that is using Linux friendly gear like Atheros. Or maybe it just worked out that way. Maybe Atheros was just the less expensive card at the time this dv9000 was built. Worked for me either way. Broadcom cards can be made to work under Linux, but Atheros had open sourced their HAL, and I like to support companies that support Linux / Open Source.

The good and the bad of the hardware support of Ubunti 8.10 for the HP dv9000 ultimately came down to the 802.11 card. Once installed, Ubuntu was not happy with the Atheros card. When I used the hardware managers and *disabled* Atheros support, all was well. I had to do the exact same thing on the Acer Aspire One.

I ran the Ubunut upgrades. The Atheros support crapped out. Same as the Acer Aspire One. It appears to me that it all worked out this way:

Linux reverse engineered the HAL for Atheros cards, and they worked.
Atheros released the specs for the HAL and the firmware of their cards.
The MADWIFI project released a bad series of drivers for Atheros cards... based on the newly Opened drivers and HAL. Go figure.

It may be more complicated that that. That is just what it looked like out in end-user land. It matters not for this project: I have documented getting the Atheros cards going via NDIS in one post and via the new native drivers in another post.

Installing Ubuntu 8.10 was not hard, although it was confusing a bit at times. The dv9000 had two partitions as it arrived from HP: SDA1 was Vista, and SDA2 was the recovery partition. 52 GB and 10 GB used in total and respectively. 160 Gb hard drive. Plenty of room.

I had Ubuntu shrink SDA1 from about 148 GB down to 72 GB. With 52 GB in use, that left 20 GB for growth. I left SDA2 alone: 12 GB with 10 Gb in use. Here we hit an oddity of the installer. It looked stuck. Like nothing was happening during the resize. I popped open a terminal, and started 'top', and could see 'ntfsresize' was hopping all over the place. It was clearly doing things, and was not stuck. The on screen graphic progress bar just had no insight into what it was doing.

I inserted a new SDA2 and SDA3: SDA2 was '/' and was 10 GB. SDA3 was '/home' and was about 62 GB. SDA 2 of old became SDA4 of new, but was not re-sized or moved. SDA4 (The Vista recovery partition) lives at the end of the disk.

GRUB thought the SDA1 and SDA4 were both Vista partitions, so as a post-install step I went into /boot/grub/menu.1st and made SDA1 Vista and SDA4 Vista Recovery. Just labels, but important. I booted both to be sure that they still worked.

I booted Ubuntu and applied all the service, and installed a few more programs like Avahi, Macutils, HFS support, Sensors/hddtemp, and set up monitors in the Gnome taskbar for system speed and temp. I like to watch that kind of thing, and I was very interested in having it on this computer so I could watch it while the VBDOS programs were running.

This was the first computer I have ever set up without a swap partition. Another reason for having all the system status stuff enabled on the task bar was to watch memory usage. With 3GB of RAM, and the primary mission being to run 16 bit VBDOS programs, I did not think that it would ever have memory issues. It was just a theory though, and I wanted to be able to watch it. So far, so good.

DOSBOX

Once everything was up and running and all the service has been installed I installed DOSBOX using Synaptic. Nothing major or weird there. Then I copied Dad's programs into his home directory from the USB fob. They were put into a new subdirectory called 'vbdosprograms'. Next I started DOSBOX (from "Applications / Games"), and mounted the programs to the 'C' drive:

mount c ~/vbdosprograms
c:

'alt-enter' toggles DOSBOX to full screen and when running like that it looks just like a DOS computer of old.

The rest, as they say, is history. It all worked, and better than than it ever had under XP. Screen caps with Fn-PrtScrn worked like a champ. GIMP could edit those to whatever was required. They could be saved in whichever directory made sense from that point on.

From a technical point of view, this capability exceeds anything Dad has ever had before. He can now run on the latest, fastest hardware, and has far more control over the results. He now also has Linux support. It is not that I did not support him on MS Windows. It is just that for me MS Windows is just another computer platform and I often have to sit a mess with it to figure out why it is broken, whereas Linux is something I know fairly well.

Acer Aspire One: Six commands to a native Atheros driver

2009-01-01T01:05:00.008-06:00

There is nothing new in this post that has not been repeated around the Internet (a series of tubes) ... well, not much anyway.

My *next* post will be about Ubuntu 8.10 on an HP DV9000 laptop for the purposes of running VBDOS. It is far more complicated and interesting. This one is pretty simple.

If you are a purist. If you can not stand the idea of running your Acer Aspire One (AAO or AA1) with impure, non-open-source drivers, and you have read here that NDISWRAPPER solves the wireless issues of the AAO and installed it through gritted teeth... then this post is for you. Atheros, being good open source folks, do have a pure, open source solution available to you via the MadWifi project.

It takes six commands to be "pure" (IE, run without binary only sourced drivers such as those NDISWrapper lets you run). It is assumed you have unloaded all the NDIS drivers and stuff. If not, load up NDISGTK (via synaptic or apt-get) and make sure the target system is clear of cruft. The system should have no/zero/none wireless stuff installed before you start step 2 below. Yeah: I suppose removing things first means there is more than six commands...

If you do not have a wired network connection as a backup to the wireless, do step 1 *before* you take off the the NDIS driver....

wget http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz
tar xfz madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz
cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe ath_pci

With this you have real, Linux drivers again rather than NDIS windows drivers as I previously noted. This can be both good and bad. So far on the AAO/AA1 with 8.10 (or actually, Mint 6) I have to unload and reload the ath_pci drivers after every suspend or hibernate. Thus:

sudo rmmod ath_pci
sudo modprobe ath_pci

Sucks... still looking for a better way. Not being a purist, I went back to NDISWrapper for now.

Mint 5 / Ubuntu 8.10 / IBM X30 dump and stir

2008-12-20T19:24:00.002-06:00

Mint 5 and 6 have failed me on two different system installs. Very un-Linux-like these days. The first time is my office Dell 745: Neither Mint 5 or Mint 6 will install there. The second time was just Mint 6 and my former IBM X30 laptop: Again, will not install. In both cases it appears that the default graphics mode, as well as the safe mode, just will not work on the computers graphics hardware. Mint is fully spun down to the hard drive, but X just won't work.

In the case of the Dell 745, Ubuntu 8.04 (The basis of Mint 5) and Ubuntu 8.10 (Mint 6's underpinnings) both installed just fine on the 745. That Ubuntu would install and Mint would not is proof that even though Mint is based on Ubuntu, it is *not* Ubuntu. Normally this is not a problem: I have generally preferred Mints defaults for theme and default application selection, and use of whichever driver is needed to make the hardware work. Since Mint 5, I have been running Ubuntu on the office Dell 745. Oddly, Mint 6 works just fine... and in fact, spectacularly well on my Dell D620 laptop.

Ubuntu 8.10 would not install on my IBM X30. Same symptoms. Looks like it is installed, just X will not work.

Backing up a second: I was running Mint 5 on the IBM X30. I decided to give the X30 to my brother for Xmas, and that meant a complete rebuild. Mint 6 would not install: Same behavior as Mint 6 on the Dell 745. It boots, I pick to run the Live CD and then it spins for a bit, and never displays another thing. Same thing in safe graphics mode. Ubuntu 8.10 does the same thing on the X30 though. Ubuntu has a mode Mint deletes where I can just install rather than running the LiveCD. I did this, but the same blank screen appears after the install. The graphics mode is shot. I boot to single user and look, and the xorg.conf file is essentially blank. Just a few empty stanzas.

If this were going to stay my computer, I would have hacked the file and seen if I could get it to work, My brother is not a computer guy: I need to give him a computer that just works. He has a Mint 5 desktop system I built for him a while back, and that has just worked. The laptop needs to be the same.

I decided to try something, and jumping ahead, it worked. I re-installed Mint 5 (more or less Ubuntu 8.04) and got that running easily on the X30. Then, using Synaptic I installed the Ubuntu software updater. Mint has a nifty software updater, designed to create stable systems by only recommending for install software packages that the Mint community has tested. I was going way off that farm. The Ubuntu software updater has a distro update mode.

My working theory was that if I updated to Ubuntu 8.10 on an already configured system that it would use the previous settings and all would be well. Firing up the Ubuntu software update, it did in fact offer to take the system from what it thought was 8.04 to 8.10. I accepted, and it downloaded and installed 1800 software packages. I now had the look and feel and apps of Mint 5, laid over the top of Ubuntu 8.10, not its "native" 8.04.

The system booted and went into X without issue. I updated and installed various software packages like HFS and Macutils so that his laptop would be compatible with his wife's iBook. Used to be a joint laptop, but with the X30, she gets full ownership of the iBook I think. That was part of the idea of the gift: have then be able to both use a laptop at the same time.

I rebooted the X30 a few more times, just to be sure everything stayed put. The boot sequence is unlike Mint or Ubuntu: Looks like part of the bootsplashes are mixed up. I actually like the it better this way, as it gives some details about what it is doing without being too verbose.

There is some very very slight weirdness in the way that the screen is drawn. Maybe a compositing thing with Compiz. Sometimes it appears the X server forgets to turn on or off certain pixels in text. It is not horrible. Just slightly annoying. I am actiually kind of amazed that the Compiz stuff works, and rather quickly, on hardware this old. Vista would be frozen solid trying to use such an "ancient" (in computer years) video system. I thought about just taking it back to Mint 5 and being done with it, but I really wanted everything as updated as I can get it. It will be a long time before this computer gets another update. I decided to leave it as it was.

We had an early Xmas with that corner of the clan. He seemed thrilled with the new toy: It met the definition of a good gift I think: Unlike me, who buys computers all the time, computers are just not something he would buy, even though he uses every one I ever built for him. I included in the X30 package not just the X30 but an extended battery, an Atheros 802.11G PCMCIA card, a dual USB 2.0 port PCMCIA card, since the default USB ports are 1.1, and the 'blade' so that he can have a CDROM should he need it.

The USB 2.0 card came in especially handy, and Linux immediately knew what to do with the card. No driver muss or fuss.

Turns out my brother got a digital camera for Xmas too. An electronic Xmas! First challenge of the Mintish X30 was transferring pictures from the camera to the laptop via the USB 2.0 card. I had not anticipated that camera (but I guess I should have: Who uses film anymore?) but it was easy to have Synaptic grab F-Spot, and then pictures were then transferred easily. It appeared there was a bug in F-Spot: It was set to put the photos in a directory called "Pictures" but it kept putting then in the home directory. I did not have a chance to look into this one yet. I did verify it does the same thing on my Acer Aspire One running Mint 6 though.

Tags: Linux, Linux Laptop, Mint, Mint 5, Mint 6, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu 8.10, IBM X30.

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Now in the Handy Hospital Size

2008-12-07T13:14:00.001-06:00

This last week has been a very special week:

On Monday, while chasing the overgrown puppy to keep her from escaping, my wife fell and broke her ankle.
On Thursday, the doctor said “Going to have to make your wife bionic, I.E., install titanium plate and a number of screws”.
Friday was spent in the day surgery ward
And the subsequent weekend was about pain and dealing with a hard headed woman who wants no help from anyone, even when she can’t walk an inch.

I guess being stubborn is endearing at some level. Must be: I am hardly less so. But this isn’t about me....

My title for this is actually a reference to the Acer Aspire One (or AAO, sometimes apparently in blogspace the AA1).

Someone asked me why I use the AAO instead of the Macbook when I am out and about. That was a mistaken impression I had given because I was talking so much about the AAO (such as two recent posts here and here) and not at all about the MacBook. Most of the time the MacBook is with me in the backpack in case I need a real computer to do real work. The AAO, even with a real OS such as Mint rather than WinXP, is suboptimal for extended or serious work. This is mostly because the screen and keyboard, rather than the processor or RAM after the upgrade and with the efficient multitasking OS. (Aside: I have no idea why WinXP chokes on this computer when I try to do more than two things at once, but Linux doesn’t have the limitation, so XP stays unbooted most of the time, except when I am making sure it is fully patched or testing something with IE).

Still, one main reason to have the AAO was for exactly this last week. Lots of time is hospital waiting rooms, lots of getting up and moving from place to place. Lots of chances to pack and unpack the computer. With the AAO’s tiny size and weight, it is all a snap. And worst case, should the AAO be stolen from the waiting rooms while I am nearby but distracted by talking to a doctor, nurse, or what is happening to someone’s baby on “One Life to Live” (Monday in the ER waiting room was all soap day: I guess they didn’t have CNN or MSNBC available on that TV), then I am out the AAO and 350 USD, not the Macbook and my 3,200 USD (from three years ago, to be sure).

On Monday, after they were done putting on the temporary cast and giving me the bad news that the ankle was broken in such a way that they were referring it to a Ortho, the day nurse asked me that the cute little computer was. I replied that this was the “Handy hospital size”. She looked at it, impressed that computers came in such a thing as a hospital size. Then she looked at me with a bit of doubt, feeling correctly that someone nearby was probably pulling her leg. Only seemed fair after what was going on to my S.O.’s leg.

I should inject here that the hospital was/is Memorial Hermann, and that they had an open if slow access point in both the ER and the day surgery waiting areas. Nice. I should also say that compared to our last experience with a hospital emergency room that this whole level of care was much better. It was not without its issues, and it is crystal clear to me that there is both good and bad stuff going on in the US health care system. That is a whole other post.

Friday was more of the same in terms of waiting, and in terms of the utility of the AAO. It was very handy to be able to read all my email from work, and keep every one in the family status’ed on progress, as I learned it from the various members of the staff, or from direct observation. As I moved from check-in to pre-Op to waiting room to lunch to waiting room to post-Op to go-home-prep area, the AAO tagged along and allowed me to stay in touch, even in areas of the hospital where the cell phone was utterly at zero bars. The wifi was omnipresent at MH. The iPhone and the AAO were always in touch.

With every change of location, it was easy to close and tuck the little 2.2 pound laptop back into its Car-DVD-case-acting-like-a-laptop-case. Linux went into suspend mode almost immediately and always recovered (except for the sound server, which is always a goner after the first suspend and takes a reboot to get back. Not like I need that in the hospital though). If I was using the power cord, that took a bit longer to stow. The AAO comes with a long power cord. Good for waiting rooms when you may not be able to sit close to the outlet. With small default battery the AAO comes with, I was using the cord fairly often. I will be watching for a six cell battery for this thing like a hawk.

I supposed I could have done most of surgery day with just the iPhone and an external battery to keep it charged, but reading work email off the iPhone would entail using the craptastic Outlook webmail interface via Safari. Do-able. Not fun, and really not fun for an entire day, From that point of view, the AAO’s screen and keyboard look positively capacious.

While I was being silly with the ER nurse, it turns that in fact, the AAO (with Linux Mint 6) really is a handy hospital size.

Bailout

2008-11-25T21:16:00.002-06:00

- I want the American car industry to survive.
- I drive a Honda Fit (which, unlike many Honda models is made in Japan and imported)

There seems to be cognitive dissonance there. My position about cars has always been kind of free market. I buy the car I want or need, from whomever makes it. My last "car" was actually a Dodge Truck with a Cummins, which I had because I needed a truck at the time for a construction project.

In each case, the vehicle was the one I considered the "best" in its category. I voted with my money, and hoped that the manufacturers were taking note and building cars based on what was best for the market. If I bought a Honda, and so did a bunch of other folks, then the US Auto makers would see that, get it, and start building Honda-like cars. I live in fantasy land. Far easier to just start a round of name calling and saying that because people are not buying their cruft then somehow *we* are being unpatriotic rather than they are not building what we need or want. Market forces and supply side economics is all well and good till it takes your company out back and spanks it.

Reminds me for some reason of an old Ford commercial where people supposedly could not tell a Ford Granada apart from a Mercedes Benz. They did not mention how many free drinks they had at happy hour first. Since the automakers in the US could not actually build anything like a Merc back then, they tried to convince people via advertising that they were. It was so patently absurd, yet some bought into it... till they bought one. I talked to one guy who had done so, and he was disgusted. Mad at himself and mad at Ford. Bet he never bought another Ford. He said he wasn't going to in any case.

The closest thing to my Honda Fit available from GM is a car imported from Korea, or one built by Toyota and re-badged as a Pontiac. Ford and Chrysler don't even have that much. The SuperMini class is nonexistent with the latter two. If Ford did have something, it would probably be a relabeled Mazda 3. Aside: In the current situation I wonder if Ford will be able to hang on to Mazda. They need to.

Rather than building cars we need, the point of the car companies has been to build cars they want to build, and then try and build demand for those cars via advertising and branding. Uhmmm Hummer. Tasty. The point of the Hummer brand was not that people need such things to drive back and forth to work, or even to haul the kids to Fut Ball (Soccer) practice or bring home milk and eggs from the store. The point of the brand was to drive a modified Chevy Tahoe that cost less than half its selling price to build, no matter how inefficiently or badly built and no matter how unlike a real military Hummer it is. Not that we really need to be driving real MilSpec Hummers for any of those things either. You'd even have thought from the Hummer ads that they were cars for being green, since they often featured people out in nature, and the camera point of view zoomed back at the end to show the planet Earth. Yeah. Right.

Even worse is that there were some real opportunities there. The Chevy Tahoe chassis of the fake Hummer has plenty of room to add things like a Diesel hybrid power train, which at first would probably be big and bulky, gain experience with it, and then downsize the drivetrain over time for use in Honda Fit or even Smart size cars.

I do get *wanting* to drive a big car/truck. I loved driving my Dodge Truck. The Cummins was a sweet motor, and it got pretty good fuel economy for such a behemoth, and best of all, it would run on anything. BioD, DinoD, soy bean oil, peanut oil, used motor oil, even small amounts of ethanol were good as they "dried" the fuel (absorbed water so it could be burnt). I accidentally put in six gallons of Gasoline once in an otherwise full fuel tank, and being on a long trip, burned it without being able to tell it was there. Not recommended: probably took some years off the injection pump, but odd how I got 2 MPG better that tank full.

The Dodge was big, drove nice, felt safe, was comfortable on long trips other than the engine noise (later models are quieter), and had a nice high driving position. There were some problems with the body, letting me know I was driving an American designed car though. I had to keep fixing one of the back doors when the door handle would disconnect from the cable so that the door would not open. Finally had to fabricate a part to keep it from happening. Crappy design. Easy fix.

I took some friends from India to the store in my truck. They looked it over very carefully, and I could not tell if they thought it was crazy to drive such a thing to work or just simply amazing... in a bad way.

Funny thing is it was not a badly built truck: It is clear Americans can build good vehicles. See Honda's Marysville Ohio plant for details. Or Mercedes plant in Alabama. Or the Toyota plant in California. If the design is good, there is nothing wrong with the labor. It is just that the designers cut stupid corners and the results speak for themselves.

