Cool Stuff ... or not :)

Fighting FakeRAID and GRUB problems

2010-09-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows that RAID can be an effective solution for redundancy and general availability, but in a real professional environment it is clearly not enough - and a very careful analysis of all the possible point of failure should be made (and people that believe having a single expensive SAN with RAID5 inside 'covers everything' at enterprise level should be quickly and quietly removed from decision positions).

However for very cheap (home or really-small business) some compromises have to be made, and given the abysmal reliability but acceptable price of the more recent generations of hard-disks it is now a decent solution to use some form of low-cost RAID 1 (mirroring) even for home use.

Now if you have some basic technical skills with computers you already know about the 'integrated RAID' that is now provided at basically no extra cost on most of the modern motherboards, and if you also have some decent Linux skills you also know that the type of RAID provided by those solutions is very specific in needing some (serious) OS-side support and as such it is referred in the Linux world as FakeRAID and in the purist circles is always derided - however that is a very narrow and slightly shortsighted view (of the same kind as 'I don't see SMP becoming mainstream …') - for certain scenarios the FakeRAID can be a very effective solution if you know what you are doing!

So how bad is FakeRAID ? Well, right now it is not as polished as some of the other OS-level software approaches (like volumes in Windows or Linux) and it is not as fast as some of the very expensive dedicated hardware solutions, however:

a) it is much better for interoperability among different Operating Systems than any of the other software solutions - think of it at hardware vendors forcing Linux and Microsoft to come to an agreement on volume (basic) formats :) On top of that it also perfectly fixes the initial boot problem (since the BIOS is aware of it, unlike for instance a Microsoft proprietary solution).

b) it can be a LOT cheaper and also 'easier to recover' than a dedicated hardware solution.

So what problems should you be aware of ?

First of all there is still some lock-in but this time from the hardware vendors - there are a number of FakeRAID formats and those are not 'playing nice' one with another so a FakeRAID from one type of motherboard most likely will not work on a totally different motherboard - you can see a more detailed discussion here but as a general quick rule of thumb you must remember that ideally you should replace the motherboard in such a system with another motherboard with the same chipset for a full 'instant replacement' !

If that kind of drop-in replacement is not possible things are still not completely lost - since Linux can still see such FakeRAID volumes even on some slightly different hardware (because the differences are coming from BIOS level) - so you can still perfectly read all you data, but this time you might need some extra storage to save the data to, then you can re-arrange things in BIOS for the new FakeRAID format and then restore the saved data - far more time-consuming but still doable if you care about your data - which is precisely what happened to one of my systems :)

So which are the problems mentioned in the title ? Well, once the theory from above was well clarified (and I was no longer trying to get a 'perfect solution' since the old chipset could no longer be found) I decided to reinstall clean versions of the Operating Systems - things worked very well for Windows (except Windows 2000 which seems to no longer be supported by all FakeRAID vendors), but surprisingly the boot process was looking very tricky on Linux, specifically with some of my USB 'recovery tools' and with new installations. The problem was apparently related to RAID support (since in some early attempts it was booting OK without the RAID) - so I lost a huge amount of time experimenting with a number of distributions - most of which were starting OK from the installation DVD or LiveDVD but were rather tricky in setting the partitions and all without any exception were finally getting to the same end-point - a non-bootable system at GRUB level !!!

I will not list all the stupid tests I have done to clarify that strange behavior but instead I will fast-forward to the actual conclusion - the problem WAS related to RAID, but not to the actual OS-level RAID (well, most of the time at least, see below the paragraph on Ubuntu) but instead to something else simpler but far more surprising - the free-memory pattern of the low 640k of the memory which was changed when the RAID BIOS was activated !!!

So the bottom line is that even to this day there is a (dumb) bug in both GRUB and GRUB2 which 'assumes' that the low memory is pretty free in some fixed (???) addresses from (linear) 0x90000 to about 0x9A000 - where some initial parts of the kernel (and also memtest) is loaded/started (in real mode) !!! And of course that assumption was NOT true once the extra RAID BIOS was active - so no surprise that the system was never bootable! You can easily check for that problem with displaymem at the GRUB legacy (which still is a LOT better than GRUB2 when something goes wrong) command prompt - if you see any reserved block in that range you will see booting problems!

So how on earth those Linux DVDs were still starting so well ? Well, that also explained something that I have observed starting a few years ago - pretty much all serious distributions are using ISOLINUX to boot from CD/DVD (even if GRUB was looking easier to setup and handle) - but of course ISOLINUX / SYSLINUX / EXTLINUX are all working OK even with strange low-640k memory maps - so probably without ever getting to describe the full (potential) problems, the maintainers were just automatically choosing the boot method which 'was working' !!!

Once that become clear the obvious solution was to switch to EXTLINUX - which is a lot 'different' than you would think, since as far as I know there is no large-scale friendly distribution using it as the final HDD bootloader - many distributions are including it somewhere but are optimized around having GRUB and more recently GRUB2 as the general system bootloader which has to be 'automagically' updated after installing a new kernel or anything :(

So the final solution was to install Ubuntu - one extra 'trick requirement' was that the above system was also somehow used for certain tests, and I wanted both a 32-bit and a 64-bit system side-by-side - 'forcing' GRUB legacy on both (but with different targets - I used the partition table for the entire disk for the 32-bit version and the actual Linux64 partition for the 64-bit version), and then 'chain' from GRUB to a manually-maintained EXTLINUX for the actual booting - things work OK as long as I remember to manually update the EXTLINUX configuration file after major kernel updates. There was also an extra complication - somehow along my many tests I ended with a separate small /boot partition (located in the first 8 GB of the disk - at some point in the tests I was ready to accept even the most fantastic explanations, like for instance the BIOS not being able to read in real mode past 8 GB), where EXTLINUX also is placed (starting from the boot sector of that partition) and I have to copy there the kernel and initrd files - and with that occasion I also noticed that Ubuntu kernel/initrd files do not have anywhere in the name some 'architecture marks' - like x86 or x64 somewhere in the name - so basically I keep them in separate folders to avoid inherent name clashes :)

The other tricky part with Ubuntu was handling RAID partitions - it seems that the current 10.04 LTS neither in the LiveCD nor the AlternateCD is very prepared to handle the changes after you create or seriously change partitions on FakeRAID - so ideally you just create everything on the first boot from one of those CDs and then just reboot - when the installer will detect the partitions just fine and go ahead without any problems! Surprisingly the Alternate x64 also has some bugs, so I ended installing from Alternate x86 and Live x64 - but the resulting install worked equally well once correctly set with EXTLINUX !

So the bottom line is that sometimes you might still see unexpected things with Linux, but a little persistence (and good internet searching skills) can provide a quick workaround - and hopefully during the long run the GRUB bug from above will be fixed and I will no longer need to keep both GRUB and SYSLINUX on my USB recovery tools :)

Ubuntu LTS - from 'huge disappointment' to 'acceptable Lazy Lynx' ?

