dwasifar's daily gripe

Have a Mint

15 June 2010, 10:16 pm

Regular readers of my techie posts will recall I had trouble with upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on my primary desktop. Two clean installs failed to work right and I was forced to fall back on upgrading a 9.10 installation in place. This has been bothering me since it happened, and last week I decided to try another way around the problem. I popped in a spare hard drive and installed Linux Mint 9 (Isadora).

Now, this is not exactly abandoning Ubuntu. Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution. New releases of Mint follow Ubuntu releases by a few weeks. The differences are partly cosmetic, and partly philosophical, as Mint includes things that Ubuntu doesn’t include by default, primarily proprietary drivers and media codecs. It also makes some different choices for default applications, as we will see. There are also a few features unique to Mint.

First of all, the burning question. Did Mint 9 install correctly where Ubuntu 10.04 failed? Yes, it did. I got a completely normal installation process, pretty much just like Ubuntu except in shades of green, with a snappy working system at the end of it. So score one for Mint on that.

The first thing you notice about Mint if you’re used to Ubuntu is the theme. Ubuntu abandoned the brown themes in favor of a dark theme with purple background with Lucid, but Mint retains its greens, with dark taskbars and window decorations. This makes it feel kind of like OpenSUSE. The windows use a very simple button style, plainer than Ubuntu, and the buttons are on the right, as apparently no other distro really wants to follow Canonical in moving them to the left. I moved them to the left manually, because all my other systems are Ubuntu right now and I’ve already gotten used to it. The startup sound is different too; a quick ethereal chime rather than the Ubuntu jungle bongos.

Ubuntu gives you panels (taskbars, for you Windows folks) at top and bottom; Mint uses just one at the bottom. They probably figure they can do without the top bar because Mint uses a custom main menu called Mint Menu instead of the standard Gnome main menu, so there is no “Applications Places System” dropdown area taking up panel space. I worked with that for a while and found I didn’t really care for it, so I added the small Gnome menu next to it; one small icon drops down into the traditional Gnome menu divisions. I’m used to using a single panel anyway, at the top, and a dock at the bottom, so I moved Mint’s single panel up to the top and was good to go. The shutdown menu is different too; it is the same as Ubuntu 9.04, with a list of choices (shutdown, restart, suspend, logout, etc) rather than the simple confirmation dialog Ubuntu has been using for the last two releases.

Shortly after installation, Mint presented me with some system update suggestions, and I got a chance to look at Mint’s update manager, which is custom to Mint. Unlike the Ubuntu update-manager, Mint’s manager shows you the available updates rated by priority. It’s nice to know, but I’m not sure what value it has, since most of us just accept the updates when they come.

I did not have to set up the medibuntu repositories and install proprietary codecs; those things were already in place. That’s one step saved from a regular Ubuntu install. I did have to manually choose to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers, though. However, compizconfig-settings-manager was installed already. This should be in Ubuntu, and I don’t know why it’s not; if a distro comes with Compiz enabled, the settings tool should be part of it. Score another point for Mint.

Mint has a few different choices for default apps, as I mentioned. The default IM client is Pidgin, as opposed to Empathy. I know Ubuntu chose Empathy because it integrates better with their notification area, and Empathy looks nicer and more modern (like Adium) but Pidgin is more robust and supports Gaim encryption. I don’t really have a clear preference. Ubuntu’s default mail client is Evolution, and Mint uses Thunderbird. I switched to Evolution a while back because of peculiarities in how Thunderbird formatted outbound mail (it would sometimes remove paragraph breaks on its own, and you couldn’t see the change until you looked at the mail in the Sent folder). Thunderbird 3 may have solved this, but since my mail backups were already in Evolution format, I installed Evolution from Mint’s repos, and ran into the first serious problem.

In Evolution, like every other mail client, unread messages in the list are displayed in bold, and read messages in normal weight. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. In Mint, Evolution displayed all messages in bold, whether read or unread. The statuses were being set correctly, but the font weight wouldn’t change. I struggled with it for a while. It was impossible to get any information about the problem from Google. (Try entering “read messages bold evolution” in Google; most results are about creationism.) So I entered a bug report with the package maintainer and received a swift response telling me they could not reproduce the problem, and asking me to upgrade to a later version. I installed 2.30 from someone’s PPA and that solved the problem; but if 2.28 has this bug, why is it the version in the Mint repos? Minus one for Mint.