Take the GM alternator. Please.

I had a Chevy 454 engine in a class A motorhome. A Holiday Rambler. Another time I had a different year model Chevy Suburban with a 454 rigged out for towing an Airstream. I just about decided to keep a spare alternator on the coach/in the truck because they died at 30,000 miles like clockwork, New. Rebuilt. Did not seem to matter. Talking to other RV'ers I found that story repeated over and over. Did not seem to matter even what year. It was a bad design, and it went unfixed , on and on. There was no fiscal reason to change it apparently. Heck, there was probably a nice revenue stream in it for someone. Yet other design alternators are built here in the states.. like the ones that go into the Honda's at Marysville, and they last just fine. I also had a Ford E350 based Class C RV, and it went over 100k miles and I never touched the alternator. The E350 had other design problems though: Ford's I beam front suspension was a terrible idea, and yet they kept that for years and years and years. The tire folks must have loved that, since the Twin I beam would not stay aligned for love nor money, and even finding someone who *could* align one right was not easy.

As a former mechanic, I could go on and on about the stupidities of American car design. To use the word "Conservative" in its most pejorative possible way is the best I can come up with. Never change. Never learn. Never grow. Fight progress at every turn. After the oil embargo of he 1970's showed us how vulnerable we were, instead of adapting and even spending some money educating the American consumer about the virtues of spending more for quality and more for higher tech, better fuel efficiency vehicles, they spent money on lobbyists fight things like CAFE. One of the scare-points that these people made about CAFE: That it would be bad for jobs. Now look at where we are. I am pretty sure I know who is really bad for jobs.

When the oil crisis was past, they dumped even the fledging attempts at making a decent or at least a fuel efficient vehicle and went back to making stuff like Hummers, Suburbans, Escalades, Tahoes, Excursions, and on and on. When they were making a 10-20K profit per vehicle, they were telling the unions that they needed concessions, then gave themselves millions in bonuses because of how well the company was doing.

That does not even count the fact that they fought against, or at least did not leverage *current* technology. How long have there been diesel locomotives? Ever since they retired the steam engine. The tech in not new. It is not expensive. It is not hard. Cummins and others have made small, high quality diesels forever. Take a small diesel engine, hook it to a generator, run it at a constant, optimized for fuel economy RPM, drop it in a small car, fuel it with BioD made from oil made from Algae grown in salt water, and you have *everything* you need to solve the auto industries problems. 100 MPG. Last 500,000+ miles. End of story.

Well, sort of. The auto industry will also have to make sure that they are sized correctly for cars that last longer. And that is part of the problem. Gas engines don't last as long, so cars built with them have to be replaced more often, so there is more profit there. The gasoline engine is the ultimate in planned obsolescence. Doing the right thing, and doing the long technically possible thing is stuck up against doing the more profitable thing.

The car industry... all industry really, needs to figure out that if we do *not* solve problems like that in favor of doing the right thing, then we are all going to choke to death on the poisons we have created. See Yeast making Beer for details. Hopefully we are smarter than yeast. Most of us. Doesn't count if you use your smarts for evil.

Humm: If you take all the people trying to do the right thing with their smarts, and balance them against all the people trying to do the wrong thing, does that net out to being as smart as yeast? 1 + -1 = 0.

There is profit in doing the right thing. Maybe not quite as insanely a huge profit, but that huge profit is short term. In fact, it is over. Profit has turned into needing a bailout. Hey! Can we (the shareholders) have those bonuses back? Turns out we some better things to spend it on.

I called this one "Bailout" because I have deeply mixed feeling about the proposed automotive Industry bailout. As I said at the beginning, I have always tried to use market forces via what I spend money on to try and influence the makers and sellers of things. In truth, I do not think "No regulations on anyone for anything" capitalism is working as well as the Conservatives have assured us it will. Their solution is frankly insane. Let the car companies die (but not Wall Street: Give them tons of money with no strings). Put out on the street over 3 million good people who mostly never did anything wrong (other than perhaps believe in the myth of "Trickle Down"), and in fact did almost everything right. The Conservatives of course are blaming their usual bogeyman, the unions. All smoke and mirrors so that no one looks at the real reason they got where they are, and dragged us with them.

If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome, then the right wing economic plan is demonstratively crazy. Yet the Newt-pack would have you believe that it all came tumbling down because we did not believe hard enough. We did not deregulate enough. We failed the god of deregulation with our false and weak faith. We need to believe harder. We'll just keep paying this terrible price till we believe more and oh, give more too. The god of deregulation requires *serious* tithing.

The price of freedom unfortunately is eternal vigilance, and these folks have been stealing us blind and then blaming the hired help. To some degree this is our fault. We were not vigilant. We watched Fox News. We drank the Koolaid. Hannity and O'Reilly and Limbaugh and Colter et al were treated as if the bilge water they were pumping made sense. It sounded too good to be true (the entire right wing economic, trickle down story) and it was. Money for nothing and your chicks for free is in fact a recipe for dire straights. Apologies to MK and the rest of DS.

It was all there to see for anyone that looked with clear eyes. George H. W. Bush called it was what it was: "Voodoo Economics". Although this was a statement of fact (as much as any statements about economics are facts in any case), it was successfully treated by the smear machine like the term "liberal" and made into a dirty word / phrase. Even the guy that devised "Trickle Down" (David Stockman) for Ronald Reagan recanted it. We went with it anyway. We forgot everything Excel taught us about math (=sum() decreases, not increases, the total when the numbers it is summing are decreased) and said "Yeah: OK. Less taxes equals more money for the government, so we can all stop paying taxes and still have more lovely roads, bridges, and national parks to enjoy" Turns out Heinlein was right again (being right all the time can be annoying). TNSTAAFL: Not only is the moon a harsh mistress, but so is reality.

I am really really really really really happy that, despite how spineless the Democrats generally are, they did not let Social Security become invested in the stock market. Thank goodness for small favors, since they pretty much laid down for the rest of the program, including things like FISA. But I digress.

So... I think we have to do this bail out. 3 million or more jobs just can not be lost. Worse, some of the few manufacturing jobs we have left to, thanks to previous right wing leadership of things like our mills. WWII was won by being able to manufacturer the other side. But I digress... I think we also need to make sure that we get what we need out of this. They got what they wanted, including private jets that are "Not Negotiable" when it comes time to tighten to corporate belts. AIG got their money and went right back to partying. Enough of that stupidity. They have clearly not been worth what they were paid. Not even close. For all the industry leadership they have shown, I am thinking it is time to give them cubicles, pay them minimum wage, and have them fly steerage.

We do not have a lot of wiggle room here. The resources we once have have been squandered by the right wingers and their tales of economic myth. Reminds me of the old George Carlin joke about "Saving the Earth". The Earth, he noted, will be fine. It is just us humans that are in trouble. To be sure the human race will survive this downturn. The question is how deep and how long will the pain be. At the end of it will be have a middle class anymore? Or are we back to fiefdoms.

OK: Bailout then. With conditions. We gave running government as a corrupt business a try for 16-20 of the last 28 years (I tend not to think harshly of the Bush 40's years, even if his domestic policy was a zero and the only reason Gulf War 1 happened was because oil-friends of his had their country invaded. I am not a fan of anyone invading anyone else, no matter what the reason was they got help. As bad as that all was it paled in comparison to either Reagan or Shrub) . Now time to try running business as a fair government. We know what their needs and wants are, but we are going to be part owners, and now we get to say what our needs are. All future bailouts regardless of industry should have these same conditions. No more giveaways. If they don't like it, let them go bankrupt, buy them our of bankruptcy for cheap, and fire the lot of the so called management. Our needs are more important than their wants now. We need cars built right. We needs cars that get good fuel economy. We need cars that take advantage of current tech (BioD fueled diesel hybrids) for now, and we need to do research for the cars of the future. We need to not trust that these folks will do this. They have proven that they will not. Worse, they lied about who they were and why they were making cars. They called themselves "Car Guys" in interviews in the automotive magazines, tuning in to our love of cars and the road and using it against us, acting like they were just one of us, and really excited about that next new thing they were getting ready to foist off on us. The only thing they were really excited about was the money they were making selling us garbage.

I am not talking about matters of taste here either, like whether a Cadillac Escalade is a thing of beauty or was beaten with an ugly stick and then had some stuff bolted on it they found laying around the shop. I mean a good car as in safe and fuel efficient, using reasonable fuels that are zero carbon impact, and built to last out of materials that can be recycled. Do that first, then go back to beating them with ugly sticks if need be. There is no accounting for taste, but quit letting taste trump doing the right thing. BMW let Chris Bangle make some really ugly real ends on their 7 series a while back, but that is a matter of my personal taste, and I can still appreciate that the car under the sheet metal has some nice engineering to it. Peel back the sheet metal on an H3 and you have a gasoline powered solid rear axle Chevy Tahoe. I wonder if the alternators last any better yet?

You would be correct to note that America car quality is not as bad as it used to be. We are safely past the Chevy Vega and Chevette. Ick. Some even assert that Ford has reached parity. I doubt it. Ford does not make a single car I want to drive. While I hear the assertion being made, and see the study from JD Power and all... I do not believe it. I have eyes. I have rented Fords. It is true that they are not as bad as they used to be. I see no parity. I drove a Ford Focus recently for example, and it made me long for my Honda.. or even the Hyundai Sonota, Chrysler PT Cruiser or Chevy SSR I had rented before.

We, for our part, need to get over the go faster, race for pink slips mentality of our collective youths, at least until we are racing with electric cars. We have to grow up now, and watch these people and demand that they do the right thing or get out and replace them with someone that will. We tried the self policing, let market forces rule, wolfs guarding our hen house thing. Give the auto execs ... more importantly, the people of the auto industry, the money they need to see it though, but on the other side have them building world class cars that we can be proud to buy. Vehicles that meet our real needs, not the pseudo-needs the auto-execs defined with advertising.

"Made in America" used to mean something. It still can mean something good. This bailout is our chance. We need to PWN these guys. Have them do it the real American way for a change... and make us proud.

Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One

2008-11-17T00:44:00.002-06:00

Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One

Codenamed "Felicia",Mint 6 is due to arrive this month, and RC1 is already available over at http://linuxmint.com.

Mint 6 is built off the solid basis of Ubuntu 8.10, and inherits most of its goodness, and layers on the extras that make Mint my favorite Distro right now. I'll have a post up soon over at TalkBMC about using Mint 6 as the main office distro. This one is about Mint on the Acer Aspire One (AAO) though..

When we last left the AAO I had just added more memory and was experimenting with Puppy Linux. Since that time I have found that the power supplies for my Compaq M300's work on the AAO: Not great: the Compaq PS plug is slightly smaller in exterior diameter, but it fits well enough I can leave the real AAO power cord in the "car 11" DVDplayer" bag I bought to act as the AAO's case. I can have a power station on my desk, and another by the bed, and don't have to unpack the cord. Very handy. Kind of ironic, since the M300 sort of fit the same slot of computing hardware the AAO does.

A friend of mine told me that Mint 6 RC 1 was out, so I went and downloaded it to the MS Windows side of the AAO. The reason for this is that I have some handy tools for making bootable USB fobs over there on MS WIn that I got from the following tutorial on PenDriveLinux:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/11/15/usb-boot-cd-for-ubuntu-810/

There is a sort of beauty to using MS Win to create Linux boot media.

I booted the AAO back over to WinXP SP 3. There I created a mint6 directory on the NTFS partition, and downloaded all the bits noted on the tutorial link above, plus the mint 6 .iso to the new mint6 directory. Next I modified the batch file there (inside the .zip download) and renamed it mint6.bat. The modification was just to change the two places inside the batch file that it refers to the .iso by name to point at the mint6 rc 1 .iso instead.

Then I inserted my USB fob.. that one that had Puppy 4.1.1 on it... formated it, and ran the new mint6.bat. This calls 7zip (7zip also is included in the .zip download) to unpack some stuff from the .iso {handy that 7zip understands .iso}), copies it to the USB fob, and makes the fob bootable with 'makeboot' (also included in the .zip download). It is clean and easy. Whoever created that .zip did all the work.

I have the AAO set to boot USB first by default, so I booted the USB key, and Mint 6 RC1 flew up. Fast. Amazing how much faster USB keys boot than CD's. I then clicked the install icon, and started the install process.

If you have ever installed Mint or Ubunbtu, there will be no mysteries on the install. Same set of screens. Same annoying graphical time zone setter (although it does seem to work a little better than it did, but not by much) When I got to the disk layout, I did the usual manual definitions since this system dual boots. Disk layout on the AAO looks like this in 'fdisk':

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19457.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x11a8ba38

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 637 5116671 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda2 * 638 4285 29302560 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 4286 5258 7815622+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 5259 19457 114053467+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 5259 5501 1951866 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 5502 19457 112101538+ 83 Linux

I really love that the AAO has a 160 GB hard drive. Since the Acer's box said that it was a 120 GB unit, I resent less that MS Win is taking up part of the space.

SDA1 is the restore partition defined by Acer and more than likely made useless by this system being dual boot. 5 GB that will probably never be of use.
SDA2 is MS Win XP SP3.
SDA3 is '/'.
SDA6 is 'home'.

I had Mint format sda3, and just told it to mount up the rest as is.

The installer then formated SDA3, and took less than 3 minutes to install the software, and less than three more to download language packs, and then it was time to reboot the system. Total install time was less that 10 minutes.

Up to this point, other than everything having the Mint theme, this was all like the Ubuntu 8.10 install before. This changed with the reboot. Ubuntu 8.10 and the wireless card.

Ubuntu required that I *unload* the Athero wireless drivers before the Atheros wireless card would work. Seems counter intuitive, but that is what worked.

With Mint 6 booted, it could not 'see' the wireless card, and so I assumed that the same thing would work for Mint. Nope. I unloaded and rebooted and Mint 6 still could not see the wireless card. I went round and round. It was odd. The hardware was clearly visible to lspci:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

No drivers would work. This is not good, because Atheros is one of the good guys/companies when it comes to Linux, having fully released Open Source versions of their hardwares drivers.

http://www.atheros.com/news/linux.html

Weirder, this all worked under Ubuntu 8.10. If there was ever any doubt Mint is not the same Distro as Ubuntu, it is erased by things like this. This *is* RC1 though. I have no doubt that this will be fixed by GA, or shortly after: If nothing else, I have read the Ubuntu will be fixing the Atheros drivers in the hardware manager and Mint should pick that up.

This presented me with an opportunity though. Previous to this Mint had always supported my wireless cards so well I have never had a chance to play with their MS Windows driver install tool (System / administration / Windows Wireless Drivers). I know that NDISWrapper is the secret sauce behind this tool, and that is a little controversial in Linux circles. I agree that I would rather the Atheros native stuff be working, but it isn't, and I either need wireless to work, or I need to go back to Ubuntu 8.10. I decided to do NDISWrapper for now.

I pointed the tool at the Windows driver over in the MS Windows partition (cleverly mounted as /windows), and it does *not* activate the wireless card.

/windows/WINDOWS/system32/netathw.inf

It says that it see the hardware, but it does not create the wlan0 device.

Humm.. I grabbed some Atheros Drivers from here:

http://download2.dvd-driver.cz/atheros/drivers/ar5008/xp32-6.0.3.85.zip

And these worked. In fact, wireless seems every bit as crisp with NDISWrapper and these as Ubuntu 8.10 did with the native drivers... if not *better*. That just seems wrong at so many levels. But it is true as far as feelings can measure things. How long it takes to find the WAP and sync up seems to be 1/3 of the time that it used to be under Ubuntu 8.10.

The other malfunction of Mint, and Ubuntu had this as well, is that when I suspend the unit (and it suspends quickly and without drama) and then return to service, I have no sound. The new-fangled PulseAudio sound server does not appear to like suspend / resume operations.

To test out the speed and efficiency of the AAO unit running Mint, I went over to MSNBC and started to watch an episode of Rachel Maddow's show (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908). It herked and jerked something fierce. Sound was smooth though. I had done the same exact thing with the same exact computer under MS Win: I knew the AAO with is hyperthreaded 1.6 Ghz processor and 1.5 GB of RAM had the resources do this. I suspected that Mint had a weird default for the Flash player, or that at the very least this was not Flash 10. Adobe had recently release Adobe 10 for Linux, bringing it to Flash player parity with the rest of the computing platform world. I know it is not Open Source, but I still have hope that one day Adobe will see the light here. Or that one of the Open Source Flash players will catch up enough to play Rachel without digital jitter.

Looking in Synaptic, the flash player installed was called "Flashplayer-nonfree" and was labeled as being "10.0.12.36ubuntu1". Right next to that was one labeled "Adobe-Flashplugin", and it was at version "10.0.12.36-1intrepid2". I flipped them, and sure enough, Rachel was now playing smoothly. That was the main thing. I love my Linux and all, but don't be messing with the "Rachel Maddow" show. I won't go back to MS Windows or anything, but I would start using my Mac for everything Rachel if need be.

The irony that Rachel is on MSNBC is not lost on me either. Rachel, like our new, actual, real president (to be) is a Mac user. And I watch her from Linux... It is a multi-computer-cultural world these days.

Next I fired up an .mp4 rip of a DVD, to see how that would work, and here there were no problems. In fact, the AAO makes a fine little digital show viewer. It's fabulous LED backlit LCD screen is just perfect for watching a programme late at night while the SO snores on.

OpenOffice.org stays at 2.41 in Mint. I had hoped that Mint 6, being released just enough after Ubuntu 8.10 that OOo 3.0 was out would pick up the new OpenOffice, but Clem and company decided to stay with 2.4.1. it may not be that big a deal though. The main reason I wanted OOo was to be able to read MS Office 97 documents, and it turns out Ubuntu and therefore Mint have reached forward with a mod to their copy of OpenOffice 2.4 and grabbed 3.0's ability to read and write to MS's new format. I tested that at the office the other day with a Mint 6 / OOo 2.4.1 install I have there, and it worked great. I am not a fan of the MS for4mat, but I realist enough to know that interoperability is going to be required for a while yet.

I installed OOo 3.0 on a different, Ubuntu 8.10 based computer at the office, and am sort of sorry I did. For now, 2.4.1 is more stable, at least on Ubuntu and probably Mint.

Wrap up: Mint 6 stays on the AAO even in RC1 form. I have the wireless problem worked around for now, but will keep trying to get the real drivers going every time a new kernel point release comes downstream in MintUpdate. In fact, I will reach ahead and install all kernel related stuff ahead of when MintUpdate classifies then as '3's. I really want native Atheros drivers. I also hope the sound / suspend problem gets fixed by a kernel update.

