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.

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.

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.

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…

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…

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.

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 »

Found this article on Popular Mechanics via Slashdot:

Hydrogen, ethanol and even compressed air all have the shrink-wrapped sheen of the bright, green future. But gasoline? At $1 per gallon?

Researchers at UMass Amherst recently published a new method of refining hydrocarbons from cellulose, paving the way to turn wood scraps into gasoline, diesel fuel, Tupperware—anything, essentially, that’s normally refined from petroleum.

[…]

Using a catalyst commonly employed in the petroleum industry, Huber and his colleagues heated small amounts of cellulose very quickly for a matter of seconds before cooling it, producing a high-octane liquid similar to gasoline. “The temperature window is very critical,” Huber says. If you heat too slowly, you produce mainly coke—elemental carbon residue. If you heat too fast, you make mainly vapors. The sweet spot, about 1000 degrees per second, transfers roughly half the cellulose’s energy into hydrocarbons. “If we can get 100 percent yield, we estimate the cost to be about a dollar per gallon,” Huber says. “Right now we’re at 50 percent. Can we get 100 percent? I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll bump those numbers up.” (emphasis mine - DC)

Like most things in Popular Mechanics, it certainly sounds promising on paper. At worst, it sounds like it’ll fit in a similar niche as the coal-to-liquids technology pioneered by a couple of countries that had a lot more coal than oil available to them. At best, it might be just the thing to permanently eliminate scarcity - if they can get production costs down into the $2-3 range (not sure what it is at 50% efficiency), that’ll serve as an upper limit for future gas costs.

Either way… between this and biodiesel, we’re living in very interesting times.

Per Rachel’s initial instructions, I found someone willing to host my blog. As luck would have it, WordPress happened to be pre-installed on the site, which was just incredibly handy. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to play with it much… until now.

Some quick thoughts thus far:

1. Importing from Blogger was easy once the host upgraded to WP 2.5. It doesn’t get much more point-and-click than what I saw.
2. I have just learned about sub-categories. You have no idea how much this thrills me - it means I don’t have to go through my entire blog and start deleting categories or moving them around. I can just point my more esoteric categories under broader categories. This thrills me to no end.
3. Themes - I’m going to be having fun with them. Oh yes.

If you wish to view my madness as it progresses, you most certainly may at alpha.colborne23016.com. I’m still posting primarily from Blogger for now - when I’m ready to make the transition, there will be plenty of warning. Eventually, all that’s going to happen is that I’m going to make a quick DNS change and that, as they say, should be that, except for the few souls out there that get here using the old Blogspot address.

Suggestions? Let’s have some!

I’ve noticed that I need to branch out my reading selections a bit - I mean, you can only read Instapundit, Rachel Lucas, and Slashdot for so long before you just have to step out of your comfort zone. Granted, I hit Google News fairly frequently, as well as Fark, but still… something was lacking. I needed a bigger picture of the world. Unfortunately, my mind has a limited memory capacity, and bookmarks just weren’t cutting it - yeah, I could go to the sites, but I never knew if there was anything worth reading ahead of time.

Annoyed by this, I got an RSS reader. It wasn’t hard - since I run Ubuntu, I could just do a nice, quick search in Add/Remove Programs, which is where I found PenguinTV. Works great, at least when it’s not hanging while I try to add another feed… like right now.

To be honest, I’ve been playing with it for the past few weeks now. Works great, no complaints… except for one - I can now read way more than I used to. I can now keep track of all of the tech blogs I’ve always wanted to keep track of. I could now keep track of all the other ancillary blogs that I’ve seen that I wasn’t motivated enough to visit daily but which I wanted to keep track of. Sounds great, right? Well, it was… until I received an idea:

I’m going to add every single blog in Rachel Lucas’ blogroll to my RSS feeds.

It seemed only fair. She added me to her roll, so the least I could do is help support my fellow blogroll compatriots by seeing what they have to say. Besides, since she gets a fair amount of her material from those sites, maybe I could preempt her once in a while. It’d be my way of getting inside her decision loop or something.

