Magic Computers

2009/08/30 — isecore

I’ve just finished watching the movie based on the novel “Män Som Hatar Kvinnor” (loosely translated: Men Who Hate Women), the first part of the so-called Millenium-trilogy.

Now, I admit that I have very low expectations of Swedish film, but to my own surprise this one managed to engage me, and I’m actually looking forward to the next part. Not really interested in reading the books though, but who knows?

Anyhoo, one thing in this movie is the same thing that always annoys me when it comes to movies: Magic Computers.

I grow tired of movie-makers who use computers as a simple device to not have to explain their plot-advances. It’s literally a Deus Ex Machina where the director, writer and producer simply have to say “computers” and the audience goes “aaaah, right” and asks no more questions.

As a self-proclaimed hacker and computer-enthusiast this annoys me to no end. Sure, fine. I’m okay with scifi-movies in the far distant future which might bear little resemblence to computers today, but every time I see a brand-new Mac or PC or whatever that doesn’t behave like an actual computer it annoys me.

Especially if a contemporary computer appears, yet has been dressed up with magical abilities and sound-effects. $DEITY, does it ever annoy me! If I had a US$ for every time I see a magic computer in some movie, I’d probably have at least fifty bucks by now. They’re everywhere. If I ever make a movie, I’ll make damn sure to not include magic computers.

Rather than having the spunky yet mysterious heroine tapping away at a keyboard then triumphantly deliver a crystal-clear picture of the perpetrator, or calling in some low-life with “hacker skills” and less-than-impressive social skills who can break the [whatever], I’ll have her sigh in resignation and report to the other hero that it’s [whatever] and simply cannot be broken by hammering away at the keyboard.

Posted in Computers, Thoughts And Such. 1 Comment »

More Karmic Koala

2009/08/27 — isecore

I’ve been running the upcoming version of Ubuntu for about a week now. It’s codenamed Karmic Koala and will have version-number 9.10 when it’s released in stable towards the end of October.

Let’s just say it’s been an interesting week. And also, lets say that I’m a bit nuts for running this as my main OS since it’s significantly more prone to… err… personality defects than the last time I ran an Alpha, which was almost 1½ years ago when I ran the alpha of the then-upcoming 8.04 aka Hardy Heron.

But it’s impressive how fast it moves along. Almost daily there are improvements, and almost daily the experience of using Karmic becomes less like dancing polka in a minefield and more like using an actual operating system.

Also, I’ve finally started using Firefox 3.5. Version 3.5.2 to be precise. I gave up on the Artwiz-fonts that I’d been using as interface-fonts for more than a year. Partly because FF3.5 refuses to accept bitmapped fonts in it’s interface, but also because lately I’ve felt that the artwiz fonts while pretty to look at are increasingly difficult to read.

Posted in Computers, Linux/UNIX, Software. No Comments »

Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”

2009/08/21 — isecore

The last two years or so I’ve had really bad luck with harddrives. I’ve had a whole bunch of them fail me, and most of them weren’t even that old. Ironically enough the drives that keep chugging along most peacefully are in my server – and they’re of a brand I never trusted (Maxtor) as well as going on six years of age. Keep in mind as well that they’re in my server and thus is rarely if ever turned off. I think I’m going to max out the MTBF on those bad boys some day.

But as for most other drives, great misfortune. I’ve had about 600 gigabyte of Seagate-drives die on me. Even the mighty Western Digital have fallen for my curse, and my current 640-gigabyte Western Digital started having minor issues this spring. A while back I ran some tests on it and sure enough, it was having bad sectors and they were slowly but surely multiplying.

I say “my current” but as of the time of writing this it’s my previous. I rifled through my mattress and text-link money and managed to scrounge up enough cash to buy a new drive. This time I went for a 1TB Western Digital instead. It just seemed uneconomical to buy a smaller drive for almost the same price. I’m also constantly amazed at how much space they squeeze into the same formfactor. I grew up in the era when it was considered spectacular to have a 3.5″ drive with a whopping 2 (TWO!!) gigabytes of space on it, so 1TB is even more impressive.

Anyhoo, this also called for a reinstall of my OS. Since early 2007 I’ve been an Ubuntu-man and I saw no reason to change this. This time I decided to be adventurous and went for the as-yet unreleased Ubuntu 9.10, aka the Karmic Koala. It’s currently in Alpha4, but I felt bold and since it’s going to be released in another two months I just didn’t see the point in installing 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackal) and then upgrade later. Plus, I was really curious about some of the new things.

So, some first impressions. I’ve run this for less than 24 hours, keep that in mind.

