Portability & Platform Independence

Becoming Browser-Centric

2012-01-24T19:30:00.001-06:00

With the direction that personal computing is going these days, with cloud based storage and internet based everything, I've really been making an effort to become more browser-centric and do more things on line. I use everything Google (docs, maps, calendars, gmail, voice, and so on), I use Dropbox, I use SkyDrive, I use all sorts of on-line things. It's the way the world is going I feel quite sure.

But I came by the nickname "Old School" honestly, and it's a rougher transition for me that I think it should be. I recently made a concentrated effort to do everything I do from a browser. I've even tried a number of different browsers, but the transition is just, one I can't quite make yet, and I think that's for one of a couple of reasons.

The first is my paranoia. Not that all my information is going to be stolen or anything like that. But I'm afraid that one of these days, Google is going to say "ok folks, we've offered these services for free long enough, now we're going to charge $9.95 a month for them" and I'm going to get stuck with another monthly subscription fee that I don't want or need. I have no real basis for that paranoia by the way, I'm just always suspicious of a free lunch.

I think the second reason is probably the more likely though, and that is, I'm just so enraptured by my MacBook.

As I was trying to get contacts and calendars and things like that I was reminded over and over again of all the reasons I like my Mac so much. The user interface and the integrated apps are just so nice, and they work so well.

I still think the world is going the direction of the cloud, and I think that's probably a good direction for it to go in, but for the time being, I'm a pretty happy Mac fanatic.

POP vs. IMAP

2011-11-05T14:50:00.000-05:00

Recently at work, the topic of POP vs. IMAP has come up, and I've got opinion on the subject, I'm encouraging people to use IMAP these days for a number of reasons, but I'm curious about the opinions of others, particularly my more "systems" oriented friends, (don't make me point you out, you know who you are...) :-)

Facebook

2011-11-05T14:27:00.000-05:00

Here is another blog post that's long over due. I've been wanting to write for some time about the new facebook layout that's caused such lively discussion recently. I wanted to wait until I'd had the chance to check it over very extensively before I commented, and after having several weeks now, I've come to the conclusion that the only thing I really don't care for is the fact that it separates "Top Stories" from "Recent Events". I really can't figure out the criteria on which it bases it's decisions, and I'd really rather just see a list of "news posts" or whatever they'd like to call it, in chronological order. There may be a setting in there somewhere... But that's my only beef. I kind of like the ticker where it shows you real time who's commenting on what. More than a couple of times I've jumped into conversations I wouldn't have been part of if I didn't see them scrolling across that screen. I'm not as bothered with the privacy concerns that are shared (often legitimately) by some people. Yes, I'm aware of them, yes, they bother me, but I don't do anything on line that I'd be embarrassed if someone found out, that's all. If there are things in my life (and there are) that I don't want people to know about it, I promise, you're not going to see it in one of my on line posts...

Updates

2011-05-04T22:15:00.000-05:00

I've had a couple of little projects going on here recently, that are tech related but not especially note worthy. I moved computers around in my home so I have a "lab" area, and an almost normal looking living room!

Besides that, I came across an old salvage rig late last week. It's an iBook G4, 800 mhz PPC processor with 800.change or RAM. It's original OS was 10.3.9.

I told a friend I'd help him out, the drive needed to be wiped, but I didn't have original CDs and wasn't able to locate one that I could download an ISO for, so, for some strange reason, I turned to Ubuntu. Turns out, they have a PPC release of 10.10! So I downloaded it, burned it onto a DVD (it's over 800 mb) and booted the old G4.

I was greeted with "old school" installation screens, and it guided me through the setup as easily as it always has.

I hope for a few more days (through the weekend) to have to play with this before I return it.

Considerations

2011-04-26T21:48:00.000-05:00

For the past few days I've been looking into (with rising curiosity I might add) the possibility of going "sans cell" and living digitally with only WiFi connectivity. In my case, the mobile device would be my 64 gig iPod Touch. I'm considering a combination of TextPlus, Skype, and a product I'm staring to like more and more called Line2. I've been reading up on this, and wonder if it's not worth giving serious consideration to? There would be some cost involved in order to have a phone number that people could dial from a traditional phone, and I'm gathering that begins around $10 a month depending on options.

There are advantages to each of the apps I've started using. TextPlus for example is very easy to setup and use, although I still wish "convos" could be displayed with text only and not the avatars, but that's not unique to TextPlus. Skype offers free Skype to Skype calls, so that's worth having around for those half a dozen friends who use Skype, but I've been playing a little more this evening with Line2, which is kind of a whole package. It texts, and phones, and everything else, but finding out about pricing was difficult. Each time I tried to find the price of a particular feature, I was taken through a web store and had to go through and place an order to find out the price for example of a "premium number". That's kind of interesting. I still didn't find out the prices of many of the features because it wanted me to commit to purchasing them first, which I wasn't willing to do. Still, Line2 seems at least in the 7 day trial version) to have it all together in one package. I know I'd be interested in putting Skype and TextPlus on the "fourth screen" (The attic for unused apps) for a little while and focusing on a single platform. That might be nice...

Mobility Sans Cell

2011-04-25T22:07:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking of doing a little experiment, and considering the possibility of a mobile life, sans cell phone, using only a device like my iPod Touch, using services like Skype, and TextPlus, and Line2.

I wonder if anyone I know has used those on an iPod, and if anybody has any other thoughts. An article over at lifehacker spawned the idea.

http://lifehacker.com/#!378511/turn-your-ipod-touch-into-an-iphone

Tweeting

2011-03-22T22:07:00.000-05:00

So I've started tweeting again. The first time I tried Twitter a year or two back, I was so astonished by the amount of smut and unsolicited followers that I only lasted about a week. But recently there have been a couple of occasions where there were things I wish I'd been able to follow on Twitter (facebook, and OpenDNS) and wasn't able to, so I thought I'd try it out again.

This time, I restricted who can follow. I don't really have much of anything worthwhile to say, but if you happen to read this post and you'd like to follow me for some reason, I'll be happy to allow it.

I guess in some ways, I think of it like TV. There are some good reasons to have TV, and there's a lot of news and information you can get out of it, but there's a lot of stuff that not worth while too. I guess it takes a little discernment is all.

Spare Computers

2011-03-22T21:28:00.000-05:00

BSSC didn't last long as a spare computer. I got another old hand me down. And old Dell Dimension 2400. It's a P4 2.4 GhZ that only had 512 mb of RAM and a dead hard drive. But I swapped the hard drive out and took the gig of RAM that was in BSSC and put it in the Dimension and now I'm getting Windows up and running on it. It's surprising to me how good it runs actually, and will make a fine backup I think, but it's a computer, and actually a reasonable usable one.It has a decent 17 inch flat panel with it. That by itself made it worth the cost. Lots of updating to do though, and like most of the Windows machines I build, it'll probably take days for me to get the updates on it and squared away, but it's something to fill my evening.

BSSC

2011-02-26T21:52:00.001-06:00

My run at having just a single computer in the house didn't last as long as I expected it would.

I was given another train wreck of a computer by a guy at work who was moving and didn't want to take it with him. You'd have thought I'd have learned by now, there's a reason people give computers away, but that seems a lesson I just don't learn quickly.

I've dubbed this thing BSSC, which stands for Big Stupid Silver Computer. It's a train wreck of a computer that I think at one time might have a supposed "gaming machine", it was FULL of stupid blue lights, and many more fans than I've seen in a single computer for a while, there were hard drives and CD drives that were disconnected and held in with a single screw and it was like nothing I've ever seen. I pulled out five fans, one of the hard drives and one of the CD drives, and ALL of the lighting and when I turned it on, I could still have a conversation in the room without have to yell over the roar of the who knows how many fans from within that case.

When I got enough of the hardware out that I thought I could live with it, I put it back togehter and installed Windows XP and everything seems to be working! There are a few errors in device manager that I can't locate drivers for but that's just because I haven't taken the time yet, but that'll come eventually. For the time being, I've got a moderate Windows XP box, but I think it's going to be one that would actually serve a useful machine fo a short time if the Mac has to back to the hardware Apple store for some extended length of stay.

But for now I think it's off to bed with me. More on BSSC a bit later.

Browsers

2011-02-21T20:14:00.000-06:00

Since I've been back to a Mac (January 22, so just a month tomorrow!) I've been forcing myself to use as many of the native apps as possible, including Safari. But the other day for some reason, I needed to have a couple of browsers opened at the same time and opened up Firefox, and I've got to say, it was like slipping on and old shoe. Very comfortable, very familiar, very fast... And so I made it my default browser. Safari is definitely very polished, and very classy. Top sites is a feature I wish every browser had, but one of the things I missed most was keywords, which I make extensive use of in Firefox. And one little annoyance I never quite got over, is that when you don't have any tabs opened (when you're browsing with just one "tab" as it were) the browser window is shorter by the width of the tab bar, and there isn't an option to keep the tab bar visible all the time. I'm kind of weird about how I have things on my screen, and I like all my windows the same size, and one right on top of the other, and I could never quite get used to that.

So, for the time being, I'm back to Firefox, and very happy to be there. I don't know why Safari doesn't have something like keywords. If it did I could put up with the shorter Window, but Firefox seems to suit me a little better just now. I suppose that's part of why there are different browsers, huh?

Curiosity

2011-02-13T17:21:00.000-06:00

Curiosity killed the cat they say. In my case, it killed my Mac...

I was curious about how well the Mac would run off an Ubuntu live CD, so I stuck one in, pressed the C key and restarted the MacBook. To be sure, it ran like something that steams and falls out of the back end of a horse, and I was less curious about why when I rebooted the Mac and it said simply "No boot device found"!!!

Really?

So, trying to maintain my optimism, I put in the Leopard CD, booted again into the install, canceled that, connected my Time Machine hard drive, and selected "restore from backup" off of the Utilities Menu.

Currently it's at 14.7%, with 1 hour and 27 minutes remaining...

Utilities

2011-02-01T21:45:00.000-06:00

So I was thinking today, as I ponder my new, streamlined approach to computing, if I should drop my Mac, or if it were to get stolen, or lost, what's the most important thing I'd have to have off of it, right away?

I had a few different thoughts but quickly settled on my contacts. Well no problem I thought. Those are backed up in my time machine on an external USB drive that I always keep someplace that my Mac is not. But then I thought, how in the world would I get them without another Mac to restore the backup from? No big deal, right? Just export the address book to a .csv file and open it in Excel on whatever computer happens to be close by. But Mac's Address book doesn't export to .csv, only vCards.

A quick Google search showed me a utility that is not free, but is something that no one who uses Macs Address Book application should be without. Its called, oddly enough, Address Book Export, and it will in fact let you export to a number of different formats including .csv. And since it was available in the Apps store, I didn't even have to enter my credit card number. :-) A click or two later, I had all 160 or 170 addresses in a raw, ugly, .csv file, which I promptly copied to the flash drive that I'm not wearing around my neck any more and I'm more prepared for the eventual disaster than I was previously. It's a worthwhile download I think.

Remote Connectivity

2011-02-01T21:31:00.001-06:00

I had kind of a unique opportunity today to kind of put my configuration to it's first serious use. There's a blizzard here in Iowa, and I live 40 miles away from work, so I left work early to beat the storm, and when I got home, wanted to log in remotely to do some work from home.

So, I fired up my virtual XP machine, VPN'd in to the corp network, RDP'd into my desk at work and started going to town. Actually I wish it was as smooth as all that, there were a few little hiccups, but they were minor indeed and I was able to iron them out with minimal difficulty.

It was a fair bit slower than I wanted it to be, especially based on my Mac, but there could have been a number of reasons for that including the fact that I was connected to my SonicWALL via wireless G (there are plans eventually to get back into a wireless N router), I might not have had enough RAM allocated for the VM, the corp network could have been slow, and the machine I was RDP'ing into I know is not going to win any races. But given the complexity of the connection, I was very happy with the way that it worked, and that I was actually able to do what I wanted it to do. That probably seems like a very small thing to many who may read this, but it made me smile.

Nativity

2011-01-31T21:01:00.000-06:00

I'm having a wonderful time getting back to a Mac. As much as I can, I'm trying to work as natively as possible for a couple of reasons. First of all, I think that any computer you buy ought to just work out of the box. But also, I still think like a support person, and want to be able to work with things in the default configurations. I could spend days customizing my Mac to great extremes, but then if I need a "go by" while I'm supporting someone, it's not going to look or work like theirs does, and I want to be able to support what I use. That's part of the inspiration for using MacMail, which is in my opinion one of the best pop mail clients available. That's why I use Time Machine for backups also, and why I'm still using Safari without any add ons. That's a bit of an adjustment because I'd gotten very used to Firefox's keywords with bookmarks and used them nearly exclusively when I was browsing.

I do like Safari's Top Sites though and am making that transition easily enough. It's no hard thing for me to leave my favorite web mail clients for MacMail, although if I wanted to I could pop those webmail addresses as easily as I pop anything else.

But if I had to pick one thing that I like better about Windows than Macs however, it would be Windows Explore as opposed to Finder. Finder is certainly more robust in it's ability to, well, find things, but when it comes to file management and moving things around, I still lean towards Windows Explorer.

Many Windows users that I know have never even used Windows Explore, and to be fair, probably not many of them have a real need to. But I moved files around a lot, to and from portable drives and so forth, and I'd gotten very used to Explorer.

What I'm finding with the Mac is that theres much less of a need to move files around the way I did in Windows. Part of that is because of the way I'm streamlining I know, but I wonder if the reason I'm streamlining is because I find Finder just slightly more awkward than Windows Explorer? I've copied all of the important docs that I use to my Mac, and they're backed up regularly to an external USB hard drive via Time Machine, so I'm finding I don't use my flash drives as much. It's nice that everything is in one place and I don't have to worry about formats and whether what I save on one PC will look the same on another which is very nice.

But I'm finding that the Mac is enabling me to have a cleaner, simpler user experience, where I can actually USE the computer and not spend so much time making sure it's useable.

Flash Drives

2011-01-29T14:37:00.000-06:00

I've noticed something interesting this past week. I wear a flash drive around my neck, mostly because I've used so many computers, and there are certain docs, bookmarks, and so forth that I like to have with me wherever I go. But As I've been using my MacBook for the past week, what I found is that many of those documents and things have been transferred to the Mac, which too is almost always with me and I'm editing them on the Mac and have been using the flash drive like a backup device, not necessarily for keeping current copies of stuff. It's kind of a different approach than I've taken for the past seven years, and was something that came to me kind of gradually, but is something I think I need to put more thought into. Maybe it's time to hang up the lanyard! That's a daunting thought.

MBP

2011-01-25T18:33:00.000-06:00

So I'm back to a Mac, again. And I wonder why I ever left. (Actually, I know just why I left, it had to do with a $1,200 rip off of a brake job at a local establishment and no other way to pay for it, but that's a different blog...)

Being back in a Mac reminds me of everything I love about Macs. Especially MacMail, and Parallels Desktop, but there are so many other things. Everything just feels so polished and finished, and solid. And fast too. It's very, very fast.

