Tag Archives: ethernet

Hot Air

As expected, MacWorld was a big disappointment. The MacBook Air was supposed to be the big “wow” item, but it’s more of a big “meh”. Apple clearly set out to make something comparable to the VAIOs Sony has been selling for years–which is a great idea, as I love small laptops, but in the quest to be thinner than anyone else they introduced a few too many design compromises.No optical drive built in is no big deal; I go weeks between using my Mac’s optical drive. More of a problem is the lack of any Firewire capability, the inability to upgrade the RAM, and the fact that there’s no ethernet unless you carry around a USB ethernet adaptor. And of course, that adaptor will use your only USB port, so better carry a hub too. And cables for your hub.

[Update: It's also no smaller than the regular MacBook; just thinner. So it's not an ultraportable, and no easier to carry around.]

Now, if they had done something like Fujitsu’s P1620 and made it possible to flip the keyboard under and use the device as a tablet, that would have rocked. But as it is, it’s just another laptop, albeit a very thin one; and it’s not really suitable as a primary machine.

So what’s the target market for the MacBook Air? People who want a status symbol, or people who travel an awful lot and need the absolute lightest Mac possible. They also need to be people who can afford a second Mac as a main machine, or people with very light needs. So I really can’t see the Air selling in great quantities. If I were choosing a Mac laptop today, I wouldn’t get one, even if price wasn’t a concern.

I was more interested in what they’re doing with AppleTV. I’ve been thinking for a while that dealing with scratched and scuffed Netflix DVDs is a pain, and I’d rather just rent movies via the Internet. AppleTV is going to offer this as an option. Add in the ability to buy TV shows a la carte, and it’s starting to look pretty tempting.

Of course, there are a couple of problems. The first is that a lot of content isn’t in MPEG-4 format. The iPod would never have been a success if it hadn’t been able to play MP3s and had only worked with MPEG-4 audio; and similarly, if Apple wants the AppleTV to be a success, they need to make it able to play more formats than just MPEG-4.

The second problem is selection. Right now, the movie and TV selection via iTunes doesn’t even come close to Netflix. But give it another year or two, and I think the cable TV and satellite companies are going to be in big trouble.

The economics are simple. I watch 2-3 hours of TV a week, on half a dozen channels. To get those channels, however, I have to buy a bundle of over a hundred channels that I literally never watch. I could buy the shows via iTunes instead, cancel the DirecTV subscription, and save $30 a month. But not this year, not until all the shows I want are available…

The big question will be whether the new AppleTV software can be easily hacked to enable installation of other codecs and playback of non-MPEG-4 content. If so, I may get one. If not, I’ll wait until the content is all available in MPEG-4–which may be a long wait.

LCD DHL IBM JFS KDE USB HID

The excitement started a week or two ago when I discovered that my ThinkPad laptop’s internal cooling fan had stopped working. As soon as I did something graphically intense for more than a minute or two, the system would overheat and perform an emergency shutdown.

Fortunately, I have a backup laptop.

Unfortunately, the backup ThinkPad laptop had also developed a fault. The fluorescent backlight for the display was failing. The screen was a curious reddish-purple color, and very dim—unless I turned the brightness up, in which case the backlight stopped working entirely, and everything went black. It also tended to crap out when the machine got warm.

So, I called the IBM hardware support line. The next day, the DHL truck showed up and I was handed a shipping box. I followed the instructions and shipped the dying-LCD laptop, which I figured was the less usable of the two. I enclosed the appropriate paperwork and a short description of the problem. Then, I went back to writing Java.

One day later, the DHL truck turned up again. It was my laptop, repaired. New LCD, and they also upgraded the BIOS while they were working on it.

Next, I installed Kubuntu on the repaired machine. I switched to Ubuntu back in June 2006, and had gotten used to GNOME. Unfortunately, the GNOME developers had subsequently decided it was a good idea to include the Mono runtime as a required part of gnome-desktop, and Ubuntu had made it a required part of ubuntu-desktop.

For those who don’t know, Mono is controversial. It’s a Novell project, and Novell just signed a deal with Microsoft to get permission to use patented Microsoft technology in Novell’s Linux distribution (SuSE). Mono is a reimplementation of Microsoft’s .NET, and it’s widely believed that Microsoft hold many patents that cover .NET.