The Acer Aspire One, More RAM, and Puppy 4.1.1

2008-11-10T00:53:00.001-06:00

This post is a follow on to my previous post about the Acer Aspire One (AAO).

There is one really bad thing about the Acer Aspire One and that is that to get the hardware I wanted required getting the one that has WinXP pre-installed. No big deal for me: Ubuntu 8.10 is now installed and running very very nicely, and the hardware is just counting the minutes (or maybe its me...) until Mint 6.0 is released so that it can get the latest version. I thought about going to Mint 5R1 of course, but wanted a chance to play with Ubuntu 8.10. The new AAO hardware presented that opportunity.

What is bad about the XP on the AAO is that when my wife got hers, she did not also go to Linux. No.. instead she looked at it as a chance to get a computer she could run WordPerfect X3 on. She still spends most of her time on her MacBook and Pages, and is saving her pennies for a new Macbook, but that means Windows camel has a nose back under the tent flap at the Casa, Yes: I know my Acer 5610 dual boots to Vista, and that my AAO dual boots back to XP as well, but these are for experiments and professional learning, not for production use. I wish Corel would release WP for Linux (a modern version I mean. I have WP8 for Linux) so I could head this off at the pass. Nuts. OpenOffice.org 3.0 does everything I need and more, but my wife is more of a power user than I am when it comes to word processing. Apparently mail merge on OOo is not up to WP X3. Then there is the whole "Show Codes" thing that every word processor other than WP is missing.

The AAO has surprised me with its speed and utility. The Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz processor is hyperthreaded, which to Linux looks like two CPU's. I turned on various monitors like gkrellm and the Gnome taskbar monitors, and can see that the threads are getting different workloads: Linux is taking full advantage of the design. It is crisp. The monitor is also still amazing: the LED back-light making the white color look so clean and bright that the previous king of my monitor stable.. the Macbook Pro... looks a little gray and dingy in comparison.

Despite being crisp with is factory 1GB RAM, I decided it was worth the time, effort, and 22 USD to replace the stock Hynix 512 MB pc2-5300 stick with a 1 GB unit from Crucial. In fact, I decided it was worth taking the Acer apart over and over and over... although that was not the original plan.

I noted in my last post about the AAO that my unit did not match the box documentation: For one thing, I had a 160 GB HD rather than the advertised 120GB. My wife ordered hers from Outpost, and hers is also 160 GB while documented as 120 GB. I got to wondering if I was really limited to only 1GB of RAM on the upgrade, so I went to Fry's and got a Kingston 2GB PC2-5300, and dived into the Acer. I used the instructions here:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/08/28/how-to-add-ram-to-the-acer-aspire-one-netbook/

However, the pictured routines are not complete, and the video gave me the clues for the missing bits. The video also told me that once I got to the part about taking out the mainboard I had a different unit than they did. The screws were not all in the same place, and how the hard drive connected in to the mainboard was utterly different. This made me hopeful that 2GB RAM stick would work.

For all I know, it would. The problem was that the stick I had had been returned as not working, and it did not work in my unit either. I have no idea if this was because the stick was bad or the AAO... even the new one... does not support the larger RAM size. If it does not, it seems a stupid limitation.

I went back in with the 1 GB stick, total 1.5 GB, and all was well with the AAO again. Both XP and Linux felt crisper. I expected Linux to be faster since it is far better at addressing memory, and it uses memory not in use by programs as disk cache. I did not expect WinXP to speed up though.

Quick aside here: XP can only run about two programs at a time on my wifes AAO. I have never tried to figure out if this is a weirdness of hers (as long as she is on MS Win, she is on her own) and XP has not been up enough on mine to know if that is also true on mine. I have no idea if MS dumbed down XP ULCPC even more than XP Home (which would seem redundant and unnecessary but since MS says they are not making as much money because of the Netbooks, it might be true). I can tell you it is not a limitation of the hardware. Ubuntu 8.10 (and soon, I am sure, Mint 6) have no such problems. I have all sorts of things open all the time. My problem is screen real estate on the 1024x600 screen for active tasks!.

If you have researched the AAO at all, you know that adding the RAM to the system unit is not for the faint of heart. I take apart hardware all the time, and at first I did not think it was that bad... till I crunched the right hand speaker cable putting it all back together and had a horrible speaker buzz for a while till I took it back apart and fixed it. Doh. An AAO is not as hard as a G3 or G4 iBook. But it is not as easy as an Acer 5610 either!

It it a total mystery why there is no access hatch over the top of the memory slot. It is on the bottom of the mainboard, and there is an access hatch on he bottom. The hatch lines up with what looks like a place that they might someday solder in a connector for something: maybe a G3 wireless card? But there is nothing there on mine, and to get to the freakin' RAM slot is a complete system teardown...

The Hard Drive that the AAO uses was not what I expected at all. I thought it would be the same form factor as what iPods use. Given the small size and bantam weight, surely it used an itty bitty HD. No. Looks like a standard 2.5 inch laptop hard drive.

Before I leave the AAO hardware for this post, I do have to say that I can not wait till the aftermarket catches up to the AAO. For one thing, there are not yet any decent cases for this form factor. I bought a car DVD player case, and it works pretty well, but it would be nice to have something a bit more form fitting and with a place to stick the power cord. The other thing I will buy as soon as I can find it at a reasonable cost is a 6 cell battery. The stock three cell battery lasts about 2.5 to 3 hours, but part of the reason to have the uber-portable form factor of the AAO is to leave the power cord behind for the day.

Its Not Puppy Love

I do not try to diss Linux Distros for the most part. The people that work on them usually do it out of love, and often for free or for what people donate who love their work. That being said I have to say that Puppy Linux 4.1.1 is not ready for the Netbook form factor... at least not the AAO. Where Ubuntu (with a quick disablement of the ATH5k drivers) works pretty well, and extremely quickly, Puppy 4.1.1 does not work quite as well. Fast... but no 802.11, so what is the point? Web 2.0 pretty well sucks rocks when you can not get to the web.

I followed the directions at PenDriveLinux ....

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2006/03/25/puppy-linux-on-usb/

.... and created a bootable CD. I booted this on the Acer 5610, and created a bootable USB fob (FWIW: I had to replace the USB Flash drives MBR, even though the on-screen directions says you probably won't have to)

I booted this on the AAO, and while Linux boots *fast* it does not detect and load the Atheros drivers in a way that works. I messed around with it: Puppy has a pretty nifty tool for this: but nothing that Puppy provided created a working wireless connection. Sure, I could have gone NDISWRAPPER, and Puppy even has a cool way to load this, but I refuse to go that route on an Atheros equipped computer.

Puppy worked fine on the Acer 5610 with its Intel wireless though, so this appears to be a problem that is specific to the AAO and its very recent Atheros card. Probably "fixed in the next release". lcpci on the AAO says:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

I had a spare USB fob, so I left Puppy on it. The other USB fob on that keyring has Ubuntu 8.10, so if nothing else I have a pretty nice repair tool set with me at all times. Is it geeky to have more than one USB fob on your keyring?

Puppy is interesting and fun to play with: Not the easy-breezy Ubuntu/Mint experience, but amazingly complete for being 96 MB or so. My 2GB fob that Puppy 4.1.1 is on has all sorts of room to spare.

Another day closer to Mint 6......

Walking On Sunshine

2008-11-08T23:26:00.005-06:00

Stephanie Miller has new intro music on her program. "Walking on Sunshine" has replaced the previous number, which I do not know the name of, but it sounded like Pep Rally music. Not a criticism: it made total sense for the voice-over: "Operation: Take Back America"

I bring it up because while I have never much cared for "Walking on Sunshine" for some reason, it actually seems to fit right now. I am hardly a dour person by nature, but "Walking on Sunshine" always had a Pollyanna-ish sensibility to it that did not appeal to me.

Normally.

This is different in that now I get it. It just took 8 years of darkness and oppression to put the song into its proper perspective. Watching things like...

Voter suppression and at least one if not two stolen presidential elections that resulted
Bigotry and Racism dressed up as Patriotism: Hate made into a positive character trait.
Fraud
Huge upward wealth redistribution
Rampant greed
Guilt by association
Spying on Americans without cause and without warrants

… and so forth rule my country has been so hard to observe. Lie after unchallenged lie. The myth of the liberal media. WMD. On and on. All of it made worse by knowing that my primary weapon against all these things is being funneled into electronic machines that will do with it whatever their masters say to do has been doubly frustrating. Don't show up at the polls... and if you do, it won't matter anyway because we'll flip your vote to meet our needs. These people have been torturing people in my name! They will walk away from this mess richer for having destroyed an economy and ruined the name and the honor of a nation of good people.

All that pain. All that darkness. All that despair. Replaced by hope. I wonder if Barack knows just what he has done. Sure, he did it by empowering people to feel hope again, by telling them that if they will work hard a common goal can be achieved, but leadership counts for something. Vision. Passion. Commitment. Most of all, Integrity. Saying and doing the same thing at the end of the campaign that you did at the beginning.

What bothers me is that this stuff is cyclic. People will tend to forget again where we were and expect the bright future as the status quo. They will become vulnerable to the pernicious lies such as "Cut Taxes in Order to Grow". The problem with this lie is that it shares the quality that the very "best" lies do: it has an element of truth in it. The lie is that if we cut taxes, and we grew that we should just keep doing that, over and over and over again. It is not infinite. The logical extreme is that if no one paid any taxes at all we would have an infinitely well financed government / social system.

Also, the reverse: if everyone gave everything to the government, then there would be little if any growth. Where there is no incentive to better oneself, there is only stagnation. If no one ate anything, then there would be enough food for everyone.

The extremes prove that the middle is the place to be. There is our real discussion: What services do we, as a nation want? The funny thing is that, if we could take the politics out and just do a straight up vote, we could determine what the majority wants, set a price to that, and be done with it more or less. The minority that has been ruling is not interested in that though.

I do not like to pay taxes more than anyone else, and for the same reason. It just seems like such a big chunk of money. Be that as it may, I have never understood the lengths that people go to in order to avoid paying them either. I like roads and bridges and emergency response teams and a strong defense and national parks. I like having a big institution on my side to protect me from the big institutions that are not on my side.

Related to this, in the lie-as-truth department is the concept that we can just grow our way out of anything. It makes no sense, yet it is accepted as delivered wisdom from on high. As a homebrewer, I can prove this is not true every time I brew a batch of beer. Dump the yeast in the wort, step back, and watch the yeast party … right up till they die, about a week later, poisoned by their own excessive growth. Yeast drink maltose, pee alcohol, and at some point die because there is more alchohol in their maltose than they can live in/with. To grow our way out of our problems in an infinite loop means leaving the little blue marble we are nearly all perched on. The question is only whether or not we'll leave before we choke to death like the yeast do.

Rachel Maddow (Queen of Cable TV, according to Stephen Colbert) points out on occasion that she does not get why the party the hates government always tries to run the government. The results are clear: a self fulfilling prophecy. When elected these folks prove the government doesn't work. Its like handing OJ the glove. Of course it won't fit. Duh. Government doesn't work: see? We just proved it by running it into the ground.

Another lie: Government should be run like a business. Uh...No. Sure, we don't want stupid stuff happening like spending too much on hammers, but having a good purchasing department does not map to business and government running the same way. If anything, business needs to run more like government. Huh?

I take it as axiomatic this above all else when it comes to people: They will do what they are paid to do, and by extension, whatever appears to be the path of least resistance to the most money. Heinlein's sub-story in “Time Enough for Love” about the “The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail” for example. One might argue that this is the root of capitalism. The problem is that people … especially businesses, are more often than not really lousy at figuring out things like short term pain for long term gain. When you are measured by the quarter, and punished severely when you make less money in a given three month period than in the previous one, your only motivation is the money. People don't matter. The right thing doesn't matter. "It's just business" becomes an excuse for almost any behavior. See all the recent layoffs for example. 240,000 this last quarter.

We need people to have jobs so they can make and then spend money, but the economy is bad so the companies aren't making as much money, so they are laying people off to try and make ends meet.. so people have less money, and......

The death spiral is pretty easy to see. A smart company will use this time to build at the expense of those around them that are locked in quarter-think. Most (but not all) companies that think that way are privately owned, so they can get off the treadmill of quarter-think. If nothing else, the US Government tends to think annually. Four times longer than quarter think though. Nothing like the 50 year business plan of some Japanese companies though.

The Sickness of Too Much Competition

I watched the 22 months of this election as I have no other, primarily on MSNBC. As the election progressed, I got utterly sick and tired of Pat Buchanan. He went on and on and on during things like post debate analysis about how Obama needed to get tougher, and go more negative if he wanted to win. He just did not get the idea that Obama would not attack harder, and use every trick in the book in order to win, even though Obama had clearly stated he did not want to run that type of campaign, and knew that we-the-people were tired of politics as usual. It started to sound like pleading: “Please oh Please go negative: Drop down to our level!”

Buchanan seemed to be saying that the means do not matter: That winning was all that counted, and that Obama could not govern if he did not win first. Win win win win win win win win. The party of the right, with all it supposed morality, imbued by being aligned with people like Jerry Falwell and the religious right, was all about winning, but not about how they won. Buchanan was and is a microcosm of his party. In fact, he is considered a leader in conservative thought! It hardly seems like thought is involved. Seems much more visceral than that.

Competition is good up to a point. It can be a motivator. Some people like it a lot: See all the sports addicts in the world for details. Others compete internally: Can I do better today than I did yesterday? I am of this latter type, FWIW. My sport is snow skiing because I can focus on just trying to make a better run than the last one was. I don't even really care about speed: I like being on the mountain. I am not in a hurry to get down. Better only means "Smoother and more Graceful": A big enough challenge for me at my age and not having been blessed with hand/eye coordination.

For Buchanan, the fact that Obama only criticized specific policies of specific people, and never went to the easy, low hanging fruit like the preacher problems Palin or McCain had must be giving him headaches: He does not appear capable of understanding a moral decision to take the high ground. Rachel Maddow told him over and over that the "Eat your young" approach is not the way that Obama rolls, but "Uncle Pat" just kept saying more or less "then he does not really want to win..."

No: He wanted to win. He just wanted to win the right way.

I keep hearing that the Party of Pat is in disarray. Lost at sea. Trying to figure out how to win again. To get back in power. It is not about doing the right thing. It is about winning at all costs, and they don't get how they were beaten by someone that did not play that way. Right now they are trying to figure out how to tear down, destroy, whatever it takes, Obama. It is not about the people or the country or what is right. It is about winning.

We have emerged from the darkness, but the darkness is still there, trying to figure out how to get back in. Stealing trillions for eight years was not enough (Boy: When they say "Winner takes all, they means it!). Got to have more!

Walk on Sunshine for now, but never forget the last eight years. Despite the electoral college landslide, 46% of the country voted for the losing ticket this last time around. 46% wanted four more years of hate based politics and all that entails.

As Kent Jones says: "Vilgelance"!

Acer Aspire One, Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows XP ULCPC edition

2008-10-28T21:52:00.004-05:00

Over the years I have purchased quite a number of small computers looking for portable computer nirvana. Things like the HP 620LX palmtop and the NEC 800. Both ran the sucktactular WinCE though. Deep yuck. To get to a real OS, I have build Franken-IBM-X30's because I did not want to pay full tariff on the original units. Better. Much better. But parts are old, and there are some problems with the case design such that mine has a number of cracks held together with glue and tape. Very geeky I guess.

There has always been an inverse proportion between the price and the the size at the low end, except it was more of a bowl shaped curve: really small or really large laptops cost major coinage, and there was always a sweetspot in the middle someplace. It varied a little by manufacturer but it was more or less true across the board. One quick example: I paid less for my Acer 5610 than I did the HP 620LX palmtop. Part of that is time of course: The HP was bought back in the late 1990's. That actually makes it worse: factor in inflation and that HP would be over 1000 USD now. Better example: look at Sony VIAO today: The small laptops cost way more than the medium size units.

The OLPC XO-1 has changed all that. Whether it was meant as a laptop for the children of the world or not, its first and easiest to find effect has been on the creation of the "Netbook" class of computer.

I have an XO-1, bought last year as part of the “Give One, Get One” promotion, and it has been a handy little unit: I wrote here about it standing in for an Apple iBook for my brother for example. The XO-1 has never been a full replacement for me for an small notebook computer though. Two things hold it back: one is that the word processor is not the full OpenOffice WP, and I can not therefore do what I want with the HTML for things like this post, although blogger is wretched at the the way that it imports HTML so maybe that is not such a big thing.

The real problem is the keyboard. It was designed for children, and it works well for them. Me... not so much. A friend of mine, Anne Gentle, who works with the OLPC on documentation carries an external keyboard around for hers. That works, but defeats the purpose of having a computer that I can toss in the bag and use on the airplane.

In fact, as I type this right now, I am on an airplane, winging my way to Denver, Colorado. (Parenthetical Paragraph: be careful about airplanes and Netbooks. Easy to leave in the seatback pocket... having done it while writing this article, and being really happy when Frontier Airlines found it! Yea Frontier!)

The unit I am using is my brand new Acer Aspire One. The AAO fits fairly well on the tray table of this Airbus A319, but the flight is full, so he guy next to me is not enjoying my elbow as I try to type and it keeps swinging over the armrest. I type hard....

My neck is not enjoying the angle either. The screen is tilted forward, notback, in order to get the keyboard far enough away from me. I'll clearly decide in a little while to finish this up in my hotel room and watch a movie on the iPhone instead.

The AAO was 349 USD at Fry's last Friday night, and I have it set to dual boot the special edition of WinXP called ULCPC (just what Windows needed, another SKU) and Ubuntu 8.10 for now. I am in fact using OpenOffice under XP on the plane because the WiFi cutoff switch is not yet enabled under Ubuntu. I have the doc on that, just have not set it up yet. (Later edits done from the awesome Old Chicago restaurant in Boulder using Ubuntu) The box for this AAO said it has a 120 GB HD, but in fact the one I have has a 160GB drive. I am not taking it back to get that "fixed".... My AAO is glossy black and looks like a big iPhone 3G, and this is further enhanced by the fact that I have an Apple sticker (from my iPhone purchase in fact) placed on the lid, so that it looks like a small Macbook. I only have the 3 cell battery in this unit though, and that is something I will probably change as soon as I can find a six cell one. With a six cell battery, this is the first computer I have ever seen that has a chance of being able to run all day long away from the power cord.
Speaking of the power cord, the one that comes with the AAO is terrific, in that it is small in diameter, and very very long. I can see sitting in an airport and actually being able to reach a plug with this one.

