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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein
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Sun Dec 7 1:22 pm, 2008
So I'm tired of dinky $5-10 a month hosts, which might be fine for blogging, but not good for much else. They don't let you control the machine, obviously, install what you like, select what distro you want or let you have long running processes. Damn it, I want to do some real Django stuff outside-of-work. I want to play around with postgres, etc. And yet I'm still a cheap bastard, don't want to pay over 20-25 a month for something that's not serving much traffic. Fortunately, in the last couple years virtual machines, Xen in particular, to the rescue... But I'm suspicious of Slice Host, feels like there's some hype there (although I've never heard anything really bad). I'm just like that. So as an alternative I came across Linode -- pluses in my mind are: you can do it month by month, don't like it, just move on. You can upgrade VPS specs on the fly, memory, etc. Need to add machines in a couple spots across the country? Sure. The distro selection is good, Centos, Arch, Slackware, SuSE, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu (which I chose since setup is so crazy simple). There's a nice control panel to manage the machine, a monitor to reboot in case it goes down, stats, even a little ajax console if you can't get to a terminal for some reason. And setup of the VPS was instant. No shit, I had a webserver going in 1/2 an hour. Sweet.
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Sun Nov 2 1:00 am, 2008
So I wanted to install Ubuntu Eee, field test it more than the 'live cd', really use it on a daily basis. But I didn't want to blow away the default Xandros OS on my Eeepc. I didn't even want to partition it, just didn't want to touch it. Ubuntu Eee is Ubuntu optimized for the Eee with the Netbook Remix ui. Ubuntu is a vastly better branch of Debian than Xandros, particularly Xandros on the 901 which has very few packages. But Xandros works there, bug free, so a good fallback. The strength of Ubuntu is the vast number of packages, and the number of people and online support for them. Got a problem? Betcha Ubuntu boards there's someone else with the same. And someone who knows what to do. Ubuntu just continues to impress me with attention to user-friendly detail that previous distros lacked (sometimes it was not the prerogative of the distro to have those details).
In short here's what worked for me, to get Ubuntu Eee onto a card, and leave Xandros untouched:
1. Using an 8g kingston data traveler USB stick, I downloaded Ubuntu Eee and used unetbootin to create a bootable stick.
2. Power up the Eee, press esc a couple times, choose the usb stick.
3. "try ubuntu without any change to your computer" working? Poke around, things look good? Proceed by clicking the installer.
4. Forward through the setup options (mostly location stuff)
5. At the partitioner, choose 'use entire disk' and select your sd card, in this case SCIS4 "Single Flash Reader"
6. Setup your name and password (there was nothing to migrate)
7. On the final step of the Ubuntu install, click 'advanced' in the lower right corner, make sure "install boot loader" is checked, and select your removable sdd as the target rather than sd0 (which is your Xandros internal os). You're putting grub onto the card, and not the internal drive(s). I didn't do this first time through and while I could, using grub, boot to either the card or internal, I could do so only with the sd card in. That's not cool. To get out of that situation (if you do make that mistake), making the Xandros internal default again, you can from Xandros:
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,0)
(hd2,0)
grub>root (hd0,0)
grub>setup (hd0)
grub>quit
(hd0,0) being your internal drive. The point of this entire install is to have an OS on a card, I don't want to have to require to have the card, and I might want to have several.
8. Proceed with the install, prompts you to restart, do so. I had to force power down after the screen went blank, it didn't seem to be able to actually power down. This didn't worry me, and it didn't seem to effect anything.
9. Restart, make sure Xandros comes up without interruption. OK, now let's test the OS on a card:
10. Restart, pressing esc a couple times on boot, select the sd from the bios menu you're presented with. You'll have to do this on every machine boot if you want to use the card, not such a big deal IMHO.
11. So, what we've done is install grub on the card, but there's a problem, when we did so on install the drive (the SD card) was assigned a different address -- it's now the first drive rather than the n drive. The first entry in the grub list is the entry you want, but if you select it and try and boot it will fail because it wont be able to find the disk. What you do is select the entry in grub, hit e, then select "root (hd3,0)" and hit e again to edit this, change it to (hd0,0). Then hit "b" to boot.