One theory is that Microsoft is encouraging people to become dependent on Mono now so that they can suddenly threaten patent infringement suits and cripple desktop Linux later on. That might sound a little paranoid, but remember that Microsoft already funded SCO during their lawsuit alleging intellectual property infringement in Linux, so plenty of people are suspicious.

Anyway, I want no part of anything to do with .NET, so I had been planning to switch back to KDE and use Kubuntu once the next major release came along. But, with a newly repaired machine and the prospect of upheaval anyway, I decided I might as well make the switch now.

The next piece of excitement was when I discovered that Kubuntu doesn’t support ReiserFS. Regardless of whether Hans Reiser turns out to be guilty of murdering his wife, ReiserFS is on the way out, as Reiser’s team had stopped improving it in favor of Reiser4; and unfortunately, Reiser4 hasn’t made it into the Linux kernel.

So, I had to reformat the entire drive. After some research I decided to go with JFS. (Hey, it’s IBM dog food.) I soon had Kubuntu up and running.

Next I had to move my data over. I tried the direct approach, connecting the two laptops via ethernet and transferring my files over that. After a few minutes the first laptop overheated and shut down. Uh-oh.

I had a fairly recent full backup, so I restored that on the Kubuntu system. I then left rsync running overnight, at nice 19, with a bandwidth limit imposed. This got everything up to date slowly enough to avoid overheating.

Installing Java, Eclipse, VMware and IBM’s VPN software was next. Unpleasant, but it was done soon enough. I logged in and swapped the laptops, putting the newly repaired one on the desk and plugging in the external keyboard and trackball via USB.

Which is when things got really ugly.

The symptoms were unsubtle: the arrow keys, Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up and Page Down would all open Ksnapshot every time I pushed one of them. Investigating further with xev revealed that those keys were generating a spurious “release key with keycode 111″ event after each pair of correct events. No “push key with keycode 111″ event was being generated, but that didn’t seem to matter.

I investigated various possible fixes involving xmodmap. I tried unloading the USB HID kernel modules and seeing if X could handle the USB keyboard as an explicit second keyboard. Nothing worked.

Then, as I was staring at the output of lsmod, I had a vague recollection about UHCI and OHCI and EHCI and USB devices and incompatibilities… On a whim, I tried unplugging the keyboard from the USB hub, and plugging it directly into the laptop. Suddenly everything worked.

So it seems there’s some lingering bug in Linux’s USB keyboard support, which is triggered by USB keyboard converters. My guess is that when the keyboard is plugged into the hub, the incoming USB signals are converted to USB 2.0 by the hub, whereas when the keyboard is plugged directly into the laptop everything is done using USB 1.x. Perhaps the buggy module is only used for USB 2.0.

Actually, there’s one last lingering problem… if I type Shift-Insert the system goes insane, launching dozens of Ksnapshot windows. So I think I need to get a genuine USB keyboard. In the mean time, I’m making a mental note not to type shift-insert, which I don’t usually do anyway as most programs recognize the more usual Ctrl-P for paste.

Fun with paper

Got a color laser printer handy? Make Tux!

On an unrelated note, anyone seen a place selling glowing ethernet cables? I’ve seen glowing USB cables, but I don’t need those. What would really be cool and useful would be an ethernet cable that flickered every time it transmitted data.

House stuff

Time Warner turned up yesterday and hooked up the Internet. We now have a nice, reliable high-speed connection again. There seems to be nobody in WiFi range who has a wireless access point; either that or they’re not broadcasting SSIDs. Reception is fabulous throughout the house. The modem and router are in the office, and I have the music server up and running again.

It turned out that Time Warner have some kind of lock on their back-end systems to restrict the allowed set of MAC addresses for cable modems. If your modem isn’t on their approved list and in the MAC range their system knows about, you can’t use it. So, I now have a surplus US Robotics USR6000 cable modem. eBay time…

On the plus side, the Cable Guy tells me that RoadRunner in Austin includes the cable modem in the cost of the service, unlike Comcast who charged an extra monthly rental fee for a modem. We’ll see.

For once I don’t feel too bad about the $40 hook-up fee, as the cable guy had to string coax from pole to pole using a long metal hook and a tall ladder. He says the signal quality is great, and the download speeds certainly seem spiffy–at least 50% better than Comcast for about the same price.