Another peeve: Mint annoyingly brands Google results. If you do a Google search, the results page comes back in a modified format, with the Mint logo prominently displayed at the top. This is just bad manners. Removing the Google formatting required downloading someone’s altered google.xml file and copying it into three different locations. Minus one. In fact, minus three. That’s just inexcusable. And for some unknown reason, they changed the config file for cups-pdf (installed by default) so that it dumps the pdf output into the home directory instead of ~/PDF. They also enabled “fortunes” in gnome-terminal, so that every time you open a new terminal window, you get an ASCII penguin with some random saying. Cute but pointless. I edited the configuration to disable it, and changed the color choices for the prompts while I was in there; bright green on off-white is not a very readable color for a system prompt. (But at least they didn’t start you off with white on dark purple background like Lucid does.)

There are some flaws in Ubuntu Lucid that made it into Mint 9 unfixed. For example, the startup and shutdown splash screens get big and ugly once the Nvidia drivers are enabled. This is fixable, sort of, but requires geekery with the grub config files and is mystifying. I’m surprised Ubuntu didn’t catch it, and I’m surprised Mint didn’t fix it after all the complaints when Lucid was first released.

Most other things you would expect to work on Ubuntu work just the same on Mint. I installed my DVD and DVD-A burn scripts from my own online guide, and they work fine. Installing Amarok 1.4 from my own online guide also worked fine, right down to having to manually install a dependency from a Karmic package.

All in all I’d say the Mint experience was pretty much a wash; there were some things that I didn’t need to do on Mint that I’d have had to do in Ubuntu, and other things I needed to fix in Mint that aren’t broken in Ubuntu. But, and this is the key, I got a good working installation to start with, whereas Ubuntu didn’t give me that this time around. So on that basis alone, I’m sticking with Mint for a while.

Filed under Linux.

1 Comment

Wireless router tech support – Linksys vs. D-Link

13 June 2010, 7:57 pm

Recently my Linksys wireless-N router became flaky. It would forget it was a wireless device and stop accepting wireless connections. Sometimes this would solve itself after a while, other times it required a reboot. As a stopgap measure I hooked up a second cheap-ass wireless-G router I had on hand and configured it as an access point with DHCP disabled so it would obtain IPs from the other router. This didn’t solve the problem, really, but it did fix it so I could get a wireless connection without having to drop everything and go reboot the router when things got hinky, which usually happened when I was using the laptop in bed and didn’t want to get up and go do geekery in the basement with the router.

This held me over for a while. But then the Linksys got to the point where it wouldn’t accept new connections at all any more until it was rebooted, so there was no denying it – I needed a new router.

Naturally I wanted the migration to be as clean and easy as possible, so I got another Linksys – an E2000 to replace the failing WRT300N. I looked through the manual online before buying, and everything in the configuration was pretty much the same – all the options available in the old were in the same place in the new. So I thought things would be pretty easy.

Maybe, I thought, I can just back up the configuration on the old one and load it into the new. Nope. That didn’t work. So I set about the process of manually copying all the settings from the old one and about halfway through I hit a snag.

The Linksys routers have a built-in DDNS client. This allows you to use a service like dyndns.com to map a dynamic IP address to internet DNS, so you can host a domain on a dynamic IP. If your internet IP changes, the router knows right away, and it sends an update command to dyndns.com so users on the internet can continue to access your domain without a break. Not all routers do this, of course, but it’s nice to have one that does; otherwise you have to run an app on one of your servers that watches the IP and updates dyndns, which takes longer and generates more traffic. So I prefer to have the router handle it. I have multiple low-traffic domains hosted on a server behind that router, so on the old Linksys I just put them all in the same field, comma-delimited: domain1.com,domain2.com,domain3.com, etc. Dyndns parses the string when they receive it and everything is taken care of. It’s worked fine that way for quite some time.

But the new router wouldn’t accept the comma-delimited string. It would only accept a single domain name in the config field. The setup page looked identical, but didn’t behave the same. So I went to Linksys’ support site and started a support chat.

It took a while for me to rise to the top of the queue, but I eventually got someone who asked me about the problem and seemed to kind of understand it. His first step was to send me a link to the latest firmware. I clicked it and it closed the chat window, ending my support chat prematurely. So I swore a little and then got back in queue. By the time I was at the top of queue again, I had already found the latest firmware on my own, flashed the router with it, and tested the problem area to find it was still behaving the same way.

The second support chat tech also seemed to understand the problem; not at first, but after a little explanation. But before we got that far, he asked me to turn off the ad blocker in my browser and we spent about four minutes before he understood I needed to know whether he meant the browser I was using to talk to him or the browser I was using to configure the new router. So that was a little annoying, but once he had a handle on the problem he excused himself to do some research, and after about five minutes he came back and sorrowfully admitted there was a bug in the firmware of this router. He promised to submit it to the lab so it could be fixed in future releases. I asked if he could recommend another product without the problem. He told me the E3000, next step up in the product line, did not have that problem. I asked him how he could be sure, and he replied that they have all these products online on their own network so they can work with the product directly when helping customers solve config issues. The E1000 and E2000 have this bug, but he tested the E3000 personally and saw that it did not. Pretty neat, actually. I thanked him and we closed chat.

