Blogging Ottinger (tim)

On Thursday night, the fan died on my P42p thinkpad. If I am a bit unresponsive in email, or don’t have information I should have, you know why. Hopefully we can get it resurrected, else I’m looking at maybe getting a new laptop.

The T42p has been my constant companion for about three years, and runs Ubuntu. I upgraded to Hardy Heron without a hitch. It is very snappy, and has a lot of tools and programming languages on it. Even though it would be underpowered (and the 80GB drive too small) for windows, it is quite pleasant as a Linux box. It tends to outperform my friends’ much more powerful Windows and Mac boxes, and the updates are much easier. I did have some trouble learning how to use it with different monitors, and of course my usual problems getting different IDEs all squared away, but it is a very fine box when the fan isn’t dead.

Reddit let me to a strange web site for some cracking/hacking/naughtiness (I think. I wasn’t interested enough to read it). What I did see is a sentence on one page that said:

Does the underground still breath?

My, how the letter E changes things. Does the author ask if the underground is still alive(”does the underground still breathe?”) or if it will kill you (does the underground still breath)? Should those who don’t want their breathing stilled stay away?

After that, I just wandered off disinterested. The site doesn’t fit in with my life program of cultivating innocence.

This is what I did with my Sunday afternoon (from 3pm sunday to about 1:00 monday)

“There’s accidents everywhere,” said Cindi Fox, a communications specialist with the Iowa State Patrol, this morning. “Everyone needs to stay home.”

Little damage, none of it serious? I saw dozens and dozens of freshly-wrecked cars along I80, and quite a few were upside-down or on one side. I remember at least four or five semis that looked as if something very serious had happened indeed. Well, I guess it’s all a matter of what you consider dangerous.

The biggest problem was that there were patches of really, really, really bad road rather than a continuous stretch of them. As a result, people would hit the rough stuff at 50 miles an hour or more, sometimes with cruise control on. If you have cruise or hit your brakes, you’re in for it. Likewise if you’re going 55 when you hit some of these.

I got the computer that will be my wife’s laptop in a rush because I need VisualStudio.NET for a class next week. Sadly, I find that VisualStudio 2005 and its installer have incompatibility problems with Vista. Great. My whole reason for spending money from savings now instead of after four or five more months of saving up, and it’s going to be a time-consuming ordeal.

The first VS.NET installer work-around is in progress now, where I have to copy the installer disks to my local drive (2nd disk first) and run it from there. In vista, the installer won’t run from the CD drive.

The first major annoyance with windows Vista is that everything confronts you with an EULA acceptance screen, and all the license agreements are monstrous tomes. The idea of all my software uses being hedged in by lawsuits is a little troubling. I’m not sure what I’ve agreed to, and I don’t know how I’ll ensure that all my family uses the software in strict compliance. Does that make your skin crawl?

Second disk copied. Copying the first. I’m grateful for xcopy still being a windows feature. It’s been a long time since I have had to use backslashes for command lines. It works fine, though.

The second annoyance is that the Vista UI is clunky, in that the things you want to do are usually a few cascading menus away. If it weren’t for Win-R/cmd it would have been far worse.

The mouse controls won’t put enough acceleration on my touchpad, so I have to make multiple swipes to get from one corner (say the start button) to the other (say the close X button on a full-screen program). It takes three left-to-right swipes to move a half-screen window from the left side of the screen to the right, regardless of mouse speed. Likewise, it takes two swipes to get from starting a program to the “Cancel or Continue” dialog’s “ok” button. Maybe inconvenience is the new usability. When you have to do a lot of seeking and clicking, this touchpad sensitivity limit is not your best friend. That might be my computer more & driver and not Vista. Is it like that for everyone?

Another windows annoyance is the reboots. Not only do you have to do them often when installing software, but they take forever to complete. I have much faster times from all-the-way off to fully-logged in on my Linux machines including my laptop. I never have to reboot unless I upgrade the kernel. I suspect vista doesn’t really draw a distinction, or perhaps it’s because open files can’t be moved, renamed, or deleted in Vista.

Ah, first disk is copied now. Starting the installer.