Unfortunately, Time Warner aren’t so reasonable when it comes to TV. To get the essentials–Cartoon Network, Comedy Central and BBC America plus scrolling program guide–we’d have to pay $68.21 a month, plus another $10 for a DVR. Or, $64 a month and put up with decompress/compress artifacts from using the old ReplayTV.

So, we’d already decided DirecTV with TiVo was the way forward. $41.99 plus $4.99 for TiVo, but it records the MPEG stream direct from the satellite to the hard drive so there’s no quality loss, and you can record two shows at once while you watch a third show recorded earlier. Plus, all the channels are digital quality, unlike with cable.

DirecTV presents its own problems, however. To get the full channel lineup for Austin you need two pieces of coax going from the dish to the receiver, and for the TiVo option you need a phone line too.

The phone line thing wasn’t such a problem. I needed a real phone line for the home office anyway, and SBC may be Satan, but they’re cheaper than Verizon. The TiVo could call out on the office line overnight and that would be fine.

So, SBC came out. They also played the game of running wires from pole to pole. Their technician got the phone connection as far as the outside of the house, but then he hit a snag. However he wired things up outside, no phone service inside; and when he put a signal generator into one of the sockets inside, he got signal on all four wires. I’ve wired phone connections, and I know that that ain’t right–the phone signal should end up across exactly 2 wires.

I tracked down the electricians who wired the house. They came out to investigate, and discovered that whichever of their colleagues had done the job had completely botched it. No two sockets downstairs were wired up the same way. In the end, they opened up and rewired every socket. On the plus side, I found out that although the sockets are CAT-3, the wire in the walls is at least CAT-5e. So theoretically at least, I could switch the wall plates to Ethernet one day and switch the entire telephone network to VOIP.

But not today. TiVo needs a real phone line for its modem, and I want to see how reliable the Internet service is before trusting it for my phone calls.

Since the electricians were at the house anyway, I paid them to run a second coax from the living room to the nest of cables on the side of the house, plus another CAT5e phone connection for good measure. To do this they had to drill down from inside the house, because they couldn’t find exactly the right point to drill up from underneath, and obviously nobody wanted to risk drilling up through the beautiful wood floor.

So right now there’s a missing faceplate and some damage to the drywall, but I can patch that up and put in a 4-hole plate, install an RJ-11 and two coax sockets plus a blanking plate, and I’ll have a nice clean DirecTV hookup point exactly where I need it. The DirecTV installer can stick the dish on the roof, run the wires down the side of the house, and hook it all up from outside without having to drill holes in anything or run unsightly cables inside the house. Free installation sounds great, but I’ve seen what happens when free installation involves routing a cable from your living room to the outside world, and it isn’t pretty.

Could I have routed the extra coax myself? Probably, but what I really paid for was not having to spend an hour of my time doing it, and not having to crawl under the house, where there could be poisonous spiders, 6″ centipedes, snakes, or scorpions.

Debian update

I got jigdo running, and downloaded the first two Debian CDs. Successfully installed this time. Somehow it skipped installing the ethernet drivers, and when I tried adding them with dselect inside Gnome or KDE dselect couldn’t see the CD-ROM.

So, I booted in “emergency” mode, and dselect could then see the CD-ROM. Installed etherconf, ran it, it did everything automatically, rebooted one more time, and the machine is on the net.

Sound still doesn’t work, but I’ll worry about that later.

Now I have some annoying program asking me what network configuration I’d like to use every time the machine starts up, where the correct answer is “no network configuration *you* know about, bucko”; I need to get rid of that…

dselect is definitely way better than RPM.

Trip report, day 1

In retrospect, it was my own damn fault. I should have gone for the peppermint. But no, I chose the raspberry Earl Grey, which is apparently full of caffeine. That, combined with worrying about the day to come, meant that I only got around four hours of actual sleep on Saturday night.

Sunday morning, the taxi didn’t quite turn up. In spite of the fact that I had spelled out the street name, somehow the house number had been omitted again. I walked up the street with my cases and got in the taxi.

This was not the usual taxi company. The usual taxi company had been uncontactable, because like an idiot I’d put off calling to arrange a taxi until ten on Saturday night. This taxi looked like it was about thirty years old. There was no traffic on the streets at 07:30, so obviously the driver charged me the standard rate instead of running the meter. I’m sure when I get back and have to sit in traffic, the meter will be running.

