Trading on down

What? More books?

Oh yeah, but these are some classics. Not in the true sense of the word of course, I have enough Dickens and Dumas for the moment. But these will do. As you can see from the pic (yes, I know it's not a very good one), I got some Bond, James Bond. While I was at it, I also picked up the last James Clavell book I didn't already have in my collection. I've yet to gain what isn't in this list (Moonraker, Diamonds are forever, and a few others) but these are in okay condition, considering that they're all printed in the 1960s. I note that some of them aren't written by Ian Fleming, but rather by John Gardner. I haven't read any Bond books written by this author yet, so I'd like to know how the debonair spy is handled.

The Clavell is also in reasonable condition—it's also been looked after. They were all a pretty good price too, only $15.00, and that's including the cost of getting them here. Nine books, for that price, less than $1.67 per book. Should keep me happy, once I start (again) the Clavell series from the beginning with Shogun, and go all the way through to the last book, Whirlwind. Only this time, I'll finish each book before I go on to the next one.

Waving goodbye

Google Wave allows embedding of waves now. The only problem being that if a user that comes to the website to view this blogpost isn't logged into Google Wave, then they don't see any content within that box at the bottom of the post. Seems strange, but never mind. I've been having enough fun just trying to get my head around all that Google Wave can potentially be—watch this space for more details. I may even paste the static content from one of my waves here, that way everyone can at least view it, whether they're a 'waver or not. I just won't allow modifications from non-wavers.

And that's a wrap from me.

On the other hand...

Books are one of those things I tend to like reading, though these days books have to compete with online attractions like blogs, music, online games and www.youtube.com, as well as other activities such as television, movies and boozing with your mates. Err, I mean drinking.

I've finally received the last book I'd ordered from fishpond.co.nz (Dan Brown's first book, Digital Fortress), and I thought I'd best make some comments. It's the first time I've actually bought second hand books from the Internet, though it's not the first time I've ever bought books second-hand. A good condition second-hand book has the advantage of lasting nearly as long as a new book does, with appropriate care. It can often cost a third of the cost of a new book, and provide just as much enjoyment. I normally buy new where I can, but these three books were too good to pass up. I'm glad I wasn't too disappointed.

For the price, the books pretty much meet the criteria specified on the website, and though they don't exactly meet their online description of condition, they're okay for the price I paid. I get a copy of the text, none of the pages are ripped/falling out/mutilated and the spine isn't "broken", a pet peeve of mine with some readers "splitting" the spine so the book will stay open at the page they want it to. It's a quick read for one of the books; you might think that 510 pages would take a while, but I've finished it in roughly six hours of on-and-off reading.

I suspect that Dan Brown will never become a favourite author, as there are simply too many inaccuracies in his books. I have to deliberately forget about that, and just treat them as stories. As such, Digital Fortress reads okay, but Angels and Demons is far better. I liked that book so much I ended up buying the illustrated version of it and The Da Vinci Code, both well worth the price (new, but discounted) that I paid for both at Paper Plus Books. I just hope that his latest shows the polish that Angels and Demons has, but I suspect not, as he takes pot shots at the Masons. It's also the third book to focus around a central character, Robert Langdon. Anyhow, 'nuff said from me. I think I'll dive into my other book tomorrow.

One mouse to rule them all

It's all a matter of style

How do you control multiple computers? Some of us do it with fancy little KVMs. That can work well, though they're not cheap when you start looking at more than two computers. Then there's easy free software that can shift the mouse pointer focus between two computers running XFree86/Xorg. This has the advantage of switching the keyboard focus too, though it doesn't do the monitor switching for you. Oh yes, and there's the two-computer limit, unless you happen to run the software in daisychain mode; start it up on the first computer, point that at the second computer. Start it again on the second computer, pointed at the third computer, etc etc. That tends to get ugly though, and still requires that you have authentication (at least as far as Xorg is concerned) for each client. I decided to combine what a KVM does with what x2x does, though I seem to have slightly mixed results.

