Why Dont You Blog?

A few weeks ago I finally cracked and bought a new PC. Out of the box, this one was great. The HDD is massive and silent. The huge amount of RAM makes Photoshop usable once more and the widescreen monitor is a pleasure to look at.

What really lets the whole deal down is Microsoft Vista. It is, without a doubt, the worst operating system I have ever used. Yes, it may seem like it does more than MS-DOS but, in reality, it constrains you more (and uses a trillion times more system resources). Vista is pretty. It has nice icons and the transparency looks cool for the first hour or so you use it, but the reality is I had a more stable system with Windows 3.11 (even my ME box crashed less).

All the doom and gloom aside, my Vista box only has a few problems but they are monumental annoyances. I would rather have the limited use Windows 95 gave without the massive inconveniences Vista forces on me. Let me explain:

First off: I have (at the moment) 136 problem reports waiting for solutions. The very existence of these annoys me. Windows claims to be able to search for a solution then comes back with nothing. I also have 4 which claim they have solutions but I cant find out what the solution is. This is leading to no small degree of madness.

Next in line: Vista makes it harder for me to make changes than Ubuntu. Every time I try to do something I have to give administrator authority. It gets to the point where I almost authorise without looking. This is not making the system safer by any stretch of the imagination.

Thirdly: The resources it uses is astronomical. If I have no applications open, nearly 1GB of RAM is being used. What do I get for this? Transparent icons. Wow.

Fourthly: It crashes. It is no more stable than Windows ME and a far cry from what I would have expected from Win2k or WinNT. If I get another USB driver error message I will explode…. Argh… Boom…

Last but not least: It hates my software. The Rise of The Machines is obviously a genuine event because my Devil Infested Vista machine has software it just doesn’t like. Not in the normal software failure way, but almost random dislikes for certain applications (they run fine on the other Vista machine…).

The two applications The DevilVista hates at the moment are Opera and eMule (before you ask, I only use this share legitimate files, I would never use it get warez or the like). It hates them to the extent that neither are usable any more.

When I open Opera, it seems to open fine. All my previous windows and tabs load and the system works as normal. The evidence this is a recent dislike is evinced by the fact sites I visited last week as still available on load. However, over the last four days every time I click on ANY link in Opera or type an address in the URL bar and press go, the USB WiFi connection drops out. The network goes from full strength (the router is about 8 feet away), to unable to find any networks. Normally, there are about six or seven networks within range, but this instantly goes to none. No matter of refreshing will cure it. (remember this state).

eMule is different. I can open it. Connect to Kad or a Server and start sharing files (all legitimate remember). This works well for about 60 - 90 minutes whereupon the WiFi network vanishes and I am at the same state as above. eMule worked fine until about four weeks ago so this is not time coincident with the Opera curse.

Anyway, I try to troubleshoot the WiFi connection. Windows is no help, coming up with spurious error messages and terrible advice (and complaining it cant get online to find help… the irony.. it burns…). I try unplugging the device and re-attaching - this just kills it as now the device no longer exists on the system. My WiFi connector is attached to an external, powered, USB hub so I take the plug out of one port and put it in a different one.

This makes things go very weird. Initially it is great, the WiFi light comes on, and networks are found. I try to connect to the router and it asks for the WEP key. So far so good. It then connects to the router but refuses to “identify” (whatever the **** that means) and I am restricted to “local” access only. I try to log into the router (surely that is part of the “Local” network) and it just fails - unable to connect to server. (In the meantime, the laptop on the table next to me connects fine). In the end, admitting defeat, I reboot only to discover the BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER Blue Screen of Death message and it reboots again. This time everything works fine, I log in and it connects first time, every time.

It is coming close to driving me mad. For the most part, I can get away with out using Opera and eMule but the apparently arbitrary nature of this software vendetta is confusing. The machine used to run both without any problems. I am a touch concerned it may start to hate MS Office or FireFox and then there will be a real problem.

For completeness’ sake: I have run AVG and SpyBot S&D with upto date definitions. I have tried an online virus scanner and a rootkit checker - all seems to be clean. I am not yet willing to reinstall everything (there is a lot on the pc) and, before it is suggested I dont want a Mac (too expensive) and while I may install Linux (Not Ubuntu after my previous efforts, but PcLinuxOs is tempting) it isnt a solution.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Popularity: 31% [?]