I got to the airport, and took a quick look at the queues. There were several hundred IBM people travelling that morning, and it certainly looked like it. I’d read the small print, however, and knew that since I had an e-ticket, I could check in curbside. The queue there only had two people ahead of me. The downside, of course, was having to stand outside in -14C weather, but I was wearing my serious winter coat and hat.

Security was no problem, and I found myself with over an hour before boarding time. Time for food. Time for next problem. The “restaurants” were only serving breakfast food until 11:00, but I’d be on the plane by then, and the cheap-ass bastards at American Airlines didn’t intend to serve any food, even though the flight was over lunchtime. I ended up picking a Burger King “Croissanwich” and “French Toast Sticks” as the most edible and lunch-like option.

I was starting to feel a little cranky by now, so I listened to Bill Hicks’ “Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1” to recalibrate my crankiness meter. While I was doing so, someone bearing a remarkable resemblance to Timmy from South Park arrived in the departure area with his two companions. His vocabulary was more limited than Timmy’s, in that he could only say “Uuuurrrrrrgh”, but he seemed to be compensating by really putting all his energy into it. I wondered if he was going to be sitting next to me on the plane.

As it turned out, he wasn’t. Sitting next to me instead were two teenage girls, students, probably on their way down to Florida for Spring Break. They wanted to sit by the window, which suited me fine, so I swapped seats with them. Eavesdropping on their conversation before takeoff was mind-numbing; it seemed to be all about one of their friends, her fashion faux-pas, and how she’d really let herself go and should ease off on the french fries if she had any respect for herself at all. I amused myself by wondering if they’d be appearing in the next “Girls Gone Wild” video.

The plane looked to be about as old as the taxi. It did take off, however, and once it was airborne I stuck in some earplugs and tried to get some sleep. Lunch was an organic low-fat energy bar, one of the selection I’d brought with me. I’ve been to these events before and know that skipping proper meals is an inevitability, even without the airlines and airports conspiring to keep me hungry.

Several hours of intermittent napping later, the plane touched down in Orlando. As I was leaving, I was amazed to hear the family behind me talking about their pet skunk! I seriously considered trying to get an invite to meet it, but what would you think if some stranger on a plane showed an unnatural obsession with your household pet?

On the plane I’d seen some newspaper headlines about the peace rally in DC. I wished I could have been there. On the bus to the hotel I used the phone to check how CNN and the New York Times were reporting the event.

The Wyndham Palace seems to be a more upscale hotel than the Swan and Dolphin. Unfortunately as Team IBM arrived, all the hotel’s computers crashed. The hotel clearly has some serious failover issues—without the computers online they can’t issue room keys, check people in or out, or do much of anything really. We stood around for quarter of an hour while someone coaxed the Windows server back into life. The salesmen did what salesmen do in that kind of situation, which is find out from the staff what kind of computers they are using, what kind of database, and so on. (Not IBM, happily.)

The room turned out to be a reasonable size. It’s on the 21st floor, and looks out over Epcot. The desk has a Hermann Miller Aeron chair. (Which is comfortable enough, but not worth the outrageous price.) I found what was allegedly an ethernet port, but it didn’t work. The TV remote didn’t work either. I reported the problems and went to find a shuttle bus so I could check in for the conference.

The woman at the front desk told me the shuttle buses were leaving from the Conference Center on level 1. I went to level one and looked around. There were a bunch of signs telling me that the Conference Center was on level 3. I went up to level 3 in the elevator, and found myself back in reception. I repeated the process via a different route, in case I had missed something. Frustrated, I returned to reception. This time, a different woman told me to go to the conference center on level 1. I pointed out that I’d just been to level 1, and the signs there had told me the conference center was on level 3.

At that point, finally, she let me in on the secret. See if you can guess what it is before reading on.

Think you’ve got it? Well, here it is: There are two different level 1s. The level 1 you can get to from reception is the hotel level 1, which isn’t connected to the conference center level 1. You can only move between the two on level 3, which is why the signs direct you there. To add to the amusement value, the conference center wing of the building isn’t shown on the floor plans. She told me how to get there—along two corridors and down some escalators. I did my best to appear grateful rather than angry, and wandered off.

