Daniel Swan

Did you know you could shoot RAW with your Canon point and click? Extend the available time you can record video for? Script up events and actions? Play games?

Lifehacker to the rescue.

This was promptly bookmarked under ‘Things to do when I’m bored’ – my default bookmarks folder for neat things I want to try :)

Well at least that’s the quote I’ve seen kicking around. In a fit of ‘new things technical’ over the weekend, I erased 10.5 from my G4 PowerBook (I’m sorry Apple, but if you think Leopards performance on the G4 is acceptable, there are at least 2 owners here who would heartily disagree) and decided to stick the Hardy Heron Ubuntu beta on it instead, having been superficially impressed with it in a quick show and tell with Frank on Friday afternoon.

So this quickly turned into a bit of a frustration. Having erased Kubuntu from my now Windows XP SP3(!) Dell laptop (oh so much happiness after Vista), I still feel I need a Linux platform to play on and I have issues with VMware Server (version 1 doesn’t seem to be able to bridge my WLAN connection and version 2 beta is .. dire quite frankly to the point of non-functionality).

The actual installation on to the PowerBook was fine, although booting from the LiveCD it was obvious that my wireless card was not supported ‘out of the box’. Ploughing ahead anyway, I wiped the system and booted back into a very refined Gnome interface (I never thought I would end up back in Gnome, but KDE is turning into a train wreck of a window manager). It certainly looked pretty, but the differences between well supported x86 architechture and Apple’s former PowerPC favourites quickly became clear.

There is *no* out of the box support for the PowerBook wireless. In fact getting it to work was quite the exercise in frustration. The procedure is mildly different from Gutsy (and in fact better) but nevertheless not that easy to find. I managed to get it working for, hmm, about 1 boot. Since then it has refused to work. It can’t even see half the wireless networks that my Dell can – and has great difficulty authenticating with my Linksys router (mind you my PDA also struggles with this). However this leaves me at the mercy of a wired connection, and I’m sorry – I have laptops precisely because they’re portable and it annoys Harriet less to have me in the room with her nerding rather than in the spare room nerding.

Then the other problem start to become appparent. The keyboard backlighting functions are broken, not just the fancy dimming functions – but the caps lock key. The single mouse button is a hindrance beyond belief (which it just isn’t in OS X despite a large number of context sensitive right click operations available). The screen dimming buttons make X extremely unstable. It’s impossible to install OpenOffice.Org currently from the repositories. The machine itself is running hot – and believe me this machine got hot under OS X but it’s managed to iron a nice flat depression into my sofa cushion with Ubuntu on it. Oh and there’s absolutely no support for the ATI Radeon Mobile chipset in it – so no compiz-fusion for me, or at least no way I could see to make it all hang together.

I appreciate that some of these issues might be related to the fact it’s a beta release, but it seems that PPC owners (especially laptop owners) are getting short changed. I’m sure this would work great on a desktop with an NVIDIA card in, but for me having this installed without using any of the joyful, full functionality of the laptop is just plain wrong to me.

It’s a shame, because as a distribution I still think Ubuntu is by far and away the best desktop Linux for those of us for whom compiling systems is just not fun anymore (yes I did used to do it.. 13 years ago!). It’s been rock solid as a server platform for us on x86 and x86-64 (mind you I can happily say that about RHEL4 as well, I just dont like it as much).

10.4 goes back on the PowerBook tomorrow as a) I no longer have 10.5 media and b) it’s faster. Strange how downgrading from the latest OS releases has suddenly become a necessity for me! A shame I lack a dedicated Linux platform to play with though. Maybe I should just get another laptop…..

Well after patiently waiting for Vista SP1 to come out and see if it improves the dreadful stability of Vista on my Dell Vostro 1400 – I installed it this week to find out that it has absolutely no effect at all.  Ever since I installed Vista on this machine it’s been up and down like a yoyo with IRQL related BSODs no matter how I configure it.  In fact some Vista updates have been prone to making the situation worse, which meant I ended up having to hand approve and test every update to make sure that it wasn’t going to make Vista *any worse* let alone any better.

