Most people don’t think about their operating systems.  When they do, it’s because something has gone horribly wrong with them - programs are crashing, the old printer isn’t working, the computer is running slow, that sort of thing.  There are a few brave souls, however, that do think about their operating systems, and view their choice of an operating system as a personal choice, an exercise in free expression.  A lot of these people buy Macs, thinking that they’re being cool, cutting-edge, avant garde, and such.

They are, but that’s besides the point.

Those of us without the means to buy a Mac, or those that just want something without some sort of fruity logo on it, travel down a different road - a road fraught with intrigue, danger, and hope.  We go into the frontier of operating systems, into a Wild West-like land of freedom and opportunity, a land with only the veneer of civilization, where nobody holds your hand and where you’re just as likely to kill as be killed.

I am, of course, talking about Linux.  BSD and Solaris folks don’t apply here - they’re sort of like the Quakers, the Shakers, the Chinese, or maybe those wacky Jehovah Witnesses or something.  They’re just weird, and should be shunned accordingly.

To help illustrate the veritable and verifiable coolness that is Linux, I present to you religiously themed operating systems:

Ubuntu Christian Edition - For those that want the Power of God to grace His Servant’s hardware.  It even comes with the WhatWouldJesusDownload toolbar!

Ubuntu Muslim Edition - Don’t let that evil Western font of technology keep you from your proper observances as a practicing Muslim!  Keep track of your prayer times with Minbar!  Peruse the Koran with Zekr!  Look at all that green!

Of course, no such compendium of open sourced religious zealotry would be complete without…

Ubuntu Satanic Edition - It’s dark.  It’s bloody.  It wants to swallow your soul… or your sole.  They hunger for fresh fish, you know.  Like real Satanic worship, though, there’s no real content - it’s just a bunch of themes so everything looks evil.

Welcome to the Wild West, everyone.  Enjoy your stay.  It’s real shiny here.

Sadly, I don’t even remember how I found this… but I did take it.  The questions were… interesting, to put it mildly.  The results were… entertaining.  Yes.

The Loverboy Random Gentle Love Master (RGLM) FACT:You embody the German principle of Konstantzusammenschaft, which is best described in English (without using the obscure English word “sammenschaft”) as “eternal togethermanship”. Well-liked. Well-established. You are The Loverboy. Loverboys thrive in committed, steady relationships—as opposed to, say, Playboys, who want sex without too much attachment. You’ve had many relationships and nearly all of them have been successful. You’re a nice guy, you know the ropes, and even if you can be a little hasty with decisions, most girls think of you as a total catch. Your hastiness comes off as spontaneity most of the time anyhow, making you especially popular in your circle of friends, too. You know not to make the typical Loverboy mistake of choosing someone who appreciates your good humor and popularity, but who offers nothing in return. You belong with someone outgoing, independent, and creative. Otherwise, you’ll get bored. And then instead of surprising her with flowers or a practical joke, you’ll surprise her by leaving. Your exact male opposite: The Billy Goat Deliberate Brutal Sex Dreamer Always avoid: The Nymph (DBSD) Consider: The Window Shopper (RGLD), The Peach (RGLM)

Link: The Online Dating Persona Test | OkCupid - personals | Dating

Note:  Impending post regarding the horror that is the ESO’s Chevy Malibu, and my aborted attempts at repairing it, is most certainly forthcoming.  I just need to find a way to express the level of pure, unadulterated frustration I experienced in a way that’s coherent.  I’m not there yet.  Until then, here’s something to get you by.

I’m going to admit something that could be potentially dangerous:  I’m a closet font enthusiast.  Now, I’m not crazy about it or anything - I couldn’t tell you the exact pica dimensions of Helvetica or anything nutty like that, but I’ve always wanted to create my own fonts.  One of these days, I may even exercise the level of patience and dexterous fortitude required to successfully pull something like that off.

Then I found this feature on Slate:

In April, an online font clearinghouse called FontShop quietly uploaded a program that, the company wrote, was meant to be “purely entertaining—something to kickstart creativity.” FontStruct, a browser tool that lets anyone create an original font, was so popular that the site’s servers crashed within days of the official launch. As of this writing, 1,509 DIY fonts of all types—pixel fonts optimized for the Web, text fonts for documents, display fonts, “dingbat” fonts—are available for free, making the site an instant Web 2.0 community: the YouTube of typography. Although the term typography seems a tad grandiose for a site on which one of the most celebrated fonts, Luchador, is a series of pictures of Mexican wrestling masks.

This, naturally, is the part where I damn near explode in ecstatic glee.

A little further in the article, it reveals the existence of DaFont.com, which happens to be another repository of community created fonts, which is where I found the necessary font required to engage in this mild form of blasphemy:

Oh yes.  You wish you could be as cool as I am.  Well, guess what?  You can! Install some fonts and have at it!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have the aftermath of a car repair from hell to sort out, which, as I’ll get into later, involves participating in a class-action lawsuit… I’m not kidding about that.

One of the more enjoyable things that the ESO and I engage in is a little activity where she names something and I Google Image it to see what comes up.  This frequently leads to me exploring some rather odd parts of the Internet, though… for example:

The ESO mentioned something about bites.  So, I Googled up “bites”, which led to this.  For the record, I will never search for that again; half of the pictures are disgusting pictures of bedbug bites.  That said, it did lead to me hitting up Wikipedia about bedbugs and, in the process, learning about traumatic insemination:

Traumatic insemination is the mating practice of a few species of insects wherein the male pierces the female’s abdomen with his genitals and injects his sperm through the wound into her abdominal cavity. The most widely recorded example is that of Cimex lectularius, the bed bug.^[1]

So, if I were a bug and I felt like impregnating the ESO, it would pretty much involve me raping her in the belly button or thereabouts with the hope that, somewhere in that abdomen of hers, is her uterus, and that, most importantly, I poked the right part of her belly to get my sperm in there.