The bus took me to the Swan and Dolphin hotels, where the main conference is. I registered, and was given an attendee badge. So far, so good—except I’m an exhibitor. I asked about this and was directed to an exceptions booth. The woman at the exceptions booth asked me what my pedestal number was for the exhibition hall. I had no idea, as someone else had dealt with all those details, and hadn’t thought to tell me. She checked a list of names, and found that I wasn’t on it. She checked the list of pedestals, and said she couldn’t find ours listed there either.

I was pretty skeptical of this last claim, as I’d seen a photo of the pedestal at the previous iteration of the event, held in Spain last week. I asked if I could at least pick up the uniform shirt we’re supposed to wear. I was told that there was no way I could be given anything, even information. Apparently they must have some major problems with unauthorized people maliciously showing up and demonstrating products.

I checked my watch. I was due at a team meeting with the head of software sales in about 20 minutes, and really didn’t have time to argue. I was also tired, and getting distinctly cranky again.

I picked up two Krispy Kreme donuts on the way to the meeting. One of the advantages of having been to half a dozen previous shows at Disney World is that I know the secret location of the cafeteria that has the cheap food and Krispy Kreme donuts. It really is almost like Mission Impossible—down two unmarked corridors, along a third, I’d never have found it if I hadn’t been desperate for affordable vegetarian food at a previous event.

Damn, those were fine donuts.

The meeting was soon over. The person responsible for arranging the pedestals arrived late and stood around by the door, and tried to run away as soon as possible, but I ran after her and caught her. Before long she’d vouched for me and I’d been issued an Exhibitor badge.

I returned to the Wyndham Palace Hotel, exhausted. I picked a restaurant by the simple method of finding the one that was actually open. It had what was allegedly an Australian outback theme—the waiters were dressed like Steve Irwin, only with full length trousers instead of shorts. The decor was eccentrically inaccurate; I’m pretty sure they don’t have gorillas in the Australian outback. The food was cheaper than Disney, which meant I managed to get my first proper meal of the day and not exceed the IBM per diem expenses limit of $32. The food was pretty good, the bread was fresh, and the butter was shaped like a kangaroo. I took a photo of it.

I returned to my room, crashed into bed, and slept for ten hours.

Scalability

The iSeries team at IBM in Rochester, MN put together a computer with 128GiB of RAM, 24 600MHz PowerPC processors, 5 100baseT ethernet adaptors, and an array of 270 8.5GiB hard drives.

To load it down, they needed 67 more computers to simulate the expected load of 100,000 simultaneous Notes users. Each simulated user sent e-mail to random other users, scrolled through views, opened databases, and so on. Average server response time was 67 msec; during the 6+ hour test, 97% of the mail generated was delivered, and the system didn’t become bogged down.

I’ve often wondered what they do in IBM Rochester, as we’ve driven past a few times. I guess now I know. Me, I just like reading through the numbers and marveling at it all.

Work

I wouldn’t mind the blue tape if it meant that stuff actually got done properly.

However, my stuff wasn’t moved until the afternoon, and of course the guy who handles all the keys only works until 14:45. So I spent the whole of yesterday at home. I came in today to find that they’d put the desk in the office for me, but I had no chair, no shelves, no power, and no network connection. I’m not sure what they imagine I do for the company, but apparently it doesn’t involve computers.

I scavenged a hub and rigged it via uplink and a long ethernet cable to the connection on the other side of the room. Enquiries were made regarding the situation, and I was informed that hubs are now prohibited. Each office gets exactly one network connection, and if you want more—say, because some idiot just moved two people into an office formerly occupied by one—you have to request them specially. It then takes three to seven days to get the additional connections sorted out.

Oh well, I have faster network connectivity at home anyway. When the stupid proprietary VPN system is actually working, that is.

Windows 2000

Windows 2000 is a piece of shit.

I now have a new(er) ThinkPad at work, which will run Windows 2000. People have often said to me “Yes, Windows 95 was awful, and Windows 98 was bad, and Windows ME was flaky, and Windows XP isn’t very good… but Windows 2000 is great. Stable, fast, reliable.”

I took their word for it. Yes, I know, paint the word “SUCKER” on my forehead. Now I’ve had a chance to experience it first hand, I’ve discovered that Windows 2000 is every bit as shitty as Windows 98; it just costs a hell of a lot more.

