A Viking with Bricks in his head

Mining, building, fighting...

2011-09-04T11:28:00.000+12:00

What a little gem

Recently, when I bought the Humble Indie Bundle, I gained some free playtime on Minecraft. Not having played this before, I thought I'd finally give it a go. All I'd tried previously had been the predecessors and alternatives (Infiniminer, Manic Digger), so I thought I'd see why everyone was quietly addicted to this little game. Not even out of beta yet (supposedly being released some time in November 2011), it still manages to pull in the buyers with over three million purchases to date. That's not even including the people that are somehow managing to run it for free.

The basis of the game? You interact with a world of blocks (of various styles, but all the same shape), cacti, clouds, trees, snow, rain, lava, water, animals, mushrooms (two types), grass, flowers and of course, enemies (called mobs in the game). Most of the time when you kill an enemy—assuming they don't kill you first—you will end up with something else you can use. Skeletons drop their arrows and their bones, which you can then use to tame wolves with. Spiders will drop string, from which you can make fishing rods, bows and wool. Pigs give you pork chops that you can then eat, though you have to cook these to give you better health. Sheep also give you wool, that you can combine with colours to give you coloured wool. You can gain these colours by picking red or yellow flowers, or mining blue lapis lazuli gems. Pumpkins help make bright lights when you combine them with a light you made earlier out of a stick and a lump of coal. With stone, you can make furnaces where you can melt stuff and turn iron ore into iron ingots, or cook food, increasing its health value.

A builders nightmare

Out of this small collection of blocks (three types of wood, cobblestone, stone, dirt, wet dirt, water, lava, snow, flowers, coloured wool, etc etc), it's surprising what people have managed to make. Someone made a decent model of what they thought Hogwarts looks like inside, and even managed to add a little challenge to it—find all 100 diamonds. Others made worlds available where people can cooperatively build things, or challenge each other in PvP.

I've spent most of my computer time since installing just building my own little empire, surviving—or occasionally not—against the hordes of mobs that come out to kill you, and building the most weird constructions... a skywalk between two homes in the most recent world is my latest effort. I intend to grab enough sand to turn into glass to entirely encase the walkway in glass, and be safe from mobs as I walk between the two homes at night.

Minecraft wouldn't be minecraft without the ability to mine. So underground, you can also find coal, diamond, iron ore, redstone ore, gravel, and obsidian. With obsidian, you get to make…the Portal to the Nether.

The what?

The Nether is a completely different world, with lots and lots and lots of lava, and an enemy you really want to dodge the first time. Take a flint and steel when you go there, because you won't come back otherwise. I got caught in the Nether when a ghast extinguished the portal, and I had no way back. Since then, I've learned to keep out of their line of fire, and to protect the portal with big walls that they can't shoot through—cobblestone from the "real" world works best, though netherrack will do at a pinch. The Nether wouldn't be very much fun if you couldn't mine here, but at the moment, there's not much you can mine except for&hellips;well, lava. Then there's netherrack, that you never seen in the real world. And glowstones, that you can make other bright lights with. Funnily enough, they even have gravel in the Nether too.

So what's the draw? Why are so many people addicted?

I wish I knew how to answer that, I really do. All I know is—since I started, I find it hard to stop. And I guess that's the mark of a really good game. Yes, of course it's simple. The physics don't work like the real world, or else my skywalk would fall out of the sky. Trying to protect wolves from their own stupidity is sometimes more of a challenge than actually avoiding the enemies to begin with, but more fun sometimes, as you can walk into a collection of enemies with a little less regard for your life. The graphics are deliberately simplified, which makes for some odd looks when you're building stuff out of blocks that look like coloured lego stuck together. Oh, and don't get caught by a creeper. Those guys will kill you when they explode.

People have of course tried to modify the game so that you can use better graphics (photorealistic-ish blocks, trees, water, stones etc), and I've had mixed success with those. They sort of work, but then they slow the game down beyond what a good speed of reaction will provide. Other modifications are just plain useful, and there are a whole lot of these modifications. Currently they're all unsupported, but there will apparently be support for mods in the official client soon. I have to admit I rather like my minimap up in the right-hand corner.

Anyhow, I'm off to go glass in that walkway. Oh no, there's a creeper !!!!

Christchurch, one year on

2011-09-04T10:25:00.001+12:00

The night we all (hopefully) slept

I slept well last night, thankfully. On my mind was the question "what if...". Thankfully, it didn't all happen again, as I don't wish to repeat that particular experience. Although the February 22nd quake was far worse in damage, at least we could all see where we were, and which doorway to dash to. September 4th 2010 was just ... eerie. Here's a snippet from the diary entry I wrote the next night before going to bed (early) in my clothing.

4:33 am, 7.1 Richter earthquake, 10km deep, centred about 30-40km west of Christchurch. Gave me a hell of a fright to see flashes while the first really big shock was rocking us around for more than a couple of minutes—that was probably powerlines going out and arcing.
A number of shocks afterwards, at least 23 since above 4.0 richter, including some around 5.5, and it's likely more will happen in the next few days. News coverage for the whole day on the event and its aftereffects right through until 7:30pm tonight, water and sewerage out across most of the city, power restored here just before midday. Government estimates for repair at over $2 billion, large areas of road damage, houses damaged to various stages though around here, we only ended up with a broken vase and one photo frames' glass panel. Books fell off Wendy's bedside cabinet all over the floor, with some ending up on the bed. All that has been tidied up now, of course—everyone seems okay, just real shaken.
Oh, if only we knew. Of course, things continued on from there, with various aftershocks happening, then another really big disaster on February 22nd this year, and yet another decent 6.3 jolt on June 13th. So, needless to say, it's been quite a year.
I noticed this on a Facebook feed today, thought I might post it for a laugh. Thanks to whomever posted it originally.

The Humble Bundle just got bigger!

2011-08-06T17:00:00.002+12:00

The Humble Indie Bundle 3

If you haven't made up your mind to buy the original five games, then the creators of the Humble Indie Bundle just made it a lot more compelling. They added some games. And they've even thrown in some time with MineCraft (edit: this may now be over), if I read this image correctly. I went ahead and bought the initial five games on the strength of the Cogs game alone—neat game, by the way—but the other four games in the pack weren't weak either. HammerFight is really really hard. And I haven't got past level three in that.

The extra games

Adding the Braid game seems a bit weird to me, though I guess I'll warm to it. As for Machinarium, I've loved the game since I first saw it in operation. Atom Zombie Smasher is a good old top-down strategy shooter that rather reminds me of Alien Swarm. Cortex Command is an in-progress developing game. Steel Storm is another top-down shooter. Revenge of the Titans is a frenetic arcade mash-up of Real Time Strategy and Tower Defence. And to round out the collection, Osmos puts you into the position of a mote that has to get bigger.

Not only have they made the extra games available for all three platforms, but they've even provided extra content for some of the games as well, such as the Machinima soundtrack. If you loved the demo, then you'll probably love the music too. And there's only five more days to buy them all.

TV on HVR-900H under Ubuntu Linux

2011-07-27T11:08:00.039+12:00

Adventures of a WinTV stick in Linux Lands

A while ago, I read a book that described the fight that the U.K. had to get their FreeView up and running. It was quite a good read, all things considered. At the time I read the book, New Zealand had barely heard of Freeview, but was already well on the way to a roll-out.

Fast forward to today—all analogue TV frequencies are set to be gradually turned off over the next year to be replaced by digital transmissions, which means you'll need either a modern television (with Freeview built in) or some sort of set top box, with or without recording capability. Computers have their own set of challenges that Hauppauge have addressed with their line of USB and PCI TV receivers.

I finally got the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-900H working under Ubuntu Linux 11.04! It seems I needed to modprobe tm6000_dvb and tm6000_alsa modules. In addition, I needed to download a firmware file that wasn't on my system. The link was easy enough to find, once I knew what I was looking for:

http://www.stefanringel.de/pub/xc3028L-v36.fw

An alternative URL is:

http://steventoth.net/linux/hvr1400/xc3028L-v36.fw

Observe the usual things about making sure this is the right file, and all that. Put this into /lib/firmware/ on your Ubuntu system—other Linux distributions may differ. Anyhow, it seems that the VideoLAN client will now play digital TV from the USB stick, once you point vlc at a dvb-t device, set up the frequencies you need to receive channels on, and of course have a decent signal. If you want to improve the picture somewhat (on my initial setup, I was getting all sorts of weird effects) you may want to turn on deinterlacing. Fiddle with the settings until you can't see any obvious blurriness when things move around fast on the screen.

Apparently mplayer can be set up to use the stick as well, though I've no idea how to get it to use the stick in just plain "start it, choose channel, watch like a drone" mode. At least VLC allows me to do that without any real magic commandline invocations.

Setting it all up

First off, you need to know what frequencies you're going to be receiving a digital signal on. Wikipedia is good for this, as they have a whole barrel load of information for various countries—New Zealand frequencies are included amongst them. For Christchurch, you'll need the Sugarloaf frequencies of 682 MHz, 698 MHz and 706 MHz. For other regions in NZ, see this list of DVB-T frequencies. These are all owned by either TVNZ, Mediaworks or Kordia, and provide most channels available on the digital platform.

Once you have the local frequencies, you can then feed these into VLC once you start it up. Do note that I've included screenies from both the Windows and the Ubuntu version of VLC, as the same instructions aren't quite the same for each OS.

First off, hit that Media menu, choose "Open Capture Device", and in the Capture mode dropdown, select DVB (DVB Directshow under Windows). In Device Selection, choose DVB-T. For Linux, make sure there's something in the "Adapter Card" box —Windows doesn't have that setting. Then set the Transponder/Multiplex frequency to the relevant frequency for the transmissions you want to receive. Set the symbol rate to 8MHz for NZ, I'm not sure what you need for other countries. You should be good to go. In Christchurch at least, you could add all three frequencies to a playlist like I did, that should cover all relevant broadcasts from Freeview/HD.

Oh yeah, hit Play. It'll take a few seconds to scan the frequency, and load up the first available program off the frequency. Other programs can be got to by choosing the Playback menu, skipping down to Program, and selecting from the list.

Troubleshooting

First off, figure out if you're close enough to the local transmitter. Odds are if you're receiving crap telly now, then digital TV simply won't work without an improvement in aerial. Don't use the aerial that Hauppauge provided unless you're less than 5 km from the transmitter. Use a better one—preferably a good external UHF aerial. I'm relatively lucky to be able to pull in my signal with bunny ears, but that's because I'm practically line-of-sight to the local transmitter. If you're not, then all you can do is try it and see. If you have the option of taking a feed directly off the roof aerial, then that's also worth a shot, but if you don't want the hit of putting in a signal splitter (typically drops received signal by at least 3db), then you may need to go to the expense of putting up a separate aerial. Roof aerials (if they're set up properly) are usually your best bet for the cleanest signal.

Then, double check your frequencies. If they're not correct, then you won't be receiving anything, because the transmitter you chose with those frequencies will be too far away. If you're sure you've got your frequencies right, and you're close enough to the transmitter—and you have a low-loss line to the USB stick, see what the signal strength software shows—this software was included on a CDROM if you bought the stick from a retailer.

Other than that, I can't honestly suggest anything much more to think of for troubleshooting. It's just the normal getting a television signal right, but a little more stringent on the requirements.

Update about iPAQ ebook software

2011-07-12T22:04:00.001+12:00

Books on the move

Last year, I posted a quick blog entry about the state of free software for reading eBooks on the iPAQ. It seems I missed one other piece of software out, and boy is it a winner—aside from the few gotchas. The software's called ZuluReader, and once I point it at a collection of ebooks in EPUB format, I'm away and laughing.

ZuluReader Portable is a reader specifically for portable devices, and provided you stick to a couple of simple rules, you should be enjoying books on your portable device without any significant issues. The first general rule? You can't have unsupported files in the directory you point ZuluReader at, otherwise it has a nasty habit of falling on its nose and being unstartable until you correct the initial error by removing any files that don't work in ZuluReader. The second thing isn't a killer, but it does require leaving the application if you decide to change the fontsize used by the main program. Of course, you can simply re-start the application, and everything comes back.

The ZuluReader Portable program has a set of icons on the screen that are easy to figure out how to use, and because EPUB files allow for reflowing text, you're able to adjust fontsize up or down to suit without breaking things too badly. Books with pictures could be a different story, depending upon how big those pictures are, and whether the pictures scale well to a device that has a 240x320 screen. That bit, I don't know, as I don't seem to have any books with embedded images in (aside from covers, that is)—I've yet to find them.

Books on the screen

Of course, ZuluReader Portable has a big brother too, allowing you to read, organise and even create ebooks on the PC. There's also sufficient glue embedded into the program to allow you to send ebooks to whatever device you happen to be using, though you do have to have some form of ActiveSync or modern equivalent installed. The screenshots look pretty good, though different from the Mobile version. In addition, it's not the easiest piece of software in the world to use, so do grab the documentation—it will be really useful.

Needless to say, this piece of software has made reading ebooks a whole lot more fun, instead of limiting me to books available in Microsoft's .lit format. I'm happy...

Does Google+ get a plus from me?

2011-07-12T20:40:00.001+12:00

Summary

My initial assessment of Google+, which I’ll hereby summarise as simply Plus. I joined Google+ yesterday, and started getting used to the various additional functions I now have. There’s some good stuff to look forward to, but there’s still a couple of niggly warty things to work out.

For starters, Plus has some advantages for me, in that it attempts to integrate several of the aspects of Google that I use in one interface. The items I can directly access get bumped into their own tab, meaning I get to keep the previous tab contents - at least until I click on the +brickviking, which then takes me up to the top of the Plus hierarchy, no matter what task I clicked on it from.

New stuff

Apps-wise, Plus doesn’t add much beyond what I already have, bar the Circles addition, Hangout and the serious rewrite of the Profile screen. So, the warts and the bonuses of Plus - hard to summarise in one short document. The warts seem to only be little niggly “I can’t find out how to do this”, “Too many steps to do A or B” or simply “We don’t support doing that yet”. As for the bonuses - well, there’s the obvious takeup of Hangouts, the ability to finely sort your contacts into categories, with your choice of how those circles interact, if at all.

Warts

Yes, so far, it has warts. Simply put, things just aren’t as intuitive to do as I’d expect. I couldn’t initially figure out how to make posts to circles, until I figured out how to actually select a circle then choose “Feed for this circle” - that then makes any of the posts from me appear only to members of that circle.

As for Hangouts, the only real bug I’ve found so far is that trying to type into the text chat portion simply doesn’t work, though I did figure out a way around this. Find another text field in the main browser window, type in some text, highlight the text, and copy the text to the clipboard. Switch back to the Hangouts window, and paste from the clipboard. You should then be able to keep typing as you normally would. This is just one of the weird problems that needs to be fixed. In addition, the application occasionally seems to think the microphone’s muted, even when it’s not.

Bonuses

Hangouts are a fantastic idea. There’s the obvious comparison with Facebook’s Video Chat feature, but Hangouts has the edge, as it works on all three major platforms. Facebook currently only supports Windows and Mac OS X.

Circles are a rather neat UI tweak to manipulate existing data about contacts. It’s not exactly anything revolutionary, however it’s a nice touch and a nice way to do sub-setting. Facebook does have lists, but the interface to add people to each list is quite different. Facebook loads the list of friends as a big list, and lets you choose which lists those people are in with a dropdown on each friend’s entry. Circles allows you to drag contacts into each circle you create, and the focus is on the groups you create, not the individuals.

Feeds are basically Buzz, which contains (at your discretion) tweets, other RSS feeds you happen to be following, and other Buzz posts. Again, nothing stupendous, more of what they did previously. However, you can drill down, selecting feeds based on what circle you’ve selected. Trying to do the same thing with Facebook is nigh on impossible.

Summary

I suspect that Hangouts probably won’t be wildly popular, due to most people probably wanting real interaction instead of just via monitors, cameras and microphones. Adding people to the Hangout isn’t exactly intuitive, so I created a circle specifically for adding people to for hangouts - that way, I can select the circle, head off to the stream, and click the “Start a hangout” button on the right hand side.

The fact that Hangout’s plugin is installable to Linux gives Plus the edge, but I don’t think it’ll take Facebook too long to implement a plugin that also works with Linux browsers, if they haven’t already done so. After all, Skype works with cameras on Linux, there’s no reason why they can’t implement that into the Linux plugin too.
And my verdict? Yes, Google+ gets a Plus from me.

There's a python in my shell

2011-03-14T19:11:00.002+13:00

I guess I shouldn't have woken up this morning. I've just seen someone spend 24 hours around at my place, trying to get their machine to the point of being able to boot up a Linux system. They succeeded after a lot of asking questions in the machine's setup, and then they decided to try something I'd never seen before.

For what it's worth, they were installing SourceMage. But the flash in the pan was, once they'd installed gcc and gazillions of other programs provided with SourceMage, they set their init shell to /usr/bin/python. Then they rebooted and loaded the kernel, which started off Python, and typed:

>>> import os
0
>>>

It all went from there... sigh. Sometimes I like geeks and the things they do. I must admit though, I'd never thought of this one.

No doubt you lot would have already found out about the earthquake I was in, which wasn't as bad as the very recent earthquake in Japan—exacerbated by a huge tsunami. Still, our earthquake was bad enough, causing a few cracks in our house, our power and water to be off for more than a week, and internet took even longer than that. Still, I'm alive—unlike 200-odd others, the wife's great, and we're doing well while I type up this note. To all of you who asked, thank you for your messages of support. I was touched especially by one message that was forwarded by snailmail from an email frem the Open Cobalt and SecondLife AWG groups—thanks to you all, especially. I'm only sorry it took me so long to get back to you all.

Please, if you haven't considered it yet, do think about sending support to Japan. They need it.

Later ...

Anyone for a good book?

2010-12-19T14:22:00.006+13:00

Something to say about Reading

Some of my many books

iPAQ software ebook readers

When comparing electronic reader programs for the PocketPC platform, I'm dismayed by the paucity of offerings. There aren't too many options available for free, and a lot of the programs are somewhat limited by the small amount of memory available to use on my iPAQ. For reading html, there's always the included Internet Explorer, for text, you can use Word, but those aren't usually what ebooks are delivered in. For example, there's epub, pdf, lit, pdb and a score of others. Programs that support one format don't usually support other formats, so to read all the formats, I have to install multiple programs.

I finally found something positive to say about Microsoft's Reader program - at least on my little iPAQ, it works better than the competing Freda and hasn't hiccuped once on any of the .lit books I've fed it. In contrast, every few pages or so in Freda, I'd have to drop into "Book Properties" and back to the page before I could view the next few pages, as otherwise I was presented with black screens, or the screen simply wouldn't refresh with the new page. What a shame I can't actually activate Microsoft Reader on my device, as Microsoft doesn't support running the ActiveX applet on the iPAQ. In addition, I'm stuck with the size of the font the program chooses to display some book text in, which isn't the same as the fontsize in the font settings page. If the .lit file specifies a font size, I'm unable to override that. Add to that, the only format the reader program seems to support is Microsoft's own .lit, meaning I have to go somewhere else for anything else.

Mobi software released Mobipocket, which supports some common formats (pdb, txt, html) but not others (pdf, epub); in addition, it costs. In comparison, Freda is free software, and supports reading epub documents, but doesn't support pdb or pdf. And to read pdf, I had to install PocketXPDF—thankfully it seems to work well if I use the "Plain Text" mode. This does the job much better than trying to run Adobe's official offering, which seems to assume we like panning the page back and forth to read a page, and seems to have been built for devices with screens that are 640 pixels wide, or even 800 pixels, and doesn't provide a "render in plain text" mode.

Other alternatives

I've been looking for an effective portable device to read ebooks in multiple formats; PDF, epub, lit, HTML or even plain text are the formats I seem to be dealing with recently, but I suspect I won't be dropping $299 on the local eReader—the Kobo. Nor would I be able to afford the Sony eReader, and the Amazon Kindle isn't available in New Zealand—and costs a bunch, just like the others. I suspect the disadvantage of all these eReaders is that they only read books (or occasionally play music in addition) and are expensive for what they do. If you add in the cost of the books, often you have a ebook solution that isn't much less expensive than a paper version, with the only real positives being the fact you can store multiple books on one slim device, and you can—depending on what country you're in—purchase and download books wirelessly. But you'd better not drop it, or you'll be paying out more money.

In addition, I could quite imagine having more than the thousand books capacity that the Kobo provides internally. Thankfully the Kobo designers included a SD slot, though when putting a large SD card into the Kobo you'd better be prepared to wait a while until the Kobo has finished cataloging the books. I put my 2Gb SD card into a shop's sample Kobo, but after three minutes I gave up waiting. Clearly, if you're going to put books onto a 2Gb SD card, you'll probably leave the card in the device. In addition, I quite often want to do other stuff with a portable device aside from just read ebooks—sometimes I want to browse the web, play some music, play a quick game of Sudoku to while away the time, or maybe even take some pictures. Devices that do most—if not all of these things—are available for nearly the same cost as the more expensive readers, and provide me with all the other stuff I want to do. About the only negative is the shorter battery life in comparison.

In addition, I want colour screens. Some of the books I read have (wow!!) colour diagrams in them, and I'd hate to reduce them to 16 greys. So colour is pretty much mandatory for me—one reason why the battery life is shorter. Nobody's made an e-ink device in colour yet, or not that I've seen.

Anyone for a book?

Books are dead, long live Ebooks, A debate?

I recently watched a debate whose premise was "From the book to the hard drive: books are dead", featuring some of our local literati and other notable presences. In essence, two teams of three members had to debate whether books in paper form were well on the way to being buried, or keeping pace with modern alternatives. Needless to say, the debate was adjudged a success for the team for the negative—that is, that the book has not died, and is still relevant.

But that rather begs the question, doesn't it? Personally, I find I'll read an e-book in preference to a real book for one reason—portability. With a real book, it can come in any one of six different formats—fourteen if you add in children's book formats—and can be as thick or as thin as the pages allow. In addition, you have to remember to carry around some sort of bookmark if you can't remember the page you're on. I refuse to dog-ear my pages just to retain the current page number—eventually, folding those page corners will mean the corners start falling off. Then there's the weight, again dependent upon if the book's a hardcover, a trade paperback (my preferred format) or a smaller paperback, and—again—how many pages were put into the book. Occasionally, publishers will add extra pages in to promote further books either by the author themselves, or other authors that the company just happens to also publish for. Then there's the dustjacket if the book's a hardcover.

Then there's the quality of paper used—most books seem to use a paper that yellows readily, and very few books I own actually have the "white" paper so loved by booklovers. Leaving them in the sun—or even strong light—causes this yellowing that's impossible to reverse, and looks ugly. The paper becomes quite brittle, easily tearing and difficult to repair correctly. Using sellotape is a definite no-no, but there aren't many cheap repair tools that actually work. Also, if the glueing job isn't up to snuff, then you start losing pages from the spine almost as soon as you start reading. I have at least three paperbacks that run the risk of losing tens of pages this way.

Instead, with a portable device it's always the same size, it's always the same thickness and weight, has no corners to dog-ear, only has to be charged up every so often, and is eminently readable in most conditions if you've got decent hands. For the readers that have their own backlight, you can have the device in most lighting conditions, but with the ones that don't, you do have to consider ambient lighting conditions, but at least for the e-ink displays, you don't have much reflectivity of the screen. Then there's the fact that you don't have to break a book's spine—a pet peeve of mine, but rather easily done in today's books. In fact, you don't have to turn any pages, you simply press buttons or stroke the screen to turn pages.

My only regret is that the manufacturers haven't been able to bring the manufacturing costs down to the extent where a good—and I am talking good book reader won't cost you much more than it would cost to get ten or twelve books. Devices currently tend towards smaller page sizes because it's easier to produce a small display (or a larger greyscale display) than it is to do a full colour screen of say, an A4 page in size. Small screens also make for a more portable device—one that can be slipped into a pocket, instead of a bag. Indeed, with cellphones, there are already e-reader programs that duplicate what the Kindle and their kin do. And in addition, it's a computer and communications device. Wonderful!

But...

However, in favour of books—and I am talking about paper and hardboard here—are some of those same things I have mentioned. Publishers are able to produce books in multiple formats, small for handbags, large for coffee table presentation and large format imagery. In addition, they can add in pictures from esteemed artists, cover the books in a protective dustjacket (mostly to market the books) or print directly on the cover—typical for paperbacks of any size—again, to market the book so someone would want to pick it up and buy it. Some publishers even add their own bookmark for hardcover books. And fold-out maps are a rare addition that you'll never seen on any electronic device—who has a fold-out screen on their e-reader?

They don't require batteries, don't require energy to operate—except when lighting conditions are poor, will often take a drop without damage unless you happen to be reading in the bath, in that case books of any type will get wet. The only storage they require is a space on a bookshelf, preferably not dusty, not flooded with light, and not prone to mold. In return, books give joy, tears, thoughtfulness, or in some rare cases, inspiration.

Vive la book!

A little success

2010-08-05T22:31:00.000+12:00

Nothing left but air in the middle

A few days ago, I finally completed this little puzzle from Rubik that I'd bought back at Easter-time instead of a chocolate egg—I ended up with chocolate later of course, but I digress. It took me a while, but I finally sat down and worked on it during an afternoon, and while I'm not sure I can repeat the effort, I have succeeded this once, at least. The idea is to guide six little coloured balls into the cups on the outside of the sphere, the trick is, the two inner spheres are weighted, and are on pivots. The spheres also have a limited number of ways that you can get a ball out to the outer sphere due to the placement of the holes in each respective sphere. And you have to make sure that any of the balls you already got out don't fall back into the innards of the sphere.

It's the only Rubik's puzzle aside from the links and Rubik's Magic that I've succeeded with, my memory lets me down for the Cubes. It put me in mind of the fact that we can't all achieve the great things in life, because there simply aren't enough of us with the sort of impetus to achieve those. So, we have to make do with little stuff—the love we give to our partner, the achievement of a puzzle, the correction of somebody else's source code—all these are little things, but for those of us that do them, the fact that they are done at all means something.

Of penguins, cafés and mighty warriors

2010-07-17T13:57:00.000+12:00

Café World is a massive time sink

Anyone who plays Café World already knows this, of course. Since we started playing it, I think I've watched the total sum of about two hours of television. And that's over eight weeks ago. Of course I wasn't watching a lot of television anyhow, but it was more than an hour a week. That's just one of the effects.
Businesses seem to want Facebook banned, and with somewhat good reason. The games that are
provided with Facebook are designed to get your face in front of the screen and hold it there for quite a while, with titles such as Farmville getting over sixteen million distinct users, or at least that's Zynga's claim. Café World isn't far behind, claiming over twelve million. All these games take time, energy and concentration to play, time that could well be spent actually doing the job instead of surfing the web. The good aspects of Facebook are unfortunately outweighed by the design of the games. And let's face it, if the games weren't great to play, they wouldn't have thirty million users just on two games alone.
Even the children have options these days, with online games such as Club Penguin keeping younger eyeballs on screens. This has the net effect of children pestering their parents for an online subscription so they can actually BUY stuff for their penguin and puffles (a creature you can buy in the game). Then there's miniclip.com, which also offers easy to run games that don't need anything much more than a browser and a relatively recent machine to play them. Of course, World Of Warcraft (WoW for short) seems to lead the world in numbers of people playing, and it's also subscription-based, though it's certainly not run from the browser. It has a DVD's worth of content that gets updated quite often, pushing the disk space requirements up even further.
I still don't know if I have to turn in my subscription to the DVD rental shop yet, I guess time will tell.

A computer without enough hardware

2010-05-15T20:34:00.007+12:00

I walk the line

I finally did something with the machine I was having trouble with. Turns out I won’t be using it for a NetBSD machine after all—it’s been set aside as a machine to run Café World, from FaceBook. Why? Because it’s not running anything else except for Google Chrome, Xubuntu and Café World. It's not able to be pimped out any more than it already is, as I don't have the CDROM drive that goes in the multi-function bay. What were Compaq thinking when they released this range of machines? That people would not want to add a second hard drive or more memory? I’m guessing that at the time it was released, they thought nobody would want more than 512Mb of memory on their machine—where have I heard that quote before...

Anyhow I set the machine up as an attempt to try running Café World better than the last time I tried to run it on Windows XP. So far at least, it appears to have been somewhat of a success, even though it has less resources available than the 2.8GHz Celeron machine. To refresh memories, the machine has a 1.3GHz Celeron, 512Mb of memory, and (now) a 10Gb drive with Xubuntu on it. Nothing else to get in the way of running Chrome, and running Café World in that browser. I ought to retain most of the speed I saw on fatty (the 2.8GHz machine) without the game slowing down because the computer’s going to fetch something or rehash the stored files database or check out what packages need updating, or whatever. The only time the game slows down is when it’s swapping, which can really impact gameplay negatively. Currently the only other disadvantage is that I have to keep switching the monitor over between the two machines.

So, what else will happen to this machine? Other than me putting the CMOS battery back in (done), and figuring out what the weird GRUB2 error message is, there’s nothing much else to do to it. Aside from adding twin (a screen-like terminal multiplexer, but with window borders), that is. And no, I don't have the nice monitor any more—that went back to the owner.

No Competition, and cheap build quality.

2010-05-12T19:54:00.000+12:00

Windows XP SP3, 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 (Celeron), 512Mb memory, Google Chrome, Flash plugin. And Café World.