Sounds great, right? Where’s the problem? Well, there isn’t one… except, of course, that she has tons of blogs in her blogroll, so now I have the better part of 60+ blogs sitting in my syndication list. That’s a lot of blogs to keep track of. I’m at 65 right now and I’m only on the P’s. I’m going to be pushing near 90 by the time I’m done subscribing to them all.

That said, I am discovering something. Most blogs appear to be more than happy to allow RSS feeds, but not all of them. Some of them are “members only”. Some of them require you to send them an e-mail, at which point they’ll send you the feed. Some don’t have a feed at all. I do understand that many of them derive income from ads, so, consequently, they don’t want you reading their blog unless you can view their ads. The key, however, is not to restrict access to the RSS feed - just don’t give away the whole enchilada. Give out the first 100 words or something, but don’t make it more difficult than necessary for others to access your site. That’s only going to hurt your traffic in the long run… I know that because, well, if you’re one of those blogs that plays games with RSS feeds, I’m not going to visit you. I just don’t have time to check on you from time to time. I’m sorry.

Next up: How to back up my RSS feeds… Hardy Heron is coming out soon, and I’m looking forward to trying it. I’m not going to do it, though, if I don’t have some way of backing up all of my data, including things like RSS feeds and the like… I’m sure there’s an XML file sitting in my home folder somewhere.

I installed Safari 3.1 for Windows today on my work PC.  I’m not going to say too much about it since there are other, better reviews out there already.  Besides, I’ve only used it for all of about an hour now.  Here are my thoughts thus far:

From the official Microsoft Exchange blog, there’s this little gem:

Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows Server 2008 does not include a backup utility that supports the Exchange ESE streaming backup APIs. The Windows 2008 backup application, Windows Server Backup, cannot be used to take backups of Exchange.

Exchange still includes the ESE streaming backup APIs, but the absence of an Exchange-aware backup application in Windows may come as a surprise to many. Another change we made that may also affect you is the removal of remote streaming backup support on Windows 2008.

This leaves you with two choices for taking Exchange-aware online backups when running Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows 2008:

1. Move to a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)-based backup application. You can use Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 or a third-party backup application that supports Exchange-aware VSS-based backups of Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008.

[…]

2. Use a Third-Party application that supports ESE streaming backups using a local backup agent on the Exchange server.

By itself, that’s mildly annoying - Microsoft is now pushing its own backup solution, so it’s purposefully crippling Windows Server Backup, or, alternatively, purposefully crippling Exchange so it doesn’t properly work with it. Either way, this is annoying, but not terribly fatal. What is, however, is this gem:

Known Incompatibilities

One known Exchange-related incompatibility with Windows Server 2008 is the downloadable Messaging API Client and Collaboration Data Objects 1.2.1 package. Currently this tools package operates on Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP. We’re working on validating these tools against Windows Server 2008 and expect to have an updated version released.

Why is this important? Because this package is required for Symantec’s Backup Exec to back up an Exchange 2007 server, that’s why. In other words, the one library necessary for one of the most popular third-party tools to back up an Exchange 2007 server on Microsoft’s brand new server operating system doesn’t work, making Microsoft’s backup solution the de facto viable backup solution.

Nice. Very nice.

It’s because of things like this that I’m starting to take a very serious look at Exchange alternatives. After all, let’s take a look at where we’re at with Exchange 2007:

1. It only runs on an x64 version of Windows Server. Most of the servers I maintain don’t already have that, and there’s no in-place way to upgrade them.
2. Exchange 2007 requires insane amounts of RAM (at least 4 GB). This means that Exchange is going to have to sit on a dedicated box. I am curious to see how they plan on pulling off a new version of Small Business Server with this thing.
3. Successfully administering Exchange 2007 requires mastering the PowerShell, since the GUI console is purposefully neutered.
4. .NET 2.0 and Exchange 2007 are incompatible with .NET 1.1, meaning that servers running .NET 1.1 apps (i.e. Sage Timberline Server and ACCPAC, among other things) can’t be on the same box as Exchange, even if there was an x64 compatible version of those server apps.