One of my favorite things is that two of my very favorite pieces of open source software are available for the Mac. DropBox and KeePass. KeePass is a password vault that lets me keep all of my important information in a single secure file. That file I store in my DropBox which syncs with any computer I run, including both Windows and Linux boxes at work, as well as my little Eee, which is now sitting quietly on a shelf, waiting to be called into duty as a backup when I have to use AppleCare.

TextWrangler is the other piece of open source software that I like a lot, which is the HTML editor I use. Or should use to keep current on the web work I'm so dreadfully behind on. And there's my favorite FTP client, FileZilla (thanks for introducing me to that one Lumpy...).

I've still got more tweaks and things to work out, and maybe I won't be done with that for another week or so, especially the VMs under Parallels, but it feels like home. And when I'm blogging in front of the fireplace at the coffee shop with a vanilla latte, well that's just alright. :-)

Streamlining

2011-01-20T19:14:00.000-06:00

When I was preparing Phenom for his new home, one of the things I did was copy all the data off that I wanted. Pictures, iTunes and so forth. I took the 250 gb WD Caviar blue out of Phenom and put it in an external enclosure and pruned all the Windows clutter from it, then over the course of the past several evenings I've been sorting and consolidating data from three small external USB onto the single Caviar in it's external enclosure and will be keeping it as a data vault.

So now I've got the three small drives, a 320 and two 80s that I'll re-allocate. The 320 is going to be a Time Machine drive for either my Mac or Mary's which we'll be getting this weekend. Right now, one of the 80s has the iTunes library and pictures and things that are going to be transfered onto the Mac as soon as I get it on Saturday, then it will be empty. But I'm really happy to have everything sorted out and just have one drive that's primarily a data vault, and one that's going to be a time machine. It works well with the more stream lined and simpler approach I'm going to take.

Along that line, I've been very happy with the way that I've been getting along with just one computer, and carrying that computer with me. I'm just the littlest bit uneasy about not having a backup computer, and I'm looking forward to having the Mac as a primary and the netbook as a backup, I'm ready for a little bit larger screen, and a little bit more muscle, but I've been doing pretty good with only the netbook, and I've been pretty happy with the way that's going over all.

Wireless

2011-01-20T18:52:00.000-06:00

I'm really kind of surprised by this. I didn't expect the difference would be as significant as it is, but it's pretty undeniable.

When Phenom found a new home, I wanted to stream line a little bit and go for a cleaner, simpler look on my desk, so I took down the SonicWALL TZ 150 coupled with a Netopia 2240 in favor of a Motorola 2247 because it's one device instead of two and one less plug in and stuff like that.

What I found was that there are places in my tiny little apartment where I couldn't get a wireless connection! And at my desk, with the netbook sitting right beside the 2247 my wireless signal was often weak.

I didn't do any speed testing or anything like that, but I put the SonicWALL/2240 back in place tonight and was astonished at how much better the wireless connection is.

One of the reasons this surprised me is because the 2247 had two antennas as opposed to SonicWALL's single one, and I just assumed this would provide better coverage and signal strength, but that certainly wasn't the case.

Perhaps one day I'll actually do some serious testing with the two different configurations to see if I can figure out why that's the case. For now, I'll just look at my SonicWALL and smile...

Netbooking

2011-01-16T07:04:00.000-06:00

So I sold Phenom this week. It's a good machine and served me faithfully over the past year, but for a number of personal reasons, I want to have a smaller "computing footprint" and have decided to replace him with a MacBook. I won't get the MacBook till next weekend, and the week in the interim is going to be kind of interesting. The only computer I have right now that's functional is my little netbook, an Asus 1018P.

I've used the little netbook in the past pretty extensively, but have always thought of it as a mobile device that mostly provides WiFi connectivity when I'm away from home, and so the resources weren't all that important.

But to be honest, I've been setup like this since Friday and while it is an Atom processor, as opposed to a quad-core 3.4 gigahertz Phenom, the performance is mostly very acceptable. I think I've mentioned in the past that probably about 90% of what I do on a computer is on line, and for that, little netbook seems to do just fine. While I'm in this interim period, I'm using Google Chrome exclusively for browsing, just to see if I can break away from Firefox for a little bit.

I've got an old 15 in NEC flat panel connected to netbook's VGA port, so it's dual headed which provides a little more screen real estate.

All in all, it's kind of a nice little setup, given what it is. I'm looking forward to seeing how I feel about it next Friday...

Smart Phones

2010-11-25T08:59:00.000-06:00

(Editorial note: I'd originally posted this on November 20, but it was late, and I posted it to another blog I write instead of Port Plat Inde as I intended...)

Finally, something new related to portability to blog about, and it's really not something I know a lot about, but I'll share my observations. I've got a new phone now.

For the past year I'd been using a Blackberry Curve, and getting along with it quite nicely but over the last two months the phone had been restarting itself. Twice it did it when I was on calls, often it would do it when I was texting. I'd been to the Sprint Store a total of four times, and they'd reloaded the software, and replaced the phone to no avail. So eventually they swapped it out for a Samsung Rant.

The Rant is not nearly as classy as the Blackberry, and doesn't have a fraction of the features, but as I've been playing with it last night and this morning, I'm starting to think that may be ok. It's a "slider" phone, so at least it has a full keyboard, and they keyboard has wider spacing than on the Blackberry. That's a bit of an adjustment but after entering more than 60 contacts manually and texting a bit last night I'm starting to get used to that. The screen is not nearly as large or as nice, but serves it's purpose.

One thing I'm curious to find out about is the battery life. That was my biggest disappointment with the Blackberry.

But this is only my second "real" phone, so I'm kind of looking forward to a different experience. A good friend of mine keeps encouraging me by telling me that change is good, and it's nice to know about some other devices I suppose. The way I'm going to wind up using it, it's going to be much simpler than the Blackberry. Because of the screen I won't be using it regularly for e-mail or facebook, and the contacts lists consists entirely of names and phone numbers, not e-mail and snail mail addresses. So it'll be a bit different. But that's not always a bad thing.

Kindle

2010-11-25T08:38:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I picked up a Kindle because there's a person I know that's got a particular need for something like an e-reader, and I'm wholly unimpressed. It's kind of a nifty device I suppose, and it's probably got it's niche, but for the purpose I'd imagined it for (basically, and electronic Bible) I found navigation to be difficult, and numbers nearly impossible to enter because there are no number keys, you have to pres the SYM key, and then use a 5-way controller to navigate the number you want and select it. I found it to be very impractical. I suppose if what you wanted to do was just turn pages, sequentially and not have to search or navigate back and forth regularly, it would be a nice device, but I found the awkwardness of the navigation to make it unsuitable for my purpose. That's likely not a flaw in the device, but rather in the way I'd hoped to use it, but wanted to share that observation.

Desk

2010-09-16T09:38:00.000-05:00

This past summer I'd gotten a very small very nice little computer desk. Mostly because I didn't like the way my 8 foot folding table dominated the living room as my workspace. And the little desk was very nice, kept very neat and tidy, but it would accommodate exactly one computer, and nothing else. Every time I brought a computer home to repair or something, I was always pulling out more folding tables or something to put it on.

Last week I came to the conclusion that the little desk, as nice as it looked, simply didn't cut it for me, so I drug the 8 foot folding table back out. I've got enough space now that I've dual headed with a smaller little NEC, and I've got my router shelf back on the same surface as my monitors, and I feel like I've got room to breathe and work again!

The only bad part is that now I want another 23 inch LG as the secondary monitor and that's not in the budget right now... :-(

Phenom

2010-09-06T08:48:00.000-05:00

Windows 7 is now running on Phenom, and I'm at the point now where I can say the machine is "usable". It's got all of my favorite software on it, and many of my little tweaks and things.

There's a feeling of familiarity about it, but it's still kind of different. I'm not sure I care much for the control panel, and I know I don't care for the way you have to modify the start menu. To be fair, I'm still a little unfamiliar with that. But Windows 7 isn't that bad, although I think it's going to be a fair bit more work that Linux (Ubuntu) which just ran and ran, and never required much intervention of any kind.

So, the learning continues, but I think I'd like to shift my focus a little just now, and delve back into web stuff. I haven't been working with that nearly as much as I'd like to, and as I play with Windows Explorer, and FileZilla and web site control panels and things, I'd kind of forgotten how much I enjoyed that.

Perhaps if/when my current job ends I could move in that direction.

Windows 7

2010-08-25T23:24:00.000-05:00

I ordered Windows 7 tonight for Phenom. I wrestled with that decision for a week or so now, but it really came down to just a couple of things.

First of all, part of what prompted me to build Phenom was learning. Learning about hardware I haven't built in years, learning about Linux, and so forth. I've kind of reached a plateau in my Linux learning curve (and that plateau is nowhere near the top, by the way) and the hardware doesn't vary much.

But I've already been approached a couple of times by people who've said, "my computer is doing such and such", and I've had to say "sorry, I don't use Windows anymore". In conjunction with that, I may be facing the prospect of being out of work by the end of the year, and I need to update my Windows skills. Whether I like it or not, and regardless of how right or wrong I think it is, I still live in a Windows world, and I need to be aware of whats going on around me.

The thing about Linux is, it doesn't break, it doesn't gather junk, it doesn't go slower after it's been running on a machine since February, and there's not really that much to fix. Every now and again, an application incompatibility or some such thing, but nothing really earth shattering.

So, for the chance to learn something new and different, and update my skill set a little, and keep in line with the original intent for building the new box, which was learning, I've decided to go and put Windows on the box.

I've got a spare 250 GB Caviar Blue Label laying around, so I'm just going to pull the existing 1 TB Caviar Black Label and run Windows on the smaller drive, but I don't think that'll be an issue. And then, when I want to go back, it'll be a simple matter of moving the cable.

But that's the plan right now. It's always subject to change...

SonicWALL

2010-08-17T21:57:00.000-05:00

I haven't written much about my newly beloved SonicWALL which came to me in the collection of things that I got when I got my server, but currently, it's the crown piece.

The good people of SonicWALL have been extraordinarily helpful (and very patient with me) as I figure out just a little bit of what this thing is capable of. There will be lots and lots of learning I know and I'm enjoying it a lot. I have absolutely no need for this kind of security appliance but it provides a level of comfort knowing that my internet connection is as secure as I'm able to make it with this device.

There's still so much cool stuff it can do that I haven't scratched the surface of that I'm sure I'll be learning for a fairly long time, which makes me very happy. Some would argue that also makes me fairly pathetic that this is what I do for fun, but I've been especially blessed by the opportunity to be able to learn this kind of stuff, mostly at little or no expense. It's pretty cool when it's a cheap hobby.

More on Server

2010-08-05T22:47:00.000-05:00

It seems the new version of Ubuntu doesn't care for the old hardware, so I couldn't make the drives work properly when they were raided, so I pulled one of the 80 gig drives, booted into the RAID configuration utility, broke the raid and told it that second drive doesn't exist. That at least got Ubuntu Server to install. Currently it's being built as LAMP server and Samba file server. I'm curious to see how it comes out...

Server

2010-08-04T22:15:00.000-05:00

So I haven't been blogging here much lately because, frankly, not much has changed in my computing situation. Getting rid of the netbook turned out to be a mistake because saving for the MacBook didn't go as well as I'd intended it to, and the lack of mobility was killing me, so I wound up getting another netbook to replace the one I'd sold. I lost a little on that one, but I'm ok with it. The original netbook has a good home.

What this post is about is a server that I came across recently. A friend of mine is moving out of state, and he wanted to get rid of some old equipment he had around from when he used to own his own company. I've been thinning out my spare computers and parts recently, but told him I'd find a place for this somewhere, and after I got it home and turned it on, I must say, I'm a good bit more intrigued about it, and the possibilities than I was when I told him I would take it for him.

It's a monster to be sure. Albeit, a bit of an older monster, but it's pretty cool none the less. It's an HP Proliant ML310 Generation 3 Server. It's got a 3 GHz P4 HT proc in it, and 3 gigs of RAM (on four sticks, I'm not sure how that's configured, I haven't pulled the RAM to count it yet) but it's running Windows 2003 Server SBE, with all the original HP server management tools on it! I hadn't seen those in years! It's got a pair of hot swappable 80 gig SATA drives in some kind of RAID but I don't know the configuration on those either just yet. It also has a DAT drive on it, and uses Veritas to back up. It's like a machine I'd have configured six or seven years ago.

I'm not sure when was the last time the machine was actually used as a server is, I'd guess it had to be at least a couple of years, but the license for NAV hadn't expired yet. The machine also didn't even have SP2 on it yet, which is a little frightening, but I've let it sit here quietly most of the evening doing updates and getting re-acquainted with some "old school" stuff. I hadn't worked on a Win 2003 SBE server in I don't know how long, I guess since I was out in Vermont that year.

I really wish I knew someone that had a need for this kind of a box, but I'm not sure what anybody could do with it. Of course I can't give it away with 2003 Server on it cause I don't have any of the software that came on it, and I'm weird about illegal software, and besides, I wouldn't want anything confidential of my friends to go out, so I think what I'll do with it is take a few weeks, and here and there and get the thing updated, then work on figuring out how to get the RAID controller, etc, to work in Linux and make a Linux server out of it. I know that on boot it has at least one failure that says "adapter failed to load" or "adapter not functioning" or something like that (it went by pretty quick, I don't even know what adapter it referenced) so perhaps some of the BIOSs need to be updated, but what a fun little box this will be.

There was a laundry basket of cables, cords, tapes, and other various and sundry items, one of which was a Sonicwall TZ 150 Wireless security appliance that I haven't even had the chance to log into yet, but that'll be a lot of fun too, I'm sure.

But the item in the laundry basket that made it so heavy was an APC BackUPS 750, which wouldn't do anything except tell me to replace the battery, so I set it aside for a few hours and for got to unplug it. Apparently the reason it wanted it's battery replaced is cause it was completely dead. But after several hours being plugged in and not powered on, I hit the power button one more time so I could document what lights on the front of the thing were lit and find out how much it would cost to replace the battery, and wham! Five good green lights on the status bar, and that too roared to life!

I really hope I can get this configured to use Linux and find a practical way to fit it into my configuration. Of all the wayward computers I've given homes to over the years, this is by far my favorite...

New Direction

2010-04-21T21:50:00.002-05:00

I think I've finally arrived at the direction I'd like to go with computers in my home. Back in February, at tax time, I built a quad-core Phenom with 8 gigs of ram in an Antec Sonata case that I've just been delighted with. There were a few wrinkles to iron out early on, but I've arrived at a config that just blows me away, and one that I can't begin to tax the resources of.

So I've been thinking of mobile solutions, and here's what I've arrived at. I've sold Little Eee, and I want to sell my beloved nc6230 and replace them both with a MacBook.

Here's why...

Little Eee was running 9.10 NBR. Basically the same as Phenom. nc6230 is running Windows 7 right now, but the only reason is because I need a machine that will run iTunes. But I really want to get away from Windows all together, and I thought it was redundant to have Linux on two machines at home. I'm scheduled for a lot of overtime between now and the end of June and I'm hopeful that by then, I'll be able to pick up a MacBook. Then I'll have Linux and Mac on desktop and laptop respectively, and if both machines are about the same age, I'm hopeful I'll be able to use them both for about 5 years.

