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Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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December 09, 2002 - Updates at 0715 EDT
Good morning. Happy Birthday to our little Sally. We brought her home with us a year ago today. That's good enough to count for a birthday in my book. We let her have a sleepover party on the weekend with her friend Ebony. She also got some new food and water bowls (the equivalent, present-wise, to socks or ties, but who's counting). If I get home early enough, we'll go on a nice long walk this afternoon.
Yesterday, I walked Ebony. He's a bigger dog, younger than Sally. So for a while, we went the way Ebony wanted to go. That is, I could have convinced him to go the way I wanted to, but the walk isn't for me, is it? So by the time I was ready to head back... I wasn't quite sure where I was. We're still in the neighborhood (you can tell here by street names, each section starts with but a single letter), but I've never been in this particular batch of streets. I eventually made it back home with Ebony, slightly after dark. We kept the traffic noises from the two main roads on our right side, and avoided the dead end streets, and ended up exactly where I thought we would, at the far end of my street. Woo. Not bad at dusk, but I certainly wasn't planning on a 3 mile hike. I can definitely feel it this morning.
Gryphon, my faithful Acer 600TER laptop, is dying. He stopped responding to external input six times on Saturday, and a couple more times yesterday. By external input, I mean even the power button wasn't any help. I had to take out the battery and the power plug to reset it, each time. So it's time for a new travel box. After a few hours of looking about yesterday afternoon, the best price/performance box I could find appears to be the Compaq Presario 1525us (I'd give you a H-Paq site link, but they're all dynamic now, with session ID's that I don't know how to deconstruct). I can get this for $1600 directly from H-Paq. It looks like I can get it on extra special from BestBuy for $1500, but the site says it isn't available for delivery or pickup. I wonder why it's featured on sale, then?
I can't even come close to those specs for that price at Dell. IBM's site links are all broken because of their site reorg (brilliant, that, eh?), but when I finally found configurable Thinkpads, the same thing applied: Those specs should cost me over $2K. Mmmmm. Any suggestions from the assembled eyes? One thing I might do, if I were to buy the Presario, is to call and special order it, changing out the drive for a 5400 RPM model, which I understand is a big performance boost for the little guys.
I suppose I'd best get the trash out, and get into the office. I've got a client site to be at by 10 or so, and I want to meet with El Jefe before hand. Take it easy.
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December 10, 2002 - Updates at 0715
Good morning. It appeals to my notably sick sense of humor, the crap that goes on in your average mailing list. Person A is thoughtlessly offensive. Person B calls them on their shit, making an effort to be informational rather than insulting. Person A takes said shit-calling personally, disregarding even the remotest possibility that Person B might have had a speck of clue about the matter. Low or high flames result. Bah. Well, I often make great effort not to be Person A. This time it was my great fortune to be Person B. Ah, well. That's what mail filters are for. I just don't get email anymore from people that drop down to personal insults, as this one did. OK, now, on with life...
We have a reasonable possiblity of freezing rain tonight into tomorrow morning. How lucky for us! With temperatures hovering in the mid 40's the last couple of days, the snow has thinned down quite a lot, but there's still a fair coating over most open surfaces. It'll take another couple of warmish days like that to abate most of it.
I have email recommending the Compaq line, dis-recommending the Compaq line, and promoting Toshiba's products. I'll go back over there and have a look this morning. I've also got to call Best Buy and see if they can actually fulfill the deal they're offering. If so, I might have to call the boss and make a decision.
Well, I put more energy than I intended into that first paragraph. Whenever things don't go well, I Monday-morning quarterback myself, trying to see how I could have made the outcome better. But you know what? Sometimes people need to be told they're being thoughtless and rude, even (or especially) if they don't know it. I just wish that my participation in such dialogs didn't bother me as much as it always does. I'm tired again, and I have to leave for work. Y'all have a better day than I'm having, alright?
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December 11, 2002 - Updates at 0807
Good morning. So how can I tell we're having a problem with freezing rain and icy road conditions? I mean, in addition to the news from the traffic reporters and weather people... The rain that's trying to drip off of our patio furniture and backyard trees is forming icicles, and they're growing, slowly. That's not going to be what I call safe driving conditions. Even if I drive well (and I do), I also have to count on the sanity and caution of every driver around me, much more than usual. Thank you, no. So I've emailed my bosses, and certain clients. We'd planned this as an in-case anyway, so the emails are more acknowledgment, than any real news, neh?
There was yet more email last night in my box about a new laptop...