The AAO is pretty much everything I have been looking for (to date) in the ultra portable computer department, and slots in neatly above my iPhone and below my MacBook Pro.

Circling back to my "Nirvana" comment: I know that time will march on, and that the AAO will one day look as primitive to me as the HP 620LX does now. The difference is that I never felt the HP or any thing that came before the AAO were even close to being the mini-laptop that I wanted. This little Acer is close.

That brings me to my first problem with the AAO: Windows XP. I don't run Windows anywhere else, and I do not intend to start here with the AAO. XP with service pack three is not a horrible OS or anything, and many will be happy with it. It is just that at Casa Carl we use either OS.X or Linux. I keep Vista around for experiments only, and really don't need XP for experiments. I pretty much know what XP will do, and besides I have a dual boot work laptop (Dell D620, Mint 5 and XP) should I need XP for something. That being said, the AAO will stay dual boot till I have a chance to get Ubuntu totally sorted out. On airplanes for example, I do have to be able to turn off the WiFi card. According to doc I read, I have to tell Linux what to do with the keycodes that the WiFi switch generates. Doesn't look too hard. See here for details:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne

/usr/bin/setkeycodes e055 159

/usr/bin/setkeycodes e056 158

Looks pretty easy. (Update: Ran this manually, and it works exactly as documented. Cool Beans! Added to /etc/rc.local. Will use Ubuntu on the return flight if I fire up the AAO.) The AAO can be bought with Linux pre-installed, but here is another place the AAO slightly misses the mark for me: No mechanical hard drive versions of the AAO have Linux on them. I wanted the 120/160 GB hard drive and was willing to sort out Linux rather than have a tiny SSD harddrive but have Linux preconfigured.

Here is where I do not get the AAO price point at all. It would seem that the SSD version with it's more expensive disk save money on the OS, and that Acer inverts that for XP so that with the less expensive disk you get the more expensive OS. I want the less expensive OS and the less expensive higher capacity disk please.

I also wanted the real Gnome desktop, not the special one that they put together for the AAO. The AAO also comes with a version of Linux called Linpus, which I never heard of till I started the AAO / Netbook research. I tried to download Linpus to have a look in a Vmware Fusion VM on the Mac, but the Linpus file server kept timing out. I tried Linpus on an AAO at the store (MicroCenter), and decided, based on first impressions, that it was not for me. Linux is Linux more or less, but this one was too simplified on the user interface. Probably great for Linux new folks. Very task oriented. Very iPhone.

Installing Ubuntu 8.10 RC

I was on the road when I bought the AAO, and so I did not have all my usual external devices with me: I did not have a CD burner I could put Ubuntu 8.10 on and then boot. This was not a big problem as I found an easy four step procedure to download the Ubuntu 8.10 .iso, and write it to USB flash fob, make it bootable, and then boot and install Linux from:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/10/06/usb-ubuntu-810-install-from-windows-non-persistent

The only thing I had to change from their documentation was that I had the release candidate, not the beta, so the .bat file had to be modified with the right file name of the .iso.

The AAO, via F12, booted the fob, and in no time I was looking at the very familiar Ubuntu Live screen. Amazing how much faster a USB fob is to boot than a CD. There was one thing I did not expect: The wireless card was not visible. I was surprised because my research into the AAO before buying it (and I looked at every NetBook out there with USA availability) was that the AAO had an Atheros WiFi chipset, and Linux supports those very well. Atheros has open-sourced the driver, and even the firmware bits.

I like to support companies that do the right thing when it comes to device driver support, so having an Atheros card was a big plus for the AAO. Very big.

Since it was going to be dual boot for now, this was not a show stopper: I could always run back to XP and surf and download bits if I needed (Linux can read the NTFS disk space, no problem), so I went ahead and ran the install. Besides, Ubuntu was not the GA version yet. Chances were it would be fixed by Ubuntu, saving me the trouble later.

Since I had a 160GB HD, I went into manual partition mode, gave XP 30 GB, and there is a 5 GB or so recovery partition on the front of the disk. This proved utterly useless recently on my Acer 5610, but I left it be for now. I gave '/' 8GB, set up a 2GB swap, and gave the rest to /home. Formatting the new /home took a bit, but the install flew down after that, taking maybe 4 or 5 minutes. Here is the full disk layout:

steve@kara:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda 
...
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track,

19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x11a8ba38

Device Boot         Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sda1               1         637     5116671   12  Compaq diagnostics 
/dev/sda2   *         638        4285    29302560    7  HPFS/NTFS 
/dev/sda3            4286        5258     7815622+  83  Linux 
/dev/sda4            5259       19457   114053467+   5  Extended 
/dev/sda5            5259        5501     1951866   82  Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda6            5502       19457   112101538+  83  Linux

Once I was booted to Ubuntu, I still had no wireless, but the hardware manager said that the Atheros drivers were loaded. That meant it could see the hardware, but that the drivers were not working for some reason.
A quick boot back to XP (and XP does boot very quickly on the AAO) and some googling with FireFox (the first thing I always install on an MS Windows computer, even before OpenOffice) and I had the solution from the Ubuntu forums: I had to disable the Atheros driver, and then it would load the right bits. Not at all intuitive, but it worked.

Next I installed all the package updates with Synaptic. It was only 100 or so, far fewer than the Beta. A reboot, and the wireless was gone again. I disabled the Atheros drivers again, rebooted, and it still didn't work.
More research, and it turned out the latest kernel regressed the Atheros drivers, and it would not be fixed till after GA. Nuts.

I had so little time in it (Ubuntu installs fast, and this time no /home format required), I just decided to reinstall, and to not let the kernel updates back on to the computer till I had read that the Atheros stuff was fixed again. That is where I am today. One thing: My wireless activity light blinks, even though in the forum they mentioned it would not. No idea what is up there. Glad it works though.

Ubuntu has had no other issues: Compiz works out of the box, even with the tiny amount of video RAM (8 MB). Ubuntu boots slightly slower than XP (something I have never seen before. Usually Ubuntu runs rings around MS Windows) but there is a concurrency setting for boot that should get it going faster, should I get really wrapped around the axle on that issue. Probably won't. It is not slow in any case. It is just that the version of XP on the AAO has been tweaked. Ubuntu figured out the screen size (1024x600) without issue.

I read reports when researching the netbook class of computer that the fan ran a lot on the AAO but I have not seen this. There were some references to Acer making some BIOS changes to fix this, so perhaps my unit is new enough to have that fixed. Running all this time (over two hours) on the airplane, it has never gotten more than slightly warm on the bottom (and later, when on Ubuntu do the edit it was the same. Slightly warm. With the WiFi enabled it still was good for well over two hours).

I set aside a paragraph just to mention the screen. The LED backlit screen is beautiful. What the iPhone screen was to all the phones that came before it, this screen is to every small laptop I have seen. It is right up there with the new Macbook, the Macbook Air, and the like for color, clarity, and crispness (sounds like a diamond commercial). The "secret" in part is surely the LED backlight rather that the Cold Cathode Florescent types of older computers. I read in a review a comment about viewability angle, and I can verify that one oddity: you can go off angle left to right and the screen stays very readable. Maybe too readable for an airplane. Tip it forward or back though and it polarises very quickly. It seems like they took a 1200 x 1024 bit of LCD, halved and rotated it 90 degrees to make this screen.

OS.X

In a perfect world, I would be able to run whatever OS I wanted on this hardware. The hardware is so nice, and so close to what I have been wanting that it is sad that OS.X is not available. Steve Jobs, in replying to a question about when Apple would do a Netbook said that they could not make one at the price point of the Acer that would not be junk. The thing is, from all appearances, the AAO is not junk. In fact, it is utterly amazing what all comes with this unit at this price. All sorts of USB ports (three of them) and card readers and an external VGA connector. Slipcase. Decent keyboard, although I am about ready to toss the CapsLock key out the window (but the don't roll down on A319's). I can't seem to avoid hitting that thing. Most useless key on a keyboard from any manufacturer , and they always make it extra big so I can hit it as often as possible. I have been assured by a touch typist that the CapsLock key is a "Good Thing", and I trust that typist implicitly... but on this one she is dead wrong. The key is evil. Evil I say!

With Ubuntu Linux, I do not have to put up with Evil. A quick trip into system / preferences / keyboard, and CapLock is just another ctrl key. Bye bye evil.
I was tempted by an HP 2133 for one reason. Keyboard. There was one sitting right next to the AAO at Fry's. I played with it. It's keyboard is better than the AAO's. But at 1.2 Ghz rather than 1.6, less hard drive, and coming with Vista rather than XP, and at nearly twice the price (600 USD versus 349 USD), and just couldn't go there.

An Apple Netbook at that HP's price I would probably do though. Hello Steve Jobs or whoever runs Apple? Market calling.

Selection Criteria

2008-10-23T23:15:00.007-05:00

Elections are funny things. As a geek and part time policy wonk, I am fascinated by what criteria people use to select candidates to vote for. Maybe it is just that elections amplify and bring out both the best and the worst of people. Preconceived notions and hidden fears are out on public display.

Especially interesting are the disconnects between a stated belief or position and the way that someone votes: Easy example: A liberal pro-choice woman voting for McCain / Palin. What in the world is happening there? It is the campaigns stated positions that they are anti-liberal, and that most women's issues such as choice they are against. What is going on there? I have only theories, as I can not get into their heads, but I have heard that it is more important for some to vote for a woman, even if she is not a woman who will share their values.

No Race

Then there is the whole issue of race. From a scientific point of view, race is largely meaningless unless one is interested in a few adaptations such as skin that became darker to deal with stronger sunlight, or some such. There is no significant difference inside the human genome from one ethic group to another, and often less difference can be found between groups as inside a single group. All can have children together. All are the same race where it matters.

Someone on the radio recently asked the question of race that I found interesting food for thought: Why it someone who is ethnically white who is married to someone who is ethnically black having black children? Is the white ethnicity really that weak? Ditto White/insert-ethnic-group-here always ends up as the inserted ethnic group, unless they can "pass" as being Caucasian?. The fact that they call it "passing" speaks volumes. White appears to be the most easily diluted ethnicity there is. All of this was asked tongue in cheek, but I think it highlights the absurdity of the whole position. As noted in the previous paragraph, all are actually the same race, so the constant distinction is one of no technical meaning but unfortunately has had huge historical consequence.

Science does not seem to enter the equation. It is about emotion and prejudice, not rational thought. What are my prejudices?

Party Party

Another way of cutting this thought-pie is the two party system we have here in the States. Are there really only two dominant schools of thought in this country? Answer is of course no, and the fight in this, as every election, is over the small 'i' independent voter. I am one such.

I am not utterly happy with my choices this year, as every year. Neither candidate represents the entire body of my personal school of thought. That could only be true if we were all the same, and all like me (or me like the monotype). Every election we hear about having to choose between the lessor of two evils rather than being able to vote for someone more closely aligned with our own personal criteria. In this, the so called European Socialist systems that have elected parliaments are more democratic than we are. The coalitions are built at a different level. Add in our electoral college where so far four times in history the person without the majority of the votes was seated in the White House. The polling on the current election has made it appear that the Republican party is trying to make it five times, having already ceded the popular vote.

The path to this electoral college win lies through working in many subtle and non-subtle ways that the current Democrat candidate is somehow unfit for office, and that the lack of fitness is based on bigotry, prejudice, and stereotypes. There are code words meant to elicit unthinking, irrational responses from the so called "low information voter". These voters are appealed to as being the only true Americans, based on geography. They actually appeal to someones pride based on them not knowing much.

Single Issue

There is such a thing as a single issue voter. This person feels so strongly about one issue that so defines their life and their identity that whichever candidate is closest to them on this one issue, they have their vote, no matter what else is happening around them. Going back to the liberal woman I mentioned above, a vote for Palin, a woman, being more important than anything else going on around them perhaps.

I don't get it. If I were a single issue voter, I could not support Obama because of his FISA vote. I am still quite upset with him about it in fact. As recent news about what the folks in the spying posts are doing with the spying data has proved, it was and is a bad decision. FISA as currently constituted is bad law, and I think it is unconstitutional, even though a professor of Constitutional law voted for it. I would have expected a man who taught Constitutional law for 12 years to know better. If McCain had voted the other way... against FISA, I would have a harder time choosing who to vote for now.

Crossing the Line

I am not a single issue voter though, so it was not all I had to consider. Another is that as a husband and father of a girl, I am concerned about women's treatment and rights. At first blush, that would have made Palin a plus, but her positions are so anti-women that it was not one for very long.

Then there is this: McNasty

I don't really care about sexual affairs of politicians. I know many that say that having an affair proves they are unfit for office because they can not stay true to their spouse. Inability to keep their word in their private relationship maps to a liar in public. I say "Meh". Every relationship is different, they all have their own rules, and there is such a thing as an open marriage. Unless one is actually in the relationship, there is no way to know what the affair means about the people involved. In this day and age, whether some like it or not, sexual fidelity does not have to map to morality. Call me unprurient (tm), but I don't actually want to know enough about the people involved in them to be able to choose which it is on a case by case basis. It is their personal and private affair. I don't like FISA because of issues exactly like this. I don't want to know, and no one else not directly involved should want to either.

I can not however tolerate a man calling his wife either a B***h or to me far worse a C**t. That crosses a line for me. This is not prudery or lack or worldliness on my part. Verbiage like that shows me what the speaker of such foulness thinks about women in general, and that means they are not someone I trust with policy about women. It crosses over into other areas: It matters not which area. I don't trust them any more. This then I suppose is a reverse single issue vote or non-vote. In the lesser of two evils race, the man who did not insult... and in fact appears to deeply respect his wife... wins. They respectful one either gets my vote or I don't vote, but I can not vote for the man who dropped the C bomb on their wife.

That is one of my prejudices.

Small i

Is not voting really an option? No. In many cases, not voting is in fact voting for the one you do *not* want in office. Many voter suppression campaigns are based on this: Depress the opposition vote so that all of the votes on your side of the issue carry more weight. Like it or not, not choosing and expressing that choice with a vote is probably what someone someplace wants you to so.

I am a small "i" independent, which probably means that the big two political parties are either gunning for my vote or trying to figure out how to keep me from being interested in voting at all. I do not understand why my personal politics are not those of a national party, since they are, to my way of thinking, very well thought out and rational. :)

I am a pay-as-you-go, fiscal small "c" conservative. I do not like debt, either personally or nationally. I know there are times when debt is required, but one of the things that utterly disgusted me was the debate we were having in this country in the late 1990's about what to do with the budget surplus. Seems so long ago now. We had Trillions in accumulated debt, but there were those who wanted to give the surplus budget money back as rebates and tax cuts... before paying back the debt! I like the idea of tax cuts. Who likes taxes? but pay what we all owe first. We have to do it as individuals. I expect the same fiscal responsibility from the government.

At the same time I am socially liberal, and that is how I self-identify if asked, mostly because "liberal" has been made into such a dirty word that I enjoy the shock value if nothing else. I reside in Texas. Say no more.

When John Adams talked about "liberal values", it turns out he was talking a great deal about the values I am talking about here. So, I guess that makes me a tax 'n spend liberal, because the opposite seems to be don't tax and still spend. Spend. SPEND. Spend without income to cover it.

Choose

It was easy to choice this year. The FISA thing has meant I have given little money. My enthusiasm is tempered, but it is not a hard choice. Seemed like no choice at all. But what got me thinking about all this was reading a blog post from a liberal friend of mine, who is also a small 'i' independent, who if voting for the other team. We started in the same place it seemed, and arrived at two different destinations.

As I soon hope to hear Zachary Quinto say: "Fascinating"

Ike was here

2008-09-22T16:13:00.006-05:00

Ike came to the Gulf Coast of the US, and left a great deal of misery in its wake. There has been a lot of breathless reporting on it as it happened, and that has started to fade from the news. The towns and general area are still recovering.

I lived here during the last hurricane, Alicia in 1983. Even though Alicia was a Category Three, and Ike was a supposedly lessor Category Two, Ike has been much worse in terms of total destruction from what I can see and remember. According to the talking heads on the news, the main problem with Ike was not that Ike was slower wind speeds than Alicia, but that it was a much larger storm, side to side, end to end.Ike could cover the entire state of Texas: Alicia was much smaller than that.

One personal odd thing about Ike versus Alicia is that back in Alicia I was young and stupid. I went for a walk in it, just to say I had done it. It stung like crazy when the water hit skin, even through a T-shirt, so it was not a long walk. If debris had hit it would have done more than sting.

For Ike I was older... and much farther away. I was on business in Sunnyvale in fact, and had to watch along with the rest of the world rather than be there. It was a very unpleasant sensation to feel that helpless. I would not have gone for a walk in Ike, but I did want to be there rather than 1600 miles away. Mostly this was because my family remained and had no power. Their connection to the outside world was me: I watched MSNBC's coverage, and IM'ed it to them to let them know what was happening. Oddly, IM worked the whole time, even when voice did not. At least it felt like I was doing something. Thank goodness I had an iPhone for that much IM'ing!

Ike slammed the Gulf Coast area late Friday. I flew back into town as soon as the Houston InterGalactic Airport reopened. It was about what I expected at first: Branches and signs down all over the place. Odd places where there was no obvious damage. Power was broadly down. I packed up the family and we headed to Austin till our power returned. Again I was out of town, but now I did not feel so bad.

Driving out of town Monday evening after dark reminded me strongly of my trip to Pune India: I *knew* millions of people were around me, but the city we drove through on the way out of town was pitch black except for the odd spot here and there where there would be lights. Pune was like this: One evening while having dinner up on a hillside, I was looking out over the dark valley below, dotted here and there with lights. One of my friends there asked me what I thought of the view. I was confused. I thought I was in the countryside someplace. They pointed and said I was looking at a major part of the city.

I could see the outlines of buildings in the dark, but so few lights were in evidence that I had no idea what I was looking at. I decided that India was doing a much better job only lighting things that needed light than we do in the states: In the Gulf Coast area there is no chance to have a telescope and have it be very useful: Too much light pollution. Too many useless photons.

It had a funny feeling of Deja Vu: Like I was back in Pune, to see Houston and the surrounding metroplex like this. I could not help but think that it would not be a bad thing to not turn back on all the lights that were currently out. Not the ones in the homes of course, but the ones in empty office buildings, and on signs for places no one goes to at night: Just silly to have everything lit up like Xmas. The mind goes down odd tracks in the middle of disasters.

Once we were west of Beltway 8 / The Sam Houston Tollway on Highway 290, lights started to be on, and another 30 kilometers or so northwest we found an open fuel station. It had a line of cars around the block, and police guarding it: It was surreal in another way: The hint that violence was lurking just below the surface. The veneer of civilization was wearing thin. My wife had wisely conserved enough fuel we did not have to stop.