Of course, plans I lay like this are always subject to change, but that's the direction I hope to go in.

Mobility

2010-04-15T22:22:00.002-05:00

So I had occasion the other day to pick up a little 8 gig iPod touch. It's been a lot of fun figuring the little thing out, and I've really enjoyed it a lot. In fact, it's given thought to something I may try here...

I'm using the junk out of that thing on facebook, I find the iPod fb app much easier to use than on the BlackBerry, of course, with an iPod you have to be near a Wifi access point...

But I wondered what would happen if turned off the desktops, laptops, and netbooks for a weekend and see how well I fare with a BlackBerry and an iPod touch. It's going to be a full weekend for me, so computer time with be limited, it may be a fun weekend to try that out.

Forward Thinking

2010-04-15T22:10:00.002-05:00

Most of you who'd read this know that I built a nice computer this spring with an unexpected windfall at tax time. The short story is a quad-core Phenom with 8 gigs of ram in an Antec Sonata case that runs Ubuntu 9.10. (Will that change on 04/29?)

In addition to that, I've got my beloved nc6230 running Windows 7 right now, and my Little Eee, an Asus 1000 HE that I've had a lot of fun with. It currently has a 30 gig ssd in it and the battery life is increased substantially.

But the nc6230 is a little older (four I think, or five) and the battery isn't what I'd like. Frequently less than 2 hours on a charge. And the little Eee for all the wonderful things about it isn't just exactly what I'd like in a mobile machine, so my goal in the next year or so is to move out of both nc, and Eee, and what I'd like to move towards is a MacBook. Then I'd have no MS OSs. I only keep Windows for iTunes, but a Mac would do that too.

I think a MacBook would be an excellent augment to Phenom, and OS X a nice compliment to 9.10.

Windows 7

2010-03-12T06:41:00.002-06:00

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm experimenting with Windows 7 on the nc6230. Currently it has 3 gigs of ram, and 7 actually seems to run better on here than XP did.

As part of the experiment I'm calling "Windows 7 Immersion Camp" I'm going to try to use Windows 7 exclusively at home for an undetermined amount of time to kind of force myself to get used to it. During this time, phenom is running as a headless workstation. It has no monitor, kb, mouse or speakers attached, just power and ethernet cables. I connect to it via ssh and sftp from either nc6230 or from work. It's kind of cool really. OpenSSH is the tool that's running on phenom that allows me to do that. The configuration was much simpler than I thought it would be.

Mostly this experiment stemmed from a desire to bring my own skill set into the current generation of technology, and not be so O.S. although I wear that moniker proudly...

Browsers

2010-03-12T06:31:00.002-06:00

I'm experimenting with Windows 7 on my nc6230, and I'm discovering the benefits of using multiple browsers in a way I hadn't before. At work, our corporate mail server is an Exchange server that I access via OWA. OWA works much differently in IE than it does in Firefox so I use IE for that, and for Hotmail and other things Microsoft.

I'm using Chrome as well, which is where all of my Google apps live, Gmail, calendar, docs, reader, and a couple of blogs.

In Firefox, I run facebook and a couple of other tabs, but it's helping me stay a lot more organized in my browsing where previously, I might have been running one or two instances of a single browser (generally Firefox) with a dozen or two dozen tabs opened between them. I was constantly flipping back and forth from window to window trying to find the right tab.

Using different browsers for different tasks is a much more efficient way for me to stay connected.

Tools

2010-02-06T10:09:00.003-06:00

Yesterday two different friends of mine were describing problems with their computers that they'd like my help with, and as I'm preparing to go and visit them, one of the things I do is make sure I've got all the latest AV stuff and current versions of the tools I use on my flash drive. And it occurred to me that as recently as a few years back, when someone asked me to fix a computer problem for them, I'd grab my tool bag and head out the door. But recently, within the past few years anyway, it seems like I fix more computers with CDs and flash drives than I do with screw drivers and the like.

It's just kind of interesting to me how things change...

New Computer

2010-01-30T22:39:00.002-06:00

So I'm contemplating a new computer. I'm going to do ok on taxes this year, and so I thought it might be time for me to get something that's at least current technology instead of the years old computers I've been getting by with.

I'm going to build it myself as opposed to buying one already made, and I'm in the decision making part where I'm trying to decide what components to use.

Those who know me, or anything about my computing habits will know that this isn't going to be a race car necessarily. Prime considerations (in no particular order) are that it's quiet, as I find fan noise really annoying, and it's got to have a great deal of storage space and memory because I hope to run a number of VMs. I've thought about raiding a pair of terabyte drives for redundancy and performance, but I'm also toying with the idea of separate physical disk for a home partition. I'm just not sure about what's going to be going on inside the box yet.

I think the only thing that I have decided on is that it's going to be built in an Antec Sonata case and that because of noise. That case only has two fans in it. All the air coming in comes in through induction at some filtered vent holes towards the front of the case where the drives mount. So I won't be overclocking in it, or using ripping hot video cards that offer epic performance, I'll need to keep that in mind. I've also decided that I'm going to run with an AMD processor, just because I've never done that before, and frankly, this seems like a season of change for me.

If there are thoughts on motherboards and processors, I'd enjoy hearing them...

Dropbox

2010-01-23T09:57:00.002-06:00

I've been introduced to a service recently called Dropbox which I've started using a little bit, but I like it a lot. In short, it's on line storage, and not a lot of it, but enough of it to get you where you need to go.

If you've followed this blog you know that I stive to be independent of any single machine and/or platform, and thus wear a flash drive around my neck with everything that I consider to be important on it, and that's gone a long way toward making me machine and platform independent, but to be honest, sometimes it's come at the price of a little inconvenience, which isn't all that bad, but I may have found a more convenient solution.

On of my mainstay apps is KeePassX, it's a password keeper, but I use it to keep so much more than that. I keep the master database on my flash drive and whenever I need to access the information, I just plug in my flash drive and there I go. Except there are some machines where it's not convenient to plug in a flash drive because they either lack front side USB ports, or they're stuffed under a desk somewhere. I've often had access to a backup copy of the db on a machine like that, so I never really gave it much thought, but recently I found if I keep the master .kdb file in the dropbox folder, then it's always accessible, wherever I am, without having to crawl under desks or something of that nature. I still keep the file on my flash drive for those instances when I don't have a network connection, but Dropbox seems to be working out quite nicely.

Current Config

2010-01-15T19:40:00.002-06:00

We've been doing a bit of shuffling around at work, they're re-arranging cubicles and so some of has to take up temporary quarters in conference rooms and so forth. Doing so inspired a new configuration at work that I liked so much I adapted it for home.

The home configuration right now consists of two Linux boxes Dimension (the "main" computer running Ubuntu 9.10 has 2 gigs of RAM in it, but only a 40 gig IDE hard drive), and Puny (which is a Celeron with 256 mb of RAM and a 10 gig hard drive) but Dimension has a beautiful 19 inch flat panel, while Puny is using an older 17 inch CRT.

Puny is right of Dimension which is centered on the keyboard in front of me, and they're Synergized, which is something I hadn't done a lot in the past and never really had much of a use for. I still don't really have a need to run two computers at home, but they're here, so hey, why not?

The machines at work are nicer but the configuration is similar enough that it has the same feel. The big difference is that at work I'm currently using a borrowed Deck keyboard which I'm absolutely falling in love with. Mostly it's the small form factor. Since I've been using laptops and netbooks, I've grown accustomed to using the number keys across the top of the keyboard, and I've come to really dislike the numeric keypad for the distance it makes me move my hand to reach the mouse and the space it takes up on the desktop. This may be a small thing I realize, but it's a significant thing to me.

I hope to have small form factor keyboards that at home and work permanently in the future.

Monitor

2009-12-12T23:46:00.002-06:00

"You have not because you ask not". I've read that before...

I've been wanting to upgrade the old CRT I'd been using with the Dell Dimension as my main computer for some time, and I thought while I was in St. Louis recently I'd run by a used computer store there and check out their inventory of good used flat panels, but there was a sign on the door saying "Closed on Thanksgiving", and I'd never heard of a computer store that was closed on Thanksgiving, but with tears in my eyes, and rakes and shovels, and implements of destruction, I got back in my green Buick and went off to find another place to buy a monitor. I didn't fine one...

(There are a few people who may read this post and get those last few lines...)

But there's a guy I work with who stays much closer to the leading edge of technology than I can afford to, and I mentioned to him one day last week that I was looking for a decent flat panel, and he says "hey, I've got just what you're looking for in my closet at home, I got it with a new computer and upgraded after about two months". With fear and trepidation I asked him how much he wanted for his Dell 19 inch wide screen display and he mentioned a price that was right in the ball part of what I'd wanted to spend in St. Louis! I think if the truth were told, he probably knew he could get twice what he said he wanted, but I think in his own special way he was cutting me a break (for which I am and will continue to be very grateful) as I hadn't had too many of those lately... But I certainly owe that co-worker a debt of gratitude, and he knows who he is, and I hope he'll read this post and smile, knowing that he'd done in

But the short story is, NOW I have a machine that will truly service me and my low demand of my computes for probably some time to come. I still keep dreaming about the next pile of parts that comes together to replace this old Dimension, (which also came from another co-worker who was sympathetic to my cause) but unless and until something breaks, that's project is likely to remain a far off dream, although I still keep looking at the re-fub pile on Tiger direct...

The New Place

2009-12-05T05:14:00.002-06:00

I've moved recently, back to a town I used to live in and it's nice because I'm 4/10ths of a mile from work, but there is no phone jack in the main room of the house, so I'm doing something a little different. I've got the wireless Netopia 2247 in one room and the laptop (my beloved nc6230) in the main room of the house, and currently, it's the only computer I've got running. It's kind of a different configuration. It's not as bad as I thought it would be. Almost all the time it's booted into Linux although I still have Windows on it. It's the machine I used to take to work because of a java based application that doesn't run well on my Windows box at work.

I'm relying more and more on my flash drive for mobility especially since during the move I was in and out of a number of computers and configurations.

As much fun as this is, and as clean as it is having only the laptop in the main room, I still miss the desktop and want to have a desktop as my main machine again soon.

Dimension

2009-11-24T06:25:00.002-06:00

Well, from my previous post the Optiplex didn't quite work out the way I'd hoped, which tuns out to be no big deal. I'm moving next week, and partly because I didn't want to have so much to move and partly because I hope that in some small way someone else can benefit from the parts and machines I'd had around here, a friend of mine came last week and took all of that away. Now I'm down to one desktop machine and a very small collection of spare parts.

I think instead of focusing on Synergized machines and a large collection of cool, albeit older computers, this is a good time for me to focus on building one really nice machine and delving deeper into Ubuntu and learning more about it.

Additional details should follow, but for now, I'm back to the Dimension as my main (and only) box, but I did put the 2 gigs of RAM in it, although I'm still only using a 40 gig IDE drive as opposed to the 250 SATA that I wanted to put in the Opti. Also still using the 17 inch IBM glass monitor, which for the time being is working out rather nicely, although I'd like to be able to replace it with a decent flat panel soon.

Optiplex

2009-11-18T23:10:00.002-06:00

Well, my Optiplex experiment didn't turn out nearly as well as I'd hoped. It seems regardless of the configuration, the video would intermittently die, and the only way to get it back was to power cycle the machine. All the lights on the box were still on, CD drives would still spin if they'd been spinning previously and everything, it just wasn't working out. I swapped RAM, power supply, and hard drives, with no change. So now I took the two gigs of RAM and I put them in the older Dimension and am back in that box. The increase in memory here seems to have gone a long way to helping this box out. And I'm back to a 17" glass monitor again instead of the 15" flat pannels.

Guess my configuration is pretty standard, or vanilla, or generic, (or even geriatric) but whatever the right word it, it works and it's a stable enough, quiet enough machine that coupled with the fact that I don't generally require a tremendous amount from my machines that stress them much, this ought to be quite a suitable little machine for little while. I'd like to get through the winter with it and and then start looking for something a little more classy to scavenge than this pole of parts I've got. But you know, at the end of a long day when you sit down in front of something as nice as mine is, and it works well for what you want it for, you wonder why it took you so long to come full circle. It was a nice trip and a welcome detraction. I've learned lots no this little venture, about public auctions, about RAM and hard drives, and the difference inside to a couple of different boxes. So while the desired result was not achieved, at least I had fun along the way...

Simplicity

2009-11-17T19:26:00.002-06:00

So again this evening, the idea of simplicity was impressed upon me as it relates to computing. Recently I've dreamed up all sorts of eccentric configurations for the computers in the house, based almost entirely on a recent winning bid of mine for a pair of matched flat panel monitors and some recently acquired knowledge of Synergy.

The monitors didn't work out the way I'd hoped. I thought they were 17 inch, but they turned out to be 15, and they wound up being about two hours from where I live, and I had to drive to get them, and then I didn't get the power supplies for them, so they had to be shipped, and THEN only one of the power supplies works, and the monitors colors are funny. *sigh*

But I've been thinking about the time and energy I've put into this configuration and I've thought that it really isn't worth it. Even when I've had two computers synergized and so forth, I still only use one at a time. So I think I'll focus on having one computer that's as nice as it can be given the limitations I have to work within.

My little experiment of using only mobile computers in the house worked well for a short time, but I got tired of having to plug it in and unplug it every time I wanted to come or go, and it was kind of a hassle. I like having a desktop computer that's on all the time that I can just come home and sit down in front of.

So instead of pursuing two nice matched flat panels, I think what I'll do is focus on making one decent system out of the computers I've got and running like that.

Mobility

2009-11-05T00:19:00.002-06:00

The desktop computers at my house have been packed away for a week now. I'm getting along rather nicely with my beloved nc6230 as my "main" machine. It's been kind of a crazy couple of weeks at my house, so this is the only computer that's been traveling with me, Little Eee has been at work.

I'm having some wireless issues with Windows on the laptop, not with 9.10 which is kind of interesting to me. I'm suspicious of a driver issue but haven't taken the time to troubleshoot it.

I've been involved in some training clases at work related to some additional equipment we're going to be working on in coming months and have been very happy to have built this laptop as a dual boot although I think that I should have size the partitions differently. I gave Windows a 20 gig partition, and left the remaining ~40 gigs for 9.10 imagining that I'd be spending more time on the Linux side of the computer, but because of some software that's Windows only, that doesn't work on my desktop at work, I've been using the nc6230 and haven't been booted into Linux much at all, although it runs well, with the exception of being able to play DVD's.

In the interest of saving disk space on my poorly planned Windows partition, I've taken off OE, Windows Media Player and a few other components I don't ordinarily do without. It may be time to drop in the Gparted CD and see what I can do about resizing partitions and giving Windows a little breathing room.

I did turn off restore points and that went a long way, but still I've only got 5.6 gig free, which is a bit less than I'm comfortable with. Everything is running fine, I just wish I could put some of the things back that I've taken off, but that may be for another day.