12. To make this change permanent to the card, go to 'accessories' open up terminal -- type 'sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst' (or whatever editor you've got) and change all the instances you see of "(hd3,0)" to "(hd0,0)" (no quotes, I'm just sayin). You could also change the timeout option to avoid seeing grub all together, since you're really not using it on the card.
This is great, SD cards are cheap. In fact, if you donate money to Ubuntu Eee, you get a card just like this. Imagine all computers having SD slots, essentially being OS readers, and you've got a pocketful of OS chips. Why not have a couple OS X's, Microsoft (if you insist), whatever distro you like, just pop in a card, the internal drive could serve as master storage. Love it.
footnote: as decently design as Netbook Remix is, it seems to hog resources, so I switched to XFCE with 'sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop', unchecking 'maximus' in the Netbook Remix sessions window, logging out, selecting an xfce session, then doing a 'sudo apt-get --purge remove ume-launcher' since the thing just didn't seem to want to go away, even in the xfce session. Anyhow, much faster. -
Sun Oct 26 9:09 pm, 2008
In my effort to de-clutter over the last month I got rid of a few extraneous machines. Was I ever really going to get that Beowulf Cluster going? Probably not. Not unless I get laid off (and maybe I'm hoping since I haven't had any real serious time off in about a decade). Point is, I like to poke around. So one machine I couldn't bear to part with is my old A21 ThinkPad -- which, hands down, is the best piece of hardware I've ever owned, although the extremely square display is kinda funny in retrospect. Fact it still works perfectly, case in point. I wondered what Xfce is up to -- haven't seen it in a very long time and there's Ubuntu with a nice little xubuntu roll-up. One small CD later, and one completely painless install later, my ThinkPad is running Ubuntu/Xfce -- and damn fast. An 8 year old p3 laptop with 512 ram, and it's as usable and as fast as my mac. There's a minimal and simple quality to Xfce I just love, it's fantastic. Really, you want Compiz Fusion? How can you get any work done with things moving around like that? Just fluff, IMHO. Don't hide my tools, don't make them slide or bounce or skitter away, just put everything out there as simply as possible, now that's usable. But I'm also not really going to be carrying around my ThinkPad anymore, cuz it weighs, I dunno like 10 pounds or something? I want a VM of it, for work, and on my mac. I've been using Parallels, and I haven't had strong opinions about it. I'd tried to do an Ubuntu install on it a while ago and it wouldn't take, this time it did. But here's the thing, after I installed, I thought, well why not do a Parallels update? It's right there in the menu. There's updates to do, I do them. Should I have read more about them, perhaps. But who does? Turns out my key for the latest update (or 'version') doesn't work -- in other words, I've converted my VM image to something that won't work with the previous version (for which I've paid), my previous version (for which I've paid) is gone, and I can't get into my VM now. Ummm, Kay. If my activated copy of Parallels wouldn't work with whatever updates they're giving me I feel they're somewhat obliged to stop me from installing and converting my current VM's without first buying the upgrade. Assuming folks are reading the fine print on a update is not good. Enough of that, off to VMWare. The VMWare Fusion demo imports my parallels xubuntu VM flawlessly. All in all VMWare feels better, I don't have hard numbers to back this up (for instance I don't know if it utilizes memory better than Parallels or not, although these folks seem to have an opinion) -- but interface wise, better. Not giving the full-screen escape code in a tooltip above the full screen button, like Parallels doesn't, is a pain for noobs, or forgetful idiots like myself. Also, getting the vm-tools on for window resizing and 'Unity' was easy -- a menu mounted disk image, a 'sudo perl vmware-tools-install.pl' (Hey somebody's still using Perl!!).
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Tue Aug 19 11:44 pm, 2008
Continuing with all things Eeepc, I got a Tekkeon MP3450 external battery. So far, seriously rocks. Along with the Eeepc battery I figure I can get something like 8 full hours. The Tekkeon is relatively small, weighs about a pound. See side pic, no one seems to show it in comparison with an eeepc, and for Eeepc to MacBook photo, see previous post.
