Category: digital

Two big announcements in the world of computer technology today. First, Opera Software has made their Opera desktop web browser free (as in beer). Second, Microsoft has splintered … sorry, “reorganized” their corporation. One is a very smart move, the other is not. Read on …

First, the Opera announcement. I used to use Opera back in my BeOS days. While their BeOS product at the time was not a paragon of stability, it was still eminently usable and a far better browser for late 90’s surfing than Be Inc.’s NetPositive. Opera, until today, had always been a commercial or adware product. You could download it for free, but ad banners were displayed unless you paid. With today’s announcement Opera makes itself as free to the casual user as is Firefox or other Mozilla products. Safari and Internet Explorer are only free if you pay for the OS, and both are platform specific.

Now I say “as free to the casual user as …” because Opera did not open the source to their browser. But really, how many people are going to download Firefox and immediately start making significant contributions to the codebase? Not many. I will not deny that open source means more eyes on the playpen, but even that has not stopped Firefox from having some pretty bad security bugs recently. I think that time will tell whether a closed, paid developer staff can keep pace with, or outpace, a larger volunteer staff. It will be interesting to watch.

In any event, this was a smart move for Opera. People these days are not willing to pay for browsers, as so many free and viable alternatives exist. It will also act as a tractor for their embedded browser products, which means more revenue. Some might see this as a last ditch effort by Opera, and they may well be right. I don’t sit in board meetings. But I think it’s merely a recognition that they aren’t going to get rich selling a desktop browser, they need more press, interest, and therefore users, and that the more people that embrace the desktop browser the better it is for their more commercially viable embedded solutions.

I have downloaded and installed Opera, have the Flash and Java plugins working well, and am giving it a test drive. Here are my initial reactions:

• It is fast. Faster than Firefox by a good margin. Very nice.
• The rendering engine adheres to standards nicely. Well coded sites work. Broken ones are usually broken in Firefox as well.
• I actually enjoy having a mail, IRC, and NNTP client in my browser. Opera does this well. Mozilla does not.
• Much of the Opera online documentation needs to be updated. The instructions for installing Java just simply do not work. The UI has changed.
• Speaking of the UI, while I’m aware that Opera is written in QT, Opera needs to make a serious effort to provide their own skins to mimic the look and feel of the platforms they support. There is an Opera-supplied Windows skin, I’d like to see the company provide top-shelf skins for GTK+, KDE, and MacOS X users.
• Tabs should be the last toolbar before page content.
• Toolbar bookmarks should not have to be stored in the main bookmark repository as well as the toolbar.

I must say, on the whole my Opera 8.5 experience has been very positive. I may well switch from Firefox if Opera shows themselves willing and capable of delivering bug fixes, UI tweaks, and general quality updates and support. Try Opera. If it’s not your cup of tea you’ll know pretty quickly. If it is, you’ll love it, not just for the speed alone.

And from the “Dumb Business Decisions” desk we have the Microsoft reorganization. Do they really think chopping a turd into pieces makes it not a turd? Do they think this will positively impact their ability to deliver secure, standards-compliant, user liberating (as opposed to user emprisoning), and fault tolerant products? Do they think this will enhance creativity and innovation rather than add more layers of bureaucracy that stifle innovation? Does anyone think this? Granted, I do not like Microsoft. It’s hard for me to see much that they do in a positive light. But I think this reeks of desperation and corp-think to even the most unbiased person.

Today Opera Software executives acknowledged a change in business climate and moved the tiller to compensate. Microsoft desperately clutched at straws. Or, that’s my take on it. Time will tell.

This server has, for the past 8 months or so, been running off Fedora Core 3. When Fedora 4 shipped in June I added “upgrade server” to my to-do list. And there it languished.

Last month while visiting a friend the server locked up pretty hard and the drive just sat there spinning. Woo called me to tell me, and I had her hard reset the machine. I became worried about the status of the drive, but apparently not worried enough to actually do anything about it. Bad idea.