The problem is, if I’d wanted the E3000 for fifty dollars more, I’d have bought that in the first place. But I don’t need the extra functionality of that unit. So I went looking for alternatives and found the D-Link DIR-655. I downloaded the manual and it seemed to do everything the Linksys would do. I decided to try one out and found a unit at a local office supply store. Unfortunately I didn’t stop to read the big sticker the clerk put on the box until I got it home. “15% restocking fee if package is opened.”

Well, crap. Now I can’t try it out without incurring $13.50 in restocking fees if it has the same problem. So I went to D-Link support. They don’t have a support chat. They have something they call a chat, but it’s actually just a bot, and those never help me because I never need support unless it’s a really obscure problem. So I was forced to call them on the phone, and got an offshore tech who seemed to not really understand what I was trying to do. I told him I needed to know, before I opened the box, whether the DDNS field would accept a comma-delimited string of multiple domain names. He thrashed around for an answer for a while and finally told me you can only enter one domain name for DDNS, because each one needs to be separately updated. I already knew that wasn’t the case, and I asked him, are you telling me I can only enter one domain because there’s only one box for it in the setup? He said yes, and I said, okay, clearly we are not communicating; you don’t understand the issue, so please escalate the call.

Before he would escalate the call, he wanted to know the serial number of the router. I’m not giving you that, I told him, because if I do, and the answer turns out it won’t do what I want, then I have to return it to the store, and the next guy who buys it will have support problems if he ever calls you because it will already be registered to me. Amazingly, he seemed to understand this after having it explained only twice, and told me he would escalate the call, and to please hold.

At this point I was disconnected.

So I swore some more and called back. Waited on hold for a while and got another offshored tech who was even less acute than the last. I explained I was being escalated when I was disconnected and asked to be escalated again, but she insisted on trying to solve the problem first, and clearly didn’t have the first clue what I was talking about. “You want to know how to configure DDNS?” “No, I want to know if I can put a comma-delimited string of multiple domain names in the hostname field. Please escalate this call.” We were back and forth with things like that for a little while; she’d say something obviously wrong, I would try to explain it again, and ask her to escalate. Finally she told me she would consult the higher level techs for me and could I please hold. I asked her to escalate the call again and instead she put me on hold to go ask. In about five minutes she came back and said, “The higher level techs say yes, you can change the value of the field.” I asked her, “Do you mean to say you just asked them if that field is editable?” She told me yes, and I said, “Okay, that was not actually the question I asked you. Now, please escalate this call.” She finally decided to do that, and of course then we had to go through the serial number thing all over again.

Finally, after all that, I was put in queue for a tech at the next tier. This took about ten minutes on hold. When I got him I could barely understand him, his accent was so thick, but he glibly informed me the field would accept that kind of string, and we rung off. But by that time I didn’t really trust their answers. So I called the store where I’d bought it – OfficeMax – and talked to a manager. I explained my problem. He said, what exactly are you trying to do? I told him I needed to find out whether the DDNS setup would accept a comma-delimited string of multiple domain names. His response was refreshing. “Yeah, you’re not gonna get that information off the back of the box! If it were someone who came in after a month complaining that their cell phone wouldn’t connect to the router, I’d tell them they should have checked into that before they bought it, but in your case there’s no way to be sure without trying it, so if you need to bring it back within the next couple of days, ask for me and I’ll waive the restocking fee.”

Wow. Actual customer service judgment. I thanked him, opened the box, and went about setting up the router.

As it turned out, the DDNS configuration accepts that string. But it shouldn’t have taken this much effort to find that out. The D-Link is actually more configurable than either Linksys, though the configuration interface is less organized, and it has an annoying requirement to reboot after config changes. So for features and usability I’ll have to say it was a wash between the two. But Linksys’ support experience was definitely superior to D-Link’s. Both of them disconnected me unexpectedly, but the Linksys technicians both eventually understood what I was talking about, whereas two of the three D-Link people never did, and frankly I’m not sure about the third. His answer was right, but he could have been right by accident – after all, it was a yes/no question.

The router seems to be performing well. Time will tell. But I have to say, based on my support experience, I’d still consider Linksys next time even though the product disappointed me this time.

Filed under Linux, Technology.

2 Comments

Knowledge or virtue?