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Sun Aug 3 10:00 pm, 2008
My Eeepc 901 finally arrived. There were all sorts of rumors about the delay of the Linux version I won't detail, since alot of Linux based rumor tends toward the hyperbolic end of the spectrum (I admit it, I too am a delicate sensitive flower when it comes to the endearing scrappy OS GNU/Linux). But the 901 is so close to being perfect. Very close. My personal criteria:
It has to be portable, light enough and solid enough to quite actually throw it into my backpack without worrying and ride a bike to work through NYC traffic.
901: Yes. It's solidly built and the SSD removed my worry about jarring the storage device (which is not the case with my MacBook). It's slightly heavier than the 701, but I don't notice the diff in a bag.
It has to have reasonably enough battery life if I'm waiting for table service in Brooklyn, or at a conference.
901: Yes, so far seems like 4+ hours (which feels like the average time for table service in Brooklyn). I've heard more, but I haven't really taken it on excursions yet. I wasn't totally displeased with the battery life of the 701, I just had to remember to always charge before I left where ever I was with a socket, and if at con I would always try and spy out where free sockets were.
It has to have a standard interface, both hardware and OS for me to use it without pouring over documentation.
901: Yes. This has not been the case with other devices I've had, like cellphones. It fucking boggles my mind that every cellphone I've touched has a completely different UI, hardware layout, and sequence of actions to get something to work. This is just a scaled down laptop and Xandros (cons for that coming up) at least is deeply simple to operate at a basic level.
It has to be hackable.
Look, I know the iPhone is mostly hackable. But I don't want some corp suddenly bricking my device if I choose to do XYZ with it. No worry, I can install whatever I want on this hardware depending on how much effort I want to put into it.
So where is the 901 not perfect? It meets all my criteria. Except the Xandros installed OS is lacking. It's a fork of Debian, and it just doesn't have the repositories Debian does. It's a little, well, weird as far as distros go. So, it's hackable. But there's time investment. I can put Ubuntu on it, which I'd like, but again, time investment.
Some haxor notes: use the simpleui.rc in /var/lib/AsusLauncher not the one in /opt/Xandros/share/AsusLauncher (don't know why it's there if it doesn't do anything, probably just not cleaned up). It's standard xml-ish, from here you can add/remove things on the Xandros interface.
To get rid of the freaking annoying input method language switcher in the dock (which clobbers the ctl+space command for Emacs) do
sudo apt-get remove Xandros-gcin
sudo apt-get remove gcin
There is just a tiny amount of things in the Xandros 901 repository, so first add 'deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free' to your /etc/apt/sources.list for at least the build essentials. Do 'sudo apt-get update' afterwards to get the list of repository packages, then 'sudo apt-get install build-essential'. Now you can at least compile from source. If you keep this debian repository in your list, remember you're now off the reservation, you could potentially fuck the machine. So I'd recommend then taking it out and doing source whenever possible.
I installed Emacs of course, and Gimp without problems. I like TrueCrypt and Password Gorilla -- for Password Gorilla, download the source, then, using what I just recommended you don't do (the debian main repository):
apt-cache search tk8.4
(make sure it's there)
apt-get install tk8.4
apt-get install tk8.4-dev
run:
./configure
run:
./gorilla
(it should error)
apt-cache search incrtcl
apt-get install itcl3
run:
./gorilla
(it should error)
apt-cache search bwidget
apt-get install bwidget
run:
./gorilla
and for TrueCrypt (I believe this time I had removed the main debian repos and apt-get updated), get the fuse source code and compile, then:
apt-get install pkg-config
wget http://ftp.Linux.hr/asuseee/Xandros/binary/truecrypt_5.0-1_i386.deb
dpkg -i truecrypt_5.0-1_i386.deb
Keep in mind this deb is coming from an uncertain source, if you want to compile all of it be parepared to fight a bit.
