Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

Vintage Kids' Books: Look Quick

2009-12-22T23:20:50Z

I don't feel particularly good today, for no easily identifiable reason, but I did want to call attention to a blog I happened by while browsing around for gifts for my godchildren. The author (unnamed except as "Scribbler") has reviewed an old children's picture book most weekdays since mid-2007. The books are generally pre-1990, and many are a great deal older than that. I spent most of an hour skimming the site, and happened upon a lot of kid books I don't think I've thought about since I got my first library card at age 6 and quickly exhausted the Edison Park branch of the Chicago Public Library.

The reviews are affectionate and honest, and reflect my own reactions, what little I recall of them. Among the books it brought to mind are the highly understated Georgie's Halloween, about a little boy ghost who makes Casper look manic; Dinny and Danny, about a dinosaur and his caveboy; Little Galoshes, about a farm boy who is known to the farm's animals by the sounds his boots make; Ola, in which a Norwegian boy goes down the mountain to cavort with girls, trolls and other strange creatures; Sam and the Firefly, about a firefly who learns how to write persistence-of-vision messages in the night sky, several tales of Babar the Elephant, and a canonical host of others.

She can't and doesn't list everything. I didn't see any of the Otto books, nor Space Cat, but that's OK. I already know that stuff, and was looking for things I might have forgotten.

I have to act fast, I think. Your Wonderful Beneficial Federal Government has all but banned children's books printed prior to 1985, under the assumption that they might have been printed with ink containing traces of lead. So countless copies have already been burned as hazardous waste, and it's more or less illegal to sell them. Never mind than an almost unthinkable portion of world culture will pretty much vanish over the next few years due to CPSIA. The most popular books will be reprinted with modern inks; most will not, and will eventually be forgotten.

The law will not be enforced until early next year, but after that, you will be risking a $100,000 fine and jail time for selling Dinny and Danny to an adult at a yard sale. Doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat: Your party is at fault. The only member of the House who voted against this thing was Ron Paul.

On second thought, I know why I feel lousy.

Odd Lots

2009-12-20T15:10:42Z

Hard drives are cheap, and I still have one free SATA port on my desktop system, so I ordered another drive as a Linux playground to solve the problem described in my entry for December 19, 2009. This time I'm going with a Seagate, since for reasons still obscure, the Linux kernel seems to like Seagate drives better than Western Digital drives.
And while we're talking drives, Seagate has just announced the 2.5" Momentus Thin, which at 7mm is about as thick as a vanilla wafer (you can tell I'm off my diet for the holidays) and will definitely bring down the BMI of netbooks and other portable gadgetry.
I think most people may have seen this by now (I forgot to Odd Lot it back when it appeared a couple of weeks ago) but wow: video footage of an underwater volcanic eruption under three klicks of water. Man, this is what robotics is for. (Thanks to Aki Peltonen and several others for the link.)
I just received my brand-new Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook here, and all I know so far is that it powers up and boots reasonably quickly into Windows XP Home. The unit as configured to order has both a built-in TV tuner and a GPS receiver. It's going to be my travel computer and replace my knuckleheaded Lenovo 2005 Thinkpad X41 Convertible Tablet PC. I'm going to mess with it for a little while and will post something here as soon as I have a feel for it.
We've been hearing about Apophis for years: the 900-foot asteroid that will swing by in 2029 and say hello. And for an unnerving change of perspective, check out the close encounter from the asteroid's point of view, in a JPL animation that counts as the scariest thrill ride I've taken in awhile. (Have not seen Avatar yet.)
Speaking of asteroid collisions, if you're an SF writer spinning a plot involving big rocks and the sudden release of kinetic energy, look for Hazards Due to Asteroids and Comets, Tom Gehrels, ed. (University of Arizona Press, 1994.) It's a 1300-page compendium of academic papers on big things hitting even bigger things, with lots of formulas, charts, and analysis. Dense and not an easy read (and also not cheap--it was a steal years ago for $40) but I've learned a great deal from it.
It's interesting to read the reasons why good and intelligent men do not believe in God, and here's Gregory Benford's testimony, which is a lot more cogent than most I've seen. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
Finally, if there's some source code in your past that you regret (I'm thinking of a few lines right now that I'd like to wipe from this space-time continuum if I could) maybe the answer is Bad Code Offsets. Debug-and-Trade, anyone? (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)

Linux Bug #257790

2009-12-19T03:42:35Z

I never thought I'd say anything like this, but...I may have run afoul of Linux bug #257790, "Kernel does not recognize Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200AAJS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 GB/s Hard Drive (2nd Generation)". I recently bought a new 7200 RPM hard drive (guess which model!) for my main desktop system, which had come with an older Seagate 5400 RPM unit as the primary bootable drive. I migrated my Windows XP install over to the new WD drive without any trouble. But when I go to do a clean Linux 9.10 install, the installer does not see the WD drive. It does see the secondary drive in the system, which is a 5400 RPM Seagate 750 GB unit. But the WD? Installer no see.

Interestingly, gparted has no trouble seeing the WD, and even resized the Windows partition there to make room for two additional Linux partitions. However, when I go to install Karmic in the new partition on sda2, the installer doesn't see the sda device at all...except when I check the button telling the installer partitioner to erase the whole drive and install Linux on the entire thing. Then sda magically appears. At that point, when I re-check the option to install Windows and Linux side by side, the sda device vanishes from the device selection pane at the top of the installer partitioner window.

While sniffing around the Web looking for insights, I ran across Linux Bug #257790, simply because it names the precise model of drive that I just bought. Supposedly, that bug was fixed for the 9.10 Karmic release at the end of October, but evidently the installer still has some reservations about certain WD drives...like the one I now have. I'm tempted to download and install Fedora to see if I get better service, but if any of you Linux gurus have any suggestions I'll certainly hear them. I do not want to go back to my older (slower) drive, nor do I want to wait for Lucid Lynx (V10.04) due in April. I can't imagine that this is not a fixable problem. Thoughts?

Odd Lots

2009-12-17T03:43:39Z

I know, I know, I've been quiet for a week, but there's been a lot to do away from the keyboard, much of which borders on sock-drawer sorting. Focusing on only one project for most of a year almost guarantees that things will get messy away from the target of your focus. So I've been picking up downstairs in my workshop and sorting my office closet. No socks, but lots of loose fileables sitting in a pile, one with a yellowed corner that did not come with age. (So much for cacheing data on the floor.)
We have a rattlin' good sunspot creeping across old Sol's face, and whaddaya know: I spun the dial across 15 meters this afternoon and heard voices. 'Course, my fire alarm still does not like the Icom 736, so all I could do was listen, but it was nice to think of this overlong solar minimum as something other than eternal.
If you haven't already, upgrade to Firefox 3.5.6. There are a number of newly discovered exploits in earlier releases, including a remote code execution item that looks pretty ugly.
I also upgraded to Thunderbird 3.0 earlier today, and so far am most pleased. They've added a profile-wide message search feature that (considering the appalling number of emails I've accumulated and carried forward since 1995) will be extremely useful here.
Speaking of ugly, when a film with the budget and ambitions of The Avatar can only do aliens who look like ugly humans, you have to wonder what CGI is for. This is the problem I've always had with Trek: A splurch of latex on some extra's forhead does not an alien make. I'll see it anyway, but I call failure-of-imagination based on the trailers.
InfoWorld posted a very nice review of the major virtualization products, including VMWare Workstation 7, Parallels Desktop 4, and Sun's VirtualBox 3.1. VirtualBox is free and installed by default in Ubuntu 9.10, but you have to jump through some inexplicable hoops to get it to recognize USB devices. I haven't upgraded to VMWare Workstation 7 yet, but Workstation 6 is cheap and does everything I need it to do.
People argue a little about how useful certain time-honored degunking techniques are (especially disk defragmentation, and double especially defragmentation for SSDs) but the biggest single win in my own experience is degunking the Windows Registry. There are a number of apps to do this, but the best on the free side is doubtless CCleaner. (Its original name was Crap Cleaner, which gets points for truth-in-advertising.) Freeware, and if you're ever faced with a Registry that's been gathering crap for eight or ten years, you'll appreciate what it can do.
Two people wrote to me (a little breathlessly) to tell me that Neal Adams is drawing the next several PvP strips, and I had to admit that I had no idea whatsoever who he was. I flashed on Nick Adams, whom I saw on a few episodes of The Rebel back in 1961...but a comics guy I'm just not, even if I do follow PvP. (In case you're as clueless as I, here's a bio on Neal Adams.)