I love Linux. It’s not as if I use it much but I love the idea of it. Open source. Free collaboration. All that.

I am less enamoured of the techy-boys-toys attitudes that seem to infect a lot of Linux-users, or the unlimited contempt that they can show to anyone who knows ever so slightly less than them about operating systems.

The recent developments in the one-laptop-per-child project which will now see it offering Windows, as well as Linux, seem to be causing a lot of dissent. This was described on the BBC as the OLPC project “getting in bed with… the Great Satan”

According to the BBC report, the purists in the OLPC movement see Linux as at the heart of the project. Well fine, but is this project supposed to be about spreading access to technology and internet communication or is it about creating a world full of Linux nerds? Because, to most people, even to most techies as Ivan Krstic pointed out, computers are not ends in themselves. They are just tools.

Some of us like messing about with tech (to a degree..) Most people don’t. A television that you couldn’t operate without degree-level knowledge of electronics engineering would be pretty unpopular. Why assume that every third world kid will suddenly become someone who is happy to mess about with a kernel for weeks?

Most people in the world use Microsoft products. Nearly everyone of us has to use Microsoft in work. Surely that makes a Microsoft operating system a reasonable component to put in a product that aims to cover the world.

Or are the kids who get these laptops only to be allowed to use predefined worthy educational products on them, while their first world equivalents are playing games?

I’m not exactly the world’s biggest fan of the OLPC project anyway, but I don’t think it stands or fails on the nature of the operating system.

IMHO the OLPC has always been liable to turn out to be another top-down western attempt to solve the problems of the poor countries - our solutions to which usually turn out to benefit the rich countries.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Popularity: 16% [?]

As I have a perfectly functioning set of computers at home (running XP, Ubuntu, SuSE and PCLinuxOS) who all network quite nicely and share files as you would expect. This meant, I had thought the move to Vista was in the dim and distant future.

However, a few weeks ago my laptop underwent some toddler-inspired “maintenance” and I was forced to buy a new one. All the available laptops came with Vista pre-installed so my choices were limited.

Now, over all the laptop is fantastic - new technology items are always nice to play with. It is fast (an order of magnitude faster than the 3 year old one it replaced!), it is user friendly and, for most tasks, Vista is quite usable.

I say most tasks.

One of the critical things this laptop is required to do is to be able to access the network where the rest of the PCs share files. Without this it is, largely, pointless. Sadly, vista stubbornly refuses to connect to any other computer on the network and refuses to share its own files. The hand-holding interface of vista makes trying to trouble shoot interminably difficult (I have the Windows Vista Home Premium version), and it manages to hide pretty much all the functions underneath many, many layers of “wizard” interfaces. It is, in short, a nightmare.

After a week of trying, I can now get the Vista laptop to “see” the XP machines when it draws the network map (although this involved finding and installing updates on the XP machines) but every time I try to map a network drive or connect to the networked printer, Vista decides it can no longer see any other machines on the network. It is hellish. Without being able to access the shares, the Vista laptop is largely pointless. It may end up getting hit with a sledge hammer simply to relieve frustration.

I am somewhat bemused by the way the new OS from MS is so incompatible with previous ones that you need to add a hotfix to the older machines to let Vista talk to them, but I suspect MS has its reasons.

If you are thinking of “upgrading” your MS Windows XP (or older) machines, then I STRONGLY suggest you upgrade to a better OS like Linux or even (shock, horror) Mac OS X. If you want to go for Linux, then certainly consider PCLinuxOS as it is very easy to use, offers all the benefits of Vista with none of the problems. If you go for Vista then it will cost you money and you will need to learn a new user interface - if you want to do that, go the whole hog and Linux yourself. (Hell, I’d even say go for Solaris and I’ve had many a problem with that in the past)

I really, really hate vista. [tags]Technology, Windows, Vista, XP, Operating Systems, OS, Linux, Mac, PCLinuxOS, Networking, Protocols, Microsoft, MS, Ubuntu, SuSE, Solaris, Rant[/tags]

Popularity: 33% [?]

Popularity: 33% [?]

In a recent post, I mentioned I was still subscribed to PC World until this week, despite a claim I made many months ago to the contrary. I made a big enough deal of it last time, that I felt I should explain what happened - and this gives me the chance to explain why I finally did cancel the subscription.