9.10

2009-10-31T11:39:00.002-05:00

In addition to my little experiment where I'll be running with two mobile machines at home instead of the Dimension/Pavilion duo, I'm running 9.10 on both nc6230, and Eee. On the Eee, I'm running the new Netbook Re-Mix (NBR) and I must say, it's one of the most practical updates I've seen. It's VERY nice looking, the interface looks much more polished than in previous versions of NBR that I'd used. The icons are bigger and prettier, and there's only a menu bar on the left hand side of the screen.

But on first blush, this seems worthwhile. An interesting note, is that I'd wanted to put 4 gigs of ram in the nc6230 and only found out by experimentation that it's max is two, but I'd taken the two gig chip out of the Eee and replaced it with a 1 gig chip and the performance seems quite acceptable.

So nc6230 right now has a small Windows partition mostly so I can use an old version of Photoshop because I'm more familiar with it, and besides, it's a legal copy, and then a larger partition for 9.10.

With Little Eee, I actually took out the 250 gig drive and put in it's original 160. I did this for two reasons, first of all to maintain the integrity of my current build in case 9.10 blows up. I can just swap drives back and be on my way, but it's running 9.10 NBR on a single partition with 1 gig of ram and doing very nicely. Which is both a credit to 9.10 NBR and to Little Eee.

Experiment

2009-10-29T19:07:00.002-05:00

I think I'm going to try a little experiment to see what happens. My nc6230 recently came back off loan, and coincidentally, it was the day that Ubuntu 9.10 came out. So I reformatted the hard drive, and put Windows in a small partition, because whether I like it or not, I live in a Windows world (although I got my first taste of Windows 7 today and wasn't all that impressed that it couldn't find drivers for an old network card), and then put 9.10 on the larger partition.

I don't know if it's because I've been using older slower computers for so long or if I didn't remember how nice this laptop was, or maybe it's 9.10 and ext4 or something but this computer is running better than it ever has, and it's also much faster than any other in the house, which include the Dell Dimension and the HP Pavilion mentioned in previous posts. So the two desktop computers have been powered off, and here I am with the nc. The screen looks great, it's large, I've got this fabulous Logitech wireless mouse thanks to a co-workers upgrade, so I think I'm going to run like this for a day or two and see how bad I miss the desktops. I'm wondering given the whole "portable" emphasis, if I'll miss them that much at all. I really, really like this laptop.

My only concern is that if I'm using this full time, I wonder how it will hold up and if heat would be an issue. I wonder if I'm not being paranoid because I built ThinkPads back in the 90's when heat most certainly was an issue, and I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of anyone who stumbles upon this post.

Puny

2009-10-26T06:58:00.002-05:00

You may remember seeing a post about a box I named Puny. It's a old Gateway Essential that I found in the dumpster at my apartment this summer that had broken version of Windows 98 on it and a messed up video port.

I'd put some memory in it, and had been running XUbuntu on it, with LXDE and it was working well enough for demonstration purposes, to prove how Linux will run on old hardware with limited resources. But recently, Puny has found new life. I've recently become familiar with Ubuntu Minimal a CLI only version of Ubuntu. No GUI at all! I think it's original intent was so that you could do a text only install and then add only the packages and the desktop manager you want, and I've read a couple of interesting blogs where people have built systems like that, that have come out nicely, but I installed it and left it.

Most of what I use Linux for at work involves logging in to a couple of test systems, Cisco routers, and as a telnet and ssh client. So now Puny is sitting beside my Windows box and is my main Linux box at work. It's a little different to get used to, but I've got six tty sessions available, and typically in my terminal window in the GUI I only kept three tabs opened. There are some adjustments involved, like not having a browser, which I used as a "spare" and to keep an eye on our outage boards, but I'm having a bit of fun with this minimal install and I like it a lot. Who knows how long it'll stay like that, but I'm enjoying getting some additional life out of a computer that was thrown away.

Quick Config Update

2009-10-17T23:24:00.002-05:00

I'm working on a little configuration update on the home computers. I've posted recently about the Dell Dimension and what it's gone through. Well, I'm adding to it, a machine to come along side it, to partner with it, and perhaps in some way I'm not yet sure of, make a more complete outfit or something like that.

The basic idea is like this... Dimension is the "main" computer, it's using a 17 inch IBM (glass) monitor, then the new box, an HP Pavilion is using the 15 inch NEC flat panel and it's positioned left of IBM which is centered in front of the keyboard. I'll post a picture after a little bit so it's clear what I mean, it doesn't sound the way I mean it to when I re-read that. But the two computers are running Synergy (where I work, we say they're synergized...) so it works off a single keyboard and mouse.

I'm working out a few little glitches, particularly with Synergy, but I'm confident in a relatively short time, I'll have that worked out.

Current thinking is that Pavilion would get crammed full of hard disk space and would function like s data vault or storage facility, but I may do something external with that. I'd really like to have an NAS unit.

Of course one of my favorite features about this setup, as with previous setups that I've posted about is that it's all 100% cost free. It's computers that were discarded, and monitors that no one else had a use for and on top of it all is a pile of open source software!

It's a lot of fun to play with, and it's pretty inexpensive. That's a big plus right now.

Android

2009-10-15T22:38:00.003-05:00

I had a quick "water cooler" discussion with a friend of mine at work this morning about Android vs. Google OS vs. Moblin on netbooks. I found this article earlier this evening, where the writer encapsulated a lot of my thoughts about Android, so I wanted to share it. It's a review of the new Acer Aspire that dual boots Android and Windows...

Acer Aspire D250: Finally, An Android Netbook

Forward Thinking

2009-10-15T22:07:00.002-05:00

It's kind of a meandering path, my thought process tonight. I hope I'll get where I'm going but it may take me a little bit to get there. Try and bear with me through this post...

So I'm trying to think forward a little bit and plan some for the upcoming release of Ubuntu 9.10, and think about how to implement that and a couple of thoughts have emerged that I wanted to post.

First of all, I was thinking about portability of data and what would be involved in moving into a new distro, and I was considering all the data that had accumulated on my netbook in recent months that I didn't have in other places, which kind of goes against my credo of mobility, and as I set about to make all of that portable, I began to ponder how I'm using the armada of flash drives in my little Case Logic flash drive case and I started to realize how inefficiently I'd been doing things.

Some time ago I'd gotten a SanDisk Cruzer Titanium 4 gig drive to wear around my neck. My justification of course, the titanium drive is more rugged, can stand up to more abuse, and so forth, not that I'm all that rough on my drives, but I thought it would be cool for daily use. Then I'd gotten an 8 gig, then a 16, and thought with the 16 that all of the data from the six or so other drives would all fit on it, and so that's where it went, till the 16 gig was almost full of everything imaginable (and some things that aren't imaginable) and I wore that one around my neck.

But I had too much data on the hard drive of the little netbook to be able to back it up practically, and I had way to much unnecessary garbage hanging around my neck, so I thought I do things more efficiently.

I'd taken the guts out of a SanDisk Cruzer 8 gig and put it in the titanium shell, so I thought I'd go back to using that as my primary "carry" drive and use the 16, two 4s and a 2 to store things in a way that made more sense. What I wound up with is a 2 gig that I call my utility drive, it's got portable apps with ClamAV installed which I use as a mobile virus scanner when I work on other computers. If the drive gets infected, I just toast it and re-install the portable apps. I've got a 4 gig that I call my media drive which is mostly full of music and videos, then the 16 is acting more like a real storage device, holding archives of things, and backups and so forth.

While I was moving things around, it looked a little bit like this. I've posted similar pics in the past on facebook when I had my mobile data vault connected...

Dimension Update

2009-10-10T21:33:00.002-05:00

When I went to work this morning, I took the Dimension with me, cause although Debian had been running ok, there were some things that I didn't care for. Certain web pages seemed difficult to load whether using Iceweasel or Firefox, I just wasn't thrilled with the way it interacted with the Nvidia card in this computer, and there were a number of other things that by themselves would have been inconsequential, but together made me think that perhaps there was a slightly better way. I should say that lugging the Dimension up and down three flights of stairs, was by far the hardest part of the job...

I loaded twice today because in my zeal to removing things I thought I didn't need after the first load, I took out too much and eventually produced errors in Synaptic that I wasn't able to resolve, but I learned from being a zealot, and was a little more conservative in my bush whacking the second time around...

The long and short of all this is that I've got a fast (given what it is) seemingly stable, Ubuntu box that I think will work better for me as a "day-to-day" machine. Not much is special about it really. My "big three" essential apps (Filezilla, Firefox, and KeePassX) are on there. I like the terminal better as well, being able to sudo instead of having to open a root terminal, and got VPNC installed and working. Bookmarks are all imported and I'm using the current version of OpenOffice and all of that. I'm using Banshee for a music player and although I only have about 14 CDs that aren't in iTunes format, it's a nice little collection that spans the gamut of my taste in music.

So...

It's my intent to NOT do what I've done in the past and rush headlong into every new application I hear about whether I need it or not and keep things relatively stable for a little while. I bet I know how that works out...

Debian Update

2009-10-08T22:03:00.002-05:00

I wanted to share a little about some of the small mods and tweaks to the Dimension 4500 since I've been using it during the past week or so. Not that I've done anything revolutionary, or even that I expect anyone to care, but, in keeping with my stated purpose over a year ago, I want to chronicle what I do with computers so I can look back and wonder why in the world I thought that was a good idea six months from now.

I had another machine here at the house that had the same kind of memory as the Dimension an old HP. So I took the gig of ram from it and put it in the Dell, that was a big upgrade from 512 to 1 gig. I haven't seen quite the performance increase I was hoping for, but perhaps it is more stable, it's hard to know for sure.

Iceweasel is gone now, and I'm running the current version of Firefox as the only browser on the box, of course, KeePassX had to be installed as well as FileZilla, those are high on my list of essential apps. But I'm running the version of OpenOffice that came packaged with this distro, which is 2.4. I don't have a reason to upgrade right now, and I wonder if this machine has the resources to run it properly, so I'll just leave it for now. I removed many of the apps that I don't use at all, Evolution, Ekiga, Cheese, Xsane, Orca, and there may have been one or two more. But when it's all said and done, 5 gig of my 35 gig drive is used, and I've got 30 gigs free! That I think is one of the coolest parts.

I'm relying on Blackberry and iPod more but that's a different post. That's the brief update.

Minimalism

2009-10-05T23:06:00.003-05:00

As both of my loyal readers will know, changes with my computers are often and drastic. Right now, my nc6230 is out on semi long term loan and due to another set of recent and unforeseen circumstances, I find my self no longer using my Mac for the time being. That in itself is a story, but perhaps that's for a different time.

Currently my "main machine" is a P4 Dell Dimension 4500 with a 40 gig hard drive and 512 mb of ram, I'm using a 15 inch NEC flat panel that has a large gouge in the lower left corner of the screen. It's running Debian without many bells and whistles. It's a pretty basic machine, with a very basic configuration. I'm running Debian because not one but two of my Ubuntu disks wouldn't install properly, so Debian came to the rescue. It gets a bit more tweaked every day but I'm using it in very much it's default configuration, and it's working quiet nicely for what it is.

Moving away from the Mac was both difficult and easy. It was difficult because I'd had it customized as much as I could on that machine and it worked really, really nicely. Wired keyboard and mouse, and they keyboard was the short one, 2 gigs of ram on OS 10.6. At three years old, it was the nicest computer we owned and so it was difficult move out of.

It was an easy move because I like to keep as much of my information in the cloud as possible, and work to be able to access it whatever machine I'm on, on whatever OS I happen to be using. So aside from all the slickness that is Mac, I didn't have many concerns with regard to data.

In some way, there's some satisfaction in the knowing what an easy transition it was. And I take comfort from the fact that I'm not tied to any particular machine. But they're only computers after all, they come and they go I guess.

Blackberry Update

2009-09-30T09:31:00.002-05:00

I've been using the Blackberry now for almost two weeks as impossible as that seems and the little device has been a blessing to me in more ways than I can count.

Thus far, the only real complaint which is probably not fair because of my usage, is that the battery life is not what I'd like it to be. That's easy enough to work around, I just keep it plugged in when I'm at my desk, but I'd like it if the battery would last for days like it has on previous phones. Of course on other phones, I haven't used data like I do on this little guy, so again, I have to consider what's fair to the device.

That's my brief update from Blackberry...

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

A New Mobile Test

2009-09-28T08:39:00.001-05:00

I'm working out a new idea with the Blackberry here...
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Mobil Blogging

2009-09-23T05:05:00.001-05:00

So I'm trying out a new feature of Blogger which should allow me to send an email to an address and have it wind up on my blog. If this works the way I'd like it to, I may be blogging a lot more than I have been...
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Blackberry

2009-09-22T21:32:00.002-05:00

So September is more than half gone and I haven't been blogging as much as I'd like to, and there's been a fair amount going on technologically speaking for me.

The newest thing going on right now is that I'm a Blackberry user now. How I came to be one is a bit of a story. Most of mine are. But I've just gotten turned onto this thing on Saturday, so it's still very new to me. Typing on it hasn't been nearly as challenging as I expected it to be, and after a few days, I'm starting to develop a little bit of comfort in using the little device.

I'm learning to facebook on it, and e-mail and things like that, and using the data stuff much more than I thought I would to be honest.

So it's a fun little device, and potentially a very useful little device that needs a lot more of me getting used to it, but you know, I think there's some thing too this. i wonder why it took so long to catch on? :-)

Actually, I know much of the reason for that but I'm not going to get into it in this post. For now, I'm only going to say that I have a positive impression of the little device, but I've got a lot to learn...

Puny

2009-09-13T23:18:00.002-05:00

A week or two ago I was leaving my apartment and beside the dumpster was an older looking computer. The case appeared to be in tact, and it looked clean enough to make me want to stop. Upon closer examination I found a video cord attached to the PC with a connector that had been cross threaded. Apparently too difficult to take out, who ever had the machine snipped the cord and tossed the box.

Well with a pair of pliers and minimal effort that cord came off and I took it to work with me and fired it up and I gotta be truthful now, it took me a little bit by surprise. There were registry errors on the 9 gig windows 98 hard drive, and it only had 64 megs of ram on that Celerlon 433, but it booted!

Undaunted by the fact that Windows wouldn't load, I threw in my favorite Ubuntu CD and then within a couple of hours, *poof* out pops the CD and the next mighty wonder is born.

I added ram and brought him up to 256. It's actually Xubuntu, which I'd better very very clear about if H.L. Miller is reading my post tonight.

But I took it into work and it's currently been running for over 13 days in the corner of my cubicle. I want to see how long it will stay up.

Blogging

2009-08-25T09:19:00.002-05:00

There are a couple of different blogs that I write on that each use different software to manage them. This blog of course is managed by Blogger, the other one I blog on a lot is managed by Word Press.

Between the two software packages, I think that Blogger is much more straight forward. The layout and templates in Word Press seem very difficult to manage to me. One particular thing that I struggle with is when I'm posting and I end a paragraph, it looks right in the editor, but comes out without the break when it's posted.