Uh… what?

Just remember, folks: God’s in his Heaven - all’s right with the world.

WARNING:  Technical frustration ahead, involving mildly technical terms.  You’ve been warned.

Oh, happy days…

Back in the days when I wasn’t quite so much of a cheap-ass (i.e. back when relatives were buying my computer gear), I had a little iMac that, using iTunes, I would burn MP3 CDs with.  It was great - I got an MP3-playing CD player for my car of the time and enjoyed listening to 9 hours of music on one disc.  Truly glorious.

Then I had to pay for my own stuff.  Suddenly, budget became a big, big issue… which meant that, once the Mac started being a little less reliable, that I was on my own.  For most people, this would mean finding a used Windows PC somewhere and running iTunes on that.  I, however, am stubborn - I was never a big fan of Windows to begin with (hence the Mac), and, now that I have to deal with its horrendous bugs, quirks, and annoyances on a daily basis at work, I’m not exactly anxious to come home to it.

So, I run Ubuntu.  That’s right - I’m one of those propellerheads running something called “Linux”.  Have been for a couple of years now.  Works great enough of the time for me to not go back to Windows, which, to be fair, isn’t setting the bar particularly high, but is still a pretty serious accomplishment for something which costs $0.  In fact, because of the nature of my work, Linux has its advantages.  For example, let’s say a web site stops working at a client location.  Is it because of DNS?  DHCP?  Group Policy?  A Windows Update?  Well, if I throw my laptop on the network and the web site works, that narrows things down substantially - I now know that it’s probably a Windows option, not a network option.  Similarly, if the web site doesn’t work, that tells me it’s probably a network option and not a Windows problem.  Another nice thing is that I can actually run whois natively instead of going to crappy web sites to do the dirty work for me.  Of course, all of this would be possible on a Mac, but, until this blog really picks up steam and starts coughing up “new laptop” money (ha!), I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

That’s not to say all is a bed of soft rose petals.

As the title of this post suggests, Linux has its warts.  One of the bigger ones is that usability definitely has historically been something of a low point.  There are a variety of really good reasons for that, of course.  Linux was originally meant for servers, not laptops, so it was meant to do server things, not laptop or home PC things, and it was meant to do them in a way that was friendly for servers, not for people sitting at home.  There are also various political issues that tend to rear their ugly head from time to time; when your operating system is being written to at least bend to the will of philosophers instead of end-users, you’re going to have some problems.  Remember, though - it’s free in every way that matters.  You can get it for free.  If the group that makes it decides to stop supporting it, you can grab the code and support it yourself if you have to.  You can’t do that with Windows.  In fact, you can’t even do that with large parts of Mac OS X.  That’s a selling point, even if there are some necessary evils that come with that.

Thankfully, as the years have passed, people have begun to pay less attention to the philosopher-kings and have begun to pay more attention to end-users.  This frequently happens when money gets involved, and, believe me, money is definitely involved in Linux now.  This might seem a little strange at first - as I mentioned earlier, Linux is free.  How do you make money off something that costs nothing?  That’s actually fairly easy - there are a couple of ways you can do just that:

1. Charge for the hardware it’s running on.  HP, IBM, and plenty others make money this way.
2. Charge for support.  This is how Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, makes their living.

Consequently, Linux is a lot friendlier than it used to be.  It can do 99% of what most people would expect it to do.  Can it deal with digital cameras and photos?  Yep.  Need to do some graphical arts work on the cheap?  No problem, as long as you don’t get too crazy about it.  Need to play some music?  Have an iPod?  No problem - heck, there are a couple of different ways to get there.  Some of them can even bluff their way on to the iTunes store.  You can play, rip, and create your own DVDs, too.  You name it, Linux will probably let you do it… with a few caveats.

Today’s caveat:  Ordered MP3 CDs.  I still can’t find a program that will actually burn an MP3 CD for me.

Now, I need to define what my problem is.  Anybody can dump a bunch of MP3 files on a CD and hit “Burn”.  That part works fine.  Trouble is, I have a lot of classical music, so track order is very important to me.  File order generally implies “alphabetical order”, which isn’t going to work if I have two classical symphonies on the same MP3 CD and both have an Adagio movement.  What’ll happen is I’ll hear the Adagio movement of the first symphony, then the Adagio movement of the second symphony - what I actually want to hear is the Adagio of the first symphony, then the next movement of that symphony.  iTunes will kind of do it, as long as your files are already MP3s.  It won’t convert files into MP3s on the fly for you, at least last time I checked; that’s easily circumvented, though, by simply burning the CDs as MP3s.  No biggie.  Banshee (a Linux program) used to do this, only it would even convert any non-MP3 files to MP3s on the fly, which was really nice, but there was one problem - the tracks weren’t ordered.  I might as well have just dragged them on to the CD myself as if they were a bunch of Word files.

So I waited… and waited… and waited.  I gave it about a year, figuring that, after all of this time, they would fix the problem and I could burn MP3 CDs with impunity.

End result:  Nope.  In fact, Banshee won’t even burn an MP3 CD anymore, ordered or otherwise.  Great.  I love it when programs lose functionality.