Months ago, fed up with crap articles and over the top Ubuntu coverage (to the extent you would think PCW was sponsored by Ubuntu…) I decided enough was enough and planned to cancel my subscription. I went online, checked the details and realised I had paid for another two months. On a whim, I decided there was nothing much to be gained by cancelling now and that waiting until after I had the next two issues would be better. Obviously this is where the flaw was hidden. Two months later, I again forgot to cancel until after the direct debit had been taken out, and again decided to wait.

This carried on for months, and to be fair to PCW the general standard of its content did improve quite a bit - albeit only for a while. In the end, I decided to stop pretending to myself that I would cancel it and just enjoyed the subscription a bit longer.

You may be aware of the fact I have recently moved house to the middle of nowhere (granted, as I moved from the middle of nowhere this is not much difference). As part of this, I needed to notify everyone who writes to me of the new postal address.  You would think that a “modern” publication like PCW would make this easy. You would be wrong.

There is a subscription management site where you go to deal with all the problems. I went there, entered by 10 digit customer number and not once managed to gain access. Each time it claimed it could find no trace of my records. I filled in the helpdesk type page with other details (address etc) but it continued to refuse to acknowledge my existence. I tried telephoning the customer line but got stuck in a queue and I fail to see the reason why I should spend money to rectify their mistakes. After a short while, I finally gave up and got round to what I should have done ages ago. I cancelled the direct debit. I wonder if, now, PCW will accept my account every existed?

In the end, PCW managed to retain me as a subscriber by the skin of its teeth. It is ironic that a technology magazine finally lost me as  a result of its poor website… Still, at least I can use the money for a subscription to Digital Camera or similar

[tags]Ubuntu, PC World, Bad Customer Service, Bad Shops, Rant, Technology, Linux, Computer Magazine, PCW[/tags]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

It has been a while since I posted some interesting links, so here goes:

http://www.rense.com/general72/size.htm - visual representation of how the size of the Earth relates to other structures in the universe. The last image shows just how small the things we think are large, really are.

http://dmartin.org/weblog/things-i-can-do-in-linux-that-i-cant-do-on-windows - summary of why Linux is better than windows, as if people needed telling

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ - how to boot and run linux from a USB drive.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/06/appeals_court_r.html - from Wired.com: “Appeals Court Rules Cops Can Steal Cars and Lie to Victims To Conduct a Warrantless Search”

http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/M42HeartNMCropM.html - image of the M42 Nebula in Orion.

http://www.religionfacts.com/ - information about the worlds religions, surprisingly detailed from what I have read so far and (also so far) does not call Atheism a religion .

http://www.forbiddenlibrary.com/ - “Banned and Challenged Books” - while interesting in that it shows what books have been “challenged” in the past, it also shows what wingnuts think they can get away with. Is 1984 pro-communist for example?

http://www.blifaloo.com/info/lies.php - “How to Detect Lies,” another one of those sites which have a little knowledge on a subject. This is one of the better ones, but it is still for entertainment purposes only. Do not rely on any conclusions you draw using the information here.

[tags]Science, Astronomy, Cosmology, Linux, Windows, Technology, Links,Law, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Orion, Nebula, Religion, Books, Body Language, Interrogation, Interview, Philosophy, Culture, Beliefs[/tags]

Popularity: 37% [?]

Popularity: 37% [?]

Oh dear. I am really not having a good day today.

This site, and a few others I admin, is hosted on a Linux server and today I was SSH’d in doing some admin tasks. One of the advantages of it being on Linux is the crontab. Over the years, the crontab for this account has grown into a convoluted, long, interesting, useful but undocumented crontab. For non-*nix people, the crontab is a way of scheduling things and is great for setting up automated processes like backups, sitemap submissions and the like.

Today, I needed to copy a line out of the crontab and use it elsewhere. I logged on and tried to list the crontab. In my haste I typed:

crontab -;

(missing the “l” key by a few mm). Argh. This has had the unfortunate effect of killing the entire crontab. I could cry. I should kill myself as punishment for the sheer stupidity. Now when I send crontab -l, I get the dreaded “no crontab for [account name]” message as a response.

What a nightmare. I am stupid enough to have no backup of the data in the crontab, nor was it documented well enough to recreate it properly. I should be shot.

At the bare minimum, I hope this will act as a lesson, for myself if no one else, in the importance of documentation and backups.