6 June 2010, 11:30 pm

The discussion of the last post turned pretty quickly to the Genesis story, and it’s been making me think about that for a while. I went back and read the opening of Genesis to make sure I wasn’t mixing up what it actually says with what people tend to think it says.

First thing I noticed was that the antecedents get kind of screwy. Sometimes you don’t know who’s talking to who. For instance, when speaking to the serpent, god says: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Whose heel? Adam’s? Eve’s? Their kids? It’s actually interesting to google that phrase and see how various christians explain what this means:

It is a prediction of Jesus defeating Satan.
It is a metaphor for sin tormenting your head and crippling you.
People stomp on snakes.
Eve and the snake had sexual relations.
Good stomps on evil. (My favorite part of the website where I found this: “Hitting a snake on the head is a death blow – seeing its brain is in its head.” Nice to have that spelled out. It also claims a snakebite on the heel is a temporary inconvenience and not fatal.)

Personally, what torments my head is the job of reading some of these explanations. They’re mostly just strings of non sequiturs, expressed with great fervor.

But I digress. Maybe the serpent was intended to be Satan (and most of the christian apologists I found in researching this piece, laity and clergy alike, are pretty sure of it). But the disturbing thing is not what this story says about the serpent; it’s the tree of knowledge thing.

To recap the story: God makes man, and tells him not to eat from the tree or he will die. Then he makes woman, who somehow also gets this keep-off-the-tree message – maybe from god, maybe from Adam, maybe some other way, the book doesn’t say; but she knows it. Then the serpent shows up and says, no, you won’t die, it’ll give you knowledge of good and evil. So they chow down, they get the knowledge, and they immediately cover up.

The first thing you should notice here is that god lied to Adam, and the serpent told the truth. They got knowledge, and didn’t die. So, if the serpent is Satan, then in his very first appearance in the bible he is not “the deceiver” – god is.

The second thing you might note is that once they get knowledge of good and evil, what is the first thing they do? They become ashamed of being naked. Apparently being naked is evil. But if that is so, then why did god make them that way and set things up so that they’d run around sinfully naked forever unless they ate from the tree? Does god get jollies out of this? “Ho ho ho, look at those happy naked idiots! They don’t even know how sinful they’re being!” It’s like watching a dog run into a glass door. There are people who get amusement out of that. I wouldn’t care to associate with them. It’s pretty sad to think that’s the kind of god christians want to have running things. But I digress.

The third and most disturbing thing is the sinfulness of the tree of knowledge itself. There is no getting around this: the bible starts off by unequivocally stating that knowledge is bad. It’s dangerous and sinful and god doesn’t want you to have it. Trust me, says god, you’ll be happier without it. And to drive home the point, when they get some anyway, he punishes everyone from then on.

What an incredibly stupid, damaging premise to hang a religion on. Stay stupid, or risk the wrath of the creator of the universe. What a choice. Makes the lady and the tiger seem like Let’s Make A Deal by comparison. This sets the tone for the repressive, vicious anti-intellectualism christianity is infamous for. Don’t question, don’t think, don’t reason, or we’ll kill you. And we’ll be doing god’s work.

But even if we’re not talking about things like the Inquisition, the effects are still widely felt. For example, it makes possible the kind of brain-hurting crap I endured while googling for the various explanations of the bruise-your-head verse. If you believe knowledge and reason are an impediment to holiness, as the Genesis story makes it seem, then you are free to spew illogical nonsense and call it enlightenment. And the more grip that belief has on you, the less likely you are to be sensible and rational about other things, like politics or money or how to treat your wife and children. Or science. How much of the organized resistance to teaching schoolchildren actual science comes down to the belief that education leads you away from christ? Offhand, I’d say 100%; all of it leads back to that in one way or another. When I say “education,” by the way, I mean actual education, the kind that gets people to reason and think freely, and not “religious education,” which is an oxymoronic doublespeak euphemism for “indoctrination.” Or perhaps “brainwashing” might be a better word.

But again, I digress. The tree of knowledge story in Genesis lays the foundation for a tragic dualism: not mind against body, but rather knowledge against virtue, and we’re still dealing with that silly notion to this day. Show me the American who hasn’t met someone who thinks “ignorance is bliss” is intended as sincere advice, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t get out much. It’s astonishing that here in the 21st century we still tolerate it. Or, conversely, since we do tolerate it, it’s astonishing that the 21st century is any different from the 8th.

Filed under Religion.

14 Comments

It’s magic

31 May 2010, 1:48 am

Howdy again, folks. I suppose I ought to change the name of the blog to something not containing the word “daily,” especially now that I have a new gig occupying a lot of my time. It’s been ten days since I posted. Sorry about that; I hope you’re all still out there.