So after my first post-SP1 Vista update BSOD I just jacked it all in.  One of the advantages of MSDN logins is that I can get valid versions of software quite happily. I’m now sat here, back in the familiar environs of Windows XP SP2.  In fact since I got my old Powerbook at home, I’ve been using Linux on the laptop less and less – so I trashed that too.  The Dell is now a Windows only zone.  I have had to make some compromises as I couldn’t install an unpatched XP SP2 CD due to the SATA/AHCPI setup on the laptop (so I turned it off), but after finding this excellent page, I managed to get all my drivers back onto the system and it runs perfectly.  I could have rolled my own SP2 install disc with the SATA drivers, but even my geek patience has some limits.

First impressions?  Well it takes up about 1/4 of the space of Vista (if not less), is significantly faster, and hopefully is more stable.  Vista is definitely pretty – Microsoft have done a lot of work on it – XP’s font rendering is clearly not as good, but right now I don’t care!  I’m glad I don’t have to put up with the awful Vista icons anymore in my home directory (I still don’t understand why I have to have icons on directories that are clearly named ‘Music’ ‘Pictures’ ‘Downloads’ etc.) .  The Control Panel is reduced back to a sane level of components.

Hooray for downgrades eh?  My Linux needs are now catered for in the shape of an Ubuntu VM (courtesy of the free VMWare Server) which runs just fine with a dedicated GB of ram in the VM, although I suspect I will just do most of my *nix based work on the Powerbook anyway.  At least I feel I have some flexibility now!

I do however have a little warning for the current XP2 installation.  Any signs of instability will not be tolerated.  The next BSOD I have, it’s all going.  The VM, XP, Vista, the lot and I will just turn my back on the Microsoft world forever, and Ubuntu will rule the machine.

Why not just run Ubuntu and have XP2 in a VM you ask?

I still like to play games…

Since upgrading a few machines to Leopard, transferring data and reinstalling essentials like Microsoft Office, the Office suite has been a bit broken – locking solid and then moaning about Microsoft Framework errors. It’s usable, but you need to wait 5 minutes to actually use it which is pretty unacceptable.

The quick fix is to delete from your Documents folder\Microsoft User Data\Office 2004 Identities\ any of the ‘Main Identity’ folders.

Open Entourage and set up a new identity (the new email setup effectively).

Close Entourage, restart Word. Things are fixed.

This works even if you don’t use Entourage as an email application!

So, I thought I was getting along quite well with Vista. Well I was. Until today.

Today I boot into Vista to the fantastic error :

Windows could not start becuase of error in the software.
Please report this problem as :
load needed DLLs for kernel.
Please contact your support system to report this problem

Seeing as I AM the support system for my own laptop, I fired into Kubuntu.

Mounting my Vista partition a quick survey of the problem shows

1) My 100GB Vista partition has magically shrunk to 2.5GB

2) It’s taken all my data with it. Completely. Not a single shred of my personal stuff remains.

dswan@eridanus:~$ df -h | grep sda1
/dev/sda1 2.5G 727M 1.8G 29% /mnt

and

dswan@eridanus:~$ ls /mnt/
boot.ini MD2Fixer.exe ntdetect.com WelcomePictures
bootmgr md3.txt ntldr WERUNTIME.INI
CLLauncher.exe mfc71.dll Program Files windows
Documents and Settings msvcr71.dll version.ini

is all that remains.

Great. Thanks a f*cking bunch.

Well I’m typing this sat down at my new Dell Vostro 1400 laptop, and it would be remiss of me not to say something nice about Dell and the laptop itself.

This is actually my second Vostro 1400 – I bought one a little while ago, and somehow it picked up a dent in the screen.  Whether this was due to my mishandling or a manufacturing error which I didn’t previously notice (it didn’t show up well on my desktop background but was glaring under the bright white of a blank PowerPoint slide) I don’t know.  I was prepared to cough up for the repairs, but placed a call into Dell anyway to see what could be done.

I don’t know what Dell’s home service is like, but this is a Small Business laptop, and the Vostro line has a dedicated point of contact on the phone.  My first call was to report the fault.  My second call was from Dell to let me know that they would have to escalate the call to see if it was accidental damage or not.  The third call was from Dell to say that they would replace the unit for free despite the fact I had no accidental damage cover on the machine.  In the course of these conversations I spoke to excellent call centres in India and the USA with competent and efficient staff -  a stark contrast with my many dealings with Apple.