[tags]idiot, linux, rant, site-admin, why-dont-you, whydontyou[/tags]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

I will keep this short and sweet for now. I am considering buying a satnav GPS device and, from initial research I think I would like a PDA version, rather than the more “normal” car mounted satnav system.

Obviously, as a poor blogger (feel free to donate ) I am aiming for the cheapest one possible, but I still want to avoid a total lemon. Does anyone have any suggestions / comments on the topic? Ideally, I want one which is relatively easy to add new maps to (North America would be useful but not straight away).

Would a SatNav be better (more cost effective) than a PDA? While I feel I would like a PDA, I will admit I am not sure the extra functions will get used. The main reason for the purchase is to be able to navigate to remote places, I am not sure that being able to write a spreadsheet when I am there will be that valuable. Also, if I go for a PDA, would getting one with WiFi be worth it? It strikes me that a PDA without WiFi would be pretty pointless, the trivial task of bluetoothing data from my phone to PC is annoying, so I can only assume it would be worse with a PDA.

In a perfect world, I would be able to get the system for under £150, but I suspect that is massively over-optimistic, especially if I want a WiFi PDA. I have seen the MIO P550 PDA, which seems to have everything I want, for around £220 — does anyone know if it is worthwhile? Is there a Linux GPS PDA with WiFI? That would probably tick every one of the boxes as far as my buying wishes went

Popularity: 28% [?]

Popularity: 28% [?]

Previously, I have complained how Linux (and the Linux Gods) truly hated me and went out of its way to make my life miserable. Even repeated sacrifices of Windows and Apples didn’t help until, like a Miracle sent from Tux, I came across PCLinuxOS. This has been wonderful. It works with all my hardware and is really easy to use.

There is one small problem. Since I mentioned Toutatis in the last post, the Linux God Tux seems to have passed the message on to the Rails God to make my life hell once more.

PCLinuxOS is still brilliant. It works really well. It came with Ruby installed (version 1.8.5) and installing ruby gems (0.9.2) was a walk in the park. The problems started when I got all clever and issued:

gem install rails –include-dependencies

The first time, I got an error message saying it could not find rails in any repository, second time it seemed to run ok. Sadly, despite getting messages telling me rails-1.2.3 is properly installed, I can’t get it to run. I get various error messages, depending on what obscure task I am trying to do (eg. “rails demo” produces errors about not having the 1.2.3 version, and needing to edit environment.rb to reflect the actual version…).

This creates a bit of a quandry. I can download (in fact I already downloaded it) the Rails CD version of PCLinuxOS, but I like this installation. It is set up to my preferences. I have spent time tweaking it and installing firefox extensions (for example). The thought of re-installing just to get rails running is nauseating. However, one of the reasons I wanted Linux was to do Ruby / Rails development in a way which matched the deployment server.

Choices, choices… I think it is time for some more sacrifices… Maybe some coffee beans will do the trick for Ruby, no idea for Rails…

Popularity: 26% [?]

Popularity: 26% [?]

Painting my hallway - to match the rest of the EC gift house upgrade - I was thinking about a comment, by someone called Tel, on a post here. He basically said, in response to a plaintive whine that Linux should have simpler forms if it is ever to become really popular with non-techies “Hint. Pay someone to do it.”

I would rather mess about with Linux for weeks than paint my house. All the same, the cursory paintjob took a couple of hours at a total cost of £18.99 for a huge bucket of uninterestingly coloured paint and a set of rollers.

There are so many calluses on my hands, it would probably justify more spending on some sort of medicinal cream. I suppose the cost of hot water and soap to turn me back into a human being rather than a mobile device for carrying paint round should also be factored in. I refuse to cost in the old brush pole or the rags I was wearing, as these were already landfill waiting to happen. All the same, this barely adds up to much over £20.

How much would it have cost to get someone to paint my hall and stairs and landing? A good few hundred GBP more. It would certainly be a better job. Would I care? Clearly not or it would have been decorated before. It’s not as if I lounge around on the landing admiring the finish of the walls.

To spell it out, if I couldn’t do it myself for very little cash, it wouldn’t have been done.

I’m going to turn this into a parable, in a truly Christ-like fashion. (The more devout among you may already know the Parable of the Linux Installation,as a part of the Apocrypha.)