2010-06-25T06:49:00.000-07:00

There have been a number of previous Ubuntu versions which were clear disappointments, with 8.04 LTS going to the top of the list (see for instance here), so the launch of the latest Ubuntu LTS version - 10.04 Lucid Lynx - was expected with understandable curiosity.

Unfortunately after a promising beta version the first release candidate started to expose ugly problems which unfortunately remained in the final version :( It is however possible to get past those and with a little effort get a very acceptable installation - but that is obviously not something very simple for a newcomer or when we speak about deploying it on a small number of computers - so the correct codename for the version IMHO should have been 'Lazy Lynx' :)

The first and most serious problem is a very unfortunate (and IMHO far from smart) change in regard to X11 on a number of video cards - most notably some VERY common Intel models used mainly in notebooks - with the result that actually many systems that were very stable under the previous 9.10 can't even boot the 10.04 LiveCD !!!

So if you just tried to start the 10.04 LTS LiveCD and after 5-10 minutes you get a computer that just hangs with a black or garbled screen and no feedback at all (most notably no starting sound) you are most likely a 'victim' of that problem (one other alternative might be RAID-related stuff, but that one most often just 'blocks' the computer for like 3-5 minutes only and after that is starts OK). One ugly but GENERIC workaround for the video problem is to start in 'safe video mode' - unfortunately in the current version that option is no longer 'friendly' in an obvious menu so you basically need to press F6 and erase the 'splash quiet --' part of the options and replace them with 'xforcevesa' - this can solve plenty of problems but unfortunately you are now stuck with the VESA minimal video driver (which will remain after installation) and all acceleration and 3D is gone :(

The real workaround for certain Intel video cards is to actually use another option - 'i915.modeset=1' - apparently older X11 code was failing on maybe 3% of the Intel video cards with the default modesetting behavior (and for that case you needed 'i915.modeset=0') so somebody decided to reverse (disable) that - which seems that now fails in like 10% of the cases :( Anyway, if after that your LiveCD starts nicely then you will be able to install just fine but the booting process will fail on the first restart - so again add manually (once) 'i915.modeset=1' to the boot options and then once booted OK from the command line do:
sudo echo options i915 modeset=1 > /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf
(which will set that option persistently). Some other information on the matter can be found at this page - but note that the version of the page might talk about older cases where you had to disable modesetting (which is now the default).

As I said another (rare) problem might be in certain RAID configurations - but patience and attention (plus eventually some Google skills) will get you over that :)

If you want optimal interoperation with Windows another 'pre-installation trick' would be to format the Linux partition in advance with EXT3 and the older 128 bytes inode (mkfs.ext3 -I 128) and do not let the installer to reformat the partition (and in the installer you should ALWAYS use the advanced/manual partitioner !) - that way you will be able to read and write to that partition from Windows with EXT2 IFS !

On certain hardware configurations (Broadcom cards) WiFi will not be configured by default and you will need at least once a wired Ethernet connection so that the 'hardware wizard' will be able to fetch the (restricted to deployment) Broadcom firmware. After that your network will start and you can enable time-sync (which will install ntp) and most certainly you will have over 200 Mbytes of updates :)

While the default general color combination is a small improvement over previous versions, the 'new looks' are actually worse - apparently there is some huge 'OSX envy' somewhere at a very high level at Ubuntu and that leads to some very dumb usability/efficiency decisions - one of the most talked subject about 10.04 is about how to get back to the classic button order so here is again - you start gconf-editor, go to apps → metacity → general and change the value for button_layout to 'menu:minimize,maximize,close' ! Of course that is only part of the road to a decent look - I also MUST change the theme from the new Ambiance to Clearlooks (which allows me to configure the color for the title bars since it is the same as the color for ' selected item').

Also I always make certain the 'desktop effects' are on 'Advanced' (which means compiz) and then install compiz-settings-manager where I have a huge amount of personal productivity settings (including a large number of hotkeys). I also need my favorite firefox plugins + my passwords + my bookmarks, then I install VLC (in this version on my notebook it seems to need to be manually configured for OpenGL video output since otherwise will crash the system), and of course WINE 'just in case'.

The look and usability will be more than acceptable in the end:

When no amount of reality distortion field can hide the fact that the emperor is naked

2010-01-29T11:58:00.000-08:00

After a long media frenzy on how the Apple tablet will revolutionize the world and be the best thing since the invention of the PC, the actual official announcement of the iPad has indeed slashed all records - I mean, all records on the number of new jokes (most of them surprisingly funny) launched in just 24 hours !!!

There are many 'firsts' in regard to this latest launch, but none of them is really a pure technological achievement - and most important of all is the fact that for the very first time Apple has launched a product that even the most die-hard fanboys see as non-inspiring and not so desirable in any way. This is a huge problem - since at Apple it was always a matter of selling a product which was visibly and vastly overpriced but at least it was so desirable that people would skip rent and still buy one just in order to have the latest 'status symbol'. That's no longer the case - and is only in a rather small part since the name is related to an article of feminine personal hygiene. It could be that for the first time there was too much hype prior to the launch but more likely it is also related to the total lack of something technologically new or at least exciting - it is just a much bigger iPod, one that you can NOT carry in your pocket to listen to your music on your daily commute ...

There IS however one potential market segment where the iPad might fit - but again I wonder if Apple really would like to go there - the product could be an almost-perfect device for your grandmother or anybody else with poor sight or hand coordination - but that would make it instantly the most non-cool device that Apple has ever sold and I am curious if the company will survive the wave of jokes on that matter.

There are plenty other things that are wrong with the device - unfortunately at the very top is the actual US economy :( The device would have done well in 2005 or 2006, but that is 2010 and with little chances to see a real recovery before 2020 the sticker shock might be a little too much for everyone but the most brainwashed fans.

And finally let's get to the actual huge technological problem - while with the original iPod the real innovation was a legal market for a product which until then RIAA would have considered totally illegal (and certainly fight in court), and on the iPhone the trick was to grab some small market share from other totally-closed devices (and getting most of the money in hidden long-term fees from the cellphone providers), today the iPad is trying something that even most mactards see as the wrong direction - closing a class of devices perceived as personal computers and which until now people would assume that they own - not entirely true, given that both Windows and OSX are actually licensed, but at least in theory it was possible to 'break free'. Well, not any more - the new device is just another totally-closed ecosystem, but unlike the iPhone (where pretty much all the other players were equally closed at the moment when Apple was actually grabbing market share), on this one there are quite a number of cheaper and better devices already on the market or very soon coming. And just as with the cellphones - where the actual iPhone killers are open-source devices like Android or Nokia N900 - on the tablets the new wave of Linux tablets and netbooks will actually marginalize the iPad probably long before most people will forget the original jokes about it.

The only (other than grandma-device) segment where the iPad might eventually compete is the electronic-book segment - on this one ALL the publishers will agree that the total closeness is a huge advantage - but unfortunately the device is 1-2 years too late even for that (not to mention that a Kindle will kick major iPad ass in direct sun).