People say Vista is pretty, but I can haver nicer compositing and better UI choices and tweaks with Beryl. Or to Mac OS/X. Vista has only one real look-and-feel choice. You can tweak colors and some trivial settings, and that’s about it. I can’t even change the location of window buttons to get the X away from the minimize/maximize buttons. It’s Vista’s computer, I just live here.

The desktop comes pre-cluttered with third party icons. All these trial offer icons need deleted. I also need to get rid of the IE and Outlook buttons. I don’t want to invite all the web’s viruses into my wife’s machines. It’s Firefox and Thunderbird for us.

It troubles me that windows doesn’t respect my browser choice like Linux does. When I set firefox as my default in Ubuntu, everything starts firefox for web browsing. In windows I set firefox as the default, and Microsoft programs still launch the internet exploder. Another reminder that Vista owns this box, not me.

The lack of a package manager is a real problem. Every software title you might want, you must first find online, and then download and run the author’s installer. Chasing down all my software seems a waste of time. Of course, each program you run, including installers, has a permit or deny dialog, and may also have a “Cancel or Continue” dialog later on. I’m going to have to find out when there are updates, and then I’m going to have to repeat this process. Debian APT will fetch upgrades for all your software. It’s a single command, can be done with a GUI, and (in Ubuntu) is done periodically by the “update manager”. Not just your operating system… your compilers and office software and games and database servers… the whole shebang.

Oh, look, only one desktop. How quaint. How do you windows manage with all their running programs cluttered up in one screen? I immediately download VirtuaWin, but I can’t install it because another installer is running. In Debian Linux I can likewise only run one copy of APT at one time, but I don’t notice so much because it can install all my apps at once. Here I can do one at a time, and only one installer at a time. This will take a while.

Everything is downloaded to the desktop by default. I guess that’s almost convenient, but the desktop (as I mentioned) is cluttered to begin with. I’ll have to delete all the installers once I get the software loaded.

The two advantages so far are 1) that we were able to reformat my wifes iPod to use vfat, so we can load songs and podcasts from our Linux machines, and 2) that (after web searches and incompatibility work-arounds) I was able to finally install my copy of Visual Studio 2005.

So far the only thing I like about vista is that I can use programs whose authors decided to support *only* windows. Linux people get used to proprietary developers ignoring them, and tend to work-around problems (or wait for some other open-source group to work around it for them), that’s the only thing I *don’t* like about Linux.

Ah. Now I need to download patches to try to solve the incompatibility problem for VisualStudio.NET 2005. I download the patch for vista first, and it dies saying that the program it’s looking for is not installed. I later download it again and it works (for about 1/2 an hour it keeps working and working… followed by a reboot). Oh, but then it didn’t really work. After the reboot, I’m told to get and run the patch again.

I’ve spent the whole morning trying to install visual studio on vista. I installed Mono and MonoDevelop and some additional tools in Ubuntu Linux, and it maybe took me 4 minutes. And I never had to reboot. Three or four hours with Vista and I’m not even installing Resharper yet. Sigh. I was really hoping to work through some of the examples my colleague will be leading Monday using the Visual Studio environment. I guess I better not plan on sleeping much tonight.

BTW: after I got done giving permissions for it to run, reshaper installed very quickly.

Another service pack. “A program needs your permission to continue.” Sigh. I’m twenty minutes into the service pack and still waiting for it to finish.

Okay, it looks like I can run my applications. It’s now 2:00 in the afternoon, and I started before 9:00. I took a break for a sandwich and 1/2 hour to go get my rental car, but otherwise its been all sitting here on the laptop, swapping disks, searching the web for work-arounds, blogging, and waiting for things to finish.

Enough angst for one day. But basically if you want to know what it’s like for a Linux or Mac guy to run vista, it’s easy: tape two fingers of your left hand together, put a sock over your right, randomly remove or disable 1/2 your programs, ad then try to do some work. It’s a lot like that.

There is a LOT of SNOW here.

My driveway and sidewalk took me all day (from 1:00 until after 5:00) with only one break and with three shovels and an ice scraper working. All four of us were out there moving the heavy stuff from the driveway to the edges. I know the driveway isn’t very long, but I’m sore and aching from the all-day work. Admittedly, the two younger kids were not able to shovel like the bigger teen boy and myself, but it was a lot of work.