The laptop was picked up for free, and a replacement delivered in better time than expected, given the 6 week wait for a new build of the machines.  It’s now in my hands, I’m delighted to have it back, and Dell have gone right up in my estimation as a company to deal with.

And the laptop?  First of all – it’s pretty.  Not Apple pretty, but pretty nonetheless.  Much better looking than the plasticised home lines.  It’s solidly built too – it feels rugged.  I’ve eschewed the shiny screen that blights so many laptops and I’m glad I did.  When did glossy screens get so in vogue?    It’s also good value for money – £300 less than an equivalently specced MacBook and with a separate 128MB NVIDIA 8400GS to boot (and is just about capable of running BioShock – and more importantly Portal ;)).

Fine, I’m lumbered with Windows Vista Business preinstalled (but at least I get a CD with it on as well) but this has already been wiped in favour of a dual boot Vista/Kubuntu Gutsy. People may be surprised by this, knowing that I favour OS X on the desktop and Linux on the server, but I’m pretty technology agnostic to be honest and Vista.. isn’t as bad as everyone makes out.  I want to use it in anger a little longer and then do a little comparison with Gutsy  (the release so, so much better than the beta releases!).

But yes, I’m a happy customer.  Now I’m going to reboot into Kubuntu to burn the MSDN downloads of Win XP and MS SQL server that I’m obliged to install in work this week for CARMEN!

I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to keep the Scrabulous application in Facebook.  Whilst a couple of weeks ago this was running fine in Firefox under Feisty it is definitely no longer the case for me.  I would like to say it was fine under Windows and OS X where at least it has been playable, but tonight I can’t even get my games to view no matter what I’m using (whilst I’m carefully avoiding the unnecessarily contrived Long Way Down on the BBC).  I would upgrade to Gutsy except for the fact my replacement machine is currently en route from Dell, and I can’t be bothered to reconfigure things which are probably going to end up cannibalised on behalf of Microbase in a weeks time ;)  I just want it fixed though!  I’ve never been a big Scrabble player and being schooled by colleagues and friends in actually playing the game (rather than my naive approach of just getting rid of the letters) is rather enjoyable.  Maybe a couple of physical boards would be a good addition to the offices ;)

So I’ve added a new blog from Hugo Hiden to the blogroll links. Hugo is the technical director of the North Eastern Regional e-Science centre (http://www.neresc.ac.uk), which is based in Newcastle University. We interact quite a bit whether it’s due to the CARMEN project or our Campus Grid or because of the fact we’re both sort of (but not quite) in the Computer Science department, but spend lots of our time there.

Hugo is one of the people (and there are many) who don’t subscribe to the philosophy that Open Source is necessarily best. Filling the shoes of the previous technical director (Savas Parastatidis, now at Microsoft) maybe this is unsurprising, but I think the blog will be extremely interesting if you’re wondering how things might be done in a parallel universe outside your OSS microcosm :)

The original ‘heads up’ on this exciting development came of course from Frank who is always there at the bleeding edge of anything ending in 2.0.

Information wants to be free ^_^

I had very high hopes for the “One Laptop Per Child” initiative.

The OLPC project was a genuine attempt to provide a cheap ($100) laptop for educating children in developing countries. Ruggedised, running Linux, well designed, it’s had many people wanting one for themselves, even if this meant paying a charitable premium back to the OLPC project.

However I’m deeply worried that the project is losing its focus. Firstly they refused to implement a premium option for private consumers, even though this could have swelled their charitable coffers.

Last week the news came that the $100 laptop would be a $175 laptop. The specifications had been ‘beefed up’.

Adding three quarters again to the price of the product seems to be crazy. But what is worst of all are the reasons why this has occurred. Apparently Microsoft want in on the OLPC good vibe, and provide a cut down version of Windows for it because – GOD FORBID – someone might actually start handing out Linux for free to children in developing nations.

Of course Linux runs on everything from toasters, to Linksys routers, PDA’s, phones and who knows what else. Windows on the other hand, doesn’t. So the OLPC specs appear to have been increased specifically to accommodate Microsoft, increasing the price of the unit, and allowing Bill Gates to make damn sure that no child is left behind from the great opportunity to be locked in to a DRM future.

My warm and fuzzies about this project just left the building. A real shame.