Let’s start with the bootup. Yes, it boots much faster than Windows 98. Then it sits there saying “Preparing network connections…” for over a minute (I timed it), doing nothing at all. No disk activity, practically no network activity. How long does it take to do a DHCP lookup anyway? It turns out that it’s faster to boot Windows 98 on the old Pentium II machine than it is to boot 2000 on the Pentium III that’s supposedly twice the speed. Crap, really crap.

Plug’n’play. Oh yeah. I have two devices—a PS/2 serial trackball and a 3com ethernet PC card. It took three attepted installs of the drivers, and two system crashes, before Win2K finally gave in and recognized the trackball. Getting the system configured to use the ethernet card was easy in comparison—at least, getting TCP/IP to work was easy. Getting Microsoft file sharing to work… well, I still haven’t. I’m using rsync under Cygwin to copy files. It’s faster than SMB anyway. (56 bytes for a 5MB file—now that’s what I call a low protocol overhead.)

Of course, every single networking configuration change requires a one minute wait while it ‘prepares’ the network connection, followed by a reboot, followed by another one minute wait during bootup. That’s assuming the system doesn’t crash, which it did once. Or spontaneously reboot, which it has done twice while trying to browse local SMB volumes. I think I’ll just stick to rsync. Obviously Microsoft couldn’t write a reliable, fast file transfer protocol if their business depended on it. Fortunately for them, it apparently doesn’t.

Mention of reboots brings me to stability. No more blue screen of death in Windows 2000, they told me. That’s true—it goes straight to the black screen, then the BIOS menu comes up and the boot process begins again. To think I used to think the bomb dialog on the old classic Mac OS was unhelpful! It’s difficult to see how Windows 2000 could suck more in this area. More frequent random reboots? Or perhaps future releases of Windows will randomly scramble the filesystem? I guess the workaround is not to use Microsoft file sharing, as that’s what seems to trigger the reboots.

Reliability? Last bootup web browsing worked, but instant messaging didn’t. This bootup I powered the machine off for ten seconds first, and now they’re both working. Any error messages or explanation? Nope. Windows 2000 just sucks.

Thank goodness I have “Windows 2000 Professional”, and not the crappy amateurish version. I wonder if I can hack the splash screen to put in the missing quote marks?

Probably not. One thing that’s clear about Win2K is that the iron fist of Microsoft is in control. Don’t like Outlook Express? Well, you’d better get used to it, because you can’t uninstall it. Try add/remove programs, and there’s no entry. Try to delete the files, and Windows arrogantly tells you that you’re not allowed to, even as Administrator. Hack around that restriction and forcibly delete the files, and you encounter the final indignity: the next time the system demands that you reboot, it copies all the files back again from a hidden directory.

Yes, in the wonderful world of Windows 2000, Microsoft waste your disk space with two entire copies of every piece of bundled crappy bloatware that you don’t want, just so that they can be sure it’ll be there whether you like it or not. Presumably the idea is that I’ll say “Oh, well, since I have to have Outlook Express and Internet Explorer and NetMeeting, I guess I might as well use them.” As you can probably guess, this sends me into a seething rage. I have resolved that I will delete NetMeeting and Outlook Express, even if I have to use a sector editor to do so.

The worst part of this whole Windows 2000 experience is that it’s chips away yet another piece of my faith in humanity. As long as I could believe that Windows 2000 wasn’t entirely a shoddily-written piece of garbage that an undergraduate hacker would be ashamed of, it was possible for me to believe that 90% of the computer users out there were not in fact deluded morons. I thought that they chose to use an OS which, although ugly and expensive, at least worked and would run lots of software.

Now I know otherwise. Now I know that the people who evangelize to the reliability, scalability and ease of use of Windows 2000, really are a horde of hopelessly brainwashed Windozer zombies. Why else in the name of sanity would anyone fork out money for crap like this? If Microsoft announced the new Microsoft Spiked Dildo at a price of $500 a year, I bet the ’dozers would be out there at midnight on launch day, bent over and greased up…

Plug and play

I’ve been through two days of slow bandwidth hell at work, because it turns out my PC card ethernet adaptor only works properly in one of the two PC card slots. In the other slot, it runs at about a tenth of the speed.

Naturally, Windows didn’t bother to tell me this.