In places the snow was over two feet deep, and the bottom had a nice crust of ice. I’m grateful for the ice scraper. The snow piles on either side of the driveway by the street got well over four feet high, and we had to top them in order to get more snow out of the way. I am now envious of my neighbors who have snow blowers. Those would have helped so much. On the other hand, we don’t get a lot of these big snowstorms, and maybe I will be glad to not have spent the big bucks on a blower when the weather turns warm in March or April.

The snow was coming down pretty hard, so as soon as you have one area of the drive cleared, you have to go back over the previous area to take up the half-inch of snow that accumulated while your back was turned. We did the porch and sidewalk several times. The driveway was already covered over by the time we got back inside the house.

My windows are all covered with ice, and of course the snow and ice is clinging to the screens. What fun.

I didn’t see one snow plow today. I guess those guys are pretty busy just keeping the major arteries cleared of snow and free from accidents. I’m glad there was no school. Not only did I not have to drive in this, but I had three helpers today.

For tonight, I commit myself to hot drinks, multivitamins, and lots of over-the-counter pain killers. I’ll also keep looking out the window. I may have to go back out once or twice.

Since Steve requested them, I’ve put up some photos of the snow.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to stop a particularly nasty move in the senate. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 includes among its odious bits some legislation that prevents third parties from examining and busting invalid patents. Like the one on clicking a link, or the one on writing loops in code, or any of the millions that have prior art and are obvious. If mad patents cannot be attacked by third-parties, then we as programmers will become increasingly afraid to code as all obvious mechanisms become covered by patents and we will have to pay for defense from mad lawsuits.

As with all legislation, this act has good parts and bad parts. I’m not totally against all that it does, but the harmful bits are ugly.

We need to get some money into the EFF right now.

The power supply for the zoom GFX8 multi-effects pedal is skimpy. It has a tiny, fragile two-conductor cable that runs to the pedal. There is a hard-rubber cover where it goes into the converter box, but it’s too hard and too short. Sure enough, the cable fails right where it runs into the block. It failed at rehearsal on Wednesday night.

I knew it would not last, though it’s made it for a few years. So I figure I can order one from any supply house. I flip it over and look at the specs. It produces (get this) 12VAC 500mA output. Note that it’s AC output, not DC. Also it’s neither nine nor eighteen volts. You are NOT going to find these in ready supply at a guitar store or catalog. In fact, I did not find them in ready supply. There are some about, but the product (Zoom AD0008D) has been discontinued. In a year or two, there probably won’t be any more around.

I hope that the newer zoom effects have standard power supplies, or at least better quality cables. I did order one, and if it’s not back-ordered or out of stock I should get it next week. In the meantime, I’ve lost nearly every effect I own. This is the second time that’s happened. The last time, it was also a multi-effect with a funky power supply. That one later failed from an internal wire break. Ah, the things we skimp on come back to bite us.

I got by on Sunday on just the two channels (clean/dirty) of my Crate “Club” series vintage tube amp, a great little amplifier by the way. That was not too bad, and actually it sounded better and more natural and warm than the effects from my Zoom. That’s to be expected since the Zoom is all digital effects. It has to sound a bit more synthetic than the all-tube genuine analog signal path.

I think I will swear off digital multi-effects. At least if I have individual pedals they will probably die out one at a time. If the power supplies go out I can use standard 9V or 18V DC power supplies which can be purchased at any guitar store. I could even use 9v batteries if I have to. That’s some operational survivability I don’t have now.

With the Zoom I have a boatload of presets that I can tweak and adjust and save, and I can switch between pre-built patch sets with a single button click and banks of four user-defined patches easily. That’s when the unique, fragile power supply is not broken. I really have enjoyed that kind of flexibility and the range of capabilities of this great digital board, and it always sounded good enough to me.

Now I have a friend in a prestigious recording school who can build me great analog effects with true bypass (so I can maintain an all-analog signal path except when I really need to patch in a digital effect). I’ve seen and heard some of his work, and it’s quite impressive. I’ll spend a bit more getting a collection of high-grade analog effects, but they’ll be high-grade analog effects.

The new power supply for the Zoom will buy me some time until I have what I want. Maybe a few years. But once I get my first couple of effects pedals, losing the zoom will be less of a catastrophe and more of an inconvenience. I will be able to patch around it easily.