So - will it fail or not ? Well, for 1-2 years the sales to fanboys might keep it afloat, but on the long term it might remain in history as the device that sank the myth of Steve Jobs ...

Ubuntu finally getting a good version this year ...

2009-11-12T06:09:00.000-08:00

After the half-failure with the current Long-Term-Support (LTS) 8.04 version the guys from Canonical finally managed to have a decent version with 8.10 but again 9.04 was a disapointment so now everybody was expecting 9.10 - which I am happy to say is (finally) another solid release !!! (even if the transition to GRUB2 is not without surprises).

However the major question in the mind of everybody that is involved in using Ubuntu for something more than getting email and surfing the web at home is about the next Long-Term-Support version - and we all hope that 10.04 LTS will be a version which FINALLY will allow real business use of Linux ... but of course that should not be taken as certain - some last moment stupid decision is still possible :(

Predictions 2009

2009-01-03T01:24:00.000-08:00

Just a very quick post for now - as you can see my 2008 predictions were over 80% correct - I have only missed the one regarding high-profile assassination (which however remains a possibility for 2009) and the success of the second generation iPhone.

I will only have one general prediction for 2009 and you probably already know about that - things will get A LOT WORSE - among other things expect 1 EUR = 2 USD, more war and generally the shit will hit the fan ... and I don't (yet) speak about the global warming shit - that will start hitting us in about 5-6 years :(

Also I will only provide one technical prediction for 2009 - things will look bad for the large players and especially Apple and Google, but it might be possible that specifically because things will be so ugly we might finally see some actual progress - at least better batteries but I really hope for (at least) one major innovation ...

Apple 'behind' the most hilarious Simpsons episode in years ...

2008-12-02T04:05:00.000-08:00

The funniest Simpsons episode in years aired recently - you can also take a look at the best part here but let's just say that every single thing that is wrong with Apple is there (maybe except the recent action where Apple directly attacked free speech in a way that certainly makes Microsoft proud). There are many, many small references, including one to the famous 80's commercial ... just take a look for yourself (and don't be fooled by mactards - it IS incredibly funny).

Another 'funny' thing from Apple - as predicted they are getting closer and closer to their own antivirus industry - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2550?viewlocale=en_US !!!

UPDATE - the knowledge base article above was removed by Apple - but I guess that is now far more embarrassing :)

Also even more embarrassing is the OFFICIAL LEGAL POSITION of Apple that ONLY A FOOL WOULD BELIEVE APPLE 3G ADS !!!

Mandriva 2008 Spring vs. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ... and how neither one wins :(

2008-06-01T04:42:00.000-07:00

You might remember from my old Ubuntu 7.10 vs Mandriva 2008 story and later from the Fedora vs. OpenSUSE vs. Ubuntu on both x86 and PPC that the winner of the 'end of 2007 Linux competition' was Ubuntu 7.10 (but only by a whisker or so) - and I was actually mentioning that the competition only started to get more interesting - so now we are a the end of the spring 2008 and it's time to see how things have evolved ...

Mandriva launched the new 2008 Spring version (or 2008.1) around April 9th 2008 and just 2 weeks later around April 24th Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was out clogging the internet pipes in a download frenzy :) Needless to say - I have tested some of the beta and release candidates before those launch dates and very soon I have also installed both final versions on a number of computers - but as always there were too many other more urgent things to finish first and I wanted a slightly longer-term experiment with those so only now I will try to do a (rather short) review of those two.

I will start with the good part - Mandriva 2008.1 got slightly better than the previous version with the new 2.6.24 kernel and the entire color theme and user interface remains very good, polished and usable - which probably make Mandriva one of the best distributions around if you want both KDE and GNOME.

In a rather similar way Ubuntu 8.04 has integrated the newer 2.6.24 kernel and all the latest sofware and has also done a number of small usability improvements - for instance for a newcomer from Windows WUBI might a nice way to take a first look at Linux.

Unfortunately here is where the constructive criticism must start - BOTH Mandriva 2008.1 AND Ubuntu 8.04 LTS just scream 'unfinished work' all over them - it might be a general Linux feature that it's an evolving target but the fact that 'managers' from both Ubuntu and Mandriva somehow decided that they will replace the major winner of the entire open-source philosophy of building software - we will ship when it is ready - with time-fixed release dates (which not even Microsoft is able to pull most of the time) is such a huge mistake - and is mind-blowing that the entire media is still missing the fact that by officially abandoning the 'we will ship when it is ready' approach the open-source just handed a major victory to the closed-source camp :(

Among the worst parts in Mandriva:

On clean installations on certain notebook video cards (and NOT the 'latest stuff', just ordinary intel cards that worked perfect with the previous installer...) the dual-output leads to a bad graphics configuration and the system can not start in GUI mode - a more experienced user is able to fix things very quick from the command line but it's easy to see how somebody without any previous Linux/X11 experience will run scared and never look back;
There is still a problem with suspend/hibernate which seems to be related to a 'video suspend script' - the 'suggested workaround' is to remove the script /usr/share/pm-utils/sleep.d/20video ???
CPU SpeedStep is OK for 1.2 GHz Low-Voltage Pentium-M models but not for the slightly-newer 1.4 GHz Low-Voltage Dothan ??? (which works fine in Ubuntu or Windows).
HUGE problem in certain configurations with the default inode size on EXT3 - 'normal/older' versions of GRUB can not even boot from those !!!

Good or at least better-than-Ubuntu stuff in Mandriva 2008.1:

Ndiswrapper still works;
Compiz seems to be working for the first time stable with KDE;
notebook HDD problems seem to be handled better than in Ubuntu;
Default UI is better than in Ubuntu.

Worst parts in Ubuntu 8.04:

Ndiswrapper is no longer working (there is a bad workaround here but it's not working in all Broadcom configurations);
Suspend/resume is again not always working :(
Many things that look 'unfinished' or 'untested';
still using the old/unpatched GRUB that can not boot on newer EXT3 with big inodes;
Default UI is still hurting my eyes :)

So who is the winner of the spring contest ? If I would be forced to pick just between the two from above I would say Mandriva might be now one whisker ahead on some configurations - but the actual unexpected winner is Ubuntu 7.10 which still remains the main Linux on my ultraportables !!!

That is showing a dangerous closed-source precedent now moving to Linux - just like many people will still favor XP over Vista or OSX 10.4 over 10.5, it is now the first time when a newer 'generation' of Linux distributions fail to become clearly better than the previous one ... That is definitely related to the fixed release schedule imposed by the above distributions but might also raise a small question - is it possible that the complexity of modern distributions (meaning full operating systems, and I include here Vista and OSX 10.5) might have now reached a point where it is no longer possible to 'get them right' the first time ?

What can you do when you need the portability of the MacBook Air but you only have 500 USD to spend ...