Our house had power restored Wednesday, and so we returned to start cleanup. I don't mind working and getting dirty, but I can not sleep in the swamp without A/C. Most everyone around us were doing the same cleanup kinds of things. The primary sounds up and down the block on Thursday were generators and chainsaws: We had power, but we were among the very first. Even now, over a week later, about half of the houses I drove by last night in our area were still without power.

Civilization is not really returning as of yet: All last week, people drove slowly everywhere, either to conserve fuel, or to avoid downed branches, power lines, and other debris. This week some... to many... are driving like they are all mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.

I always drive slow and in the slow lane at the posted speed limit: I have a Honda Fit, and there is no point is speeding about. I'd rather get 40 MPG if I can. Yesterday and today I had cars taking umbrage at this, and honking and speeding by as close to me as they could without actually hitting me. More fuel stations are open: enough that the long, police guarded lines are gone, but the good humor has gone from some peoples lives. Not without reason. All last night and on the way to work I heard the sound of police, fire, and ambulance sirens rushing off to the latest problem, from looting to people being hurt trying to cut up fallen tree limbs with chain saws they do not know how to operate.

This is not to saw that disasters don't bring out the good in people. While I was in Sunnyvale helplessly and uselessly watching the hurricane, my neighbors fence fell on my car as well as my wife's. The next day when the winds backed off several neighbors left their own personal situations to help my wife pull the fence off our cars and prop it up until it could be fixed. That story was repeated a million times too, all over the Gulf Coast area.

It will be at least a year before all the damaged signs are replaced, and all the visible signs of Ike on the infrastructure are removed (As an aside, for Galveston it will be much longer than that, if ever. Some historic landmarks like the Balinese Room were utterly destroyed). It will be years before all the trees that were damaged regrow all the canopy they have lost, and the uprooted ones replaced. Some lost huge, 100+ year old trees that will not be replaced in their lifetimes.

I expect the veneer will be re-shellacked as soon as people get their power back and their finances and lost deals and whatnot recaptured, redone, or at least put far enough in the re-view mirror that they don't affect they way they drive.

Me: I'm glad I'm moving to Austin.

The iBook and the XO-1

2008-09-03T14:39:00.004-05:00

3.5 years ago, my daughter and I assembled from parts an iBook. The donor computers for the new Franken-iBook came from eBay, and we had purchased them at the time to get our original 500Mhz dual USB white iBook going again. It had stopped charging its battery.

The original iBook was the camels nose under the tent wall: It was purchased used from someone at the office, and was mostly an experiment to see what the new Apple world with OS.X was all about. I was deeply curious about OS.X because I had used previous MacOS version and did not like them. OS.X, with its BSD underpinnings seemed to me to be the first OS from Apple I could get into.. and it was. That was then. Now we have an all Linux and Mac household, with MS Windows only around for historical reference and research.

That original (to us) iBook unit failed when something called the "DC-in" failed. Looks like this:

http://www.pbparts.com/shop.php//9226647.html

... but I did not know anything about Mac / iBook hardware at the time, so we bought a pile of broken iBooks from eBay to experiment on what it would take to get it going again: the iBook was sorely missed, and seemed worth the gamble / experiment.

iBooks are a nightmare to take apart. No kind way to put it. Apple really never meant for it to be and end-user operation. Here is the procedure over at ifixit for how one gets at the DC-in bit and replaces it: Even after having done it many times now, it still takes me at least two hours to get the iBook apart, the part replaced, and the iBook reassembled.

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/iBook-G3-12-Inch/DC-In-Board/50/16/

Once the original iBook was running, my daughter and I looked at the pile of parts, and decided we had enough bits to get another iBook assembled as a gift. We tested various things like screens and motherboards, and got together a 500 Mhz iBook and gave it to my brother for Xmas in 2005. It was the perfect gift we thought: Something he would never buy for himself, something we had spent hours making, and would help free him and his wife from MS Windows.

He powered it up, used it for a bit, and we noticed something. It was not charging. It had been when we built it, but it was not anymore. He had the time of one battery charge to play with it. Having just been through that "No Charge" thing on my iBook I suspected, and it did in fact turn out to be turned out to be the DC-in bit. His gift was a few days late, since I took it home, and replaced the DC-in with another from the junk pile and tested it again.

That DC-in lasted 3.5 years, but it apparently had failed again.

My brothers other computer is the Mint 4 handbuilt desktop box I gave him a while back, and that was fine for email, web surfing, and school work, but you can not sit if front of the TV looking up stuff, like "What other stuff did that actor / actress star in? They look so familiar....". The iBook had been that computer for them for years. But I had to haul it away for another screwdriver session.

At some point repairing iBooks, or really any computer, becomes like that joke about the hammer: "I like this hammer. It is my favorite one! I like it so much I have replaced the head twice and the handle three times."

I had with me (as at all times) my OLPC XO-1. I handed it to them as a replacement for the iBook till it was repaired, showed them how to open up the lid by first flipping up the ears (this always gets adults for some reason). There was general notice of how cute it was, how tiny the keyboard is, etc. By the time I got home I had an email from my brother from gmail and the XO-1 about how much they liked the little unit. It would be fine till the iBook was back among the living.

This made me feel better: While I was pretty sure the problem was the DC-in bit as ususal, if it *wasn't*, I was going to give them the XO-1 as their in-house laptop. That they actually liked it helped make that idea easier.

I ordered a new part from pbparts (although ifixit has them too), and a week later it arrived. I put it in last night, and the iBook is back among the living again. With a fresh rather than used part, I hope it will last another 3 years at least. The next thing to fail will probably be something other than the DC-in.. you would think. Although this is clearly not a quality part / design relative to other parts of the iBook... or any other Apple gear.

Once nice thing about the iBook is that it looks like, at least for now, that parts are plentiful, and this one can keep rising from the dead for years (like the proverbial favorite hammer): at least until Macbooks drop down to this pricepoint, when it will probably be time to move on.

Even nicer though is that the XO-1 was there and worked for them for what they wanted it to do: be the living room laptop. Given the way the XO-1 is built, it should be able to do that for a very very long time to come. Aaannnnd .... it is cute as a bug and runs Linux. Hard to beat that.

Amtrak

2008-08-14T18:39:00.005-05:00

I enjoyed most things about my trip on Amtrak's Sunset Limited train. I liked the price, the seat (relative to an airplane) the way your luggage stays with you the whole time, the Vista-cruiser snack-bar car, the Diner car (food was actually pretty good: Tasty veggie omelet!), and so forth.
Here was another big trains-are-better-than-planes for me: The train stays cool sitting still or running, unlike an airplane which barely stays cool at all till it is at altitude. That may mean little in Alaska or Greenland,but in the Texas Gulf coast region, or the high desert of the Southwest US... heck, pretty much anywhere in the south now that I think about it, this is huge.
One other thing surprised me: There was no clackity-clack. I last road on a train in the early 1970's as a young puppy, and one of my main memories of that experience was the sound of the steel wheels as they clacked over the rails. We would stop and start on this train, and I would not even notice it unless I happened to be looking out the window. While sitting on a siding waiting for a freight train to go by in the other direction (because apparently we are too stupid to build tracks that run both ways) I was listening to an audio book called "Axis", the sequel to "Spin". A pretty good read/listen except the the hypno-reader Scott Brick was reading it, and in his other professional life at carnivals he makes people go into trances than then cluck like chickens. In any case, I felt a slight sway, looked out the window, and we had gone from sitting still to moving at over 50 MPH without me noticing at all till there was athe sway. Those double decker cars are tall, so a gentle sway is to be expected.
Last year I sat in a cafe in Alpine watching the Sunset Limited arrive in station, and it had just a few cars on. This time they had 10 cars on, and Anthony the conductor told me that this was getting to be one of the short trains, so it looks like trains are benefiting from the cost of fuel. I had bought the very last seat available over a week in advance
While the train cars were big, the seats OK for sitting (but not sleeping), there were enough bathrooms, there were no stupid preflight instructions, and so forth, it does seem to me that Amtrak is missing a beat here. They need to overcome their one major problem relative to air travel: How long it takes.
I am not proposing faster trains (although bi-directional track would be nice). Instead, I think they need to take a few things they already have and expand on them.

First off: 110V power.
Every seat. It exists on the upper seats, but not on every row. On the lower level where I was, it did not exist at all

Failing 110V at every seat, at least put the airplane style connectors in place. I had my full airplane setup with me just in case... but there was no case.

There were no tray tables, therefore no place to set my computer.. but without 110v or airplane style power, that was not important. The Macbook battery is getting aged and lasts a little over an hour these days. On a 17 hour train ride, that is next to worthless.
Internet:
RV's have domes available that let them access the Internet full time. They stay auto-aimed at the Hughes satellites. Couple with with inside the train Wifi. Trains are not so uber-tech like planes that any of this microwave radiation will mess with them. Actually, it doesn't with planes either: That whole no-cell-phone thing is a bunch of non-technical malarky. If a plane is so sensitive to EMI, why in the world even get on one? A good thunderstorm and the EMI from a lightning bolt anywhere near the plane and you are dropped from the sky. That never happens though does it? Planes are the safest form of travel... but not because you can't use a cell phone. I don't know why the regulation exists, but I think it probably has more to do with the plane companies wanting to sell people on using their own inflight telephones, not to mention the annoyance of having someone chatting on the phone the whole time you are in flight. On a train, you can step out of the seating area, and make a call. Sweet. Slight digression though. Back to the Internet thing: If Avis can make a rental car into a mobile hot spot, then so can Amtrak do the same for a train, and at a much larger, more cost effective scale.
Add conference-cars that business-people can use to make, practice, or do presentations or work in groups while traveling.
When I flew to India, that plane trip took about the same amount of time as this train trip, yet the plane had In-flight Entertainment. Really, a few LCDs, a Linux computer with a fast hard drive, and you are set! And with Internet access combined in the choices expand
hugely: Folks don't even need to break out their computers. Just have an Internet channel. Simple.

Idea here would be to use the time a train takes to their advantage. You can't make the train go faster cheaply, nor can you do it and maintain the carbon footprint and cost advantages. You can add services at price increments and still far undercut the cost of flying.
The point of the train as a way to travel is not actually going really really fast. The point is not having to drive or fly, and to be able to make effective use of your "downtime". With a few changes it does not even have to be downtime. What is viewed as a disadvantage can be an advantage, at least for those who have the ability not to run their lives at 200 KPH at all times. Type A personalities probably need not apply.

There are some days at work where I have so much stuff to work on that I just work from home. Sit down at the iMac, and just start typing. eight or ten hours later, I knock off for the day. Reports, reviews (back when I was a manager), studies, email, spreadsheets, teleconferences, etc. Nothing that required I actually be in the office. With a few changes, that same work could be done from the train just as well. In many ways, such time is *more* productive. Fewer interruptions.

Bi-Di

Back to that Bi-directional track thing: With a single set of rails running East-West in many parts of the Sunset Limited's route, our safety, in the sense of our ability to *not* run head on into a train running the other direction appeared to have been limited to the talents of the people and machinery doing to the scheduling to keep two trains going the opposite ways off a single stretch of track. That just feels like an accident waiting to happen. Neither people nor computers are 100% reliable.
This also affected our ability to make good time: It took almost as long to run from Houston to San Antonio (where we had a 2.5 hour layover and picked up some cars) as it did to run from San Antonio to Alpine. But Houston-S.A. is maybe 180 miles or less, and S.A. to Alpine is over 400 miles. A big part of that Houston-S.A. time was spent on sidings waiting for freight to go by.
There are also too many train crossings. Trains and cars do not mix. We really need to spend some time and money on this critical infrastructure and get this kind of thing straitened out. Cars don't like to wait for trains (OK: Their drivers don't) and trains have to slow down "just in case". Slowing down and speeding up is the enemy of low carbon footprint for both cars and trains. Build a bridge... with rails going both ways.

A week with 2.0.1

2008-08-14T18:37:00.002-05:00

I have been on vacation in Far West Texas for about a week now. This is actually my real home out here, as I just rent in the Space City.

2.0.1 has been a mixed bag: Stability is better, but still not great. keyboard hangs are still there. Battery life is pathetic still.

On the Amtrak train out here, I exhausted the Lenmar external battery and was at about 50% of the internal battery when I finally arrived in the Alpine, TX train station. We were running about two hours behind because every time a freight train needed our tracks, we pulled over on a siding and waited. It is a crime of epic proportions that we in the US have let our railroad system decline like this, now when we need it most. Really: Tracks in both directions guys! The carbon footprint of me on a train going 600 miles to Far West Texas is just a tiny fraction of me in my Honda Fit driving the same route. But I digress...

The Lenmar was good for about two full charges, so that means in 17 hours I charged my phone twice, and then used it down to 50% again. First company that makes a decent auxiliary battery I can just leave strapped on gets my business.

Here is what I was doing: I watched about five hours of movies, listened to 10 hours of audiobook, and occasionally used the GPS to get a fix on what city I was near. From the specs, I should have used slightly less than two charges worth, and it did not seem to be the movies or audiobooks doing the damage to the battery. The visible drop came when I was using the GPS / Map function.

This matches an observation I made when I was in SanFran a few weeks ago: I went to the city with a full charge, and I *only* used the GPS / Map function while there. Nothing else. By then end of about 8 hours of walking around the city and getting fixes (mostly for fun: I knew where I was most of the time) the battery was in the red.

GPS eats battery.

Another thing I have never really thought through about this: If you can not see a cell tower, the GPS is worthless. If it can not load a map, so it can draw a pin on it, it just goes into la-la land. Not even a basic longitude and latitude readout appears. That seems like an oversight: Another assumption that people will never be out of sight of a cell tower.

On the train, we were following I-90 most of the way, but at one point we skimmed within feet of crossing over into Mexico. For a while, I had no signal at all. Then I had only signal from Mexican cell infrastructure, which AT&T warned me about with a nifty IM telling me that International rates now applied.

I slapped it into airplane mode for an hour, and when I took it back out, it was back to "no signal". I was glad to see it went in and out of Airplane mode: I had read that some were having trouble with that after the 2.0.1 upgrade.

Since arriving, the iPhone has been in Airplane mode most of the time: my house sits in a Caldera, and the rim walls of the volcano contain enough iron that no cell signal penetrates. No Internet either, although that is because of a problem over at the cable company.

To Jailbreak, or not to Jailbreak?

2008-08-14T18:34:00.004-05:00

So far I have not Jailbroken my iPhone 3G. The App Store has for the most part kept me fairly happy with the things that it offered. Fairly. I will more than likely jailbreak it though at some point: Whatever it will take to get tethering going. I seem to be spending a fair amount of time lately in places where the only electronic communications I have working is my iPhone.

As I write this I am sitting in the Amtrak train station in Houston. It is a total backwater of the Internet. To write this post "natively" on Blogger (I.E., Web 2.0 style, with Internet access to the Blogger built in editor) is just not possible from here: In fact, I am sharing the one electrical outlet I could find in the train station with another guy who is working on a report for his job on his iBook. (addendum from the future: I created the post in HTML in Komposer on the Mac. I uploaded the HTML to Blogger, and then I had to go back and fix all the messed up carriage returns and line feeds that Google had added to the HTML: Instead of honoring the CR/LF and other tags, it made a right mess of the posts... so I had to come back with the online editor and clean it all up. Grumble. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog, already in progress..)

This is in the heart of Space City, just a few blocks from downtown! No Internet at all!

The train is over two hours from leaving yet, so it is the perfect time to write, except that my Macbooks battery is now getting old, and I have to be near power plugs to work.. and to charge my iPhone to the top for the upcoming 15+ hour train ride, in case there is no power near my seat. My handy Lenmar battery is already topped up and ready to go.

In this situation, and in other recent one where Internet access meant iPhone only, I really need to be able to tether. It does not have to be 3G. It does have work. I used to have this with my
Samsung A series phone, and it was way less sophisticated than this iPhone is. Null River ever released a 10 dollar application called Netshare that would allow one to tether with an iPhone. Apple took it down. Then put it up. Then took it down. (As of August 4th, 2008, when I was fixing the CR/LF mess, Nullriver's web site still said they were "working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore") I do not wish to be subjected to the vagaries of Apple for things like this. I like the App Store, but as soon as I see a Jailbreak app that makes it work, this phone is getting jailbroken. Till then, I will wait. And fume.

My wife tired of the un-jailbroken 3g faster than I did this time. She spent a long and frustrating time getting hers opened up, only to find out that Installer.app was not yet ready, and that the reason she had Jailbroken it did not really exist yet. It was long and frustrating because the pwnage tool was still a work in progress as well: I read it is easy now.

I watched her in interest to see how well the new tools worked on the 2.0 / 3G phones, and it looked to me that the hackers were pretty close to getting around the roadblocks Apple had thrown up with 2.0. I wonder why Apple even tries?

My son got my wifes "old" iPhone, and we told him to leave it at 1.1.5 and jailbroken rather than upgrading to 2.0 because sadly:

It was more stable
It was better on batteries. My daughter has my original
iPhone, put 2.0 on it, and can't pass an electrical outlet anymore.

That has been the big disappointment of 2.0 and the 3G for me so far. Well, these three things:

Crashing apps
Crashing OS
Dismal battery life

And that is with 3G turned *off*.

Don't get me wrong. I love the 3G: The GPS and location based stuff are huge fun and deeply useful. And after some testing I have noticed that the WiFi signal reception is better with the 3G than the first gen unit. That is goodness. And badness. I preferred the first generation units aluminum case overall: Less fingerprints and the like. Cooler to the touch. And I preferred the feel in my hand of the first one to the new one, but I am in a huge minority there. Most like the tapered edge case of the 3G. People that have not held a 3G pick mine up and usually saw "ooohhhhh.... I like that". Guess I just have to be different. For me, the Wifi improvement is worth the plastic case, even though I view it as a tradeoff.

I did put the 2.0.1 upgrade on that came out today. So far, the main thing I have seen it do is make a few apps I had installed but that had disappeared re-appear. New apps install from the app store a little faster too. Backups via iTunes still take forever. I have not had it on long enough to evaluate if it does anything for battery life or stability yet. Before I did this I researched the state of the Jailbreak and Installer.app for 2.0.1 / 3G. Looks like when I get back from vacation it will be ready.

I'm ready now... here in the train station...without Internet.

The only reason I can see not to jailbreak it will be if Apple and Nullriver set the tethering app free again. Or there is no tethering possibility coming anytime soon on the jailbroken iPhones. I guess there is one good thing: I went way longer leaving this one un-hacked than the first gen one. I guess that means Apple is making strides in the right direction.