I've tried a few different templates with no apparent change in functionality, but there's some additional playing that I want to do with it. But as I was stewing about it this morning, I thought, well, this is one reason why I try different things, and I thought that someone else may have encountered something similar and that there may either be a quick fix, or someone may be having a similar experience. That's one of the points of this particular blog, so I thought I'd put it up.

Jalbum

2009-08-23T22:43:00.003-05:00

I found a piece of software that I wanted to mention here incase anyone else has a need to do a photo album on line. It's called Jalbum, and if you Google it you'll find it quickly enough. I have a domain that I've registered so I can work with a couple of ideas and solutions related to platform independence. Nothing that's ready to be posted about yet, mostly like a work shop, or a place to try things out. Anyway, for the time being, the web site is mostly a photo album, and the software that was used to create the album is called Jalbum.

It's a very nice solution when it comes to doing photo albums. It's easy to use, it lets you import and caption photos, and you can FTP either to a web site of theirs, or to your own domain which is useful. What I do with it is pretty basic, but since this is a blog about what I'm doing with computers at any given point in time, I thought I'd post this. I hadn't had a need to do something like this before. Captioning photos was a big one for me because when I'd only had a dozen or so images on the web site, I was manually captioning as I put the photos into an HTML document. This is much easier.

One thing that seems a little odd to me, which may not be so odd, it may just be the way this type of software works, but each time an album changes, I have to "re-make" the entire album. This only takes a few moments so it isn't such a big deal, but when you try to FTP it out, for some reason, it seems to work better if you send the whole photo album up instead of just updating changes.

To be fair, I'm using it on a non-Jalbum domain, which may make all the difference in the world, but for what I do, it's easy enough for someone who is more like a network administrator than a graphic designer. But if at some point I find something different that suits my needs better, I'll post about that then.

E-mail Addresses

2009-08-22T22:32:00.002-05:00

There's a contemporary of mine, a trusted friend and respected co-worker who doesn't give himself as much credit as he should. It's one H. L. Miller, and I find his posts refreshing and insightful. He's not been involved with technology as long as I have and because of that, sometimes he challenges the ways I've thought about things for a long time, or he takes things into consideration that haven't occurred to me in years and years. I appreciate and admire his fresh look at things and lack of preconceived ideas about how things should be.

He posted recently on his blog about the use of multiple e-mail addresses, and it's a subject that I've been meaning to post on for some time, so I'll credit him with the inspiration for this post.

I've skirted around the issue of e-mail before, and web based e-mail verses installed clients, but I don't think I've hit on the use of multiple e-mail addresses before.

Really, the use of multiple e-mail addresses is about controlling what goes where, and being able to manage spam. For a long time, I had an e-mail address that could receive as many as 400 pieces of spam per day, and using a variety of e-mail programs like Outlook Express, Mac Mail, and Thunderbird, I was eventually able to manage that fairly effectively, but as that e-mail address went away and I started using others, I began to see how spam was something that the most efficient way for me to deal with spam was not to try to do if from the client side, but to find a web based solution that did an effective job of managing the junk for me. For me, that tool has been Gmail, which does a remarkable job of keeping out the junk, in part because they're using what was formerly Postini, which has long been a favorite spam control tool of mine.

But Gmail isn't the only thing I do to manage spam. Even though I've made it my habit not to give out that address except to friends and family, its been around long enough that it attracts a fair amount of spam. I have other web based accounts that I use when I subscribe to news feeds or something like that, where I know I'm going to generate additional mail. And one account that I consider "disposable" although I've had it for years. It does nothing but collect spam that would otherwise have to go into a "legitimate" in box.

All in all I'm sure I have over a dozen e-mail addresses. I probably only check four to six of them on a regular basis, but it's like opening and closing valves to control the flow of water. If you put a little effort into how the mail comes in, it's a lot easier to manage once it gets here. Imagine if instead of a faucet in the kitchen and one in the bathroom, and one for the laundry, if once a week a truck backed up and put 200 gallons of water in a tank in your living room. Same volume of water, it's just a lot more difficult to deal with. But if you can control it coming in, you'll have a much better time. The same is true of e-mail. It's a little more work on the front side, but it can be tremendously labor saving and worth the effort on the other end, especially when one of those messages gets infected with some form of malware.

So like my compatriot Mr. Miller, I would agree that web based clients, even if slightly less convenient to are safer and better in the long term. I hope to be able to speak soon on premium spam solutions and Bayesian filtering next...

Virtual Machines

2009-08-15T07:55:00.002-05:00

I thought I'd provide a brief update on the virtual machines I've been using just recently. On my iMac at home, I use Parallels Desktop and run two virtual machines, one is Windows XP, the other is Ubuntu 8.10 (LTS). The host machine has 2 gigs of RAM and each of the virtual machines has a gig allocated to it mostly for performance, so I don't run a lot of other things when the virtual machines are opened, although I can, and I have, but you can see a difference in performance on the Mac when you run multiple apps and a VM.

The new thing that I'm doing with VMs is that I installed one on my Linux laptop. I've got an older HP nc6230 that has 2 gigs of RAM in it and it runs really, really nicely. It's running Ubuntu 9.04 right now. Whether I'll move to 9.10 next month is something I need to consider a little more carefully than I've considered upgrades in the past, and is probably the subject of another post. I'm using Sun's VirtualBox to manage a Windows XP VM and I really kind of like it.

I'm finding out more and more as I've alluded to in other posts, that it's not really very practical to leave Windows environments all together. There are many things that I still like about Windows, especially Windows XP, although most of the apps that I really like on that platform are open source and have Linux and Mac counterparts, like VLC, Filezilla, KeePassX, and Jalbum among others. But I think if for no other reason than for support purposes, it's useful and important to be able to see what a customer is seeing.

VirtualBox seems to be a nice VM manager especially in Linux. I haven't use it on other platforms yet. I had one issued where Windows XP blue screened during installation from a CD, but I just mounted the iso and installed from there and went on with no errors or problems. Typically when I want to run VMs in Windows I use Microsoft's VPC which is free, on Mac I use Parallels which I like a LOT. Sometimes with VirtualBox I can't mount USB devices the way I'd like to, and that very well may be something I just need to learn how to do properly, it may not be an issue with the software at all.

So three different VM managers for three different platforms and all of them are fairly straight forward and pretty easy to use.

I think that it's important to be familiar with various environments. Who knows what the future holds? With Moblin, and Android, and Windows, Macs, Linux, and all the various combinations of hardware and software you can come up with, I think that we're nearing the point where there won't be a single dominant OS and hardware platform as there has been with Windows and PCs for years. And as someone who supports end users, I think that as these various hardware and software platforms emerge there's going to be a lot of benefit to knowing different ones of these.

There's a principal here as well though, it's not just knowing the specific platform but being familiar enough with different platforms that you can adapt to the changing environments. Perhaps I'll delve into that more in a future post.

Minimum Config

2009-08-15T07:12:00.002-05:00

It's been an interesting week in my cubicle at work. When the week began I had at least six computers at my desk, and very little work space.

I was working on a Windows XP computer for my brother, I had my old Power Mac G4, my netbook (an Asus Eee 1000HE) my Linux laptop (an HP nc6230) my Windows PC for work and an old Compaq Armada, affectionately dubbed "the craptop" running Debian 5 because the hardware is so old and the Debian kernel is older and has better support for the older hardware. There may have been another computer or two off and on during the week, but that's been the general configuration for some time.

But the G4 went to another location at work, and I got my brothers PC ready to go so as I was considering what was left, I decided to fold up the craptop and use my 6230 in it's place, the netbook is mostly just a mobile device, and it's usually only out so I can show it to people so recently it's been staying in it's bag, so I'm down to two computers primarily, the 6230 and my Windows machine.

I do this from time to time. What generally happens is I get into what I call a minimum config (which is sort of a joke with me based on something we do at work) then over the course of time, more and more computers migrate to my desk and the whole cycle will repeat itself.

I really enjoy it when I'm in a minimum config. I think for one thing, I find it less confusing. One of the guys I work with Synergizes four computers on the corporate network, he's got a dual monitor on the bottom with one on top, and a laptop to the right of that, then he often runs with a 5th computer, a netbook, on the left of that, and as cool as that is, I find it very "busy" and I can't focus on all that's going on. In my minimum config, I primarily use my Windows PC for e-mail, our ticketing app and chat, for all that I do in routers, I use the 6230 with a few Linux terminals opened up (actually one window and three tabs) and a browser that watches our whiteboards and has Gmail.

It's a very simple setup, no Synergy or anything like that. Very easy to manage, and it seems to fit with my motif of portability. It'd be very easy to pick up and move to another desk if I had to which I hope I won't be doing any time soon. But I just wanted to provide a little update about what's been happening with computers recently. Not much has changed with computers at home. I'm still using the iMac, and the only virtual machines I'm running are an Ubuntu 8.10 (LTS) and a Windows XP machine. More on those in a future post.

Just Lately

2009-08-04T23:54:00.002-05:00

Just lately, I've been making a few subtle changes in the way I do mobile computing, which I remain convinced will be in the next three to five years, cloud computing. I recently acquired an 16 gig flash drive (one of the new San Disk Cruzers) and I've finally found a flash drive that will do everything I currently want a flash drive to do. It's big enough that I don't have to pear down on the .iso files I like to have with me, as well as a couple of pieces of software that I install and put on on computers for other people, plus my personal portal with as many tech notes and screen helpers as I need. It's nice to have that all in one place finally and to be able to carry it from place to place with me.

It's not the 4 gig cruzer I'd been carrying around, but one of the lighter plastic kind, and I think I like it a bit better actually, although that Cruzer Titanium attracted a lot of attention, this is lighter and I don't feel it so much pulling around my neck.

I still use it with Portable Apps, and still do everything I always did, it just seems more convenient to have it all in one package. The iso files were big for me, I didn't always have the ability to cary them with me and I'm pretty happy with the setup of the flash drive.

I've got my own domain now, and have been playing with that a little bit over the past few weeks. In previous posts I've mentioned that a good experience in the cloud begins with a good secure portal which is kind of what I hope to build in the coming months. I'm not sure what shape that's going to take yet, but Google Apps will be the first thing I look of course, and I've found a couple of other nice tools lately that will be useful, so there's lots to do, and lots to lear. I look forward to it all.

Cloud Computing Follow Up

2009-07-19T20:23:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I made a post about cloud computing to which a friend of mine simply responded:

WHAT???

Too often I assume that no one reads my posts, and they only serve as a historical record for me to look back on and see what I was thinking at some given point in time, I'm grateful for the splash of cold water. Thanks, my friend.

So now, with no pre-suppositions, I'll explain as briefly as I can, computing in the cloud.

Here's the first thing you need to know... On network maps the internet is usually represented as a cloud, so in some technical circles, when we speak of the internet, we speak of "The Cloud". I think this is mostly because we think it sounds cool.

Armed with that piece of knowledge we can move on. Speaking very generally, whenever your computer uses an application like e-mail (Outlook Express) or a word processor or something like that, it stores information on the computer. It downloads the e-mails onto your computer or saves your document or picture onto your computer.

Simply stated, computing in the cloud is when your data, (your e-mails, documents, pictures and so forth) are stored on the internet someplace, or "in the cloud" instead of on your computer. This means that where ever you have an internet connection, you should have access to your e-mails and things, regardless of which computer you are using.

That's really all there is to it, it's where you store your stuff and where you access it from, but we like to make it sound much more complicated than that. We call it job security.

The Key To Cloud Computing

2009-07-18T20:42:00.002-05:00

The more I read and the more I learn about computing in the cloud, the more I become convinced that the key to the whole operation is a good portal. This is still a relatively new idea to me, and I'm still working out exactly what that means to me, but I think that tools like the Google apps (email, docs, calendars, reader, etc...) is key. And I mean similar types of things, not necessarily those apps in particular, although those are the apps I'm using mostly. But having a good set of tools, easily accessible, through one main interface is extremely important.

This is one reason that Google's Chrome is something of particular interest to me. I've long felt that operating environments like Windows are bloated and tend to require too many resources of the host box to provide the services that they do. And as someone who cut his teeth in mainframe environments when we were still using IMB 3270 terminals, not terminal emulation software, it's interesting to me to see the potential for a shift back to something that resembles a more mainframe based model (although I understand, the models are completely different, it's the principal I'm referring to...) where apps and data are stored in the cloud and the computers we use act as terminals to access the data. The information can be accessed from anyplace where there's access to the network.

With the prevalence of proliferation of broadband internet access, and the advent of services like Microsoft Windows Live, Adobe's Acrobat.com, all of Google's apps and a number of other services, I can't help but believe this will be a trend that we see continuing.

I'm looking forward to seeing how it changes as it continues...

Google Reader

2009-06-21T13:20:00.002-05:00

So I'm probably behind the curve on this one, but I've just discovered Google Reader and I have no idea why it took me so long to discover it.

It's another RSS feed reader, and there are a number of them out there, I've just never really been that interested until I found out that it would work in conjunction with Google Gears to make information available off line. But it's very easy to use, and like most of the other free pieces of software I've been working with recently, it's from Google, which I addressed briefly in my previous post.

It's a great way to get a lot of information into one place so it can be gone through quickly. It's much quicker than going through web sites one at a time and sorting through the information that's on them.

I'll be working with it on a few different computers and platforms in the coming weeks, but I figured since I was new to this software, perhaps others were as well.

Google Toys

2009-06-21T07:18:00.002-05:00

I've recently learned about something called Google Gears which as I understand it is supposed to be a browser plug in that makes it possible to do of line reading of things like Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Docs. I've downloaded and installed it on the Mini 9 (which I now consider to be my "mobile" netbook unless I'm going to need extended battery time and then I'll use the Eee) and on the iMac, but on both of those computers when I go into manage add ons in Firefox the the preferences button is grayed out. I'm obviously doing something wrong, but thing this could be a really valuable feature. Especially as it relates to mobility.

The one thing that I don't care for, and I don't know why I'm apprehensive about it, is all the cool Google apps that are out there and all the great stuff they give away for free. I always feel like I'm looking over my shoulder waiting for them to make it a subscription service or something like that after everybody has gotten so entrenched in it that they can't get away from it. To be fair to Google, I've never seen any indication that this is the case, I'm just being paranoid I think.

But I'm looking forward to figuring out Google Gears if it's something that assists mobilists everywhere, and I'll be sure to post back here if I figure it out.

Netbooks

2009-06-19T21:56:00.002-05:00

Based on the previous post, you'll know that I'm getting very used to the Mini 9, and even the keyboard, although the tilde and the vertical pipe are still very difficult to get used to. The apostrophe I'm actually beginning to cope with fairly well. If I think about what I'm typing, it's not really that bad. I've been trying to use it more than the Little Eee just to try to get used to it, and this afternoon, I even caught myself on the Little Eee with the third finger on my right hand going down to the level of the space bar for the apostrophe!