2008-03-01T10:14:00.000-08:00

First things first - if you just want the HotAir in order to "make you look cool" (as probably 95% of the owners do) you have already lost that battle, time to go away, nothing for you here ... However if you really like the idea of a very portable notebook, you are not crazy about glamour and you only have very little money - keep reading - there is still hope :)

For a smart buyer there ARE a few low-cost alternatives but you will need to set your priorities straight - first real question is "does size matter to you ?" :) Or in other words - how good are you with very small screens and keyboards ? If you don't mind a VERY small screen and a small keyboard you can actually get something SMALLER than the MacBook Air starting NEW around 300-400 US$ - either the already famous Asus eeePC or the newer Everex Cloudbook - get the first if a more normal touchpad is important to you, the second if disk size is essential.

However there is a serious problem with both of the above - the screen is actually more than 3 times smaller than the Air and the keyboard can feel too small at first so you will NOT write your novel on a 7'' screen (and generally you should also avoid reading one if you care about your eyes).

If money was no object there were many other choices a LOT better than the HotAir - Panasonic W or Y series, Lenovo X61 and X61T, Dell Latitude XT, and soon the Lenovo X300 which seems quite nice ... but obviously those are in the same price range as the Air (but without skimping on any important features and then selling that as a 'major progress') ... so the only route left is pre-owned ... but amazingly you can get something with BETTER FEATURES than the HotAir for about 500 US$ - just head for ebay or craiglist and look after a Dell X300 or Dell X1 - the 'secret' is to buy from a bigger seller that probably got a (very) large batch that was retired by a bank or something like that -they will have a decent description of the item, 10000+ feedback (so a scam is very unlikely) and most often you will get 2 weeks of 'warranty' so if things go wrong you can still send it back ...

X300 is cheaper and I recommend the models with the 1.4 GHz Low-Voltage CPU (but the older 1.2 GHz Low-Voltage CPU is also just fine and runs circles around the 600 MHz Celeron Low-Voltage from the eeePC). X1 comes with an Ultra-Low-Voltage CPU around 1-1.1 GHz - that one was only somehow superseded by Intel in 2007 by some models and the first major step forward will actually come in 2008 so it still is almost as good as it gets in the ultra-cool CPUs!

You can probably get a good X300 with 640 MB RAM, 30-40 GB HDD, docking station, combo CDRW/DVD and two batteries under 400 US$ delivered - if you want more RAM you should try to get one of the cheaper models with only 128 or 324 MB RAM since any memory upgrade will mean that you will throw away the memory from inside and add a 1 GB SODIMM stick from Crucial or similar for around 80 US$ - for a total of around 1.1 GB RAM which should be OK for any decent scenario. The same can go for the HDD if you need LOTS of space - you can upgrade to a 120 GB WD or Samsung 2.5'' model for well under 100 US$. The total will most likely come to less than 550$ even if you do both upgrades, and you will have an amazing subnotebook that is LIGHTER than the HotAir and has ALL the extensions you will ever need - USB, FireWire, PCMCIA, SD card reader, Ethernet, WiFi, video out, swappable battery, even modem and IRDA :)

Most of the machines will come with the original XP sticker so you will be able to install a clean legal version of the Dell OEM XP - but the hardware configuration is rather classic at this moment and most of the modern Linux distributions will work just fine (eventually with a little tweaking on the WiFi and Suspend to RAM part).

Another HUGE advantage over the Air or any of the 2000-3000 US$ new subnotebooks is that you can actually get 2 notebooks + all upgrades for under 1000 US$, and at that point you can always keep them 'cloned' and at any moment something fails you just switch to the other one - unlike a new expensive model where you might have warranty, but that means you will send the notebook (most likely together with ALL you confidential information) to be repaired and AT BEST you will get it back in 1-3 weeks ...

Finally here is another somehow similar post - Cloudbook vs eeePC vs X31 Thinkpad - the IBM Thinkpads are probably even better built than the X300/X1 but are slightly heavier and do not have a touchpad :( (that last one being the reason why X61T was not the absolute best TabletPC ever on the price/performance ratio - but I hope that Lenovo X71 will fix that :) ).

Managing notebook HDD problems with Windows Power Events Monitor (+ hdparm + smartctl)

2008-02-20T02:25:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the relatively recent frenzy around how in Linux there was a very aggressive policy regarding disk-drives with the result of very premature HDD failure? Well - the good news are that it was not something wrong that Linux was doing, the BAD news are that the same problem is now present with certain HDD models under Windows too !!! The problem is related to the huge number of head loading / unloading and I had posts about that story here, here, here and here - the fact that the bug can generate some loud noise is the partially good part (since you might become aware of it, but that only takes place in like 25% of the drives), the real problem is that after a certain amount of head loading / unloading your HDD will just fail, and that can take place even after only a few months of use ... (more likely a little over one year so that many disks will be out of warranty and full of important data). The WORSE part is that on some of those HDD models setting 'saner parameters' only works until the HDD is powered-down OR SUSPENDED - so for instance even if you manage to disable that infuriating disk-clunking it will be back as soon as you resume your notebook from standby!!!

Under Linux the fix was not very complex - for instance under Ubuntu I have created a text file /etc/init.d/hdparm-B with a content like:

#!/bin/sh
hdparm -B 254 -S 61 -M 254 /dev/sda
echo 30000 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
echo 8 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
echo 24000 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs

and then symbolic links to that as /etc/rcS.d/S92hdparm-B and /etc/acpi/resume.d/99-hdparm-B.sh (it is simpler than it sounds).

Under Windows however things are not as simple since there is no very clear folder where to put some commands that you want executed in certain conditions ... and since the irritating disk clunking (from head loading/unloading) is now also a serious problem under Windows with certain laptop disk models (like for instance Western Digital WDC WD1200BEVE) a small helper program was needed ...

Initially I have used myself some other of my own programs that are always running on my notebooks, but when two of my friends asked for help with just the same problem it was clear that a more generic solution was needed - and in about 2-3 hours on Sunday I have placed together a small program which will solve that problem in a way that should be very simple for most of the technical Windows users - it just took two days after that to get the project on SourceForge :) (together with the source code which is GPL v2).

So what you need to do is to first go to the SourceForge page for the binary release for Windows Power Events Monitor and download the program (the start page for the project is here and from that one you can also navigate to the page with the source code).

In order to install the program you just need to unzip the content of the binary release to your C:\ drive root - you will get at the top a folder called C:\_smart (which later you can rename or move, but it will be easier to test it this way), and inside that folder you will find the program that you need to run as C:\_smart\bin\pwr_mon.exe - just start it and a new icon will become visible in the system tray - the light-bulb will be ON if the computer is on AC and OFF when using batteries, a right-click will bring the main menu of the program from where the main window can be shown/hidden. If your HDD is one of those that will not retain the settings over power-off or standby (some Western Digital and some Samsung are certainly in this category) you will also need to create a shortcut to this program somewhere in your StartUp folder (or the StartUp folder for all users).