Still: If I have to buy a different phone that already had tethering working, and flip the SIM back and forth, I am not above that, but it will be silly, and all Apple and perhaps AT&T will have proven with their roadblocks is that they do not want people to use the tools the way that we want or need to.

One last thing about the 3G hardware, and this is on the annoyance side: Why in the world can't I charge off Firewire and other older devices? I get that the data side may be costly to keep dual circuits a around for, and that Apple has capitulated to USB, but still: 5 volts is 5 volts. Use it! It is not just my firewire charger brick that is not working: I have a Maxell USB charging stand that it won't use. And my Altec Lansing portable speakers. My wife even has a battery backup unit that is nothing *but* 5 volts, and the iPhone 3G says "Nope: not gonna use it", but the 1st gen iPhone does.

Stupid. Annoying. Unnecessary.

iPhone 3G and Firmware 2.0

2008-07-13T20:40:00.004-05:00

.... or, in the ever confusing parlance of computers, firmware 1.2.0.

I am one of a minority in this world when it comes to the 3g: I did not get one for the 3g bit. I wanted the real GPS and flush headphone jack and mostly the 16GB of flash storage. My 8GB unit was always stuffed and actually the 16 GB of the 3G will be no different.

I had a few hopes for the unit that have not really panned out.

1) I had hoped with the 3g feature turned off (which it has been since two hours after I bought the unit: As soon as I could stop playing with it enough to search out the setting to turn off 3G and revert to EDGE) that the battery life would be better. Nope. If anything it is worse. I will probably never leave the house without the Lenmar rechargeable auxiliary battery. With 3G on it is horrific to watch the battery drop.

2) I had hoped with the plastic back on the 3G case replacing the metal back of the first generation iPhone that wifi and edge reception would improve. It didn't get worse but it is not noticeably better either.

One other quibble, and this is not limited to Apple: why is this called a 16GB when it has 14.6 GB? Even if I play the stupid marketing game that they play on counting memory... where marketing says there is 1000 per GB where computers are 1024 per GB (and dropping some zeros) . 16 times 1000 and divided by 1024 is 15.6 GB. There is a missing GB.

I assume that the OS and control data structures are using that space but I wish it would report it!

My daughter ended up with my "old" iPhone, and she put 2.0 on it, so I had a chance to compare a 3G to a first gen unit, both running the same OS. As you might expect location based stuff is way better on the 3G, thanks to the real GPS chip. In fact, so far, location based stuff is not working very well on her unit.

Her unit was Jailbroken originally when I had it, but we looked at the App Store and she decided that it had everything she wanted, and brought hers up to 2.0.

Similarly, while there is a Jailbreak for the 3G / 2.0 out, I am going to wait a few weeks before I decided to jailbreak mine. This is not the same thing as "unlock" mind you. I am not trying to hook up to a different GSM carrier than AT&T. I am not unhappy with their service other than the basic concept of lock-in itself. I am an adult, and I walked into it with open eyes: I agreed to two years of lock-in for the less expensive up-front price. Always the devils bargain.

Jailbreaking pre-2.0 for me was about getting the iPhone to do and be more than Apple was letting it be at the time. The platform has so much more potential than was being used! Besides, I had to have Solitaire.

The App Store brings about 80 or 90% of what the open stuff brought to the table... and then adds in a whole pile of news things the Jailbreak apps never had: Tons of games and location based apps.

What is missing for me so far are all the themers and BSD subsystem based things like file managers and one of my personal favorites "sysinfo". I like to be able to look at the iPhone as the computer that it is, and see what apps are using all the CPU and memory, and kill things that I want gone. It was also a handy way to reboot the entire phone.

If these things *stay* missing, then back to the Jailbreak. If nothing else the free version of Solitaire was much cleaner looking and had better controls!

The App Store is a terrific thing: Do not get me wrong when I say I *might* jailbreak mine. I love some of the new things like the news widgets, and I have purchased a test Solitaire game that is not too bad.

Some App Store sourced stuff is not ready yet: One called 'Where' has yet to load up. Several other apps have caused the iPhone to crash and burn, which is odd because I thought part of the point of having the whole SDK was to keep everything in the box and far enough away from the OS to keep that from happening.

In the comments of my last post, Akshun J provided a link to an article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20080618/tc_zd/228825

In that Article, titled "Hacking is No Solution" Sascha Segan of PC Magazine takes serious issue with the whole idea of Jailbreaking. Here is one quote:

"Here's the rub. You can bet that all of these apps will appear for jailbreaked iPhones. Instead of kicking Apple's butt and speaking out against the artificial deficiencies created by the restrictive license terms, geeks will just jailbreak their phones and use the apps anyway. Mainstream users won't get StyleTap or TomTom or Firefox."

I think this is missing the point of what happened. The App Store now exists! It has tons of stuff the mainstream users will love, and it is going to have way way more things. It has free things too, despite what many feared was going to be the case. There are all sorts of things that one used to have Jailbreak a phone to get that are now in the App Store and free: things like the "Flashlight" app from Erica Sadun for example. I have used the heck out of that little thing, and I *still* have it, now on my unhacked iPhone.

The App Store exists *because* the geeks jailbroke their phones. In the never ending tug of war between the hackers and Apple, Apple decided to join them (to a degree). It is not Open Source mind you, but the SDK *is* free. My wife has a copy. She can write apps for the iPhone if she wants to.

If I end up Jailbreaking my iPhone again to get to Sysinfo or other apps not in the App store, I am pretty sure that what I am after will *not* be mainstream. How many people really want to watch the processes running on their iPhone? Really? How geeky is that?

No matter how geeky it is, if it is popular, I bet it will show up in the App Store sooner or later. The Mainstream and the Geeks will be happy.

And finally, to the point of my last main post, the Blackberry has been seriously left in the dust now. I know they are working on a device to try and compete, but it is hard to imagine catching up if Apple keeps the peddle down like this. Shoot: The next iPhone might even have decent battery life!

iPhone and Blackberry

2008-07-07T22:24:00.004-05:00

Been a while since I wrote anything for this blog. Life has a way of getting in the way of writing, especially when one is getting ready to move, and to change cities at that.

I have had this short post knocking about in my head for a while now. A few months ago a new, second phone appeared in my daily life. I now have a work phone and a personal phone. I wanted the new phone to be able to see and stay in sync from my calendar at the office (since we don't have enterprise iPhones... yet)

The new unit is a Blackberry 8830 "World Edition". It is not the latest and greatest, but I have since held and played with a Pearl and Curve, and they are not that different from the 8830. World edition in this case means it has both GSM and CDMA radios. CDMA for the US, and GSM for the more wirelessly sane rest of the world. Two radios! I guess the AT&T / T-Mobile version of this phone just has the GSM though.

Going back and forth between the iPhone and the BB requires getting used to a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. Modern phone. Ancient Phone. Intuitive interface. Learn by rote interface. Easy to use keyboard. Nasty hard to read hard to use keyboard. Beautiful screen. Not as pretty screen. Etc.

The BB does the one thing I need it to do: It syncs extremely well to my calendar. Meetings will get canceled 15 minutes before they start, and the BB knows about it right away.

Other pluses:

Battery life is pretty good
Sound quality of the earpiece is good, although the mic is tinny
Bluetooth headset works well with it: At least my Motorola H681 does.

When the new iPhone 2.0 firmware is released, and there is a real, enterprise way to get calendar and email going with it, the BB loses its only advantages except maybe battery life (and the new iPhone 3G may address that with a better battery). Then its disadvantages become even more painful by comparision:

Tiny, hard to read keys with lousy backlight and non-standard special symbols placement
Smaller screen
Worse Calendar app (if you can get a meeting onto the iPhone, it is much easier to read and manipulate there)
Worse email app
Worse phone book
Far far far worse browser. Did I mention far? And I have Opera 4.1 on the BB, but that only makes things slightly tolerable.
Both of my supplied cases broke within the first week! That would be a leather case with pivoting belt clip, and the hard plastic dock looking thing. Both broke at the same place too: who thinks a pivot made with a 1 or 2 mm plastic center axle is strong enough?

The whole thing has the feel of an OS / hardware platform that was not designed but sort of grew organically. Stuff was bolted on to the side over and over again. It is a hodgepodge of stuff, none of it intuitive. I had to read the stupid manual to find the *mute* button for the movie theatre, never mind the goofy way the ringer volume is managed!

I know a large number of people are not happy with Apple and the things they have been doing with the iPhone. Lock in to AT&T, controlling the application delivery mechanism, and so forth. I sort of agree, but you know what is also true? It is easier to hack an iPhone and install whatever you like on it than it is to use the approved install mechanism on the BB.

If the trueism about why Linux is not winning the market space is the MSWin has all the apps is true, then the same thing applies to the iPhone and the BB, with the BB playing the part of the application underdog. And all that is *before* the iPhone App Store even gets going.

One of unhappy sets of folks has to be RIM. They are really going to have to re-think their device line and their OS, and soon. Right now they are bringing a pen knife to a machine gun fight.

Mint 5.0 at Home

2008-05-17T22:13:00.010-05:00

I recently posted over at TalkBMC about the latest revision of Mint Linux, 5.0 Beta. As usual, when I post things to TalkBMC about Linux I am focused on Enterprise desktop or Enterprise server applications. I said there, in essence that it was hard to believe that this even was a Beta, since it was so stable. At the time I had used it about 24 hours, but as of this writing that has stretched into several days and nothing I wrote there has really changed. Still fast. Still solid. Still beautiful.

Saturday night we decided to stay in. I have been on the road in Boston and Austin for the last two weeks and sitting at home seemed a special treat. It also was a chance to do something I had not been able to for a while: Play with Linux at home. I have had my Apple Macbook with me as my primary computer for weeks now, other than the time I had been able to squeeze in on Mint on my office Dell D620.

I looked over the candidate computers at the house, looking for new place to test out Mint at home. My Acer 5610, of which I have written quite a bit here, is dead now. It stopped having a working trackpad, I took it apart, decided it was not going to be worth messing with, and piled it all in a bag for now. What I do not need is another desktop computer, and a laptop with a broken trackpad is a desktop as far as I can see.

The XO-1 will be getting a new, Fedora based Linux install on it shortly, whenever a small group of XO-1 owners near here next get together. Anne Gentle has the latest and greatest and is ready to get us all in sync. Besides, I am pretty sure the XO-1 would take some serious tweaking to get Ubuntu / Mint going on, and none of what Mint brings to the party is really what the XO-1 is about. Its not about MS WIndows either, but that is another story...

My IBM X30 was running Ubuntu 8.04, and my Dell C400 had Fedora 7. Fedora 9 just released, but I'll not be looking at it for use as a home version of Linux, due to the fact the Redhat has decided that Linux desktops are probably better left to Ubuntu. If you have no idea what I am talking about there, it is a long story, but the ending is that RedHat has decided that consumer desktop computing is not where they want to be right now.

Fedora is not exactly equal to RedHat by any means, but their distro is much harder to get going on home hardware like laptops due to not including any closed source anything, and so many of the wireless cards in laptops still require closed source drivers / firmware.

I needed a laptop for Mint, Fedora 7's old home base was elected. But this led to another problem. The Dell C400 I have I built out of parts, and I never have had a CD for it. It is too old to be able to boot off its USB 1.0 ports with my USB CD drive attached: The BIOS just does not support it. This required pressing into service my IBM X30, and doing something you just can not do with MS Windows.

I took the 80 GB Samsung PATA harddrive out of the C400, and installed it into the IBM X30. I then booted the Mint 5.0 LiveCD, and watched Mint come to life.

The IBM gets its wireless from a D-link DWL-G630 PCMCIA card, since IBM only allows their own 802.11 cards into the mini-PCI slot (#&^$^$*). ALL these stupid 802.11G cards I have laying around here from old laptops and I can't use any of then in the IBM without having to either hack the cards internal ID, or the IBM modified BIOS. And for what? the cards are perfectly good cards. grumble grumble. I digress.

Here is where something weird happened. The wireless card was dead while the LiveCD was running. I have never seen that before. It works under Ubuntu 8.04, and Mint 5 is based off that. What in the world is up there? Maybe this really is a beta....

Whatever: I don't need it to work here. The IBM is just the hard drive host mother. Clicking the install, I go through the standard seven dialog panels, and as usual, answer panel 4 with the pull down rather than the time zone map, which I find useless. I manually set up the disks as well, since I want '/' and '/home' in different partitions.

It takes about twenty minutes for the CD to load up the code to the hard drive, and prompt me to say that it is ready for a reboot. This was about twice what it took on the Dell D620 at the office, and it is purely a sign of how much I/O wait there is in an older CD unit, such as what I have in the IBM. 24x CD rather than 4X DVD. Makes a huge difference.

Now, instead of a reboot, I turned off the X30, and I pulled out the Samsung hard drive, replacing the Hitachi 40GB unit with Ubuntu installed on it, and place the host mother aside. The Samsung goes back into the Dell C400, and boots.

Here is the trick no MS Windows computer can do without all sorts of special stuff, like running Sysprep to get it back to a blank state. Linux does not care that the IBM and the Dell are different computers, with different chipsets, and different wireless cards. The Dell TruMobile 1150 MiniPCI card is correctly configured and finds the WAP in the house without issue.

Even though the '/home' I am using came from Fedora 7 and this is now Mint 5.0 Beta, the desktop is just like it used to look. It migrated to Ubuntu with only a minor issue. I had the gnome hardware sensors applet installed in Fedora, and Ubuntu did not put it in by default. No problem. Synaptic can re-install that.

First I fired up MintUpdate and had it bring down 45 updates. This took less than 3 minutes. Then it found another small set it wanted: Maybe 15 or 20 more: I didn't look. This went in taking less than a minute. I set MintUpdates preferences to show me unsafe updates, but not to automatically select them. A few more updates show up, but nothing that looks like anything I need bad enough right now: an Xorg update to the Intel video driver being the main one of interest.

Exiting Mintupdate, I fired up Synaptic from 'System/Administration' and loaded up the things I usually do. GkrellM, HFSPlus, Avahi, Macutils, hardware sensors and hddtemp: Stuff that tells me how the computer is doing, or lets me work with data exchange via HFS formatted USB disks. Not having MS Windows to deal with, all my data exchange is done on HFS right now. When the Mac and Linux support ZFS, I'll go there next. I know that HFS is not the worlds best File System. It is better than VFAT though.

Nothing of a kernel nature came down, so no reboot required. I exited my userid to restart X and then started to play around with the fully configured Mint 5.0 Beta.

My first point of curiosity had to do with video compositing. MS Windows Vista is a total pig here, needing all sorts of special video hardware to work. My Ubuntu and Mint experience had been that Linux with Compiz requires substantially less hardware: the D620 laptop at the office ran composited video extremely quickly with an Intel video chipset not known for its speed. The C400 is much older, and much much slower. It has the Intel 82830M Graphics controller, a 1.2 Ghz processor rather than two 2.0 Ghz processors, and 1Gb RAM rather than the d620'S 2gb. Its harddrive is PATA rather than SATA, and the C400 is a laptop optimized for power savings and portability, not speed.

I turned on Compiz (System / Preferences / Appearance / Visual Effects), and set it to the custom settings that were pre-existing on the computer: I assume they came with Mint. The computer is slightly slower on screen paints, but not so slow as to be unusable. Not even close. I could use 'System / Preferences / Advanced Desktop Effects Settings' (installed by default now! I used to have to go get that off the CD!) to tweak out a few more effects and go even faster if I wanted. For now my major curiosity has been satisfied: Even on old, minimal hardware, the new video compositing engine of Linux, Compiz, runs rings around MS Windows. I could not even install Vista on this C400 if I wanted to.

Firefox RC1 shipped today, so I imagine it will hit the Mint repositories pretty quickly. Clement Lefebvre, Mint 5.0 guiding light, wrote in his blog the he was keeping on eye of FireFox RC1, and had hoped it would be in the Beta. I had hoped it would too: FireFox 3.0 is a huge improvement over 2.x when it comes to things like memory footprint, memory leakage, etc. Very important on a smallish system like this C400.

One important test of the laptop is how well it web surfs, and so I went to watch Keith Olbermann's special comment a few dozen more times:

I turned on and off Compiz, and tweaked the settings, but the little laptop just can't quite hit the full framerate of the MSNBC video player. Still, it was pretty impressive that no matter whether Compiz was on or off, or at minimal effects or the slightly more I tend to use, the frame rate stayed the same. Compiz was not in the way of the video framerate. The minimal hardware overall was.

When Mint 5.0 GA's, I think I'll be making a trip back to Austin to do an ungrade on my brothers computer. He has not called me even once about Mint 4.0, so it is not giving him any problems. But 5.0 is even better, although I had beeter be sure Google Earth works first: That is his "Killer App"

Update: Suspend / Resume: I forgot to mention here that I had tested the Suspend and Resume functionality. My benchmark for Suspend / Resume is the Apple MacBook Pro.

The default for "Cover Closed' at 'System / Preferences / Power Management" is to blank the screen. I changed that to "suspend" on both the D620 and the C400. Both suspend in about 5 or 6 seconds and the D620 takes about that to resume. The C400 take a little longer, maybe 8-10 seconds. Not as fast as the Apple, but still amazingly good, and a huge improvement over what came before it.

have also tested the hibernate function on Ubuntu 8.04 and the IBM X30. That works as well, but takes more like 30 or so seconds, since it is writing its state to the disk and powering completely down. Power up looks like a normal boot except that at one point it freezes for a bit while it realizes that there is hibernation data, restores than, and then suddenly you are back to where you were. Hibernation appears to have no advantages in terms of boot time over a complete normal power up, other than it saves where you were, which can be handy from time to time.

Universal Writ

2008-05-11T12:07:00.011-05:00

I just read an interesting post over at Linux.com buy someone named Susan Linton. Titled "Review: Hardy Heron converts an Ubuntu skeptic", the article has some interesting things to add to the discussion about Linux's readiness to be ones only desktop operating system. I am already pretty well on record about my thoughts on that point, since I have not used MS Windows personally for years and years, and only use it at the office when forced to. My brother and his wife have been using Ubuntu, it close relative Mint, or OS.X rather than MS windows for over two years, and both of them are not computer professionals. Neither has even taken a computer class.

This being the case, you would think that the article would be preaching to the choir, and it was in some areas, but in one case it left me feeling rather ... well... cold I guess.
Here is what Susan said:

The look of mud

Ubuntu has become the face of Linux for most new users these days, and the first impression is important. At first boot, the first thing you'll probably notice in this release is the new login screen and desktop background artwork. The login screen is tastefully understated, but the new wallpaper features an expressionistic heron on a burnt amber background. There's a reason why no other distribution uses brown as its default color scheme. Brown is not an attractive color, and Hardy Heron is just Not a pretty distro.