Saturday night as I sat in our home office room, the drive started grinding. Not the “death noise” but consistent read/write activity. I could not ssh in. So I ran to the other end of the house, grabbed the spare monitor, and had a look. Lots of errors concerning SELinux vs. ntp. Was it software, or the drive? Who knows!? It’s a crapshoot! Whee!

I reset the machine and waited for it to come back up, which it did. I ran some simple tasks, which all worked. I then asked rsync to sync my mp3 library (which is quite large) to the server. It has done this before, so it only needed to transfer a few songs. But rsync generates ls style file lists, so it is quite an intensive read process regardless of the amount of data that is out of sync.

Boom. Death. The machine … just … froze.

OK, so it wasn’t SELinux vs. ntp. It was the drive. I shut the machine down and powered it back up to ensure that the drive hadn’t died, but was just dying. Sure enough (and thank Jebus) the drive was only on its deathbed, not in the grave. Having travelled this road before I knew enough to shut it down, throw a placeholder page on an alternate apache installation and not touch that drive except to take data off it when a replacement was ready.

I have a spare 250GB parallel ATA drive in my arsenal. I resolved to install CentOS on it. First speedbump. My CentOS/i386 Install Disk 1 was damaged last month, and I had never burned a new copy. And in a fit of insanity I had tossed the ISOs I had downloaded. Duh. So Saturday night as I slept I curl‘ed that image. Again.

Second speedbump. Awake yesterday morning, burn the image, and find it is corrupt. Spent another 2 hours downloading it again (again). This image worked, and I installed CentOS onto the 250GB drive.

Third speedbump. Go to boot CentOS for the first time and only get a GRUB prompt. Try defining root and am presented with the lovely GRUB Error 18 message. The drive is too large for the BIOS in this PIII-550 to recognize, and CentOS has placed /boot outside the range of the BIOS’ view. CentOS can install fine, as Linux does not use the BIOS to get drive information … except during boot. Le sigh.

So now I have 4 options.

• Re-install CentOS making a dedicated /boot partition within the BIOS’ line of sight.
• Pass funky kernel parameters at boot to overcome the problem.
• Buy a drive less than 128GB. Or several if i want more storage and use LVM.
• Get a controller card and bypass the BIOS completely.

Now really the only two sane options are the first and last. Passing kernel params is a major kludge. Buying (perhaps multiple) 120GB drives is cost-inefficient. So I sat contemplating the best approach. I soon realized that the 250GB drive I have is getting old, and has been used quite a bit. In fact, this is the drive that the Mac caused to poop itself a few months ago. I was setting myself up to be right back in this same position in weeks or months, knowing Murphy’s Law. And knowing my luck thus far on this issue …

So off I went to Fry’s. When looking at controller cards I realized I could get a Serial ATA card for the same price as a Parallel ATA card. And SATA is a LOT faster. Not only that, but factoring in a rebate I could get a Seagate 300GB SATA drive for US$119. At least one decision was simple. I came home with a SIIG SATA controller card and that Seagate.

Now, the SATA drive in my desktop is only 250GB. No way I’m getting a 300GB drive and not using it in my desktop. So after a dry run with CentOS and the 300GB drive to ensure the controller card works, I spent a couple hours migrating my desktop from the 250GB to the 300GB. Let me tell you, rsync’ing between 2 local 7200rpm SATA drives is a thing of beauty. Incredibly fast. Jizz-inducing fast. Yum-MY!

So, at around 11pm Sunday night I was where I thought I was going to be at 11pm Saturday night. 24 hours spent spinning my wheels. Great. I finally got CentOS installed, transfered data from the old 120GB drive and began configuration. The server is now about 90% done, and web services have (obviously) been restored. And we’re now traveling on a 250GB 7200rpm Western Digital SATA drive connected to a processor-independent controller card. Whoopee!

My apologies to those that waited for the server to come back online, and my thanks to those folks who are hosted here. Hopefully this will be the last such glitch for some time. And enjoy the speed improvement. I’m off to do that last 10% of configuration.