In short, a bit of a disaster. You'd think that Microsoft should have been able to walk away with this one laughing. However, it was not to be so. The weird bit is, Windows XP (SP3) has been quite good at other stuff on my computer. It's competently executed Second Life clients better than I was able to run them under Linux, and of course, it's usually been easier to play games under Windows, especially games written for Windows. This time, I tried out Café World on Facebook under Windows and under Linux, and I think you can guess the result. Linux won. Hands down. No competition. Not even close.

I watched the hard drive activity while the game was running under XP, and the hard drive was running pretty much flat out all the time, I'm assuming that the computer was running out of main memory, so it was going back to the hard drive to grab a bit more space to swap bits of itself out, then requiring that piece about five seconds later, so swapping it back in, etc etc etc. In short, I was the victim of a concept known as disk thrashing, when the computer simply hasn't got enough memory to keep up with everything it needs to do.

If you're asking what else I had running in the background, there was pretty much nothing aside from what would be running on a Windows XP Home computer with most of the services turned off. In short, there wasn't any other computing activity that would have impacted on Chrome, which was the only application running with an exposed window.

The astute among you would have noticed I didn't state what version of Linux, but for argument's sake, it's the latest Ubuntu. Of course it's got all of the fixes from the 2.2 series right up through the later series of 2.6.32 kernels. In comparison, Windows XP has had whatever fixes have been applied to the NT kernel throughout the years it's been around (since about 2000 or so). Is it fair to compare these two operating systems purely on the basis of one admittedly hard-on-the-system game executed through the web browser running the Flash plugin? Maybe, maybe not. However, the stats are there.

My wife has a very old machine (600 MHz Pentium 3, 384Mb memory, running Kubuntu) and put simply, her system lagged seriously when she tried Farmville. It lagged even worse when she tried Café World. So I tried out a wee experiment, because I can do this on a local network system, you see. I ssh'd from her machine to my machine running Ubuntu, and turned on X forwarding, and compressed the link too, just to smooth things out a bit. Then I started Google Chrome, and pointed it at Café World. Put simply, it still worked, although the connection was a little laggy as would be expected with an encrypted SSH link. Given I couldn't try the same thing from her Linux box to my Windows XP setup I didn't even bother trying that scenario, given the way the game had misbehaved under Windows.

Hardware failure

A good long time ago, I bought a set of headphones with a microphone. At the time, I loved the sound I got from these headphones—needless to say, I still love the sound, but some of the aspects of hardware build quality are starting to show their weaknesses. I've had to open up the volume control again for the third time, this time to replace a broken earth wire in the microphone lead. It used to be that if you had a microphone lead, you could almost run over it with a truck and the darn thing would still keep trucking. That's not been the case for a couple of decades. Cheaper prices have seen off the evil demon of quality. These days, if it breaks, you just go out and buy a new one, as it's typically cheap enough to buy. What a shame, except I can't even afford (usually) the cheap, poor quality leads, so I have to patch them up myself. Luckily I'm reasonably handy with a soldering iron, so I had that apart, and crossed my fingers as I tied down two connections again. It seems to work well now, but I don't know how long the fix will last. I hope it lasts longer than the previous fix.

What is this I see before me?

2010-05-06T22:11:00.000+12:00

I don't quite know why I took notice of this, but I did rather wonder where the rest of it went...

What, Windows again?

2010-04-23T21:26:00.000+12:00

Install woes

Yep. I finally got sick of the fact that my Solaris wouldn't boot. So I turned the 10 Gb drive into a Windows XP Home install. The install worked well enough, but the Windows installer needed to put files onto the first drive into a special partition. Linux lost a bit of swap space in the end, but I figured it was worth it. It had been the first time I'd spotted an install where the system drive wasn't the boot drive. The other weird thing to get my head around was that my Windows drive was called H: and not C:—which was the boot drive.

I soon found out that 10 Gb was nowhere near enough for the games I wanted to add. So I retired a 40 Gb hard drive out of brick, copied my Windows install over to the drive using gparted, then tried to get it bootable using the Windows CD. Unfortunately for me, the Windows installer insisted on putting boot files onto the first hard disk, and wouldn't continue unless I allowed this to happen. In the end, I gave up, toasted the copy, and created three partitions. One partition had grub and Linux kernels so I could still boot Linux from the first drive, even though the rest of the Linux files were held on the second drive, I just had to do the normal twiddle with the file system tables. The second partition was for the Windows files, and the third partition was for Windows virtual memory.

Hardware issues

I stuck the Windows CDROM back in and booted the computer. The Windows Setup program merely said "Setup is examining your hardware configuration", then the screen went blank, and the drive activity light started flickering about six times a second. In the end, the only way I was able to get Setup to continue was to pull the power plug out of the first hard disk while Setup was examining the hardware, then plug the power back in while Setup was loading the rest of itself into memory. I don't recommend doing that, of course. But I finally got Windows XP installed last night and spent the rest of this morning, and most of this afternoon installing all the updates, along with SP3, Quicktime, Adobe Reader, and so on, as well as Quake 4 and the Command & Conquer games I bought.

One thing I found out rapidly is that Windows requires reboots after most of the updates I'd put in. Take Acroread as an example: I installed the latest copy of Acroread, and was fine. Then I told Acroread to check for updates, it then downloaded the update, installed it, and required me to reboot the computer. I even saw that same issue with Windows 7. I seriously don't miss that aspect of Windows.

So now I have two copies of Windows XP, one Pro and one Home. The main reason for installing XP Home is so that I can actually play games on a machine with an AGP video card. The machine's also considerably faster than the 1GHz Duron, although it doesn't have as much memory. I'd probably add some other 3D programs too, such as blender, OpenCobalt and Second Life clients. I have a lot of older games that might work under Windows XP that won't work under Vista (or Windows 7) so my machine will be good for that.

That machine, part two

2010-04-23T19:14:00.000+12:00

Yes, that one

About a week before, I'd received a computer to analyse. It had ... issues. After typing up the article, I tried installing SP2 again, and got a warning that WGA had not been installed on the machine. When I installed WGA, and tried to reinstall SP2, I got a warning that the version of Windows that had been installed, got installed with a Volume Licensing Key that had been subsequently de-allocated (rendering it invalid). As a result, the machine no longer had a Windows install that could have any other updates applied to it, if those updates depended upon WGA. I duly rang owner, and suggested that they either get themselves a valid Windows license and CDROM, or consider the purchase of a new machine. They got back to me, and told me I could (effectively) keep the machine, though they did take the monitor back.

So, that was the end of the line for that install of Windows XP Pro. I nuked the install, copied my wife's copy of Kubuntu to the hard drive, stuck it back inside the machine, and added another memory stick for good measure. Powered it up, and struck the first problem. The machine wouldn't accept more than 512Mb on the motherboard. So, haul out the added memory, powered back up, and down, and up several times while I tried getting the hard drive grubbed, before finally growing a clue and hauling out my Ubuntu 9.04 CD, putting the drive into my main machine, booting the CD, running "Reinstall grub" and so on. Then I pulled out the drive, rinse repeat, into the Compaq. Booted, but was really really slow. I couldn't understand this, because it was a 1.3GHz Celeron, so it should have been faster than my main computer. Also, network was really slow, and only 30% of the packets were getting through. Rapidly realising that the machine wasn't a working one, I put wife's drives back into her original machine, and left her to it, feeling rather cheesed off that my attempt to help out hadn't gone at all well.

Thinking on the problem

Next day, I hauled the hard drive back out, stuck it back in fatty, copied my Windows XP Home installation (which I'd installed less than three days before) over to the drive using gparted (nice tool, by the way), and did the futzing around required to boot Windows. Except it only got so far before stopping. Thinking that it was just Windows playing silly with me, I booted it up again, and got the same reaction... it would only get so far, and then stop. Giving up on that for a moment, I flipped the machine over to boot Linux, and did a speed test on the drive. Unusually, I got some seriously divergent results, from 8Mb per second up to 17Mb per second. I decided to eliminate the cabling, and tested the other three drives, which all varied by less than 0.1%. So, I suspect that not only was the OS giving trouble, but so was the hard disk. I've uhm, retired it.

I think what I'll do with the machine finally, is put a NetBSD drive back into the Compaq computer—which only takes one drive anyhow—and simply use it as a networked NetBSD. I don't know what else to do with a machine with Intel 815 graphics, 512Mb maximum memory, room only for one drive, and a proprietary CDROM which I don't have. So the machine doesn't show much chance for expandability. Ah well, so much for trying to help someone else out—but at least this time I got something for my troubles.

Twelve games and a drenching

2010-04-13T17:01:00.001+12:00

A ‘new’ old adventure

I finally tracked down a copy of “Command & Conquer - the first decade.” I’ve been looking for a while for this version, rather than the original Command & Conquer game that doesn’t work on Windows XP (or it doesn’t for me, anyhow). This collection is the first twelve "episodes", i.e. C&C, Red Alert, Tiberian Sun, Generals, the expansion packs, and so on. I’ll let you know how much fun I have. I wasn’t having much luck finding it until EB Games had themselves a sale, and finally brought some in. The last time I saw the collection was over three years ago, and I had to turn it down at the time because I didn't have the money—nearly $90. Thankfully I didn't pay that much today, due to the special, I only paid $35.00

The key to future typing

Anyhow, I’m typing this on a new cheap keyboard, because somehow my keyboard got drenched in tea when my teapot overflowed onto it. It feels quite different from my keyboard, so no doubt it’ll take me a while to get used to it. I had to go for a bargain keyboard, and I can feel it. My finger memory will need to be retrained as my previous keyboards were a different feel, with keys in slightly different places than this one. The Enter key is flaming huge in comparison, and the pipe symbol ‘|’ and backslash ‘\’ are down beside the right hand shift key. I haven’t had a keyboard like this for years!

I had a bit of an adventure when I bought the keyboard though. I need a PS/2 dongle to connect to a KVM I’m using. The first keyboard that I bought didn’t have the dongle in the package, so I had to take the keyboard back and get another one that had the PS/2 dongle. Now I’ve got it home, and it works well aside from the squashy keys. Let’s hope that this keyboard doesn’t have another spill, though the price is at least cheap enough to afford a replacement in a reasonably short space of time. I know I’ll hang onto the dongle though, so that I don’t have to go through the hassle of buying a keyboard just for the dongle.

Repair of an older computer’s OS

Some days, it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Someone I know had one of those days recently. They got given a computer by their boss, that had Windows XP installed onto it, but nothing had been updated since. They requested that I come over to help them as they couldn’t get email or the Internet going. When I got there, I immediately pulled the USB cable out of the DSL modem, which at least fixed the Internet problem, but only in part. I even managed to plug a printer in, plug a digital camera in, and print photos, all without issue. But I got stumped on the email, so I left it for the owner to talk to the ISP about. Yesterday, they spent most of the day on the phone to the ISP, trying to sort out the email problem, with the eventual decision by the ISP that the computer must be somewhat broken. That’s when I suggested they bring it over here, so I can work on it at my leisure. So far, it's got to me with these symptoms:

Updates won’t install onto it, due to the OS being not patched.
Google Chrome can’t be installed on to the OS, as it hasn't been brought up to SP3
Service Pack 2 won’t install on the OS, claiming it can’t be installed on this version of the OS
The web browser won’t go to Skype.com, the browser sits and waits, but doesn't go any further. The same thing happens when the user clicks the “webmail” link on the ISP’s home page—the browser simply sits there and the progress bar moves up to about five bars, then seems to stop.

Frankly, I smell a rat, and no doubt I'll be spending a fair amount of time just getting the computer to “do email”—I’ll let you all know what luck I have.

Another calculator, same as the first?

2010-03-25T22:18:00.003+13:00

A new purchase

I recently got another calculator for $10 from an online store. I saved $19.95, so I was happy. There was a reason not to be happy, but more about that later. It's still my first honest-to-goodness modern Hewlett Packard calculator—my previous HP was a HP34C and died long ago. But something struck me as soon as I received it in the post. It's another one of these calculators with a display that has two lines, one for the input calculation, the other shows the output from previous calculations. The display's almost exactly like the Casio FX-82MS with the same characters and annunciators, and the HP 10s even has a very similar keypad layout, only the occasional keys have been transposed, and the directional keypad is in a different position.

As well, the internal menu system is exactly like the FX-82MS, to the extent that if I compared the HP documentation and the Casio documentation, I'd find no mistakes on either calculator. Their documentation certainly differs though, even though they've both printed their respective instructions on a single sheet in multiple panels, the Hewlett Packard documentation is separated into distinct pages, and those pages don't take up an entire column as the Casio instructions do. I also found that the self-test on this calculator is almost (but not quite) identical to the FX-82MS. The key combination to start the test off is even the same: Shift-7-On. Once starting the test, keys in the keyboard test are pressed in exactly the same order as they would be on the MS, which makes for a slightly odd order on the HP's keypad. And I still haven't found out what all the numbers mean at the end.

So, is it a clone?

It's not absolutely a clone, and it has the advantage of being solar-powered like the FX-85MS, though I haven't seen one of those in this country. Nice for when you've got some nice bright sunshine, it keeps the watch-cell battery topped up with solar power, and makes the battery life a lot longer as a result. It also has a slide-on case just like the Casio, but slightly differently designed. The fit is tighter, for one, so the top's not quite as likely to fall off inadvertedly. It has exactly the same default ranges too, so if you couldn't find the FX-82MS, this HP 10s would do fine and be literally a drop-in replacement for it.

The LCD display and the colours selected for the fascia and keys mean that everything can be read clearly, and is easier to read than the MS, and it reminds me of the other white calculator body I have from Casio (the FX9700G Plus). However there's a slight anomaly when you look at the M+ key, the DT is supposed to be associated with it, but the way the design was done for that key isn't quite as together as for the 82MS. However, I can certainly live with it. The keys have a good positive travel and don't have a tendency to offset, unlike the keys on the Casio body which can on occasion look a bit higgledy piggledy. All in all, the Hewlett's quite a good calculator, though the lack of programmability is reflected in its price. It seems strange that somewhere in the documentation on the HP web site, there is mention that the calculator has 128 Kilobytes of memory, I'm trying to figure out what on earth uses up all that space, given there's no programmability.

And the reasons for being unhappy?

About the only problem that I had was when I first received the calculator and turned it on, the display wasn't quite right. In that top line of the display, there was a missing line of dots. I'd normally have shrugged this off, but in the case of this calculator, there's little enough font information as it is, as the font on the top line is only six pixels high by five pixels wide, with an additional pixel's worth of space between each character cell. So having every single character missing its second line of pixels was a bit disconcerting. If it wasn't so cheap, I'd have probably returned it to the retailer by now, asking if I could have another one of the same value. But the cost of return is nearly as much as the calculator cost me to begin with, so I probably won't bother. And as it was, using the self-test cured the missing line of pixels, so I don't have to send this back to the company after all. I would have felt like a charlie if they'd slung it back my way saying "It works, deal with it". I was also hoping like anything that this calculator was programmable, but it was not to be. Ah well.

Accuracy!

For simple tests, it shows roughly the same degree of accuracy as other models, though there are some differences. For example, this test:

(asin (acos (atan (tan (cos (sin(9)))))))

results in the figure

9.000000002

being displayed, instead of the FX-82MS' result of 8.999998637. So maybe there are differences after all. After taking away the 9.00000000 and then multiplying by 1E9, we get 2.124, which makes me wonder if this calculator has an extra couple of digits of precision up its sleeve. Weird.

Where are the corners?

2010-03-17T21:48:00.002+13:00

A new toy from the Rubik stable

You’ve heard me talking about my Rubik’s Cube family, not once, but several times and also about the other non-cube members of the puzzle family. Well, today I bought another non-cube puzzle. This one contains three clear spheres that are hooked together with pivots, and if you look through, you can see six little coloured plastic balls, nestling in the centre sphere. The outside one’s got knobs on, and there’s a steel ball bearing on each of the two inner spheres. So not only do you have to fight logic, but now you have gravity to contend with too. It’s called the Rubik’s 360°, and it's not like any other puzzle I've ever played with.

Why another puzzle?

I’d like to use the excuse that I was getting ready for Brain Week, but frankly that’d be a bit pointless after Saturday. No, I simply liked the look of this puzzle, and thought I’d add it to my collection just because I like it. It also happens to be my equivalent to purchasing an Easter egg—except this one will last much much longer, after the chocolate has become a dim and distant memory. It's also better for my waistline, not that I have much of one anyhow. In addition, I would like to add a couple of other puzzles that I don’t already have, the Megaminx and the Holey Megaminx. I suspect the second will be easier to do because there’s no centres to match the rest of the face against, but I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before... anyhow, they both have twelve faces, each face shares its pieces with five other sides, and they do look quite difficult. One variant has six colours, where opposite sides have the same colour, but the other variant has twelve colours, to remove the chance that two pieces with the same colour pairing can get mismatched. No doubt there'll be other puzzles I want to lay my hands on. Not only are there single-layered versions, but there are double-layered Gigaminx, three-layered Tetraminx, and four-layered Petaminx, though I've no idea what the last one looks like. I've also seen online versions of the Megaminx, and it's easy to use but hard to get used to without the real thing in my hands.

Have camera, will snap

2010-02-13T20:43:00.002+13:00

A new dawn

A few months ago, someone I knew was finishing a course, and I was invited to the leaving ceremony. That was fair enough, except his mother, with even more unsteady hands than me, wanted me to use her camera to take some pictures of the ceremony. It was at that stage that I found out how badly I sucked at photography, and how badly the camera did its job. It was a little point-and-shoot camera, but I don't remember it having any optical zoom.

I gave up in the end, only having taken about five shots. I've no idea how any of them turned out, nor have I asked since. It was way before then that I decided I wanted to get into digital photography, but it was at that leaving ceremony that I decided I was never going to pick up one of those little cameras again. At least, not without a much better idea of how to get the best out of it.

I finally entered the age of digital photography today, with the arrival yesterday of my first proper digital camera. No, I'm not talking about those hosey little webcams, that can barely reach 640x480 for motion, and maybe 1024x768 for still pictures. Nor the webcam that happens to be on my cellphone, at 1.3 Mpix, which only does 1280x1024 for a maximum size. Instead, this little camera (the Fujifilm Finepix S5600) which was first released five years ago, features 5 Megapixels on the CCD. That doesn't sound like a lot in these days of 10/11/12/14 Megapixel cameras, but it still manages to show a respectable 2592x1944 pixels in 4:3 mode, or 2736x1824 in 3:2 (the same format as 35mm film.) That allows for a full size print roughly A4 in size, and that's without enlarging it.

I have a whole lot yet to learn about how exposure, aperture, shutter speed and ISO rating all interact to produce the perfect picture, but with this camera, I get to find all that out, as I'm able to tweak most of these settings by hand. Of course, the camera has a really good automated mode for those point-&-shooters that don't want to fiddle, but I decided early on that if I wanted to get into photography, I wanted what I see through the viewfinder to be exactly the same as the picture I get in the camera. Unfortunately, this camera doesn't provide that, though it's pretty darn close. There's two reasons. First, it's not a dSLR, though it looks like a baby brother of one. I have to admit though, that a lot of the reviewers that reviewed this camera when it came out said that it's pretty close in features to the bottom end dSLR cameras. The second reason is the failing that all cameras have: the viewfinder. In this case, it's a 115,000 pixel 1.8 inch display, and though it's crisp and clear, the resolution and its size really lets it down. The viewfinder is no better, though you at least have the advantage of sealing out the remainder of surrounding light, pretty useful when it's bright sunlight and you can't see the screen even with the brightness pushed up a bit.

Looking up the first review of the camera, with its impressive (for the time) optical zoom basically decided me on it. All the previous cameras I had looked at in the same price range featured 3x optical zoom and maybe a bit better digital zoom. There's plenty of things on the Internet already steering us away from digital zoom, as it typically reduces the number of pixels it initially captures. So I wanted high optical zoom, even with the need for something to stabilise the camera with. My only remaining problem was how much I was going to have to pay for it. Luckily, I stumbled across two things. One: somebody to sell it at a price I could afford. Two: something I could sell that would give me that much money. I sorted those both out, now I have the camera in my hot hands. I was exceptionally lucky, as the owner basically threw in everything with the camera that wasn't any use with other cameras they already owned. The fact that it is a second-hand camera helped to drop the price too. It's not ancient, which means that it has more of the modern technology inside of it to help out.

In addition to the camera unit, and the two cables that came with the camera, I also got a camera bag, a 2 Gb xD card, a 256 Mb xD card, a circular polarising lens, and a lens hood that also features a 52 mm thread and an additional 55 mm thread for adding other filters or lenses. All of this means that if I can find further lenses (whether 55 mm or 52 mm, or larger if I purchase step-up rings), I can actually make the S5600 the core of my own little optical warehouse. This comes with a qualifier though, they have to be suitable for digital cameras, and they have to work with the lens that's there already. The large 10x zoom can be expanded further by a 2x telephoto lens that can be added, which makes my total optical zoom ratio up in the low 20s. And that's before I kick in the digital zoom, not that I ought to be using that anyhow. If I want to go in the other direction, I can screw on a wide angle lens, which gives me a slightly wider field of view than the admittedly underpowered native 38 mm minimum focal length of the camera.

But first, I need to learn the ropes. That means getting to grips with all the features this camera has, before I start adding bits to it that I don't understand why I'm adding them for. So, needless to say, I'll be a happy snapper. No, there won't be too many pictures featured out of this camera that'll actually make it onto the Internet, but I hope you'll be happy with the ones I do show you all. And with that, I'm off to go get another shot.

Disproving theories is easier than proving them

2010-01-26T16:19:00.000+13:00

They made them good, back in them days

2009-12-24T16:57:00.005+13:00

Well, not that good really, but okay. I'm talking specifically about a little hand mixer with two beaters, I'm not sure if it was a little Kenwood or a Sunbeam. However, back in those days (I'm talking about the 1980s here) they didn't bother putting on stupid secure screws so Joe So Lame Lewser couldn't get in and try to fix it herself. They just put on two Phillips screws, and left it at that. The reason I mention this is: I've just saved myself what could have been a very costly repair bill by repairing the mixer myself. Thankfully the fix was simple. If the mixer had those "other" screws in, the ones with the heads that only professional repair places should be able to undo, then I probably wouldn't have been able to repair what ended up to be a dead simple fault.

The symptoms: one of the two mixer blades would lock in, but the other one would no longer lock in, and kept falling out. I got a little sick of trying to use it with just one working blade, so I undid the two screws, hoping like anything I could get it back together again even if I couldn't fix what was originally wrong. Luckily I found what was wrong. Inside the mixer, a clip-washer had come off one of the rotor-gears, stopping it from working properly. After a good ten minutes which included removing the entire motor from the housing just to replace the clip washer, I finally got the clip washer back on, put everything back together again, making sure I put both springs back where they belonged (one had fallen off) replaced the washer I'd forgotten to put back on the first time, and shrugged my shoulders at the other missing washer, as there wasn't much I could do about it. As far as I could tell, the old mixer still worked in every other regard, so I had no reason to spend any more money getting a new one, so needless to say, I'm pretty pleased with myself. The only problem being, I still haven't finished the job, the other beater still flaps around like anybody's business, but hey, I did it myself. Chalk that one up to home repairs everywhere.

As long as you're extremely careful, and don't do anything stupid, a lot of simple faults can actually be repaired without having to cart the item off to a professional service centre. In saying this, don't bother with the repair if the item's still under warranty. And if the dead/missing/broken/faulty part involves items with more legs than you've got eyes, then forget it too. You'll only break the warranty, and you may end up with an item you can't repair (because you lack the tools/expertise/parts) and have to pay the full cost of the repair instead.

It’s all shiny, captain!

2009-12-20T20:31:00.001+13:00

To be fair, I haven’t seen this message in Google’s Wave interface very often, but this is the error message you get from the Wave interface when something’s gone pear-shaped. They generally provide a input box where you can type in what you were doing (“Looking at a wave”), and submit that to the technical people. You then have to refresh the page. This is much simpler than some other things I’ve seen happen, where browsers promptly die, very occasionally taking the operating system with them. Yes Sue, I’ve seen that happen.

It’s certainly in a “closed beta” stage, though “semi-open” would be a more correct term, as Google have been handing gobs of invites out to those who politely ask, or to those who get given one by a waver who is already on line. And you can tell the functionality’s not all there, though there are certainly things you can do. Who would have thought you could stream video and music twenty years ago? GoogleWave reminds me of a house that’s just being built, so random decisions about the wallpaper are getting made before some of the walls are even up. They’re sort of stringing cabling through the joists to bring power to the plasma television they have up on the wall behind me. And they’ve already changed what goes on the floors about seven times before they standardised on white concrete. Or was that wood panel? Nope, it was ceramic tiles, I think. But I think you get the point. We’re still finding out how to tie in everything else from twitter to blogs, music to live video, email, MSN chats, and lots of other stuff. But the remaining problem is: how do we use it without referring to whatever else we’ve all been doing before Google Wave came along?

That’s a little trickier.

At the moment at least, I’m using it as a glorified IRC client with fancy formatting, and “paste-where-you-like” functionality. As long as all parties are present on a wave, and nobody stomps on anyone else, it can be even more fun than IRC, purely because of the removal of the linear input structure mandated by IRC. The same applies to any Instant Message services, because they present information to the user in a continuous stream of lines. Google Wave does that bit better than any of the other messaging services I’ve used, including jabber. But I’m still trying to use it as a series of lines to communicate. And I’m not entirely sure that that’s what GoogleWave is good at. The fact that a conversation is just there, is great. Nobody has to worry about archiving it any more. Of course, if Google Wave goes teats-up, then we may need to restart using somewhere else as a server. It’s definitely a server-client architecture, and probably requires a good understanding of the infrastructure of the server before you let your users loose on it.

Other posited uses of it have been:

Live meeting notes
While a meeting is happening, you can have a large number of meeting participants also taking notes, all on the same page. This requires some discipline, to make sure that you don’t have a catfight. Certain people need to take charge of specific areas and not step outside those boundaries, at least not without good reason. Other people probably could cruise through, correcting any obvious mistakes that don’t get picked up in the first five minutes or so.
Wiki, or live F.A.Q.
GoogleWave doesn’t have quite the same formatting abilities as a matchbox, but you can at least use highlight, bold, italic, strikethrough, underline, and choose font, size and colour. Paragraphs come for free, so does paragraph formatting. Images come through as links, or occasionally pasted as inline images with a border to them. All other files seem to be relegated to attachment status. Most of the time, these are all the formatting items you need in a wiki, at least. F.A.Qs aren’t much better.
Document collaboration
If a more complicated document is required, somebody can set up the structure of the document, somebody else can concentrate on the subject matter, and somebody else can get the formatting (yes, that’s separate from structure) of the content correct. Takes a bit of work, but nothing that others aren’t used to already.
Show Off Page
Needless to say, there are those of us who just like to browse the gadgets. Gadgets are gobs of code that provide anything from simple functionality a step up from lists of sets to fullblown applications embedded into the middle of a wave. They provide anything from simple twitter feeds, to maps from GoogleMaps, to included youtube videos, to … well, you can pretty much come up with anything you like. But, you need to get your code correct. If you don’t, well, it’s recorded for all eternity afterwards. If this worries you, then stick to what others have written. As long as it’s well written, and doesn’t stomp all over other content, then it’s acceptable to put small amounts of gadgets into a wave. Some of them don’t play pretty with other wave content though.
And …
Well, the sky’s the limit… or at least the coding quality of the Google Services upon which GoogleWave is based.

That’s a really short summary, and doesn’t provide anything like a full summary. At the time that GoogleWave was announced to the world, there was a video released (a long 82 minute video) that described many of the features present in GoogleWave at that time. Since that time, there have probably been advances in the stability of the underlying code, as well as other people making gadgets. On top of all this, of course, is the content in the very large number of waves present when you enter with:public into the search box. People are obviously confident enough to take their content public, and not hide it away in a bunker somewhere. Of course, most of these are low-bandwidth, but there are probably a few examples of really good content. And with that I take my leave and wave goodbye.

See ya.

Trading on down

2009-11-28T21:38:00.006+13:00

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...

2009-11-14T21:12:00.001+13:00

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

2009-11-11T21:27:00.001+13:00

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?

2009-10-21T14:33:00.001+13:00

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

2009-09-27T22:00:00.001+13:00

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.

Of pages and spaces

2009-09-27T21:37:00.001+13:00

I’m all spaced out.

Well, I’m not really. Come to think of it, I just joined MySpace, so I should be anything but. Or does everyone think that an old fart like me joining MySpace means I’m spaced out? I don’t know, to be honest.

I’m on three other publically accessible blog sites, blogger.com, spaces.live.com and bebo.com, but I’ve found that of the four blogs I write semi-regularly for, only two of those can be directly posted to by using Writer. The other two blogs require that I use the browser and go directly to the website to use their web-based editor, or use a third-party plugin from ping.fm. One thing I’ve got quickly used to using in Writer is the three tabs where a post can be edited, or previewed as it may look on the site itself. Works well for spaces.live.com (of course, Microsoft do both Windows Live Writer and live.com) and blogger.com (which has a publically available API), but doesn’t seem to work at all for whatever Bebo and MySpace use as their non-publically-available API.

So. Apart from the evil chickens that say that “Facebook and MySpace are alien conspiracies to steal your soul”, a recent quote from IRC, no less… How do I get my blogging goodness all in one window? Simply put, at the moment, I don’t. I have to duck and dive amongst Writer and web pages, hopefully being able to cut-and-paste from the main two blogs that Writer does support, into the two that Writer doesn’t know how to write to. To add to this, bebo has no significant ability to format text; there’s no html encoding (that I know of), so no headers, emphasis, or italics. Thankfully, MySpace is a bit better in that regard.