So, what am I going to do about it?  I’ll tell you what I’m going to do - I’m going to figure out how to do it myself.  If nobody else will code the functionality, well, fuck it - I didn’t get a degree in Computer Science for nothing.  It’s not like I don’t know my way around some code, right?

(Famous last words, folks.  Famous last words - remember that last paragraph when I’m found in a ditch somewhere, muttering something about “garbage collection”.)

So, here’s what I’m thinking… it looks like Banshee just dumps all burning functions to whatever is responsible for burning CDs on the computer.  Fine by me.  Ubuntu Hardy Heron includes Brasero, which appears to use a series of plugins to take one set of data (MP3s, for example) and burns them into another set of data (audio, for example).  Consequently, all I need to do is come up with a plugin that, at a bare minimum, takes MP3s, orders them the way burning an audio CD does, then burns them into MP3s (perhaps by doing something as simple as just appending the track number at the beginning of the file name).  If I’m feeling really creative, maybe I’ll run the original audio through gstreamer or something and convert it to MP3 on the fly.  If I’m feeling really creative, I might even take it one step further after that and let the person choose both the input and output formats - this would let people burn OGG CDs, for example.  That, though, would come later - I only care about MP3 discs right now.

Wish me luck… I’m going to need it.

Let’s run through the checklist of all that is funny:

1. Does it make fun of Canadians?  Yep.
2. Does it involve Mounties?  Yep.
3. Does it involved a disabled lesbian steed?  Yep.
4. Is there a transgender Native American involved?  Yep.

Then, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Iowahawk’s latest foray into playwriting is nothing short of brilliant… sort of like poutine.  I don’t care what anybody says, combining gravy, cheese curds, and french fries is brilliant.  Do not deny the brilliance!

NOTE:  Non-technically minded readers can pretty much skip this post.  It’s not going to mean much to you.

In an attempt to wipe away some of the funk of the week, I decided to do something truly fun and exciting… that’s right, I updated the operating system on my laptop from Ubuntu Feisty Fawn to Ubuntu Hardy Heron.  By “upgrade”, of course, I mean “wipe and reinstall” - I’d have to go from Feisty to Gutsy to get to Hardy Heron, and, well, Gutsy never worked well on my laptop.

Since it’s pretty much routine for anybody doing this to post some specs, well, let’s get to this:

Compaq Presario V6000Z
AMD Sempron 1.8 GHz on nVidia MCP51 chipset
40 GB Hard Drive (not sure of manufacturer)
1 GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 6150 Go
Broadcom BCM94311MCG mini-PCI wireless adapter
nVidia MCP51 Ethernet adapter

First, the good news - unlike every other previous version of Ubuntu I’ve ever had to deal with on this laptop, Hardy Heron didn’t make me play games with boot options.  You have no idea how much that thrills me.  I threw in the LiveCD and it largely did what it was supposed to.  It didn’t handle the wireless adapter right, but that wasn’t surprising - Broadcom wireless chipsets have notoriously poor Linux support.  Best of all, it even got my screen resolution right on the first try.  That was also a first.  It would seem that Canonical has finally decided to stop ignoring HP laptop owners.

Installed Hardy Heron - went well.

I followed up the install by plugging in to my router and doing an update - there were over 100 updates.  No surprise there.  Like always, they were tons of little updates for all of the various packages that are installed in an Ubuntu installation.  If you’re used to dealing with OS X, it will blow your mind.  If you’re used to Windows, it will seem mildly strange - but only mildly.

Rebooted and installed the nVidia driver from the Restricted Driver Manager.  Worked great.  Another reboot.

Now, it was time to tackle wireless… here are the steps that worked for me:

1. Start with this walkthrough.
2. Once done with this walkthrough, the blue light still wasn’t on.  The key, as I discovered here, was to also pull the b44 and ssb modules.  You can do that by typing in sudo rmmod b43 b44 ssb after installing ndiswrapper but before starting ndiswrapper with sudo modprobe ndiswrapper.  Once I did that, the blue light came on instantly.

As an aside, the Dell package that the walkthrough has you download with the wget statement is 50 MB.  You can get the exact same driver (and just the wireless driver) here from HP.  However, to make that work, you won’t be able to use unzip to open it - instead, do the following:

1. sudo apt-get install cabextract
2. Download the file using Firefox - it’ll save on your desktop by default.
3. cd ~/Desktop
4. cabextract sp36884.exe

This will then dump all of the files out on your desktop - there’s not a lot of them, so they’re easy to clean up later.  Then, just run ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf from there.  The download is only 5 MB - much shorter.

So, now that I’ve started to play with it a little, here are some likes and dislikes:

Likes

- It’s prettier.  The new desktop effects are pretty neat.
- Power management!  Actual, honest-to-God power management!  When I unplug the power plug, the monitor dims.  When I plug it back in, the monitor goes bright.  Let the laptop sit for a bit with the power unplugged and *gasp* the monitor dims some more.  About damn time.

Dislikes

- Firefox 3 has an annoying habit that I wasn’t aware of until now.  When I type in a new blog post and hit “Enter”, instead of just going down a couple of lines like every other browser out there, it will bring the screen back to the top of the frame, then give me a couple of lines.  The end result is that, each time I hit “Enter”, I’m no longer able to see the bottom of the input box.  Supremely annoying.
- That’s pretty much it for now.  I’m sure I’ll come up with more.

All in all… it seems all right.  I’m impressed.

UPDATED: I discovered something rather unpleasant when I fired up my laptop this morning - the wireless was down.  Removing the b44 and ssb modules, then restarting ndiswrapper got it back up, but I decided I needed to come up with a more permanent solution.  Fortunately, the solution listed here did get the job done.  Use the 0.3 solution.