When I first got my new x86-64 machine back in late April I decided to run Ubuntu Linux on it. It worked quite well, but I found that updates (especially critical updates like Firefox security patches) were slow in coming. As I run Fedora Core on my server, I ended up switching to that on my desktop as well. But, I have switched back. Click “Read More” to find out why.

One of my closest friends needed a new machine recently, and after I convinced him it would be a poor time to buy a new Mac if he could avoid it (as x86 Macs are around the corner) he opted for an x86-64 machine that dual boots Linux and WinXP. He decided he wanted to try CentOS, the free variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A couple weeks ago I piled myself and a bunch of tools and CDs into the car and headed south to Ashland, OR.

Now, one thing that worked well for me in Ubuntu and has been nothing but a PITA in Fedora is AppleTalk printing. Like me, my friend has an AppleTalk laser printer. I spent (no joke) 6 hours trying to get CentOS to print to the thing. Getting Netatalk working on Red Hat variants is like pulling teeth. It was beyond frustrating.

I eventually installed Ubuntu for him and after re-reading Netatalk docs and sorting through which PAP backend I had actually worked, he could print. It felt … glorious … after the RH debacle.

When I got home last week I rsynced my home directory to a backup drive and installed the i386 variant of Ubuntu (as there is currently no Flash plugin or Sun Java plugin for x86-64). Installation went smoothly, and setting up my AppleTalk printer took … ready? … 2.5 minutes. Two and a half minutes. 150 seconds. Beats the crap out of six hours and no printing.

I’m not knocking Red Hat. They make a great product. But I think their interest in the desktop is minimal. For desktop Linux, I’m now solidly an Ubuntu devotee. It Just Works.

In the interest in giving back to the community I wrote up a step-by-step how-to on AppleTalk on the Ubuntu wiki. If you need AppleTalk services on Linux, check it out.

And hey … Macromedia and Sun. How about x86-64 plugins for Linux folks? Huh? Come on …

A few months ago I went off on a rant about Mac hardware prices, the Apple “boutique” experience, and my cogitations on my next machine.

Well, about two weeks ago I asked OSX to do an ls of my mp3s, pipe the output to a text file, and play an mp3 in iTunes at the same time. HFS+ completely pooped itself, the volume information of my Firewire drive was entirely corrupted, and all the data therein went poof.

Fortunately, having been playing with ‘puters for as long as I have, I had (knock wood) a backup. But I was still plenty pissed. There is absolutely no reason that a journalled filesystem asked to do an intense ls read while accessing a file on the volume should explode. None.

And Tiger is around the corner. I’ve heard some ghastly rumors about Spotlight. I’m seeing more interest in feature deployment than feature engineering. It’s gonna cost US$129. It will be dog-slow on the 500Mhz G3 iBook. Yadda yadda yadda. So, what to do?

Thanks to the generosity of my girlfriend and family in the face of an impending birthday, I am now the proud owner of:

• Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra-939
• AMD Athlon64 3200+
• 512MB PC3200 DDR440 RAM
• 250GB Serial ATA drive
• nVidia GeForce FX5200
• Sony DVD/R-RW CD/R-RW
• Antec mini-tower
• Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480w PSU

Along with these major components came a floppy drive, USB keyboard etc etc. Total cost, including shipping, was ~US$730. I built the machine from the assorted parts yesterday, thanks to some speedy shipping from NewEgg and Crucial. The machine is fast. Extremely fast. I have to adjust, I’m not used to apps opening in an instant. But don’t get me wrong, I do not miss the SPOD (Spinning Pinwheel Of Doom). 🙂

Installed Ubuntu on it last night (you didn’t think I would buy such a beautiful machine and subject it to Windows, did you?!) and am very much enjoying this Debian-derivative. I have christened it “ra” in keeping with my tradition of naming my machines after Egyptian deities (the server is “aten”).