Those were the days, my friend

Being online as long as I have been, I’ve seen a few changes. I started hearing about MySpace quite a while ago, but saw no real need to join it. I felt the same about Bebo—it was a thing that young people were a part of. Then I started getting involved, and taking a look at what you could do with Facebook, Bebo, MySpaces and Live.com. I’d already got to grips with blogger.com, due to it being a simple (at the time) blog-hosting site. The other three are anything but. In fact, to this date, Facebook users don’t even have their own blogspaces, even though MySpace (a comparable service) provides blogs to its users. I can’t say I’m one of the most “connected” people I know, even though I have a twitter feed, MySpace/Facebook/Live.com/Yahoo.com/Bebo pages, and others in addition. I don’t tweet from my cellphone, and in fact the only reason I had to use my cellphone recently in correlation to a social networking website was to get verified. Yes, Facebook uses SMS to make sure its users are real people. I’ve no idea who actually paid for the service, though it possibly turned up on my bill.

Your circuit’s dead, can you hear me, Major Tom?

Even with being available on multiple sites, like many other people I get the impression that very few people (aside from those I tell, of course) are even going to know I’m now a Live Blogger FaceSpacer BeBopper Tweeter unless they stumble across me in a “Oh, I’ll just see whose page I can randomly scan for” frame of mind. Frankly, who of us wants to do that? Surely we have better things to do than that? Well, apparently not—as it would appear, in a recent study, university (and college in America) students were apparently more wrapped up in their social networking lives than they were in their real-life courses, so much so that in some cases their grades were adversely affected, and in some even more extreme cases, their attendance at those courses. It makes me wonder why they didn’t just sit on a Pak’n’Save (a local supermarket) checkout for six months just so they could afford enough money for their computer instead of wasting tens of thousands in government student loans for courses they had trouble completing.

So. What do people most want from these social networking sites? I believe it’s to feel as if they belong. It’s not necessarily the geeks and geekettes that have the highest attendance either, as social networking sites play to normal people more than the average geek. After all, the geeks are possibly too busy retrofitting Linux to Granny’s 12 year old computer. And the largest base appears to be the 18-30 age group, as they’ve been the ones most exposed to it from a young age.

What ever happened to the time when late teens were seen sucking down sodas and bragging about their hot wheels? And actually spending face time with their peers?

Grand Angus, or King Pin?

2009-09-11T10:14:00.003+12:00

So, what’s this Big Burger Bang-Up about, anyhow?

Well, I decided I’d had enough of not getting any junk food in my life. So, I held a small competition. McDonalds and Burger King are both advertising new products in their range. Since when is that new? Since my wife and I decided we’d each like to try one. Only…to make it fair, we decided to try one of each—needless to say we well and truly went over our recommended daily intake yesterday. I got some money out of the bank (it’s an expensive process testing out fast food. You lose your money nearly as fast as they can steal it from you) and went to McDonalds first to try out their Grand Angus.

Aye, so what’s a Grand Angus?

Roughly speaking, it’s a burger made with Angus beef, salad greens, tomato, two slices of cheese, salad greens, mustard and mayonnaise (that I noticed), all presented on a oblong sour dough bun. Apparently the North American market has had that for years, but it’s only recently made an appearance here in New Zealand. It features New Zealand Angus beef too:

“…or occasionally Australian beef. But only if we can’t get any New Zealand beef…”

I like it, because it’s, well—beefy. Can’t say a lot about the salad greens that it came with, so I just shut up and ate them with the burger. They were fine. Really…just not on their own—I noticed they got a little bitter if I tried eating the greens on their own, and the situation wasn’t exactly resolved with the included mayonnaise. Anyhow, we had that, then we headed off to the Burger King (across the road) for the second part of our “Mighty Burger Bang—Up”.

And the King Pin? How come it “gets what it wants, when it wants it”?

Marketing. Frankly. It’s a longish bun (the same length as the sourdough bun) but a little narrower and a bit squashed-looking, onion rings (crumbed), the usual chicken pattie, cheese and some sauce. They even semi-divided it, though that ended up being a bit messy to separate, which spoiled the effect rather. To me, nothing too distinguished, nice but …. yeah. Personally I think the Grand Angus (even though it costs twenty cents more) has more … beef. That would kind of figure, seeing as it’s made of Angus beef. But never mind. The love of my life prefers the King Pin.

Opinion’s still divided?

Yup. I like one—she likes the other. Don’t get me wrong, she likes the Angus, but the King Pin was more of a hit with her. It’s got the chicken and bacon flavour as well as the onion rings, cheese and some sort of sauce. She found it nicer, with an overall better taste than the Angus. In her opinion, pretty darn nice and she’d do it again.

Will you ever be reconciled?

Don’t know, don’t care. I tend to have McDonalds once every two years if I’m lucky, and we have Burger King even less regularly. So, nice experiment (though an expensive one), but not one I feel like repeating more than once in a while.

The modern browser, and other worlds.

2009-09-07T21:15:00.001+12:00

Goin’ on a Safari diet

Earlier this year, I posted about Google Chrome and how good a score it got on my Windows XP Home system. Since then, I found the Safari browser from Apple, also based off the same WebKit code. I also got a copy of Windows XP Professional, then patched it to the max. Safari got a better score than Google Chrome too, as it didn’t fail the linktest that seems to plague Google Chrome every time I try the ACID3 test. Literally the only thing that Safari failed on was speed, and that’s totally unsurprising, given that I’ve got a Duron 1GHz, with a whole 1,256Mb of memory. Still, the machine does me okay for what I’ve been doing up until now.

Safari hasn’t exactly supplanted Google Chrome for sheer skinniness of browser interface yet, nor has it impressed me as much as Opera did when I first ran that way back when I first spotted it. I’ve literally only found two things missing from Chrome – the ability to turn off flash (a la FlashBlock for FireFox) and the ability to add arbitrary other plugins. Still, it’s pretty okay. I like things in Safari but don’t know if I’ll use it as my main browser; given that it comes from Apple, and they don’t exactly give out the source code to all their crown jewels, I may step back to Firefox.

New Jools for Mozilla Corporation

Incidentally, I understand there’s been a new release of Firefox (3.5) which supports the HTML 5.0 release of the HTML specification, which seems to include lots of goodies that don’t need browser plug-ins such as Flash, Shockwave, or SilverLight. While that’s nice, what does the HTML 5.0 standard mandate that earlier revisions didn’t? I haven’t any idea at the moment, which is why I’ll head off to the W3C.org site for the HTML 5.0 preliminary standard to see what it says. Dry reading, but it’s the last word in the standard. I may have to go somewhere else to actually find out what it all means, mind you – but hey, that’s life.

Same old same old for Microsoft?

In comparison to IE8, I think I still prefer Firefox/Chrome. I don’t know why, it could be the fact that I can’t block adverts in quite the same way with IE. It could be the fact that I get a bar and a VERY loud noise that pops up every time the page has a flash applet that IE could run, but first it needs to check with me first. I can’t reduce the volume of the noise, and it’s one of the things that really puts me off. It could also be the fact that IE8 still only gets 23/100 on my machine when I do the ACID3 test. Hey, that’s better than the rank score of 3/100 that I got with IE7, or 12/100 in IE8 non-compatibility mode! It could even be the fact of the fallibility of Microsoft’s programmers when they made previous versions of the browser so exploitable, and so much a core part of the operating system. Hopefully IE8 isn’t exploitable in quite the same ways, nor to the same degree. Frankly, I don’t know.

Personally, for blocking/choosing flash, I prefer to use Firefox with the FlashBlocker plugin; add AdBlocker Pro and NoScript, and nothing is getting through those three without your say so. In my eyes, that’s a better way of doing the job. NoScript has the advantage of treating each site separately, no matter if it happens to display content on the same page or not, each website gets its own blockable entry. It’s the same for AdBlocker Pro.

So now what?

What’s next in the browser wars? I honestly have no idea. Not as a desktop user, anyhow. I could say I had a wish-list, but I’d be incorrect in saying so. And as I’m no programmer (really) I have no idea of the scale of the job that modern browser programmers have… do they make it lean-n-mean (a la Chrome) and risk leaving out features that users want, or do they make it sing and dance (a la Firefox 3.5) and take plenty of a user’s machine memory on load-up? That’s a hard act to balance, because while some people want to get the job done (display me the page, please, and don’t put any stupid dressing on it), some others want to be immersed in a multimedia environment hosted (funnily enough) by a browser-like interface.

So, what? Host the whole OS in the browser?

That’s a possibility being mooted by some – create the browser as a thin shim around a internet-based operating system, with most of the applications hosted at remote servers, along with most of the user’s data files. Great for redundancy, it almost approaches what thin clients are built for. A bit useless for those of us with slow old modems and gobs of hard disk space just crying out for tunes to be stored locally. And in New Zealand at least, shuffling all that data over our slow links that we have here isn’t all that practical unless you’re only editing a few documents a month and doing a little bit of surfing, a little bit of email, and some (small amount of) music listening. Otherwise you end up paying gobs of money because you’ve gone over your data cap for the month.

Local, or Server?

Personally, I prefer local. Nobody else has to deal with it then. As long as I’ve got a copy on my hard drive, nobody snoops my network traffic to see my artwork, music, or letters (or blog posts, for that matter). I’m not entirely in favour of server storage, except for one thing—access for other people. As soon as you throw in multiple access to the mix, then server storage makes more sense. With local storage, you have to shove a document up to some other place (via ftp/http/torrent) or let someone have a reccy at your personal machine to see the document, or use some sort of peer-to-peer software like Skype/Messenger. Hey, people are still emailing stuff, but that assumes the other person has an email account they have access to. And who remembers that grand old collection of software: uucp? Granted, all these solutions work (except for uucp now, of course), but they always feel like a bolt-on to me. Even server storage feels like a bolt-on to me, but it’s how shared environments work. “Team” members put documents into a store, and everyone has access to it, to work on as they need, sometimes in pairs—in which case, the document will probably be locked so that only certain things can be done by other people.

These sorts of team environments are only really used by businesses at the moment, but there’s no real reason to restrict it to them. I can imagine that Grannie might just want her son’s help in writing up a letter, but the son’s in another city. In which case, a shared environment may just do the job. I’m not talking about the type of thing whereby Grannie offers son a Remote Desktop invitation, as that’s not really what that’s for—and that’s rather limited to whatever software happens to be on Granny’s machine at the time, the speed of the network (sometimes abysmal), and the speed of understanding between the two of them. VNC offers a similar experience to Remote Desktop, but can operate across differing operating systems. An ad-hoc arrangement whereby son pastes paragraphs into Messenger and then Granny pulls that out of Messenger into her editor would of course also work, but there’s nothing like working from the same page, so to speak.

Linux (and indeed Unix of old, BSDs etc) had this concept of kibitz – a program that provided a shared shell where two (or more) people could interact, though for xkibitz at least, it’s text only. I can do the same thing with a OpenSSH session, the screen program and an editor, but this requires either that I give the other party/parties access to my account, or provide a common login account for everyone to play in that’s a bit more locked down security-wise, so if anyone goes NATO on you, you’ve at least got some protection. Again, a screen session is text-only. Examples of fully graphical, fully interactive by all parties systems aren’t too prevalent, and VNC (in its various forms) is the only 2D example outside of RFB that I know of currently.

Why not a 3D environment?

One concept has a fully three-D model environment that everyone logs into, and everyone can create objects and interact with each other’s objects, all be it with some restrictions. Currently, I know of two models in this case: Second Life is one well-known example, OpenCobalt and EduSIM are two other examples that aren’t so well known, partly because people are still working on the underlying software. Frankly I’m still getting my head around things in Second Life, and I’ve volunteered to be a tester for the OpenCobalt project to bring them up to speed. There are some limitations to all of these environments though, in that you have to have a recent machine, and a reasonably fast Internet connection (DSL at 2MBit should do). Good quality graphics cards are a must for these applications, as I’ve found out to my detriment. Neither of my machines have a really recent video subsystem, and as a result, their performance suffers when subjecting them to the requirements of a 3D multi-user environment.

Why are there two models? What’s the difference?

The main difference between the two models lies in this. Second Life focuses on a server-driven hosting model, where everyone who downloads an official Second Life client and executes it automatically (with suitable username/password) gets logged into the Second Life server cluster, and can only interact with the activities hosted there. If you wish to have a slice of your own land, then that is paid for on a subscription basis, because that’s actually how they make their income to afford the running of the servers. I believe they’ve accepted the fact that most people won’t actually buy their own land, just as long as they can get those people to interact with people who will buy land, build projects, and items to interact with.

In the other model, there’s the “everyone gets their own island” model, where each person starts off with an environment (called an island, in Cobalt parlance) they can tool up as they need. The trick to getting people to each other’s environments is in a tool called the teleport. Much like Second Life, it allows an avatar to transport to somewhere else. Unlike Second Life, the teleports are not mandated by a server farm or by a company. And currently at least, spaces are only visible to other people on a voluntary basis. If I start up a Cobalt island, it’s completely autonomous. If I wish others to come to that island, then I can hand out a “postcard” telling somebody “this is where I am on the network, so come and join me”. I can take the island down whenever I like, without having to report to anybody other than whom I’ve invited to my island. People that receive a postcard can then use the teleport mechanism to come to my space.

So far, in my testing, I haven’t nailed down exactly how many people we can have on an island before performance starts suffering. I have heard that there have been twelve people (wow!) on an island, and performance wasn’t impacted, but they were all on a local area network. I’ve noticed that things happen at a slower frame rate for me, but that’s because I’m on an older machine. I’ve no idea how performance degrades for hundreds or even thousands of people in an island, because we’ve never done that scale yet.

OpenCobalt is built on the Squeak platform, a popular form of Smalltalk that’s freely downloadable and usable by anybody, so it was a good fit for a project of this type. There have been extensions to the Squeak platform to allow it to do the 3Dish thing, previous work was put into a client called Croquet, and further work was done on Croquet to produce what has become OpenCobalt. It’s got a wee way to go, but I think with the right work, we can get the performance of Second Life, without the necessity of depending upon a centralised server farm to run it on.

Anyhow, that’s my little wander through the subjects rattling around in my mind.

Unix, but not as we know it.

2009-09-03T21:12:00.001+12:00

Last night, I finally managed to install the last piece of a group of packages from the SUA Community, a site sponsored by Microsoft to provide further tools for the Services For UNIX (3.5) subsystem. The SFU (now known as Services for Unix Applications or simply SUA) is a Unix-like environment to lure other non-Windows developers over to the Windows platform without scrapping their existing skill-base altogether. It provides an execution environment running within Windows, including “more than 350 commonly used” utilities (grep, sed, awk, telnet, find being a few examples) seen on many Unix-like platforms, shells (ksh, tcsh, perl and rsh-based tools), a compiler (gcc-3.3) and binutils, full NFS server and client, ftpd server, POSIX threads and other things too. They omitted the X server, funnily enough, even though they added quite a few X utilities. Microsoft’s rationale behind this was that there were already enough publically available X servers for download without them reinventing the wheel. Personally, I think that if they had provided a kernel-level X-like server, it would have removed the requirement for other options. Only problem being, we wouldn’t see the source code. But then I’m used to that. Plenty of tools to use in the SFU.

However, the number of tools provided aren’t anywhere near the number provided on a modern (read: released in the past five years) FreeBSD or Linux (or for that matter, the granddaddy of OSes, Solaris) distribution of software. So, the SUA community (previously known simply as “/Tools”) set about remedying the perceived lack of tools by supplying additional ones. Bash—being my favourite, is in there, as is the not so well-known zsh. Then, there’s ncftp, the Xming X server (the last publically-available Xming-6-9-0-31 server), and even several updates to the SUA/SFU tools, most importantly a later version of gcc. Of course, there are a lot of other tools as well (too many for me to mention here) that make the SUA environment a much more useful and friendly place to non-Windows administrators.

Anyhow, to finish off, I finally managed to get Xming installed, merely by downloading the current version from the maintainer (funnily enough, the same version as supplied in the SUA community package collections), and clicking the executable from a normal Explorer. Given that trying to run Xming-setup from a ksh as administrator wasn’t working, I ought to be grateful it works now.

BSD - Reliability, Fast Speed, No Cost, Open Source. Yup.

2009-06-08T14:24:00.007+12:00

Oh dear. It blew a gasket

Yeah. So much for FreeBSD 7.2 being super-robust, or so I thought. It seems that FreeBSD doesn’t like holes (bad blocks) in file systems any more than other operating systems do, and there’s no way of telling FreeBSD's UFS2 filesystem to include a list of bad blocks that it finds when it builds the filesystem, though in way earlier releases, there used to be just such a utility, called bad144.

I had put FreeBSD on to the 20 Gb drive after I had moved Linux data off it to another drive. After I installed FreeBSD, it worked really well. Right up until I had to turn off the power on it one day, as it had locked up fairly solid. When I brought it back up, the inevitable fsck happened, as most operating systems do when a partition hasn’t been cleanly unmounted. It got stuck when it couldn’t read a particular block, and wouldn’t go any further, even when I ran fsck manually. Needless to say, I then backed up the data to another drive, and will figure out what else I need to do—perhaps I can migrate the DOS drive to the end of the hard disk so that I can restore FreeBSD into a space without any “holes” in it.

So where to from here? Any other issues?

I have to say that that has been the only issue I’ve struck with FreeBSD 7.2 so far. Yes, the issue’s a biggie, but no real reason to pan the whole OS just because of hardware fallibility. And frankly I like the idea of the whole of the source of the OS (that’s not just the kernel, but also the base applications) being available in one place, as opposed to the normal Linux behaviour of the kernel being downloaded from kernel.org, and the applications (whichever applications the distribution decides upon) being provided from other sources, such as the Free Software Foundation’s GNU suite of applications

FreeBSD shares this model of supplying a complete operating environment with the other variants of BSD (Dragonfly, NetBSD, OpenBSD and others), and has offered models for other operating systems to do the same—FreeDOS is one example, Plan 9 is another.

Oh yeah, another thing—FreeBSD doesn’t seem to much like my SATA controller (a SiI 3112 with added USB/Firewire interfaces) and won’t actually read any data from the drive connected to it. Strange, but again, not a reason to pan the OS. It just seems strange that Linux has no appreciable problems both booting off the drive, and running off the drive, yet FreeBSD has issues. Driver code, perhaps?

And now, a bit of history

The origins to the free versions of the BSD operating system reach all the way back into the late seventies when UCB and others were providing patches to the then king of operating systems - AT&T UNIX. All an institution needed was a valid UNIX licence, and to be able to pay the (relatively for software) minimal cost for the tapes and postage, and they could have the BSD additions to UNIX for a song.

Of course, this still didn’t bring BSD into the realm of the average C64/Amiga 500 computer user of the day, but it came close. Generally if you were earning enough money, you could buy it yourself (along with the expensive AT&T UNIX) and install it on your own hardware—probably also very expensive at the time. It wasn’t until the mid eighties that an attempt was made to reduce the cost to practically zero, and remove the requirement of having an AT&T licence. It wasn’t until the late eighties that Bill Jolitz and others decided to port BSD to the then-popular Intel i386 processor to produce the 386BSD OS, that people at home finally had a UNIX-like system they could afford the cost of. The story of the initial release of 386BSD was published in Dr Dobb’s journal over several issues starting in early 1991. While 386BSD was not a success, eventually foundering for technical and community reasons, others took up the charge and furthered some of the concepts at least, if not the core of 386BSD - and merged it with some work done to produce 4.4BSD-lite, and then produced FreeBSD from that merger. Further history is mentioned in the BSD wiki entry and is probably more accurate than I have just been. Other exceptionally informative articles live at Lynne's Blog. And yes, that's Lynne Jolitz, wife of William Jolitz, one of the architects of 2.8BSD and 2.9BSD, among other things.

And now? Anything else to report?

Oh yes. You want to know where to from here? Well, now that I've installed FreeBSD, I've found that I'm having slight issues in GUI mode, as things only seem to kick off when I move the mouse. Hm. Not terribly useful to me, but it’s something I can handle. I’ll have to deal with all that once I actually get the FreeBSD data reinstalled into a slightly safer place - somehow, I suspect a hole in a DOS drive isn’t going to have quite the same problems as a hole in a BSD filesystem.

That will at least mean I can keep playing with FreeBSD.

Stuff, or fluff?

2009-04-28T21:15:00.002+12:00

Is it stuff, or is it fluff?

Yup. What's it really worth? That stuff you've collected over the years? People will debate this topic like, forever. Compare, a 1946 Austin 7 against a 2008 Ford Falcon. Just doesn't compare. One goes faster than the other. One uses less petrol than the other. One is a darn sight easier to repair - guess which one. Yet will you find the ardent Austin owner willing to give his precious vehicle up for a modern vehicle instead?

Uh, no.

Then there's just uh, fluff.

A 1995 Pentium I 90Mhz machine with four 72-pin memory slots. It's got four PCI slots, two VESA slot and two ISA slots. It's just been consigned to the tip because it only supports a maximum of 128MB memory, and that's only Fast Page or EDO. No SDRAM support here. Its keyboard controller is shot, though fixable with another chip from a similar machine, it's just an 8042. The internal inbuilt CMOS battery is shot, resulting in the CMOS clock being reset to 01/01/1980 every time it's powered on. Even if the CMOS were to retain the time between power ups, it fails the Y2K test. The hard drive controller doesn't support a hard drive faster than 8.4GB from the BIOS - yep, that's that 1024 cylinder limit kicking in. The CDROM drive is double speed. The floppy drive stopped working about seven years ago and hasn't been cleaned of dust bunnies in nearly that long. The IDE cable only works if it's twisted in a figure eight around the power cable to the hard drive, and even then requires the occasional kick to make sure it stays in place for longer than 15 minutes. Hence the rubber band holding the connector onto the drive. Oh, hang on, that's perished.

At least Linux boots on it. But really, it's for thin client use only. Oh, hang on - NetBSD boots on it too. Remember? NetBSD runs on everything. But definitely time for the recycling plant. Oh, wait a minute, this doesn't conform to ROHO guidelines for minimum levels of exotic chemicals used in the manufacture. So we can't even recycle the components.

Fluff.

Another piece of fluff: a hand scanner with a proprietary 8-bit ISA card that plugs in and only has drivers for Windows 3.1. God, that is SO fluff.

Then, there's my own piece of fluff that I actually still own, because it hasn't canned over yet. It's an XT. Not a true blue, not even close. It has a Hercules card AND a CGA card. It has TWO XT drive controllers, I'm not sure which one works and which one doesn't. I have two 20MB drives. Yes, that's Mega bytes. Not Gigabytes. And they're both MFM. I think the CGA card has a serial port on it too, which leads to a bit of confusion when plugging in the sickly green monitor I still have. It's destined to become a classic, though not a very good example of the class of XTs available. It even provides a 10MHz Turbo!

I'm sure I don't have to provide any more examples.

Are we on to the good stuff yet?

Then, there's stuff. Like the current batch of netbooks coming out. The previous generation of these didn't have much memory, and only had a 2GB SSD drive to store the whole OS onto. Not a lot of room, I think you'd agree. And probably destined to become the year before's fluff. Or hand me downs. Or something like that.

The more modern incarnations however, feature the later Atom processors and a decent amount of drive space. Smaller than a laptop, they also take less power than a typical laptop, yet they have features that most good laptops have, like a crystal clear screen that's literally gorgeous to look at. It's only 1024x600 on an 8.9" screen, but that's still large enough to display documents on and not get eyestrain. It's eminently portable, folding down to not much larger than my FX9750 calculator, but a darn sight more powerful. I'd be happy enough to receive one of these in about four years time, as I've been looking for a machine that I can read ebooks on, type up the odd source code file, or perhaps even listen to some MP3 tunes. Trouble is, I probably won't end up with one, as they'll probably be retained by their owners.

So—what items of fluff or stuff can you provide? How low can you go to provide a horror story of a machine touted as the best thing since sliced bread, yet ten years later (or less) has ended up simply being the biggest lemon of its class? What would be your current dream machine or geek item? Nothing too weird, it might end up being next decade's lemon.

I'd love to hear your comments.

A fast bit of chrome.

2009-04-12T11:33:00.009+12:00

Wow - I've got my cake and I can eat it too!

I've been taking the latest Google Chrome browser for a spin recently, and I'm frankly pleasantly surprised. There's only one thing I've found that I can't do in it, but more on that later. It's fast, there's minimal "fat" with it (no superfluous stuff) and it renders content accurately—or seems to, anyhow.

Let's apply the ACID test

I ran Chrome through the ACID tests, and it seemed to pass all but the ACID3 link test with flying colours. Chrome passed every element of the ACID3 test but took too long, which is about standard for my machine (Duron 1GHz, 1256MB, VIA motherboard, ATI Radeon 7000 AGP card). For some reason the linktest seems to show up as failed too. However, I can probably forgive these few failings. This is definitely a plus for the toolkit that Chrome is based on (WebKit, otherwise known as KHTML, used inside KDE's Konqueror.) Firefox 3.0.10 managed 71 out of 100 tests, and was quite slow in the process even on a Celeron 2.8GHz machine, though I'm not going to screenie it here, as this article's already too bulky.

In a not surprising comparison, Internet Explorer 7 looks like a dogs breakfast, I can't even tell how many tests it uh, passed, neither can I click on the letter A to find out. I really really hope for Microsoft's sake that IE 8 fixes some of the bugs with the renderer, because frankly in the mode I had IE7 in (fairly much untweaked, how you're supposed to have it), this response to the ACID3 test is totally useless. Incidentally, from what I've read on the current-at-the-time Wiki page on ACID3, apparently Microsoft don't actually intend on making their browser achieve a perfect score.

Microsoft, developers of the Internet Explorer browser, said that Acid3 does not map to the goal of Internet Explorer 8 and that IE8 will improve only some of the standards being tested by Acid3.[17]

Aww, I found a bug(let)

As I said before, I've only found one thing I can't do - and that's to delete entries off the list of downloaded files. In comparison, Firefox shows a list of downloaded files, and if this list becomes overly large, it affects how fast Firefox loads and displays documents. However, I'm able to delete entries from that list, unlike Chrome. Will Chrome fall foul of that same problem? I rather hope not.

There's not really much more I can say on the subject, but well done, Google. I'm impressed enough to have made it my default Windows web browser, supplanting poor old Firefox 3 in the process. The only questions I have left are:

when is it going to appear on Linux, and
when is it being open-sourced?

Apparently, as WebKit is open-source, we already have the basic codebase of Google Chrome now... just not the source code to the Google tweaks they made to make it so screaming. I imagine that Safari may well have similar results to Chrome, due to its use of the Webkit codebase.

June 8th 2009

Further to the article, I finally got a copy of Internet Explorer 8, and fired it up on ACID3. It has improved on its godawful previous score of 12/100, and now the picture at least looks a bit like the reference page. Now there are boxes of about the right shape, though they don't appear to have any colour in whatsoever. *sigh*. Never mind. We can take hope that eventually, Microsoft will come up to par. IEX, maybe?

Oh, sorry. You wanted to see what it looks like on my computer? Doesn't this article already have enough heartbreak in it?

Finally, SQL Server Express 2008 is installed

2009-04-08T16:21:00.003+12:00

It was a bit of a struggle

... but I did it. After a couple of false starts, that is. I initially selected SQL Express 2008 for download and installation, (that's Microsoft's server for those not in the know) and then found that I probably should be installing the SQL Express 2008 with Advanced Tools. Well, I tried. I really did. The problem was, the file wasn't playing ball. Either I'd download it and attempt to install it and find that it was broken when it was decompressing, or I'd not even manage to get it to download. So I gave up and went ahead and installed just the plain server from media I already had. Then there was the little debacle I had just getting the Management Tools working. I also wanted to install some sample databases I'd seen on a Microsoft website in relation to the SQL Server, but every time I kept trying to install it, it kept failing stating I needed to enable Full Text search. That particular facet is only supplied (at least in the Express versions of SQL Server) with the Advanced version.

I had a feeling that Full Text Search was an option that I could tweak by installing the Management Tools, so I gave that a go again. That eventually got installed today, after I downloaded the standalone executable for the tools to add to the standalone SQL server. I did have a struggle when I tried to execute the management tools executable the first seven times, but all I kept getting was the SQL Server Installation window. What I hadn't realised is that because I hadn't (apparently) completed the install of the SQL server the first time, I had to complete that step first. Once I actually did that, then things started working. I ticked off the box for Management tools, then waited while it spun the drive platters, and installed. Whew. Finally I had them installed. I tried the tools out, but found out that I did really have to install the Advanced version, just to get the sample databases installed.

So, I decided I was going to give the Advanced install a try, given that I'd had success with the installation of the Management tools. So, I clicked the executable that I needed to run, chose "Advanced", and waited. Finally, it actually installed properly. So then all I had to do was choose the facets I needed. I ticked off the Report module, and the Full Text Search boxes, completed the process, and sighed after I saw the two "Success" boxes.

Another struggle

... I'm going to end up with (now I have the AdventureWorks databases) is simply getting my head around how to use Microsoft's variant of SQL; either as a simple SQL server (which is normally how I'd use it) or in any other aspects of how to get it running better. I'm used to that, though I'm pretty new to the whole SQL scene. My only previous experience has been creation and maintenance of databases and tables in a PostGreSQL environment, as well as issuing queries against that database. I've also tried out two GUI front ends to browse databases.