A Sublime Autumn

2009-12-09T21:13:55Z

It got down to -13 F last night, breaking a longstanding record for the date here. By 10:00 AM it had finally broached zero, and I went out to get the morning paper. And while doing so I noticed an interesting thing: The leftover snow that my old and cranky snowblower always leaves on the sidewalks was vanishing. There was no wetness on the walks or the driveway, and I wouldn't expect any at 0 degrees F. But the little splats and scattered dusting were all going away, and a quick check just now (2 PM) shows mostly clear walks and driveway, except where people have walked or the car passed.

How sublime! I guess at 6600 feet, snow and ice don't have to melt to go away.

The photo above was taken yesterday by our neighbor and friend Lena Olson, who is a spectacularly talented sculptor and photographer. She made it look like our house was lost in the middle of a wintry nowhere, when in fact there are neighbors on all sides of us, in houses generally bigger than ours. That's just a telltale of her talent: She knows exactly how to frame a shot. Wow.

Some Good Juju and Some Bad Juju

2009-12-07T21:32:04Z

Bad juju first: When I woke up this morning it was 0, and we had six inches of new snow on the ground. Carol had a physical scheduled for 10:00, so we were out the door extra early, slithering (even in 4WD) in a winter wonderland. We got there and back intact, but it was snowing again when we pulled into the driveway, and the Weather Channel radar indicates that it may be snowing for some time. Given that six inches is close to the limit my little snow blower can handle at one gulp, I decided to get rid of what was there to make way for what was clearly coming. Not too difficult, and I was mostly done when I slipped on a patch of black ice on the driveway and went down hard on my right arm. Here's hoping an Aleve will minimize the swelling, but I'm expecting some exquisite bruises on that arm, albeit bruises no one will see except Carol given that long-sleeved shirts are the order of the season. Winter began here in early October, and may we be so bold as to demand that it be gone by February?

Probably not; that promising sunspot that popped up for a few days on the far side of the Sun is now gone, and our hundred-year solar minimum continues with no end in sight.

The good juju comes to us mostly from the Engadget blog. A very perceptive post from Niley Patel on Saturday exposes Michael Arrington's wrath over the Crunchpad coup that supposedly killed the tablet stone dead a week ago. And today several people wrote to tell me that what had been the Crunchpad is now the Joo Joo Tablet, and Arrington's erstwhile hardware partners Fusion Garage intend to go it on their own. More details over on Gizmodo.

Saturday's post suggests that Arrington was careless about defining contractual relationships between his firm and Fusion Garage, which is peculiar, considering that Michael Arrington was a lawyer long before he was a blogger or a tech enterpreneur. He registered the trademark for "Crunchpad" only at the end of November, after calling it by that name for well over a year. And now, wowzers, Fusion Garage claims that he never had much to do with the technical development of the device to begin with.

Arrington is threatening wholesale litigation, and the whole thing is starting to smell like greasepaint to me. But think: What better way to launch an unlikely dark horse in the tech world than to foment a media circus? Everybody loves a fight. I see a possible business plan that puts the Underpants Gnomes to shame:

Phase 1: Talk for a year or two about a fantastical device and see if anybody notices.
Phase 2: If nobody notices by the time the device is ready to sell, pretend to have a riproaring legal fight over who has rights to what.
Phase 3: Harvest endless millions of dollars' worth of free PR while taking pre-orders.
Phase 4: Have a group-hug videocast to settle conflicts that never really existed.
Phase 5: Profit!

The problems could be real, too, obviously. But there's something funny going on somewhere, and whereas I won't order one until I see that it can be configured as an ebook reader (and ideally let somebody else try it first) I still have high hopes. Let's watch.

Update 12/8/2009: Engadget has a little more detail, and a hands-on video.

Odd Lots

2009-12-04T18:29:38Z

We broke a new cold record for December 3 last night, when it went down to -3 here. (The previous record was +3, so that's a significant margin.) Cheyenne Mountain is covered with snow, and it's a wonderful wintry-Christmasy scene out my office windows, though I have to get out there and clear the walks when the temps eventually get up into double digits.
My prediction: We will not quite break 2008's record for sunspotless days this year. Why so sure? Well, we're already at 255 days (and just passed 1912's count of 253) but a sunspot appears to be forming on the back of the Sun, and it will rotate around the far side and come into view in about a week. If it's a big enough spot, it may be visible for the rest of December. So add 7 to our current 255 and you get 262, which is in cigar territory for 2008's 266 sunspotless days, but not quite lit. Of course, if the spot lives and dies over the next week or so (which I've seen happen for smallish spots) we may still beat 2008. Either way, we're in the thick of the deepest solar minimum in 150 years.
I just ordered a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook, after spending some quality time with Julian Bucknall's slightly older and smaller Dell netbook at the Meetup-less Delphi Meetup last night. The keyboard is surprisingly usable, and I don't expect to be writing any 180,000-word computer books on it. I was looking for compactness, not cheapness (there's a larger toy budget this year, much thanks to Assembly Language Step By Step and other things) and so I loaded up with a GPS receiver, higher-res display, faster CPU, and (obviously) a bigger battery. All that, and it still runs XP. Windows 7 was an option, but why burden a pocket machine any more than it's already burdened by just being a pocket machine?
Intel has unveiled a novel 48-core x86 processor, arranged as 24 dual-core CPUs communicating through a mesh network with up to 256GB/s bandwidth. Cores no longer need hardware cache coherence machinery, which cuts the complexity and power consumption of the (huge: 567 mm2!) part. I'm still wondering howinhell we're gonna program these things.
Does anybody my age or older remember the TV series Men Into Space? It ran for one season in 1959-1960, and was created by Ziv TV, the firm that also did Science Fiction Theater, Sea Hunt, and Highway Patrol. Remarkably, I don't remember it at all, even though Broderick Crawford's iconic "10-4!" is crystal clear in my head. There was supposedly some Bonestell backdrop art in the show, and a solid attempt at factual accuracy, within the limits of weekly TV production of the time. Thanks to Roy Harvey for the link.
People who are familiar with my novel The Cunning Blood should take a look at these 3-D renderings of the Mandelbulb. This is almost precisely what I had in mind when imagining Magic Mikey's views of chaos signatures using the Femtoscope. (Chapter 12, p.196ff.)
In a dance-around-it sort of way, Slate admits that there's no compelling reason to use Office 2010...or 2007...or any version past the one that meets all your needs. Duhh.
From Neil Rest comes a pointer to a puppet show dramatizing the Bohr-Einstein debates over spooky-action-at-a-distance. Einstein is played by a stuffed bichon. (What else? You'd cast a Chihuahua?) BTW, this is for real; it's not a parody but an actual physics lesson.
Borders is closing about 200 of its Waldenbooks mall stores in January. Here's a PDF list of stores to be closed. I'll admit that I haven't bought anything at a Waldenbooks store for many years, simply because they don't have the selection of the "big" Borders stores. (I also don't go to shopping malls that often.) This may be good news, if it means that fewer of the big stores will have to go down too.

Review: Planet 51

2009-12-04T01:40:58Z

There's concept, and there's execution. You need both to make a truly terrific work of fiction, whether on film or in text. I had high expectations for Planet 51, and the concept did not disappoint me: A loopy twist on the classic alien monster movies of the 1950s...except that this time, we're the aliens, landing on a planet full of...1950s aliens.

Or, let's say, 1950s aliens living in an alien analog of 1950s small-town America. As with the 2005 animated film Robots, there's an alien analog to just about everything Earthish: Malt shops, bowling alleys, poodle skirts, backyard barbecues, and hovering alien '59 Caddies. There are 50's alien monster movies, and 50s paranoia, here directed against...aliens. Somewhere off in the desert is a mythic alien Secret Base a la Men In Black, where dozens of captured robotic space probes from Earth are kept under glass domes. Into the thick of all this lands a souped-up Lunar Excursion Module containing an oafish, self-involved square-jawed astronaut, who is surprised that Planet 51 is inhabited, and is as terrified of its innocuous green noseless inhabitants as they are of him. His arrival triggers the awakening of a 6-wheeled robotic rover named Rover, which handily dismantles the dome under which he's been stored, and then goes looking for his master, NASA Capt. Chuck Baker.