* It’s fast. I installed it with the default filesystem, which previously was EXT3 but since Koala has become the new and shiny EXT4 on new installations. I was a bit skeptical to the claims I’ve read, but boot-up on my machine is very quick. There’s obviously been a lot of optimizations to bootup and I’m sure EXT4 helps out a lot. I have yet to enable concurrent booting as well, so maybe that’ll help too.

* It’s fast. Yeah, I know. Technically these things are the same, but I felt it warranted two mentions. It not only boots fast, it logs in fast too. I didn’t install preload until an hour ago, but it never bothered me. Everything just starts up virtually immediately. With preload I suppose it might be even a little quicker. Even slow hogs like Firefox start up much more rapidly.

* It’s unstable. Yup. It’s Alpha 4 after all, so there’s bound to be a lot of quirks. Up until just an hour ago for example I was unable to listen to music, since Rhythmbox would crash after 5 seconds of play, and bring the whole soundsystem (PulseAudio, whatever) with it and turn my box into a deaf-mute until I rebooted. An update seems to have fixed this. There’s plenty other quirks, applications that crash without notice. So there be dragons here.

* Liferea STILL segfaults with signal 11 for me. This is messed-up. A brand-new install, with Liferea from the repos, and it still segfaults? Now it doesn’t even start, it just pukes out a segfault when you try to start it.

* Lots of nice minor touches, visually. The Karmic login-screen is so much nicer than the default in Jaunty. I might actually keep it, instead of replacing it with something slicker from Gnome-Look. There’s been improvements to function as well, the default login looks and acts professional, while being somewhat pretty. Additionally, it fades away nicely to reveal the desktop in a very MacOS X-like fashion. With Compiz Fusion enabled it also does blur and fades and all kinds of other snaziness.

* More control over Rhythmbox’s notifications. Yeah, this one might seem trivial but for me it’s a big deal. I tend to keep Rhythmbox running maximized on another desktop, since I have eight of them. I don’t see any reason to minimize it. This meant however that Rhythmbox didn’t notify on song-changes, which in turn meant I had to change to that desktop if I wanted to see the name of the next tune. This has now been corrected, you can tell Rhythmbox to ALWAYS notify on song-changes. To quote Jamie Oliver: “Lovely!”

* Firefox 3.5 has really, really crappy visual integration into Gnome, for some reason. I’ve gone back to the 3.0.x-series instead. I like using the bitmap Artwiz fonts for visuals, and FF3.5 completely ignores these and apply it’s own philosophy of butt-ugly fonts in menus instead. No thanks. FF3.0.x doesn’t have this hubris and instead decides to fit in. So it’s my browser until Ubuntu/Whomever fixes the visual integration. This kinda sucks, since FF3.5 is stunningly fast.

* The bug in the kernel affecting us with an AMD/ATI-chipset is still there. Details on this are fuzzy, and it’s plagued me for more than a year. Essentially it causes really high load (and slow speeds) while copying to USB-devices. At least for me, many others have other problems such as slow SATA-speeds, but that has for some reason not affected me. Also, maybe it’s not related to AMD/ATI since I remember reading about people with Intel-chipsets on Asus-boards also having similar problems. Which in turn makes it more difficult for kernel-devs to figure out.

Posted in Computers, Hardware, Linux/UNIX. No Comments »

Hyllor! Hyllor!

2009/08/19 — isecore

Alltså, hur svårt är det att hitta snygga hyllor? Jag letar efter en bunt med små, billiga och diskreta hyllor som jag kan ställa saker på. Min lavalampa, div elektronik, mina surroundhögtalare i hemmabion. Jag har letat som en tok och försökt hitta några hyllor som uppfyller mina krav på storlek, utseende och belastning.

Jag vill ha en 6-7 hyllor tror jag. Två av hyllorna ska monteras i hörnen på mitt vardagsrum och bära upp mina bakre surroundhögtalare. Sen vill jag ha en bunt med hyllor, några som kan monteras på väggen nära mitt skrivbord så kan jag flytta upp lavalampan och div annat från min skrivbordsyta. De som blir över vill jag sätta nära TV’n så jag kan pryda den väggen lite, t.ex. med några gamla Lagoona-foton.

Men det är apsvårt att hitta hyllor. De ska inte vara stora, storlek mellan 20-30 cm och de ska vara ganska (eller helst helt) kvadratiska. Jag har sökt på Clas Ohlson, Rusta, Jysk, Jula och en bunt med andra affärer.

De få som finns är:

* För dyra – 99+ kronor för en liten skiva trä? Come on! Jag har sett några små träplattor som kostade 200 kronor! Vem är jag, Ernst Kirchsteiger? Jag är inte gjord av pengar.

* Har skitfula monteringsanordningar. Vem i hela hälsingland vill montera en liten vägghylla med en konsoll som är större än hyllan själv, och så fylld med snickarglädje att t.o.m. en dalahäst blir vimmelkantig? Eller nåt plåtschabrak som ser mer ut att höra hemma i ett polskt koncentrationsläger än en inredningsbutik.