On both my computers, I'm lucky enough to have a video card with two outputs, though with the KVM I'm using, I can only switch one monitor. So—I plug a monitor into each computer as the primary output (yes, I have multiple monitors), start up the x2x program on the first computer and point it at the second computer's X server, switch the keyboard focus over to the second computer, and work with the applications over on the second computer with the same keyboard and mouse. Except now I've struck a problem.

The newest version of Xorg in the latest version of Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) doesn't support the XTest extension that x2x uses to operate with. Because of that, I can't use x2x any more from the Mandriva to the Ubuntu machine. I could probably get it going in the other direction, but once Mandriva removes the XTest extension from the Xorg setup they have, I also lose that advantage. So. What do I do then?

I suspect I'll be left with options such as Synergy. That has the advantage of being somewhat platform-agnostic, where clients work on both Windows and on Xorg. I've never used it, but the people who have told me of it say good things of it. So, let's see what happens.

Tennis, anyone?

On its own, the mouse isn't a very good gaming device, not unless you get one of those fancy multiple-button laser mice that report at twice the normal rate of other mice. That's a bit academic to most of us, however. Put simply, at least for me, joysticks aren't much use either. The trend these days tends to be for gamers to use multiple inputs, often using the mouse to point, then using an ancillary keyboard to call up all the other functions. These extra little keyboards (sometimes users use the ordinary keyboard instead) are USB devices, and wired into the Windows input layer or the Xorg input layer where games can see their key events and act upon them. Think of a key for each specific function, so you're probably dealing with up to thirty extra keys on a keypad on the opposite side of the keyboard from where you have your mouse.

Looking back at input devices, one of the original ideas was a 5-fingered chorded device to provide up to 31 separate events. As I've mentioned before, you often had to be quick on your ... fingers to use one of these well, so it was eventually scrapped and replaced with the mouse that we love (or hate) today. But it seems that we've almot come back to the idea of extra keys, though at least we're not always chording any more.

Quake, anyone?

Now, where did I put that update?

See Emily Play

This one's brought over from my MySpace blog, with one or two modifications. I'm just trying out Scribefire at the moment. It seems a bit slow to respond when I initially type stuff into the window, but in all other respects, it seems perfectly fine. For those of you who don't know, ScribeFire is a blogging client, written in JavaScript, that is a Firefox plug in. And not a bad one, either. Yes, it has its small problems, but it seems to support more blogtypes than what I was last using: Windows Live Writer.  My only issue with Writer is that it (gee!) only runs on the Windows platform. In comparison, this plugin runs anywhere that Firefox will run.

Careful with that axe, Eugene

I spotted ScribeFire in the list of available packages after having updated my Mandriva install up to the latest version, 2009.1. I did have a bit of an adventure getting everything set up and working, but my first problem was to get all the packages for the new release onto the system. As it was (at the time) sitting on 2009.0, I first had to change the urpmi configuration so it got the new stuff, not the old stuff I'd already been using. Did that (with the help of easyurpmi.zarb.org), and started upgrading packages piecemeal. Up until last month, I'd grabbed a batch of packages to update, then urpmi'd them into place.

Started with KDE, got most of that installed, tried rebooting the X server, only to find out I could no longer get KDE started. Shrugged it off, chose xfce instead. Upgraded gnome, then upgraded E17, adding some X server packages too. Tried booting E17, X server didn't want to know. Gave up on the X server as I'd obviously broken Xorg, went back to console for the moment. Thought about it a bit more, then said to hell with it. Upgrade them all at once.

urpmi --auto-select

Urpmi churned a bit, then asked me what library I wanted to provide for graphviz, then told me I'd lose several packages in the process as newer versions weren't available. I dealt with the occasional conflicts, installed all the packages I could (forcefully in two cases), then rebooted.