So, it has to run on a new operating system on a dedicated box, has to be administered from a command line, and requires me to spend time and energy learning an entirely new way of administering my servers… what’s stopping me, exactly, from finding a cheaper proven Linux-based alternative, exactly?

It’s funny - if Microsoft just kept bolting new things on to the Exchange 2000/2003 core, I wouldn’t even be talking about this. I mean, they used the same interface and the same basic methods of backing up and administering Exchange servers for the better part of seven years. Everyone knew how to handle Exchange 2000/2003… or, at least, anybody that cared did. Now Microsoft is tossing out all of that built-in knowledge and inertia. How can this possibly benefit them? If anything, I would think they’d try to keep things as close to “safe and comfortable” as possible so techs like me don’t start getting ideas about trying the competition.

Goes to show what I know, eh?

In an earlier post, I detailed some frustration I had with Exchange 2007. This post continues in that vein with some new knowledge I found…

To get the import-mailbox cmdlet, you have to have Exchange 2007 SP1. Trouble is, the 32-bit Exchange Management Tools offered by Microsoft do not include Service Pack 1, so you have to download that separately.

Total download? About 1.5 GB between the two files. Fun!

I discovered this when noticing that my backup server was unable to back up the Exchange server due to mismatched ESE.DLL files. Oh, good, good times.

Last weekend, I was tasked with installing a brand new Exchange 2007 server. For those of you not already familiar with it, Microsoft Exchange Server is what’s frequently known as a “groupware” application, meaning it provides e-mail, shared calendars, shared contacts, and all that good stuff. The nice thing about Exchange is that, historically, it includes everything, up to and including the kitchen sink. You want e-mail? It can do that. You want the ability to sync somebody’s mobile device with the exact same contacts, tasks, appointments, and e-mail that they have back in the office? No problem - it does that. You want shared calendars? Done. Do you need a web access page so that people without e-mail clients can still access important work information? Sure - it’ll do that. There are some warts with Exchange, just like any other Microsoft product. For starters, Exchange is another one of those products that continues the grand Microsoft tradition of “throw everything in a big, monolithic database file that’s unnecessarily difficult to back up or restore”. It’s resource hungry, to put it gently - it’s not uncommon for it to use a full gigabyte of RAM or more for, say, 20 mailboxes or so. It doesn’t play well with others; the Outlook Web Access page looks nicest and is fully featured in Internet Explorer on Windows, for example. But, it does work, especially for smallish companies that want a little “big company” functionality. It’s not perfect, but, like Windows and Microsoft Office, it’s what people know, and that’s frequently good enough.

Exchange 2007 still does all of this, but, like Windows Vista, there are a few differences compared to previous versions. The interface looks different. There are more features. Things are laid out differently. That’s fine and good - change happens. I’m okay with that. However, if you’re going to make changes, at least try to be consistent. For example:

1. In old versions of Exchange, if you needed to change permissions on a mailbox (i.e. say the administrator needs access to somebody else’s mailbox), it was fairly intuitive. You changed permissions on the mailbox the same way you changed permissions in the file system - you right-click the mailbox, go to “Security”, and make your permissions change. In Exchange 2007, that no longer exists - to change permissions, you have to use the new PowerShell.

2. In old versions of Exchange, there was a program called Exmerge that let you import and export mailboxes and PSTs (Microsoft Outlook data files). You could take somebody’s PST and import it into an Exchange mailbox and vice-versa. In Exchange 2007 SP1, you can still do that, but there are a couple of changes. First, the Exmerge tool, which was graphical in nature, is no longer supported. Instead, you’re supposed to use the import-mailbox and export-mailbox tools in the PowerShell. Secondly, the import-mailbox tool doesn’t work on the mail server (64-bit by requirement) - it instead tells you to use the tool from a 32-bit machine with the Exchange tools installed. Those tools are 650 MB in size. They also don’t include the import-mailbox tool. Because of this, there’s no clean or easy way to import data from Outlook into the server other than having everybody launch Outlook and manually import their data file into the Exchange server (imagine doing this for 50 people to see why this is bad).