I find the feel of the keyboard on the Mini to be nicer than that of the Eee although the layout isn't near so nice, the screen of course is it's shining point. I really find myself wishing the processor were an Atom N280 and that it had 2 gigs of RAM. Sometimes it gets to lagging pretty good, and I don't know if that's the processor, the memory or the SSD that causes it. The size is really nice too, but yesterday at work, I started both netbooks with full batteries and ran them beside each other till they died. Mini went almost exactly 3 hours with it's three cell battery, Eee went almost exactley 5 with it's six cell.

So there are pluses and minuses to each machine. If I could only have one netbook, I'm still confident it would be the 1000he, butthey each fill a niche for me, and each has a unique roll.

HTML work is a bit difficult without my full sized laptop, but I'll get used to that I suppose. One thing that I'm REALLY liking is NBR or Netbook Remix, which I'm thinking of putting back on the Eee, but that may be a project for another day.

Just wanted to share some quick thoughts.

More On The Mini

2009-06-13T23:10:00.002-05:00

Well, I'm back from my week as a counselor at summer camp, and when I walked in the door late Friday afternoon, the first thing I did was grab for the Mini 9.

I must say that despite my best efforts, and in spite of it's slower processor, lesser amount of RAM smaller (albeit SSD) hard drive, and that oh so annoying apostrophe key, I'm really liking the Mini 9 a great deal more than I expected to. Much of this I'll attribute to it's very solid feel and that gloriously beautiful screen.

I haven't powered on the Eee yet since I've been back, but I've been forcing myself to use the Mini in hopes that I'll find it such a hideous device I'll be able to give it away or something, but it's really a very clever little device and I'm liking it more and more, the more I use it.

I've been working with it in such a way that I'm typing a lot, just to get used to they keyboard, but that's really the only legitimate beef I've got.

I still think of it as more of a portable device, and I'm not storing anything of value on this machine, but there may come a day when this thing has more RAM and a bigger drive and it may work out that I wind up using it that way, who can tell with me and computers, but it's a pretty interesting little thing.

Know Your Roll

2009-06-07T06:46:00.004-05:00

I've spent the past two day digging seriously into the software installed on the Mini 9 by default and adding a lot of my own customer touches. And I've thought more and more about what roll this machine could fill that none of the computers fill that I'm currently using. Well, as I began to adjustment and tweak, and shape it into something usable for me, a thought kind of emerged, and although it will mean just a bit of an adjustment in the way I work, I think I've found this machines place in the line up. I've kind of figure out what that role is, but there had to be a little pushing and shoving to make room for him in my work style.

Basically, most recently, I'd been a two computer user. A desktop and mobile. When I got my Little Eee, that changed just slightly, I was still using two machines primarily, but I took my laptop to work and used it there and was primarily using iMac as my desktop and Eee as my mobile.

One of the things I've discovered in this little Mini 9 is the perceived notion of home much more portable it is than the Eee, yeah, right. But it kind of seems like a quicker solution, I'm not sure why, but here's the current thinking, which is subject to change because I'm out of the office next week. I'm thinking that Mini 9 has more of a "portable" role, and Little Eee will have more of a "serious" role. And I guess what I mean by that is that if I've got to go somewhere quickly, and throw a machine in the trunk of the car, I wouldn't feel nearly as bad if this one got crunched as I would if my Little Eee got crunched. I think that's mostly because of the storage space although there are other reasons for it as well. But on the 250 gig SATA drive in that machine I store an abundance of .iso files and back up my flash drive onto it regularly, and it would be a very significant loss if that one went away.

Having put that thought to words I seems like I'm saying the Mini 9 is more disposable than the Eee, but that's not what I mean to communicate.

The way that I've got the Mini 9 setup however is a very "portable". I don't store any information on it that's personal, that goes on a flash drive I stick in the machine, and if someone I knew were going away over night and had to have a machine to use, I wouldn't mind giving them this one. It would be discouraging if this one got lost or broken, but it wouldn't be the setback it would be if I lost my little Eee that's for sure.

The Mini 9

2009-06-06T20:46:00.002-05:00

Well, if you seen recent posts you know of my desire to experiment with different distros of Linux. That plan has changed slightly. It had been my intent to try those out on my laptop, but that got traded last week for a Dell Mini 9. How all that came to be is a bit of a story that's beyond the scope of this post, but I have very mixed emotions about it.

It has the Atom N270 processor, and when I got it, it had 512 mb of RAM and Dell's pre-load of Ubuntu. Since I got it, I've upgraded the memory so it has a gig of RAM, and I've put Netbook Remix (NBR) 9.04 on it. I really like NBR on this little device. The screen, for it's 9 inches is one of the most beautiful I've ever looked at, on ANY machine. It's super nice, and the feature to me that makes all the other drawbacks worth putting up with or getting used to.

The keyboard is one of the worse layouts I've ever seen or used. There are no function keys (F1-F12) on top, use of the function keys is done with the use of the Fn key and the home row of keys, a, s, d, f, and so on. That's pretty awkward but I can get used to that. The apostrophe is down next to the space bar on the right side of the keyboard, next to a menu key, and trying to press that takes a LOT of getting used to. I haven't accomplished that yet, although I'm finding out that if I use the third finger on my right hand I can reach it ok if I don't type too quickly. The tilde is also something that you access through the Fn key then the letter w. That's just odd. But if you can get over the layout, the keyboard actually feels pretty nice, I just have a great deal of typos while I'm getting used to it is all.

For the slower processor and the smaller amount of RAM, NBR actually seems to run better on this computer than it does on my 1000he, which surprised me, perhaps it's just that the display is so much nicer that it seems to run better. This little experiment is tempting me to go back and try NBR on my 1000he, but that may not happen any time soon.

Anyway, it took me two serious days of tweaking, but only 1 installation, and I've gotten the installation down to 1.9 gig, leaving 1.3 free of the 3.3 available to Ubuntu after partitioning and giving 211 mb to the swap partition. It's installed using ext3. It had been my intent to use ext4, but for a variety of reasons, I did something of a default installation, then took out all the stuff I won't be using and added some of my favorite apps, which may be another good post some day, but on this one I took off OpenOffice and am just running with Abiword for the word processor. I've customized the default NBR layout pretty heavily, not as far as looks of functionality, but just icon placement and streamlining. I've actually gotten to a place where I think it's pretty attractive, and almost functional as something more than a toy. It looks nice and works fairly well, and I can't complain about that really.

Synergized

2009-05-25T10:36:00.003-05:00

Just recently I've kind of discovered that I've been using both my Eee and my iMac together a lot of the time. Usually I put the Little Eee in front of the iMac, because with the large white space on the bottom of the iMac, the Little Eee almost has enough clearance that it doesn't interfere with the screen on the iMac. Usually, I move it forward just slightly more than is comfortable and push the lid open to a viewing angle that is just slightly greater than what I like, and this has worked very well.

This morning however, I wanted to be able to share information from one computer to the other, and while that's a different story and one that will be the subject of a different post soon I hope, a little bit different thought occurred to me while I was considering that, and I've Synergized.

The configuration was just a little bit of a trick to figure out, not all that bad. It has mostly to deal with host names but after a very short time, I got the config file on the iMac to look like this:

section: screens
imac.local:
eee:
end

section: links
imac.local:
down = eee
eee:
up = imac.local
end

And that was all there was to it! Next, I put a large book under the iMac so that it elevated it about two inches and put the Eee in front of it at a desired viewing angle and all works very well. Here's how it looks...

Thoughts on Knoppix

2009-05-18T10:14:00.002-05:00

This morning when I came in to work, instead of firing up my laptop with Ubuntu 9.04 on it, I'd put in the Knoppix 6.0 CD and run like so I could check it out.

Things went very well for the first couple of hours. I was especially impressed with the support for 3D graphics, the eye candy worked quite nicely even running off of a CD. The default browser worked well enough, I didn't check but I think it was Conquerer.

There were two issues I ran into that for me were show stoppers. First, I wasn't able to telnet by default. I could ssh into another Linux box here at work, but to try to telnet into into a modem which is a regular part of my job, it wouldn't fly.

While I was trying to find a suitable work around however, the machine froze up. I only had a terminal and a web browser up at the time, and the machine has 2 gigs of RAM, so I don't expect this was a resource issue, but it's difficult to say. I left it sit there for a good 10 minutes before I needed the machine again and so booted back to my Ubuntu HD installation and ran from there.

I hope to give Knoppix a more serious evaluation in the future, I've always heard good things about it, and I can't with a clear conscience say that this was the fault of the distro, it may well have been an issue with the laptop, but I wanted to share this experience anyway.

Stability vs. Cutting Edge

2009-05-16T20:55:00.004-05:00

I have a lot of fun playing with Linux. I enjoy a lot of different distros, and don't claim to know anything about any of them to be honest. The one I use the most is Ubuntu, but I picked up a European Linux magazine a couple of weeks back and one thing I noticed is that they talk a lot about just about every distro except Ubuntu. This has prompted me to start playing a little bit more and I'm expanding the breadth of my knowledge if not the depth, but I'm having a lot of fun with it.

One of the things I've discovered in the course of my playing around, is that I may not be ready for releases of Ubuntu the day they come out because I don't know it well enough to troubleshoot it properly. Shortly after I installed 9.04, I began to have a weird intermittent problem with wireless connectivity. At first, I was quick to (wrongly) blame Ubuntu. When I went back to a previous release I found I was experiencing the same issue, so current thinking is that there's something wrong with my wireless DSL gateway, which I can't imagine because I've tried two from different manufacturers, or the wireless card in the netbook, which would really be too bad. But I was speaking with someone today that had a few ideas which I had not and I'll be playing with that in the coming days.

But what this has taught me is that on "production" machines, which is to say, machines that I need every day and need machines that need to boot and function reliably, perhaps out there on the bleeding edge isn't the best place for me to be. I think that in the future, I'll be hanging back a release or two and taking a more Debian like approach to things.

But this coming week, the plan is to use a couple of new live CD's in my laptop at work and see if I can actually work off of them, I hope to try out Fedora 10, OpenSUSE 11, and Knoppix 6. I hope to be able to share how that goes later in the week.

Remix, Another Day

2009-05-01T08:13:00.002-05:00

Well, my brief experiment with Netbook Remix is over for the next month or so. There were just so many little quirks that I couldn't quite get right, the favorites issue was a bit one. I'm going to give it a month or six weeks and try again, because to be honest, I like the idea, but there are just a few little hurdles I can't get over right now.

Just to recap my issues...

> The Favorites category on the left I was unable to use, I couldn't drop icons in it as I was supposed to be able to do.

> There is an icon in the tool bar in Firefox that's a heart, which is a different favorite icon than the one listed above, but although I delete that icon, when I restart Firefox it comes back.

> In terminal, which is one of my mainstay applications, I changed the colors and the font, nothing wild here, I just removed the check from the option that said "use system fixed width font" and also on the colors tab the check that said "use colors from system theme", but when I exit terminal, the changes were not saved and next time I opened it up was the very difficult black on white scheme.

When I consider all three of those issues, I wonder if there's not something like a permissions issue on a folder or something that my user couldn't write to. That would account for all of those issues, but I've seen a couple of other issues with either UNR (as it seems to be officially being called) or 9.04 on other machines that make me want to wait another month or so.

In many ways, I wish that Ubuntu would alter their release schedule and do something like a beta in April, and the stable release in October. Perhaps what needs to change is not Ubuntu's release schedule, but my installation schedule...

Remix, Additional Thoughts

2009-04-28T20:59:00.003-05:00

So after a day of working with Netbook Remix, which I'm learning goes by a variety of different names and initials, I'm having mixed emotions.

What I did was took another SATA hard drive that I had around, and put that into the Little Eee so that my previous configuration is preserved. This allowed me to be a little more carefree than I might otherwise have been. One of the things I did in my plowing through this installation like a bull in a china shop, was use the new file system, Ext4, and I'm not quite sure whether it's Jaunty, or Ext4, but the performance does seem to be more than a little bit snappier that on my other hard drive, which I had upgraded to 9.04 but had not put Remix on.

The Remix interface is innovative if I can say it like that. It's interesting, and I think over time I'll come to like it quite a bit if I last that long. I've got more than a couple of little speed bumps that I've encountered, most of which are not show stoppers in and of themselves, and may just be the result of running with a week old OS.

First, there's a Favorites category on the left hand side of the menu and you're supposed to be able to drag icons into it, and it should work, well, like you might expect favorites to. That doesn't work on mine for some reason. The two other little things, are that I can't remove the favorites button from within Firefox from it's tool bar (to be clear I'm talking about two different favorites items here) and when I set up my terminal the way I wanted it and exited, it opened back up in it's default configuration.

I'm kind of wondering if there's not a permissions issue somewhere that's not allowing me to write to a particular part of a profile or something of that nature, but I've posted to the forums, and will be following up in recent days and learning more about it. I will of course continue to post here.

One of the things that I wanted to do here is to force myself outside the box of having a traditional menu type interface, whether it's located on the top or bottom of the screen. I'm not really sure why I feel compelled to try that but I thought it was important for some reason to kind of leave my comfort zone, or at least do something a little less familiar for a while.

More soon!

9.04 Netbook Remix

2009-04-27T23:16:00.002-05:00

So I'm going to endeavor to try something new tomorrow that I'm very excited about. I'm a little apprehensive because traditionally I'm a pretty conservative guy when it comes to computing and work styles. Generally I prefer a menu of some description that's similar in function or style to the start menu in Windows, and I only share that to say that that's the kind of menu that I like, not to advocate Windows necessarily.

So when I first tried Eee Ubuntu, it was with some hesitation that I explored the Netbook Remix interface, and I pretty quickly dismissed in favor of a more conventional menu system.

But last week, Ubuntu 9.04 came out, and I upgraded my Little Eee and I found that, although there wasn't one single "bowl me over" feature, I liked 9.04 well enough to upgrade my laptop, and then installed a virtual machine in Parallels with it.

Well earlier this evening, I found out that the Netbook Remix version of 9.04 was tested on the 1000 series of Eee PC and is supposed to offer greater support for hot keys and so forth, so tomorrow I'm going to jump off the deep end and see whether I can do computing in yet another new way, and keep myself from getting stuck in a rut like I've done so many times before. I'm looking forward to it, I think it's going to be an amazing experiment. I may even try doing Ext4!

A more detailed report will follow...

9.04, First Blush

2009-04-24T21:57:00.002-05:00

So after spending a couple of days at work trying to get Ubuntu 9.04 to download through the corporate firewall, I brought my Little Eee home, and did the upgrade here. It took over four hours on my 10 mb network connection. I'm not quite sure why, I don't think the download itself was that large, but I wanted to share a couple of quick thoughts.

First, considering the time it took, I think it went pretty well, there weren't any errors, nothing blew up or anything like that. My most frequently used apps seem to work well enough, those being Wine (the Windows Emulator), KeePassX and so forth. Wireless still works and so forth, but I'd expect it to, this is released software that's no longer in beta.

I don't notice any dramatic speed differences one way or the other. I'm not sure what all is supposed to be new about it, I should probably look that up, but I'm running Easy Peasy on my Eee and the upgrade didn't seem to balk. I'm not running the Remix interface, I'm not sure if that made a difference or not.