Oh Canada… when will your wackiness end?

A larger than life Canadian drug dealer has had his jail term cut - because the jail is not dealing with his 430-pound weight.

Michel Lapointe has already served 20 months behind bars awaiting sentencing in what his lawyer described as horrible conditions.

There are two ridiculous parts about this story.  First, that it’s possible to become too fat for jail - when the jail is in charge of every prisoner’s diet, how on Earth is it possible to feed someone enough to become too fat to remain in jail?  Did it not occur to someone to maybe cut his portion of poutine?

(As an aside, am I the only one that finds the concept of french fries covered with melted cheese curds and gravy far too delicious to contemplate?)

The second ridiculous part, though, is that he was in jail for 20 months awaiting sentencing.  Apparently, the Canadian judicial system is about as clogged as their medical system, requiring upwards of two years just to figure out how long someone should be incarcerated for.  I’d be curious to see how they handle sentencing that’s less than the period the prisoner was incarcerated for - do they get some “comp time” if they commit another crime?

When you’re tipping a contractor that shows up to your house, after you hand the contractor the cash, never, ever unbuckle your belt buckle, unbutton your pants, and start zipping down your fly… to tuck your shirt in.  Seriously, if you need to tuck in your shirt, wait a minute or two for the contractor to leave.  Handing someone money in your house and following that up with anything involving your pants is liable to send the wrong message.  I cannot begin to stress this enough.

(Yes, this happened to me today.  That’s how my work day ended.  At least I got some dinner money out of it, though… and, to the guy’s credit, he did tuck in his shirt, and he did stop there.  Thank goodness - that almost became the first time I would have ever used my steel toed boots for defense.)

As some of you have probably guessed, I’ve been a little busy lately.  Yesterday, I had a nice server migration from hell.  Today, I got to finish that up - I got the tip not because I inspired someone to play with their pants but because I worked my ass off and got the job done.  Did it take about twice as long as it should?  Yes.  Did pretty much everything that could go wrong go wrong?  No - both servers stayed up, which is better than some of the nastier migrations I’ve been a part of - but it still wasn’t a lot of fun.

While I’m bitching about work, let’s talk about spam.  Everybody gets it.  Everybody is annoyed by it.  Simple enough.  What’s kind of fun about it, though, is that, when you’re managing a mail server, you get to experience how different people handle spam.  Some will want the spam to be segregated to a separate folder so that, if a legitimate e-mail is trapped by the spam filter, they can check the folder later and find it.  Others are mortally offended that, somewhere, even in a folder labeled “Junk E-Mail” there could be an e-mail in there that mentions (the horror!) improperly sized penises, and will immediately freak out, raining death and hysteria upon you, upon discovering that e-mail.  What’s really fun is when somebody decides they want both.  Y’know, because, if you’re going to host your e-mail on an operating system that exemplifies the wacky nature of quantum physics, the least it can do is violate said laws while hosting your e-mail, right?

Right.

While I’m here, a quick heads up - I’m visiting my son (first one) this weekend, so posting may be a little sparse.

Secondly, the ESO asked me how I felt about a middle name of “Lucas” for impending son #2.  Needless to say, I smiled a little.  Heh heh heh… if she only knew… if she only knew…

Not going to be posting much tonight - I’m involved in the server migration from hell.  It’s always fun when you migrate a server, only to discover that nobody has any idea where the installation discs are for their business-critical applications… oh, good, good times.

I’ll have something tomorrow, I assure you.

Ah, the joys of pulling a 15 hour day yesterday… it wasn’t all bad; if it was, I wouldn’t have been able to throw down a couple of posts.  That said, I’m rather ridiculously tired, so if today’s post veers towards incoherency, there’s probably a really good reason for that.

The 15 hour day was the direct result of a customer’s Exchange (e-mail, among other things) server going down.  That this particular customer was located about an hour away from where I live and normally work certainly didn’t help matters any.  However, I learned about a couple of interesting toys that can make a restore go sooooooooo much smoother.  First, though, I wish to rant for a bit about Windows, and why it absolutely sucks when it goes down.  I’ve done this before, of course, but I want to expand on it a little today.

One of the nasty side-effects of some of Microsoft’s choices in the past is that Windows is arguably much more difficult than it needs to be to restore, which means that it’s much more difficult than it really should be to back up.  The culprit, as always, is Active Directory, which, in any Windows-centric office, is essentially the glue that holds the world together.  Without Active Directory, you don’t have user accounts, which means people can’t log into their workstations, which means nothing gets done.  If Active Directory comes up missing, you are hosed.  Active Directory stores its information on a server known as a Domain Controller.  You can have just about as many Domain Controllers as you want, practically speaking, which is a very good thing - if you have more than one, you can just replicate the information to the other domain controller(s) and almost never worry about restoring Active Directory from scratch.  If you have to restore from scratch… well, let’s just say that Microsoft was apparently staring long and hard at Schrödinger’s cat; in a vain attempt at creating (or, at least, inspiring) a Heisenberg Compensator, Microsoft created a backup and restore scheme that requires your server to know not only what it was at the precise time of that backup, but also precisely where it was going to go next.  It’s a rare company that would dare laugh at quantum physics, but I suppose you can get away with it when you’re worth billions of dollars.  Needless to say, this makes my job damn near impossible… or, at least, it did, until I learned about a new toy…

That’s right - the VMWare Converter.