There are two common threads to these complaints - PowerShell. Don’t get me wrong - I have no problem with PowerShell. I think it’s an incredibly useful and powerful tool, and I’m happy that Microsoft is getting serious about providing a useful command line tool for the Windows environment. However, I’m a little less excited about Microsoft arbitrarily deciding that the only way to administer one of their most popular products is through the PowerShell. The great thing about Windows is that every single part of the operating system can be administered from the graphical user interface. It may not be the ideal place to administer it, mind you, especially for more repetitious activities, but, for one-off tasks, it’s wonderful. The GUI can communicate insanely difficult concepts quickly and relatively efficiently, giving you all the information you need to conceptualize the task at hand. Command lines rarely give you that ability - you have to know what you’re doing beforehand.

Consider the following task:

Let’s say you need to check file permissions on something. Which would you rather do? Use this:

Or this:

Now imagine having to manage your file system with only the latter method. Now, to add insult to injury, imagine only being able to administer your complex mail server with just the latter tool.

Right.

This is why I’m not a fan of Exchange 2007, and why it took me 13 hours to set up that mail server last Saturday. Ugh.

For far too long, I’ve been using an RCA cable modem with wireless transmitter as my router/wireless access point. There were a couple of problems with the unit, however. Firstly, it was an 802.11b wireless router, which meant the range was terrible - I had serious difficulties getting a signal reliably in the living room (the unit was in the bedroom). Secondly, what security settings it had would get blanked out whenever I unplugged the unit, which was often because it would freeze up every week or two. After dealing with this for over a year, it finally got bad enough where I felt compelled to purchase a new wireless router. At first, I was going to find something with known DD-WRT compatibility. However, in a moment of excessive frugality (I have these moments often), I saw a Belkin F5D8233-4 802.11n wireless router on sale at Walmart for only $70. Since there were plenty of Belkins on DD-WRT’s compatibility list (albeit not this particular one), I figured I had a fighting chance of getting a cheap, long-range, possibly Linux-compatible router for my home.

Initial Setup

Getting it set up was mostly painless, at least at first. Hook it up to your network like you normally would, insert the setup CD, and follow the bouncing ball. The CD, however, is only Mac and Windows compatible - it wouldn’t run on my Ubuntu box under WINE. I settled for doing the initial setup on my old iMac. The documentation you get with the unit is extremely sparse; there’s no information in the box on the LAN IP address, passwords, or anything of that sort. The online documentation at Belkin is marginally better, in that the user guide actually includes that sort of information.

One hitch that burned me for a while was that the Belkin would not acquire a DHCP address from my cable modem. After a bit of research, I found out that the default firmware on it (3.01.10) had a glitch in its DHCP client that prevented it from successfully getting an address from DHCP on a consistent basis. Fortunately, the latest firmware on Belkin’s site (3.01.14 as of this writing) fixed that. Since you need an Internet connection before you can download the firmware, I strongly recommend either downloading the firmware before installation of the router or, in a pinch, plugging a workstation directly into a broadband modem long enough to download the firmware. That said, I don’t recommend the latter approach unless you’re really confident in your resident software firewall.

Wireless Setup

Getting the wireless setup was largely self-explanatory. It supports WEP, WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK, just like any self-respecting wireless router of this day and age, which is nice. One thing that did burn me was the “Wi-Fi Protected Setup”, or WPS, which allows laptops to authenticate against the router with a certificate instead of a standard wireless key. Though my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn laptop was able to authenticate against the router easily enough, the same could not be said for my significant other’s Windows XP laptop. Disabling WPS caused the router to behave like a normal wireless router, authentication-wise, which was what I was looking for. With a little more time and effort, I might have been able to figure out how to use the router with WPS enabled, but I didn’t see the point.