Is that a great concept or what? Alas, for all the great ideas and great artwork, somehow it doesn't completely gel. Much could be done with an astronaut who realizes (as Chuck Baker eventually does) that he's simply baggage strapped into a completely automated spacecraft, and that it's not about him. Too bade that nothing is; Baker is drawn as an idiot, but somehow isn't even true to that time-honored Hollywood template. Is he an astronaut, a lounge lizard, or a motivational speaker? (I got the impression that the scriptwriters couldn't quite agree on who or what he was.) The alien characters are fun because they're just barefoot green 50s suburbanites (the women all have built-in high heels) doing 50s things, and even listening to 50s music. It's a stretch, but this is a cartoon movie, and for the most part the alien side of things works. Teen alien Lem debates with his comic-store geek friend Skiff about the existence of, well, aliens. (I.e., humans.) Skiff is sure that we're out here; Lem can't take any of it seriously, at least until he has to hide Capt. Baker in his bedroom. Lem pines over alien girl Neera, whose growing sensitivity to social issues prompts her to hang out with a group of protesters led by a long-haired, guitar toting alien hippie jerk named Glar. (Bzzzzzt! Hippies had not yet evolved in 1959, and the friction between the two cultures suggest something more like 1965 than 1959.) Once knowledge of Baker's landing escapes the boundaries of sleepy alien town Glipforg, the alien army converges on the town, under cool, sunglassed Patton-archetyped General Grawl, and acts pretty much like the US Army acts in all those 50s alien monster movies.

The film is carried largely by the brilliant little robot Rover, who acts like a very bright dog with a power screwdriver, and gets most of the good sight gags and physical humor, including a surreal riff on "Singin' in the Rain," as it rains...rocks. (Rover's job is to pick up rocks, like any good interplanetary probe. Alien rain is thus a species of nirvana for him.)

There are some good laughs here, though not as many as I wanted. The mandatory cultural references come thick and fast, some of them so subtle that if you blink you'll miss them. The big negative is that Baker's character is almost entirely wasted, even as a comedic figure. I also think some of the potty humor was over the line, or at least it would have been when I was a 12-year-old.

But hey, it was good (if not completely clean) fun. I have a special fondness for Rover, because he was pretty much how I imagined a character in one of my published stories: a clever and lonely Mars probe also named Rover. (See "Bathtub Mary" in my collection Souls in Silicon.) Burger King actually has a Planet 51 tie-in going on right now, and if I could force myself to eat at Burger King I could get a Rover toy for my bookshelf. (I've done worse for less, so we'll see...)

Cautiously recommended.

Stream-of-Consciousness: Decembering

2009-12-03T03:14:53Z

(Playing around with blogging styles here.) We got back from our Thanksgiving trip to Chicago yesterday afternoon, just before the deep freeze closed in again. Low tonight 10; high tomorrow 15; low tomorrow night 4. This is the coldest damned autumn we've had since we moved here, as well as the snowiest. Still, I'll take this climate over Chicago's three-month gloomfest any day.

I stuck my nose in the attic earlier this afternoon, scoping out what it might take to finish the job of shielding the leads from my garage smoke detector from my new-and-never-used wire dipole. What it will take is gloves and a winter coat, and wistful regret over not doing this in the fall. Wait a sec--this is the fall. And it's not like I have any sunspots to coerce my signals into a path long enough to be useful.

My venerable 2005-era Kodak EasyShare V530 pocket camera is malfunctioning consistently and is probably scrap. I've said this before and it unexpectedly and inexplicably came back to life, but it's been sitting dead in its little cradle for a month now, and I'm trying to decide what may take its place. I have the superb Canon G10 for technical photography, at which I've gotten tolerably good, but I still need an unfussy camera that will fit in a pocket, not need a case, and take a certain amount of rattling around with keys and small change (or big change) without damage.

In truth, what I'm really looking around for in a pocket camera is the champ at minimizing shutter lag. When I press the button I want the picture now--or as close to now as the technology permits. (I know DSLRs are good at this, but I want something small.) All of my previous digital cameras have required an ungodly amount of time to calculate what they're going to do with the pixels that they're about to capture, and this has meant a lot of missed shots of cute nieces and rowdy bichons playing dog soccer with Katie Beth's beach ball. Sony seems to lead in most of the stack ranks on the shutter lag front, so I'm thinking about the Sony DSC-WX1.

Elsewhere in the Dying Hardware Department is my poor HP Laserjet 2100M printer, which I've had since, well, damn, I don't remember, but probably 1998. I have pumped an immense amount of paper through that little cube, and replaced its worn-slick feed rolls in March of 2006, expecting them to work for another six or seven years. No luck. Paper feed has gotten erratic once more, and I'm not sure I want to go through the gnarly process of changing the feed rolls yet again. (That said, I have another repair kit on the shelf, so I probably will. I was the Lord High Feed Roll Executioner thirty-five years ago when I worked the LaSalle St. copier territory for Xerox, and such hard-won skills are a shame to waste.) So this might in fact be a good time to pop for my first color laser printer. I'm still shopping, but the HP CP1518 is the current front-runner. I know that the color laser cartridge market is a racket, but there have been times this year when I would really have liked color output for proofing book pages and covers. I guess if I do change out the rolls on the 2100 yet again I could park it downstairs for volume runs and keep the color unit up here. We'll see, and soon--I need the tax deduction this year, courtesy my assembly language book.

Dash is sliding into puppy puberty: I caught him marking the baseboards in the front hall where QBit often sleeps. I rolled him on his back and tried my best to sound furious. He wagged his tail. A disciplinarian I'm not. I sense (nay, smell) interesting times ahead.

So Much for the Arrington Crunchpad

2009-11-30T18:56:44Z

Damn. Like, well, damn. Michael Arrington just announced that, probably no more than a week or two before shipping boxed product, the Crunchpad is dead. I rarely post two entries on the same day, but I happened on this just a few minutes ago, and it's important enough not to hold until tomorrow. The problem seems to have come out of nowhere and is shaped something like this: The CEO of Fusion Garage, the firm tasked with manufacturing the Crunchpad device, just popped up in Arrington's inbox and basically said, We don't need you anymore and will be making and selling the device ourselves. WTF? And WDHTHIA? Barlennan?

What happened probably happens a lot in certain tech partnerships between small and roughly equal entities: One who thought they held more of the cards wanted a bigger cut of the take than the original agreement gave them. And because both Arrington's group and Fusion Garage have joint ownership of the various pieces of IP involved, neither can just move ahead and release the product on their own. (Why Fusion Garage doesn't recognize this is obscure.) Unless this is an extremely clever way to simply kill the project without admitting technical failure (a possibility, but not something I'd expect out of Michael Arrington) the project may be dead on legal grounds.

Or maybe it really was the problematic 12" capacitive touchscreen that has given these guys pure hell from the outset. Doesn't matter. I had high hopes for the gadget, which (screw the Web!) would have been a spectacular ebook reader. I dislike the physically small, low-res e-ink readers we now have, because they don't display technical art well, nor color at all. Comics people have the same gripes, albeit for a different kind of art. There's no physical law saying that all ebook readers must be the same color-and-resolution-limited, coat-pocketable thing. Books are different.

Again, if the fail was really technical, and all this huggermugger a smokescreen, we won't see anything out of the ashes. But I do hope that if we're just seeing tantrums here, something can be worked out.

(Still, is it just me...or did Arrington fold perhaps a little too quickly?)

More here later if I can find it.