Now, how would this piece of software unravel quantum mechanics as we know it?  Easy - by effectively creating a byte-level backup of the server and converting it into a VMWare image, which, in turn, can be launched in VMWare as a virtual machine should the source server go down.

(Right about now is when I lost about half of the few regular readers I have around here.  It’s okay - you can come back when Rachel links to me again.  She’s a little busy with Rupert right now, though, so it’s going to be a while.)

First, a quick primer on virtual machines…

A virtual machine is a machine-in-a-machine.  To help conceptualize this, pretend that you are a computer.  Now, let’s pretend that we installed a second personality inside of you (a second soul, if you will).  It will only have access to the body parts that you grant it when and where you choose to grant it, and, if you’d like, you may grant it complete control over everything.  You may decide after a while that you want control back - if you do, you may take it back.  The result is something similar to a split personality, only you can talk with the split personality, switch them at your choosing, and it’s only as hostile to your personality’s ability to perform in the real world as you choose to let it be.

Now, let’s pretend that somebody close to you dies (say, that friendly server above you that keeps you warm at night).  Using the VMWare Converter (were you a computer, of course), we could create an image of that server before it dies and install it into you; once that server dies, we could then turn that virtualized version of the server on.  Whenever someone tries to call that server (Hey, Johnny!), instead of the dead server responding (or, for that matter, failing to respond), the new alternate personality in your head would respond (Hi!  I’m over here!).  Now, as I’m sure you can imagine, if a lot of people used to talk to this server, things are going to be a little slow for both you and your new alter-ego.  Even so, it’s sometimes better to be able to talk to the dead slowly than to not talk to them at all.

(Thus endeth the most confusing and metaphysical explanation of server virtualization ever.)

Now, the cool part for me yesterday was that, since my problem server wasn’t dead - just slowly dying - I still had time to run the VMWare Converter on it (or, as the case may have been that night, run ShadowProtect on it, then convert the resulting ShadowProtect image - it was faster than running the converter directly, believe it or not), which is why, instead of having no e-mail at all, that particular customer now has slow e-mail, a slower SQL server (it had the most free resources and was the newest server in the office), and a new server on order… and they were back up to fully functional by the end of the night, at least until I logged out, at which point I learned another important lesson:

“Always run mission-critical virtual servers as Local System, not administrator… at least not if you plan on logging out at all.”

Ah, c’est la vie.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Found this bit of Microsoft-related hilarity on Ars Technica today:

Nevertheless, it’s far from perfect, and not only on the security front. While many tests show that Vista outperforms XP on some high-end computers, the average computer system does not run Windows Vista as well as it does Windows XP. This will of course change as the average computer becomes more powerful and as Microsoft tweaks the operating system (SP1 already offers some help), but the fact of the matter is that Vista is recognized as a slow operating system.

Many have therefore turned their hopes to Windows 7. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will not increase the minimum requirements as it did from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Considering that Microsoft hopes to get Windows 7 out the door faster than it did with Vista (which came out six years after XP, compared to the typical three) this is entirely possible, and Bill Gates has all but confirmed that Windows 7 will focus on performance improvements:

We’re hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I’m very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don’t have a lot of work to move that data back and forth.

Uh huh.  Sure it will.  Will it also have a relational database-driven filesystem that will make searches richer and faster, just like Vista (to say nothing of previous versions of Windows - hi, Cairo!) was supposed to have?  What other fun and interesting features will Microsoft promise this time around and completely fail to deliver?

Oh, I can’t wait to find out…

According to Slashdot, we are about to pass two momentous milestones:

1. The estimated population of the planet will reach 6,666,666,666.
2. The number of used IP addresses will reach 666,666,666.

Both will probably happen today… so, y’know, if the four elephants of the Apocalypse show up at your front door, this is probably why.

There are terrible, terrible things that lurk on the Internet… terrible things like… the LOLCatz Bible. Let’s quote from the “good” book, shall we?

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

6 An Ceiling Cat sayed, im in ur waterz makin a ceiling. But he no yet make a ur. An he maded a hole in teh Ceiling.7 An Ceiling Cat doed teh skiez with waterz down An waterz up. It happen.8 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so wuz teh twoth day.

9 An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet.10 An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good.

11 An Ceiling Cat sayed, DO WANT grass! so tehr wuz seedz An stufs, An fruitzors An vegbatels. An a Corm. It happen.12 An Ceiling Cat sawed that weedz ish good, so, letz there be weedz.13 An so teh threeth day jazzhands.

I… wha… um…

16 So liek teh Ceiling Cat lieks teh ppl lots and he sez ‘Oh hai I givez u me only kitteh and ifs u beleevs in him u wont evr diez no moar, k?’

That, folks, was John 3:16… and, with that, there was me running for the frakking hills.

UPDATE: But wait! It gets horrifically mind-bendingly worse! That’s right… I also discovered LOLCode! An example:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

What… the… make… it… stop…

Okay, okay… between everybody at Rachel’s site and Gary badgering me about it, I decided it was high time to start watching some Firefly. Besides, the site I was trying to watch BSG Season 3 on was not only highly pirated but also highly unreliable - half the time, it would crash my browser, while the other half of the time it just wouldn’t download. So… Hulu, there I came…

Some initial thoughts after seeing the pilot:

1. The commercial breaks were placed in much better places in the Firefly episodes than they were in the original BSG episodes I tried watching there about a week ago. I’m feeling much better about Hulu as a consequence.
2. Okay, I’m probably a little disturbed for this, and there’s probably something seriously wrong with me, but there is just something absolutely irresistible about Kaylee, the engineer girl. She had me sold the instant I saw her sitting in front of the Firefly holding that parasol with that ridiculous look on her face, talking about her ship with that almost insane singsong voice… I don’t know what it is or why I’m so excited about her, but I like the kind of crazy she’s serving, and I need to get me another slice. I’m serious about this, and I know it doesn’t make any sense, but she has this crazy-cute thing going that, for whatever reason, just really gets me going at full burn. Don’t get me wrong, the companion is rather attractive as well, but, given a choice between the companion and Kaylee… sorry, companion. You can just stay home. I have me some port intake stabilizers that need some attention, like right now! (God, I need help.)
3. I like it! The captain has a dystopian Captain Kirk thing going (yeah, he gets the ladies, too), everything looks like my backyard, and the whole universe seems kind of messed up, but not quite messed up enough to just call it quits. Besides, there’s something about watching space ships with TV western music in the background that just kind of gets this sweet & sour thing going… it works. It doesn’t sound like it should, but it does work.

Needless to say, I’ll be catching the rest of the episodes as time permits. Besides, I need something to do while I wait for Season 3 of BSG to show up. In short, I approve of this message. That is all.

UPDATE: I’m not alone. Rachel enjoys Kaylee as well. So, apparently, my taste in women is the same as a heterosexual woman’s taste in women. Outstanding. This will come in handy if my penis ever falls off and I become a lesbian. If that happens, though, I’m moving to Beaverton. I mean, how can you be a lesbian and not live in a town called Beaverton? Unfortunately, unlike Rachel, I haven’t downed the entire season yet, so, alas, there is much for me to learn… that said, yeah, I’m not going to be able to look at a strawberry the same way again.

Arstechnica reported today that the iMac has turned 10.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been 10 years.  My first Mac was a Mac Classic, which, surprisingly, lasted me through my freshman year of college… in 1998.  Printing reports was always fun with it - anything that involved superscripts or subscripts would cause the old LaserWriter attached to it to slow to a crawl.  This wasn’t much of a problem in high school, but it didn’t take long during college to discover that my chemistry and physics reports were taking anywhere between half an hour and an hour to print.  Seeing as they were in the 4-6 page range, and seeing as I had the rather nasty habit of doing the reports about half an hour to an hour before class, this was increasingly becoming a problem.  Even worse, I didn’t have a modem for the Mac, which meant that Internet access was completely out.  Of course, the university had a nice enough computer lab to keep me from being too disappointed about this, but it was still annoying.

Then, one day in 1999, my grandma surprised me with something - she bought me an iMac.  It was a Rev. D iMac, Bondi Blue in color, and it was a huge upgrade over what I had previously.  Finally, I had a computer that could get on the Internet!  Even better than that, it displayed things in color!  Even better than that, it could actually print out my reports in under five minutes!  This was a truly glorious machine, as far as my pitifully low standards were concerned.

Fast forward to 2005 - it was my senior year of college.  I took a couple of years off so I could properly learn the value of a college education (or, more accurately, properly learn the value of the job skills I had by that point - about $7.50/hour at Radio Shack), and, unfortunately, my finances were none the better for it.  So, I milked that iMac for everything it was worth.  By this point, I had upgraded the pitiful 6 GB hard drive with a much faster and much more spacious 80 GB hard drive.  I had also installed OS X on it (10.1), then upgraded it to 10.3.  I also had put in a RAM upgrade by this point - it had 160 MB of RAM instead of the 32 MB it originally came equipped with; this gave it just enough to run NeoOffice.  Being a computer science major, I certainly was not above using the UNIX underpinnings of the OS to compile and run my homework assignments.  To enable me to do my assembly programming homework at home, I had installed Bochs on it, which gave me just enough to compile the code into Intel-native machine code. My senior project, which involved a little physics simulator that a couple of guys in my class wrote and which they tasked me with the documentation of (a task which I didn’t approach with quite as much enthusiasm as I probably should have, in retrospect), still compiled somehow, and, yes, it did run… very, very slowly.  While most of my classmates and friends were playing with 2+ GHz machines, I was plodding along with my G3/333 MHz iMac, barely keeping pace.  By this point, Flash animations were becoming increasingly sophisticated; it didn’t take long for me to learn that my computer didn’t have the horsepower to deal with YouTube.

I didn’t get a better computer until 2006, when a customer of mine told me to dispose of a perfectly good machine… and dispose of it I did.  I still kept that iMac around for another year until it was replaced with a slightly newer iMac that another customer handed to me.  By this point, the ESO had begun to enforce a strict “one computer in, one computer out” policy to keep me from accumulating a large horde of computers, so, though that old iMac had a certain sentimental place in my heart, it was time for it to go.

That iMac, I am certain, is still running somewhere.  I gave it to the receptionist at my current employer, who, as I understand it, gave it to her brother.  Like so many Apple products I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with, it’s running far longer than anyone would ever want it to, which is the opposite effect I’ve seen from most other manufacturers.  Some day, I hope to get another Mac, once I’m flush enough to buy one.  Until then, I’ll always have fond memories of that old Bondi Blue iMac (”Bondi Blue” apparently being code for “teal”, by the way) and how it somehow got me through my seven year journey through college.

Found this on the official IEBlog - long story short, your ability to uninstall your current version of Internet Explorer is entirely dependent on what version you have going into SP3.  So…

IE6: No problem.  You couldn’t uninstall this even if you wanted to.  SP3 will give you all of the latest patches and security updates.

IE7: Though you can uninstall IE7 now, you will not be able to uninstall IE7 once you get SP3 on your system unless you install IE7 after you install SP3.