From: Colbeck, Andrew
Subject: Another country heard from
Date: 10 Dec 2002 18:30:28 -0800Hullo.
Brian, here's my advice based on much experience with Compaq laptops: don't.
For 6 years my company has been going back to the same well and buying Presario laptops of various kinds. Only the very old ones are without complaint. They're flimsy, heavy for their purpose, tend to have cruddy WinModem drivers where the full function drivers are only available in their Windows Restore CD, have slow hard drives, sluggish video, and flaky power problems.
On the other side of the fence, we've bought a handful of IBM ThinkPads for senior management and they just work. We've two obvious failures, both of which IBM fixed with a no hassle advance replacement. In the spring of this year we put an embargo on buying the Presario and have only bought ThinkPads and our laptop support quickly dropped in call volume. Money well spent.
My brother-in-law works for Broadcom as a chip geek, and they buy Sony VAIO laptops. He likes his *2* enough that he bought one for his wife; the other brother-in-law followed suit and they're both happy as clams.
It's probably stating the obvious, but you didn't note on your journal that your product selection will be partly skewed by your ability to get your favourite distro running on "Gryphon2".
Andrew 8)
Andrew must have a touch of the second sight...
And in the end, the Vaio won the race. I got a GRV550 this very afternoon. Gentoo is 1/2 installed on it now, booting and installing all the GUI stuff as I write (and on to sleep), it should be ready in the morning. Woo hoo!!! Thanks for the input/validation.
That was last night, as was this pair of pictures. On the left, you can see the old Gryphon, my trusty Acer Travelmate TER600, struggling mightily to help me rsync my data off onto Goldfinger. He fainted twice in the process, but I managed to revive him each time, and we struggled on. I think he knew that his replacement was waiting in the wings. However, Gryphon Mk. II is possibly big enough to be a lifting body, and therefore doesn't need wings at all! He's a Sony Vaio GRV550, with a 2.4G P4, 512 M of RAM, a 30 G disc, DVD/CDRW drive, many ports, and the biggest Wow of all, a 16" screen. Look at both those pictures, see the cookie box to the right of the laptops in each. That gives you a sense of scale, neh? Now Gm2 (for shorthand, eventually the new Sony will also just be Gryphon) doesn't do 1600x1200. That would have cost me a pretty penny more. But 1280 x 1024 ain't bad, fellas. And this allows for a bigger keyboard, bigger keys, and more of them, which is going to be better for me, once my fingers learn where they all are. I'm just installing the last bits of software on Gm2 right now, and then we'll see what we can see.
I'd best get this posted, and do whatever's next. See y'all later!
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December 12, 2002 - Updates at
Hullo. I've got the new and improved Gryphon up and running with KDE 3.1 rc5 on Gentoo Linux. I'd say that a 24 hour run of compiling and installing software is a pretty good burn-in phase, don't you? Mmmm, I'd link there, but the Gentoo site is down at the moment. Anyway, the new box so far appears stable and ready to get to work, that's a good thing because I'm going to have a busy day today. First to the office, then at least one customer site following that.
I don't know why I didn't have Eric Raymond on my Start page. Perhaps it's just some mental laxity (laxitive?) As usual, I found myself there by following a link, this one from Bob Thompson's post from Monday. This one was on the virtues of phsyical courage. Right on, but I really got sucked into another essay that Eric wrote, entitled Demographics and the Dustbin of History. That's about the state of things in Europe, and contains some strong views as well (Eric's good for that). In that article he links also to Karl Zinsmeister. What I'm interested in is this: from any European readers of this site, if you read the ESR essay and Zinsmeister's, what do you think? Not of the opinions, nor about America (although you're welcome to have your own thoughts and feelings about both, no skin off my nose). What I'm interested in are the facts and figures from which these fellows are drawing their conclusions. Are they right? Are population levels dropping? Is it really that bad over there? What are you doing about it?
OK, now I'm running late, and there may still be ice on some roads, so it'll be slow going. Have a great day!
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December 13, 2002 - Updates at 0707
Happy Friday! I've just started, and already I'm late! Yesterday was a fairly good day. Then, in the evening, I spent significant time working with Greg on trying to the the GL sub-system working on the new and improved Gryphon. Instead we kept finding new and interesting ways to break it. The rendering speed when GL is working is certainly going to be worth it, though. So I'll keep after it. I also worked on the Rekall writeup for Linuxmuse. I'm about halfway through that, because I'm having to learn the product in order to write about it. That includes mail back and forth with Shawn Gordon, president of The Kompany, and reading lots of documentation.