Other issues include how I can make full use of the whole Visual Studio environment (at least the Express portion), and how I can compare it with the equivalents under Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris. Namely, that's gcc for Linux and FreeBSD, and Solaris' compiler suite in addition to gcc running on Solaris. Once I get enough programming experience under my belt, I eventually want to get to the stage where it really doesn't matter what environment I'm using or what compiler, I should be comfortable with the tools in use.

I'll let you all know what luck I have.

In, out and round about.

2009-03-01T22:16:00.003+13:00

In for a penny.

Okay, so I've got this tape deck and radio combo I have to occasionally repair, because it tends to uhm, not go right. Anybody would think I'd just go out there and get a new one, junk the old one, you know. Well, One - I don't have any money, so two, I like to repair my own things where I can. Saves ME money, saves other people's time telling me they can't fix it because they no longer have the repair manual, yada yade yada, gives me the satisfaction of repairing it, and so on. Only ... somewhere in the back of my mind is the nagging thought of "what happens if I can't repair it this time?", and then I get a little worried.

I thought "Right, I've had enough"—I feel like I can't be bothered with having it in the state it was in; namely, not working. Now "not working" to me, means not performing as it was originally built to - in this case, the tape mechanism wasn't playing... something was jammed. I wasn't sure whether it was the transport mechanism or not, though I'd almost ruled out any of the circuitry beyond the playback/record head, and settled on the problem being almost purely mechanical. Those sorts of problems, I can fix. I'm no electronics whiz, can't measure a transistor's hFE without hauling it out of circuit to do so, and besides which, mechanical problems are a bit more amenable. At least, that's what I was hoping the first time I headed inside the case.

Okay. Speakers unplugged, unconnected and hauled off. Then, it's on to the screws. First five screws unscrewed, off comes the back.. hang on, no it doesn't, there's something else holding it on. Damn, where is that fifth scre... ah, there it is, on the base, along with the other six screws I have to probably undo, just to get the sides off. Off comes that screw, the other six screws, all neatly laid out in order so I can put them back on when I've fixed the problem in seven minutes, or so. Then off comes the back, gently, while I figure out which of the three leads have to come off... in this case, I decide, all three can come off. Gently does it, that's AC Flex I'm unbending there. Right. That's the back done. Now, how does... ahh, that's right - once the back comes off, the sides will come off in one assembly. Ease that dial thingymagig off, I'll need that later for the pot on the fine tune control. The buttons will stay in place - they're nice like that. One was missing long before I got the tape deck, so I don't worry about stereo/mono switching any more, though I do toggle the switch back to stereo while I notice it.

I reach inwards to see if I can twirl the motor around, the usual fix for this particular problem - oh, I can't get to it. Now, how the heck did I do this last time, twenty two months ago? (Or was it longer? I can't remember) Ahh, that's right—there's a central screw tying the front to the circuit boards, just in behind the transformer cables from the diode bridge. I reach for that screw, have it out in a matter of seconds. I'm doing well now, I can take the front off, and finally look at the little flippy thing that turns the head around for playing the tape in the right direction. I figure it's sort of up, but not really, and reach for the wheel in the back to twirl it around again, only I still can't get to it. I'd need fingers like spiders legs with the strength of cabling to deal with that... right. Time to take the whole tape transport system out - luckily it's all on one lump of metal, secured by four easy-to-reach screws. I have them off, also in a matter of seconds, also laid out neatly so I can put them all back in the order I took them out in. You can't be too careful when you're doing this job - no sense in having three more screws left over when you've finished than when you've started. It's off with the rubber band for the digits capstan, that always comes off anyhow, so it might as well come off properly now.

I finally get my fingers on to the wheel concerned, spin it around some until I hear a satisfying click from the mechanism, don't bother to check the head's flipped around, as that's what usually happens anyhow, right? Everything looks good, so I put mechanism back, screw the four screws back into place, and even remember to put the capstan band back on. I'm hot to trot as I put the front back on, uhm, wait a minute, something's not fitting. Oh, that's right. The spike for the direction-switch mechanism popped out from underneath the screw that was holding it down so the tape mechanism would go around to begin with. This is beginning to be a little unfunny. Undo the teeny tiny little screw (I've had to find a third screwdriver to take this one off; as it's so tiny, none of the other screwdrivers have heads that little), and set it aside, with the teeny tiny screwdriver head pointing at it so I can find it again. Put the front on again, good, it all fits.

Put in the little screw, then the sides, then put the back on... oh, hang on, I've got to connect those three leads back so they don't short to anything inconvenient, like the hot side of an AC cord, for example. This puppy's not earthed, so being careful of that fact will save someone's life. That's Batt+, Batt -, and ... hang on, this white wire doesn't go anywhere. Oh, that's right, it's the aerial plug. Right. Pull it over to the obvious contact. I can stick the actual telescopic aerial back on it when I get it back into the bedroom. But for now, I'll stretch.... hm. Won't come that far.. Weird. Hang on, pull the back a bit further into the case so the wire will stretch to the contact. Right. That's come far enough now, let's plug it on and have out of.... wait a minute, it doesn't fit. Am I sure, or am I only imagining it? After another couple of minutes of fruitless poking and prodding, I give into the realisation that no, the aerial contact isn't that one. Where the heck is the aerial connector? It surely can't go onto the tuning capacitor, those are NEVER used as aerial inputs except for DC (direct conversion) sets and crystal sets and the like.

Ah, it's up over in the corner, right next to the AM rod. Figures. Right. Let's get my fat little fingers in there—no, they're not actually fat, but they certainly feel like it in this job. Can't quite reach down into the case to get the connector onto the spike. Rats. I know this came off, so it can jolly well go back on! I need more room to work in. Ah, that's right, I just put the sides on, let's see if moving those aside does give me any more room. Reach over to the sides, pull them off in one piece, set them aside. Yup, now there's plenty of room to put everything back. Cool! Put the recalcitrant aerial connector back on, fit the Batt + and the Batt -, and get ready to put the sides back on. Grab the sides, slide them back into place, put back the six screws I pulled out from the base earlier, and eventually reach for the back to put that back into place. I'm almost done now. Reach for the five screws, put them back into place, and tighten them down. We'll test it now.

Out for a pound?

Plug into wall, find tape (Jean Michel Jarre's "Concerts Lyon/Houston") and close door. Press power. Nothing. Flick power switch—handy, that. No lights. Oh, hang on - I can't hear anything without earphones. It's time to grab those from beside the mouse hub, uncoil them and insert relevant plug into relevant hole. Ah, that's right. This tape deck needs that lever depressed so it can play tapes. Depress lever some and screw the tiny little screw back into place. Press power again... hm. No satisfying "Clunk" as I hit power. I flick the switch, only to realise I've flicked it already. I toggle the power switch—nothing. Darn. Here I was thinking this job was going to be simple. Turns out it just got a bit more complicated, and I have to dive back inside to figure out what else is wrong. I've never had this problem with this tape deck before, guess there's a first for everything.

Back into the case, undo the five screws—hang on, gotta power off and unplug. No point in frying myself—this is an unearthed case, remember. Undo five screws; can I do this job without having to remove the sides? I seem to remember that if I don't have to remove the sides, that saves me about six screws, and a bit of work. Take off the back, remove the Batt and aerial lead, set aside screws in the usual order. Reach for the bottom of the circuit board; darn, gotta take off the base anyhow. Guess the sides are coming off after all. Take the screws out, take the bottom and sides off, have a quiet look around to see what I can see on the bottom (copperised tracks, but still somewhat conducting) or the top. Nothing's obviously wrong, so I figure I must have jarred something loose. I put back the sides, the back, plug back into the wall, just to check out. Hm. Nada. Obviously not connected yet. Time to remove the back and the sides again, and have more of a nosey around inside. Hm, better check the fuse while I'm here, I guess. It looks a bit coppered up too, come to think of it. Pull it out, looks good to me, put it back in. Plug into the wall, flick switch, nope. No juice. Unplug, scratch my head and wonder what the heck happened. Pull meter down from bench, set to AC, 1000V, put neg probe on the case of the transformer, the pos probe on somewhere else hopeful. 4V. Nothing really useful. Try DC volts instead ... 4V. Well, at least it's consistently f00kd. Scratch my head some more, flick the power switch off again, look at the back, flick the voltage change switch a couple of times, figuring anything'll work. Plug back in, and flick the power switch. Hey! There's lights this time! Wahey!!! I think my job's almost done.

Now I've sorted that out, I can put the case back together, so I do that, remembering this time to put the back on first so I can connect the aerial lead, then I can put the sides on, then put the back on properly. Plug back into wall, and I decide I'd better run one final test to make sure everything's all right. Maybe it was just the power glitch that caused this. Flick switch, satisfying lights glow. Reach over for the earphones, get them plugged in—radio goes. That's at least good. Flick the switch back over to tape, press play. Uh oh, nothing happens. Oh, that's right - this wants its lever depress... hang on, it's already depressed from when I screwed in that little screw again. Oh, great. so the original problem is still not fixed.

sigh

Undo the first five screws (again), remove back (again), remove only the four screws that actually hold the sides on, because now the base can stay on as I don't need underneath it. Remove the central screw inside, as I need back into the tape mechanism again. Pop off the front, taking that little screw out too... yup. gotta point a little screwdriver at it so I don't lose it. Off with the capstan band, off with the four screws that hold the tape mechanism in place, and I ease it out to have a further look at it. I ease out the tape from the place where it's sitting, press the play head, and it doesn't move. So I press play - the play button depresses and locks satisfyingly. But the head doesn't actuate. Weird. I jiggle it a little, and it flicks, and pops back down into place. Ah, I see. Now it should actuate. Press play, nope. Doesn't actuate. Strange. Jiggle around some more, then realise I have to flip the head around manually anyhow. Do that, then press play. Clunk. The head actuates, finally. Good. Press stop, the head drops back down. I think I'm done here, so I'll wrap up. Put the mechanism back into place, not quite as easily this time, as I have to contend with the base being in place instead of neatly out of the way. Still, I manage it, and put the front back on, remembering to put the little screw back into place to lock that lever down. Put the central screw in to hold the front on, then put the sides on, put the back on, oh, hang on - have to put the aerial back on, so it's off with the sides, on with the aerial connector, then on with the sides, then on with the back. Put a tape into the mechanism, plug in the earphones, plug in the plug into the wall, flick switch, flick power on. Press play, ahh. NOW it works. I even hear sound, though it's .... hang on, it's backwards. Whoops.

Press stop, off with the power, unplug, five screws, four screws, central screw, one tiny screw, front. Remove tape, fiddle with head, flip it around. Tiny front screw back in, central screw, etc etc... only this time I don't put the back on. Just put the tape back in, press play. Yay, now I get sound; though it's a bit muffled, it is recognisable and playing in the right direction. Cool! While the music's playing, I put the sides on, aerial contact didn't come off this time, so it's the back on after the battery contacts go back into place. Plug the power in - yup, still goes, still plays the tape. Good. I'm done.

And then I realise the capstan band is still out on the floor.

Expletive deleted by request of owner

Suffice it to say, that after the job was finished (and after a suitable couple of deliberate drops onto the floor)—yes, that did fix the audio, not muffled now), I'd spent nearly three hours on this simple little tape deck. It now works, thankfully, which means I can plug my MP3 player into it and hear music through the speakers. But boy, was this an adventure I don't wish to repeat.

All at sixes and sevens

2009-02-17T15:05:00.003+13:00

Oh no! Not more cubes!

"What? More cubes?" I hear you say. Yes, though I'm behind the times in telling you this, further advancements have been made in developing larger Rubik's Cubes than just The Professor. When I last wrote about the Professor, I was aware that working models of the 6x6x6 and 7x7x7 cubes had already been demonstrated, they were only waiting for the manufacturing process. The developer of this style of cube has said that methods to produce cubes up to 11x11x11 currently exist, they merely have to bring them to market. The general assumption is given that this method could actually be extended further, but I don't think I'll be paying for a 13x13x13 any time soon, as the price points for the 6x6x6 and 7x7x7 cubes are between US$46 and US$55.

So what? I couldn't even solve the original!

Don't worry, all is not lost - there are solution pages for these new cubes already, provided by the company, as well as other pages by www.bigcubes.com; other solution pages already exist for even the little 2x2x2 version, though if you know how to solve the corners of any cube, you already know how to solve the little cube. All is not lost. However, in solving the big 7x7x7 cube, there's one important difference between it and the 3x3x3 and Professor. The centres can move in relation to each other, meaning you have to make sure you put the centres into the correct orientation first, as shown by the eight corner cubies.

Why's the big one curved?

That's right, it's not quite a cube any more, as the picture in the Wikipedia article shows. Because of the size of the respective pieces, and indirectly the method of manufacturing, when a face is turned around 45 degrees, the possibility exists that a piece will simply fall out, as it is no longer securely held by adjacent pieces. The curve combats this effect, by overlapping the area occupied by the piece, and will probably be a "feature" of all the larger models. Even the 6x6x6 cube has been modified somewhat so that pieces don't fall out - the summary is that the corner rows are actually 2mm wider than the inner four rows, allowing things to actually work.

Mirror mirror

Of course, other twists exist on the cube, many of them playing on other aspects. This cube differs from others in that all faces have a mirror-like finish of a shiny reflective sticker on each cubie; in addition, each cubie is a unique size instead of the same size as their opposite face equivalents. This makes the cube look really weird when it's mixed up. Hey, at least you'll puzzle the heck out of everyone else when they try it out.

Of mice and batteries, and calculating.

2008-12-19T09:26:00.012+13:00

Charge it!

No, that's not the plastic fantastic, which is probably just as well in the current financial situation. Instead, this is just a wee update to my post from April 6th, 2008 about batteries in my mouse, when I posted that Alkaline batteries seem to average in my mouse about seven months. Well, when I bought some NiMH rechargeable batteries a little while ago, I decided to give them a try, after previously having disappointing results with a couple of sets of NiCad rechargeable batteries (500 mA/h). I was charging the older ones up, and was lucky to get a week out of each pair. Anyhow, when I charged up the new batteries, I put them into the mouse on about the 14th of November. They ran for more than four weeks of use before changing them, and it's the 27th of December before I had to put another pair into the mouse. Frankly, I'm somewhat surprised, even though the batteries are only the "cheaper" 2000 mA/h capacity, and not the 2450/2700 mA/h batteries I really wanted. I also heard that someone wasn't too impressed with Eveready batteries, which were exactly the brand I'd bought. Never mind, I'll see how the batteries behave.

The batteries were a steal—at only $20 for four batteries, and with a normal 18 hour charger effectively thrown in for free, it was a better price than paying out $32.50 for one 18 hour charger and two batteries that I'd seen by Energizer; that wasn't including the $13.45 cost of two more batteries to make up the foursome. Other "cheap" batteries I'd seen were only $19.85 for four batteries, not including a charger. Again, that was for 2000 mA/h capacity, just a store brand for K-Mart. I'd hate to think what it would have cost for a fast charger—either a one hour charger or an eight minute one, apparently neither of which are any good for the batteries.

Hack it!

With regard to the previous sets of batteries, I at least was able to save the cost of the power for charging them by using two solar panel garden lights I'd found at the side of the road. The first one took one rechargeable AA battery, and could happily be left in the sun, to give me a charge over two days after having removed the LED. The second solar cell garden light was a bit interesting, as I had to hack it a bit to get a pair of AA batteries added beside the space for a single AAA battery. In essence, I hacked the battery cradle out of a dead TV remote, got out my soldering iron, and set to work melting plastic and rewiring the cradle, then mounting the cradle onto the back of the cell, opposite from the solar panel. In the end I did all this without having to strip the single AAA carrier out. Once that was done, I had charging for free, for three NiCad AA batteries and one AAA battery, all in the sun.

Unfortunately, given the restrictions for NiMH batteries, I can't use this same method for charging them, and instead have to use the provided charger, to make sure I don't overcharge the batteries by accident.

Hack it again!

While I was at it, I thought I'd convert a Casio FX-82TL (cheap scientific calculator used for secondary school) over to a FX-85TL/FX-300TL (effectively), though with a slight twist... instead of using the normal LR44 the FX-85 has inside, I'd retain the AA battery from the FX-82 (so I didn't have to wreck the case any more than necessary), and make it rechargeable via the solar panel instead. The wiring was rather simple, as all I needed was wire to the solar cell (which I'd already "filched" from another solar four-function calculator), and a diode to prevent the battery discharging through the solar cell again. So, first off, I soldered wire on to the contacts of the cell very carefully—copper pads on glass takes no time to heat up, even with a little soldering iron like I use. Then, I connected the solar cell in place of the battery, turned on the calculator, checked it works—yup, no trouble. Added in the diode (the right way around), checked that the calculator still works, which it does, though it now needs a bit more light due to the voltage drop across the diode. Finally, place the rechargeable battery in place, cover the solar cell so there's no light, and test the calculator one last time. Yup, all working.

So for a little bit of solder, a solar cell from a four-function calculator and a diode, I have a scientific calculator with what is effectively a new ID and a battery that'll last just about uhm, forever? I vaguely thought about the same trick on my FX-82MS too, but there isn't the same space for the solar cell, as the battery space takes up 90% of the space above the display. At least on the TL, I'd be able to cut out a slot and have space to spare, if I wished to do a tidy job, and not just a sellotape job over the top of the case.

I also wanted to try this trick with one of my other calculators, but I don't know enough people with calculators with solar cells on for sacrificing (I'd need at least three cells)... what a shame. Not only that, but two other aspects of this calculator lean me away from solarising it—first off, it uses alkaline batteries, though this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It affects the voltage I have to provide the calculator, of course. Secondly, the reason for the alkaline batteries: this calculator draws more current than the FX-82 I converted over. I'd also have to fit a special plug so I could detach the solar circuit from the calculator, which would remove its usefulness somewhat.

What I was thinking of initially would be: three little cells (or maybe even four) wired together in series to provide either six volts, or eight volts to allow for halfway usable voltage at low light conditions, connected via diode to charge the batteries. Again, being NiMH batteries, I'd have trouble making sure the batteries weren't overcharged, and I'd have to build the same sort of circuit into the charging as a normal charger has. I.E. a bit more sophisticated than two wires, one diode and a solar cell. So for the moment at least, that project will either never get off the ground (usual for me) or I'll actually have to put some cash into the project to ensure it doesn't look like an ugly hack. If I were to do justice to the job of course, I'd put the whole calculator onto a "charging" cradle like the Palm Pilots used to have, and simply solarise that instead, my only problem would be sourcing (or making) suitable cradle to take one FX-9750G+ on its end, with plug. Interesting, but probably will never be done. So, what other mean hacks have been done to the humble calculator?

Poor brother to the big king

2008-09-15T21:46:00.011+12:00

The Beginning

Gawd, the fifth edit... mainly to stick back in all the pictures that disappeared from other places. Anyhow, on with the show. I have just added to my small collection of calculators, and thought I'd describe something about them in this post. Casio make a line of programmable graphical calculators: the FX-9750G, the CFX-9850G, the Plus versions of these, and so on. My latest acquisition is the FX-9750G+. It's just about the bottom end of their range of this sort of calculator, and doesn't have a three colour screen (orangey-red, green, and blue) like the big brother. But it'll do. Yes, there is a difference between this and the previous FX-9750G: this one has had some finance functions added, which I've already taken advantage of. This programmable graphical calculator might be the little brother of the family, but there's enough in here to keep me reasonably happy.

Anyhow, I thought I'd compare it to two other calculators that I have here - the Casio FX-82MS, and the Canon F-804P. Neither calculator is programmable, though the Canon can accept a small number of user-provided functions and store them for later recall.

First off, I'll introduce the FX-82MS, and here's a huge version, so you can count the pixels on the display. Look at how crisp they look.

Umm, why did you buy them then?

Well, I bought the FX82MS as an upgrade to the FX-82TL (which I then gave away to a friend for his course work - who needs TWO FX-82 calculators?) because I loved the idea of the navigation keys on the MS, which the TL never had, and neither had any FX82 model previous to that. The extra 14 functions helped out too. Literally the only thing this calculator wouldn't do was base-N calculations, you had to buy at least the FX-100 for that. Which is where the Canon comes in. Just as an aside, I now have the FX-82TL back, as the previous owner hasn't used it since the coursework I gave it to him for.

I saw the Canon F-804P on a table in a store that was selling off all their little consumer electronics range, and changing the range of products they sold; as a result, I picked it up for only $20. The only reason I picked it up is because it appeared to do base-N calculations. It does, but more on that later. I most recently bought the FX-9750G+ because I wanted a programmable calculator; the fact that it is graphical is also a bonus. The calculator was also discounted by 25% - purely because it didn't have the outside box which I probably would have discarded anyhow. I wasn't going to complain at the price, or the discount, though I did try for more of a discount.

Do I have to have a degree to understand the Manual?

Studying the rather large 454-page manual of the FX-9750G+, I find a lot in here. We start off with a page informing us of the difference between the FX-9750G+ and the CFX-9850G+/9850GC+/9950G+ variants (the CFX has sort-of three colour screen, the FX doesn't). Then we follow with an insert describing how to put the batteries in, and what happens directly afterward. Directly following that, there's an additional 20 page Quick Start section. This covers just about everything the "I want to use it now" users probably ought to read, even if they don't read the rest of the manual. The rest of the subject matter is distributed among 22 chapters in the main bulk of the book, and is followed by Appendices and a not-very-complete index. My main complaint is that I find the depth of information provided in here tantalisingly superficial. All the examples they provide work as stated, though I'm having a little trouble understanding the financial section or repeating the same output for the same input; that could simply be Operator Error. When I say superficial, I mean superficial in a "Name-Your-Subject Unleashed" kind of way, as if they've covered everything they think the average user ought to know, but I don't find that it's detailed enough for me, especially in the programming area. I looked online for a manual describing the BASIC-like language that the calculator uses, but the only language I could find it in is French. Bleah.

In comparison, the FX-82MS manual is actually a fold-up booklet which covers the essential aspects of the calculator, but doesn't break a sweat doing it. If you know what you're looking for, you'll either find it or you won't - it's at least clear and the English is well written. Again, the examples work, but they don't spend much time on explaining them as it's reasonably obvious.

The Canon F-804P manual came from Japan, and it looks like it. Instead of being a large book, it's a small booklet that's been glued along the edge like a paperback. The language used in the English is certainly not the best used, featuring such phrases (apologies to the Canon people here, but this is meant as a criticism) as (for the ON key):
Turn on power, cleaning up / cleaning independent memory / cleaning statistic memory

       Push it down to open power source if the electric source is closed. 
        Push it down to clean up the input characters and wrong identifiers. 
        Push down [SHIFT] first and then this key to clean up the contents in the independent memory. 
        Push down [ALPHA] first and then this key to clean up the statistic computational registers (statistic comprtional mode).

Eeeek. And yes, that spelling mistake is really in the manual. In the other half of the book we have the Japanese instructions - and they look far better written than the English. It's a pity I don't read Japanese, as they might explain some of the English instructions better.

The Interface

One of the more confusing aspects to the FX-9750G+ at least for me (being used to the FX-82MS, this threw me for a couple of seconds) is the menu that shows when the AC/On button is pressed. However, I simply hit the [EXE] button, and go straight into what looks like a knock-off of the HP-48G/GX/S/SX, except it isn't. Simple four-function calculations work the same as they always do, with x,+,/, and - all having their own keys. Instead of a = key (which is on another key) you use the [EXE] key, which makes sense from a programming sense, but not so much for a new-to-calculators user. At least it's in the same place as the = key on the FX-82 and many other models, at the bottom right. The two other calculators are dead simple: turn them on, start entering numbers. Aspects such as choosing Radians or fixing the number of digits of result displayed are easy if you read the manuals.

Command recall

One niggle I have about the FX-9750G+ and the Canon is the fact that the command history doesn't work quite the same as the FX-82MS; on that, you simply hit the up-arrow, and are presented with the previous command, and as you keep hitting the up arrow, you scroll through the last ten calculations issued. With the FX-9750G+ however, if you want anything but the previous command (reached by the left or right keys), first you have to hit [AC], then you can scroll through the remainder of the command history. That's described in the manual too, but isn't intuitive to me when compared to the FX-82MS. For the Canon, you can only recall the last command you typed by using the left or right keys. Deletions on the FX-9750G+ are handled differently too, more like a PC's Delete key, rather than the behaviour of the Backspace key that you find on both the FX-82 series and the Canon F804P. Basically, back up the cursor to the point you want to start deleting from, then hit the [DEL] key to delete characters.

The display

The screen size for the FX-9750G+ is a nice 128 pixels wide and 64 pixels high; the font size for the text character set is 7x5, giving a 7-line text display and leaving some extra room down the bottom for drawing labels. The text size for graphical-mode text is a little smaller, at 7x4 pixels. The size of the screen is readable, but not exactly large. My wife has a hard time reading something that small, but most people should at least be able to read it.

The FX-82MS has a two-line display, the top line is 12 characters, each of 6x5 pixels. The numbers are clear and easy to understand, and the bottom line holds the usual ten digits plus sign and 2 digits of exponent (plus sign) display of seven-segment, with the nice addition of comma separation for larger values. As a side note, this toggles between the usual American/English system of 123,456,321.45 and the Spanish system of 123.456.321,45 - useful, though not for me. There are several additional annunciators for Shift/Alpha/Hyp and lots of other symbols, though three of them aren't used on the FX-82MS. I think they used a display module from the more powerful calculators that support complex numbers, matrix calculations and vector mathematics. I note that the new FX-82ES (where do they think up these designators, anyhow?) has gone to a fully pixel-addressable screen too, though it's still not large when compared to the FX-9750G+, but it's large enough to display "proper" equations like you'd see in a textbook, which is exactly what they're marketing this function as. It's an expansion on the S-V.P.A.M. theory.

The Canon's screen has a two-line display that is similar to the FX-82MS though the top line is made up of 5x5 blocks instead, and the quality of the letter shapes suffer as a result. The bottom line shows the same ten digits and sign, plus 2 digits of exponent, and these numbers all use a seven-segment display, though I find the "shapes" not as nice as the Casio. It also has annunciators, but they're down the bottom of the display, and there aren't as many as are present on the FX-82MS.

The keypad

For the keys, I'd have to say that Casio did their job really well for both models of calculators I have. The legends are clear, and the alternative functions that show above some keys are also clear, with good contrast and visibility. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about the Canon. Why am I not using the Canon F-804P instead of the Casio FX82MS? Frankly, though the features of the Canon are nice, they're put into a case that's frankly not very well designed. The keyboard is cluttered, the legends above the keys require the user to have good lighting conditions merely to see the legends, and the keys just don't feel right, having a short travel. They're also small and close together, which doesn't exactly help. The fascia (the bit surrounding the keys) is shiny, which makes the act of reading the legends harder, and though the white text on each key is quite readable, the orange and pale blue colours are anything but readable against the reflection of the fascia if the average user has light behind him shining on the calculator.

That doesn't register

The FX-9750 family (including CFX models) gives the user 28 registers—the 26 letters, rho (r) and theta, for polar coordinates. If you know Greek or mathematics, you'll know these symbols. In addition to this, they support lists, matrices and collections of lists called files. Storage of up to twenty formulae, six pictures, six "lists" of numbers, multiplied by six "files" of lists, twenty six matrices and six graphs is also provided, making quite a collection even for a programmable graphics calculator.

The 82MS has nine registers (A-F, X, Y, and M) that can be used to store numbers in, these registers are also supported as sources for numbers in formulae that are typed in; i.e. AX^2+BX+C. The FX-82ES only has seven, though the FX-82ES Plus has the full 9.

The Canon has 26 letter registers, an angle register and a memory register that is separate from these, and the same support for using the registers in functions.

Functionality

The FX82MS has (according to its manual) 240 functions, including support for advanced statistics, regression formulas and combinatorial functions. Quite a lot for a cheap student calculator. The Canon has 145 functions, has the ability to store multiple user-provided formulas, and also has ten constants from the engineering/science field. In addition, the Canon has the ability to do base-N calculations for the binary, octal and hexadecimal bases. No floating point support, but then even the FX-9750G+ doesn't have support for base-N floating point, though it can convert integers between bases. I haven't counted the number of functions that the 9750 has, but purely because of its programmability, you can quite often synthesise what you need from what you already have. I've managed to code a rather accurate "natural log of Gamma" function from someone else's description on a web page.

One other thing that really surprised me about the HP-34C (one of the first programmable calculators I owned) was what I later found out to be called the Gamma function. At the time, I called it factorials on non-integers, but the function that Hewlett chose to implement is actually Gamma(n+1). This gives the same value for normal factorials as the factorial equation, but takes a little longer to generate. None of the other calculators I've come across will do it, but that old calc will. It seems that some other calculators in the HP stable will also do it, but not all of them. I still rather wish I had that, but it's gone, long gone.

Accuracy

Both the Casio calculators are accurate to ten decimal places on display; the FX-9750G+ is accurate to fifteen digits internally, in comparison to the FX82 and Canons' 12 digits internally. However, I've found to my surprise, that the Canon is the most accurate calculator I currently own, bar none. I suspect that unlike most calculators I've used, which use a certain number of digits of precision, the Canon says it uses 12 digits of precision, but actually uses floating point at its core, and rounds down to 12/10 digits of precision when displaying the final result of a calculation. Take this as an example, which shows what I mean (use the symbol for PI, not the letters P and I): (PI-3.141592653)*10000000000 That's 1E10 for you engineer types. On the FX-82MS, I get a result of 5.9, on the FX-9750G Plus, I get 5.898, showing a greater degree of precision of 15 digits as opposed to 12. However, the Canon comes up with an answer of 5.897932385 so where'd those extra digits of precision come from? We've got rid of ten of them when we took away the original 3.141592653 (ten digits worth) but we're still left with ten digits, at least for simple single-stage calculations involving the constant PI. Extending the concept does eventually run into a barrier, at least for Pi, as I end up with: 3.14159265358979323846_198694562nnn... as compared with the real value of 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 (five digit spacing, fifty decimal digits.)