Today (well, yesterday, technically) my friend and I went walking around the local main-street shops in the next town. One of them turned out to be one of those crystals-and-incense places full of new age hocus pocus. We couldn’t stay in there long, because the incense was chokingly intense (and as a cigar smoker, that’s saying something) but we did poke around long enough to get a good look at the books and stickers and ceremonial daggers (!) and spirit stones and other magic-and-fairy related gewgaws and trinkets. Bumper stickers that say things like “Witches do it in circles” and books about how to get in touch with your inner animal guide or whatnot. And of course, guides to performing magic.

Hm. Magic. I’m going to start by assuming this is not the Arthur C. Clarke magic, the kind that’s actually “sufficiently advanced technology.” No, I’m pretty sure this is the old fashioned idea of magic, wherein you perform a ritual, or cast a spell by speaking a special incantation, and something supernatural happens. The normal laws of cause and effect are then bent in your favor, apparently, so that something (say, for instance, doggerel recited to the empty air) that ordinarily wouldn’t cause something else (for example, good health) actually does cause it, and breaks the ordinary chain of cause and effect that would normally result in the poorer health you would otherwise experience. Do I have that right? I hope so, because sometimes I have a hard time actually explaining back spiritual bullshit.

This is all good fun when it appears in fiction. The Harry Potter stories are witty and entertaining with their alternate world of people who can do things like light a fire by waving a stick and barking “incendio!” (though they still need to explain exactly what advantage this has over a butane lighter). But there is a significant contingent of people who believe – or believe they believe – that these things actually work in real life, in spite of a complete absence of provable evidence. Witchcraft and wizardry are not real, but that doesn’t stop a certain type of person from practicing them anyway.

This tends to piss off christians.

Not all christians, I hasten to note. I have been called to task by commenters for lumping all christians in with the least rational of them. Sometimes that’s appropriate, because in many cases the least rational christians are the ones who actually read their scriptures literally and don’t play fast-and-loose with the bible to make the uncomfortably stupid and scary parts palatable to civilized sensibilities. (They have other reasons for playing fast and loose, but I’ve covered those elsewhere, and I digress.) In this case it’s not appropriate to lump them all together, because I’m pretty sure the bible doesn’t actually say you should deliberately cultivate an inability to distinguish between generally harmless goofballs who have trouble separating fact from fiction (on the one hand) and people who actually want to be evil (on the other). So in this case the christians I’m talking about are the Fred Phelps spittle-spraying variety who try to get Harry Potter removed from the public library and pick fights with store clerks because they don’t want to be served by a non-christian. You know the type.

I think this type of christian fears sorcery not because it’s foolish and clearly doesn’t do anything, but rather because they are afraid it might actually work.

How could anyone believe something so obviously foolish, you might reasonably ask? Well, think a moment. What is prayer, exactly? What are church services? Why, they’re rituals to be performed, and doggerel incantations recited to the empty air, in the expectation that something supernatural will happen in your favor, and the normal laws of cause and effect suspended. In other words, they are exactly what the books in the crystal and incense store promise. They are magic. And it stands to reason that the most rabid christians would feel the most threatened by non-christian “magic,” because they’re the most likely to believe in the reality of their own christian “magic” which differs from the other type mainly in the trivial details of the rituals and the words, not in the actual underlying superstition: say these words and make these motions and speak the name of this imaginary being, and things will happen without physical cause.

So I think those christians who are threatened by the wiccans and other new agers and their books of spells are not angry because they think it’s false; I think they’re angry because they fear it’s true – because if it is, it’s new competition in the magic biz, and we all know how ruthlessly religions pursue monopolies. And, of course, given the with-us-or-agin-us mindset that tends to come along with that kind of christianity, if it’s not the work of Jesus (as decided by them, of course) then it’s the work of the devil. Thus ordinary Harry Potter readers and harmless mud-smeared neo-hippies banging djembe drums around a campfire are transformed in the minds of christians into agents of satan spreading evil magic around, which can only be countered by redoubling the christian magic and encouraging others to do the same (unless, of course, it devolves into physical violence, which happens occasionally, though not as often here as in places like India or Africa, thankfully).

When viewed from outside, the whole thing takes on a bizarrely surreal aspect; one group taking up imaginary weapons to fight against another group, who mostly don’t even know they’re in a battle, and don’t even think their imaginary weapons are weapons at all. Imagine watching, say, a light saber battle in Star Wars before the special effects and sounds were put in, so that you have a bunch of people running around waving sword handles with no blades at each other. That’s what this looks like. Now imagine the actors think they can actually see and use the missing blades. It’s beyond weird. It would be funny if the people doing it weren’t threatening to cripple the secular world for the rest of us in the process, to make things safe for their particular brand of magic. It’s like a gigantic game of Dungeons and Dragons that spills over into the real world – not in the sense that orcs and dragons are roaming the streets, of course, but the tiresome fanboys (christians and new agers alike) are, and they’re almost as bad.