Odd Lots

2009-11-30T16:57:48Z

Here's a great graphic strongly suggesting that the much-denied Medieval Warm Period really existed, and was indeed a global phenomenon. (For further evidence, read The Little Ice Age, which predates the worst of the current Global Warming hatefest and thus may be considered reasonably reliable.)
I had not heard this before: The imminent Nook ebook reader from Barnes & Noble will have a Wi-Fi connection, allowing owners to browse free ebook previews that are only accessible through store hotspots. This gives people a reason to come into physical stores, Nooks in hand, spend time, drink coffee, browse the print collection, and leave with a bag full of print titles that aren't available as ebooks. Assuming it's true, as a marketing gimmick, it's brilliant.
The Nook has a slot for a Micro-SD card with a capacity of up to 16 GB. Assuming a typical text-mostly ebook file to be 500K in size (which is very generous; most fiction titles I've seen are about half that, or less) a Nook is capable of storing about 30,000 books. If you read a complete book every single day, that will last you for...82 years.
I've already seen the Nook e-reader referred to as the "Nookie reader." Which it will be, trust me.
People are quibbling in the comments that it's not a self-propelled model train, but screw it: This guy made a Z-scale model of an N-scale model train layout, working effectively at a scale of 1:35,200. He gets serious points for, well, something, and the video is very cool.
And at the other end of the scale, here's the world's largest model train layout. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.) Makes me want to go back and work on The Million-Mile Main Street, positing a 1:1 scale model train layout that covers an entire planet, where the trains (each a sort of AI hive mind) run things, and the people are hired actors.
Researchers at Purdue have demonstrated ALICE, a new species of rocket fuel consisting of aluminum nanoparticles and...water. Larger aluminum particles have been used in rocket fuel before (they're part of the formula in the Shuttle's strap-on boosters) but the smaller the particles, the more efficiently they burn. As aluminum is common just about everywhere, if you can corner enough solar radiation to smelt the aluminum and dig up some water (guess where, Alice!) you can go places.
Pete Albrecht sent me a link to SeatGuru, which provides detailed floor plans for all major aircraft on all major airlines, including where the power ports and extra legroom are. If you fly a lot, it might be worth a close look. Here's a good example of a specific aircraft.
This insane vampire business has evidently begun to affect the cosmetics business; the Daily Mail reports that pale foundation and powder are pushing their tanner competitors right off the market.
I stumbled upon the above item after stumbling upon this, which may be the most inexplicable Web site I've seen in the last several years. They pay people to put that together? And what kind of organism from what planet reads it?
Word must have gotten out that I'm a liturgical conservative. I therefore find this funny, in a slightly painful kind of way. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)

Think Before You Click!

2009-11-29T16:14:11Z

I have a stray hour this morning, and I'd like to work in some notes on a few deceptive online mechanisms of various species that came to my attention all at pretty much the same time.

The first of these is Fanbox, which is a spinoff from a site called sms.ac a few years ago. I'm getting emails daily that claim to be from Facebook friends telling me that "Rodney Hornswoggle thinks you will really like this YouTube video. [Click here to] Check it out." Even though I do know Rodney and he is on my friends list, a pitch like that smells to high heaven, and I'm not dumb enough to click on it. I researched it online and got a faceful. The emails were sent by something called Fanbox. Fanbox is a Facebook service that does various things, but, almost incredibly, it works by asking people for their email account and password, so that it can begin spamming everybody in the hapless users' address books.

I boggle at the notion, but in fact this is not a new phenomenon. Fanbox's corporate parent sms.ac has done this sort of thing for years, to the huge annoyance of a great many people. As with other things of this sort, the full story is complex. Google on "sms.ac scam" or "fanbox scam" and you'll begin to get the idea. The takeaway here is obvious: Don't give your email account password to Facebook apps. Or anybody else, for that matter. Geez.

Next is Video Professor, which is (again) not a new idea: Selling tutorial DVDs via "negative-response billing." This is illegal in Canada but not the US, and hearkens back to the "book of the month" clubs or "record of the month" clubs in years past, in which you agree to accept (and pay for) an item every month until such time as you cancel the membership. At least with those ancient systems you had some reasonable idea of what it would cost you. Details of how much you end up paying Video Professor for a number of tutorial DVDs ($290!) are obscure, and present only in some very, very small print. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wrote about it in the Washington Post , after which Video Professor tried to intimidate both Arrington and the Post with legal threats. It didn't work, and the effort spawned a great deal of negative publicity for Video Professor. However, they're still out there, selling DVDs using what I consider an extremely deceptive pitch. Stay well back.

Finally, while we're talking stuff-hidden-way-down-in-the-fine-print, there are "online loyalty programs." (More here.) The scam works like this: An online retailer takes your credit card information during an order, but just before the order is completed, you're invited to join a loyalty program to receive coupons or discounts or something. The program costs $9-$12 per month, but (as always) that's way down there in the fine print, which authorizes the online retailer to give your credit card information to the loyalty program operator, who then bills your card and kicks backs funds to the online retailer that originated the lead. As with rebates, most of the coupons and other "rewards" are never redeemed, so it's basically a free monthly slurp out of a great many credit card accounts. Online merchants who use such systems should be avoided. Here are a few mentioned in the article: Priceline (you're old, Jim!), Orbitz (how d'ya think they could afford that hovercraft?), Buy.com, Fandango, 1-800-FLOWERS, Continental Airlines, and many others. (I printed out the full list included in the article as a guide to my personal boycott of anybody offering such programs.) And wow! Our old friend, Classmates.com, pocketed $70M through its partnerships with the loyalty progam operators.

Don't be a victim. Think before you click. Read it all, especially on second or third-tier sites that you haven't dealt with many times before. Check every line on your monthly credit card statements. Google for the name of the site and "scam" and see what others have said. Paranoia isn't always a mental illness these days, especially online.

Thanksgiving Break

2009-11-28T19:13:38Z

I'm by no means finished with my current thread on how necessary Windows is, but the Thanksgiving holiday weekend intervened, and Carol and I flew to Chicago earlier this week to spend time with family. I hadn't seen our nieces Katie Beth and Julie since the beginning of August, and kids change quickly at this point in their lives. Julie is now making short but full sentences (at 18 months) and Katie, now 3, is chattering away as she discusses some pretty interesting issues. For example, last night at Gretchen's house, Katie looked at me and asked her mother, "What is Uncle Jeff?" (A few of my early girlfriends probably wondered the same thing.) Gretchen tried to explain that Uncle Jeff is her brother, but Katie does not have a brother and may not quite grasp the concept yet.

No sweat on that one; she'll get there. Carol and I visited with her mom on Wednesday, did some shopping, and helped her sister Kathy prepare the Thanksgiving feast. It was drippy from the moment we got off the plane on Tuesday, and the drips continued through the day Thursday, when the family finally gathered at three. The feast included all the traditional fare: Turkey, ham, stuffing, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rolls, both ceasar and Hawaiian salad, three kinds of home-made pies (with ice cream, as an option) and probably a few things that I missed, most likely green vegetables. As has become the tradition, I acted as sommelier, and brought both dry and sweet wines for the table. The dry red was Cosentino Winery's Cigarzin 2004, a superb, fruit-forward Zinfandel without much oak but with explosive fruit flavors. Not subtle--but then, neither am I. On the sweet side I chose Bartenura's Malvasia, an unusual sweet blush with just a little fizz. We also had a German Riesling Auslese from St. Christopher, with a bottle of White Heron in the fridge in case we needed it. As feasts go it was outstanding; much credit going to Kathy, her husband Bob, and Bob's mother Betty for somehow making all the food appear at an appropriate time at the appropriate temperature.

I stayed out of the stores yesterday for obvious reasons, even though I'm shopping for a new subnotebook or (gasp) netbook. Instead I spent time at Gretchen's making an old family recipe handed down from our Irish grandmother Sade. It's called gumgash, which is essentially hamburger mixed with chopped onions, mushrooms, diced tomatoes, and shell macaroni. I dumped a little Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel 2006 into the mix, which isn't historical but adds significant flavor if you can let the whole thing simmer for 20 minutes. After we all feasted on gumgash, the girls demanded to hear their Phineas and Ferb music CD. This is a spinoff from a cartoon show on the Disney channel, about two 10-year-old nerds who invent things and drive their 15-year-old sister to distraction. The show is the girls' current favorite (having recently upended the Madagascar Penguins; could there be stirrings of Linux culture here?) and I danced with both of them to a few of the brief but well-written cuts (some of which were hilarious) on the album. There aren't many effective ways to dance with an 18-month-old, so I sat taylor-style on the kitchen floor and held Julie's hands while we both swayed back and forth to the pounding rhythms of "I'm Lindana and I Wanna Have Fun!" which, while only 51 seconds long, is insanely catching, and echoed endlessly around in the back of my skull until I finally dozed off at 11 last night.