Other calculations appear to indicate that the Canon does indeed work with floating point internally, although I've found that I can't simply enter in as many digits of precision as I can, just to ramp up. The calculator will only take the first ten digits of input and discards the rest, though numbers generated internally retain their precision until display. So for a crappy-looking calculator, it's impressed me for precision. Another common test that can be done with any calculator that's scientific is called the "forensics" test. Here's the formula, and here are the results for my three little machines and the Palm SciCalc 2 program, with the extra internal digits added. Make sure you set each calculator to Degrees mode first, or else the results will look really naff.

(arcsin (arccos (arctan (tan (cos (sin (9) ))))))
Occasionally arcsin will show up as sin-1

	Displayed result	Internal result
FX-82MS	8.999998637	8.99999863704
FX-9750G+	9.000000007	9.00000000733343
Canon F-804P	9.000000000	9.0000000000000000000...
Palm SciCalc 2	8.9999999999999999	8.99999999999999999999999998482

It was this result, and the description in the Forensics table of the only calculators to pass the test, that showed what was happening. Calculators such as the HP-30S, Kinpo SG1, SR19S1 and SG2 were described as having the same floating-point chipset, the Sunplus SPLB30A.

To achieve the extra digits shown in the "Internal Result" column, I simply took off the Displayed Result from the Internal Result, multiplying by 1E10 to get the scale to fit, which is why you see far more digits displayed for the Canon. The same also appears to be true for this calculation: (sin 60 - 0.866025403) * 1E10

	Displayed result	Internal result
FX-82MS	7.85	7.85
FX-9750G+	7.84439	7.84439
Canon F-804P	7.844386467	7.8443864671232000709...
Palm SciCalc 2	7.8443864676372317(see next column)	7.84438646763723170752931984524

For the Canon (assuming I'm correct in my assumption) I have found I can simply keep on peeling off ten-digit slices of the result, and I've gone out to thirty digits of result so far.

In total contrast to the form factor and shoddy case of the Canon, we have the FX-9750G Plus, which comes in a fetching white and green plastic case. Say what you like about the colours, but at least the legends above the keys can be read, as they contrast with the white nicely—I suppose they could have used blue instead of gold, but I'm not complaining. I understand that other models come in slightly different colours and form factors. It's still heavier than the FX-82MS though, small wonder, as it takes four AAA cells in addition to the back up 3V lithium battery.

The Program

Previously to this, I was using the FX-82MS to motor around the supermarket, adding up what we'd bought, in about seven different categories. I came across a nice way of doing this: [ALPHA] A + ([ALPHA] X x 1.175) [SHIFT] [STO] A which looks like this, once it's in the top line of the 82MS: A+(Xx1.175)->A

Basically, that takes whatever's in register A, adds (X multiplied by 1.175) to it, and sticks the result back into register A. A variant on this removes the multiplication, and simply acts as an addition, storing the result back into the register:
[ALPHA] A + 2.25 [SHIFT][STO] A which, again, looks like this: A+2.25->A

I simply used the six letter registers for different categories of goods, used the X and Y registers for price-per-kilo costs, and combined with the previous program, substituting register letter as I went. Once I'd finished I could get a grand total simply by adding together the entries in the six registers, thus: A+B+C+D+E+F= Try doing that with the original FX-82 from years gone by. However, I didn't buy the calculator just for the ability to do the same as the $20 FX-82MS. Instead I chose to do something else and actually write a program. Just as a note, Casio put out a number of different versions (upgrades) of the FX-82 since 1981 or so, including the FX-82A, FX-82B, FX-82C, 82D (which used fractions), 82L/LB, 82SX, 82MS and the FX-82TL. The Solar version of the 82 is the same as the FX-82D, or at least similar enough (i.e. it can also do calculations using fractions.)

The History

What inspired this program was the very ability to program that I'd first come across with a HP-34C I'd come across: one with a Red LED display, and nice chunky buttons with a good solid "click" to them I've not found on any other calculator since. This calculator had the ability to store a key sequence, and also had multiple registers I could stuff numbers into and retrieve from, in addition to a prompt for number, so it had nearly everything I needed, except for reliability. The calculator was getting long in the tooth when I got it, and it was showing it - with occasional times where I couldn't see the display, the Run/Stop switch wouldn't always make the calculator change modes, and the battery hatch was falling off. In the end, the calculator was retired into the bin, though I wish now I'd kept it. I'd managed to make a really simple version of the program that simply asked me for a number, then added it to the internal register I'd set aside, displayed the total, then asked me for a number again. Simple.

When I tried to do the same thing with the FX-82MS, I was missing the programmability, which means I couldn't get the calculator to ask me for a number, then add that number to the internal totals, then display the total, then go around the loop again; I had to compromise, which is where the above scriptlet came from. The saving grace, at least for the scriptlet, is that because of the command history recall, I didn't have to keep typing in the scriptlet from the beginning, I could simply recall it with the up-arrow or left-arrow, complete with assign to register, only changing the variable amount (for example, 2.25) each time.

In comparison, not only does the 9750 support asking me for a number, it also has the ability to display arbitrary text and graphics simultaneously anywhere (mostly) on the 128x64 pixel screen. This very feature is used by the calculator itself to present functions for the top row of keys, and shows what I'd call keylabels on the bottom of the screen. These keylabels are used as a menu with up to six choices, which can be completely tailored. I decided on this means, as the program should be intuitive to use for my wife - a set of abbreviations makes more sense than simply remembering that register A is used for fruit and veges, register B for meat, register C for cleaning stuff, etc. What I've ended up with looks a bit like this:
| | | | | | | | | | | CATEGORY? | | [VEGE] [MEAT] [MISC] [DAIRY] [CLEAN] [NXT] |

The World?

The programmability of this calculator is quite impressive, even with only 28,000 bytes available (or so). The frustrating bit of that impressive programmability is the fact that you have to press heaps of keys to get work done, purely because the alphabetical keys aren't separate from the main keyboard, they're integrated and reached with the use of the [ALPHA] prefix key. Casio must have thought about that, because they provided this calculator with what amounts to a serial port, although it's a non-standard one. It runs at 9,600 baud, so it's not fast, and it expects different stop bits for each side of the transmission—two for transmitting, three for receiving (I think). So, I could (theoretically) type up the average program on my PC, plug the cable (not a cheap purchase, it'd cost me more than the calculator itself cost) into the calculator and the PC, and pipe the data over in less time than it'd take to laboriously hammer keys to get the program entered in manually, correct the inevitable errors, and fine-tune the results. I personally would have loved a slot where I could add memory, but for the cost, Casio won't provide that. I already have one extra cost to outlay—a 3V lithium battery used for memory backup while the main batteries are being changed. I'm simply not flush enough to afford the $139 RRP for that cable in addition (not the SB-62, which is simply two stereo 2.5mm plugs wired crossover fashion, but rather the FA-123 interface or its big brother the FA-124.) If possible, I'm going to attempt to make my own, using the rather well-known MAX232, otherwise known at Dick Smiths as a IS232 (I think); some wire, and two plugs. I hope to make the cost all up to be only about $25. I can solder the project together myself, I just need the bits. Once the cable is assembled correctly, I'll be able to put nearly anything on the calculator that I can uhm, fit, and that the calculator understands. We shall see.

What the young can teach us.

2008-06-22T18:04:00.003+12:00

Mirrored from The Flying Brick Commentary over on Microsoft's Spaces. Hey. It's a blog.

It seems strange, but even given the length of time I've been banging around computers, I still have plenty to learn. This fact got brought home to me when my sister in law rang me with a problem her (nearly) 3 year old son had instigated. The phone conversation began with:

My delightful son has hit a couple of keys on the keyboard, and managed to turn my screen upside down. How do I get it back the right way up?

I hadn't heard of this particular little wrinkle of Windows, though it made an insane sort of sense once I thought about it for more than two seconds. Of course, her son couldn't tell her which keys he'd managed to toggle, given he's barely saying "buhss" for bottle, and "pahpah" for brother (you have to think a bit for that one). So it was up to me, the resident techmonkey, and Google Search for Microsoft problem. Thankfully, the problem came up in the first couple of hits I looked at. You see, given the key combination Ctl-Alt-Up or Ctl-Alt-Down (I'm not sure which), Windows will then go and flip the screen that way up. I vaguely wonder if Ctl-Alt-Left and Ctl-Alt-Right rotate the screen? I ought to try it, just to see if my poor old Win XP Home System with a CRT can actually do such a thing. Last time I tried it under Linux, the system locked up and I had to reboot. Yeesh.

One of the hits states

This doesn't work with all displays—only with certain drivers that have this provision for rotation.

Obviously her display supported it. To the best of my sketchy knowledge, I had thought that only certain LCD screens and laptop screens actually supported such an idea, though it turns out that it's a function of the display driver, not really of what's connected to the video output connector. Her screen is most certainly a CRT, and wouldn't have supported it unless the driver was able to do the job.

So, I learned something new today, from a three year old!

Firefox, Vim, and (almost) no mice.

2008-04-06T18:22:00.005+12:00

Someone tried to marry the vim editor's uhm, ubiquitous keystrokes up with Firefox's web interface. Now we have one big happy family. Vim. Firefox. Yeah, right. Still, the vimperator plugin seems to work (mostly) okay, aside from one or two issues with fonts for hints. I can't seem to get my statusbar back, as this particular version (0.5.3) took it away and isn't giving it back, much like a bully that's got Johnny's medical erm, notes on female anatomy. Poor analogy, but I can't seem to get it back. It's either vimperator's statusbar, or mine. I choose.

That choice is better than IE7 gave me, I guess. I get to "choose" IE7's crappy renderer, which doesn't always do the right thing. I don't get to choose from an alternative renderer, oh no. Frankly I can put up with Firefox's slowness any day, but at least it mostly puts stuff on a page in about the right place. Why it's so slow on my machine, I don't honestly know, but hey. It works. And with vim keybindings "at hand", so to speak, I find Firefox even "handier" than before. Very few things remain that require the mouse, and I can probably tolerate those, as I've been a bit mouse happy in the past few years.

The mouse was a bargain, relatively speaking, if you can call half price a bargain (original cost NZ $99). It's a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse, and runs on a pair of AA batteries. There's a story about those too, if I could be bothered digging it up, suffice it to say that I got 17 months out of a pair of Lithium batteries, when the manual suggested I'd get a more normal 3 to 5 months. That figure, ironically, has been borne out by the times the other batteries have lasted. On average, about 7 months. And these aren't cheap batteries I'm putting in - they're alkaline each time, I replace them in pairs (because you're supposed to), and note down how long the last pair lasted... I ought to save up for a new pair (or four) pretty soon. Wish I could go back to those Lithium batteries, they were good!

Now, back to vimperator. I was having a little trouble reading the tiny (12px on 1024x768) white text on red background labels that come up in QuickHints. Could I do it? Erm, not initially. But I did it eventually. Basically I ended up creating the .vimperatorrc file, stuffing somebody else's values for hintstyle into my file, then re-reading that file with vimperator. It turns out that 12px is fine, it's just the font I was trying to use that made it look really really tiny. I managed to change the font, and even managed to reduce the font size. Now I have nice readable (even at 10 px!) sans-serif letters. Okay, so they obliterate a fraction of the link I'm trying to see what the letters actually point to, but I can work with that. Now I can't actually use vimperator to submit a file into a text field, as I still have to use the mouse to do that.

OhOh No? Yeah to OOXML.

2008-04-04T08:50:00.002+13:00

The Microsoft OOXML submission to the ISO for standardisation acceptance has apparently got through the ISO voting process. Roughly speaking, enough votes were cast as "Yes" to sway the vote, even though it was clear that some countries changed their votes from No to either Abstain or Yes, possibly under pressure or incompetence. Thankfully, not that it's much consolation, New Zealand continued to vote no. There are further details at Groklaw.net, with a succinct summary at tideway.com. Appeals will of course be lodged, and there are suggestions that the passing of the OOXML as a standard (subject to appeals) will actually not help Microsoft's case with regard to anti-trust accusations.

As I don't know anything else about this particular standard, aside from Microsoft pushing it, I'll leave that commenting to the excellent team at Groklaw.net. Suffice it to say that what I have heard of OOXML, that it can include a "binary blob" that is necessary for the operation of the document standard, is of note. Others have commented better in other arenas.

We mark the passing of a Good Keen Bloke.

2008-01-11T19:35:00.001+13:00

The first man to ascend to the top of Mt. Everest, along with Tensing Norgay, Sir Edmund Hillary finally managed to climb the mountain no other man had succeeded in climbing until then. Not only that, but four years later, he was to chalk up another history-making moment when he arrived at the South Pole in 1958 as a member of the first team to achieve a land passage ahead of the British explorer Fuchs. Sir Edmund did many other things too, probably too many to mention here. A New Zealander through-and-through, he was self-effacing. I wish I had met him, and I think a lot of others did too. Now we won't get the chance, as he has died, at 9:00 this morning.

The family have agreed to the New Zealand Government's offer of a state funeral, stating that they would be honoured by the gesture. I believe that the Nepalese Government is also marking the death with a memorial service of their own. Somehow I suspect that Sir Edmund will not actually get another of his wishes, that of not being marked by any statues or markings of honour. Surely someone will want to erect a statue to him, just to mark the fact that the man did the many things that he did. However, I imagine that his main wish, that of the continuance of the Himalaya Trust, will be eagerly continued.

It is a sad day, but tinged with the sadness—at least for me—is a sense of what he has achieved, and what he refused to say about it says more to me than what he has said. He did not shout it from the mountains, aside from one comment of "Well George, we knocked the bastard off". He simply got on with it, like the quintessential Kiwi Good Keen Bloke.

I've said enough, and will let this tribute stand - one of few words, like the man himself.

Sir Edmund, we salute you.

A cube, I profess.

2008-01-08T22:11:00.001+13:00

Back in the eighties

They were the times. Shoulder pads. Electronic music. The Death of Punk music. The Rubik's® Cube, snake puzzle, links puzzle, and others. Children got so good at the Cube that competitions were held, and are still held on a semi-regular basis today. In addition, several hundred books were written showing how you could solve the cube. One book that I read was written by a 12 year old, and is still the clearest explanation I've seen to date. I've also seen some good websites that describe cube solving methods, including this website.
Then, they came out with other cubes. Cubes with pictures on instead of just simply colouring each side. Of course, this made the cube just that bit harder, as now you had to get the middle piece of each face oriented correctly with respect to the rest of the face. That was harder than simply putting a coloured face into place, in any one of four different directions. Then there were the little cubes that became keyrings. Too small to really do justice to the job of being a cube, they were a talking point for about 5 minutes, and were then discarded for serious 'cubing. I think mine fell apart about six months after.

Modern "twists" on the cube include Sudoku cubes, where not only do you have to get all nine numbers facing the right way, you've also got to make sure there's only one of each number on each face, just like a Sudoku puzzle, only there's six sides, you see. So it's more difficult. Then, there are cubes that got shrunk—such as the 2x2x2 Rubik's Mini shown on the left. And some cubes just got some grow juice—the 4x4x4 Rubik's Revenge, and biggest of all at 5x5x5, The Professor.

The biggest of all

I wrote about the other cubes I'd bought previously in my previous article all about Rubik's cubes back in June 2007. And I have an update. I've FINALLY managed to purchase The Professor. The Largest. The Meanest. The Ugliest. The Hardest Cube To Master. If you can master all the others, you'll probably do okay at this one. But if you gave up on the normal 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube when it came out in the eighties, then this one will send you running screaming for the hills. All ninety eight pieces to get right. Still only six sides, but might as well be twelve. Luckily, it was bought at the same store that I bought most of the other cubes from. And it wasn't much more expensive than the others, at only $34.95. So I now have the complete collection of cubes, with no more to buy.
I heard that someone actually came up with working prototypes of both a 6x6x6 cube and a 7x7x7 cube, but I seriously doubt that anyone will bring them to market any time soon. And don't even think of trying to speed-cube with this monster. It's simply too fragile, and even the manufacturer doesn't guarantee the product against improper usage, stating on the base this disclaimer:

NOTICE: The 5x5 Rubik's Cube by its very nature has more moveable parts than the 3x3 Rubik's® Cube and is not recommended for “speed cubing.”. Be sure to align all rows before moving them and do not force pieces to twist or turn. Winning Moves Games can not be held responsible for damage due to improper use.

And so we have it.

Gone to pieces

I'd hate to drop it and have it fall apart, as I have no idea how it's put together. Nor is there a reassembly diagram available from the Rubiks.com website, even though there are reassembly diagrams for every other size available. I also don't know how to solve this cube. Thankfully, there is a "booklet" that describes some ways of solving sides of the cube. I'll let you know how I go, if I can do it at all. For those that are interested, I found them mentioned for sale via Winning Games, at Amazon.com; for those of us in Christchurch (New Zealand), they're on sale at the Natures Discoveries shops, so they may also be in other places in the country.

Count them. Count them all, and despair

Again, thanks go to the providers of the related images from Wikipedia.org. It's probably the last time I'll waffle about cubes in this blog, though I imagine I'll have fun trying to do each of the cubes in turn. I've got the 2x2x2 down pat, just about. I can do the 3x3x3 with help from the webpage I pointed to above, as well as the 4x4x4. But frankly the Professor is going to be difficult.
Mathematically, the number of unique combinations is somewhat more than the number of combinations of pieces that we can actually tell apart, at least for the 3x3x3 and 5x5x5. This is because the middle piece of the 3x3x3 face has four indistinguishable directions; the same applies for the 5x5x5 cube. Additionally, for the eight pieces surrounding the middle piece, the corners are all interchangable, and the sides are all interchangable as well, without us actually knowing the difference. One way of telling them all is to actually print a pattern up on sticky sheet in six colours, then stick those to the cube faces. But then that makes your cube even harder to do. And it's already hard enough to do now, isn't it?

Update to post

Incidentally, paragraphs I forgot to add when writing this article before, about how to reassemble and solve the Cubes. Firstly, there are reassembly diagrams for all the Rubik's Cubes except for the Professor, up at the Rubiks.com website, though you may have to dig a little if these links no longer work.

Rubik's Cube (3x3x3) reassembly
Rubik's Mini-Cube (2x2x2) reassembly page
Rubik's Revenge (4x4x4).

For the Professor, the diagrams are a bit more instructive, so I lead off with how to Disassemble the Professor and then Reassemble the Professor. This particular website also offers parts for sale for the Rubik's Revenge and the Professor, though these parts are not always in supply.
Solution guides also exist for each of the cubes, try this link to find the free downloads or hunt around if it doesn't work. These are in PDF format, so that you can even print them off if you need. In addition, one good site I have found is here (www.waldsfe.org) and covers all four cube models I've mentioned here, though he mentions the Mini-cube in passing as being "all corners".

Now, what about that smalltalk?

2007-12-13T20:45:00.000+13:00

How to walk the (small)talk

Trying to learn programming isn't one of the easiest pursuits in the world, especially to me. In fact, I'm finding about the only real language as such that I have any proficiency in is the bash scripting language. Wonderful, that. In comparison to big brothers such as perl, ruby, or even tcl, bash doesn't have a whole lot to offer except the ability to string things together using pipes, and call external programs. It at least has arrays which is something, I suppose; I've made use of arrays in some of the bash scripts I've tailored for myself, as well as something called Indirect references (in essence, pointers, but in bash instead of C). That made my life a whole lot easier writing the programs I have, as I could simply wrap something in a mildly complicated forloop instead of hammering it all out into a temp file, then slurping in that temp file as part of the execution of the script. It's best ... avoided.

But this isn't really why I'm here. After all, I talk about smalltalk. A lot. It hasn't overtaken my life yet, though I'll bet that plenty of 'talkers could say that it has for them—it being a just-about-complete development environment in addition to being an environment for running applications. Yes, in comparison to the big IDEs (namely Visual Studio, KDevelop, Eclipse, NetBeans) the smalltalk development environment can be seen as primitive, but then so is a text editor and gcc+make, which is my normal fare. And nobody would argue that at least they get the job done. I'm sure you're mostly aware of the typical development cycle of "create, compile, test, break, fix, compile, test...", and the attempts of the big IDEs to put that all in one place; some more successfully than others.

One look for me, another look for you

In comparison to the "one window to do everything" approach of some IDEs, it seems that the smalltalk environment has one place to enter code (either of the System Browser or Debugger), a place to execute code (the Workspace), a place to view variables while the program is running (Inspector/Explorer) and yet another place to view output (the Transcript, or simply World). Sounds as inefficient as heck, and yet there's a certain sparse beauty to it. In the end, it does make sense to have various functions separated from each other. After all, you don't typically use your email client to do your budget, nor do you attempt to use your spreadsheet to send an email - there's separation of function. Otherwise we'd never get any work done.

However, in the smalltalk world, there's less separation than what I've mentioned here, as you can literally view every program's code in a smalltalk environment, all at once. If you want, you can even lock down aspects of the environment so that it acts more like a single application, rather than an environment to run a whole lot of applications. However, the normal use of smalltalk is to have everything turned on; that way you can fix something then and there if it breaks, and you happen to know how to fix it. To extend the metaphor a bit, it's a bit like having Internet Explorer being the front end to the entire source code of Microsoft Office, Windows XP/Vista, Messenger, Media Player, Outlook Express, and even IE itself. Of course this will never happen in the Microsoft world, but you get my point.

What? There are locks here?

To provide an example of locking down the Squeak environment to make it act like a single application instead, I mention a commercial offering built in Squeak: Plopp. Yes, this funny sounding name is actually an application built in squeak. And no, it's not explorable in quite the same way as a normal Smalltalk environment - it's been built to be an application, after all, and the company doesn't want just anyone browsing their crown jewels. So what's been stripped out? Most of the stuff that make Squeak what it is: an excellent development environment. The browsers have (presumably, at least) all been removed, as has the debugger, Inspector, and anything else normally associated with development. What's been left in? Great graphics (they're 3D!), and sound support, all based upon the Croquet 3D version of Squeak, an immersive world where you can spend time making drawings in 3d. The program is aimed at children, so it just has to be simple to use, that's why everything else that would get in the way of children enjoying themselves has been removed.

Je ne parlez petit parlez-pas

I came up against a small conundrum the other day. I wanted to run some code and view some variables while the code was running, but I didn't want to wreck a working codebase, which is what I had. I merely wanted to tweak, play, as it were. I couldn't find a way of doing that, without cloning the whole image and playing in that instead, with the ability of exiting without saving. It's the Smalltalk way, though I've got to still get used to that. I also couldn't start a program THEN invoke the debugger on the program, because I still don't know how to do that. The Debugger window is about the closest to what I want, yet I'm still hamstrung by what I mentioned at the beginning of this post - my lack of proficiency. And that's not just proficiency with smalltalk, or else I'd just get over it, and do the hard yards.

Instead, it's the lack of knowledge about programming in general - what works, what doesn't, how to do really really common stuff that professional programmers take for granted. Stuff like lists, sorting, filereading, and output to screen being some examples. I don't know how to do most of that in any language I know.

A useful idea I came across quite a few years ago in a related subject is the "Whole language" method of learning - in effect, chucking the subject in the deep end, and making their brain find connections for itself without the crutch of a translator to ease the process and hold back the progress. To address my attempt to learn programming, this is what I'd like to try for six months or so.

I'd like to simply boot into a Smalltalk environment, use it to run smalltalk applications, debug code, save files and so on, then get back to booting to my regular Linux. I can't quite do that with Visual Studio, although some people would say that emacs comes the closest to that under Unix-like platforms. However, there's a problem with trying to do that with Smalltalk at the moment. At this stage, I can't boot into a Smalltalk without additionally having to boot an operating system underneath to supply what the smalltalk environment doesn't. And normally, that's quite a bit.

The closest that Squeak comes (and it's not working well enough yet to be a viable alternative) is an alternative called SqueakNOS (No Operating System). In essence, what they've added to Squeak acts like the rest of the normal operating system, providing services such as reading from disk, writing to input and output ports for controlling items, and generally doing all the things we'd expect the normal operating system kernel to do. It hasn't quite got there yet, as all this code has to run through the VM, which itself sits on top of its ... yeah, well let's say it's messy. The critical thing, at least for me at the moment, is this: SqueakNOS can't write itself back to disk yet. The other point seems to be that nobody's really that interested in it at the moment, so it's not being maintained. The latest example I can get my hands on was released over three years ago, and is showing its age, compared to modern Squeak environments.

So for the moment at least, I'll just have to go with the "run Smalltalk as an application on top of the OS" and be aware that things aren't quite all there yet. Besides which, I can gain the benefit then of running multiple Smalltalk VMs side by side, and study how they differ in their implementations. Fun ones to compare for me have been Cincom VisualWorks (now up to version 8) and Smalltalk/X (now up to version 5.3.4, at least for the Windows platform), as they both present similar interfaces to the user, both of them using the underlying windowing system of the operating system to manage windows; I mentioned this in a previous post.

I believe that other Smalltalk environments (VisualAge being an example) also present themselves in a similar manner; I actually downloaded Dolphin Smalltalk to compare that. Given that it only runs under Windows, it's a somewhat unfair comparison to other smalltalks that run under multiple platforms. I've also avoided downloading anything that costs, as I can't buy it or justify the price of purchasing. Have you seen the per-seat price for Visual Age recently? Don't expect much change out of $7,500 if you want to use it in any significant capacity.

No cute dummy here - more a powerful force in its own environment

Now, into Dolphin. It's ... well, a rather well written program, and what appears to be a rather well written smalltalk. The class library is huge, even in comparison to other smalltalks I've used, and has most items that the average beginning programmer would want. I've yet to play with Dolphin some more, as I have to keep booting back into Windows to start it up.

Recent events and decisions have meant that the original authors of Dolphin have decided not to continue development on Dolphin, and as they have a serious bias against allowing the project to fall into the open source world, we aren't likely to see it made freeware any time soon unless someone does what happened to Blender (bought for $75,000). Frankly I hope that works, as I'd be VERY interested to see it tweaked even further.

This isn't a small talk, is it?

No it doesn't seem to have remained that. Frankly if I think about it, Smalltalk is chickenfeed in comparison to other languages such as Java, .NET or even C and C++. Yet Smalltalk presumably shaped the way interfaces were made, was possibly the driving force behind true object oriented programming, and hasn't gone away yet, even against the heavyweights mentioned before. It's not easy to learn, yet from learning it, there may be valuable aspects that will apply to other areas of programming. In saying that, there are apparently negative aspects to thinking Small, in that if you think in that manner, you're automatically counting out other ways of working that may actually fit the current problem better than Smalltalk. I don't know if there will be any consensus on that, given that programming can be a bit like trying to herd cats that are on fire. No further guesses from this corner, at least.

That's Grouse, not Sexpot

2007-12-13T16:12:00.000+13:00

A shot in the daylight

I found out that Wine happily (well, mostly, anyhow) runs a game well known to Germans, called Moorhuhn. And that's not Moorhunn, as I found out by accident. Roughly translated from the German, Moorhuhn is a grouse. So Moorhuhn Jagd is "grouse shooting". Once you see the game, you'll think to yourself - this is simple. And it is. You have ninety seconds to blow away as many grouse as you can, without shooting down balloons, planes, and turtles that may be in the scene. However some other objects can be shot at, and also give you points too. I first came across the game when my mother told me about it. I've stuck it back onto the computer because it's less blood than Quake, and can actually be played by a six year old with no real damage to the psyche. There isn't just the one game either - there are a number of them, based on the same theme, with some slight twists. Moorhuhn 2 and 3 also appear to work under wine, and I got MoorHuhn 3 running on zoombuggy's machine too.

In fact, I decided I liked it enough to actually pay for it. Someone was offering the game for a really cheap price, so I purchased it. Now my only problem with the game is that the copy I paid for (and downloaded from the website) doesn't work in non-nag mode; instead, it pops up an annoying dialog box that happens when you haven't bought the software initially. Instead, and this is an irony, it works for zoombuggy on her machine under wine, with no nag screens. Ah well. Win some, lose some.

Especially in later versions (Moorhuhn 2/3) there are also little tricks you can use to extend either the time you can shoot for, or the number of points you get. And, best of all, it works under Wine too, for a fast enough machine. Go on... you know you want to...

La lettre est morte. Vive la lettre!

2007-12-10T21:45:00.000+13:00

An Anachronism in today's times.

I wrote a letter today. A real true blue dinky die letter, and (with large numbers of modifications to suit a blog entry) it went a bit like this:

You are officially holding an anachronism in your hands; a throwback to the past when email, blogs, and Youtube hadn't been quite invented yet; Life, The Universe, and Everything hadn't been written, and we still thought for ourselves, or tried to anyhow. These days, we're more likely to ask if someone will be able to take a shot of their cat with their cellphone camera so we can display it on our LCD monitor as a backdrop, while we listen to the latest album from ColdPlay that we paid $1.99 per tune for and downloaded to our iPod. These days, Letters To the Editor are more likely to be emails, instead of pieces of paper.

There's the inevitable torrent of spam pouring into our ISP's mailboxes trying to sell you any NUMBER of things; while most of them will be deleted by the ISP, even they can't catch all of them. Then there are phone calls across the world through your computer for practically free, or very reasonable rates at least.