Filed under Culture, Religion.

20 Comments

Sorry it’s slow

21 May 2010, 7:04 pm

I put together a bunch of humorous re-edits of the SMBC webcomic, with the universal punchline “Christ, what an asshole.” I sent a link to Zach Weiner, who writes the comic. He tweeted the link, and he sure has a lot of followers, because my connection’s blitzed right now. So, welcome new arrivals, and sorry for the sluggish site. It’s not usually like this.

Filed under Commentary.

Comment

Google Encrypted Search plugin for Firefox

21 May 2010, 6:02 pm

Google has just made encrypted search available. Basically it’s just like the regular Google search but over a secure https connection so that no one can spy on your searching (in theory, anyway).

Here’s a Google encrypted search plugin for Firefox:

http://www.dwasifar.com/google-encrypted.zip

This plugin puts Google Encrypted search in the drop-down list of quick search engines at the upper right of your Firefox window. Unzip it to your searchplugins folder in your Firefox profile and restart Firefox.

In Linux that folder is usually at /home/[user]/.mozilla/firefox/Profiles/[xxxxxxxx].default/searchplugins. In Windows I think it’s C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[xxxxxxxx].default\searchplugins. If the folder doesn’t exist it’s okay to create it yourself.

Filed under Linux, Technology.

1 Comment

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

20 May 2010, 2:49 pm

Today is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, wherein we strike a quixotic blow for free speech by drawing pictures of Mohammed in spite of muslims telling us we’re not allowed to.

Here’s mine:

I know, I know, an artistic endeavor worthy of Picasso. Or Art Frahm. And it only took three minutes to draw.

Defending freedom of the press is rarely this easy.

Filed under Culture, Politics, Religion.

3 Comments

Yesterday’s laptops, today’s lessons

17 May 2010, 1:08 am

Recently my old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 600m, finally expired. It died on the operating table, as I was trying to repair some physical damage incurred when someone (not me) knocked it off a counter and onto a concrete floor. It survived that drop in working order, but the internal frame was broken, and when I tried to replace it with a frame from a junk computer, well, I must have damaged it in the process, because it never woke up again after being reassembled. Not sure what I did, but it’s not a terrible loss; the machine was six years old, which is about 103 in laptop years, and had seen heavy use through that time. The keys were worn smooth. It had had its life.

Still, I needed a machine to replace it, a knockaround to use in the garage. I didn’t want to buy a new machine, because I’m on a budget right now, so I went to my local used computer emporium and picked up an off-lease Dell Latitude D610 for $200. Yes, I probably overpaid, but I needed it right away, and the machine is literally like new; no scratches on the case, no wear on the keys, everything clean and pristine inside and out. I picked that machine because the D610 came out around the same time as the 600m and uses some of the same components. I knew I could use the same batteries and removable optical drive, for example, and I was pretty sure I could use the same wireless card and display panel.

So of course when I got it home I immediately tore it apart, voiding the 30-day in-store warranty in the process, and did some upgrades. Almost hated to disassemble such a clean used laptop, but some things had to go. The 40GB 5400rpm hard drive with Windows XP on it was the first, replaced with the 600m’s 120GB 7200rpm with Ubuntu Lucid. Then off came the keyboard to get access to the wireless card, replacing the Dell-branded Broadcom with a better-supported Intel wireless card. At that point I put it back together temporarily and started it up, and it booted Lucid flawlessly and connected to my wireless network. But after a reasonable time – about 90 seconds – I decided I couldn’t live with the 1024×768 XGA video resolution, so apart it came again for me to replace the video panel with the one salvaged from the 600m – an SXGA+ 1440×1050 panel. I was a little nervous about doing that but the surgery went fine. Unfortunately I couldn’t swap the RAM into the new machine – the 600m uses DDR and the D610 uses DDR2. So that was it, and I now have all the “upgrades” in place and the machine works nicely. It felt a little funny to put used components in this like-new machine, but the video panel and the hard drive were the newest components of the defunct 600m; the display had been replaced near the end of the three-year warranty, and the hard drive was an aftermarket upgrade around two years ago (the original had been a 30gb 5400). So those parts are not as “used” as they’d appear.

In the process of doing all this, I found out some things about the differences between Dell’s consumer line and their business machines.