So here I am, taking a breather on Saturday afternoon before getting busy again. We'll be home in a couple of days, when I'll continue the current series, and then segue into some observations about writing fiction. I like lumps in my Thanksgiving mashed potatoes, and I like lumps in my exposition. The important part is what the lumps are made of. If they're tasty enough, nobody will care...but I'll get back to that.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 5: Crossover

2009-11-21T18:02:02Z

There have been several attempts down the years to make Windows unnecessary. The most audacious is doubtless ReactOS, which cuts to the heart of things and wants to be a complete Windows XP-compatible OS. Needless to say, this is no small project and will take a long time to complete; right now, I'd call it somewhere between completely useless and intriguingly experimental. (It runs Skype, at least.) I'm also concerned that if they ever do get it anywhere near useful completion, Microsoft will stomp on it hard.

That's certainly the high road. But how necessary is it to clone the whole damned OS? A Windows app, after all, is just a block of x86 machine code that makes calls into one or more APIs. If you can clone the APIs in an acceptably clean-room manner, you don't need to duplicate the entire architecture, kernel and all.

And that brings us to one of the oldest and oddest ongoing projects in open-source computing: Wine, begun in 1993 by Bob Amstadt and Eric Youngdale. Wine provides a compatibility layer consisting of clean-room DLLs implementing the Win32 APIs, plus whatever magic is necessary to make the deeper host OS machinery look like Windows to the app. This is easier than implementing a whole OS, with the further advantage that if done properly, Wine can act as a Windows compatibility layer over several Unix-like OSes, rather than only Linux. Currently, Wine can operate over Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD Unix, and x86 Solaris.

After 16 years of dogged work, Wine actually works pretty well. Part of its success is due to a remarkable cooperation between the Wine project and a commercial software house in St. Paul named Codeweavers. Codeweavers sells a $40 deployment/management utility for Wine called Crossover, which basically makes Wine noob-friendly. (Naked Wine is pretty stark.) Codeweavers also tweaks Wine itself to improve app compatibility, and contributes those tweaks back to the Wine project under LGPL. Some financial support is also provided to the otherwise volunteer-based Wine project. Wine's maintainer since 1994, Alexandre Julliard, is an employee of Codeweavers, where he works full-time on Wine development.

Codeweavers focuses mostly on big-market apps like Microsoft Office, and doesn't officially support apps beyond a relatively short list of "gold" software. However, I've found that a great many Windows apps install and run just fine under Crossover whether they're on the list or not. InDesign 2.0 is listed on the site as "known not to work" but apart from a minor display glitch, it seems to work as always. (I haven't tested it deeply so far.) Most Microsoft apps work beautifully (especially older ones) and I've been using Office 2000 and Visio 2000 under it without incident since last fall.

Wine implements a sort of runtime environment emulation for Windows called a "bottle." More than one bottle may be created on a single host OS, and each bottle has its own emulated C: drive and Registry. By giving each Windows app its own bottle under Wine, apps are prevented from interfering with one another in the dreaded "DLL Hell" effect. Because it's not a VM, the performance hit for running Wine/Crossover is very small, and most important, you do not need to have a legal copy of Windows running in the VM. On the other hand, a bottle looks enough like Windows to be infectable by Windows malware, though one bottle probably can't infect other bottles on a Linux system, or the underlying system itself. (From what I've heard, the low-level system tricks played by many malware packages keep them from running or at least running completely.) There are known conflicts between WGA and Wine, so don't install WGA if you can avoid it.

Bottom line: If Wine supports all the Windows apps you absolutely must use, you do not need Windows at all. I haven't tested all the Windows packages that I use here (next up is MapPoint 2004) but for Office and Visio 2000 it's been nothing short of magical, and I'm guessing InDesign will come along eventually. In a mature software market, time works in our favor: One by one, existing apps will be installable under Wine, and each time that happens, Windows slips a little bit deeper beneath the waters of irrelevance.

Next up: For the hard cases, there's always virtualization.

Harry L. Helms 1952-2009

2009-11-20T17:47:02Z

I got word the other day that Harry L. Helms W7HLH had died this past Sunday. Harry was a friend for over 20 years, and we met regularly at trade shows including the Borland conferences and ABA/BEA, just to touch base and trade ideas. He and I had a lot in common: We were both longtime hams, we both liked classic radio gear, shortwave listening, and publishing. (We were also within a few weeks of the same age.) He was the co-founder of HighText Publishing in Solana Beach, California, and the author of a lot of books worth reading, including Shortwave Listening Guidebook (1993), How to Tune the Secret Shortwave Spectrum (1981), Top Secret Tourism (2007) and Inside the Shadow Government (2003), which may be the scariest book I've ever read. He published Andrew Yoder's Pirate Radio (1996) which is best-of-breed on the history of that insane little cross-current in the mostly placid waters of the radio broadcasting industry.

His passing was nothing out of the blue: He had blogged about his struggle with cancer for several years, and displayed a species of courage in the face of imminent death that I hope I can summon when my own time comes. His last months were spent in his home town in South Carolina, with his wife and family, and his dogs and cats all around him, and if we all have to make that final leap into the unknown, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a better way to do it.

Harry had a healthy scientific mind, and while not religious, he told me he was open to the possibility that death is not the end of all things. He enjoyed uncovering the hidden and the secretive and the overlooked (see Top Secret Tourism for a travel guide to all the places the government would just as soon nobody knew about) and I have an intuition that he was looking forward to seeing "what was out there." In one of our last exchanges some months ago, I made an outrageous suggestion, about which I won't say more unless something remarkable happens.

We've got his books, and for the time being, that's remarkable enough for me. W7HLH DE K7JPD / TNKS GD LK ET 73 SK.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 4: Format Lock-In

2009-11-18T18:51:27Z

Computing certainly isn't about operating systems. Nor is it really about apps. It's about files. Data is what we create, modify, store, and distribute in electronic form, and the ways that our data is stored give shape to almost everything else we do in computing. Being able to move from one platform to another thus depends almost completely on whether or not we can bring our files with us.

I've been working in front of a personal computer on an almost daily basis since May of 1979, and over the past thirty years I've accumulated thousands of made-by-hand files. Much of that is text, and I've had almost complete success bringing document files forward down the years, bouncing from one word processor to another by using various format-conversion tools. SF stories I wrote in CP/M WordStar in 1980 have passed through WordPerfect for DOS and several major releases of Microsoft Word and still live on my writing projects thumb drive. I keep a commercial Windows utility called Quick View Plus on hand to extract text from extinct file formats when necessary, which has been pretty rarely in recent years. Still, it's there if I need it.

It's a lot tougher once you get away from text. There are no conversion utilities for Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Visio, and as best I know nothing will import files created on either app. This is probably also the case for QuickBooks, and probably a great many more major applications that I've simply had no need for and no experience with.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this kind of file format lock-in is the only thing keeping some of these companies profitable, or for some of them simply in business. Computing is mature in terms of the basic mechanisms we use to manipulate data: text editing, page layout, spreadsheeting, presentation, raster drawing and vector drafting, image processing, and database query and display. Small points may be patentable, but the fundamental machinery is now older than any surviving patents. Building an app that could load and edit an InDesign layout file would take some work but no genius, and if done would be a major competitor to InDesign, not only in new projects but (crucially!) in existing projects as well. Adobe guards its file formats with its life because its file formats are its life.

Alas, my files are my life too. And when Adobe's IP rights bump up against my IP rights, who wins? Adobe, of course. Hence my hatred of activation: I don't use newer versions of InDesign because Adobe can turn them off remotely and basically hold my work hostage if they choose to, perhaps because they're too stupid to tell a RAID from a separate machine, or because they're hungry enough to want to force me to pay for an upgrade that may have no new features that I need...and maybe no new features at all.