* Variant: Hörnhyllor som måste monteras på båda väggarna. Det går inte för mig. Jag kan inte borra i betong.

* Har asfula färger. Jag vill inte ha nån jäkla fejkfuru eller ekfanér eller vad annan galenskap de kan komma på. Jag vill ha en enkel, diskret grundfärg.

Faktiskt den enda hyllan som uppfyller mina önskemål är lågmälda och billiga Lack från IKEA. Den ser ut som jag vill ha, kostar rimligt pris (en femtiolapp per hylla) och har inte alltför disgusting färger samt har infälld montering. Jag lutar mellan svart eller vit. Den röda ser lite för horhusig ut för min smak, samt skär sig med mina latte-färgade väggar.

Enda problemet är såklart att IKEA bara säljer den i sina varuhus, och närmaste varuhus för mig är i himla Sundsvall. Varuhuset hade lika gärna kunnat stå på månen för all den tillgänglighet det har för mig som saknar bil.

AAAARGH!

Posted in Design. 6 Comments »

WWW Is Dead

2009/08/16 — isecore

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web every website had a “www.something” type domain. When I first got access to the internet around 1995 I quickly learned that www meant it was a website. Type in www.whatever.whatever in a webbrowser and that meant there was a website.

What I didn’t understand back then of course was how the Internet worked. I didn’t understand things like DNS, I didn’t understand webservers or what powered them. All I knew was that I had a browser (Netscape!) and the power to put adresses in it and access all kinds of content.

Nowadays I understand why the www-subdomain got so much attention. This was because back in the early ’90s when the dubyadubyadubya was invented websites were the exception, not the norm. Back then it was things like Gopher, Usenet, Archie and all those other arcane tools which now mostly have gone the way of the Dodo. Back then it was a quick and simple hack to make a domain “world wide web-aware” and point it to whatever tiny little webserver you were running.

This of course kept on, and became the norm. A quick and dirty little hack became a standard, and now it’s so deeply entrenched in the collective psyche that it’s difficult to stop using it.

I thought the www-subdomain was some kind of magic affair back then. It isn’t. It’s simply a redirect in the DNS, DNS being the Domain Name System, the system that resolves human-readable domains and translates them into difficult-to-remember IP adresses.

Today we keep using the www.something fashion of setting up domains even though it’s become completely redundant. The vast majority of traffic on the Internet today is on the world wide web, and if you ask any teenager what Gopher is they’ll say it’s a ground-dwelling rodent.

There are plenty people out there advocating that we should stop using the www. fashion of naming domains completely, and I agree with them. It’s an obsolete and deprecated tradition, and we shouldn’t continue teaching it’s use with new generations of Internet users. My own personal problem is that the habit of typing www.something is so deep that I often do it without thinking, and for me it’s an active and conscious thing reminding me not to use it.

So if you’re the owner of a site and domain, the proper way is to remove it. Rather than having http://www.something.com you should simply remove the www and people should put http://something.com in their browser instead. Do a DNS-redirect or even some more basic HTTP-redirect to get visitors to the right place. I’m going to undertake this myself soon and become more consistent in my web-presence.

Posted in Computers, Internet. 2 Comments »

My First Muscle-car!

2009/08/10 — isecore

For some time now I’ve nourished an interest in classic and somewhat exotic cars. Mostly these have revolved around American (and some Australian) muscle-cars. It’s a well-known fact that I’m a big fan of the 1968 Dodge Charger, and I dream of owning one some day.

Well, a few days back I actually bought a car. It’s my second-favorite classic muscle-car, and I bought it despite lacking a drivers license. It’s a 1970 Dodge Challenger. No, it’s not alpine-white (my preferred color) but instead it’s a mean hemi-orange. It also has a shaker-hood, and it looks totally badass.

Here’s a picture of my new car:

dodge_challenger_70

Okay, fine. It’s a hot-wheels car and is approximately 2 cm long. But it’s all mine! Some day I’ll take it on a road-trip around the block. It’ll kick ass!

Posted in Cars, Humor, Pictures, Technology. No Comments »

More On Suse Studio

2009/08/08 — isecore

So I’ve been fiddling around a bit more with Suse Studio, checking it out and pondering various things. While I think it’s a fairly nice idea and has a lot of merits when it comes to quickly and easily creating custom Linux appliances I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s far from revolutionary – and a bit overhyped.

Pros with it is it’s ease of use. It takes literally minutes (not including build-time) to create and appliance, and it’s all done with a peck-and-shoot interface. Everything is simple, and anyone with basic experience in computers will be able to build an appliance provided they understand what they’re doing. The interface is slick and polished and overall works efficiently.