The 600m was a “thin and light” consumer grade machine. The D610 was very slightly thicker and a couple of ounces heavier, but the two machines nonetheless bore a striking external resemblance. They were obviously “cousins,” but as I discovered in the teardown, definitely not twins. Taking off the keyboard, you could see that the Latitude’s internal components were a little beefier; a heavier fan, slightly bigger processor heatsink, slightly thicker frame. I didn’t tear it down far enough to get to the security slots but they had to be better than the 600m’s, which were little metal corner blocks attached to the frame with tiny screws. The video panel cable was flat, rather than round like the Inspiron’s, because the heavier components left no room for a round cable; everything was packed in a bit tighter.

Taking off the display assembly, I found the hinge design was sturdier, and held on by two screws at each hinge instead of two on one side and one on the other as in the Inspiron. In the Inspiron the wireless antennas were in the base, at opposing corners, but the Latitude had larger wireless antennas on the top edge of the display assembly, with wires running up the inside of the bezel to them. And I was astonished to find that the back of the display assembly – the “top” when the computer is closed – is metal, not the plastic of the Inspiron. I thought it was painted plastic until I got it apart.

All in all, there was no contest between them. The Latitude was a tougher, tighter, better-built machine all the way down. They look similar until you get them apart, but when you do, the Latitude makes the Inspiron look fragile.

Now, after all this, you may reasonably ask, who cares about a comparative review of six-year-old laptops? They’re complete antiques. No one is shopping for these models any more. All of this is true, and the comparison doesn’t mean much in that regard. But it taught me an important lesson anyway, and that is this:

I will never buy a Dell consumer grade laptop again.

Now that I’ve torn two comparable models down and seen the difference between what they sell to consumers and what they sell to business, I don’t want the compromise. It feels like the business version is the reference and the consumer version is cheapened down. Yes, the consumer products look cooler than the stodgy business designs. But I buy them to use them, not to look at them. And they get better support, too; you don’t automatically wind up talking to some offshored script zombie if you call for tech assistance on machines from the business line. Even not being able to reuse the memory was a benefit, if you want to look at it that way; the DDR2 in the Latitude is faster, and you can feel the benefit when you use it. Why was the Inspiron built to use DDR? Who can say? Maybe the consumer line is where the soon-obsolete technology goes to get used up.

So, assuming I buy another Dell in the future, and don’t bolt to Lenovo because of the way Dell has treated me in the past at times, it will be a Latitude or a Vostro, not a Studio or an Inspiron. Maybe I’ll get ten years out of it instead of six. I know ten years on a laptop sounds a little farfetched, but for Linux users, old hardware gets a longer life – and what the heck, it’s kind of fun to try.

Filed under Technology.

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Isn’t that special

10 May 2010, 1:46 pm

I remember an embarrassing episode from years ago. I was at work, and I noticed a co-worker who seemed to have gotten a little bit of dirt on his face. So I pointed it out. “Hey Pete, you’ve got a smudge on your head. Right there.” He looked at me with that special expression reserved for clueless morons. “It’s Ash Wednesday, you idiot.” And I felt like one. How could I not know it was Ash Wednesday?

Well, a lot of time has gone by since then, and it still occasionally comes to mind. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder why I should have been embarrassed. Would Pete have been embarrassed if it had come out that he didn’t know when Ramadan is? Or the Día de los Muertos? Why should it be upon everyone to know when christian holidays are? Maybe Christmas, because you get days off from work for that. But why should I be ridiculed for not keeping track of someone else’s religious holiday that I don’t observe? But of course it doesn’t work that way. Christians are ignorant of other religions’ holidays, and that’s okay for them, but they tend to expect everyone else to be aware of theirs; not only be aware, but be respectful and help them observe and promote their holidays. Just look at the fuss every winter when retailers instruct their staff to say “happy holidays” instead of “merry christmas.” They’re just trying to be inclusive of everyone. Seems reasonable, right? No, not according to the growing movement of christians who want retailers to flack for their holiday specifically. Everyone has to give christianity priority, apparently.

This came to mind recently when the National Day of Prayer was ruled unconstitutional. Christians can get so accustomed to having everything their way that they are blind to the possibility that other people might not want to share in their self-promotion, and it’s christians who are leading the chorus of manufactured outrage over this. For the record, no one is saying they can’t pray (although to listen to them, you’d think prayer had just been outlawed). All the decision means is that government can’t promote praying. The event has always had a christian flavor; no one thinks the National Day of Prayer was intended to encourage muslims to get in better touch with allah. In practice it has always been a day promoting christian ritual. Is this the proper thing for government to be promoting? Unless you’re a christian dominionist, the answer should obviously be “no,” but somehow that’s not how it works out. Failure to approve of special privileges for christianity is somehow an attack on christianity. Interestingly, the same groups who clamor so loudly about such attacks have no trouble seeing the same logic when it’s applied to, say, civil rights laws, or health insurance. “No special privileges” is practically their mantra – except, of course, when the special privileges are being extended to their group. Then suddenly they’re not special privileges at all, but natural rights of the majority. In fact, when challenged, they often point to other special privileges as justification. How can the National Day of Prayer be unconstitutional, when Christmas is a federal holiday? Maybe we should make Ramadan a federal holiday too, just for the entertainment value of watching the christians have apoplectic fits in the streets.