I have no general Stallmanesque animus against commercial software. I have a fortune in boxed apps on the shelf, and have never minded paying for them, even when they were upgrades. However, upgrading must be my choice, and migration of software to newer machines as time passes must not require new licenses.

Even commercial software that doesn't require activation often demands a service and a tray icon, constantly popping up notifiers trying to upsell me to something I neither want nor need. In a mature market, there's less demand for upgrades, and people can be happy using software for a long, long time. I can understand the vendors' perspective and their need to be selling all the time to stay alive in a mature market. I think they should recognize my right to find it annoying and turn to software that doesn't yammer so much and waste my cycles.

The bottom line here is that some apps are difficult to move away from; for me, the two killers are InDesign and Visio. Yours may be different, but I think most people who do creative work at the keyboard have a few. The difficulty lies entirely in proprietary file formats, and leads me to the infuriating conclusion that Windows is necessary only to allow me access to my own files.

The good news (for small values of "good") is that there are tricks to be played. More in the next installment.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 3: Apps

2009-11-17T16:43:35Z

I came down with a monster headcold the last couple of days, and whereas this entry was in the can since Sunday, the remaining entries may be a little slower in coming. Bear with me...

We don't use Windows because it's Windows. (Most of us use it because it came on the machine and, well, it's paid for.) Windows is just an operating system, and an OS is a troll living under a bridge. Applications with specific missions lean over the railing and shout orders to the troll, who (mostly) does as they say while keeping order up on the bridge. An OS is 80% facilitator and 20% bodyguard. Our real work happens in the apps. If the apps we use can be run without Windows, then Windows isn't necessary at all.

There are three ways to break free of an application's dependence on Windows:

Find a version of a Windows app that runs on your OS of choice;
Switch to a similar app that runs on your OS of choice; or
Coerce a Windows app to run somehow on the OS of your choice.

I've done all three, and for the sake of further discussion here, the OS of choice is Linux. Mac OS/X is another worthy option, and all three of these methods are available there too, but for several reasons I hesitate to give Apple my money. (We'll talk of this at some point; people who know my deep history will understand.)

There is a lot of very good free software to be had for Linux, and it can be had very easily. The Ubuntu Software Center allows easy search for apps via category browsing or keyword search, and any selected apps are downloaded from trusted repositories and installed without further intervention. The Software Center can tell you what packages are already installed, and can uninstall packages you no longer want. This is so uncharacteristic of the ancient Unix culture of pain that I still giggle sometimes when I install something. ("This is easy. Too easy...")

I was a little surprised at how many Windows apps have almost identical versions running under Linux. This is true of some commercial apps as well as free apps, but free apps are much more likely to have Linux versions. I use the following apps almost identically under both Windows and Linux:

Firefox Web browser
Thunderbird email client
Skype VOIP/IM client
Kompozer WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor

This represents a good deal of what I do in front of the keyboard. (Maybe a third.) I've heard that Google Earth can be had in a Linux version but haven't tested it yet. It's not available through the Ubuntu Software Center.

Switching to a similar Linux app takes more doing, but for some sorts of work it isn't difficult. I don't use newsgroups very much anymore, but using Pan under Linux was relatively pain-free, even though it's quite different from Forte Agent in many respects. There's a very useful site called Open Source As Alternative that provides suggestions as to what free apps are reasonable alternatives to many commercial Windows apps. Definitely spend some time there if you haven't already; the real trick in open source software is often just knowing that it exists, absent pervasive ad campaigns. For example, I've known about the Gimp for ten years, but never heard of GimpShop (Gimp reworked to have a menu structure more like Photoshop's) until I read about it on OSAlt.

KOffice is probably the best of the open-source office suites, though not all the several apps are equally powerful or polished. OpenOffice is even better functionally, but it has some weirdnesses (font management first among them) that probably stem from its Java-centric design. It used to be the only one of the open source word processors I know of that will load a .docx file, but the latest Abiword will do that now. Note that OO will bog anything less muscular than a 2 GHz Pentium, so don't install it on older machines, and max your memory before you install it on anything.

For generating raw text and editing old Word 2000 files, I now use Abiword routinely. I don't do much spreadsheeting, but my fairly simple PlanetPlanner spreadsheet loads and runs on Gnumeric, and that's good enough for me.

Alas, once you get away from the most simple and widespread categories of apps (like word processors and spreadsheets) the news is mostly bad. The real problem with similar-but-not-identical apps isn't the work it takes to learn them. It's a phenomenon called file format lock-in, and in some respects is the key issue in this discussion. More about that in the next installment, probably when my nose stops dripping into my keyboard.

Odd Lots

2009-11-16T15:56:41Z

There's a useful overview of the latest Ubuntu release (9.10) here. Note the cautions about the 9.10 partitioner, especially if you have more than one SATA drive in a system destined for a clean install on a shared drive. I ran into some still-unresolved difficulties with the partitioner recently, but they seem to be machine-specific and may be due to BIOS limitations. More on that as I learn it.
A similar site for Kubuntu 9.10 is here.
I'm not much into costuming (or Halloween, for that matter; my sister got that gene instead) but within the genre of one-person-pretending-to-be-two, this may well be best-of-breed.
On the other hand, this one comes close, for sheer attention to detail if nothing else.
And while we're talking tauntauns, didja see the tauntaun sleeping bag? Authentic right down to the tauntaun guts pattern on the lining. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
2009 is now #8 on the most-sunspotless-years-since-1849 hit parade. Ten more spotless days and we move into position #7. I'm laying odds that 2009 will eventually get into 6th place but no higher.
God may not like the Higgs Boson, but hey, I'm not all that fond of opera. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Here's an interesting pamphlet from 1945 on what the future of television might be. If they only knew...
Frank Glover sent a link to an article sponsored by the ESA suggesting some SF ideas that have been realized to some extent or still may have some promise in our own (and not some alternative) future. A little breezy, but has a lot of full-color SF art and classic magazine covers. (5 MB PDF.)
This may seem like a weird stunt, but it was (and may still be) a common thing on dairy farms. When I was 10 or 11, I watched Auntie Della milk a cow by hand one morning for the day's needs, and the barn cats (who kept the barn free of mice) would line up for their milk squirts. Auntie Della's aim was very good, and by all indications the cats were completely good with that.
Make Magazine published a brilliant little project: A vacuum cleaner hose trap for small parts like screws and washers. (110K PDF.) Doesn't rely on magnetism, but is more like a lobster trap, in that parts enter easily but can't leave, and rattle around tellingly when the hose pulls them in.
From the Jolly Pirate comes word of the Corsair Flash Voyager GT: A 128 GB thumb drive optimized for speed, and (according to him) capable of holding over 20,000 MP3s. $400 now...but check again in six months, heh.
Turn the Dodge Viper logo upside-down, and what you've got is Daffy Duck.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 2: Ubuntu

2009-11-15T15:57:46Z

In the past two week's I've installed Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala) three times: twice as upgrades, and once as a clean install from a CD. The combo LiveCD/installer ISO came down with uTorrent in 8 minutes 5 seconds (!!) and has given me trouble only once, and that with the partitioner: I tried to install 9.10 on Carol's old HP laptop, but the partitioner could not determine the size of the existing Windows partition, and thus the resizer slider would not appear. On an SX270 with a similar size hard drive and an existing XP partition, the partioner resized XP without any trouble. (I'm wondering if there's some weirdness in the HP BIOS, but have not gone after it yet.) I've spent a great deal of time in Ubuntu in recent days, and beyond that one little glitch with the laptop, I'd say Karmic is the best one yet.

Apart from its contrarian (and purely optional) brownness, Karmic's default GNOME desktop is a great deal like Windows XP. The taskbar functionality is divided between two panels, one at the top and one at the bottom. Now that 20" displays are common, I use two lines for the Windows taskbar as well and don't begrudge GNOME the extra line--and you can put both panels at the screen bottom if you want to. The Home folder stands well for My Documents, with familiar subfolders for documents, music, pictures, video, and downloads. Nautilus looks enough like Windows Explorer to pass, especially given that most of us custom-configure Explorer after awhile and not everyone's configuration is identical. Left mouse button selects, right brings up context. In short, all the basic ideas of the Windows UI are present, in recognizable form. There's some bumping-up-against-habit in switching from one UI to another, but after even a little time exploring in GNOME you won't be lost anymore.