Yet I feel that this is nothing new. Debian for example can do virtually the same thing when booted from a network-enabled CD. You can choose the role of the computer and choose packages to suit it. The difference is that Suse Studio does it in a “cloud computing” environment, and that you can save your builds for later download while the Debian way is much more direct and requires more interaction.

I’m also annoyed at the lack of documentation. When you steer clear of the templates you have to essentially choose individual packages from the package manager, and as is the case with every package-management system they tend to have rather cryptic names and sometimes even more cryptic descriptions and dependencies. This is however not unique to Suse Studio – Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, et al suffer the same problem. It’s the drawback of having thousands of packages and applications at your fingertips. Great power comes with great responsibility, and so forth.

But it also serves to highlight that the only difference between Suse Studio and most other ready-made distributions is that Suses approach is to put this process on the web.

So is it revolutionary, and does it deserve the hype? Not in my opinion. But it is kinda nice anyway, and will probably fill some niche somewhere. But I believe most people will find that Suse Studio is reduntant modularity for an operating system that’s already far more modular than any proprietary system.

Posted in Computers, Linux/UNIX. No Comments »

Suse Studio

2009/08/07 — isecore

A few days ago I was invited by someone working for a PR-firm representing Novell/Suse to try out the brand-new Suse Studio.

I was a bit reluctant to do this since I’m heavily invested in more Debian-y versions of Linux and have had nothing to do with Suse since the late nineties when I had a brief fling with that distribution. Add to this that I have some relatively minor ideological issues with Novell, especially regarding their deal with Microsoft regarding the Microsoft patent-trolling a while back. Finally I felt that accepting this would entail some kind of reciprocation from me which I didn’t like the idea of. However, I was assured that there would be no strings attached, it was simply an opportunity to try it out and there were no kickbacks expected.

So I said, fine, I’ll give it a go and see if it sparks my fancy.

Yesterday I got a big box from them. Contained in this box was a slightly smaller box. It was emblazoned with various logos, and contained technical whitepapers, a pre-printed letter from Matthew Richards (Sr. Program Manager at SUSE Appliance Program) and a kit to build a foam gecko.

There wasn’t a single disc since Suse Studio is a cloud-application. So essentially what was sent to me was a expensive box with a neat little toy inside it, with some papers I wasn’t interested in reading.

I’ll admit that I had some fun building the gecko. It brought me back to my Lego days, and now I have a Suse gecko to decorate my computer with.

As for Suse Studio, it’s a web-application-cloud-thingy where you can build a custom linux “appliance”, i.e. a customized Suse distribution of Linux. It’s easy to use and I tried out building a custom OpenSuse with KDE4 and some minor tweaks. You can go really advanced to and make custom scripts and such, but if you’re happy with just some point-and-click it’s dirt easy to build a custom Linux appliance.

When you’re happy with the contents you can have it built as various different media. For example, you can have it built as a Live-CD .iso or plop it on a thumbdrive.

You can base your appliance on one of three different flavors of Suse: Either base it on OpenSuse or Suse Enterprise in versions 10 or 11. After that choose from various templates or get down and dirty with much more individual packages. The templates are nice, you can choose a quick desktop environment (KDE or Gnome) and add packages for server-use or desktop-use.

All in all, it’s a neat service and works quite well. When you’re happy with the contents of your appliance you build it. It’s then placed in a queue for build and takes a few minutes or hours to build to your specs, depending on what you put in it and how complex it is.

Now for some pictures. These are all clickable for a bigger size.

susestudio_interface
This is part of the main interface of Suse Studio. As you can see it’s quite simple to use.

building_gecko
Having fun building the Gecko-kit.

finished_gecko
The finished result. I had quite a lot of fun building it.

gecko_on_computer
Suse Gecko on top of my Ubuntu-powered computer. Oh the sweet irony.

leftovers
Leftovers from the Gecko-build. I tried to reuse as much as possible but there were lots of things which I considered to be scraps that I just threw away. The environmentalist in me felt that this was wasteful, as was shipping this in a big heavy box too.

studiobox
… Speaking of the box, this is it. It’s quite heavy, very designed and contained nothing except the technical whitepapers and the gecko-kit. Again, the environmentalist in me cringes a bit at sending a bunch of these out around the world since the software isn’t even in the box. But it’s great PR, I suppose. And every geek loves free toys.

Posted in Computers, Linux/UNIX. No Comments »

Hackers At The Beach

2009/08/05 — isecore

Today I went to the beach. It was sunny, lovely and wonderful. Despite being a bit tired it was nice to lie there and relax. The sun was hot, the weather was nice and there was just enough people to make me a slight bit too shy to dive into the water.

Quite lovely.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Myself. No Comments »
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