The range was vastly improved over the RCA - where I used to get one bar, I now get three to four consistently. Better yet, the configuration doesn’t wipe itself every time the router restarts, which is also handy.

DD-WRT

Unfortunately, what I found online indicated that the F5D8233 was probably not compatible with DD-WRT or OpenWRT due to the possibility of it having a Realtek chipset. I haven’t had the guts to try it by myself, nor, at least at present, the inclination - it does work in its current configuration, after all. Belkin provides almost no information on the unit online, as far as what its chipset is or anything of that sort, which means I’d probably have to crack the thing open to find out what’s inside. For now, that’s not happening. I may change my mind sometime next week, though, depending on time and inclination.

Final analysis

For $70, it’s not bad. It has good range, it’s fairly easy to set up, and, with a little time and patience, it runs reasonably reliably and well. At least for now, I wouldn’t recommend it for the homebrew types, nor would I recommend it for those that aren’t already familiar with setting up wireless routers - it’s just not reliable enough out of the box for that. If you’re willing to spend a little extra, I do recommend going for either a more upscale Belkin or possibly even a Linksys. Think of it as something akin to a Chevy Aveo - you get what you get and that’s pretty much that.

Is, well, they fail:

NEW YORK - A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday.

Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.

It was not immediately clear how many of the 12 million worldwide BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally Monday afternoon.

This is why putting all of your eggs in the basket of one company can turn into a really, really bad idea. It’s true that large companies generally have more resources than small ones, and that gains in redundancy and reliability can sometimes be had as a result. However, if something goes wrong with that company, for whatever reason, you are the one that suffers. It’s bad enough when your data is locked into a company’s software. It’s worse when your data is locked into the same company’s hardware. It’s absolutely out of my mind, however, when people voluntarily lock themselves into the company’s network on top of all of that.

I’m all for convenience. Heck, I even like Macs - if they weren’t so expensive and I wasn’t so cheap, I’d probably have a MacBook right about now instead of the Compaq V6000 laptop that I’m typing this on. However, there are ways to pull data off of a MacBook and put it on to my Compaq, were the need to arise, without the use of any service from Apple. The same, however, can’t be said for Blackberry - if their service isn’t on, you’re done, and that scares the crap out of me.

To each their own…

Time to talk tech for a bit.

As I may or may not have mentioned in the past, I wiped my laptop (Compaq V6000Z) and threw Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) on a while back. It wasn’t painless - apparently, Compaq laptops and open-source operating systems in general don’t speak well, a point driven home when PC-BSD flat out refused to install. However, thanks to Ubuntu’s wonderful documentation, I was eventually able to work my way through it, learning a fair amount about wireless drivers and APCI in the process.

Fast forward a few months… to last weekend.

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) came out, and I was excited for two reasons:

1. It was supposed to have a more power-efficient kernel, which would improve battery life.
2. It would actually recognize when I plug in different monitors without me having to reboot, which would be handy for presentations.

So, I went ahead and clicked the “Upgrade” button. Big oops… and I wasn’t alone. In my case, it wouldn’t even boot without some chicanery through Grub (it kept the old kernel installed, so I was able to boot off of it - not ideal, to put it mildly). Others were slightly luckier, being able to get most things working, provided you didn’t care about sound. Considering how well Linux has run on my laptop thus far, none of this was terribly surprising.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, this isn’t a knock on Linux. First off, other distributions might work better on my laptop than Ubuntu - one of these days, I may even explore some of them. Secondly, HP doesn’t offer any support for Linux for my laptop, which isn’t surprising; it’s a basic consumer-grade laptop. It’s nothing fancy and I got it used for $400. That said, I generally prefer new versions of operating systems to run better than old versions, so I’d be lying if I said I was terribly thrilled at the moment.