As for full-desktop mode, which was easy on the 701, it looks like kicker and ksmserver are not in the 901 repository, and I'm leary of using ones from the larger deb repository. Not a biggie.
So all in all, fine machine, fine purchase. I carry it always and hook it up to a monitor when I'm home. So close to being a primary machine, so darn close. -
Tue Jul 29 9:32 pm, 2008
I'm not an Apple fanboy. I do own a macbook, and I'm very pleased with it -- both the hardware and the OS are really very good. The OS, at least, is several magnitudes better than Microsoft's, and a step above most Linux distros in ease of use (but not in flexibility or 'freedom'*). I have an iPod, I bought several years ago, it is currently in a dock on top my stereo, I almost never unhook it. Apple is a great company, they generally make great products, and they certainly have a great sense of style (and an even better spin for marketing). But I'm not a fanboy, if they went away tomorrow I'd just load up another OS, without blinking or regret.
I remember the bad old days. I remember Apple taking away the command line, I remember really bad clones and an even worse OS. OK, I'm like an old depression-era grandfather, who remembers having to work with a trash-80, and remembers fondly the failings of the Amiga, and isn't ready to let any one OS become a reliance. Things change, in tech, more so and more often. Acknowledging that Jobs took care of the ugly 90's things, I still am skeptical that they can ever properly do a web app. Do they want to try and be Google? Oh, I see, they want to get on the cloud bandwagon where all your device and app data is available from anywhere.
And that is a good bandwagon to be on, who doesn't want that? I want my email, bookmarks, addressbook, passwords, netflix recommendations, etc., reachable at all times. But apparently Apple borked it, borked their MobileMe. John Markoff writes up the problems over at NYTimes (always take his word as a grain of salt). My slight pleasure in Apple's misfortunes stems from my belief that the majority is always wrong (and the other half of that Ibsen quote, "the minority is rarely right"). But I am an appropriate reactionary: if it's not cool to dis Apple, then by God, it's time to dis Apple a little just to kept their ego from getting galaxy-sized.
* Please, don't let this digress into that discussion. -
Thou Shall Not Pay The Microsoft Tax
Thu Jul 17 10:32 pm, 2008
OK, I've been waiting for the Linux 20g Eeepc 901 longer than I'd like. I could've easily bought the 12g Windows version of the 901, which feels like it's been out forever. And I could rip out Windows and put some distro on there. Like I've done countless times over the years on countless machines. But times are a-changing. It's now possible to get machines OS free, although not always easily -- and I'd like to put forth the commandment
Thou Shall Not Pay The Microsoft Tax
acknowledging that it might mean some more work on your part, or, waiting, some goddamn waiting, on my part. But I'm not gonna cave. Nope. And do I want to make MS laugh all the way to the bank... again? OS free machines, or Linux distro machines are less uncommon, although having to deal with Red Hat Enterprise (and they charge too much) package management scares me about as much.
For you kids out there, the Microsoft Tax is a term used to describe the perhaps astronomical amounts of money Microsoft makes from having their software bundled with every PC being manufactured. Whether or not you intend to use that OS, you're paying for it in the cost of the computer. Take the Eeepc, you can buy the Windows installed version and get a 12G ssd, or the Linux version and get a 20G ssd -- why? Because the cost for that extra ssd space went straight to Microsoft. -
Mon Jun 30 11:10 pm, 2008
BBC reports some folks are hoarding old fashioned light bulbs in the inevitability of newer energy saving bulbs replacing them. "They don't look right," he explains. "They're not bright enough and they take an age to come on. That's not what you want from a light bulb. You want it to light up the whole room, just like that." He clicks his fingers. Who knows if this is really widespread, the thought of someone being actually perturbed by the second difference between illumination sort of boggles my mind. Perhaps the mercury content is a legitimate gripe -- I'm hoping these bulbs are only intermediate to practical LEDs. The argument is, if you were worried about the mercury, consider how often you have to replace CFLs versus old bulbs and that the mercury in the bulb replaces mercury that would've been airborne via a power planet. But consider if CFLs become the single largest source of light, and proper recycling about as good as most other recycling schemes, how much mercury then? Me, I'm hoarding gas mantles since that is absolutely the only light I can feel comfortable reading by.