The actual low-level work is done by the Windows version of hdparm (it is included in the binary release from above) - but the actual parameters are in the three BAT files that are VERY SIMPLE to tweak so that you will get the desired results for YOUR configuration !!! Everything involved is located under C:\_smart\bin\ and by default the values that are used are picked for the Western Digital WDC WD1200BEVE - which in my personal experience so far was among the 'worst offenders' - so when I am running it plugged-in on AC I am setting it to such values that Advanced Power Management (the thing that generates the 'clunking') is 'practically disabled' (-B 254 in H.BAT) and also the Acoustic Management is set to 'fast' (-M 254). However on batteries another BAT file is called - H_BATT.BAT - and for that one I am using slightly more power-friendly settings (-B 253 -M 128) that will generate SOME clunking (but the batteries will last longer and the HDD will be slightly better protected if you drop it on a hard surface) - if you want to eliminate that residual clunking just change the values from H_BATT.BAT to the same as H.BAT (-B 254 -M 254).

There is also a third BAT file that is called just once when the program is started - it is H_FREEZE.BAT and it will protect your HDD (only until the next restart) from being hardware-locked with a password that you do not know (that action has no effect if you already have a password on the HDD and also you can still set/change the HDD password from BIOS after a full reset - don't forget to also place a password on the BIOS itself!). Some newer BIOS versions will already take care of that 'security freeze', but unfortunately not all - and certainly very few of the older computers BIOSes ...

If your notebook has two internal HDD drives (a friend of mine has one of those monsters) you will just have to edit the 3 BAT files and add a second line on each of them for /dev/hdb instead of /dev/hda. Also other actions that you would like to automate when the computer is restored from standby/hibernate or when the AC/DC status changes can be added to those BAT files so you can feel free to experiment :)

Another very nice thing that you can do with the programs from that folder is to check the 'health' and 'age' of your HDD - just get to a command prompt in that folder and run a command like

smartctl.exe -d ata -a /dev/hda > 1.txt

and after that you will have a file called 1.TXT where you can see things like the number of hours your HDD was ON (under Power_On_Hours, but some HDDs might have the amount of MINUTES here) and the amount of head loading/unloading (under Load_Cycle_Count) - if your Load_Cycle_Count is over 100000 you should start worrying (also if Reallocated_Event_Count is bigger than 0 before 1 year). And if dividing Load_Cycle_Count by Power_On_Hours results in a number bigger than 30 cycles/hour you probably need this program badly :)

So that's it - you can now use your notebook HDD without that annoying noise and without fear that in 6 months it will die as a result of too many head loading/unloading! (also please add comments to this post if you encounter any problem; the testing could not be very extensive on Vista so any feedback is welcome).

Retarded by design

2008-01-24T02:15:00.000-08:00

At some point during the last decade or so a trend emerged with some companies - and 'defective by design' was the generic name for those attempts to fool the consumer into paying more for less or for nothing at all. The vast majority of those attempts were promptly punished by the informed consumers, and the offending companies are now in a constant fall. But while Sony was punished by the buyers after installing rootkits on their computers and Microsoft have long been a disgraced monopolist, one company managed to thrive by taking the precise same tactic and slightly changing it to what now is almost a trademark - 'retarded by design' - and is of course the worst monopolist of all, Apple itself.

The same company policy was visible with the latest Macworld announcements when Apple - together with the major labels, which for a long time were trying to pull this one - decided that it will be a lot better for their bottom lines to only rent you stuff - just another name for further limiting the consumer rights and making you pay again and again for the same thing. I have serious doubts that the informed consumers will fall for that, but given the rather low price there will be enough takers - however the profits will also be rather small and I also predict some nagging technical problems ahead (not to mention that what Apple calls 'HD movies' is actually something inferior to even the decades-old DVD quality).

The same 'as restricted as possible' approach could not be missing from the other Apple products - consumers were promised that the (unimpressive for anybody with any computer experience) Time Machine would work over the network - but of course that in order to get that you will have to buy some more stuff from Apple - that is somehow funny since it is pretty much the same as with Micro$oft, which the vast majority of macmorons love to hate :) (note for the fanboys - there is a free hack to do that and avoid paying the Apple tax - but I will not provide a link since you should learn to think/search for yourself).

But the absolute best example of the 'beautiful but retarded by design' company policy is the new Mac Air - which is actually the supreme design when the actual goal is to get as much money possible from your customer yet providing something that will have the absolute minimal use and the shortest possible life - 'planned obsolescence' at its best!

The MacBook Air is a LIE from the very start - not only you can see in many posts and articles that it is NOT the thinnest notebook, but the entire marketing strategy around that is only a classic play on the american obsession with thin, beautiful ... but shallow and without any value or loyalty :(

You see - unlike a PHONE the thickness of a notebook is totally irrelevant (since you will not be able to place it in your pocket anyway) - and is just a gimmick designed to cover the absence of any other major innovation. The actual value is in the WEIGHT - and that one is OK in the Mac HotAir, but there are MANY other better notebooks that are (a lot) lighter so SteveJ could not score any points on that direction so he needed some other 'catchline' for the fanboys :)

Surprisingly MacBook Air also gets 3 things right - but unfortunately for Apple the company used for the last ten years the entire power of it's famous distortion field against precisely those things when Dell and Toshiba and other were getting those right in the first place - and as a result the brainwashed fanboys have seen very, very little value in the fact that the CD is external (a feature about 10 years old in the Windows subnotebooks), the CPU is one of the Low-Voltage Intel models (which ARE more expensive for a very good reason, but for instance IBM/Lenovo was using similar models in the X61 and X61T for about one year now), and finally the screen is pretty much the ONLY thing that an Asus eeePC owner might really miss (at about 1/5 - 1/8 of the price, and actually a much easier to carry form factor).

But unfortunately the number of things that Apple got right are dwarfed by the amount of the deliberately bad decisions - the smallest one is that you can not expand the RAM but the fact that the ONLY 'expansion' that you get is a standard USB2 is something so stupid it's not even funny - other subnotebooks get a PCMCIA slot (where you can get 3G cellular coverage for instance), 2-3 USB ports, FireWire, memory-card readers (even eeePC has a SD card slot), gigabit Ethernet (try to backup your HDD over the wireless if you think you don't need it) and more ... last but not least being a battery that you can replace 'on the go' and get even 12 hours of battery life if you really need it! (in contrast HotAir customers will either send it to Apple for an expensive replacement - which is OK given that they will not miss it since the HotAir is only used to impress other morons - or more likely just throw away the entire gizmo - probably one of the LEAST environmentally-friendly notebook models ever built in spite of all the marketing speak that you will get from the Apple sales droids).

And of course the competing high-end models that are really expensive and a clear difference between a fanboy wannabe and the real upper-class have certain exclusive features - like being a convertible tablet (however I still consider the Dell one slightly overpriced, but at least that one gets the Ultra-Low-Voltage CPU versions from Intel) or some of the amazing Panasonic models which are not only packing a DVD writer in the same weight as the HotAir, but are also spill-resistant and about 5 times tougher!!!