IE8 Beta: Though you can uninstall IE8 now, you will not be able to uninstall IE8 once you get SP3 on your system unless you install IE8 after you install SP3.

What this means is that, if you ever want to get rid of IE7 or IE8 from your machine after you install SP3, your best bet is to uninstall them immediately before applying the service pack, installing the service pack, then reinstalling your preferred version of Internet Explorer.

To be honest, this isn’t going to be a big deal for most users, but it’s still good to be aware of.  If you like your current version of Internet Explorer, don’t worry about it.  Simple as that.

Thanks, xkcd…

On Thursday, my supervisor and I went to Interop, a tech conference in Las Vegas. Like any good blogger, I have pictures… oh, so very many pictures. Since there’s a lot of them, and since they’re mildly bandwidth consuming, though, you’ll find them under the fold…

Continue Reading »

There are days when I really despise my job… I’m currently running on three straight nights of five hour nights of sleep. To say that my writing quality today is going to suffer as a result, to say nothing of everything else, is a gross understatement. You’ve been warned.

For those of you new here, I’m an IT consultant when I’m not “adding value” to company time by blogging; the company I work for handles IT needs for smaller companies that can’t afford a full-time IT staff, or, occasionally, for companies that need a decently trained extra hand around the server room. The job is fairly basic - keep servers and workstations running, install the occasional bit of software, clean off the occasional virus… it’s pretty vanilla and peaceful (if boring) most of the time. Once in a while, though, I really earn my pay, and this week has been one of those weeks. One of my coworkers was expanding a partition on a server when the server decided it would not only drop the partition but take the partitions on the backup drives with it. End result? One down server and no backup.

Great.

To add insult to injury, this particular server was special. It was running Windows Small Business Server, which meant that, not only was it important as a server, it also was responsible for making sure people could log into the system (yep - only domain controller) and also making sure people got their e-mail (Exchange). It also turned out that the server also hosted everybody’s home folders, but we didn’t know that at the time.

Now, a Windows server, by itself, is an interesting thing to restore. At its most basic, a Windows file server is functionally no harder to restore than any other server - install an operating system, grab a backup, restore some files. You may need to add it to the domain so people can access it, and you might need to tweak some file permissions if they didn’t make it across, but none of that is particularly hard or time consuming. A Small Business server, however… well, that’s a special beast, and, at least in my experience, when one of those goes south, you’re looking at up to 48 man hours (note - not two days; we’re talking six eight-hour shifts here) to get everything restored and all the kinks worked out.

What’s the difference, you ask? Of course you don’t, but I feel like ranting.

Conceptually, there are two basic ways to store information on any system. You can either store information on files, reading and writing to that file whenever a change needs to be made, or you can store information in a database. Now, a database consists of a set of files, but databases are special - they’re designed to be easy for a computer to remember. Allow me to illustrate through metaphor:

Let’s pretend for a second that you and I are working on a book. We only have one copy of the book, but both of us want to be able to work on it. We have a couple of methods at our disposal to keep things in sync:

We can hand-deliver changes to each other. This would be analogous to a file-based system - I would make the change I want to make to the book, you would look at the change, then we would get back to work. There are some drawbacks to this, though. First off, what happens if you and I want to make a change at the same time, and the change affects what the other person is doing? Whose changes take priority? Secondly, this can be rather slow - while I’m making a change in the book, you won’t be able to look at the book (seeing as I have it and all), nor will you be able to make any changes yourself. This causes a rather serious bottleneck.

We can make little notes, including the date and time we made the note, then come together periodically and make the changes together. This would be analogous to a database, and it speeds things up dramatically. We could just rely on the date to determine whose changes go first. Then, periodically, we could both get together, figure out which notes go in which order, make the changes we need to make, and go our separate ways.

Now, let’s say the book gets lost. How can we bring it back? Well, in the first model, it’s fairly simple - we could just agree to have a backup of the book that we decide to start working from. Once a day, we run the book through a copier machine or something similar. The worst that happens is we lose our changes for that day. In the second model, yes, we can still do this, but there’s a catch - what about our notes? Have we been backing up our notes as well? If not, we’re going to have a problem - we just lost all of the changes we were going to make to the book!

Let’s complicate things a little further and pretend that there’s someone else working on a different book, but they’re using our book as a source for material. They want to be able to cite our book by page, paragraph, or even sentence, so they want to keep track of what we’re doing while we’re doing it so they can keep their cites up to date. Going back to our models, there are two ways we can allow this:

Let that person take the book, make their cites, then return it to us. Again, this would be analogous to the file-based system, and it would be slow and cumbersome; we would have to wait for the book to come back before we could make any further changes. On the other hand, if that person loses it for whatever reason, we could just grab our backup, get back to work, and let the person know that we restored the book.

Alternatively…

Let that person keep a copy of the book. The copy will be updated each time we make changes in it. This would be analogous to the database model, and, as I’m sure you can imagine, it would be much faster - we could make changes while they’re citing, let the person know we made some changes, they grab a new copy of the book, life is good. Just one problem, though - what happens if we lose our copy of the book? We could restore it from a previous version, but what if our version and the other person’s version don’t match? We would need to keep a record of what version we’re each working from and compare version numbers - if they don’t match, we’re going to need to come up with some way to rectify that. Worse yet, what if they make citations based on a newer version that we no longer have and they throw away the cites to the older version? What if the citations from the newer version reference something that didn’t even exist in the old version? What if we lost the notes that led to the newer version, perhaps due to our last backup being at least two versions back?