I have the guitars I want for now. Maybe in my future I will add something with P90s, and some more distant year a nice hybrid. I’m happy with my amps and thought I was in “coasting” territory, but now I will need a bit more gear acquisition. I’m sure it will be really cool when I’m finished, if I’m ever finished. OTOH, it’s a hobby, and a hobby isn’t really supposed to be done and over.

A friend pointed me to this bit at wikipedia:

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the President because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?…

Whether you are a fan of the president or not, look at the argument being made: “What is important: what you want to be true or what is true?”

Here well-meaning relativists have been telling me that there is no right and wrong, no true and untrue, and every person should decide for himself (or herself) what is truth and what is not. I’m usually told that after hearing of some ethically gray or dark behaviors, after uttering “that’s not right.”

So imagine my joy at reading such an appeal for a True kind of Truth, not for a personally-determined standard of right and wrong, but an appeal to something bigger and more reliable. Ah, maybe when the comics turn against relativism, the fight is nearly won.

I love my SX GG5, but I can’t find a case to fit it. The reason is the fairly extreme angle where the neck meets the body. Most hollowbody cases aren’t deep enough, and the guitar ‘bottoms out’ at the end of the headstock and the heel of the body, and then the guitar at the neck joint is still too tall to allow the case to close.

I am going to have to go visiting a number of guitar shops and try out all their cases to find one that works. What other guitars have this profile and this problem?

This remains a common theme: windows needs help to keep running. This week, Ron posted in a news group that he was having some severe performance problems, and a number of us offered various kinds of help, including ditching Murkysoft for greener pastures (Mac or Linux).

Conventional wisdom includes antivirus, firewalls, and the occasional re-imaging (reformat and re-install the machine).
I’ve long relied on Ad-Aware, PageDefrag and Grisoft tools.

Mr. J says that his machine was greatly improved using Registry Booster.

Michael suggest using Spybot Search & Destroy and Hijack This.

In general, avoid IE and Outlook because those are just ways to suck virii into your machine. Use Thunderbird or Incredimail and Firefox or Opera instead.

Of course, there are some other recommendations floating about the net. You may find them useful.

I’m tired of the phrase “the real world”.

When someone in an argument or explanation utters this magical phrase, it is supposed to confer to them authority and strip same from their victim. It is supposed to be an argument-ender. It says “my experience is objective and counts, yours is not valid.” If your world is real, and mine is not, then nothing I can say matters. In fact, my very existence is 99.99% in my past, so my entire life is invalid if my experience is not in “the real world”. In this usage, it’s simply rude and inconsiderate.

“But that doesn’t work in the real world” usually doesn’t mean that it has been tried and found lacking. It usually means the speaker doesn’t imagine it will work: It fails in their imaginary world. Usually when it has been tried and found lacking, the speaker will begin with “when we tried it we had problems.” In this usage, it is a lie wrapped up in a pompous generalization. It is rudeness and presumption.

Other times, it means “in my little corner of the world.” The problem here is that we may selfishly assume that our experience is universal. The world as we have experienced it is dubbed “the real world”, and the world as others have experienced it becomes some imaginary place. This is especially true when we are talking about people who have spent the majority of their career in a single company or the majority of their life in a single town. This use is at least honest. The speaker has spent so much time in one place that he doesn’t realize there are other places. This is a common criticism of Americans in general. Sometimes we think we are the real world, the whole thing and not just one corner of it. This usage shows self-involvement, but isn’t generally intended to be rude. But it is wrong.

I’m now trying to keep myself from uttering the phrase at all. I will struggle to say “in my experience” and “reportedly” or “so-and-so found that” or “I don’t believe” or “here at this company”. I want to be honest, and avoid presumptive self-involvement or rudeness.

Please join the crusade. Don’t let “In The Real World” stand as an argument. Ask which real world the author is discussing, the whole one, the one he’s built, or just the corner he lives in. Decide to not be intimidated by the phrase. Decide to not use it yourself.

I think that dropping this little habit won’t bring about world peace or give us any kind of silver bullet, but it might make our arguments more objective and useful and that might make this shared “real world” a little nicer place to work.