So in the end there is only one thing that will sell those new products, and you can see it following this link :)

I call bullsh*t on Cringely's 'predictions'

2008-01-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

First of all - when you predict that Vista Sp1 will be shipped in 2007 and you get that wrong you can:

a) admit you were wrong by a month or two - not much but still 8-16% ...

or

b) claim that Vista SP1 just shipped (even if it's only RC1 right now).

And no, Vista was NEVER supposed to eliminate service packs, and EVERYBODY knew that SP1 will come very soon - you were just placing the wrong date on it ...

And now let's see what Cringely could see for 2008 ... hmm at no. 8 'Bill Gates will be retiring from Microsoft in 2008' - no kidding genius, and you made that bold prediction on the 4th of January when the Internet was already full with the funny movie showing what Bill will do after retiring at CES ...

And yes, at no. 10 we have 'a 3G iPhone is coming'. Wow, that was indeed unexpected and a bold prediction :) I guess your list was a little too thin ?

At 11 - 'Apple will introduce a subnotebook/tablet computer/media player' - can you be any LESS specific ? Not to mention that EVERYBODY will get a subnotebook in 2008 ...

At 12 - 'Along the same lines look for OS X to bifurcate clearly into two lines -- Mac OS X and plain OS X (for devices like the iPhone) with Apple licensing (non-Mac) OS X to a few companies, including Sony.' THIS WOULD BE THE DAY PIGS FLY AND HELL IS ALREADY ALL FROZEN !!! But I guess that you will claim you got it at least half right - since they have a mini-OSX for the iPhone ... oh, wait, that already took place in 2007 ??? Are those the ONLY bold prediction that you can get half-right ?

And at 13 - 'Apple will build into some Macs support for the Windows API, allowing Mac and Windows apps to run side by side with no need for virtualization software except to run Linux. This fits with Apple's surprising new role as a competitor to HP and Dell for the business workstation market. But what's REALLY surprising about this is it will all be with the permission of Microsoft, which will still get a license fee from Apple, though in this case it is for just licensing the API and promising not to keep any of the APIs secret. Therefore, could the logical successor to Windows Vista actually be OS X? Only if Apple licenses Mac OS X to other companies, which I don't see happening.' Is this one in any way related to the other famous moronic prediction (about 1-2 years ago) that Apple will start using Linux/Windows for their kernel ?

And just to have my first 'victory lap' of the year - just as predicted (at 2), recession has arrived but is not yet official :)

First CoolHints and LameAlerts for 2008

2008-01-04T04:45:00.000-08:00

First a few more words on the Asus eeePC - the product was very cool as a gift or self-gift for the end of 2007 but you need to think ahead and just accept the reality!

1. The product was initially announced at 199 US$ and it was smart from Asus to use the huge momentum for new year sales and do a decent amount of profit and get a HUGE amount of followers, but in order to keep those going NOW is the right time to start thinking about the 199$ target and implement that in less than 2-3 months! (serious competition IS coming).

2. Having a 63 MHz bus in 2008 is crappy in a 400-500 US$ product, MIGHT be OK in a 199 US$ product ! Either way power-management seems to suck :(

3. To the new eeePC fans - stop whining about bigger batteries - the 5200 mAh is already huge (and rather heavy) and there was an announcement about a 7000+ version - with something rather similar well-engineered models get 8 hours with a full 12'' screen (which is about 3 times bigger - hard to believe until you see it) and real 120 GB HDD !!!

4. A screen at least 10'' is a must for any model over the 199$ mark!

5. Ideally if you think about a model over the 500-600 US$ mark consider at least a 16 GB HDD that is somehow upgradeable. Apologists and morons that somehow believe a (cheap) SD is 'just as good or better' should first compare timings :) Also I don't see any good reason why such a model should have less than 2 GB RAM (OK, one acceptable reason - 'suspend to disk', but 2 GB RAM is still great to have).

6. If you take a look on the forums you will see that almost half of the users (OK, of the most vocal users) have installed XP but it seems most of them never heard that XP needs 800*600 - if you can read you will find that on the XP starting page so stop whining on how the problem is in XP. (and just as a note - OSX has just the same problem from the very first dialog). That being said the 800*480 screen is still usable in XP once you get the 'virtual 800*600' video driver (but you should always be very frugal with screen space - including tray/taskbar space).

But all the above are just nothing compared to the next huge CoolHints for Ubuntu and Firefox:

a) the next Ubuntu 8.04 is supposed to have Long Term Support and be the next 'gold standard' for Linux distributions - but no matter how much better it will be inside, people will always first see the LAME BROWN - just drop the brown or at least provide 1 OTHER theme (ideally DARK BLUE) that should be ALWAYS available (even on the mini-CD, micro-SD or whatever else); also I know that there are some people there very strict about licenses, but I believe that ndiswrapper and all the 'firmware cutters' are perfectly GPL and SHOULD BE ON THE LIVE CD !!!

b) I understand that FireFox creators were just too eager to get to the 3.x level which somehow is unconsciously associated with the 'first stable/hugely popular release' (thanks to Microsoft of course) but now there is NOTHING else more important left than to JUST FIX THE BAD SINGLE-THREADED MODEL (and whatever else makes JavaScript to suck big time in FireFox) and ADD A SIMPLE WAY TO START MULTIPLE INDEPENDENT FIREFOX PROCESSES !!!

Predictions 2008

2008-01-01T02:26:00.000-08:00

This year I will start with the non-technical part and only then go to the technical predictions.

1. Huge problems ahead for the more progressive US presidential candidates - with a very large probability of one being assassinated or dying in very strange conditions - the probability is directly related to their commitment to progressive values (and resistance to the military-industrial complex) and IMHO the 'risk order' goes like most likely = Kucinich (which was on a hit list before), Ron Paul (very, very likely given that unlike Kucinich he has no competitor of general-election-value - meaning not a religious nuts or 9/11 war monger - in his party), Edwards and also Obama (which is surprisingly low-risk-conservative lately but race might play here an extra role).

2. US recession will become official and will deepen.

3. Stock adjustments - AAPL under 100$, MSFT and GOOG down, also I don't see DELL going in the right direction if they keep doing stupid marketing choices.

4. Currency and oil-price problems.

And now let's get to the more technical part.

5. Nothing interesting from Apple - maybe a subnotebook but eeePC has already taken all their steam so they'll be left only with the fanboys willing to pay 1500-2000 US$ for a slimmer version of eeePC. The iPhone SDK will be a disappointment and the full iPhone v2 will be VERY late (maybe not even in 2008) since it might be possible to see a lower-end mini-iPhone or similar.

6. The 'Google phone' will not be a huge hit but will capture a defensible position on the market.

7. Almost all the big hits will come from less-established players (but not necessarily small - think Asus, but I am quite afraid that in their case the peak was reached with eeePC and now 'managers' will take over 'enthusiasts' with very poor results - but I hope they'll do better than Dell and prove me wrong). Also keep an eye on other companies in the same area - Sager, Clevo, maybe even Lenovo!

8. There will be an interesting battle in the OS arena with both Vista and Leopard getting better, but the largest growth will come from the other major player and 2008 might become 'the year of Linux' - and I will personally wait with a lot of hope for the next Ubuntu and Mandriva versions!