Send me a letter!

There's no reason for letters, when "stuff" is so much quicker, and we've become so used to response times of less than ten minutes (maybe an hour if we're busy and can't catch up) that letters have simply been left in the dust. That is, until the electricity goes out. Once that happens, none of the other stuff will work, especially if the phone network's gone down too. Then, only a good old-fashioned letter, sent by a friendly postal representative, will do.

Barring fires (and the occasional maraudering rubbish bin), letters have a longer life than some data CDs do, certainly longer than files on floppies, and eternally longer (and more durable) than most people's memories end up being. We haven't managed to duplicate these advantages of letters, even though we've come up with a far faster way of getting information from place A to place B on a certain mudball (the third one from the sun, I think).

Going Postal

Terry Pratchett wrote about letters having a spirit in his book "Going Postal". Get enough of them together in one place, and you have a critical mass. It's a comedy with a bit of a look at the more serious sides of life. Murder. Hanging. An angel. A new life. A new job, restoring the Ankh Morpork Postal Service, which has become moribund, useless, and frankly totally outdated and unused. The building, last used twenty years before, is looked after by one rather old codger with a breastplate made of flannelete, goose grease and hot bread pudding that's become tougher than kevlar, and one young pin fancier with less brains than the average rabbit, and that's after the "Wow, two moons!" moment.

Moist von Lipwig (ex-murderer, con artist, and all-around shyster) has gained a chance to reform his character, by reforming the Postal Service. He thinks it's all for nothing, but the letters have other ideas. There are hundreds of thousands of them in the building, including some that nobody ever wrote, and they must be sent. And so it is - he restores the Post Office, posts letters, and incidentally, manages to take charge of the very organisation that put the Post Office out of business to begin with. No mean feat, when the previous owner of that organisation (who refused his angel, by the way, and is now dead) fought VERY hard to have Moist killed, disposed of, and plain neutralised. But, the letters must be sent.

And so this letter will be sent, (and blogged) with many Christmas wishes to you. You can see a copy on my blogsite (you're reading it now, actually), but don't worry, I won't turn it into an mp3, to charge $1.99. Besides which, it's only my $0.02 worth, so I'd be making a horrible profit.

I wanted to make this letter personal, but it doesn't have that feel to me - I've only worked over three separate versions, one of which will appear as a blog entry online. This one alone survives in paper and handwriting form, just like the good old days when spam was probably edible, the web was pretty if it had dew on it in the morning, and people still thought for themselves.

Or tried to, anyhow.

The genius of it all

2007-11-29T13:45:00.000+13:00

Quick note

Well, not so much a quick note as to say I gained a couple of new pieces of hardware from a friend; one to keep, and one I'll end up buying. First, the item to keep: a box that basically does television signals to your monitor. Yes, RF in PAL/NTSC, audio (L & R), S-video, or composite video+audio, all come out on your monitor to view in wonderful colour. It even has composite video out and audio out so that you can hook the box up to an existing television and stereo, though I don't think that Picture-in-picture works on this setup. Go look up Genius' TVGo A31 for more details. I like it. The wee box is actually supposed to be for the both of us, but I guess I'll be the only one to really get any use out of it. In saying that, the box has minor issues, thankfully not many.

Hot signal.

One: it gets quite warm. For a box with no fan, and no way of keeping it cool, I hope this poor wee thing doesn't die of heat exhaustion. Two: the other thing I've found (at least for me) is that it really needs a proper aerial connection to bring in the TV signal. Simply sticking on a wire into the plug isn't really cutting it for me. Three: the picture-in-picture support works, but needs the computer's video output to be of a certain resolution and framerate for the TV picture to be properly superimposed on top of the VGA signal from the computer. So far, I haven't managed to get that right all the time, though I've got it right some of the time. And last: the output from the TV signal isn't in stereo, even though the inputs from the composite signal are. What that means is: audio from a Playstation or DVD or video player or the computer comes out in stereo, but there isn't (or doesn't seem to be) a Dolby Stereo decoder inside the box. That's a shame, as I like my sound in stereo or better, whereas frankly zoombuggy doesn't give two shakes. Anyhow, I'm enjoying it - as it means I get television without having to have a tuner card inside the computer. I even found one or two other channels I didn't know about before. As it also has composite video, I can also hook up a Playstation and play a few games, not that I actually have one of those yet.

Tabla Grafica

Second, the item to buy, at a suitably agreed price, and the item I want to talk about the most. It's a graphics tablet, but not just "any" tablet. Specifically, it's a Genius NewSketch 1212HR-III-B. It works well under Windows XP, even though Windows complains about the fact the driver isn't WHQ certified and I really shouldn't run it unless the driver has been "certified". The tablet dates from the early part of this decade (the driver is dated 2001) and thankfully for me, it works. There's even a Linux driver, though I note that the driver isn't for this specific model of the tablet, not even for this brand, but more for a generic "SummaSketch" tablet. The tablet came with a stylus with three buttons on, and two pucks (one with six buttons, the other with sixteen buttons). The tablet also seems to have three different modes of operation. I found this out from the two-page userguide from the website, but didn't find a lot else from there. Two of the modes supported are compatible with Summa tablets in general, and the third mode isn't, but it's the mode that Windows kicks the tablet into. Of the two Summa modes, only one is directly supported by the driver in Xorg, and it's the least capable mode, only supporting the use of either the stylus or the six-button puck, not the sixteen-button puck. The second and third modes support the use of the sixteen-button puck and the stylus, and apparently the third mode supports the use of both the stylus and the puck simultaneously, though I have yet to confirm that works. I did eventually find a document describing both the Summa modes, and I now know why it won't play ball under Linux with the sixteen-button puck connected. It seems that the MM protocol only has three bits for buttons (maximum of eight buttons, of which the puck uses six), whereas the UIOF protocol uses four bits, allowing for sixteen buttons. The source code to Xorg only mentions MM commands, and doesn't seem to have any facility for UIOF or K mode commands. I may need to write my own code and recompile Xorg to get it all to work. That's a pretty big job for me, and for my computer.

Who stole all my bits?

One other thing - this model uses a keyboard passthrough for power, and a serial port for communication to the computer, though other models use USB. Since I only had two serial ports to begin with, I've ended up having to sling another PCI serial card into a slot in the machine just so I could continue to synchronise the Palm V to the computer - it's just as well I had a spare slot for the card. That reminds me, I'm still on the hunt for some nice simple ways of getting email into the palm without limiting the size of each email record, currently the version of Palm that I have is limited to 4k per message. The only solution I've found so far is to turn a mbox (Unix mail file) into a text file with makeztxt, and to save that file to the Palm, making sure I've trimmed all the excess headers first. Anyhow, it's time I left again.

A drive around the block

2007-11-14T10:35:00.000+13:00

You bought what?

It seems I made just a bit of a boo boo when I purchased a DVD drive recently. The specs on it were very nice (supports DVD-R,+R,-RW,+RW,-RAM, CD-R, etc etc). The price was even better. So I bought it, and brought it home, but it wasn't until about half an hour after I actually got it home that I realised I'd made a small mistake in purchasing it. Yes, it works fine. No, it wasn't misrepresented in its advertising. So, I can't actually take it back because it doesn't work, or it doesn't do the job advertised in its marketing. No. My problem was, I didn't click to the fact that it was only a DVD reader, and not a writer. I could have saved myself the purchase cost of that drive, and added a bit of money, I might have had a writer. Never mind, it'll go into fatty as a reader, fine. Solaris recognises it, Ubuntu recognises it.

But the sun is eclipsed by the moon

Yes, I've reinstalled Eclipse, after upgrading my JDK, of course. I was aware of Callisto (Eclipse 3.2) but wasn't aware of Europa (Eclipse 3.3) so I had a pleasant surprise when I got to the download site all ready to download my copy. I'd already grabbed J2SE6 and docs to go with it, and I'd also upgraded my copy of NetBeans to 5.5 as well as installing a couple of useful plugins for non-Java coding. So I went ahead and downloaded Europa. I must say that Netbeans is considerably smaller than Eclipse, by some really significant margin. That was reflected in the long time it took to download both Eclipse itself, and some of the other plugins I wanted. On top of that, there are way way more plugins available for Eclipse. I'm still not sure yet what I'll use on an ongoing basis, though I have downloaded pretty much anything I'm likely to use, as well as possibly stuff I may never use.

Back to the books

I've been getting back into books recently, reading a bit of Stephen King (good writer, that), Thomas Harris (Hannibal fame), and Stephen Donaldson. Incidentally, he's just come out with a second part to his "Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" series. As with his other previous series, this one looks like it'll be another three-parter too. I ended up finishing "Firestarter" in just over a week - not fast for me, but faster than I have been reading books up until recently. With that in mind, I've got out two other Stephen King novels: Christine, and Cell. Anyhow, guess I've nothing else much to say.

Worms play with guns

2007-08-10T19:05:00.000+12:00

Why are worms involved in warfare?

I have found a game I can actually play under Wine! Yes, I know people say you can play heaps of games from wine, but I haven’t found that to be the case. Of all the CD programs I’ve tried, only three seem to work under wine. And one of them is a little classic—literally. Anyone who remembers the DOS game Worms, will be familiar with these little creatures from Team17 whose mission seems to be to annihilate everything and everyone else in sight, except for themselves of course. No screenshots, as I’m probably going to violate various licence agreements if I do.

Not a great taste in wine

You might ask why on earth I want to run such a game under wine when I could simply run it on Windows instead, and gain the benefits of running the game properly, on an operating system for which it was designed. I’ll explain why. I seem to use Windows about once every six months at the moment, if that. I use Linux for 99% (or more) of the time that I’m on the computer, and I don’t want to be tied to the Windows platform any more. Not that I have much choice, as most games are written for Windows first, and maybe Linux gets a thought in after that. I was familiar with Worms 2 and Worms World Party, having installed them under Windows at one stage, and watching while worms blew each other to bits with insane weaponry, and spouted totally corny lines I just had to laugh at. Just today, I was lamenting the fact I couldn’t get most of my other games running under Wine (nor, for that matter, the games that zoombuggy has collected - more on that later), because they wanted stuff that wine simply didn’t provide. And this was using the latest available wine sourcecode, so it’s not like I was not keeping up with the play. So, I decided to try out the copy of Worms 2 I had sitting up on the shelf, all unused and unplayed.

Awww. That’s a sad story.

Anyhow, I stuck the CD in and mounted it, and executed the installer—once I found it, that is. It did the normal thing that installers do, copied a bit of data on to the hard drive (don’t they all), and tried to display the README using write.exe, which I don’t actually have. Hey, that didn’t matter, the game was installed. When I ran it, Worms came up with all the relevant graphics, sound and action - so I’m stoked, as that’s one game that actually works.

You mentioned zoombuggy

Unfortunately, zoombuggy is not as fortunate as myself. For starters, she doesn’t have a CDROM drive, so she can’t install games even if she wanted to. Secondly, we’ve tried all of the games she owns under wine, but none of them want to work under anything but DOS or Windows. And because she doesn’t have a CDROM drive, most of them won’t run as they require the CD mounted before they’ll play. It’s beside the point that she doesn’t have a running Windows install at the moment, due to her having changed machines twice in the past 12 months.

Has she found any games she can play?

Yes, she has, though they are Linux games, of course. Suffice it to say that she enjoys them, and has a good time playing them. And with that, I’ll sign off.

Back to the Cube

2007-08-07T20:18:00.005+12:00

It’s tiny, Dad!

Nearly a couple of months back, I wrote here about the big Rubik’s Revenge cube that I bought, and the normal Rubik’s Cube. Today, I finally bought the tiny one, for the sum total of only $12.95— quite cheap, really.

So far, I’ve already scrambled it, put it back together (that surprised me!), AND scrambled it again. It might only have three million combinations (hah. only he says), but it's proving slightly tricky to put it back to rights. As with its really big brother, the 4x4x4 Rubik’s Revenge, it came with its own Solutions Booklet. Most of the pages described what a face was, what colours were on the cube, and what was in the pamphlet. Of the 16 pages, only one page showed actual moves that could be used on the cube to swap pieces around or to rotate them. Yes, this cube only has three sets of moves that get used to solve it.

Sell! Sell! Sell!

Oh yes, and the obligatory marketing for more of the Rubik’s products. For example, until today, I was unaware that there was also a Rubik’s Tangram (14 tangram pieces, which can of course be combined into many clever diagrams. I don't (yet) think I’ll be buying this one, much as I like playing with tangrams. As an aside, there is a Gtk program called gtans which shows a variety of shapes to fill in using the pieces. Quite challenging for some people. Anyhow, I’m sure you’ve all seen some of the other products produced as part of the company.

I came across one a couple of weeks after I bought the Revenge. It was a darn sight simpler, known as the “Missing Link.” You’d think it was relatively simple, but there’s a slight twist to it. Isn’t there always? The twist is—you can’t move the two middle sections independently, as they’re fixed in place. So really, it’s like a reorganised “15” puzzle. It took me quite a few minutes, but I solved it. Better results than I get with normal 15-puzzles.

Tick tock, time’s a’ running out

One other puzzle that I already have from the Rubik’s family I forgot to mention is the Clock puzzle. It’s got two sides, and nine clock faces on each side, linked by cogs and sliding elements that make it just a bit more tricky than you’d normally expect. Of course, the aim is to set all the clocks to 12 ’clock. Laughs can be had by seeing if you can set each clock from 1 through to 9—I haven’t found out if this can be done yet. According to the wikipedia page for the puzzle, it’s a lot easier than the other puzzles, purely because the clock faces are linked.

Acknowledgements

And with that said, I must thank the authors of the related wikipedia.org articles I used for this blog, and also my thanks go to the owner of the Missing Link picture.

Another day of SUNshine

2007-07-01T17:04:00.000+12:00

What, again?

Yes, only this time I had a little more room than before. The previous hard drive only had 3.2GB of space on it in total, so I had to leave some packages off the hard drive from the full install of Solaris 10. A few days ago, a friend of mine offered to send down two complete computer cases with motherboard and CPUs if I were to pay the postage. Funnily enough, zoombuggy agreed, as the idea was that she’d get her own computer back, with its own hard drive, and without any of my schlock on it. So we got them sent down, and I had a play.

They’re quiet, Jim

Yes, they’re quiet, and they’re also custom. The little ENS Compaqs quite often are. These machines are no exception, as they have Pentium-II motherboards, but they have Pentium-III CPU cards in them. Weird. One’s a 600 MHz CPU, the other is a 450 MHz CPU, so they're both slow, but not totally crawling. They also have (almost) tool-less cases. Again, weird, but I could get used to it. The main disadvantage is: there is only 128MB of memory in each machine, in two 64MB SDRAM sticks. So I’m now waiting for an awful lot of 128MB or 256MB SDRAM sticks that I can put into three computers. To make it worse, Kubuntu 7.04 doesn’t like having less than 256MB, and is running as slow as water on fire - personally I’ve found it runs okay with 384MB.

So now what happens?

Well, each of the computers had a 10GB drive. As one drive already had a complete Kubuntu 7.04 set up on it, I just moved on in, and got zoombuggy’s data shifted over. It seems funny, but I’d been wanting to upgrade her rather old Hoary Hedgehog installation (where do they come up with these names, anyhow?) for a while, and here I was, boom - up one distribution already, and without having to download a CD or DVD image. That was zoom and zoombuggy all jacked up, and I was up by one 4.3GB drive - that’ll probably have NetBSD put back on to it. The other machine (the 450 MHz) got the hard drive ripped out of it, which I used in fatty for the new Solaris install. Meanwhile (yes, I’ll get back to Solaris in a minute, Laura - just hold your horses) to make actual use of the machine and not have it lying around without a purpose, I put the Plan 9 drive into it. It works really REALLY well, in fact I’m frankly astounded. So, now my Plan 9 install has a machine all to itself. Once I corrected the IP I was using, and changed the hostname, it was good to go. I just wish it could get more use, but screens are at a premium here—I’ve only got two working screens, and I have to repair the third.

And now, the story about Solaris?

Yes Laura, on to Solaris. Well, as I said in the first paragraph, I had nowhere near enough room on the original drive, so I took the DVD writer out of brick and stuck it into fatty, so I could install Solaris on to the 10GB drive, and finally install everything off the DVDs that I had. I had to migrate a wee bit over from the original drive, such as the beta for Flash 9 player (yes, there IS one for Solaris x86), and the OSS commercial sound driver software - more on that in a bit. Now I’m the happy owner of a Solaris install that actually has all of its bits and isn’t missing anything. I also added Sun Studio 11 (it already had GCC) and NetBeans 5, but found the machine simply wouldn’t run the Java Studio Creator without bogging down. I guess that 256MB really isn’t enough, as I read the requirements afterward and found that 1GB would have been more like it. Of course, Solaris comes with Star Office 7, and a reasonably complete Motif 2.1 install, so I’ll at least have a bit of stuff to learn - and, it even has a complete install of Java SE5, so that I can start learning Java from that Bruce Eckel Java Book that I got from Amazon.com back in February or so. I’ve also added several packages from the Sun Freeware project, and several packages from the Solaris Companion disc. And Firefox, of course. So I’m happy, kind of.

But?

Yes, there’s a “but”. Currently the support in Solaris for sound is somewhat ... patchy. I have two ISA soundcards that don’t want to work under Solaris, even with the commercial OSS software that I downloaded. So for the moment at least, I ain’t got no lovin’ feeling ’bout that. If I happened to have an on-board AC97 sound chip, this would not be an issue, as:

the sound card would be on the PCI bus, and not the ISA bus, and
there's a AC97 sound driver in the Solaris kernel.

I know that works, as it worked somewhat under brick when I was running Solaris 3/05. So sound is the only issue I have, aside from memory (which could be worked on once I get some more 256MB memory sticks) and machine speed (probably requiring a motherboard upgrade).

And that's a wrap

Sure is. I'll have to do some more experimenting with Solaris, play with things a while. Frankly the version of Gnome I have here is ancient, to say the least. There are several aspects that have already been fixed in later versions of Gnome, such as the ability to change keyboard shortcuts. However, it does work, mostly. I don't have a whole lot of space left, but I have enough room in which to do some stuff, at least.

That's like, totally random

2007-06-20T12:15:00.009+12:00

Starting small

Well, not totally random, but several gazillion combinations makes for a lot of choice. I’m referring of course to the Rubik’s Cube... that ‘toy’ that has befuddled us from 1980 when Ernö Rubik put it on the market. Apparently when he first came up with the cube, he had to play with it for a whole month before he was able to actually complete it for himself. Since then, of course records have tumbled with the lowest record for the 3x3x3 seemingly sitting at around 9.8 seconds or so (May 2007). That’s about the lowest quote I can find, at least for the moment. But wait, there’s more.

You broke me!

Some people get a little too frustrated with their cube, and attempt to solve it by less conventional means (i.e. cheating). Other reasons for disassembly include regreasing—a favourite of cubers everywhere is a product called Vaseline, otherwise known as petroleum jelly. For some speed cubers, another product is Silicone Grease. Adding a good grease makes the cube more fluid in operation (so you can turn the faces with greater ease) and is often the first item in setting up for speed-cubing (doing the cube really really fast). Cubes can’t be done disassembled of course, so put it back together—carefully now. The Rubik’s cube site has reassembly diagrams for the three most common cube formats, though not for the Professor’s Cube. Anyhow, when you’ve finished, it’s supposed to look like this. A good cube will have a good smooth motion, not too tight or too loose. It shouldn’t be too easy to disassemble either, as the cube deteriorates the more often you have to disassemble it. These elements become more important the larger the cube, and the more you look after it, the longer it should last you before needing inevitable replacement. So far, I’ve found a marked difference between the real McCoy and other imitation products, so don’t go to the two dollar shop if you expect the cube to last longer than two minutes.

But wait, there’s more!

I first found out about the Rubik’s big brother “Rubik’s Revenge” in the late ’eighties, and have wanted a version since then. That’s a long time to want something without getting it. But hey, it happens. A few days ago, I found such a beast again, and decided to buy it, as the price was reasonable for New Zealand (only $30.00), and zoombuggy was okay with it.
This big brother has 7.4x10^45 combinations. Too large a number for me to even guess at pronouncing. I paid for it, brought it home, and found that the Rubik company had included a “Hints & Solutions” book with the cube in two parts. One part had the different instructions, each of them with a number that you used to look up the diagram in the other booklet that had all the pictures in it. Needless to say, I found it strange. I decided to go to the related website and grab their downloadable booklets to take a look at them; went there, spent about an hour actually finding the downloads, and snaffled copies of the other booklets too. This is where it gets interesting, because when I opened the downloaded booklet in my browser, it included the diagrams inline with the text as you’d normally expect. Only one ... quibble. The arrows pointing up, down, left, right, and around in 180 degrees, had been replaced with white numbers in black circles. Yay, not. Thankfully when I opened up the booklet for the original 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube, it had arrows, and the diagrams were all in the right place. Strange, that.

It’s got how many cubes?

Anyhow, I aim to buy (when I can afford them) both the Mini—Cube (2x2x2) (which I’ve since purchased) and the Revenges’ even bigger brother, the “Professor’s Cube” (shown at the back in the last picture below). That cube has 2.8x10^74 combinations. I've even seen it advertised at Amazon.com for only about US$26.00 or so, so it is at least able to be bought. That way, I’ll have the majority of the cube family, at least as put out by the Rubik company. I think I can safely skip the “cube on a keychain”, as it’s too flimsy to operate for long periods. Other varieties that I have already, include the Sudoku cube (a standard 3x3x3 cube that uses a different sudoku puzzle on each face), and “Square 1” (both pointed to by wikipedia). Grateful thanks go to the editors of the related wikipedia articles for their excellent pictures.

Knuth, that's kuh-nooth.

2007-06-06T21:45:00.000+12:00

\begin {article} And if you don't know who Donald Knuth is, just google for him and you'll see how important people think he is. His main passion of life is mathematics, but he also happens to be one of the more important names of computer science. His seminal (if I can use that term loosely) works include the five-part work The Art of Computer Programming, the TeXbook, Concrete Mathematics, and Selected Papers of Discrete Mathematics. There are of course a lot of other books that he has either produced, or at least had a rather large hand in producing. The Art of Computer Programming hasn't been completed yet, as only three volumes have been released so far, with two more volumes to be produced before he re-revises and releases his fourth edition of same. When viewing him in his video presentations (these are available from Stanford, and are linked to from his home page), I feel that he appears diffident, and rather unsure of himself. He quite often seems to be discovering the subject along with his students, though this turns out not to be the case, that he actually is viewing the subject from what commonly appears to be a completely different perspective—one not reached by most of his students. But the moments when his students and himself "get it" can seem almost like an epiphany. And for a mathematician, that's pretty heady stuff. I've also noticed that he also seems to jump around whatever subject he is covering, and seems to want to say a hundred things all at once. However, in contrast his writing appears confident, concise, and of course, accurate. You can hardly be otherwise when you're as famous a mathematician as he seems to be. Or is it Computer Scientist? I'm never quite sure. Any good scientist has hobbies, and he is no different—he owns his own small organ. Yes, it's a real organ. That's also covered in his home page, with its own special section describing it. I'm sure that's not his only hobby, as I've seen web pages devoted to diamond signs (imagine a square turned through 45 degrees, and something in the sign, and you have it), travel, and many other items I can't remember. So, go take a look. \end.

Linux for Suits - Beyond Blogging's Black Holes | Linux Journal (July 2007)

2007-06-06T21:44:00.000+12:00

I'm rather sorry I have to point to just the abstract for this article from the well-established Linux Journal, but I can't point to the article directly: you can't view it unless you're already a Linux Journal subscriber. And even if you're a subscriber, it can take a bit of gymnastics to get to the actual article. I've already emailed them about that. Anyhow, do become a subscriber, it's a pretty good idea, in my opinion. Anyhow, Linux for Suits - Beyond Blogging's Black Holes | Linux Journal (July 2007) describes what happened to Doc Searls recently, due to what appears to be some narrow-minded or just plain stupid antics, and reactions to same. As a result, he states:

The old 'sphere ain't the same. And, the problem isn't just incivility and flamage. As old hands know, that's been around for the duration and will never go away. The problem is blogging itself. Somehow it's becoming more like TV and less like what made it great to begin with.

That's all I'm going to excerpt, so I can hopefully stay within "Fair Use". Thank goodness I'm only a small one-man blogging station with not a lot to say... hopefully nobody will abuse me in the comments merely for mentioning LJ or Doc Searls.

Theme tinker

2007-05-23T22:21:00.000+12:00

Yup. Decided green was no longer the in thing, so I ditched it in favour of another of the pre-canned themes available from Blogger. Had to tweak a little until I got what I wanted, i.e. a bit of mix and match - some of this theme, some of that theme... it's not ALL working out, but I seem to be working through the bad bits slowly. Anyhow, lets get this theme to bed so I can get to bed myself... I'll write a bit more tomorrow if I think of it. The last thing I want to do is to replace the background colour with something a little more exciting. Like a New York cityscape. And hey, why don't I lighten up the background display over all?

From the Weekly Squeak: What's in a Comment?

2007-05-23T20:19:00.000+12:00

Today, I saw a news article with the following title: What's in a Comment? « The Weekly Squeak provides yet another look at why we should comment our code, this time from the perspective of a SmallTalk developer. You can read the rest of the details at the link above, but that's not where the story ends. Frankly the comments make more interesting reading than even the article does, though the article is entertaining enough. An excerpt from the article best describes this:

I believe that these statements, the code is self documenting, and there is no good place to document in code, are wrong. Comments deliver two very basic benefits. First they give context to flow. Good comments can help to point you in the right direction. If you have a method that is protected by callers or has other considerations that may limit the usefulness of a method, you had better put a comment in. Otherwise you can be sure some other developer will use the method wrong and make the mistake you thought was obvious. Class comments are a very good example of this. Having a class comment that just points you to the default flow of the object can really help.

I wholeheartedly agree with this, and don't think the standard excuses of "not enough time" hold up. I do accept that when a professional codes, that there IS a time constraint. After all, the programmer is often paid by the hour, and spending an extra two minutes per hour doing the documentation when the job is already clocking up the time doesn't seem worth it when you consider that the typical market for the code is non-technical users who will never look at the source code. But there are two things I believe worthy of consideration here. First, the documentation and comments in the code aren't for the user, they're for the coder. The second point to consider is this: the extra two minutes pays off in rewrites—when the next coder comes along to maintain the work, good comments and strong (that is, correct and relatively complete) documentation will mean that she can often do her job in half the time it would normally have taken her. Now, that's a lot of dosh saved.

A Blast From The Past

2007-03-02T20:55:00.000+13:00

I have a friend that plays an online game that he likes. He likes it so much he doesn't just buy the ordinary version, he buys the collectors version if he can instead, at its retail price. These collector's packs aren't $89.95 - they're quite often more like $110 or $120. Well, I've been a game player (not a very good one, admittedly) for a while, but haven't really been able to afford the games when they come out brand new, understandably. So I've had to wait until the prices of games I've wanted has come down. On top of that, there's the fact that just about NONE of the modern games these days will even run on my machine, due to demands for video this, 1.5GHZ that, 2GB drivespace here, Radeon 9700 / Nvidia GeForce 7 there... you get the picture. Simply put, when I come across a game I (1) can run, and (2) can play, I like to get all the members of that family I can. As a result of waiting, I've gained quite a collection.

A recent (for me, anyhow) example has been the Quake family. I got Quake 1 a while ago, thankfully I found this at the Warehouse (a budget store a lot like the American WalMart) along with Doom 2. I also got Final Doom when I found that in the Warehouse too. When I brought Quake home and played it, I was hooked. I loved the feel, especially after having played DooM. I like DooM, don't get me wrong, but Quake was something else again. Of course, then I decided to get mods, paks, and maps to extend my Quake single-player experience, just like I had done with DooM previously. To give another example: a couple of years ago, I stumbled across a cheap bundle called Totally Unreal, which contained Unreal, the expansion pack (second part, as it were), Unreal Tournament (the original one) and expansions. It was pretty good too, and brought me into the arena-style game. Now I'd got more of an idea of what it was all about. I have since seen a similar package, this time including Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Unreal 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004. At this stage, it's on my list of "I want, but will wait".

For the past six years or so, I have been looking for Quake 2 to fill the series out some, but hadn't really had much luck finding it... the two times I did find it, at the time I didn't believe my machine could run it due to the 16MB video memory requirement. So I left it on the shelf at the time. That was the way things stayed for about four years. I recently tried to find it again, and stumbled into Quake 3 Gold edition instead (contains Quake 3 Arena and Quake 3 Team Arena). By then, I'd gained a Voodoo2 and a Radeon 7000, and could play it, so I bought it. I liked that too, and finally got to play Quake Arena, against computer opponents - fun for me. Now I was even more determined to look out for a nice cheap copy of Quake 2, to fill out the set of Quake games. Of course, Quake 4 was released, and I realised once I saw the specs I was never going to be able to run it with my current machines, so left it out of my mind. Of course I kept looking.

Skip forward to five days ago. When I spotted another games collection on the shelf of our local Gamesman store, I decided to ask if I could buy it.
They had bundled the first two Age Of Empires games with the first two accompanying expansion packs, and called it "Age Of Empires (Collectors Edition)". It would pad out my set of Age of Empires games that I wanted to get. I'd originally gained the first CD of Age Of Empires, collected from a cereal packet. I took a look at Age Of Empires III, just for a comparison, I guess that's another game I won't be running any time soon, as it requires more machine muscle than I have. So I'll stick with Age Of Kings. Anyhow, I bought that set, and in return zoombuggy ended up with two more books to fill out her Philippa Gregory collection. Fair trade, I thought.