What bothered me was that I used to think that same way till a co-worker named Richard wrote me about his thoughts on the subject. I wrote about this in part in my "Color Theory" post over at TalkBMC a while ago.

What Richard told me was a simple truth that I had never really considered. He was born in Africa, and to him the color palette that he finds attractive and restful is different than the ones I do. The posit here then would be that at least in part, color preferences are based on your early experiences.

I really started to understand this when I bought my first (and only) home. Located in the high desert of Far West Texas, the colors around me are brown and orange and turquoise and sage. The sky in the evening is every pastel shade in the book, yet amazingly vivid.

What would my favorite color palette be if I had been born there rather than an immigrant?

My favorite color, like many in the West, is blue. Still is. While I am able to change still, indicating that I have not died yet, it seems unlikely that this preference will change. Most OS default themes developed in the West are done in shades of blue. Windows XP added a bold splash of green that I hated for years.

This color preference of the West appears to be changing. Vista is kind of interesting in this regard: It is done in shades of black. Many of the add in themes for XMMS and other themable apps are black, although there are also acid greens and other themes that bring to my mind a trip to "Hot Topic" and speed metal bands.

Ubuntu is not a western distro in many ways. Its intent is to be a world distro: That is a concept at its very core. Just look at the Logo!. Knowing that Linux is all about choice, no one has to leave the single thematic element in any color or even shape that does not please them.

Here this is what I found disquieting: Susan assumes her color preferences to be received wisdom. The phrasing of her personal preference was such that she does not appear to be aware of the difference between a personal bias and a universal truth.

Really: If Ubuntu was as ugly as she posits, then how the heck did it become the predominant one for the Linux desktop? Sure it is a solid bit of work, taking a terrific OS and related applications and integrating them in a smooth and nearly seamless way. Lots of Distros do that though. She is not totally wrong: back when I first looked at it, I was put off from doing much more than looking at it in curiosity as I did not like the default brown theme colors either. I preferred Kubuntu in part because it uses a blue-based color palette as its starting place. What I know now though is that this was a preference of mine, not Universal Writ.

I am not trying to pick on Susan here either. At the very beginning of her piece she states as an opening posit that she has never really much liked Ubuntu. We can infer that she might know at some level that this is a preference thing, even though the phrasing quoted above does not make it appear that this has bubbled up to the top of her mind just yet. Why I even brought it up is that it is something everyone should be mindful of when they say things. There is a difference between the phrase "I prefer blue" and "Blue is Gods Holy Color, and everyone should kneel down before it."

This has further implications than just color. I know why I prefer Linux and OS.X to MS Windows. I know those who would scream bloody murder before someone could pry their Redmond loving arms from around their MS Windows XP license are having an extreme preference too. I have seen Vista. I have used it. I get the preference there.

It is not that they could not do things they need a computer for with one OS or another. Really, the top three OS are all pretty full fledged these days. I can write a post, read email, surf the net, IM, create a spreadsheets, change the colors of the desktop, etc on any of them.

Really: There is enough polarity in this world without adding to it. Looked at another way, I just finished re-reading for the 15 or 16th time Robert A Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land". In it there is a concept of a 'Fair Witness': People so trained as to only speak the truth when they are professionally called upon to do so. It is a sort of trance state that they can enter, but it colors their thinking even when they are not in the 'Fair Witness' modality. To demonstrate, a main character of the book named Jubal asked a Fair Witness named Anne to describe the color of the house on the hill. Anne looks, and replies that "It is white on this side". Jubal then explains that no Fair Witness would ever assume that the house is anything other than what they can see, or even that the house will stay white once they quit looking at it.

That mind set is a lovely thing in my opinion because it removes so much possible false judgement from the situation. It goes no where near "White houses are best" although it would be fair to say "White houses are far better at rejecting solar heat gain than dark color houses", and so if you live in a hot place, white might in fact "be best". Unless you like being hot.

I just wish people would spend just a bit more time thinking about a preference (and I include myself in this), and expressing it as such, rather than stating it as the way that the world must revolve around.

More iPhone Support Center, plus World Domination

2008-04-05T22:59:00.005-05:00

Akshun J , well known Internet Apple non-fan, humorist, Blogger, and generally good person (if for no other reason than he likes my stuff.... :) ) posted a comment on my last post about the experience I had with the Apple support center, and it went this way:

"It's all a secret plot. A Romulan conspiracy to overthrow the Federation.

Although the best cosmetic surgeons have made him look human, Steve Jobs is clearly a Romulan. Who could doubt this? "

And here I thought he was a deity (humorous first minute of this video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2gO8blNd4A

Actually, I can not complain. Turned out the second iPhone return box was because someone at Apple had read my comments in the first attempt to get the iPhone fixed via the Apple web site, realized I needed to send in the iPhone, and sent the box. Another call to 1-800-my-iphone got everything cleared up.

More importantly: I talked to two very nice people at the support center. Bridgette and Jamey. They were helpful, knowledgeable, and also clearly both native speakers of my language (which is a Polyglot of AmerEnglish and Geekish). They both realized right away they did not need to run a script with me on how to do things to diagnose my problem, and jumped right in to actually solving my problem. Add to that the whoever read my web submission at the support center realized that the "headphones" (that ended up being a docking station for some reason) being sent were not going to fix the problem, and sent the return box.

I did get an email noting that the dock had been returned and that there was no charge. Nice.

In this day and age, getting to talk to competent people in a support center was a pure joy.

I use Linux all day long every day, and I love it dearly. The new Ubuntu 8.04 is looking very spiff. I can't wait for the Mint 5.0 version of it! The people I have dealt with for support on Linux have all been very good as well. But that is a different deal. This was a good support center experience from a commercial vendor, and that is rare. Good on you, Apple. Keep up the good work.

Honesty also forces me to admit one last thing. When my little Internet tablet was gone, even for only two days, I felt amazingly bereft. My backup phone is a Motorola C168. Nice sound quality, and loud enough ringers. Light weight. Impressive talk time. But it was just a phone. I am used to being able to look things up on the Internet no matter where or when. At dinner the other day my daughter was telling me about "Red Pandas", which I had never heard of, and right there in Taco Palace I was able to get a quick look at one, and see what they were related to, and know that there are only 2500 of them left. The ability to do this was so very cool. Made the time I was spending with my daughter that much better because I was able to get up to speed fast.

I borrowed a Blackberry Curve the other day to see what its Internet access looked like. Yuch. I welcome the day the iPhone has competition, but as of right now, it does not.

I totally get Akshun J's dislike and distrust of Apple. It is not very far away from how I feel about Microsoft and the things they did to stomp out anyone and anything in their way to world desktop domination. Apple could very easily (now that they have something like 14% of the laptop market) be positioned in the near future to begin to do and act the same way as MS. In fact, in an odd turn of events, they might even force MS to become more open as they continue to watch their market share eroded from the bottom by Linux and from the top by Apple. The way MS rigged the OOXML fight shows us that that day is not yet here though.

Similarly Apple has proven that they will deal roughly with small companies and developers, although in the case of the iPhone SDK there is at least some concession that Apple is not able to fully control the iPhone platform, as much as they dearly want to. Apple needs the developer community to support them. Unto itself the iPhone is a blank slate waiting to be written upon. Example at lunch today:

We were waiting for the veggie dumplings to steam over at Lai Lai's, and my daughter asked me if she could borrow my iPhone. She looked at it, then at me and said is disgust as she handed it back "You haven't hacked this yet." I admitted that I had not. She wanted to know what was taking me so long. I had had the phone for over a day at that point.

Without all the extra things I put on the phone when it is hacked, she did not think it was any better than her RAZR. Of course she was not looking to Netsurf. She wanted to play games.

I am trying to decide if I will hack it at all, or if I will wait to see what the App Store looks like. The guys from iPhone DevCamp think that their way is better of course, but I have to admit that the idea of being able to get stuff for the phone in a vendor supported way is tempting after this little experience.

Or, I may put Linux on it. They say the new PWNED way of getting into the iPhone is going to let them be able to put whatever they want on the iPhone. I won't for now because the experience at the support center is going to keep me on the Apple side of things (even if I decide to hack it in the near future). It is not blind, unthinking loyalty though. Quite the opposite. I am always watching to see what the vendor is going to do next.

Beside, if I go too darkside, Akshun J will reach through the Internet (being a series of tubes) and poke me.

iPhone repair experience

2008-04-04T00:57:00.003-05:00

All hardware breaks. Linux clusters break. Mercedes Benz diesels break. Entropy, like the speed of light, is an unbreakable law.

The iPhone is an amazing bit of engineering, but it is a device that one sticks in their pocket, carries in a belt-holster, bangs into walls, charges and recharges over and over. It has four radios, touch sensitive glass screen, batteries, antennas, a fairly speedy CPU, a docking port, earphone jack with built in switch, and RAM and ROM memory. It has more memory and a faster processor than my XO-1 laptop from OLPC. It is sophisticated as the day is long, nearly as state of the art as it gets. It therefore has a bunch of points of failure. The amazing part is that it lasts as long and as well as it does. The wonders of solid state design.

My iPhone was purchased on the second day they were available last summer. A couple of weeks ago, the earpiece started acting like it had lost its amplifier. When holding the unit to my ear, the voices were small and very far away sounding. At first I thought I was going deaf in that ear. I soon realized what the problem was: The headset worked fine. The Bluetooth headset worked fine. The speakerphone worked fine. The built in earpeice... not so much.

I reloaded the 1.1.4 operating level to make sure it was utterly clean, and not something bit-flipped someplace in the phone. This made no difference. As soon as I got off a road trip, I called in to Apple, and they sent me a box. I put the phone in the box. There was even a little bag in the box with a picture of an un-bent paper clip pushing in the tray to release the SIM card, and inside the bag a paperclip. The sealed box (box sealing tape included) went into the Fedex box, and two days later a new iPhone was at my house.

Wow.

All was not as good as it could be though. I tried to to use the the Apple web site to report the problem first. This somewhat confusingly led me to ordering a new headset. When I realized what I had done I called in to 1-800-my-iphone (which I did not find on the web site till after I tripped into accidentally ordering the headset. It warned me that it would charge me 29 USD if I did not return the defective headphones. OK: fair enough.

What arrived was a docking station. I have no idea what happened there. But it had an easy to turn around envelope, so I just sent it right back.

Oddly, the docking station came DHL and the iPhone replacement box came Fedex. Good thing Office Max has both drop boxes in it. This would be less convenient if I did not reside is a big city / swamp.

Another odd thing: I got a second box to send in my iPhone with when I recieved the new iPhone. No idea why. I'll call Apple tomorrow and ask what I am supposed to do with the empty box: Hopefully they are not expecting the new iPhone to be pre-broken.

DST

2008-03-10T09:54:00.003-05:00

If there ever was a cause to doubt "The Wisdom of Crowds", DST would be it. This assumes that those who make laws are crowds of course.

The idea that nations of sleep deprived people is somehow of benefit to anyone about anything is quite literally insane. It is not just that fact that DST has been shown to waste energy rather than save it. It is the fact that it will take *weeks* for circadian rhythms to settle back down. Some never really fully adapt.

How many students will sleep in class today. How many meeting will people be late for or miss altogether. How many people will fall asleep at the wheel of their cars? How much code written today will have to be re-written tomorrow or next week, when the person looking at it says 'What was I thinking?"

Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb.

BarcampAustinIII

2008-03-07T23:43:00.001-06:00

Tomorrow, at 10:00 am, BarcampaustinIII kicks off at Idea City, near the NorthWest Corner of 6th and Lamar in Austin, Texas. All sorts of cool sessions already up on the web site: http://barcamp.org/BarCampAustinIII

I particular, I am interested in the XO session that Anne Gentle will be giving. Mine has not arrived yet, so it will be nice to "Meet" one. I was reading the other day about Birmingham, Alabama ordering up 15,000 of them. That is starting to be useful density! anne has been working on the documentation for the unit, so I think this could be a veru informative session.

I will be there as close to 8:00am as I can be, since Whurley has me "On Staff". I hope that means I get to have one of the free beers.... Whurley says it is some good microbrew.

If you are free, and in the Austin area tomorrow, come on by! The free T shirts are supposed to be rocking this year, based on the Armadillo with a flamethrower art.

Cars

2008-03-04T10:32:00.006-06:00

This post is not about open source or Linux or anything like that. It is just a rant that I have had running around in the back of my mind for a while now. I decided to set it free so maybe it will go away.

This is about cars. And it is not all of the nature of a rant. First off, the good part. I write this while I am traveling (part of it anyway). I have rented a car that surprised me. After getting Pontiac G6 after Pontiac G6 from Avis, they handed me the keys to a 13,000 mile Hyundia Sonata. And... it does not suck. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

I had a 1985 or 1986 Hyundia Excel. the one designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro. I liked the color (Dark Blue), the design, and the radio. I hated the motor, the size of the gas tank, the way it was geared... pretty much everything else about the car.

The problems were rife: The gas mileage with a 5 speed was about 24 MPG on the highway. The car hesitated and groaned. I don't mind a slow car (more on that in a minute) but I mind one that does not run right. And if it is going to be slow, it better get way more than 24 MPG.

I tried to get a carburator repair kit at the Auto Parts store, but they did not carry Hyundai parts, even though it was an import place. I then went in to a Hyundai dealership to get the carburetor repair kit only to find out that I had to know which of about seven carburetors this car had. I was told by the parts guy that major engineering changes inside the same model year made for many different incompatible models inside the one model year.

I had the alleged car with me (it did look like a car from the outside), so I pulled off the air cleaner and got the tags off the carb, determined my unit was the 5th in the series of the 7 or so designs that year, and then found out the repair kit was the same price as a whole new carb! 650 USD! The parts guy admitted that the new carb was the only way to go... but that I had to stay inside the same EC level because the hookups to the various emission controls were different. There is a reason why all cars went to fuel injection here in the States.

I could not update to the latest version of the carb. The current unit was junk, and probably a new one would not work much better because with all those EC's, there was clearly a problem in the design in this part of the car. A repair kit was an utter non-starter. Fuel treatment had doing nothing either. I was stuck. I left there with a new gas tank instead. Hyundai had two gas tanks that fit that car, and I had the small one. At least with the new unit I could go an extra 50 or so miles. At that time I drove 120 miles a day, so it was not a big win.

Someone stole the radio and I traded it in. The only decent part of that car was gone. No point in keeping it.

I have driven 1965 VW Beetles with 1200cc 40 HP engines. I have owned all sorts of junkers, some of which I hand rebuilt the engine with parts laying about the garage over a weekend to get through another week of school. I have never hated a car as much as I hated that one.

So, I was surprised to see how much I like this Sonata. First of all, it is much bigger than the Excel, and it gets 32 MPG on the highway. Second, I thought it was a V6 till I opened the hood and saw a four cylinder looking back at me. It is comfortable, and.. the radio is as good as ever. It is no audiophile unit, but for a base unit it is pretty good.

Rant one then is this: Imagine the Joker, looking at the Batwing after it wrecked his plan to poison all the good people of Gotham. (The Batman movie with Keaton and Nicholson). Now you have the inflections for this:

"Why didn't they tell me (they) had one of these things!"

Yeah. OK. Fine. That one is on me. I let my early experience with Hyundai keep me from ever looking at one again, even though to survive they obviously had to change. I have no idea what the long term reliability is of the new Hyundai stuff. What Consumer Reports thinks of the electrical systems. Anything like that. I did read some end user reviews now, and most are positive. Does me a lot of good now though. I never once even considered looking.

There is probably a good lesson for marketing folks about the length of memory of the average consumer. I may not be average though....

My Fleet

To my point above about driving slowish cars, here is my and my wife's current fleet of cars:

2008 Honda Fit 5 speed, 106 HP (my daily driver)
2004 Honda CR-V 5 speed, 160 HP (my wifes daily driver)
1985 Mercedes 240D 4 speed, 60 HP
1984 Mercedes 300SD, 4 speed Auto, 120 HP.

You could add my entire fleet up and still have less HP than one modern Corvette. I drive the Fit now, but the 300SD was my daily before that. Neither will win any land speed records. About the only car the trembles in fear of my fleet is a Chevy Chevette.

The two Mercs are actually on loan to our kids till they can get established and get cars of their own. Meantime, they are safe in our tanks.

Here then is the other rant:

I went to buy the Fit after falling in love with the SuperMini class of car while I was in India. In India they have 800cc and similarly small engines. One of my friends had a brand new Suzuki four door with a monster 1.1 liter engine. It was a great car. Plenty fast, handled the highway just fine, and got great mileage. Even cooler to me, as a Merc owner, were the Tata's I saw and rode in. Two cylinder diesels. I imagine they got outstanding fuel economy. Maybe not as clean as a US specification diesel, but when you are using only a gallon to traverse 50 or 60 miles, there are some real advantages.

I had read about the Honda Fit. It is Honda's world platform, and is called the Jazz in Europe. I am going to rebadge mine to be the Jazz. That is a cooler name. The Chassis is stiff and strong, and there are five engines available for it.

<rant> Except in the bloody US!, where there is only one! The biggest, worst fuel economy engine! Argg!! </rant>

The Fit/Jazz here comes with the 1.5 liter VTEC. Same engine size as that much hated Excel, but with twice the horsepower, and gets 37-38 MPG Highway instead of the Excels 24. That is impressive really, except that I keep wondering if they could have kept the horsepower down, and given me fuel economy instead.

The Fit / Jazz engine with the same HP as the old Excel is the smaller 1.1 liter unit, and is good for something like 60 or 62 HP. Same HP as my 240D, and the 240D is a 2.5 liter four banger. I have no idea what the fuel economy of the 1.1 liter Honda mill in the Fit is because <rant> they do not import it!</rant>. Nor the 1.2, 1.3, or 1.4 liter units. Only the relatively gas guzzling 1.5 liter.

Sure, its quick, with something like a 9 second zero to 60. Of my fleet, only the CR-V is faster, and not by much. But I do not need the speed. I am used to driving the Mercs. I am not in that big a hurry to get to work or anywhere else. My 60HP 240D Merc will drive at highway speed all day long. Why not the Honda with a 1.1 liter unit? Why can I not order the smaller, slower, better fuel economy mill?