Herein lies the trade-off between databases and files: Databases are way faster than files, but can be rather tricky to bring back to life if something happens. Files are way slower than databases, but are much easier to bring back to life if something happens. Now, guess what Windows uses for everything? That’s right - databases. Guess what happens if you don’t have a good backup of some of those databases and they all tie in against each other? That’s right - I get no sleep, and neither do my coworkers. The worst part about it, of course, is that Microsoft likes to use databases in the most convoluted way imaginable so that way they’re nearly impossible to back up correctly. Pretend, for a sec, that you lost your database for Active Directory, which is responsible for all of your user names and passwords. Fortunately, you have a backup. Can you restore it all by itself somewhere else? Of course not - that would actually make sense. Instead, you get to restore it with the rest of something called “System State”, which just happens to include your entire registry, which just happens to include all kinds of various arcane configuration settings for your hardware and any program that’s running on your computer. Guess what happens if something gets screwed up in the registry? That’s right - you don’t get to restore Active Directory, which means you no longer have user accounts.

Nice, eh?

So, that’s been my week. Once this reign of terror ends, I’ll get some good posts up here. In the meantime, regale yourself with the latest on ID requirements to prevent voter fraud at Cardozaisms. It’s not news, it’s Cardoza. Alternatively, you can also get the latest in relating Professor Chaos and politics from Morbo’s good friend, Rachel Lucas.

Hello, Morbo. How’s the family?
Belligerent and filled with numerous pork treats.
Excellent. I’m Rachel, and I’m pro-war and pro-family.

Well, she’s not pro-family, exactly, at least not in the Quantity is King! sort of way, but you get the idea. Or you don’t. I don’t even care anymore. Burn in hell, hippies!

I ate far too much Mexican today - my stomach feels like it’s going to explode in a salsa-filled, refried bean infused tidal wave of death and destruction. As usual, though, that’s entirely besides the point.

Battlestar Galactica is one of those shows that I would absolutely love to watch when the episodes come out. Unfortunately, I came into the series way too late, and, from where I’m sitting, there is nothing worse than jumping in the middle of a series, especially one where most episodes build on top of each other like BSG. So, I’ve been slowly purchasing the DVD box sets, watching them, one by one.

This weekend, I finished Season 2.5, which, for various geek-related reasons, I like to think of as Season 2 SP1. If you’ve never watched Battlestar Galactica (the new version, not the campy ’70s version, which is still decent in its own right), much of this isn’t going to make sense. If you actually watch it as thoroughly as you’re supposed to, much of this will be old news, seeing as they’re up to Season 4 now and all.

Some things that ran through my mind after finishing it (and, yes, I’m going to be purchasing Season 3 soon, and, yes Rachel, I’ll use your Amazon link):

1. Dr. Baltar is such a tool. So, let’s see here… he dooms humanity by letting his Cylon love buddy get close and cuddly to his defense system (NOTE: What defense department would actually allow one person to design their entire system? Honestly, I think the Colonials deserved to lose). Thanks to his Cylon lover hacking his defense system, there are all of 40,000+ humans left. So, when he runs across another copy of his Cylon lover, what does he do? He gives her a gun and, eventually, a nuclear warhead. What does she do with the warhead? She shoots it off, letting the Cylons know where New Caprica is. In short, he manages to successfully sell humanity out to the Cylons twice within two seasons. Brilliant!

2. Though I’ve been trying to keep my eyes closed on various plot spoilers as the series has progressed, I am aware that Season 3 is where a lot of people become unhappy because of the supposed parallels between the Cylon occupation of New Caprica and our occupation of Iraq. Before I see Season 3, here’s my take on this:

The Cylon occupation of New Caprica would be, at best, analogous to Germany occupying Israel in 1949 - yeah, maybe the Germans were a little better behaved by then towards Jews than they were in 1945, but, c’mon, you think the Jews wouldn’t make life for any German occupier a living hell? Point being, we didn’t kill 99.99999999% of the Iraqi population, so any comparisons between an occupation of Iraq and a Cylon occupation of the remainder of humanity is a false one. Consequently, I absolutely refuse to take the Cylon occupation personally. I just won’t have any of it.

3. Black Market was, in fact, as bad as I heard. It didn’t advance the plot at all, it didn’t make any sense… yeah. It just didn’t jive. Here’s hoping they don’t do something quite that stupid again. The only bright note of that episode is they wiped out Commander Fisk, who really didn’t make any sense as far as the rest of the cast goes. While we’re at it…

4. Wow, the Pegasus offered up surprisingly little resistance to Adama taking over. I’m sure a lot of them were happy that the very MILF-like Admiral Cain died, but, even so, they spent maybe three episodes tops on how well Pegasus would be able to integrate with the Battlestar Galactica crew. It just seemed a little too easy.

Now, with all that said, I just want to point out that writing a decent science-fiction show is tough - way tougher than writing anything else, in my opinion. Fans of science fiction shows are far more demanding as far as plot consistency goes. That BSG is turning out as well as it is, in my opinion, is a damn good thing… even if I already know that a bunch of unlikely people will later turn out to be Cylons. Though, for what it’s worth, at least Colonel Tigh will have an excuse for his incompetence…

Thus endeth my geekitude. You may now get back to the rest of your Internet.

UPDATE: Holy frak! It would seem I was more in tune with the Porke Method than I realized, sloshing through some of it at the same time that Rachel did. Sweet. Yeah, I already know about Razor, and, yeah, I was planning on waiting ’til after Season 3 to deal with that, though I understand that, chronologically speaking, it happens between Season 2 and Season 3.