It did disable repositories for Wine and for OpenOffice. I found the updated repository for Wine on their web site, http://www.winehq.org, I haven't looked for the repository for OpenOffice yet.

Anyway, I liked it enough that I'm upgrading my nc6230. Virtual machines will follow.

Conservative Computing

2009-04-21T22:35:00.002-05:00

As I consider recent posts, and things I'm doing, directions I'm going, and things like that, I notice that the longer I work in technology, the more I gravitate towards the center, and away from cutting edge technology, and the more conservative solutions I tend opt for as opposed to new and different and radical.

That's a generalization, because I'm sure getting on the netbook bandwagon in a hurry, but that's just something I've noticed recently. I love watching the Young Guns, some of whom I work with, some of whom are friends in other areas of the country do things I've never done and go places that I've never been as they blaze new trails. And there's one particular gentleman I know who's very new to technology, and he's not constrained by any of our boxes and our "old school" ways of doing things, and it's really very refreshing. He applies technology in ways I never would have imagined it being applied, and it's fun for me to sit back and watch people do new and different things.

Personally, I'm as content with where I am technologically as I've ever been. From the computers I use at home and the computers I travel with to the technology I work with day in and day out. I'm in a good place I think, it's a good observation post to be in.

More On Browsers

2009-04-21T22:19:00.002-05:00

As I've been considering the post that I put up a couple of posts ago, about the article on Browser Wars, I've been giving more and more consideration to that, and I've thought that Firefox really is probably my preferred browser, and that for a couple of reasons, the most important of which is that it really is the only browser currently that is truly cross platform.

This means for me that I can import and export bookmarks more easily, and carry them from one computer to the next more easily. I know that I can import HTML files into bookmarks in other browsers, but the convenience of doing it all in one application and the fact that it's the same whichever platform I'm on make it a very simple task really.

It's going to be interesting to me to see what happens moving forward. I've heard it said, and to be fair, I should call it an unsubstantiated rumor, that most of the developers on Chrome were from Mozilla anyway, and so some have said that Chrome is what Firefox 4 was going to be. But I hear rumblings of Chrome for Apple and Chrome for Linux, of course right now its Windows only, but that's coming they say.

But for me, Firefox represents something a little bit more valuable to me right now then cutting edge technology. It represents stability, security, and TRUE cross platform compatibility. and that makes it one of only three programs I use that do that, the other two are KeePassX and Filezilla.

So while I watch the browser wars with interest. I won't be on the front lines in any of those battles anytime soon I think.

Thoughts On Portability

2009-04-21T21:42:00.002-05:00

Recently, you may recall, I had the opportunity to get back to a Mac. It's a three year old iMac actually that I'm using to write this post, and I simply adore it. When I found out I'd be able to get this there were two things in particular that I was looking forward to, one was iPhoto, the other was Mac Mail.

I enjoy Mac Mail a great deal, and I think it's one of the most elegant pop mail clients I've ever used. But when I first began using that, I had a MacBook, and a .mac account, and that I found made a tremendous difference. The .mac account was a solution that was as elegant as Mac Mail, albeit a little narrow in scope. But I kind of lost interest when .mac became MobileMe, and then I didn't have a MacBook, and mobile computing kind of went in a different direction.

I should preface what I'm about to say by saying that I still think Macs are every bit as elegant as they were when I first got into them, and they've lost none of their glamor for me. I always say they're wonderful if you can afford them, but I can't right now, and so I look for more economical alternatives, like three year old iMacs, and netbooks.

Having said that, because of the way things have gone for me and the way that workstyles have developed over the years, I've found that Mac Mail isn't really the best mail client for me any more, and so that part of the shine has kind of faded on the Mac for me. I'm still a big Mac advocate, although since Mr. Jobs is away attending to medical issues, I'm not completely convinced that good things are happening at Apple, which may be the subject of a different post, and I still encourage people to use them if they can afford them, I find that I'm using mine a great deal differently than I did my MacBook of just a few years ago.

Because of the number of computers I use, and because of the way I work, I'm discovering that web based mail is the most practical solution for me, and the most practical web mail solution is still Gmail.

It scares me a little to say that because I'm a bit leery of putting all my eggs in one basket so to speak, but there are just two (which really boils down to one thing) that's a constant for me whether I'm on a Mac, a Linux box, or in Windows, and that's Gmail, and related Google Apps, (and here's the important part...) in Firefox.

So for the time being, I won't be changing the fact that the majority of what I do is based on a browser, and it looks like, again, for the time being, that Gmail is where most of my chips are stacked. I will say that just because I don't like having all my eggs in one basket, I'm using Hot mail more and more, and they've begun offering some attractive incentives that I think are worth checking out, but Gmail is where I'm at right now.

Web Browsers

2009-04-14T10:18:00.002-05:00

I found a link this morning to a review written by a gentleman named Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a self described Cyber Cynic, about web browsers and what will be happening in 2009. I think his review and analysis is right on the money, so rather than duplicate his effort by providing a review of my own, I wanted to share the link.

Browser Wars

Ubuntu

2009-04-05T21:34:00.003-05:00

Someone had e-mailed me recently and asked if I thought Ubuntu was a good enough OS for general web surfing and e-mail and the like, and I was constrained in my reply by the size of the comment on facebook, so I thought I'd take the time to formulate a more complete answer here.

I should preface by saying these are my observations alone and I do not claim to be an expert, just a mostly proficient user of Ubuntu and an advocate of open source solutions. By the way, I often incorrectly use the names Ubuntu and Linux interchangeably, but really, Ubuntu is to Linux what Mustang is to Ford. Linux is the broader umbrella, Ubuntu is a variant of Linux, a specific kind, more appropriately called a "distro" which is short for distribution. There are a number of popular distros out there, Ubuntu happens to be my favorite and the one I have the most experience with. Again, that's not to say that I'm experienced with it beyond, being a fairly proficient user, but I think my opinion has a fair foundation.

Having said that, the short answer to my question is yes. Linux, specifically of the Ubuntu variety, is a fine OS for web surfing and e-mailing and so forth.

There are many, many advantages I think to using Ubuntu, the first of which is the price, which of course is free. It can be purchased on CD in some retail locations, but that cost is usually very minimal and covers the cost of the CD itself and the process of producing it. It is and should remain a free download as an iso file which can be used to make your own CD.

It generally installs on just about any computer that will run these days. For almost a year, my "main" computers were three P-III 733s. Two had 512 mb of RAM, one has 384 mb and all three of those machines run very acceptably. One of them today has "graduated" to running Ubuntu's parent distro, called Debian, all three are being used in my office, two are production boxes.

More RAM is better of course as are faster processors. Currently I'm running Ubuntu on my netbook which is an Asus 1000HE, that has an Atom N280 dual core processor and 2 gigs of RAM.

Ubuntu today is very similar to Windows in the way it functions. It has a pull down menu and you select the application you want to run from the menu, it's a graphical interface and doesn't require you to work from a command line, although it's command line interface (CLI) is very robust and powerful.

One of the drawbacks to a Linux system is the software that is available. Much of the software that is purchased at retail locations is for use on Windows computers and either doesn't run on Linux or it takes a great effort to make it run. In this instance I specifically say Linux not just Ubuntu because this is not unique to Ubuntu.

Having said that, there are open source alternatives for just about everything you can do on your Windows computer available for download at no cost, and if you take the time to learn just a little about something called package management you can take advantage of a lot the open source community has to offer. Things like OpenOffice which is an alternative to Microsoft Office, and the GIMP (or GNU Image Manipulation Program) which many say rivals Photoshop in image editing. There are a multitude of solutions out there to meet the needs of most people today.

The one thing that I haven't been able to do in Linux is manage iTunes. There are several good media players out there, and many of them will manage an iPod, but there hasn't been a Linux version of iTunes at the time of this writing.

That's really the biggest issue for me and it's not significant enough to keep me away from Linux.

I'll write more on Ubuntu in the coming days, but wanted to get this out there as a place to start.

Virtual Reality

2009-03-31T20:07:00.002-05:00

Some of you know that I've been using a Mac again for the past month or six weeks, and when I went back to a Mac, I updated my version of Parallels Desktop which allows me to run virtual machines on my Mac.

To be honest, I've been so delighted with the way that Parallels runs on my three year old used Mac, that I went a little overboard on the virtual machines, at one point, having I think 12 or 13 installed. Might have only been 11. But a friend of mine was over recently and he made an excellent observation when he said "you could spend a lot of time keeping all of those updated" and I'll tell you what, he couldn't have been more right.

So I've scaled back a bit in the interest of practicality. Windows 7 Beta I simply don't have the horse power to run. Vista is tough enough, but if I give it a gig of ram it seems to do ok. Windows 98 hasn't been supported by Microsoft since June 11, 2006. Although I know it perhaps better than any other version of Windows I've used, sometimes, it's just time to move on, if you know what I mean. Windows XP is one of my favorite two virtual machines, the other is Ubuntu 8.10. I have Ubuntu 7.10 on there just because there were so many changes that were made from 7 to 8 (and even 8.04 ot 8.10) that it's useful to me to have another version of Ubuntu on there.

The other two machines that are currently on there that I'm really getting a kick out of are Fedora 10, and Debian 5, just because they're different and I enjoy running different operating systems so I can play and learn, even though I don't do as much of it as I'd like to.

So I'm down to six now. Two current versions of Windows, two versions of Ubuntu, and two other versions of Linux, which I think rounds out the bunch nicely. And while keeping those six updated is still a chore, but some of them don't require as much attention as others, so it's manageable.

That's the short story on the reality (for me) of virtual machines.

Virtual Machines

2009-03-22T22:09:00.002-05:00

So as I settle back into a Mac, which I'm enjoying a great deal, even if it is three years old, I'd started to play a bit with Parallels Desktop which I use to manage virtual machines. It started out small, an XP machine, an Ubuntu machine, just cause there were things on those platforms that I needed to be able to test. Uh yeah, that's it, to test stuff!

Well XP led to 98, then I found my Vista CD, and downloaded a couple of older distros of Ubuntu, and the next thing I know, I've got 10 virtual machines on my Mac!

But as I've started playing with them more and more, I'm actually discovering that there is some real benefit to having these. For example, two of the machines I installed were Debian 5 and Fedora 10. And the very same week that I installed them, a friend of mine back east asked which of those platforms I preferred based on some tasks he was trying to perform. Based on the fact that I had them both installed, I was able to share from my experience, although I'm not sure whether or not I was helpful to him. The point is, I was able to share a somewhat informed opinion based on my own experience, and not having to relate what I'd heard from other people.

Also last week, Internet Explorer 8 came out, and I was able to test that on two different Windows platforms. Again, I can base an opinion on experience not hearsay (and I should add that I don't say that my opinions are necessarily right or even good, but they are based on my experience).

Anyway, all that to say that I'm beginning to see the very real value in virtual machines, and I'm grateful again for having my Mac so that I can do that kind of messing around.

I got a discount on an upgrade of Parallels from 3 to 4 which was a nice upgrade. USB devices seem to work a lot nicer, and how the devices work between the virtual OS and the Mac is pretty different, but I really don't know enough about Parallels to do a comprehensive review. I didn't use it to it's potential with version 3, I'm only using it slightly more now. But that may be the topic of another post.

Laptop Rebuild

2009-03-17T09:59:00.002-05:00

I had the opportunity recently to reload the OS on my laptop and actually there came a couple of interesting things because of it.

My laptop has for I don't know how long, had a few bad sectors on the hard drive which prevented me from partitioning the drive so that I could dual boot. Recently I found an old copy of the Ultimate Boot CD that I've had laying around, and so I thought I'd check out the utilities available on it. Well my crusty old nc6230 has a Fujitsu hard drive in it, and there are a host of utilities from manufacturers on the CD, one of which was from Fuji.

I ran an intensive scan and it found the bad sectors, and actually offered me the ability to repair them! I did so, then did a low level format and the drive came clean. At that point I was able to use Gparted to partition the drive and so now I've got a very tidy little dual boot with XP and Ubuntu.

What prompted the reload is that things have just been getting slow on the old machine as they will on a tired Windows configuration. It had been over a year since my last reload and the laptop had run the gamut of users in our house and a couple of others as well, but if you've followed this blog you know of my "new" 3 year old iMac. And that brings me to the most interesting (for me) part of the story...

I had found some really cheap ram for my Mac, $23 bucks for a 2 gig stick. So I thought I'd order up 4 gigs. But to make a long story short, the Mac maxes out at 2 gig. So after shuffling ram back and forth between three machines and including a pile of ram from my parts box, what I wound up doing was putting 2 gigs in the mac on two 1 gig sticks so it could utilize the dual channel option. That left me with the two 2 gig sticks I'd purchased, one of them replaced the two 512 mb chips in the laptop, so now it has two gigs as well! This made a BIG difference in performance both in Windows and in Linux and has really breathed new life into the old laptop, for which I'm grateful. I've started using it again more regularly. It's frequently on my desk now at work beside the old GX 110, the old PIII 733 that has so endeared itself to me. The Windows side of the dual boot I'm not using much at all, it remains fairly clean and fast and will generally only be for when the laptop becomes a loaner as it frequently does at church and things, I mostly use the Linux side, and am having a lot of fun with this, as it's the fastest Linux box I've got.

But wait, what happened to the other 2 gig stick you ask? I have a plan for it that I hope to write about next week.

Changes

2009-03-10T23:34:00.002-05:00

Well there's been a lot going on in my little computing world just recently. Most notably I'm back to a Mac as a main computer, and I'm grateful for that. I've still not quite settled in, but that's happening as the days turn into weeks here and things like that.

I've come to like the idea of having a "main machine" or a place to call home, or a launching pad, or whatever the right word is, but it's a nice feeling to have one desktop machine that everything revolves around or is supposed to. But it's a little bit weird too, and it kind of feels like something is going to happen and this isn't going to remain permanent like somebody's computer is going to break or something and I'll have to give this one back. But for the time being I'm enjoying it, and after all, part of the reason for this blog is to track changes, but I hope to be with this machine for a good long time.

I've sold the Little Eee also, in anticipation of upgrading that in the near future, and the other significant change is that finally, after nearly a year, I've been able to dual boot my laptop with Windows and Ubuntu. I'd had some bad sectors on the hard drive and had not been able to partition it to accommodate a dual boot, but recently I found an old .iso of The Ultimate Boot CD, which contained utilities from every manufacturer of hard drives I personally have ever seen. Anyway, I was able to use the Fujitsu utility to actually repair the bad sectors, then I was able to partition properly! So I spent much of the day to day while I was on the phone rebuilding that, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

I hope to be able to blog more about specifics soon.

Back To My Mac

2009-03-02T18:22:00.002-06:00

So I had occasion to pick up a 3 year old 17 in iMac this weekend. It's actually a purchase I've been planning now for a short while, but one of the things that amazed me what how easy it was to transition back to a Mac, and how easy it was to get up and going. The gentleman I got the Mac from put a fresh load of 10.5 on it for me, so it looked and felt as if it were factory fresh. I remembered fondly the first experience I had getting a Mac on the internet, and this was no different. I connected it, turned it on, and the longest part of the whole operation was waiting for it to detect the blue tooth wireless mouse and keyboard, which it did flawlessly after some period of time.