The only rough spot thus far (knock wood again) has been the fact that iTunes did not actually tag a lot of my mp3s in the way it displayed that it had. For instance, a lot of tracks (but not all) whose track number was blank got a “0” in the actual tag, even though iTunes displayed them as blank. Comment fields that iTunes said were blank actually had things like “000000009382GJH 488402009.” Thanks, iTunes. A lot. It’s fun cleaning up 18,190 mp3 tags. But I must say, the combination of EasyTag and Rhythmbox is making it a lot less painless. And thus far, I much prefer the Rhythmbox UI to iTunes’. With 18K mp3s, Rhythmbox is much easier to navigate.

Before I bore the non-nerdy to tears, although that probably happened as soon as I started spouting specs, I’ll go back to playing in my new world. A big “THANK YOU!” to woo and my family, the Ubuntu community, and drastically less expensive hardware.

I am a happy camper.

The news just broke that Adobe is buying out Macromedia. If you have been asleep in a drawer the past 10 years, Adobe makes things like Photoshop and Illustrator and Acrobat. Macromedia makes things like Flash and Dreamweaver.

This could be really great news. The employees could pool their talent and meld the best of competing products like GoLive and Dreamweaver into a single killer app. It could also be that that killer app now costs US$1500 and your firstborn manchild. Or it could suck.

In any event, the software world just lurched on its axis. Time will tell if this will be a boon or boondoggle. For now, just watch for that fourth horseman. Or the rapture.

Fedora Core 4 (Test 1) was released yesterday, right on schedule. New to this release is support for the PPC architecture, which is extremely gratifying. While I’ll probably hold off upgrading this x86 server until FC4 final is released, I’m tempted to start playing around with it on one of the Macs.

It also makes me wonder what TerraSoft (Yellow Dog) is thinking right about now. Their PPC distro is Fedora-based, and they have a pay-for product. Is a free Fedora/PPC a threat to their business? What can or will they offer to set their product apart from free offerings? Only time will tell.

If you’re a Mac user curious about Linux, give Fedora a spin. I like it quite a bit.

A little late with this one, as the domain transfer interrupted service.

The GNOME Project has released GNOME 2.10. This is a pretty big incremental release. For a complete list of what’s new, check out the release notes.

I’m looking forward to grabbing this update on the Fedora machine via yum soon. If you’d like to check out 2.10, and don’t want to modify your existing Linux or (gasp) Windows (retch) installation, there’s a Live CD available via BitTorrent.

Check it out!

One of my biggest spelling pet peeves these days is “kernal.” As in “the Linux kernal.”

It’s kernel, people! K-E-R-N-E-L. Like a kernel of corn. Or the kernel of an idea.

Apparently it’s so bad at this point that dictionary.com feels the need to point the results for “kernal” to “kernel.” The word “kernal” doesn’t even exist in the English language. And yet so many people are getting this wrong that the reference books have to offset the stupidity.

How bad is it? It’s so bad that now the typo is appearing in official job postings. Nothing screams “we don’t know jack squat” like misspelling a basic word. Way to go, Volt. Good luck in your search.

Why not just call it “the Linux colonel” and complete the slow march toward illiteracy?

Neat. Really, really neat idea. Well executed. And one of those “seems so obvious, why did it take this long?” deals.

Thanks Brazilian.

If you have used e-mail for more than 10 seconds you are aware of 419 scams. Someone from Nigeria, or some other African nation, writes to you in utter secrecy and ALL CAPS requesting that you aid them in retrieving money that was lost, inherited or from over-invoiced contracts that is being held by mean and nefarious bankers or a corrupt government.

It’s a scam. I don’t know why I feel compelled to tell anyone that they will not get millions of dollars for doing nothing, but the fact is that common sense is outweighed by avarice these days.

The good news is that this axiom cuts both ways. It turns out that avarice can blind the scammers as much as it can the scammed. A wily American, having received a 419 spam/scam, outwitted the scammers and conned them out of three dollars. A long read, but well worth it. Hilarious.

Score one for the good guys.

Thanks to ond for the heads-up.