I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

I knew I was sort of in trouble when I looked at the screen after I hit <Enter> on the Mandriva line, as the poor old grub had come up with the following output:

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=/dev nosplash video=radeonfb:1024x768-16@75 resume=/dev/sda2 vga=791 Cannot find file. Error 16 Hit Enter to return to the menu

Once I took my third dried green frog pill, I looked more carefully at the input and output to see what had broken... it was then that I realised that grub wasn't even looking in the right place, as my setup has all my information on hd3,1. So, I corrected this, and corrected the root= parameter, changed the same thing for the initrd as well, crossed my fingers, and hit "b" (to boot what I'd saved). Thankfully, it loaded the kernel, and the initrd, and started my system up. Then I hit the next snag. avahi-daemon wouldn't start. it uttered a mournful [FAILED] to the screen, and my startup continued...until I hit haldaemon. The computer then (effectively) stopped dead in its tracks, waiting for I didn't know what. After a couple of resets, I finally found out that both haldaemon and avahi-daemon were dependent upon another service I'd forgotten about—messagebus. The Messagebus service starts up the dbus daemon, which handles all of the gobbledygook that seems to go on underneath the surface in a typical modern Mandriva distro. If it isn't running, then neither will anything else that depends upon it to be there. Think of it as another udev, but for messages instead of devices, although haldaemon also uses it.

So, it was back to the single-user boot. While I was there, I corrected /boot/grub/menu.lst at the same time so I wouldn't have to keep typing hd3, and pondered about dbus. I checked in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d again for a startup script with dbus in the name, but couldn't see one. Looked a bit further, and realised I was supposed to be looking for messagebus. Found THAT, as S99messagebus. Mandriva had got stuck on haldaemon, which was also at S99. As Mandriva runs through these alphabetically, I figured I needed to get messagebus to an earlier number. I checked the header of the file, and found that what was in there, didn't match the S99 level it had been set to initially. Then, I decided to check out the chkconfig man page. Thankfully there was a parameter I hadn't seen there before... resetpriorities.

What this does is: take a valid start (S level) and finish (K level) number, and change the symlinks filenames to match these numbers. For messagebus, I now had S53messagebus, and both avahi-daemon and haldaemon were one digit higher (S54). Time for the final test. Reboot - yet again, this time the kernel was booted, the scripting ran clean, and I was finally at a login: prompt. Whew. What a procedure.

Now, I just had to get X up and running, and hope that the massive package upgrade hadn't broken something else in the process. Thankfully, it hadn't, though E17 still doesn't want to start, and neither does nautilus. Those are things I can live without, or I can fix. But it goes without saying that I shouldn't have had to go to all of this trouble just to upgrade a system. Hell, Ubuntu handles upgrades better than this. Anyhow, that's my first (now my second) post made with this blogging client, I hope it ends up being a stayer.

Intro to a strange thing

And so, with great trepidation, I enter into MySpace

(Snipped, with modifications, from my first post on MySpace blog)

So now, I've got presences on live.com, blogger.com, and quite a few other places too. I've got nearly everything under the sun except for MySpace, until now. I'm an "old fart". Yup. I'm probably 75% older than the average age on there, but I'm probably not the oldest person there. Just old enough to know better.

Brand recognition

So, how come some things are so well known they've become new terms in the world at large: “I’ll just Google it”, and some have faded into obscurity—who remembers gopher? If you do, you're older than I thought. If you also know what veronica was for, you’re one of less than every thousand. It's called brand recognition, and is the reason why some companies have survived (some for centuries, even) and some have died within a year of release. Category killers (usually), they've either become the best (and in some cases, the ONLY) entry in their chosen field, or they're pretty high up there. For Google, at least, they took over (or so it seems to me) from the all-powerful altavista.com, doing the job better than them. Now, who hears of altavista? Only old farts like me. Yes, it's still around. Yes, it still provides search results. Have I had a look at it in the past decade? Only once or twice, the last time to check that it was still up before I blogged about it. Google killed it off, or might as well have. Altavista list who they are on their website:

AltaVista, a business of Overture Services, Inc., is a leading provider of search services and technology.

and so on.

Okay, granted—there are literally hundreds of thousands of leading companies that I haven't heard of, but there certainly was a mass exodus to Google from Altavista. Something is said that the results from Google were way more relevant, and way more up to date. I'm not too sure, just that I jumped the bandwagon along with most of the Internet population of the time.

The funny thing is: their initial page is so dead simple! It's only when you start digging beneath the surface that you realise just how deeply embedded that the Google company has become. There have even been comments about how Google could be seen as another Microsoft. I can't verify that, nor deny it. But they're certainly big.