The Control Center is a great deal like Control Panel, with applets to manage most configurable options. One gripe about the Control Center is that there is a perfectly good applet to manage grub's boot options, but it's not installed by default and I only came across mention of it online by accident, while looking for something else. If you want it, go into the Software Center, and search for Startup-Manager. Install it, and you can specify grub's default OS, the menu time delay, a splash background, and other things. I take back the grouchiness expressed in my entry for November 7, 2009, with the exception that Startup-Manager needs to be installed by default.

I still have a gripe with Linux generally that goes back a long ways: It needs centralized font management. Unless I'm missing it (and I looked pretty hard) no such applet exists for Control Center, and installing fonts is much more fussy than it needs to be. This may not matter much if you're not a publisher or a graphic artist, but it matters a lot to me. I have a set of expensive Type 1 fonts that I bought in 2001 and use in all of my Copperwood Press books, but getting them into Linux was non-trivial, and not all apps that should recognize them do. Scribus and poor little Abiword picked them up immediately, but OpenOffice still can't see them and I still can't figure why. I know that X11 makes font management a little more complex than it is in Windows, but that's no excuse for not having a font manager in Control Center.

Beyond that, few complaints. There is now a Safely Remove Drive context menu item for thumb drive mount icons that I don't remember seeing in earlier versions. Videos that play without sound in Windows (due to obscure codec errors) play with full sound in Karmic. Bottom line: Ubuntu 9.10 implements all the fundamental GUI machinery that Windows does, and does it with enough similarity not to drive a newcomer to distraction. From that standpoint, Windows really isn't necessary at all...but alas, GUI machinery is only one small piece of the larger Windows pie. More tomorrow.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 1: Overview

2009-11-14T17:28:22Z

Still dealing with neck problems here, but in the background I've been pursuing a long-term, low-intensity project aimed at discerning how necessary Windows is for my daily operations. Back in 2001 or so, Keith and I considered publishing a book called Dumping Microsoft, but after I looked closely at the Linux releases of the time, decided it would be premature. Windows 2000 was mighty good, and Linux had yet to break out of its all-hail-the-console, pain-is-good hacker culture. It may be time to reconsider the necessity of Windows (and perhaps that book) which is what my upcoming series here is about.

I've changed operating systems often enough in the last 30 years not to get too attached to any of them, and have no tribal/emotional investment in Windows 2000 or XP. An OS is just a workbench, after all: It does very little work by itself, and exists almost entirely to help applications do what they must do in the most productive way possible. Too much of modern OS versions is just gratuitous glitz, which eats machine cycles and doesn't get a page laid out any faster. My reaction to Windows Vista was pretty simple: What's in all this for me? The primary purpose of Windows Vista was to make itself harder to steal, which is something of a fetish over there--and all the glitz was tossed in to persuade people to upgrade. Furthermore, the damned thing was slow. No sale.

You've heard me say many times here that personal computing is mature. I help out people at our parish with their computers, and an astonishing number of them still use Office 97. They may use the latest IE or Firefox, but they haven't seen the need to spend more money on word processing or spreadsheets. That's because the need isn't there. Office '97 probably has 90% of everything useful in an office suite; if you want the rest, get Office 2000, which I myself have been using for almost ten years now.

It's taken Linux longer to reach parity with Win2K/XP because it's written by volunteer programmers and not highly paid engineers on continuous death-march. It's also required the vision of a consumer-oriented distro firm to package up a version of Linux amenable to non-technical people. The testing I've done over the past year (in parallel with revising my assembly language book for Linux) tells me that Canonical's Ubuntu Linux is ready for ordinary users, and if it were widely available as a preinstall would be considered no geekier than Windows. (Installing Ubuntu from CD is actually loads easier than installing Windows XP. Microsoft would be perhaps a third its current size if not for Windows preinstalls.)

What makes it urgent now is a creeping suspicion I have that Windows malware is unstoppable. I see articles on tech sites several times a week describing new and increasingly clever exploits of flaws in Microsoft and Adobe software. This is troubling on many fronts, from the technical--Why in hell do we still have buffer overflow exploits after all these years?--to the purely political: How do we know that exploits in closed-source software have really been fixed? Linux is not immune to infection (it's secure at least in part because of its rarity) but the fact is that infections are difficult and rarely seen in the wild. I want to take advantage of that security, whatever its origins.

Hence the current project. I've talked about bits and pieces of it here and there in the past year, and it may be time to present what I've learned in more detail. Stay tuned.

Odd Lots

2009-11-08T19:01:45Z

Watch out when upgrading to Skype 4: The upgrade installs a Firefox/IE extension called Browser Highlighter that slows the browser down significantly, and I sure don't remember it showing me a checkbox to uncheck or in any other way refuse the install. This install-without-warning has gotten people more than a little het up. Like Skype, Browser Highlighter is owned by eBay and appears to facilitate online price comparisons. To get rid of it, execute the uninstaller via Start | Programs | Browser Highlighter. Don't just disable it in the browser; it must be uninstalled from Windows like any app or it'll just show up in your taskbar tray again when you reboot.
From the Words-I-Didn't-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: An acnestis is an itchy place that you can't reach to scratch. (Thanks to Larry Nelson for the suggestion.) I use a 24" slide rule to scratch my acnestes. Very accurate; gets to precisely the right spot!
The Arrington Crunchpad may be in trouble. Dayum. I had high hopes for this one, not so much for Web or cloud work as for an ebook reader.
Here is a fantastic archive of scanned Radio Shack catalogs, browsable page-by-page. I had a lot of these from the midlate 60s to 1980 or so, and intermittently since. (Thanks to Bernie Sidor for the link.)
From Bill Cherepy comes word of a managed PC built into a network jack. It's unclear how well this would run desktop software, but for cloud computing it could be useful, and in a cube farm setting would not be easily picked up and walked away with.
In addition to Green River and Diet Green River, there was at one time Green River Orange Soda, and Pete Albrecht reminds me that there was yet another (unrelated) Green River: The Whiskey Without a Headache. I'll believe that when I feel it. (But I can't stand whiskey, so don't wait up for me to do the experiment.)
And if "whiskey without a headache" sounds a little unlikely, then say hello to the robotic cow rectum.

Karmic Koala and Grub

2009-11-07T20:13:21Z

I twisted my neck funny earlier this week, and since then have had intermittent neck pain and nearly constant back-of-the-head headaches. If you haven't heard from me here, that's mainly the reason. Things are better now, but this neck thing is a serious issue. It doesn't take much to much to set it off, and alas, flying kites and looking at the stars have both been implicated.

The pain hasn't allowed me to get much writing done this week, but I did decide to take a chance and do an early upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. I usually let new major releases of OSes cook for a few weeks so that somebody else will spot the obvious bugs and fix them before I put my own arse in the line of fire. In this case, my neck hurt so bad that my arse didn't care, and I said, Make it so, #2.

Others have complained of problems with 9.10, so I was gritting my teeth a little as the process proceeded. It took about three hours, but the install went without incident, as had upgrades to 9.04 and 8.10 previously. When nothing obvious blew up, I then spent a couple of hours just trying things: Showing videos, listening to MP3s, playing games, opening documents and spreadsheets, and so on. Having declared the upgrade good, I tried to run KGrubEditor...and realized that it was gone. Its icon was blank, and double-clicking on it did nothing. Apparently the upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic uninstalled KGrubEditor without asking me, leaving me an empty launcher on the desktop.

I thought this might have had something to do with Ubuntu's moving from Grub to Grub 2 with the 9.10 release, but that's true only for new installs: Upgrades to 9.10 leave Grub in place and only update menu.lst. So I don't know why it happened, and I remain a little annoyed. Grub should already have a GUI settings manager/applet in the Administration menu; it shouldn't be up to some guy to write an independent app to do the job. Editing menu.lst is one of the things I do so rarely that I don't get good at it, which is precisely why GUI settings editors are necessary.