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Sat Jun 28 9:19 pm, 2008
What is it about the spork that makes geeks happy? Could it be the sparse efficiency of a single utensil doing the job of two? Could it be the vaguely futuresque portmanteau that seems to trip off the tongue? Could it be that you can purchase, as I have, a titanium spork that will outlast your own existence? Shall I hand it down to weston clones so they too may in the future use the food consumption utensil designed for no redundancy? Perhaps you think chopsticks are more elegant, perhaps, I won't argue. But when you lose one, don't come clamoring to me or my clones for a spork loan.
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DPI Gear Doesn't Throttle Connections, People With DPI Gear Throttle Connections
Tue Jun 24 9:50 pm, 2008
Or so Caputo's arguement goes. It's an old argument used to justify behavior that a large part of the population finds disagreeable or immoral. Caputo sounds like he's rationalizing. A tiered internet makes a large technorati, inventive, population used to having all the bandwidth they agreed to pay for phased out into cable-like service plans extremely grumpy and less creative. I imagine a tiered internet operating the same way as cable tv: mysteriously ever-increasing monthly bills, terrible content, terrible service and very little ability to use it for what you want. Connection monitoring necessary? Yes. Throttling connections doing p2p or turning a connection into a subscription like package? I hope not. Caputo: It could evolve in a way where people provide services where they say these applications are optimized on this tier and these applications are not optimized on this tier. In fact, let's look at the Amazon Kindle. It's a little e-book where you don't pay a monthly subscription but every time you buy a book, you pay either $9.99 or $5.99. It doesn't take too much imagination to understand that it's a computer and it's using the internet to deliver [books], yet there's no monthly subscription fee. So how does that work? You pay Amazon, and Amazon pays the service provider right then and there for providing [the content]… Is that a different network? People don't think of it that way. It's an internet that only delivers books that you buy and newspapers that you subscribe to. People won't call it a separate internet, but here's a device that only does this. I don't want an internet that turns into a thousand kindles. I want a big pipe and decide what I want to do with it.
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Rebuilding The Colossus Mark II
Tue Jun 24 11:30 am, 2008
At Bletchley Park, the famous home of World War II code breakers, work is continuing to rebuild one of the original Colossus computers, which were so vital to the Allied war efforts. The manor house is now home to the National Museum of Computing, which is dedicated to preserving the work of some of the most important computers in history. The Colossus rebuild started in 1993 and the work is not yet finished. Tony Sale, the chief architect of the re-build, began the work relying on black and white photos. Via BBC
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Mon Jun 23 8:52 am, 2008
Is the sudden media fervor for prototype hydrogen cars like their fervor for corn energy -- a gadegty love without basis on real conditions? Joseph Romm argues yes, hydrogen cars are as yet, and perhaps for the forseeable future inefficient and unrealistic. And he gets some jabs in at the NYTimes while he's at it: Is the (NY)Times unaware that electricity is pretty much available everywhere, whereas hydrogen is essentially available nowhere? Is the Times unaware that the per-mile fuel cost of an electric car is probably one-quarter that of a hydrogen fuel-cell car? Is the Times unaware that electric-car manufacturers are working on "exchangeable batteries," which would make a battery swap about as fast as it takes to refuel a car with hydrogen?
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George Dyson: The birth of the computer
Sun Jun 22 12:10 pm, 2008
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Mon Jun 16 11:45 am, 2008
Slashdot links a review of the new Eee PC 901 -- Atom powered, a larger screen than the 701 -- and because of Atom, longer battery life. Owning a 701, it's probably the best "mobile" device I've ever had. And I mean "mobile" strictly, in that I just carry it around with me everywhere. Previously I'd used the Nokia N800 which was great for checking email and the web, but the Eee has become a real second machine which I can do personal python work on, have a apache/php/mysql setup on an SD card for when I want to play around with that. I was going to upgrade to the 900, but the 901 is supposedly out any day now, yup, any day now.