Thus endeth my techy rant.

Via Slashdot, it turns out that people in the Information Sciences Institute at USC (the one in Los Angeles, not South Carolina) have pulled off a graphical census of the Internet. Some key points to be aware of, though:

1. It’s not complete, and never will be. A lot of devices on public IPs do not respond to pings, so they’re not going to have those on their census.
2. There shouldn’t be much of anything in the blue parts. I’m kind of curious what all answered there… it looks like they’re using an internal Class A subnet for their network. Neat!

I am kind of curious, though - will the companies and entities that picked up all of those public IPs 10-20 years ago eventually resell them, sort of like railroad easements? How much will those IPs be worth, and for how much longer will they be worth anything? Since IPv6 will give us a virtually unlimited number of public IPs and is already supported on Vista, I would think that the time for some of those companies to sell their public IPv4 addresses would be “now”, at least if they plan on extracting any value out of them.

Thanks to all the political wrangling and everything else over the past couple of weeks, I felt it was time to get a little perspective going. Seriously, that’s brilliant stuff right there. On a lighter note, some quick thoughts:

In Defense of Ugly Cars - never before have my thoughts on cars been spoken so eloquently. My favorite car was a ‘76 Plymouth Fury that I purchased for $200 and had for all of two months. It was powder blue, had a 360, an almost completely useless back seat, surprisingly little trunk room, and got 15 MPG on a good day. The speedometer didn’t work if I went over 50. It was huge and almost impossible to park. It was ugly. I was pulled over twice in the first month that I had it because I hadn’t registered it - it was still legal (had a moving permit), but, up until that car, I had only been pulled over twice before, and they were both for moving offenses. In short, it was the most interesting car I ever owned. Sadly, after two months and nearly $1000 in repairs just so it would pass smog, the valves started clapping, and that was my cue to exit. I loved that car, but rebuilding the engine was a bit more than I was willing to handle.

My tied-for-first favorite car was my mom’s car while I was in high school - a 1988 Subaru Justy. It was a white five-speed and didn’t have the 4WD, not that I cared back then; I still treated it like a Jeep. I probably went through a set of C-V joints about once a year during high school on the back roads near Pahrump. Mom, I just want to publicly apologize for the abuse I put your car through. Thank goodness you weren’t using it for much at the time.

On an entirely different note, my work got us new workstations with Microsoft Vista on them. For reasons that don’t make sense to anyone, they were only equipped with 1 GB of RAM, which was a little obnoxious. Other than that, though, it’s not too bad. The visuals are nice. It takes a little longer than it should to lock the computer; perhaps if they spent a little less time trying to come up with cute visual effects for everything and a little more figuring out useability, things would’ve gone a little better. GIMP starts awfully slow, but I suspect that’s more of a problem with GIMP than it is with Vista, especially since it’s always on the “Fonts” part of the load-up. Other than that, I haven’t run into any glaring compatibility problems or anything that’s really made me want to stand up and scream. In fact, unlike Ubuntu on my laptop, I haven’t been spending the first couple of days on my machine fiddling with things just to get the hardware to work. Then again, unlike Ubuntu, Vista came preloaded on these workstations.

(I like Ubuntu. I really do. I’m just giving it a hard time because I love it, that’s all.)

Also, I’m slowly building up a library of completely wrong and offensive lolcats knockoffs. Mine don’t involve cats. I won’t reveal much more than that right now because any further details would probably seriously damage my political career. Heh.

Ah, good times… it finally works.

I noticed on the LiveCD for Ubuntu that the power management actually behaved the way it was supposed to, so I wiped the install and redid it, this time not installing any kernel updates. Unfortunately, it still installed a kernel update somehow (not sure how), but it didn’t install the 2.6.20-16.1 update, which seemed to be the one that hosed ACPI. Consequently, it correctly detects battery life now. A little ndiswrapper love solved the wireless issue, which wasn’t surprising. Nvidia’s drivers installed relatively cleanly, so no complaints there.