KGrubEditor is nowhere in the list of apps available through the Synaptic Package Manager, and when I tried to add the KDE4 PPA repository containing KGrubEditor, Synaptic could not access it for some reason. (It may have been an old URL; I'm not an ace at such things and don't know how to be sure.) I eventually just went up and downloaded the damned thing manually and installed it, but the app can't find its OS icons and doesn't correctly set the default boot menu item. I guess I have to uninstall it and reinstall it, but I've killed enough time on it this weekend and will leave that task for later.

The takeaway is simple: As good as Ubuntu Linux is, it still has some gaping holes, and bootloader settings management is at the top of that regrettable list.

Odd Lots

2009-11-01T23:44:01Z

The University of Utah has a fascinating animation demonstrating the relative sizes of very small things. Starting at the scale of a coffee bean, you can zoom down by pushing a slider past single cells, various viruses, proteins, until you reach the carbon atom. Won't take but a minute, and has plenty of wow factor, especially if you can't picture things clearly at nanoscale.
For all the beautiful weather and the fact that school was out, this year's Halloween saw no trick-or-treaters here on Stanwell Street until almost 5 PM. Summer from around the corner and her third-grade friends arrived in a mob at 6:30, and Dash got plenty of girl-attention, but that mostly exhausted the supply of local grade-schoolers. A few young teens came by between 7 and 8, but that about was it. The neighborhood has a fair number of teens, but we were told they were all having at-home parties, and we're good with that, though I have a mass of Milk Duds here that would probably go critical if placed in a single sufficiently large bowl.
Carol and I went over to our next-door neighbors later in the evening. Carol wore her footie jammies and put her hair up in huge 70s rollers. I cobbled up a Ben Franklin outfit that wasn't half bad, and I carried the small pink kite tethered to a balloon stick with about two feet of string. When we walked in, the guy down the street commented, "Lost some weight, huh Ben?" "Yup," I replied. "Low-carb and all that."
Want to haunt a house? Hire a team of scientists and an architect. Real ghosts just never show up for work when you need them.
This is the smallest packaged PC I have ever seen. Not worthwhile, given that it lacks digital audio out, is Atom-based, and stuck on Ubuntu 8.04 (!!) but it is small.
And if you'll settle for something only a little bit bigger, the AOpen MP45D will do a lot more.
I may have linked to this once years ago, but it's worth running through again: The Museum of Unworkable Devices, which is bestiary of perpetual motion machines, with careful explanations of why they don't work. Lots of links to even more of the same.
NASA has calculated the "average color of the universe"...and it's the color of my livingroom walls! (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Finally, don't forget the contest I posted yesterday once it goes down under the fold! Keep those shortie filk schticks coming!

Contest: 1-Verse Filk

2009-10-31T22:59:09Z

I've had a bummer couple of weeks for many reasons, most of them relating to Global Cooling and a mild skin rash on several of my knuckles. So I need to increase the silliness factor a little, and am hereby mounting a contest, with real prizes.

The challenge: Submit a 1-verse filk; that is, a short parody song with original funny words to only one verse, what ur-filker Allan Sherman called a "schtick." It has to be a funny filk, and the contest will be judged by people who know what "funny" means. (They will not necessarily be filkers. I will have a vote.) The tune can be anything, but it has to be a tune that has some chance of being recognized by a reasonable number of people. The song should only be one verse long; brevity is the soul of damned near everything, humor not the least of it. You can send me more verses, but your chances of winning decrease with each verse submitted beyond the first.

All entries should be submitted as comments to this blog. Your choice which site, and if you feel so inclined, submit entries to both sites. Being in both places does not increase your chances, though it may increase the number of people who see your entry. The two sites, in case you only ever read one, are LiveJournal, and WordPress.

No other rules except: Use no dirty words that will get either of us into trouble. Numerous things rhyme with "duck" and even more with "wit." (Here's a rhyming dictionary, in case you get stuck.)

The winner will be judged by Thanksgiving Day, or as soon thereafter as I get at least three entries. If I don't get three entries by Christmas, we'll call it done and both entries will get prizes. The prize will consist of your choice of one from the following list:

One copy of any title from the Copperwood Press catalog.
One copy of Assembly Language Step By Step.
A variable capacitor from my collection. I'll test it for shorts before shipping.
A TO-36 auto radio power transistor from my collection. Sub a 6SN7 if you're allergic to germanium.
Anything else somebody sends me to be a prize, to be listed later.

Hey, if that don't get your mouth watering, what will? And in case you're not sure what a one-verse filk is, let me show you:

Let There Be Fleas on Earth

(To: "Let There Be Peace on Earth")

Let there be fleas on Earth, but keep them away from me;

Let there be toads and snails, but not where I can see!

To love each creature's obnoxious features would drive me up a tree--

So let there be fleas on Earth, but keep them away....from me!

Shirley, you can all do better than that. So get on it!

Am I Blue?

2009-10-30T20:29:14Z

In a word, no. And yet looking at recent operating system UIs, you'd think blue was the only color there is. Everywhere I look, I see GUIs that look like they were carved from a block of sea ice. (I guess that's why modern GUI designs are so...cool.)

I'll be doing an immersion experiment with Kubuntu 9.10 once it's out and has had a few weeks to yield up its birth booboos, since KDE deserves a second chance. (I tried version 4.0 last year and it gave me no end of trouble.) But...KDE is so damned blue. Ditto Windows 7, which I haven't seen a lot of yet but will probably be using sooner or later. And Mac OS/X as well. Now, don't tell me that these OSes can be themed in any color you want. I know that. But why is blue so pervasive in every big-time OS except Ubuntu?

Well, there's another blue distro out there, which I finally burned onto a livecd and played around with yesterday afternoon. It's Puppy Linux, which I tried in its first release years back wasn't impressed with. Puppy is now four, and much improved. It probed the SX270 graphics system and monitor here, and set itself up to use the default 1600 X 900 resolution with nary a whimper.

Puppy is unique in several ways. It's not derived from any other distro, but was created from scratch by Australian Barry Kauler and is maintained by its own community. It's a "lightweight" distro and was designed deliberately to make use of the fact that memory is much cheaper now than it used to be: It loads into memory and mostly stays there. This is true even if you install it on a disk partition (as opposed to running it "without a trace" from the livecd) and includes the major apps as well as the OS itself. When installed on the hard drive it still plays from memory, writing changes to a disk file but avoiding disk access whenever possible. This makes it feel snappy in the extreme: Click on the Abiword icon and pop! Abiword is there in front of you. Other preinstalled apps include the Gnumeric spreadsheet, the Seamonkey email client, paint and draw programs, and a lightweight browser created for Puppy Linux. (There are more; those are the major ones.)

There are some additional FOSS packages available for download from the Puppy respositories, but in truth not nearly as much as you can get for Ubuntu and other major distros. There's no apt-get; the Puppy installer format (PET) is unique, and if nobody put a FOSS package into Puppy's PET format, you have to fool with tarballs etc. and do the install manually from the console.

There is also a mechanism (which I didn't try) for repackaging changes to the Puppy system into distributable derivatives called puplets. Many of these can be had, always free. One makes Puppy look a great deal like Mac OS/X; others are tweaks to look/work well on hardware like the EeePC. Some come with a specific emphasis and preinstalled apps, like composing music or bioinformatics, of all things. In a sense, you're creating an app installer that includes the OS along with the apps, which is an interesting idea. This can be done with other distros, but the Puppy remastering mechanism makes it trivial. Puppy or its puplets can be installed on a thumbdrive and will thus run on any machine that can boot from a USB device, with configuration changes written to the thumb drive. (Ditto a rewriteable optical drive, if the session wasn't closed and there's room on the optical disk for a change file.)

On the downside, certain simple configuation items hid well: I have not yet found the way to run apps from icons with a double click instead of the default single click. Nor did I find the way to add an app shortcut icon to the desktop for newly installed apps. I admit that I didn't spend a huge amount of time with Puppy and probably won't, but such simple things should be easily findable and obvious how to use.

So on Puppy I'm lukewarm. I don't really need it for the sake of old slow hardware, but the idea of a lightweight RAM-based Linux on a bootable keychain thumb drive is fascinating, and I might download one of the puplets and try them in just that way. However, if you're just looking for an easy-to-use Windows alternative, I think Ubuntu is a much better bet.