Then yesterday, I went down to another mall to get some coffee on wild discount. I decided to look in the EB Games store while I was at that mall, just on the faint hope that they might have Quake2 or something else I wanted... StarCraft, perhaps? I didn't find Quake2, of course though I did find StarCraft for $24.95. So, I trundled off to the Warehouse, just on the off-chance. I didn't find it there either, and then I picked up the Quake 4 box, looking at the price - $49.95. Then ...I spotted another Quake 4 box, this time labelled "Special DVD Edition Quake 4", and wondered ... what the ...? What made this version different from the normal edition? So I picked it up, looked at the rear of it, and nearly jumped out of my skin.
Included on the second DVD was Quake 2, and not only that, but also two Quake 2 Expansion Paks! I'd struck gold, finally! Now all I had to do was to talk zoombuggy around. Surely she'd allow me to spend $49.90 if I promised to pay part of the cost back at a later stage? It worked, she agreed, then asked this question: "What do I get in return?" Hm. Thought I'd better be fair and ask her what she wanted, so she said she'd go back to the Warehouse and look through their books section. In the end, zoombuggy gained three more Philippa Gregory books in return for me being able to purchase Quake 2. This would complete her series of Tudor stories. I think it'll be the last purchasing I'll be doing for a while, somehow.

After I bought it, I decided to compare some prices. At EB Games where I'd gone before, I looked again on the shelf at the StarCraft collection they had tried to persuade me to buy ($54.95 for SC, expansion, and two guidebooks - actually a pretty good price), then checked on the shelf for Quake4 for the version I had just bought. Sure enough, I found it - at $89.83 (or something like that). Then I realised how much of a discount I'd got it for. I still wasn't sure if I was going to be able to run Quake 2 of course, but I looked at the machine requirements (90MHz Pentium, 24MB memory, 775 MB hard disk space) and thought let's give it a go, and took it home.

Of course I was going to need the Quake 2 binaries for Linux, not Windows, so I went ahead and installed those, and copied the data off the DVD into the right place on the hard disk. I had Quake 2! Started it up, it even ran for me, which surprised me considering that the specs had stated 16 MB of video memory. It turns out that Quake 2 has a perfectly usable software rendering mode, which runs perfectly acceptably on a K6-II @ 533MHz. Sure, I don't get the fancy graphical effects, but hey, I'm there to play the game, not admire the scenery. Another thing I don't get with it is the original Quake 2 audio tracks, as they supplied it on a DVD-ROM instead of a CD-ROM. Again, I can handle it, though the music apparently rocks.

My next purchase is to aim for completing the Command & Conquer series (there's a box called "The First Decade that I'll have to buy), and work out which of the Tom Clancy games I can run on my machine, and fill out one or two more of his games. For some reason, I like them, though they don't play the same as Quake/DooM/Unreal Tournament. I think I'll dodge games like Flight Simulator, Formula 1, Need For Speed, GTA, and anything where I have to steer around a circuit. I suck at those games, big time. (Updated on 23-5-2007) I also really like the Myst series from Raven Software. So far I have the first game "Myst" on a disc on its own, and the collection of the first five games that I also got for a cheap-ish price ($29.95), called "Myst, The Collection". I can't currently run games 4 or 5 yet, but the first three look pretty darn good.

To bring the story to an end (because this is getting to be a bit long...) I now have all the main cast of Quake games, though I can't play Quake 4 for quite a while, as that'll require a motherboard upgrade. So, be prepared to trawl the aisles at the Warehouse sometimes - you never know what you might find. Also, do check prices everywhere before you shell out your hard earned cash. Quite often, you'll get a pleasant surprise somewhere if you do. Incidentally, another option I was told about today (thanks, wishes), was to go online and go to trademe to look for a game there. I'm informed it's a good place to find games as long as you are prepared to observe the caveat emptor principle (buyer beware).

To summarise, these are the games I currently have in my collection - it's getting reasonably sized. Some of them are real old and I don't play them much, or they were given to me and I still haven't worked out how to play them yet.

Age Of Empires, Rise Of Rome, Age Of Kings, Conquerors
Beneath A Steel Sky, Lure Of the Temptress
Command & Conquer
Ultimate Doom, Doom II, Final Doom
Duke Nukem 3D (including the first two Duke Nukem games)
F1 2000
Fifa 99
Half Life (Game Of The Year), Team Fortress, Blue Shift, Opposing Force, Counter Strike
Heroes Demo CD (contains demos of:
- Deadly Dozen
- Hitman
- Project IGI
- Rollercoaster Tycoon
- Tombraider Chronicles
- Totally Unreal
Monsters Inc - Bowling for screams (Sample game)
Moto Racer
Myst Masterpiece Edition
Myst: The Collection containing:
- Myst Masterpiece Edition (yes, a second copy)
- Riven
- Myst III: Exile
- Myst IV: Revelation
- Myst V: End Of Ages
Quake and two expansion paks, Quake 2 and two expansion paks, Quake III Arena, Quake III Team Arena, and Quake 4
Railroad Tycoon II (not strictly mine, more ... left here by the owner's mother)
Spec Ops (Ranger Assault)
Tactical Ops (Assault On Terror)
Terracide
The Need for Speed SE
Thief (The Dark Project), Thief II (The Metal Age)
Tilt!
Tomb Raider I, Unfinished Business, Tomb Raider II, Tomb Raider III
Tomb Raider - The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, Tomb Raider - Angel Of Darkness
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
Totally Unreal, containing Unreal (Game Of The Year), Unreal Na Pali, Unreal Tournament
Worms 2, Worms World Party

And that's it. If I were able to stick these all on one hard drive, it'd take up quite a bit of space. And that's not even including any of the games that I've installed that aren't on a CD somewhere (i.e. games that came with Mandriva, or other Linux games (fillets-ng, xlogical, etc etc).

Hope you enjoyed this trip through nostalgia lane with me.

The Sun finally shines again in the Flying Brick System.

2007-01-18T18:26:00.000+13:00

The latest offering from Sun.

Well. After all my bashing about Solaris not working on brick (the K6-II@533MHz, Apollo MVP4 chipset, 512MB) I actually tried it on fatty (a Celeron Coppermine@766MHz, 256MB) and got the surprise of my life. It WORKS on here! And it works like I expect! So now I'm writing this from Mozilla under CDE, on Solaris 6/06. It seems to behave rather nicely, though I've yet to do some more customising. One other thing I've found though, is the lack of hard drive space. I only installed on to a 3.2Gb drive, so I'm missing some things I wanted to experiment with, like the Sun Java Application Server Platform.

The real deal.

Now to the reason I installed Solaris to begin with: I wanted to see how programs behaved on a real UNIX™, and not on a clone like Linux, nor on a BSD variant. Not that I don't like Linux or FreeBSD, merely that I wanted to try the closest thing I was ever going to get to what has always considered to be real UNIX™. Anyhow, I'll leave this as just a real short note so far. No point in boring people with the few small struggles I've had learning how to "mount" a cdrom, or how to even get X to show a picture. Suffice it to say I've dealt with those. Only things left are sound, automounting CDs, and SunFreeware. and even that's not desperately important. I seem to remember there was a driver for my sound chipset out there somewhere, so I might hunt through my IRC logs to see what's around. Sun's Freeware (of course) is available freely, so all I have to do is scare up enough room... hmm, how about a new hard drive, people? Say, oooo... about 20GB?

SunSet.

Cheers for now...time I went and played with CDE and all those wonderful things that make Solaris so unique. Now where did I put that DVD-ROM?

Good Grief, Novell!

2006-11-26T16:32:00.000+13:00

The Bad

It seems you’ve got somebody’s back up. In fact, you’ve got his back up so much he wrote a letter about it. It’s written up in a blog entry about it. For those of you still living under a rock, it seems that Microsoft signed yet another deal promising the following, among other items:

As part of this agreement, Microsoft will provide a covenant not to assert its patent rights against customers who have purchased SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or other covered products from Novell, and Novell will provide an identical covenant to customers who have a licensed version of Windows or other covered products from Microsoft.

This of course made somebody at UWC rather peeved in the process. The text of the letter can be found at the first link above, and no doubt many other places too by now.

The Good?

Of course, there are other goodies in there, like:

The two companies will create a joint research facility at which Microsoft and Novell technical experts will architect and test new software solutions and work with customers and the community to build and support these technologies. The agreement between Microsoft and Novell focuses on three technical areas that provide important value and choice to the market: * Virtualization. Virtualization is one of the most important trends in the industry. Customers tell us that virtualization is one way they can consolidate and more easily manage rapidly growing server workloads and their large set of server applications. Microsoft and Novell will jointly develop the most compelling virtualization offering in the market for Linux and Windows. * Web Services for managing physical and virtual servers. Web Services and service oriented architectures continue to be one of the defining ways software companies can deliver greater value to customers. Microsoft and Novell will undertake work to make it easier for customers to manage mixed Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise environments and to make it easier for customers to federate Microsoft Active Directory with Novell eDirectory. * Document Format Compatibility. Microsoft and Novell have been focusing on ways to improve interoperability between office productivity applications. The two companies will now work together on ways for OpenOffice and Microsoft Office users to best share documents and both will take steps to make translators available to improve interoperability between Open XML and OpenDocument Formats. “As a result of this collaboration, customers will now be able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux,” said Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Novell. “Customers continually ask us how they can consolidate servers with multiple operating systems through virtualization. By working together, Novell and Microsoft enable customers to choose the operating system that best fits their application and business needs.”

... and The Ugly

I think I smell a rat here. A rather fishy smelling rat. From what I’ve read, it rather seems like Novell went to Microsoft and offered this deal, seemingly on a plate, although the actual mechanics (legal or otherwise) are beyond me at the moment. But one other tidbit I did get from the commentaries that I read was the fact that Novell would make a one-off payment to Microsoft, of course the amount is undisclosed. Now exactly why would they do this, given that Novell offer a free operating system (Suse) based upon the Linux kernel? And that it’s very unlikely that any of the Open Source code offered by Novell would infringe any patents claimed by Microsoft, valid or otherwise? Just who benefits here? I find it really really hard to believe this is merely a case of "You scratch our back, and we’ll scratch yours".

It's Virtually pointless

For anyone holding a valid Windows licence, they surely can run Windows how the hell they like. For anyone else, whether or not they choose to run Windows under a virtualization layer OR natively, they are still infringing upon the Microsoft End User License Agreement and no amount of finger—pointing to Novell is going to claim otherwise in a court of law, as the agreement only covers exercise of patents. Or do Novell want the ability to exercise some of those patents held by Microsoft so they can improve the virtualization experience?

Service ME now

Of course Web services are big. They’ve been saying that for the past ten years or so. Frankly when SOAP was first released, on April Fool’s Day, I thought the announcement really was the biggest April Fool’s joke yet. It turned out not to be so. And many of the other services available today (AJAX, etc etc) add to the experience. Why does Microsoft want a bigger slice of the pie? Haven’t they messed up IIS enough already? Granted, there is still no way of emulating an ActiveDirectory server without losing some of the functions that this piece of Microsoft technology provides, but not everyone needs all of that functionality. Do Novell want to be the company that is finally able to offer that, for their customers?

Documenting the Blob

Now, this makes more sense. Microsoft have been complaining for a very long time that there really is no need for the OpenDocument format to even exist, given that they consider their OpenXML format already does all a user could want and more, freely offered royalty—free to any user that is willing to use their format, for only the small cost of a blob of binary code in each XML file created. Whoops, did I say that? Sorry, Microsoft. Guess that’s not Open enough. Document the Blob, and we’ll talk further.

To wrap up

I’ll freely admit I don’t know most of the details of the agreement between Microsoft and Novell. Maybe it’s just as well I don’t. But I do know a lot of people in the Open Source community and in the Free Software community too are probably seething, shouting out comments like sellout, traitors, and .... yeah well, I won’t go there. Others have claimed that Microsoft eventually want to claim a "legal right" to run Linux, and that anyone else who has not purchased a license from Novell are then in infringement of any patents contained in Linux code that Microsoft think that they currently own. Does that sound like more of "Embrace, extend, eliminate alternatives"? Yeah, I thought I smelled a rat.

A new rubber band needed

2006-10-25T17:11:00.001+13:00

I had a drive that had some data on it, but it sounded like a miniature jet engine. I did have the sound file, but I've since lost it. Someone cheekily said it needs a new rubber band. As you can imagine, I grabbed all the data off it and stashed that onto another drive, which doesn't sound that bad. I've got a friend with a drive that sounds worse than that; it sounds so loud that I gave it the nickname "The Screamer", and it's only a bog-standard 3.4GB 3 1/2 inch IDE drive. For what its worth, here are some other bad drive sounds from Hitachi.

A Pas-de-deux, in three parts

2006-10-18T12:07:00.000+13:00

Part the first: An alternative to Squeak.

My forays into the world of the Smalltalk language are proving to be rather interesting. About seven years ago, a company called Cincom took over the rights to VisualWorks, another Smalltalk environment. They have commercial licences, of course. What made me sit up and take notice is that they also have a non-commercial licence for the exact same product. The License states you’re not allowed to use it in the running of a business, or to provide products that you would ordinarily charge for. In my case, as I do no production software anyhow, I’m hardly likely to choose to charge for what I do produce. So, I took up the non-commercial licence option, and downloaded VisualWorks and a goodly lot of goodies that go with it. It’s certainly different than Squeak, in that it feels more integrated, and doesn’t have its own desktop, instead electing to create separate windows on the existing desktop, whether it be a Windows platform, MacOS, MacOS X, Solaris or Linux. There has obviously been a lot of work put into the product, as it seems to flow better than Squeak does, and given the length of time that VisualWorks has been around, I would expect that. There are even tutorials available for recent versions (currently released version is 7.4.1, hot off the presses back in May 2006) though some links on this list cannot be reached. I have noted that the wiki occasionally goes offline. I do of course have free books addressing VisualWorks (and Squeak too) but they tend to focus on the interface of VisualWorks 2.0, which is quite an old version in comparison. Still, the books will bear reading, because they will hopefully be future-proof enough for me to actually learn something about the current version I’m playing with. The books are also a good way of introducing the reader to the principles of Smalltalk in general, not just to the respective products.

Part the second: An agreement not to disclose.

So far I’ve found out that there is no decent web browser project that uses ST, and the one that has got the furthest has an NDA attached to it. As I haven’t signed it (and am unlikely to, at this rate), I can’t say what is actually IN the web browser code, and even if I had signed, I still couldn’t tell you (I’d have to kill you afterwards). From the look of it, the project’s not strictly a web browser, more one of those core components that everybody needs, or will soon if they only but knew it. If I were to take up the NDA, it would mean that I couldn’t discuss the code of the component with anyone whom I couldn’t verify as having also signed the same NDA. Ironically, this includes the author. Effectively, I’d have to request from my lawyer that his lawyer faxed over the document stating his agreement to his own NDA. Frankly, I can’t be bothered with all that unless it was mandatory. I’m beginning to see why rms feels the way he does. Ordinarily, I would have no trouble in agreeing not to disclose. After all, I effectively agreed to several when I downloaded other programs onto my computer, such as QuickTime, IE, Macromedia Flash, and others of their ilk. I don’t have to distribute those, and I’m not allowed to even discover their source code, so I can readily agree to use but not disseminate. However, in the Smalltalk world, things are different. In the Smalltalk world, you can see all the source code for applications loaded into the image. For anyone wanting to protect any intellectual property from being ripped off and used in other products, they require others using that IP to sign agreements. I’m a bit wary of that, given the length of time they ask for this information to be kept hush-hush for. I seriously expect the product (as such) to be sold as a product on the market not unlike most modern software, however, I’m assured this isn’t the case. I will have to wait and see. If it becomes available under a more liberal agreement, I might then be able to use it; until then, I’ll have to be one of the have-nots.

Finalé in one part.

Given the state of play with Smalltalk web browsers, I think I won’t be holding my breath for anything fantastic. Scamper (the web browser commonly available in Squeak) is nearly as bare—bones as you can get a browser to be and still support images and table layout. TwoFlower, the browser available for VisualWorks, has had the plug pulled on it, doesn’t work on my current setup and is not being actively developed any more, since the author wants to concentrate on the new coding project. I haven’t seen any others except in projects like Inferno and Plan 9, which are themselves rather primitive and prone to crashing at inopportune moments, like when loading a page, for example. And the mere fact that Smalltalk uses a VM to interact with the user means that things will quite possibly be significantly slower than on a binary-code platform, even if Just-In-Time conversion to binary code from bytecode takes place. I did manage to get an IRC client that looks good though. This wasn’t actually going to be a talk about web browsers, more my conclusions about Smalltalk environments in general; I guess that will have to wait until next time.

A piece of history

2006-09-10T11:08:00.000+12:00

Like a Rolling Stone

I finally got the Squeak CD downloaded, took six days over bittorrent. There’s a lot of historical stuff on this CD, though I was surprised as anything to actually find out that there’s actually a DVD available as well. For only the princely sum of (probably US)$9.95 through a paypal account, I too can have an entire DVD’s worth of Smalltalk and Squeak goodness, whatever that all is.

Hey Mister Tambourine Man

So anyhow, I was playing around with this yesterday now that I’ve got it burned to CD and all, and stumbled across the "BotsInc" environment, used to help with a book aimed as a tutorial by programming "bots". Sort of like LOGO (if any of you remember that, feel privileged, most of us are too young) but done Squeaker style with most of a squeak image emptied and only the bare essentials left in to teach about controlling the bot.

Glory Days

Reading up on the history of Smalltalk from its origins back in 1961 up to the release of Smalltalk-76 was quite enlightening, even though I had to rotate the pdf through 90 degrees and increase the font size by about 80% just to read it. Lots of design decisions got talked about, as well as the original view of the author, to produce an environment that kids would naturally want to explore in. Hearing about some of the initial hardware the creators had for working with seemed a bit baroque, especially when they said that the 8086 CPU was a non-optimal chip to use.

Secret Garden

Anyhow, I expect that just like a secret garden, there’ll be all SORTS of things to find out about inside the average Squeak image, let alone the other three or four images that are provided to experiment with, including a whole Web application environment. That one surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. My puzzle is: how do I get access to the environment from outside the Squeak image? At the moment, I don’t know.

Wild World

Just like Cat Stevens of 1970’s singing fame, I feel like this is a switch back to the simpler things of computing—where stuff was experimented with, and it just worked^TM. There’s a lot of stuff to re-learn, and probably a whole lot of stuff to learn from new. I hope I enjoy it.

A little bit of reference

I first stumbled across the Smalltalk language when Bruce Eckel, of Thinking In Java fame had described his brief brush with how Smalltalk experts just seemed to grasp certain subjects almost intuitively, in comparison to other programmers who had more of a hard time with those same concepts. Bruce thought it might have been due to the design of the language, where literally everything is an object, and unlike Java, there are no primitives—no Integers, no Floats, no Chars, etc etc. If you create an object, you can put almost anything into that object. For those of us used to lowest-common-denominators of strong typing, having a system whereby you don’t have raw types (int, long, char, float) as a basis to build other types out of can be in some senses totally foreign, yet after a while, it becomes liberating to not have to deal with what type an object is.

Learning to walk the Smalltalk

I’ve yet to learn how that works, as I’m still getting to grips with the bare essentials. The History Of Smalltalk described this phenomenon as well, stating that at the beginning, we quite often have more trouble just thinking in the field natually, because we don’t even know the building blocks of the language; we’ve got no idea of how even to do the simplest of things that we’re used to being able to do in the other languages we’ve learned. And in fact, sometimes what we have learned in those other languages is actually holding us back, because the assumptions of the previous environment simply don’t fit. Stuff like strong typing versus weak typing, or perhaps no typing at all; early binding versus late binding; syntax issues (my current weak point); and of coucse the simple feel of the language are all things to consider when looking at such a different beast as Smalltalk.

Coda

Anyhow, I’m sure I’ll have fun. I’ve got a bucketload—well, okay, a CD load of books to peruse to help me learn the language. I only wish some of these books were available inside the image so I didn’t have to flip between inside the Squeak world and outside just to go read a document. Wish me luck, and if you want to comment, feel free. In fact, do comment, it’ll let me know what you think.

The Number 8 Wire Mentality

2006-09-08T15:36:00.000+12:00

I had to cobble together something today. Suffice it to say, it worked. Drill a hole in the top of a one or two litre plastic milk bottle lid—Meadow Fresh for us South Islanders, but Anchor might work too; remove the little plastic ridge around the inside of the top, cleaning up as you do so, and remove about 2 mm of the clear plastic around the top of the bottle. Poke the Tommee Tippee Fast-Flow teat through the hole, and clamp down onto bottle, making sure you don’t have any leaks when you’ve finished. Hey presto, one home-made bottle. Nearly as good as the real thing. I note that you have to remove the little ridge inside the lid so that the rubber seals against the remainder of the lid, and you have to remove the 2 mm of plastic on the bottle, so that there's enough thread to grip the lid properly. I of course found this out only through trial and error, like the usual way of doing it, though I bet that if I'd asked an old school dairy farmer, they may well have told me that too. In these modern days, I'll bet they have custom versions, just like they do for babies. Got a story of something you’ve done? Put it in the comments, so we can hear about it too.

All booked up

2006-09-07T14:14:00.000+12:00

In Fury Born

In my previous post about David Baen I omitted a book of his, mostly because I hadn’t read it yet; however I believe that it’s well worth a mention. It’s a considerable rewrite of a previous novel of his, and is called "In Fury Born". It’s not an Honor Harrington novel, but it rocks even better than they do. I'd like to see more of the series describing this character, and I suspect he will write more. Good one, David Baen. I await the next novel with anticipation.

Sir Arthur Conan who?

Ever read any of Ellis Peter’s novels? No? Well neither had I. He writes about a monk back in the 1100s that ends up being a detective. It’s an interesting twist on the Agatha Christie/Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sort of book, though so far, I’ve only read part of one story, which was on a set of audio tapes that I got. I’ll let you know more when I’ve read them for real.

I’ve lost that reading feeling

Ever had the time where you’ve gone to the library, got books out, only to take them back four weeks later, unread? I seem to have that a bit recently. I think to myself "That might be nice to read up on", yet by the time I’ve gone back, I haven’t looked much at the book. Sometimes it’s because really, I need the book on a full-time basis so I can read it at leisure. I found I had to do that with "The C Programming Language", as well as "Thinking In Java, 4th edition", which I eventually bought for myself from Amazon back in June.

Money money money!

Computer books cost so much for what they actually are, here in New Zealand. For example, to bring in "Thinking In Java", I was quoted $100 by my friendly local bookshop. I decided to amaze myself at Amazon and buy the book there instead. Turns out that zoombuggy also wanted to buy a book. So - we went there, selected the books we wanted, and entered in our all-important details. After the dust had settled, we paid less for both books than we would have paid in New Zealand. I’m not sure what it would have cost our friendly bookstore to bring in that other book, but I don’t think the price would have been as cheap as we paid at Amazon. To illustrate, (these prices are in U.S. dollars) normal purchase price of the Java book would have been $59.95, and at Amazon, I paid $35.45. Add another $10 for the postage and handling over all, and another $3.99 for the book itself, that still comes to less than the price I would have paid for the book normally. Zoombuggy paid $24.95 for her book, and $3.99 for postage - because it was in with my order, she didn't get charged another $10.00 for their "postage and handling cost". Where Amazon seem to make the money is on what they charge for their postage and handling options. I’ve struck this before, when someone ordered a CD for me and was charged a lot more than the postage would have come to.

Like the look?

I thought I’d spice my blog entries up with a few headers. What do you think? You’re welcome to leave me comments, unless of course you’re trying to sell me something, in which case your comment will get /dev/nulled. But I accept all other comments, no matter what currency. I also want comments on my other blog at MSN Spaces, where frankly, I haven't found a "theme" that I like yet. Could be that they need larger previews of their themes so I can actually make an informed choice. I’ve also got to be more careful about any Microsoft-bashing there, as they may decide my comments aren’t what they want to appear in their Spaces.

What's the plan?

2006-09-06T17:31:00.000+12:00

Solaris can't connect

Well, I finally managed to get Solaris 6/06 downloaded, thanks to the help of someone else who had a fast connection at the time. Now all I have to do is to install it, presumably with that extra acpi-user-options=0x02, or else the kernel won’t recognise my ACPI and won’t work. I’ve already had one lockup booting off the initial CD, which isn’t a good look. While I was at it, I started up another blog at spaces.msn.com, though I haven’t found a colour scheme I like yet.They tout it as not just another blog, but more a whole environment, of which blogging is one part. The nice point, at least for me, is that I don’t have to be running under Windows to access and update it.

Plan 9

Weird. Another experiment of something from Bell Labs, though I’m not entirely sure I’ll get used to it yet. I downloaded their Live CD, and burned it, booted off the CD, and got me a Plan 9 desktop, acme the editor, a terminal that’s a bit ... retro, a series of status meters (mem, activity, load, etc) and a biff-style icon to show mail. Acme is the hardest piece of software to actually get used to, as it contains considerable functionality, combining a file manager with an editor. And to get other stuff working properly (such as ssh or drawterm), I have to set up Plan 9 on a hard disk somewhere and really have a play. That way I’ll be able to generate keys so other services can connect to the Plan 9 box. I can also modify the plan9.ini so that the computer boots straight into the correct screensize, finds the USB mouse, and gets networking up and running. And that’s not even including Inferno, which is another addition to the Plan 9 environment, though it doesn’t just work under that; it can also work as an emulated environment under Linux.

Smalltalk - or at least, Squeak.

I’m downloading the Squeak ISO image, and finding out what they installed on it. I’m not sure if they have made it a live CD or not, I’m beginning to think that the creators of the ISO didn’t. After all, what would you have as the environment that Squeak runs on top of? Browsing the contents makes me suspect that it’s a combination of documents covering Smalltalk and Squeak, and Squeak images for three platforms.

RFC documents

I’ve been working on a bash script that displays RFC documents, and downloads them if the user requires. Currently I have been using bash, with a little extra dash of perl to do the searching, and other support programs. But frankly, the whole script is getting too slow, accessing 4671 documents in one directory may be one limitation. I’m looking for another way of implementing the whole script, so that it runs fast, and not slow; as well as displaying in a window that stays present on the screen, rather than my current method of using pop-up dialogs. I’ve got the option of reimplementing the whole script in perl instead of bash, but I don’t know enough to get me by. I could also do the job in C, but I don’t know C any better than perl. On top of that I then have the problem of what I use for a window manager, whether I use ncurses (for a terminal program) or go to a gtk2 window, counting out all the console users.

And to wrap up

I got Windows XP Home booting again, once I took out the driver for the SATA card I have in the machine. I’ve also found out that the NVidia card won’t work in 3D mode on my Windows install - as soon as DirectX tries to do anything more than see if the card is there, the whole computer freezes. So I've basically had to forget about using the NVidia. Hopefully I can still use Solaris 6/06 with the serial ports. Catch y’all later.

Where are all these daemons coming from?

2006-08-17T11:25:00.000+12:00

It's been a while since I updated this particular blog. I've been a bit busy installing new hardware, and playing with different operating systems, such as Solaris 3/05, Solaris 1/06, and the three BSD. First, my notes about the BSDs - I installed NetBSD on fatty, mainly because for some unknown reason, FreeBSD wouldn't install... or at least the version I had at the time wouldn't install. As I only got what was on the NetBSD CD (base, comp, X, etc) I had to download a few more packages to make a decent install. A few weeks later, I installed FreeBSD-6.1_RELEASE off two CDs that were available, and installed just about everything bar the kitchen sink. The only thing left to get is other packages available from ports/packages. Then, I went and sliced up the drive a bit further, dumped the first FreeBSD install, and made a partition available for OpenBSD, then reinstalled FreeBSD to the now smaller partition, then installed OpenBSD. Again, like NetBSD, I only had what I'd downloaded (base, comp and so on), and had to add a few more bits. Things seem to be working okay in all three BSDs, though I have a hard drive issue with OpenBSD that necessitates me starting up in Linux first, so that the Linux kernel turns off the "Host Protected Area" of the drive. Once that's done, then OpenBSD can "see" the whole of the drive, and is happy to boot. I still hate the way NetBSD do their package management, so I have been doing the downloading manually, checking out what whining it does when I try installing the package, then grabbing the complaint packages. I much prefer FreeBSD's package management in this regard. What THEY have is a fat INDEX file, which the user downloads, perhaps through sysinstall, and browses the entries he wishes to install. Then sysinstall goes and gets those, along with their dependencies in a nice tidy manner. I've also checked out how OpenBSD does the same thing, and even it seems to be somewhat saner about dependency handling. For Night-Hawk building, especially for Gray Light, I'm going to need GLUT, so I found that and installed it in all three cases. NightHawk is available as a package in FreeBSD and in NetBSD, but not in OpenBSD. I'm going to see if it compiles and runs under OpenBSD, then find out how I create a package. Now, onto Solaris. Frankly I'm surprised. It could be my machine, but I'm not sure. 3/05 worked slow, but fine. So I went and really did something insane. I purchased 1/06 on DVD, all eight DVDs. I installed it, and got to it. It works, BUT it doesn't see any serial ports, meaning one of two things. Either I go and find a 10GB drive, and install it on fatty, so that I can at least have network access for the poor thing, or any time I want to grab stuff for Solaris, I'll have to download it to fatty first, then start up Solaris, and pull the data off fatty. sigh. For the moment, I'll have to see what will happen with Solaris, go browse website or stuff. And my final complaint... Windows. The two pieces of hardware I installed were:

A multi-function card, containing four USB 2.0 ports, and three FireWire ports. Came from Dick Smith Electronics, and came with a CD with its own driver.
A NVidia MX4400 (though this may not stay).