When the place where I work gets painted, they hire professionals. When they want networked IT systems or new software, they pay (comically) large sums of money - for things which even their best friends could hardly call “fit for purpose” - i.e they pay professionals.

When I want something to eat, I cook my own food. I know that I’d get a better meal if I hired a gourmet chef, but, yet again, I’m going with the DIY ethos…

LInux is more or less free. That is, it’s even LEGITIMATELY free - unlike so much else in the PC. geek’s world …. If you try to use it, you know you have to put some effort in in exchange for spending money. I’d be prepared to do this - in the event I ever get off my butt and re-install a Linux distro on one of the half -disassembled PCs which usually surround me.

I can’t see this is doing a techy out of a job. If I have to pay someone to install *nix - instead of relying on my well nigh 15 years’ experience of building and messing about with PCs, plus help and advice from friends, family and forum users - then what hope is there for someone who’s just bought their first PC?

It’s as if I couldn’t paint the hall without first learning how to make emulsion paint through attentive googling. Plus knitting my own paint roller, devising a mechanism for spinning it and whittling my own brush pole. Too much of a challenge? “Pay a decorator, you tight git.”

(Nice one TW in getting a PCLinuxOS distro working. It sounds ideal for you. Not having a wireless network, I’d not have the same problems - I hope - but I still think it might be worth me giving it a try. Soon. Really.

Pity it shows the new layout doesn’t work in *nix but, I suppose you can only solve one torturous IT problem at a time. It looks pretty good in my antique IE6.)

Popularity: 33% [?]

Popularity: 33% [?]

Well it seems I have had at least a partial success with the installation of Linux onto this machine. Numerous attempts with openSUSE, Ubuntu and Solaris all failed dismally.

openSUSE 10.2 in both 32 and 64bit versions refused point blank to find the USB device (previously they found it) and certainly wouldn’t give me the facility to configure it. This is doubly strange as I have openSUSE 10.2 running on an older machine in the spare room which uses an identical USB WiFI dongle, and it worked straight out of the box. This really is a shame as over the years, I have come to like SUSE and thought it’s progress was excellent.

Ubuntu 6.10 (32/64bit) and Ubuntu 6.06 (32 bit) also completely failed to work. While it was similar to openSUSE, Ubuntu is a lot more frustrating with it’s problems. The way Ubuntu obsesses about hiding the inner workings and hand-holding pretty much drive me insane. As I see it, the main reason some one will go to Linux is because they want the power and capabilities offered by a great OS. Making all of this hidden and “unintuitive” strikes me as abject lunacy.

Solaris 10.2 (32 bit) bombed. I wasn’t really expecting much from this, my experiences with Solaris on desktops in the past has never been “fun.” This time was no different. It got as far as trying to set up the graphical interface and crashed. A reboot and it was the same all over again.

While the Solaris farce was no surprise, I was a bit disappointed by the first two. This time last year I was happily running multiple linux machines (SUSE and Ubuntu) and would regularly tell people about the benefits of using them (see blog archives for examples). I honestly thought that the way both were heading, there was actually a chance you could get Linux out to the broader audience (ask heather - I kept harassing her to try it, saying how easy it is now, etc.). Give my recent experiences, I think both have taken a step backwards.

No one expects a “niche” OS like Linux to have out of the box support for every hardware device on Earth, but I would expect them to make it easier for people to find the problems. Having lots of on-line resources is useless when your problem is the network connection! I wonder what the goals of the various distros are - in the case of Ubuntu, I can only assume world domination. If the distro makers want to really move away from the small home market share (in the main, people who work in technical jobs), they need to re-think their approach.

This brings me to my last attempt. PCLinuxOS. Worked straight out of the box. I even did it twice to check. Both time this ran perfectly. Given the frustrations, and the cabinet full of install DVD/CD-Roms I have, this was amazing. I am even writing this on Firefox, under PCLinuxOS.

While I am impressed with it’s ability to find and connect to the network first time (with lots more configuration options than either SUSE or Ubuntu), I am not fully convinced I “like” PCLinuxOS yet. Give me some time to play with it, and see what installing new software is like - the main reason I want Linux is to set up an Apache server with PHP5, Perl, Python and Ruby/Rails to assist with web development. If this is not up to the task….

Anyway, let me close with a big well done to PCLinuxOS. It has succeeded where the bigger names failed (Even Mepis dropped the ball).

Popularity: 59% [?]

Popularity: 59% [?]