What is it about religionists that makes them regard people who merely decline to practice or promote their faith as attackers? If I buy a Ford, is that an attack on General Motors? If I don’t keep track of the catholic Smudge-Head Day, why is that somehow shirking my social duty? This same thing is why joke religions like the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn infuriate many christians. They see them as disrespectful, which they are, but it betrays the expectation that their particular beliefs are entitled to special respect. I don’t have any special respect for religion, but conversely, religion doesn’t have any special respect for atheists either. Why should they expect it from me, if I don’t get it from them?

Filed under Religion.

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Ubuntu: Migrating from Grip to Audex

6 May 2010, 9:35 pm

Yesterday I wrote about the odd difficulties I had in moving my main desktop computer from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04. Everything seems to work fine now, except one thing: Grip, for ripping CDs. Regular readers may remember I posted a guide for migrating from Grip to RipperX. I used RipperX for a while, until someone posted a comment about how he’d installed Grip in Karmic. I followed his link and found he’d set up a PPA. I was getting a little annoyed with filename handling in RipperX, so I used the PPA and switched back to Grip.

Now, post-upgrade, I find myself dealing with a weird Grip bug. This happens only on the system I upgraded in place, not on any of the fresh-install boxes, but when I open a CD in Grip, the tracklisting immediately highlights track 5 (or the highest track number if there are fewer than five on the disc) and won’t let me select any other track. If I click on some other track, it jumps back to track 5 as soon as I let go the mouse button. This effectively prevents me from editing track names in Grip.

Under ordinary circumstances I’d probably put more work into figuring out why this happens, but when uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t fix it, and building from source didn’t fix it, I realized it probably wasn’t a smart use of my time to be bug hunting on a package that is no longer maintained. So I decided to once again look for an alternative to Grip and RipperX. I poked around in Synaptic for a while and installed a few things – Ripoff and Asunder, for example – but in each case I found configurability and editability lacking compared to what I was used to with Grip. A little googling turned up a forum post from a user of another distro talking about Audex, and I decided to try that. It turns out to be in the repos, so installing it was as simple as sudo apt-get install audex.

Audex is a KDE4 application, and it has the polished user interface typical of those. You can set up multiple “profiles” for ripping to different formats and compression levels – it comes with several already configured, including .ogg, .flac, .wav, and several different quality levels of .mp3. The profiles are in a convenient drop-down at the top of the window, with the last-used setting remembered. Insert a CD, and it reads the disc and does an online lookup, and populates titles and cover art automatically. You can edit the song titles before starting the rip; discwide data (artist, disc title, genre, and so forth) are also editable from a clickable link below that information.

I went into the preferences section to set it up the way I liked it, and was delighted to find that the “mp3 extreme” profile was already set up almost exactly as I wanted it, using the lame encoder with the –extreme preset. The only change I had to make was a slight alteration in the filename template, and even this was made very clean and understandable, with the template variables automatically inserted by buttons, and examples automatically generated to show the kind of filenames your template would produce. There is the option to automatically produce a playlist in the output directory. It can even embed the album cover art into each file if you want (I unchecked this option, though). All these options are separately configurable for each profile. Very, very nice.

I ripped a couple of CDs to test it. Audex works on the same model as Grip and others; rip first, then encode, so while track 2 is ripping, track 1 is encoding. Behind the scenes it’s using cdparanoia to do the actual rip. Progress bars are provided. It doesn’t write any work files to the final output directory, which is important for me because my output directory is a network share. And it’s fast. I couldn’t understand why it seemed so much faster than Grip and RipperX until I looked at the files in a tag editor and saw that it was using the 64-bit version of the lame encoder.

All in all I’m extremely impressed. Audex does just what I need it to do, cleanly and quickly, with a minimum of fuss, and with a very well-thought-out interface. It’s still not quite as configurable as Grip, but it’s configurable enough. The only thing I’d had Grip doing that Audex couldn’t was create ID3v1 tags – it only creates ID3v2. But I’ve been meaning to ditch the v1 tags anyway; they’re pretty much useless now, so that provided an incentive to get off my butt and find a way to strip all the v1 tags off my files.

I highly recommend Audex. I wish I’d found it sooner.

Filed under Linux.

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