I've got that drive to Rockville in front of me yet this morning, so I'd best be on my way. But before you go, have a look at this email from Svenson about my question yesterday...
From: Jan Swijsen
Subject: crashing
Date: 13 Dec 2002 12:41:06 +0100<quote>
Are they right? Are population levels dropping? Is it really that bad over there? What are you doing about it?
</quote=>Yes. Basically they are right.
Of course from the inside it looks different. When you sit, as passenger, in a train going down a slope you have a lovely view. What you don't see from the inside is that the brakes are defect and the locomotive is missing. All you notice is that things are going fast, with just a few extra vibrations, spilling some of the coke from you tin can. And then someone comes trough your carriage telling you the tarin is going to crash. Of course you laugh it away. because, even if it is true, there is othing you can really do, appart from jumping out (and break a leg or worse aith the speed things are going).
When I say there is nothing we can do I mean there is nothing we can do to effectively stop the train. Even if today suddenly all the correct measures are taken, like fixing the brakes and fitting a good locomotive. It will still take a long time to stop the train. And we don't have that much time left so the best that can happen is that only a few wagons are wrecked in the crash.
Frankly, I think we need the crash. As soon as possible. (I mean before the speed picks up even further)
Regards,
Svenson.
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December 14, 2002 - Updates at 1159
Good morning. I've been awake for a while now, and mucking about with various things, trying to avoid getting to work, I guess. What's working: The new NVidia drivers on Goldfinger, with virtually anything except KDE 3.1rc5. But they are really quite smooth in 3D performance. I've got OpenGL working with the XFree ATI drivers on the new Gryphon, too. The performance isn't even close to comparable with the NVidia here on the workstation - I'm getting about 2200 FPS with glxgears here, and 489 FPS over on the new laptop. What I can't puzzle out is why KDE is so broken with the new drivers. I haven't yet plumbed enough of the depths to figure out which logfile(s) I should be looking at. Over on Gryphon, I heven't gotten audio working properly yet.
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio (rev 02)
That's the pertinent line from the output of lspci. Neither ALSA nor the stock kernel drivers explicitly address this chipset as a supported device. Sound does come out of the speakers, but it's very choppy and broken . . . unless I'm moving the mouse around. That makes the sound smooth. It sounds like an interrupt problem, doesn't it? Googling about a bit informs me that in at least one opinion, this is really an i830M device, and well supported by Alsa. Let me give that a try.
<Bad plinky game show music plays in background for an extended period of time...>
In the process of remodelling my kernel to go back to trying ALSA once again, I decided to go forth and slay the ACPI beast. So I went to the ACPI4Linux page at Sourceforge, pulled down the most recent patch for 2.4.19, and applied it successfully to the Gentoo-Sources kernel tree. That was by no means an assured thing, as the Gentoo Sources are heavily patched to begin with. But when that was done, and I removed kernel sounc configuration (excepting only sound card support, which is set to Module), built, installed and rebooted - poof. Battery monitoring works again. Woo. Now for the ALSA step...
<More plinky music plays...>
And that did the trick. I have a sneaky suspicion that it was actually the ACPI patch, surreptitiously managing the IRQ's properly that made things work right. But ALSA is now running just sweetly, and I'm listening to the Grateful Dead on the laptop in one ear, and Bonnie Raitt in the other ear from the workstation. OK, that's cool.
And now for something completely different. I've returned again and again to the article "Triggering Abrupt Climate Change: Can Global Warming Cause an 'Ice Age'?" by Dr. Robert B. Gagosian, President and Director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. I was first pointed at this article by an email on Dr. Jerry Pournelle's site some time ago. The science seems good, and I haven't found any information to refute either facts or conclusions. The only problem is that climate is a chaotic system, making it difficult to draw correct intuitive conclusions from good data. But it's interesting to me that two radio stations yesterday told me (not personally me, of course) to expect a cold, hard winter. This is a current report, written this year (inferred from data context, there's no date on the document). Sound's like I might be skiing to work sometime soon. Any thoughts?
OK, this is way past due, having been sitting open and jotted in for the better part of three hours as I futzed about. Time to publish. Have a great day!
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December 15, 2002 - Updates at 0900
Good morning. We did the company Christmas party thing last night for Marcia's crew, and it was fun, right up until the drive home. That involved a road closure, a four mile backup, and a detour. We got home at 12:45. Today, there's lots and lots to do, so I'll get to it, and get back here time permitting.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2002 Brian P. Bilbrey.