All in all, mission accomplished! Was it more difficult than it should have been? You betcha. But, at least it works, and for that I am thankful.

Some quick background:

A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a used Compaq V6000Z laptop from my girlfriend’s dad - it had only been used for six months by her sister and he decided it was time to reallocate it somewhere else. So, I bought it for cheap ($400) and decided that, when I got a spare moment, I’d throw Linux on there, just to find out how well it works on a laptop. Since I run Ubuntu on my home PC without much trouble and have been throwing it on servers at work whenever they’re not paying attention, I figured I’d just stick with what I knew and go from there.

The install began on Saturday. I’m still not quite done tweaking it, which is not encouraging.

Before I start explaining what’s going on here, I want to be clear about something - I’m not blaming Ubuntu for what’s going on with my laptop. Compaq and HP laptops (especially the AMD-based ones, like mine) are so notoriously poor with Linux in general and Ubuntu specifically that they have a number of threads dedicated to getting Ubuntu installed on them. The problems, near as I can tell, generally stem from poor wireless support for Broadcom wireless cards, odd BIOS issues, and somewhat sporadic support from Nvidia on the onboard graphics cards. I know that Ubuntu can only work with what it has, I know that HP does not support Linux on my model of laptop, and I’m okay with that. I’m sure there are other, better, more Linux-friendly laptops out there. I’m definitely interested in researching them in the future.

So, here’s where I’m at so far, after a couple of days of fiddling…

1. Got Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installed after finding this walkthrough, which gave me the necessary flags to hand the boot CD. Once the right flags were on there, things improved dramatically; before that, I was getting frustrated as GDM would never load.

2. Got wireless sort of working. This walkthrough helped supplement the instructions in the previous walkthrough, and I also managed to get a little more information on the bcm4xx-fwcutter utility by following this thread. That said, it’s still only semi-reliable; sometimes it finds and connects, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the little blue light is on. Sometimes it’s not. I’m probably going to have to break down and just get ndiswrapper going. Ugh.

3. Graphics are working great. Haven’t had too many troubles with Nvidia’s drivers, except for the usual issues whenever a kernel update happens. Speaking of which, it would be absolutely wonderful if there was some way for kernel updates to not break video drivers. I have the same problem with my home PC. The problem, of course, is that the proprietary drivers require me to compile against the kernel to install them, so whenever the kernel changes, it breaks… still annoying. However, I’m getting used to the procedure enough to actually keep the driver install script handy so that, when GDM goes down in a pile of flames on the next kernel update, I’ll be ready. I honestly don’t know who to blame for this… those “in the know” would probably blame the writers of the drivers, but I’ll point out that running updates in Windows machines doesn’t routinely break drivers (not that it’s unprecedented, mind you - it’s just unusual, whereas this seems to happen on my Linux systems routinely). Speaking of which, this same rant applies to VMWare Server. It’d be great if I didn’t have to recompile it after every kernel upgrade, too. That’d be swell.

4. Having major issues with battery management. Updated to the latest kernel version, suddenly lost the battery meter. Discovered that the latest kernel version breaks acpi, downgraded to the original install version. Reinstalled my video drivers (see #3), discovered the battery meter still wasn’t there. Now it’s there… sometimes. Worse yet, my wireless is much more flaky than it was on the up-to-date kernel version. The wireless was absolutely bulletproof on the latest kernel version. Now I’m left trying to decide if I want to have a working battery meter or working wireless. I’m not exactly relishing my choices on this one.

So… yeah. I’m not exactly thrilled. That said, it’s still usable; it’s just not as nice as I had hoped for. I’m still not reinstalling XP - the battery life I kill in having an anti-virus program autoscan every login is not worth it. Besides, I like Linux. Maybe I’ll just do something really daring and stupid and throw PC-BSD on this thing and see if the BSD kernel is any better behaved. It’s not like I have anything worthwhile on this laptop yet anyways.