If I try and start up Windows XP, it flatly doesn't get started. Shows the logo screen, scrolls the little blue bar a bit, then stops. Dead. If I haul out that card, then Windows will boot. At least until it decides to go find out what other video cards exist. When it finds the NVidia, then things get .... interesting again. So far, I haven't had a successful boot of my Windows XP system since I got these two cards. I got the first card so that I had more plug-n-play options, and the speed increase that USB 2.0 gives. However, the driver makes Windows have blue fits. I'm not sure exactly WHAT the issue is for the Nvidia card. Again, I suspect I'll have to do some surfing. Well, that's all from me for the moment. I'll get this posted, tidy up the fonts, and go screaming mad.

Playing with chips, bits, and wires.

2006-03-21T11:52:00.000+12:00

I’ve been playing a bit with my machine. I’ve found a blogging client I like better than BloGTK. Drivel seems to support the things I want to do, though it behaves a bit strangely too. BloGTK didn’t even let me set a title for the posts I was making, so I was having to go back into the Blogger web interface to correct this. I’m seeing what Drivel provides for a Blogger blog like this one, and I’m repeating this post (hopefully) in my personal WordPress blog. It seems that Drivel also doesn’t support setting a title - is that something to do with the API or something? I don’t know, as I haven’t looked up what the API is all about, or what I can do from a web interface.

Ubuntu seems to work a little faster than Mandriva does, but I’m not sure why that is. I get start times of about 15 - 30 seconds for Firefox as opposed to 1m52 seconds on Mandriva. My Mandriva machine seems to be too slow, but I have no idea why. Anyhow, I’ll have to reinstall from a clean Mandriva install medium just to see if that corrects things.

Hard(ware) changes

2006-02-15T20:37:00.000+13:00

I've been playing around a bit with the webcam (the Logitech QuickCam Express), and I managed to get this picture out of it, which made me quite happy. The colours are all (relatively) natural, and everything except the picture size is exactly how I want it. I've also been playing around with my own blogging software (Wordpress), and so far I've been doing okay. I don't find it too heavy (yet). This post is actually a clone (almost) of a posting I made in WordPress, but I thought I'd let you lot know about it too. I got a present today. It was a box from Canada, and it contained (before I emptied it) a DVD-writer, a 256 MB stick of memory, some blanks, Mandriva 2006.0 (x86_64 version, so no good to me), Slackware 10.0, and Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger), which I'll use to upgrade zoombuggy's machine. The owner even sent me a DVD-RAM pre-blanked, along with a few blank CD-R, a CD-RW, and a few DVD-R media. The memory stick replaced one of my existing 128MB sticks, taking my machine up to 512MB, and, once I got the order of sticks sorted, almost eliminating the memory errors I had. I have also stuck the spare 128MB memory stick from my machine (brick) into zoom, bringing it up to 256MB. Seems to work, along with putting the old 32 speed CDROM into there too. The new drive is interesting, it’s a LG GMA 4020B DVD writer, and is reviewed here, and also here at CDRLabs.com. Both reviews say that the drive is slow, but that it also supports all major single-layer media formats: CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and even DVD-RAM. Now I rather wish I had the CD that came with the drive. Now I'm going to try and watch a DVD. (Later) - hrm, after fighting with the machine, I've come to the conclusion that my machine isn't actually fast enough to play a DVD properly without actually jumping. That's a pity, as I wanted to watch Laurence Olivier featuring in the famous Shakespeare play Richard III. Never mind. At least I was able to burn a CD without creating more than one coaster in the process. I.E. two burns, one CD successful. I can only go up from here.

Slim pickings for Linux blogging software

2006-02-12T19:49:00.000+13:00

New blogging software (BloGTK) on trial here, though I don't know how well it'll work. I guess we'll find out. I got a little sick of gnome-blog-poster not actually setting the title, instead, what I set as title ended up being the first line of the body instead. (Later) It turns out that BloGTK won't even LET me set the title for a blog, although it seems to be a very nice client otherwise. I found that the main advantage to gnome-blog-poster was that it could be reached by a gtk panel applet, popping up a window below the panel. You then filled in the fields and sent it on. Nice. There's no real difference with BloGTK, except that there isn't a panel applet to reach it by. Someone cheekily said for blogging software, that I should use the browser. Umm, this particular generation of the browser seems to be really slow. As a result, it's not speedy to use, which halts the "flow of ideas" that blogging software is supposed to help with. And emailing the posting has its own limitations, though several blogging sites allow that now. I've created a WordPress blog on my own machine that's been fun to work with, though currently I'm using the browser to reach that too. I did find a really nice theme that I like lots, so I suspect I'll stick with that for a while. I'm still looking for "decent" free blogging software, so wish me luck.

Show up those RFC documents

2006-02-12T13:23:00.000+13:00

I've got a little further along on my current pet project, rfcshow. It does pretty much what it says, downloading RFC documents you want if you don't have them, providing a really simple search facility through the index, and displaying them in a small variety of formats.

What I was thinking of, was to do a graphical user interface that's different from the one I use currently, and for that, I'd have to learn more C and gtk2+. At the moment, I don't have that knowledge, though apparently it's not difficult to learn. So you could be seeing a gtk version, perhaps even with embedded hyperlinks.

Anyone vaguely interested in viewing RFC documents on their own computer can take a look at http://flying-brick.caverock.net.nz/rfcshow, though it's still a work in progress, it does nearly all that I want for an RFC program. I built this because I wanted a way of calling up any document, and I added searching because I needed it. Another project, "rfc" is written in perl, and is where I 'flogged' the search routines from. The only reason I didn't customise that version further was because it wasn't my own work to begin with. Not only that, but there were features about my program that I preferred; for example rfc uses lynx to fetch the documents from the rfc site, and displays them, but doesn't store them locally for later use (unless there's a caching function I didn't find). Rfcshow downloads documents if you don't already have them, and stores them in compressed form on the hard disk for later retrieval. It uses a dialog client to draw pretty boxes filled with content to the screen. About the only thing I haven't managed to do yet is to have a document with embedded links so that you can click merrily from document to document.. I also don't have a "table of contents", as such.

Requirements to run rfcshow are as follows: bash (2.05 or greater), a dialog client (cdialog, Xdialog, or zenity will do, kdialog may not), bzip2/gzip, perl, tcl (not mandatory) and ncftp-utils or curl. You'll also need a place to store about 120MB of downloaded documents if you choose to install them all. Requirements for PDF versions or PS versions may be higher.

Incidentally, I managed to get this working under FreeBSD without any real hassles aside from modifying the line at the top of the file that looks for bash. I even got it to run under Cygwin, though for this I had to go and find a dialog client. It can be found, as I used google to find it.

Enjoy! And do let me know what you think of it. I'm still working ot bits of it, like how to download a large number of documents at once.

Writing with no idea

2006-02-05T11:54:00.000+13:00

Yep. As some of you know, I'm trying to write a book. Well, three of them. At the moment, all three are in embryonic stage. For one of them, I don't even know what story I want to tell, quite. The other two, at least, I have some ideas for. Do all authors have this problem?

I ended up swapping webcams with someone else, so now I've got a Logitech QuickCam instead of the OV511-based KTX that I had. We'll see how much luck the other guy has with my camera.

Googletalk absolutely sucks on my connection, so I'm sticking with Skype, at least for the moment. I'm not even sure how well the audio/video would even work in MSN.

Anyhow, cheers for now.

Now you can Skype in video too.

2006-01-07T13:58:00.000+13:00

I've been taking a look at the next generation in IM programs, and came across this link: Skype - The whole world can talk for free. Not only that, they can even see each other for free. Or so it goes, at least for Windows XP machines. Not sure about anything else. On my machine, it's a bit moot, as I've only got a dialup modem, so I'd get about three pictures during the span of my five minute conversation. Can't get silk out of a sows' ear.

I got given a gift the other day - a box - green. With a pretty logo on. Inside, it had an orange folder, with a CD in it. A pretty CD, with lots of logos and authentication logos on it. By now, you've probably figured out that I got given what some consider a mixed blessing, and some others consider a downright curse. Yep, Windows XP Home. It was even legal! Over the past three days or so, I've had a play, and it's not totally horrible. I've had to tinker just to get it installed, mind you. Then, once I got it installed, I had to tinker a little more to get it like I want. Interface tweaks, mainly - shifting the taskbar to the top of the screen, making it hide itself, changing the screen resolution and background, stuff like that. Then I went to the updates website for it, grabbed the required updates (only 19.2MB, people! Wow!) and grabbed a couple of Google extensions I'd been wanting to try out. I suspect the Microsoft Anti-SpyWare program might cost a little more than I want to spend on a program, given that Ad-Aware is free, however I'm trying out the beta and it's ...erm, okay. Does what it's (probably) supposed to do. It's due to time out in July, but until then, I'll see just how it behaves.

I still don't have a really compelling reason to shift to XP full time, even though it's more stable than Windows 98. I think Microsoft simply have to change their pricing and anti-piracy visions; but that'll never change. They're a commercial entity who thinks there's too much to lose by doing so. I'm not entirely sure I agree. Ah, blow it. No, I don't agree at all, but then I'm not a major company who literally owns billions of US dollars and has control over possibly (my guess) hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide. I still have complaints about the way programs can be suddenly killed purely because an applet doesn't do the right thing. A case in point: after I downloaded the patches (and installed them), I went back to the Windows Update site the next day, to install the patch for the recent Windows Metafile Format exploit. I got to the page that showed me two buttons for selecting what upgrades I wanted to install, and that's where things got tricky.

If I clicked on either button, I got a refreshed page, and a progress bar that ticked along for about a minute or so (normally it takes longer than that); then I got the dreaded "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." And no matter what I did, I couldn't get to the correct page to download the WMF fix that Microsoft released. At least not through the Updates webpage I was trying to use. Every time I tried, I kept getting the same dialog. I eventually got there by changing users, and going back there. This time it worked, but I don't know why the other user didn't work, as both users were administrators of the machine. That's one example of why I don't like Microsoft's programming.

Anyhow, 'nuff said. Later, all.

Is this a gumboot I see before me?

2005-12-29T20:24:00.000+13:00

I finally got the Gumboots (a set of five documentation CDs) installed on their own vhosts in apache - now it's all visible from the Internet at large, when I open the correct port in the firewall. Thanks to wishes and others for pointing me to the correct way to get it all working, though I don't know why it wasn't working properly the first time I tried it all their way. Still, great that it works now.

I still haven't got this blogger working quite properly - the applet doesn't get the Title in the correct place, and there's no way of selecting the correct format for text in a paragraph without going onto the website and modifying it for myself. Still, as I said earlier, it's a good quick program.

I had a good Christmas over all, though I'm still awaiting a secondhand DVD writer.

I do not LIKE green eggs and ham

2005-12-27T10:54:00.000+13:00

Well, actually I don't mind either eggs or ham. Not that I got either for Christmas, though I got some other items of use. The one item I got that disappointed me, even though I thought it would improve things, was a 80-wire IDE cable. Now Windows won't boot (no loss, some would say) and I still haven't got any other speed increase in my hard drives. Surely I ought to get 40-something MB in drive transfers on udma4? But no, it's a slow old 12MB/sec. Never mind.

I'm still working my way through "Crime and punishment", a good old classic story from the Russian author Dostoevsky. It's getting rather intriguing, with the prime character still not having been caught for his crime of murdering two people, but constantly fluctuating between "Do I confess all? This is killing me!" and "I don't really GIVE a shit about the world". Being given lots of money and a new set of clothes only serves to have confused him somewhat so far. I'll let you know once I've read more.

Ever had the post-Christmas blahs? That time directly after Christmas day when nobody's open (in Wellington, anyway) or you don't have any money to spend and you've run out of things to do? Yeah, that's struck here too. Pity, really. I wanted to go see "The fastest Indian".

Enlightenment strikes with Gnome

2005-12-17T14:29:00.000+13:00

I've FINALLY managed to get Gnome 2.12 to work, and enlightenment to fire up under it. Because of this, I was able to get TWIN windows to take up the full screen, even overlapping the panels. I understand that I've got to address this, but I'm not too worried by it. Frankly, I've got bigger fish to fry. I'm interested to see what extra niceties Enlightenment-DR17 will bring. And now that Gnome is playing nice (I was having trouble with an old menu that wasn't formatted properly, and UTF-8 encoding was screwed) I can see how it all works.

From the desktop of The Viking

2005-12-14T16:16:00.000+13:00

Yeah, this time I'm posting from my own desktop. Like, how cool is THAT? The only thing I'm missing seems to be formatting, but I'm not too worried about that as this application I'm trying out is for quick-throw notes up onto the blogger (or whatever) site, and not for particularly worrying about whether the words are all formatted in Verdana (my preferred blogging font). The other option would have been to create a post and email it, which blogger.com supports happily. The only problem with that being that I have to go back in and edit the post to change the formatting from mobile post to normal post, then actually POST the darn thing. The second is easily handled by a setting to post straight away, the first - well, I don't yet know. Anyway, this method lets me post to the blog straight away, and worry about the formatting later.

Anyhow, I'm still waiting for my LG GWA-4020 to arrive from Canada. The anticipation is just killing me. I even went out and badgered zoombuggy into letting me buy DVD media in preparation - thankfully I saw some for NZ$9.98 for ten DVD+R and the same cost for ten DVD-RW, which is STILL a ripoff as far as most other countries are concerned, but well, that's New Zealand for ya. They even charge the earth for cellphone calls too! Just in case you want to know (like you're in New Zealand) I got the media at Dick Smith, and they're basically DSE-labelled.

I had a wee bit of an accident with my Apache. I downloaded the Apache packages from Cooker to upgrade my system as I'd decided to upgrade to php-5.1.1. Well, was MY system ever in knots! Couldn't find this file, that symbol was missing from the module file, and as a result, apache wasn't going to start without a bit of a repair job. Made me feel like chucking the whole thing in. Thankfully, I'd decided to grab slightly earlier Apache packages from the updates tree for Mandriva LE2005. I stuck those back in, then had some help fixing the config files so that all my existing vhosts could be seen.I'm still not sure how on earth to make those vhosts visible from outside my network without starting them all on differing ports. At the moment, I have them differentiated by name (gum1, gum2, cisco, etc) but that won't work from outside as my DNS is private to my network, and isn't seen from the Internet. So, noxo (from undernet#linux), thank you.

Right - time for me to go, again.

Baen Books and David Weber

2005-12-06T07:57:00.001+13:00

I got pointed to a pretty good set of books the other day - if you're into books about Science Fiction, then go see the Baen website , especially books by David Weber who writes the "Honor Harrington" series about a woman commander of space craft. I've only read the first book so far (On Basilisk Station) but already I can see I'm going to really like this author, just as I enjoy Anne McCaffrey, Isaac Asimov, and Tad Williams. Other authors (from different categories) include James Clavell, Stephen Donaldson, and Bryce Courtenay. So yes, perhaps I am a bibliophile.

Cut and iced. That's all the source

2005-11-29T19:55:00.000+13:00

As I said in a previous post, I've been collecting source code to examine. Candidates have included the three major free BSD world trees (i.e. what's in their source tarballs), OpenSolaris world, and of course, the Linux kernel (world's a bit big to reasonably subset in Linux). I've also added some GNU software - glibc, gcc, flex, binutils, coreutils, etc etc. NetBSD world is nuts, I had to spread it over three CDs, although if I thought about it properly, I would have put NetBSD on just two CDs, and packed out the second CD with something small, like some of the GNU utility programs. As it is, I've thrown current copies of the state of play for X11 for Xorg, NetBSD and OpenBSD all on an additional CD, so I've ended up doing a bit of burning. Other stuff includes sed, awk, and even grep. Thankfully I don't have any more major examples of sourcecode to ice, having done the major ones I wanted. Theoretically, if I examine the current state of play for commonly used programs, I may have a tutorial of good clean code to learn from. And with tools like openGrok to format the sourcecode, I may even be able to trace changes in the code, though code like flex and make hasn't changed for a very long time. OpenGrok (from the Open Solaris project) is a sourcecode browser and indexing application that provides a full-text search front end to any source code you index with it. In my view it is a bit complicated just to do code viewing and diff'ing. The web application (currently) installs within a TomCat server, and the database is prepared with a java console tool. It seems a bit complicated to have to create the database from existing sourcecode, then go and open up the source.war file, edit the web.xml file, then rezip everything back up into another .war file for deploying on to Tomcat. I don't imagine the average Windows refugee wanting to do that every time she wanted to view a different source tree. However I haven't given the application a very hard job, and I do like the job it does. Imagine that it's a java front end to a ctags database, and so far you'll have almost my total understanding of the application. I'll let you know if I do anything much more with it.

iPod, but not so you'd know it.

2005-11-22T19:14:00.000+13:00

I've finally finished "iPod, therefore I am", which I talked about four days ago. While I thought it had some good moments, I felt that the book mainly rambled on about Dylan Thomas's musical tastes, and how he could literally play any tunes he owned, in any order he wished. He did state a reasonable amount about how the iPod has affected the culture (from his viewpoint, anyway), and he also rambled on about how he had to make decisions about just what does get onto his playlists. The iPod's great for all of these things, but really, more could have been made of this and other things the iPod can do, or have done to it. Podcasting rates barely a mention by him, which is a shame. The fact that he lauds the iPod as the "be-all-and-end-all" of portable media players strikes me as a little wooden and repetitive, given that he effectively tells us this fact a number of times, with due explanation as to why, yet he doesn't go into great detail about just what this little wonder from Apple can do. The sub-title is: "A personal journey through music", which it certainly ends up being. But boy, I think it's banal. From reading this slice of bio, this guy is into his music in a big way. He knows artists I've never heard of (not hard), he knows tunes they've done, quite often what circumstances those tunes were created in, and what sort of impact those tunes made, both upon him, and others of his time. He even seems to know strange little bits you wouldn't know otherwise, but frankly didn't need to know. I state this carefully, because really, he doesn't tell us many things about the others he knows. Given the subtitle, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. He even has the candidness to state that he can't actually sing anywhere as well as the artists he loves so much, but I guess not all of us were born with a clarinet for a voice. For the depth of descriptions, it's worth a read, but it is still just his viewpoint. As a result, I've ended up being disappointed by this book, which is a shame; I think it could have been much better.

Ding Ding! Let's get ready to rumblllllle

2005-11-18T11:11:00.000+13:00

Gawd. Wake up this morning, and I find out that Mass is having another miniature war regarding whether they were even allowed to mandate their choice of formats; and coming up against opposition in the form of amendments to legislation currently on the table. This is subsequent to the Oct 31, 2005 hearing. Basically, it's not looking good for Massachusett's original decision, with heavyweights coming in from all corners, most of them on the side of a well-established corporation with a large financial interest in staying alive. Frankly, you probably know what side I sit on. People have already stated that as long as ODF supports the stuff that they need to do, then they are fine with it. Curtis Chong, president of the National Fedaration of the Blind in Computer science, has said he is willing to change his mind and possibly support ODF if some aspects are considered. David Berlind covered this in a recent post . Another objection to this has come in the form of people saying effectively that "all the disability software is written with Windows/Microsoft in mind", which is true because of the profile that Microsoft have in the desktop market. So they see that there isn't any point putting in alternatives, as Microsoft is already present. One of the most prevalent of these is a piece of software called "JAWS", and hooks into Office, operating as a screenreader, among other things. Be aware that as I'm not affected by a mobility or visual disability, I haven't had a need for any relevant software in these fields. As a result, I don't know what the state of play is regarding this software. I have heard JAWS is apparently pretty good. Linux has a rather poor showing in comparison, though new versions of Gnome and KDE have text-to-speech programs as part of their respective desktops. So far, I haven't succeeded in getting the Gnome version to work on Ubuntu Hoary. And I'm reasonably knowledgeable about setting computers up under Linux. I guess that this battle hasn't ended yet, not by a long shot. (More editing probably needed)

The Life of an iPodder

2005-11-17T15:01:00.000+13:00

No, not me. Some other guy. Wrote a book, in fact, about his love affair with iPod. Called "iPod, Therefore I Am" and written by Dylan Jones, he decided to write about how he got 'podded. So far it makes for interesting reading - I'll let you know if I finish it. I've wanted something to play/store MP3s with. Though I don't have a large music collection, I'd like to have some place to store it other than on several silver discs, or on hard drive taking up space. One alternative (which might take some time) is to generate an equivalent - burn a CD's worth of MP3 tunes. The time taken to create the tunes will be the same, only the storage medium will differ. Only disadvantage with this method is that I have to have the computer on when I want to listen to these tracks. But as my computer's on throughout the day anyhow, this isn't really a problem. And after all, I do have a 32x CDROM and a 7-cd jukebox. My only debate about the whole storage thing for MP3s is the cost. Yeah sure, the iPod's sexy (for what THAT means) but boy it does cost. And by some accounts here in New Zealand, it's not that hard to damage, and Apple will not pay out if there's the LEAST chance that it was the user's fault. I'm not sure I want to take that chance. So I may go for a slightly cheaper iRiver, same amount of storage space, but less cost. Of course, I'm never going to have one of these unless someone decides to hand off their old one to me. Yet another item I want, but can't buy.

Reading, burning, and reading some more

2005-11-08T16:40:00.000+13:00

What a week

Over the past week, I had the privilege of borrowing a CD burner for a day. As a result, I was finally able to get my documents burned to CD, and clear some space off my hard drive. An even better result is that I now have more than 10% of my space available, mind you, that's not all that much, as I only have a 16GB partition. I've already started filling more of it up with various downloads, and my main idea is to download common OpenSource kernels, and extract their sourcecode to burn to a CD. That way, I don't run the risk of accidentally removing any of the files, nor of taking up any extra space on my hard disk.

The source of it all

So far, what I've managed to get has been the kernels for NetBSD-2.1, OpenBSD-3.8, OpenSolaris-20051103, Linux-2.6.12 plus patches up to 2.6.14, and trees for the two GNU projects glibc-2.3.5 and gcc-4.0.2. I've even been insane enough to extract FreeBSD-5.4 world to a CD, and I intend to do the same to OpenBSD and NetBSD world trees. That'll take more time, and a burner, of course. Other ideas include the Darwin and the HURD kernels. Does anyone else have sensible ideas of what else I could add?

Reading

While I've managed to get all of that done, I've also been reading recent issues of the Linux Journal, the TUX magazine, and Linux Format. A conclusion I came to about the British Linux Format magazine is that it seems a bit more informal than the U.S. counterpart, and at least in the issues I have read so far (62, 66, and 68) there are a small number of minor innaccuracies that occasionally catch the reader out. If you're an experienced Linux system administrator, you'll probably just pass this off as "oh, they meant that instead", but when even the readers' Letters to the Editor make note of it too, you have to take note of the possible reliability and usefulness to someone new to Linux. Funnily enough, I've struck something about the TUX magazine I also don't like, though I love the for-screen layout and PDF format. It's the Mango Parfait column, and also to some extent, the undercurrent of dislike for the GNOME environment. I won't say that they're rabid KDE fans, but there's more scruff than a professional magazine should probably express, given that this publication is created by the same parent company (ssc.com) that produces the excellent Linux Journal. If only I could have afforded a subscription. Individual copies of the Linux Journal are nearly $17.00 to buy here in New Zealand. Still, that's cheap in comparison to two other Linux magazines available for sale.

Ebooks - a pain to read onscreen.

2005-11-04T14:40:00.000+13:00

I don't know about you, but whenever I find a good book, I try to get it in paper form when I can. Getting it in electronic form can cost anywhere from free to whatever the place you go to charges you, but then you have to either choose to read it on the screen once having downloaded it to your computer, or go through the hassle of printing it off just so you have something tangible you can hold. I did exactly this with "The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky", and while I got a book I could then read, I had to do some juggling around with page size just to get the text down to a comfortable size for reading. In the end I got away with four pages on each side. PlanetPDF have some good books, but the way they put text to page is abysmal - something like 12 lines in a page, with only about six to eight words per line. It makes for a lot of pages printed off. If I were to print each page as an A4 page, it'd make a great size for the visually impaired to use. I tend to like my text size anywhere from 8pt to 10pt for reading, not 18pt.

The other aspect to reading off the screen (depending upon the type of screen) is being able to sit comfortably without any glare on the screen, and the main difference of landscape layout as opposed to portrait. There aren't very many flip-screens out, and those that do exist generally aren't cheap. There's also fonts to consider, what program you're going to use to read with (Adobe's Reader, Mozilla Firefox, or the humble "less") and even whether you're going to go with classic black text on white background, or invert that so you have white text on a black background. I'm not entirely sure which I prefer, yet, though I still lean towards classic black text on white, without antialiasing. For some reason, anti-aliasing on my monitor just never seems to look crisp, and apparently that's quite a common complaint, especially with CRT screens. LCD screens have yet another problem of fidelity if you're not using the screen's native resolution.

Another good site to go to for books that are no longer under copyright, or where the copyright has been given over is Project Gutenberg. They have literally hundreds of thousands of books both in text/html/pdf/ps form and now, even in audio form. And they're all free to download. Sure if you want to download a whole collection at a go, then this isn't the place to go, but when you're prepared to get books one at a time, then this is one place to search out. I'm currently downloading a whole bunch of novels by Charles Dickens in html form from the University of Adelaide's stash of books. Dickens makes for some difficult and stylised reading if you're not used to Victorian English, but once you manage to dig under that, you'll commonly find a mine of good work, with plenty of commentary on the political map of the times. Of course there's the classics such as "Great Expectations" or "A Christmas Carol", but there are some other not-so-well known books too, as well as a number of short stories. Well worth a read if you like the classic English story.

Well, that's all from me - I'm going to have a damn good read shortly, after I finish listening to what MUST be the abridged version of Tom Clancy's "Hunt for Red October" - yes, I'm sort of a Tom Clancy fan, though I find his earlier stuff easier to read than his later collaborative works (Net Force, Op Centre). Still, it's good writing nonetheless. So cheers, all.

My top ten of computing

2005-11-01T13:48:00.000+13:00

Here we are - in no particular order:

1) Blogging. Has to be one of the ... more... interactive things I've done yet. All I need to do is to get the email portion worked out, and I've sorted it. Comments are good too, except the spam ones, of course.

2) The web. Of course. Without the web, the Internet just wouldn't be the same. Tim Berners-Lee wasn't the only one to have this brilliant idea, however he was in the right place at the right time to implement things. Of course, now companies give you so much on offer that nowadays the Web can seem pretty overwhelming to people new to the whole Internet/Web/online thing.

3) FTP. Where it all started. That, and email. But FTP is way easier to deal with for what it was designed for. Getting files from one place, to your hot little machine.

4) The desktop machine - one that's actually affordable for a lot of people. This has happened mainly because of inevitability, technology, and sheer bloody-mindedness.

5) Email. About as ubiquitous as running water in a city, or even electricity. One of the most hated things about email is the ability to spam millions of customers with just the click of a mouse, or the simple sending of one email. One of the most loved things about email is the speed with which it gets from source to destination. Also one of the oldest reasons to have started the Internet.

6) The telephone service. Without it, we'd still be using tin cans, morse code, or be using radio links. And there would be a LOT less people "online" if it meant that you had to compete for radio bandwidth with 36,000 neighbours.

7) Commercial companies to supply an Internet connection to homes over those same phone lines. Okay, they may charge a bit, but that's the price of technology, right?

8) Operating systems that are free to use in any way you choose. Of my selection, I use Linux, but Free/Open/NetBSD, Darwin, or the HURD are also free, in the sense that you can do whatever you like with them, except to try and restrict anyone else's right to also do the same. This is more prevalent when using the GPL than it is with the BSD license, however, even the BSD license allows anyone to freely modify or "reverse-engineer" any part of the free operating system that they distribute. Just don't try it with any commercial program, regardless of whether or not it's actually running on that same free-of-encumbrances operating system.

9) Human inventiveness. Without it, we wouldn't have things like Tivo, iPod, software, 4.0GHz machines on a desktop, or many other things we now take for granted that were sheer flights of fancy many years ago, if indeed they had been thought of at all.

A) Streaming audio and video. This way you can literally talk to anywhere in the world for only pennies/cents/pence/whatever.

Well, that's my lot for this post. Hope it gets through alive.

Oh, by the way, do comment. I've turned on confirm now, so theoretically, only legit comments will get through now.

Only two hours old, and already there's a spot.

2005-10-31T14:15:00.000+13:00

So much for thinking that comment spammers would leave me alone. Out, out, damn spot. Anyhow, back to our regularly scheduled transmissions. And no, you can't comment. Go away, spammer. Being on dialup sure doesn't hold a candle to having DSL. As yet, I've not experienced DSL, but I suspect that for the first month, I'd quite likely be just like a kid in a candy shop, and go WAY over my normal account allowance. Thankfully, I haven't got that chance, as yet. And, given that ADSL2 is just around the corner in New Zealand, and already being rolled out in Australia, I suspect that ADSL (version 1) is yet again going to be relegated to the boondocks just like dialup was when ADSL first came along. Free Fibre throughout the country, anyone? Hrm. Thought not. Guess our telecommunications infrastructure has to make their profits some way.