The Fit turns about 3200 RPM at 70 MPH, but the VTEC engine is torquey enough that it could easily run at 2800 RPM or even less at that speed. No overdrive gear. The cars five speed is close ratio. Why? At 3000 rpm or so the VTEC engine cuts in the second set of intake valves. The engine gets noisier, and there is a fun surge of power. But I do not need that. Let me cruise at highway speed on the more efficient RPM, knowing a downshift gets it on cam in a double quick hurry!

I have a feeling a reason is that Honda wants to make as much money as they can, and by not offering base units here in the states (where they have to certify each drive train as meeting emissions standards), they give preference to profit over the environment. Sure, the Civic HA did not set the world on fire as far as sales records goes. You know what? There is such a thing as being a good citizen of this planet too. Honda generally is, at least to the point that many of their cars are LEV and ULEV. But they can do better. Honda advertises a fuel cell car here in the states, and that is annoying since it can not be bought. My daughter was asking me the other day why we had not bought that one instead. I had to explain about the difference between an ad and reality from a whole new perspective: An advert for the possible but not yet realized. Honda may make one. Probably will. But the ads are preceding availability by a number of years.

Another reason is common wisdom. This common wisdom says that Americans won't buy slow small cars. It also says that we like Velveeta Cheese, and can't watch movies longer than 90-120 minutes. Sure, Lord of the Rings made a bazillion dollars, and we buy all kinds of other cheese here, but that is meaningless. Americans only want big, bad cars with electric everything.

The Honda dealer about had a Fit when I asked if they had any models with roll up windows.

Why not a Prius or other Hybrid?

It wasn't that I did not think of that. Here are my two main problems with Hybrids:

What happens to the batteries when they wear out, and how much does that every three or so year service interval cost the owner and the planet?
Assuming that the battery issue is not an issue, where are the Diesel hybrids? If gas can get 50, Diesel can get 70 MPG. Or more. Bio-D is far more renewable than Ethanol too.

The Perfect Car, in reach of Todays Tech

I am not crazy: I like all the body stiffness, crash-worthiness, and other cool things that come from a modern car body. The high strength steel, the quiet interior, the MP3 radios. Adjustable hight seat belts. In the specific case of the Fit / Jazz, the nifty interior seat / options. The tall SuperMini packaging. All that is goodness. I would keep all those things.

Since I current reside in a swamp, but my ancestors used to live near the North Pole, A/C is a must. I like a quiet car where I can hear just enough of the engine to know when to shift. Manual tranny to be sure, unless they come up with an Auto that is more efficient at shifting than I am. It could happen with computers these days. Slippery, wind tunnel derived shapes and quiet, tall, good feedback tires with low rolling resistance and great wet weather traction. All these things about modern cars are keeper features.

GPS and mapping systems are all nice, but I would not pay for it. Give me big analog controls that I can use without taking my eyes off the road. On-Star and similar would get jerked out of the car so fast the wires wouldn't have time to spark. Just too Big Brother for me.

Where I would really make the changes are the drive trains. I want 100 MPG or as near that as tech can get it. Assume that the batteries are 100% recyclable, and that there is a VW-like aluminum block, diesel engine option. Small. Maybe 40 HP. Designed to be clean without Urea injection because it is used only to recharge the batteries or to supplement the electric motors for acceleration. A diesel hybrid or a diesel like it is exists in a train, with no direct connection to the wheels. The hardest, lowest rolling resistance tire / wheel setup I can get, with a tuned, perhaps even live suspension to damp all that back out from the the driver.

The whole thing should be designed and rated for BioD. Grow algae in salt water tanks in the desert, and refine BioD from it.

Solar cells on the sun roof to power vent fans when the car is parked, and keep the batteries topped up. Roll up windows (I'm not lazy, and the motors are just something to break) but central locking so that the alarm system has something to work with.

One, two, and four passenger versions. Now that would be a car.

Thanks. I feel better now. Back to Open Source stuff.

XO coming soon... sort of.

2008-02-23T18:29:00.002-06:00

With apologies to Richard....

I just received an email from the OLPC Foundation. Key part:

Our production schedule is still on track and we expect to deliver your laptop by the middle part to end of March. Your donation is in queue and ready for shipment as soon as we receive additional laptops.

I am looking forward to getting my unit, and knowing that someone someplace will soon be getting the one I donated.

I have read that they are making them at a clip of over 100,000 a month right now, and over half a million have already been made. That is both impressive and a drop in a bucket. The impressive part is to think that this innovative learning device is already out there, with Linux at its core, at a pace where several million new Linux users will join the ranks this year.

The problem is that there are seven billion plus people on the planet, so the XO is still far too rare. At its current production level, the temptation will be to have these units showing up on eBay or other unintended uses than in the hands of the children that need them. That is not good.

To really succeed the XO need to reach a ubiquity that makes it so commonplace that the idea of buying on on eBay approaches the idea of buying air there. That means billions of them. SO common that no one is taking them from the children as unique, interesting, or valuable, but rather giving them each one as intended so that they can use it as a learning tool. As long as it is cool and new, there will be problems.

I think this was probably part of the problem that Negroponte was addressing in his Wired interview, when he said:

Over the next few weeks… there'll be partnerships and changes with companies that can start rolling this out. What becomes pretty clear pretty quickly, you need people to copy it and do it at a larger scale. No matter what we do as OLPC or laptop.org, you're not going to be able to do the whole world. You want to be able to influence efficiently enough to have other people do it.

No wonder MS is sweating bullets and trying to get XP going ASAP on this gear. They are looking at billions of people not using their stuff.

Apple iPhone camera and Linux Mint / gThumb 2.10.6

2008-02-12T15:24:00.000-06:00

I have been on the road for a week or so, and I have been using my MacBook for most of the trip. Today I decided to use my Dell D620 running Mint 4.0 at the office instead, since it is better at accessing my MS Exchange calendar via Evolution 2.12. When on the Mac, I have to use Webmail to read my calendar. It works, but not as nicely as Evolution on Mint does.

My office here in Sunnyvale appears to have Faraday cages around it. I have at most one bar of signal on the iPhone, and often I'll walk out to get a drink and suddenly the iPhone will tell me I have missed calls.

Every cell phone I have ever owned uses way more power when it can not reach its cell tower. It appears that the transmitter in the phone cranks up to 700 milliWatt full power to try and find someone... anyone... it can talk to. Out in West Texas, where I get zero cell phone signal, my iPhone will go to zero power in a day. So did my Samsung and Sony before it.

For this reason, I keep the iPhone plugged in to a USB port on the computer de jour when I am in the office. I jacked it into the Linux laptop today for the first time ever, with the expectation that all I would see / hear is the iPhone chirping to let me know it was seeing 5V DC and was happy with the "drink".

I was surprised to see the Linux desktop ask me if I wanted to import the pictures on the "new" digital camera it just found. I said yes, and gThumb 2.10.6 was engaged, and it drained the iPhone in short order. There they were. All the pictures I had taken on the trip so far! Cool beans. Drained is probably not the right word: Copied. The pictures are still on the iPhone too.

Side note: gThumb is not installed on Mint by default, but I had loaded it with Synaptics. 3:2.10.6-0ubuntu1 is the package number, so it is something that Mint inherits from Ubuntu.

I would of course like it better if iPhones were better supported on Linux, but I did not think they would work at all, so this was a pleasant surprise. At least the iPhone pays attention to one standard out there. It sure made it easy to get a picture off the iPhone to use as my new desktop wallpaper! Rogue Ale Public House menu, now on tap... err... screen.

Upgrades to Mint 4.0 Home Linux Desktop

2008-01-22T15:07:00.000-06:00

I recently updated my Mint 4.0 office machine to have dual monitors, which I noted in my post called "Two Heads" over at TalkBMC. I have to say is turning out to be a huge time saver for all sorts of things. The other day I was looking at the wide spreadsheet while on a conference call, and was able to see the whole thing at once, and not have it be ultra-tiny fonts I could not read. There is no substitute for resolution and square inches!

That experience made me feel pretty good about the prospects for success of a weekend project at my brothers house. He wanted four things:

A new video card so Google Earth would work better
His old email back from his old hard drive and Thunderbird
A new printer for school work
A scanner

I had an Epson 1240 scanner I was going to give him, since I knew it worked well on Linux.

Video Card

Like the upgrade at BMC I went with a GeForce chipset-ed unit. The video card we selected came from the going out of business sale at CompUSA, and had the nVidia 5700 chipset on it. It pretty much had to work, since CompUSA would not be there to return it to.

We pulled out the old, cheap, and feeble video card, and inserted the new AGP unit in its slot. A quick reboot, and it was clear that all was well so far. Screen was there and at the old resolution: I think the cheapo card had been driven by the generic VESA driver and this one was OK with that. I fired up Envy, and it did its thing, downloading the same pile of packages it had on my work system. When it was done, I rebooted, and was greeted with the oddest looking screen: The center of the desktop. No amount of jacking with the resolution or position buttons would return the far right or far left of the screen. I added a Gnome menu to the center of the task bar, and went into the nVidia setup utility to figure this out, and it appears that it was incorrectly detecting the Compaq P900 monitor as being wide screen, 1600 x 1050 or thereabouts. I forced it into 1280 x 1024, and exited X and re-logged in.

It went back to wide screen. It overrode my override!. Doh.

I thought about hand editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to force the resolution in, but pondered for a second to be sure there was not some not some easier way I was overlooking. Then a light went on. I went into the Mint / Ubuntu provided 'preferences / screen resolution' and overrode it there instead, and that took. Then I remembered that at work I had to run the nVidia setup widget *as Root* if I wanted stuff to stick. /usr/bin/nvidia-settings is the location of that widget, for future reference.

Google Earth was now as smooth as silk. One down.

ThunderBird

As was suggested to a comment here to my "Repairo" post, the problem of the missing email was in the dot file. It was not quite what was suggested, but it was close. It was very simple:

Old Ubuntu based 7.04 Thunderbird put email in ".thunderbird" hidden file
New Mint 4.0 (therefore Ubuntu 7.10 based) system put Thunderbird email in ".mozilla-thunderbird"

I do feel silly to have missed that! I moved the new file out of the way (mv .mozilla-thunderbird .mozilla-thunderbird.new), then moved the old file to the new name (mvthunderbird .mozilla-thunderbird).

Mail now back where it belongs. Easy. And of special note: *recovered from an otherwise failed hard drive!*. I love Linux.

I do not know if it was Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 that changes the name of the dot file, or if Mint versioned it to be different.

Printer / Scanner

I start this part with an "Opps", as in "Opps I forgot to bring the scanner with me."

While we were at CompUSA with all the other vultures (that is what it felt like), we looked at printers. My son pointed out an HP F4180 Multifunction Printer / Scanner / Copier. It was nearly twenty USD less expensive as CompUSA corporate carrion than its regular already reasonable price. We talked about it for a sec, and went with it.

First off, I usually only buy printers from Epson and HP. Their Linux support is always terrific. Lexmark, as much as I love their keyboards, is a non-starter because they are very bad on Linux, and by extension, Dells printers are off my list, since they are LexMarks. Brother says it has Linux support, but I have just never tried it to be able to say. Getting a printer from a soon not-to-be company was not the time to be trying new things like that.

My default is always Epson. Six colors, color stable ink, separate color cartridges for each color so I only replace the color I am using, and so forth. HP has color stable ink, in some models, and at a premium price. Most of the HP consumer grade stuff is three colors in a single cartridge plus a separate black cartridge.

The big advantage of HP printers: They put the heads in the cartridges, making them easy to refill. If the head clogs up, you just have to replace the cartridge. With Epson, the cost of fixing the heads means that you might as well replace the printer. Still, I have two Epson R380's at the house and like them well. They work on both Linux and the Macs. In fact, the central printer server at my house is an iMac. But I digress.

The HP F4180 plugged in to the Mint 4.0 computer, turned on, appeared in the printer setup menu, configured, and printed all without issue. I clicked on the "Share this Printer" option in the printer setup menu, and then went to my brothers iBook, and set up the printer over there as well, so that now he has a printer for both of his computers.

I installed the Sane stuff with Synaptic, and the scanner checked out just fine as well. Both Xsane and GIMP were able to scan things and save or edit them. Now my forgetting the Epson 1240 was moot.

CD Writer

The CD writer inside the case had failed, and we were using an external, USB attached, generic CD Writer to do that work. My brother wanted to simplify the desk though. Fewer wires laying about. Most of these external USB CD writers are really internal PATA CD drives in a special case, with a special power supply and USB to PATA converter in them. I thought this cheapie CD writer would be like that, and it was. I pulled out the broken CD writer, took the case off the USB CD writer, pulled off the USB to PATA adapter, and installed it in the internal rails. Everything checked out immediately. My operating assumption was that if Linux drove it via USB then via PATA cables was not going to be an issue, but it was nice to see that born out. Now he has a USB/PATA adapter for use with draining data from PATA hard drives, should the need arise.

And Now, the Point

All of this work happened in one day (one small part of day in fact), and was almost trivially easy. Sure, I knew what I was doing going it. I had tried that chipset on Mint already. I knew what kind of printers worked on Linux already. My experience as a Linux person made these upgrades a non-event for my brother. He will now return to happily being a user that can surf the world with Google Earth, print out things, and scan things, and never really know anything about the underlying complexities of it. To him, it will just be a simple computer that does what he needs it to do.

Any vendor supporting Linux can do the same thing, and do it more easily than other OS's because they will have the source code to see how it all works (See my most recent post over at TalkBMC for some thoughts around that).

More evidence that Linux is ready.

BarCampESM

2008-01-17T13:22:00.000-06:00

Join us January 18th and 19th in Austin TX for BarCampESM!

If you happen to be able to get over to Austin, TX Friday or Saturday, and you are interested in open and informal discussions around Open Management or Enterprise Systems Managment or ITIL or BSM or if you just like hangin' with other geeks, then drop by J. Blacks on West 6th Street in downtown Austin. Here is the Wiki:

http://barcamp.org/BarCampESM

The first 50 folks signed up there get free food on Saturday. After that first 50 you have to pay for the food, but not for the company.

The details, including a link to Google Maps, are on the Wiki. I hope to see some of you there!

The Macbook, the Optibay, and Entropy

2008-01-11T20:52:00.000-06:00

My Macbook Pro (MBP) is two years old next month. Following my own advice about buying laptops (noted in Linux+ magazines 3/2007 issue), I went with the best MBP I could afford, so that it would be as future-prrof as technology stuff ever is.

Two years later it is still a pretty good unit. The processor and memory are not that far behind current times, and it is still the fastest computer I own. There is ... or at least was.... just one problem. About six months ago, after burning a raft of CD's and DVD's for Linuxworld, the Superdrive gave up the ghost. Died. Went to meet its maker. It was an Ex-Superdrive. The only reason it was still in the computer was that it had been nailed there....

Sorry... slight rift in the Monty Python space / thyme continuum. I think we just about have it nailed up. Now back to the Cheese Shop sketch, already in progress....

I did not buy the extended warranty or anything. I never do. I figured, after rebuilding iBooks, how hard could the MBP be to work on? I got a chance to find out.

One of the bad things about the MBP was that when mine was built, there was no ultra-thin 8x version. Only 4x. This was updated in a later MBP hardware revision, but my unit had the slower DVD burner. Another was that only 120GB was available. With Linux VM's under Parallels I eat 120 GB for breakfast. Space management was a constant "opportunity"

It is not normally my way to plug products, but this post is going to be one. In this case for MCE's Optibay DVD hard drive replacement. They are at http://www.mcetech.com. Disclaimer: I have no fiscal relationship with this company whatsoever, other than sending them money. I am only a customer.

This little product is very cool. MCE has created a little plastic sled that holds a 2.5 inch hard drive, and "slides" in exactly where the Optibay DVD is in the MBP. As mine was broken, no loss. Even better, they have an option for an external 8x DVD burner, powered by USB or Firewire, so that I could replace the broken 4x with a working 8x. The total cost of this operation was 100 USD *more* than what just replacing the internal DVD would have been, about 349 USD instead of 249 USD, give or take an elephant.

The new drive is 160GB, and is from Western Digital.

Opening the MBP was far far easier than the iBooks were. 10 screws on the edge, two inside the battery compartment (do *not* mix these up with the others. These have to be *short* or they jam up the case latch), three screws on the memory cover, two torx screws under that, and then the top of the MBP slides out fairly easily to review the amazing interior of the MBP. These things are so much nicer than the iBooks in here too. Three screws (one of which is another, different size torx) , one strip of yellow tape, and a ribbon cable release the broken DVD. Move the ribbon cable to the plastic sled the new HD is sitting on. No screws hold this in. It has foam tape to buffer it at the edges. Foam tape that you do not take the sticky covers off. They are there only as foam shock absorbers.

Putting the top back on is slightly tricky, getting the snap fit around the front of the Optibay to work right, but after that it flies back together. Total replacement time was less than thirty minutes. Now I have a 120GB and a 160 GB HD inside the MBP, plus a working, bootable 8x DVD I can carry around. The external DVD is in a case designed to match the MBP's: Silver aluminum, although not as rounded looking at the edges.

With a second disk, I can dual boot the MBP between 10.4 and 10.5, run two VM's at the same time without a performance hit on I/O, and carry a raft of ISO's and VM's of Linux to mess around with.

I normally never pimp products, but this one is just too cool not to. I can even see the I/O light peeking through the former DVD slot. Apple never lets you see those things for some reason, but I love to have the feedback about disk I/O they provide.

MCE also sends a Philips 00 screwdriver that is better than any I owned, and the Torx wrenches needed.

If I have one gripe at all about this solution it is only that the plastic sled seems a bit cheesy. I would have preferred something that mounted back into the MBP case using the same hard points as the former occupant, the 4x DVD drive, rather than the foam tape shock absorber things. It does not rattle or anything once together so I may be objecting about something of small consequence.

MCE says that the decrease in battery life is minimal with two hard drives, and so far that seems to be true. OS.X keeps the HD's spun down unless it needs them. I would think that two VM's running at the same time would be death to runtime, since both CPU cores, and both disks would tend to stay fairly active.

This mid-life upgrade puts all sorts of usable lifetime/capacity onto the MBP. I should be good to go for another year or so, till I need to replace the battery. Lithium Ion batteries tend to last about three years before they poop out. So far the after-market has not done very much to extend the life of the replacement batteries, offering a 62 watt hour battery to replace the stock 60 watt hour unit. I assume that with all the battery fires in the Dells with the Sony cells that Lithium Ion is pretty much at its peak, and that safety is now more important. The battery bay is only so big, and the stock unit feels pretty densely packed already.

Till then the MBP is back into fully operational mode, ready to burn DVD's and run Linux virtual guests for the next LinuxWorld / IT360 I'll be doing in April in Toronto.