But from walking in the door to being on line wasn't a whole 5 minutes.

Now that I'm back to a Mac however, I'm realizing all the things I started doing that were kind of geared toward Linux, and I'll have to figure out if there are Mac solutions out there also like the ones I've been using for Linux, specifically KeePassX, but I'll get to all of that.

One of the things I was remembering is how much I enjoyed Mac Mail, and I'm kind of sorry now that I'm so wrapped up in web based mail solutions. That's one of the biggest differences between this Mac and my previous Mac, which was a Mac Book.

But I'm very, very happy to be back to a Mac, and I'll look forward to exploring it more and reporting back, if there's anything blog worthy, which there probably isn't.

My Most Important Post So Far

2009-02-24T23:17:00.003-06:00

I'm not your average paranoid geek.

If you read this blog at all you know I work on the internet, and over the years I've seen some pretty amazing things. But you don't have to work on the internet to know that there are some pretty frightening things that go on on line, you just have to turn on the evening news.

Recently, I became aware of a situation that involves some people very dear to me and I wanted to pass it along as a caution to others, just to be on your guard.

I know of a young mother with some unique special interests who belongs to a couple of unique groups on Facebook because of it. One day not long ago, this mother received a friend request from a gentleman overseas, who didn't speak her language and had on his profile that he was interested in local sporting events and charitable organizations. He seemed like the kind of person anyone would like to have for a friend. She'd never seen or heard of him before but assumed the best and never even thought to second guess him or question his motives.

It came about just a few days later that this gentleman had become friends with a young female teenage relative of the mother without her knowledge who lived in a different state. Upon finding this out, the mother thought it odd, and inquired of her teenage relative from another state how it came to be that she was friends with this gentleman. The teenager responded that this gentleman had just sent her a request and she assumed because there was a mutual friend in the young mother in our story that it was ok.

Well to make a long story short, once people started putting the pieces together, both the mother and the teenager took this gentleman off their friends lists, and blocked him as well, but you don't have to think long or hard to come up with a different ending to the story.

I guess my point for this is simply to encourage people to watch their backs. In this case, it was the diligence of the young mother in looking at the profile of her teenage relative in a different state and noticing that he had become friends with her that sent up the red flag.

When I was growing up, my parents always insisted on knowing where I was going, and who I was going to be with and what we'd be doing and it used to bother me so much. Of course, now that I'm a little bit older I appreciate their love and concern.

What I'm saying is that we need to be on our toes here. Parents with children on Facebook or My Space, I'm encouraging you to be on those services too, and be your children's friends, and know who their friends are, and don't be afraid to ask the questions when things don't seem quit right. To the friends I say, no one knows us better than you, and if we watch each other backs and look out when one of us starts a new friendship that seems to have come from way out there somewhere, we may just be better off for it.

Just remember, I'm not your average paranoid geek.

GPT Protective Partition

2009-02-12T05:59:00.003-06:00

I had occasion recently to take an external USB hard drive, which I *though* had been formatted ext3 for use with Linux and try to make it a Windows usable drive again. When I tried for partition it with either gparted, or Windows drive manager, I saw it identified as a GPT Protective Partition. It was a bit of a pain to deal with, and I got to use a Windows tool I'd never heard of before, but here is the very short story of how I got rid of it...

1. From a command prompt in XP, run: diskpart
2. list disk
3. select disk # (the number from the list)
4. clean
5. Then run: compmgmt.msc and select Disk Management
6. Right click on the disk, and select Initialize Disk
7. Right click on the Unallocated space and select “New Partition…”

This is really abbreviated, but give you the idea.

Computer Update

2009-02-12T05:43:00.002-06:00

Just a quick post on a couple of little updates recently on computers in my household. Nothing revelatory here, just keeping with the original intent for this blog, which was to track what I'm doing with computers.

So the P4 2.6 that I'd received recently that I'd hoped to make a server out of is now my wife's Windows box. If I hadn't shared about this, I'd been using it as a Linux desktop, but the plan is March a friend of mine is upgrading his Mac, and I'll be getting his 3 year old 17 inch iMac. It was my thought at that point to put the Linux box in service as a family file server.

But the PIII 733 Dell Optiplex GX110 which had been serving my wife was having problems, and to be honest, probably wasn't as powerful as a Windows box really *should* be, especially given some of the web design stuff that she does. So, when that box got to the point where it wasn't working properly, I pulled the second hard drive from the Linux box and put Windows on it, and now it's doing it's duty as a Windows box at my wife's desk.

Here's something that's kind of fun...

I took the old Linux hard drive out of P4 and plugged it into the tired old GX 110. I was pretty amazed when it booted without so much as an error message, and even adjusted itself to the older lower screen resolution then just ran like it always had. That was pretty amazing to me. So I think I'll take that box to work with me and put it in service there.

So what am I doing for a computer having re-deployed my Linux box? I'm using my Windows based laptop! I'm back to the old HP nc6230, although I'm thinking it probably needs to be reloaded also, it's kind of dragging just lately especially for a machine with two gigs of ran. I've got it dual headed with a little 15 inch flat panel that I picked up from a friend, it's connected with my two external hard drives, via a powered USB hub, and is propped up on bottle caps. It's not especially portable right now, although it could move on pretty short notice. For mobility's sake, I'm still with Little Eee, although it would delight me beyond words to upgrade that little guy to a 901, but that may be a different post...

Facebook on the Eee

2009-01-25T17:09:00.002-06:00

Just a quick note about a cool trick I learned earlier from a member of the Easy Peasy group on Facebook. If you go to http://m.facebook.com you can get to their mobile site, which is more or less the regular web site, sans pictures and advertisements. It's mostly text based and is designed for mobile phones, BUT... it works really nicely on the Little Eee 701, and actually makes it pretty usable.

That's all I had for today. I wanted to get this tidbit up because I've got a friend who recently had the opportunity to pick up a little 701 himself, and he's going to be looking at what I've had to share here.

Slightly Off Topic

2009-01-23T22:57:00.002-06:00

This post may be just slightly off topic, but maybe not as much as I'd thought, because while the name of the blog is Portability and Platform Independence, this post has to do with a particular computer. But actually, since it's my "new" Linux box, I guess I could stretch and say that's platform independence.

Anyway, a friend at work recently built a new computer for a parent who's old computer had been slowing down over the course of the past year or so. He delivered the new one to them, and recovered the old one to bring back home. Well, long story short, he wound up giving it to me, and I've turned it into my new Linux box.

It's a Dell Dimension 4550, with a 2.6 ghz P4 processor! It didn't have as much RAM as a Windows XP box should have, but I had a bit laying around and I must say, it's the fastest Linux box I've ever run. Historically, I've used Linux on processors that are at least a generation old, but this one runs really, really nicely. I would like to add a bit more RAM and max it out at 1 gig, it's got an 80 gig HD in it and a DVD player, I added a second HD which is only 60 gigs and a CD burner. At some point in the future, I hope to take that 60 gig drive and make it my home partition.

But for now, it's running really, really nicely, and I'm convinced it's going to work out very well, although it took me about six installations to get it installed the way I want it to be. (Not so I sound completely incompetent, I actually had two CD's both my Ubuntu 8.10 cds, the live and the alternat install that were corrupt if you can imagine that...)

My "long term" plan for this computer (as much as there's a long term plan for any computer staying in my pile) is to try not to have to change the configuration so much. I'd like to run with a stable machine for a while and make an effort to learn more about Ubuntu other than how to install it, which by this time I'm getting very familiar with.

Anyway, that's the latest technological update from central Iowa.

Gdrive

2009-01-20T06:18:00.001-06:00

Here's a pretty interesting article I found on digg.

Google Hard Drives coming in 2009

Although similar things have been tried before, they've never had the clout that Google carries. This is both exciting for me and a cause for caution, which I may comment on at some point later.

Inspiration

2009-01-19T22:11:00.002-06:00

I had occasion tonight when I was writing an e-mail to consider what inspired my interest in mobile computing, or portability, and as I thought about that, I guess what motivated me at least in part was my nine year old daughter. Of course, being the daughter of a computer person, she's been using a computer in one form or another from just about the time she could control a mouse. I'm thinking back now, but I think she was probably using a computer before she could speak completely. But the thing that's interested me especially in very recent years is that it doesn't really matter to her what kind of computer she sits down in front of, whether it's Windows, Mac, or Linux, if she can get to a browser, she can generally get done the things she needs to get done on a computer.

There are a couple of reasons why I think that's the case. First of all, on any of those three platforms, she knows the icon for Mozilla Firefox and once that's opened, the browser functions close enough to the same on all the platforms. The other thing though is that all of the stuff she does, she does on line. Whether it's games, or Gmail or whatever else she may do, which isn't a great deal yet, she does it on line, and that's prompted me a lot to think about computing in the cloud, and about doing things on line that we used to do only on one computer at a time.

I think it'll be interesting to see the impact that computing in the cloud has in the future, especially as we enter the age of the netbook, and I'm curious to see how if and how it changes the face of what we currently know as distributed environments.

It's something to think about anyway.

iPod Music Player

2009-01-18T14:05:00.003-06:00

There are two notable music players for Linux which, when you connect an iPod to the machine they will allow you to play the music that is on the iPod.

Recently, I connected my iPod to iTunes on my Windows machine to update some pod casts, and I found it updating every file on my iPod, which I thought was a little bit odd, but I thought ok. When I connected the iPod to the Little Eee again to play the pod casts, I got a message that the files (on the iPod) had been "updated" to a format which couldn't be played back in the player I was using at the time. I thought that was really odd. This is music I have purchased, from iTunes, it's legal, I wasn't trying to copy it or anything else, simply play it on the system I was using at the time.

As much as I hate to admit it, this caused me to stumble in my generally very high opinion of Apple. If there had been a message that the this update was going to occur and then if it gave me an option, that would have been so much more desirable and understandable, but as far as I can tell, the only thing that's changed is my ability to play them on another player by connecting the iPod to the Linux box.

I don't want to use this blog as a soap box and it's not my intent to rant, but I did want to mention that in case there are others who use Linux boxes to play iTunes. Although I realize that just being one who purchases the music on my iPod makes me unique, wanting to play it back on another system even more so, and the fact that the system I want to play back on is not only Linux, but an Eee, puts me in a category where I'm probably by myself, but hey, you never know.

But besides that, I've finally, and I hope for a long time, come to the point with Little Eee, where I like the configuration a great deal, and hopefully it won't be changing a lot, which means I won't have to post updates here so often about what I'm doing with computers!

squashfs

2009-01-16T14:11:00.001-06:00

As I'm settling in to the Little Eee, and finding just the right niche, and deciding how I like it configured, I'm going through a LOT of rebuilds, which is fine actually, and really is a lot of fun because every time I install I learn something new. I found a utility recently that I've enjoyed a great deal that I wanted to share called squashfs, which is a compression utility for the file system on Linux and it works marvelously on 4 gig SSDs. After a full install of 8.10 with OO 3.0 and all my little tweaks and things, I've got 4.2 gigs free of my original 4 gig!

It's a bit outside my scope here to provide specific instructions on how to do it, but it's not that difficult (or believe me, I couldn't get it done in Ubuntu...) and there are good instructions elsewhere on the internet, but it's a very, very worth while utility. I'd like to try it on a USB flash drive sometime.

A Place For Windows

2009-01-16T13:57:00.000-06:00

As much as I enjoy platform independence, and being able to work in any environment, the fact of the matter is, there are times when certain platforms are appropriate. And as much as I enjoy open source software and being able to be free of Windows, for me this is really more of an economical decision than anything else.

But there are times when Windows is entirely appropriate. For example, when you want to install PortableApps on a flash drive, or you want to install an additional application. Many of these programs are Windows executables, which are difficult if not impossible to install in non-Windows environments. There are other circumstances when it's appropriate to run in Windows environments I'm sure, but I'm running into them less and less these days, one of the most notable is when I get a new Cruzer flash drive and have to remove the U3 software. That too is a Windows executable.

But I've felt slightly guilty with each post I write lauding open source software, knowing that I probably won't have a Windows free network in my home for at least several years, and I thought it would be appropriate to share that.

Netbooks

2009-01-13T12:09:00.003-06:00

A good friend and fellow blogger posted this article first on his blog, but it's so well done that I thought it was worth repeating here. It's one of the best overview articles I've seen on netbooks, and is really worthwhile.

Five Reasons To Seriously Consider A Netbook.

Facebook

2009-01-12T22:44:00.002-06:00

I think this is fairly far outside the scope of this blog, but under the guise of portability, or mobility, I'll include it because it does follow the theme of what I'm doing in computing and the changes I'm making and so forth.

So I've opened an account on Facebook. Prompted in part by what Daniel Lohrmann had to write in his book Virtual Integrity, which is listed in the side bar under recommended resources. I've only been playing with it for a few days now, but I'm not sure I see what all the buzz is about. It's kind of nice to see old friends and things of that nature, and to be able to keep up them currently, but it's also a fair amount of work. I didn't imagine it was going to be near as time consuming as it is.

That's the first blush, I'm sure there'll be more to come on this, but that's what I've though for a few days now. I'm looking for a good tutorial so I can lean a bit more about what it is and what it does exactley. That's another thing that's a little distressing, I've been on line with it now since the weekend I think, and I still haven't quite figured out what it is, and what it's for. I'll be sure to address that moving forward.

Another Eee Update

2009-01-11T06:09:00.002-06:00

Well, after a week of being back to the default OS on Little Eee, I've put Ubuntu back on there. There were several compelling reasons for this. The customer that had called needing help with her Eee, never returned my calls after I moved back to the default OS so I could walk through the same screens she was seeing. Beyond that, having a 2 gig ram chip in the machine and only being able to see (and use) 1 gig was very difficult for me, even though the machine ran fine enough. But the biggest reason, is that, for as as much as I didn't think I did much beyond browsing and doing web based things, I began to realize just how used to it I'd gotten running Ubuntu. I was never able to get Wine to work on the default interface, and if you've read previous posts about portable apps and so forth you know what a big deal that is for me. There's one particular application that I couldn't get to run without Wine (or even with Wine because I think I actually got it installed properly, just couldn't get any apps configured under it), but not being able to use that particular application was the straw that broke the camel's back.

FTP was not something that was easy to do in the default OS, neither was HTML editing. Also, my password vault software I couldn't get running right.

So what have I learned? There are a few things.

The first thought is that I'm glad I keep this blog, because I can go back and see what I thought and why I wanted to do the default OS and why it didn't work out and so forth. I think this will be especially valuable for me moving forward. I hope that someone else can learn from this as well. The other thing that I've learned about is something called EasyPeasy. I can't stand the name, but it's the most worthwhile Linux distro I've seen for a netbook. So much so that I'm going to make that the subject of an upcoming post.

So Little Eee is running Ubuntu again, (8.10 this time!) and I'm pretty happy about it.