9. AMD is not looking good - they have totally missed so far the trend towards notebooks and now might miss the next trends , which will be ...

10. Overall 2008 will be the year of the subnotebooks and advanced mobile phones - but with a recession starting and with a rather saturated market 2008 is not the year to try to 'cash-in' as luxury items (as for instance Dell is trying) but instead is the year when the smartest players should go for the 'best value' range and gain market share and more important - followers ! (that is also the reason why it will probably be 'the year of Linux' - since that is currently the most solid and more-intelligence-less-instinct-driven community , but for a company to succeed in appealing to that segment they really need to have a good hardware product at a decent price).

eeePC and other 2007 final stuff

2007-12-31T08:05:00.000-08:00

A short note on the eeePC from ASUS - I have spent some time playing with one and it is quite nice - the keyboard and trackpad are very small but you can get used to that after some time. The main problem is just as I predicted - the screen - while some people might find it usable I am afraid it is way too small for me - I might consider it when a version with a 10-12 inch screen model will be available but I will not hold my breath ... which gets me to my next point - why that small hit was coming from Asus and not Dell or Apple or somebody else ?

It is not since Asus are incredibly innovative - while they are actually building/trying A LOT more models than Dell and Apple COMBINED, their general strategy only had mixed/unimpressive results.

And just like Dell, Asus does not really have any chance to sell stuff based on myths (and certainly unlike Apple, which is 90% based on that) - the difference is that Asus already knows that while Dell is still 'trying' with stupid choices like the recent pricing on the latitude XT :)

The real reason why Asus managed to get this small gem (still unfinished IMHO but there are like 350000 people out there that tend to disagree with me on this point) is that they didn't have a huge clue on the final results (they have like over 10 small notebook models, from 7 to 10 to 11 to 12 to 13.3 inch screens, prices from 300 US$ to 2000 US$) but they had little market to 'defend' - so instead of thinking how NOT to launch something new, they just went for it and got a very impressive start together with a decent amount of followers!

Make no mistake - we still do not know if on the long term Asus is more committed to future happy customers rather than making a quick buck - and we will see that in less than 12 months if new models with at least a 10'' display, 2 GB RAM and a 16-32 GB solid-state disk will become available. And the absolutely first thing to fix will be the pathetic bus underclocking (which seems more like a dirty fix for a major motherboard-design fu*kup).

Another small observation - I find quite impressive the preloaded Xandros Linux and IMHO you should first give it a try before installing other stuff! But more about that eeePC in a future post.

Surprisingly the major loser in the subnotebook marketplace might not be Dell (which might still sell a few highly overpriced tablets to some government) but instead Apple - which will now see some serious competition already establishing itself in this area just a few months before Apple was probably considering an entry...

Let's finish the last post of the year with a quick review of my 2007 predictions - while most of the predictions were rather generic I can claim at least 9 out of 10 to be hits - even if the iPhone had surprisingly good sales (but probably less than 20% of those activated with AT&T) the global market share is like 0.5% and the only miss was the part with the drop in the stock of the big companies - but that is not a matter of IF and instead a matter of WHEN - certain things have moved at a much slower rate but I still expect to see that precise prediction coming true very soon!!!

That being said - 2008 will bring many interesting new things so let's hope we'll all be able to enjoy those to the max!

My own 'best of 2007' ...

2007-12-28T05:10:00.000-08:00

This is somehow of an anniversary post (since the blog will just make it to the two years mark from the beginning) - and what better way to mark the past than to remember the best of it - in this case a rather mixed bag of things that I really liked during 2007 - some (very few) of them might actually be slightly older but I just managed to enjoy them during this year so it counts in my book :)

I will start with a very 'populist' subject - movies - it seems however that the vast majority of the movies of 2007 were commercial trash and remakes, so there is not a huge list of titles that I really liked ...

In the third position there is a pair of (older) russian films - 'Night watch' and 'Day watch' (in this order) - both have a rather special touch, great acting and a strong moral point (even if there is also some amount of 'action') ... and I would also say a certain degree of black humor that might not be entirely visible for people that have not experienced communism first-hand.

Second-best was 'Next' - and even that one does not score very high despite the fact that I really like Biel and Cage, not to mention Philip K Dick ...

The best I saw during 2007 was however 'The Prestige' - that one was from 2006 but I never managed to see it then, and I really liked so it deservingly gets the top spot for 2007 ...

On series I can only be very brief and recommend from the newcomers of 2007 'Pushing Daisies' and 'The Big Bang Theory', and for 2008 I might keep an eye on 'New Amsterdam' and 'Eli Stone' (and all which will survive in 2008 will join my older favorites 'How I Met Your Mother' and 'House M.D.').

On books I will just have to admit that I was not very 'effective' and among the titles that I managed to finish there is just one that I would recommend - but that one is memorable indeed - it is 'Spin' by Robert Charles Wilson (and is from 2005 when it also got the Hugo award) - there is something 'just right' about it and a certain 'shock of reality' that is not often found in a SF book ... I just can't wait to have the time to read Axis :)

Now moving from the world of ideas to the more material (and materialistic) world - after quite a number of years when 'iPod killers' failed to actually do so, 2007 was the year when the iPod was actually stopped - it was not by a single product but instead by many - like Samsung YP-U3 and YP-K3 and a few of the Sandisk models on the low-cost end, by Archos on the video end plus of course the iPhone itself - and while Zune was not yet any type of threat it was growing while the iPod market share was shrinking ...

Nevertheless the raising gadget of the year was the iPhone - and I consider it an important step for this year since first it exposed Apple as a greedy monopolist ready to take advantage of the fans, but also the incredible lack of openness from the mobile phone market on which actually the Apple entry was (unexpectedly from one of the worst monopolists of all times) a step forward!

I would have liked to name a full Latitude XT Tablet PC configuration for around 1500-2000 US$ as the best notebook of the year - but such a configuration will go around 3500 US$ and in that case I will have to just recommend looking elsewhere - Lenovo X61T or Toshiba for tablets, the latest Panasonic W/Y series for traditional notebooks.

A very serious end-of-the-year hit was Asus EEE which might have been my choice as subnotebook of the year ... if it had at least a 10'' screen (which is perfectly possible in the same form factor).

However my absolute low-cost notebook device of the year is the XO Laptop (or the One Laptop Per Child = OLPC) - the result of hard work from many, many gifted people (from which the best known is of course Nicholas Negroponte from MIT). Some of the big names in the industry - Intel, Microsoft, even Apple which tried to replace the open-source OS part - desperately tried to sink the project (which was certainly threatening the establishment) but at the end of 2007 we can finally start to see it as a major success.

The browser raising most in 2007 is of course Mozilla Firefox - but I believe that the need for better use of multiple threads / processes (and a very special care for scripting on those) might be the most serious restriction for future growth.

I have left at the very end the 'operating system software' - it was a full year with both Microsoft and Apple launching new major products so you would expect the fight to be tough ... and it certainly was, but it was the battle for the last place :) Vista was just as I predicted in the first day of 2006 - but is probably heading in the right direction now and in 2008 I see it starting to grow after SP1 - but that does not change the fact that in 2007 it was mostly a flop that was 'dwarfed' by the half-of-decade-old XP (which will still continue to be a huge factor in 2008 after SP3).

Leopard was also far from what the hype was promising - it still is a HUGE failure on the older PowerPC architecture (which in itself was more hype than substance) but with the 10.5.2 update I also expect a small improvement (after all I believe like 300 things will be fixed, so people claiming it was a huge hit and that Microsoft should somehow learn from Apple are probably delusional - Apple had like 8 TOTAL hardware configurations to cover and it still totally messed one of them (iMac) and all PowerPC stuff was already messed - so people should rather think about how Vista is running on over a HUNDRED totally different configurations and how many of those it should completely trash before becoming the equal of the Leoptard :) (and I am not speaking of the old 486 that you found in the attic in the same way I am not speaking about running 10.5 on let's say a G3...)

So at this point you might be wondering which was the operating system for 2007 ... and the answer is Linux generally and Ubuntu in particular - even if at the start of the year I was FAR from impressed, the recent Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon was a HUGE step forward (especially for the average user) and it deserves the title of the best OS product of 2007 !!!

That being said I expect a lot of interesting new things in 2008 (I might try again to predict some of them in the very first day of the new year) and I hope that everybody will have a very happy new year!

Bashing in the snow :)

2007-12-25T03:29:00.000-08:00

Just a very quick post with some of the recent disappointments - on the very first position is the price of the new Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC - while the computer itself is not bad the price is totally unrealistic and stupid - the only two possible explanations that I can find so far is that Dell executives are totally losing it (like some of the managers from companies that no longer exist today but not long ago thought people would pay anything for their average products) or that they have some huge (probably government or similar) order that was already 'price-negotiated' at something like '40% under retail price' - so for the next 3 months or so the retail price would just be inflated 40% :(

That being said I still find the XT a little too heavy for a model at that price point and certainly the 'start configuration' at 2500 US$ with a 40 GB HDD is only a joke :( At that price point I would have also expected to find the far more interesting L-series of CPUs - for about 2200 US$ I can get a Thinkpad X61T with Core2Duo L7500 LV (1.6GHz, 4MB L2, 800MHz FSB), 2 GB RAM and 160 GB HDD so paying 2500 US$ for the slightly HEAVIER Dell with Solo ULV U2100 (1.06GHz, 1-2MB L2, 533Mhz FSB), 1 GB RAM and 40(???) GB HDD must be a typo something !!! But no problem - I just guess people will discover that the new Lenovo is (probably) almost as good as the old IBM at a LOT better price and certainly with a price TWICE better than the Dell Latitude XT ...

I will also add a link to some other very interesting stories - first of all about how Apple is doing their own 'shoot in the foot' stupid stuff (or how your personal info belongs to Apple and for an inflated price you get a HDD that very likely isn't even new) and I could not miss that the iPhone has found its true purpose (slightly NSFW) :)

I will end with the link to something that seems to have been mostly a publicity hoax - about how Apple (after forcing to close ThinkSecret) was trying to close 'fake Steve Jobs' - the problem is just that fake Steve was no longer so funny any more, and was actually looking more and more like a mactard on the Apple payroll so ...

In the next post I'll take a look at the other end of the scale - best stuff from 2007!

Geek fun = more testing on the Linux offer of the fall 2007

2007-12-21T11:48:00.000-08:00

There were quite some busy weeks and I believe that some of the latest 'Linux experiments' on the Dell Latitude X300 (1.1 GB RAM) and Apple iBook (1 GB RAM) might have not been reported on time - so I will try to fix that right here :)

Since Mandriva 2008 was lacking a little and I already had a working Ubuntu installation on the X300 where I could fall-back at any time (as you probably know from here), I decided that I could also play a little with some of the other famous distributions that were released more or less recently - the 'extra twist' was that at about the same time I was also taking a look on some PowerPC installation on the not so old iBook G4 that was so lacking in speed in Leopard - on that one I already had my old Tiger installation placed on an external Firewire HDD (a 2.5'' HDD - which means that it can be perfectly powered over 1394 but also means similar performance to the internal IDE HDD or slower, and by far slower than an external 3.5'' 7200 RPM cheap disk ...) but there was enough space left on that drive so I decided to have a look on how well Linux could run from an external drive...

So I first decided to go with Fedora 8 for x86 and PPC, and also Ubuntu for PPC so together with the existing Ubuntu x86 I could have a nice 2x2 matrix and I could enjoy some simple oranges-to-oranges and apples-to-apples comparisons (pun intended :) ).

I have started with Ubuntu LiveCD on PPC (mostly since I already had some experience from the x86 installations) and on the X300 I also started the Fedora 8 LiveCD (in order to 'multitask' a little).

Fedora 8 i386 LiveCD was looking very promising - the kernel was newer than the one in Ubuntu so I had high hopes, and on top of that I liked the default theme and colors from Fedora A LOT better than the Ubuntu combinations - the installation went smooth and things were initially looking good!

On the iBook the Ubuntu installation also started well - to boot from a CD on the iBook you must press and hold the <c> key just after starting the computer (or press and hold the <option> key and then select from the list). The LiveCD came up OK and PowerPC Ubuntu was looking just like the x86 version - and the installation started well and went OK up to almost the end - unfortunately the only problem was that at the very end it complained about something related to detecting the boot device (which was not the internal HDD, but instead an external 1394 HDD) and that was pretty much it ... it was never able to boot by itself :((

The help came from the next-installed-Linux = Fedora PPC - that one was also having some serious problems (I believe the default-installed kernel was not built to boot from FireWire) but using the Fedora CD I was somehow able in the end to work around yaboot problems and finally be able to boot the Ubuntu installation :)

At this point on the x86 front I was somehow happy for a day or so with Fedora - it was looking very polished (I also really liked the slowly-changing backgrounds) ... until I had the time to actually try to activate WiFi and suspend/resume, at which point I started to notice that things were far from perfect - later I have read some posts that during that first week after launch there were some serious problem with the update servers but my experience was VERY frustrating and when placed together with the problems in the PowerPC version I decided it was too much ... so Fedora was for the moment gone (but if I have the time I will certainly take another look to the next release in a few months).

The only other widespread distribution with both PPC and x86 versions was OpenSUSE 10.3 - so the plan was changed towards doing the same 2 * 2 matrix, but this time with Ubuntu and OpenSUSE 10.3 :)

The first problem was that surprisingly the OpenSUSE 10.3 LiveCD can not boot from an USB drive (as is the case in X300 notebooks) - so for that one I had to use the 'normal setup DVD' - and I have used the same type of setup for PowerPC (I believe that no OpenSUSE LIVE CD exists for PPC anyway). Both the x86 setup and the PPC setup were without further problems and in the end I got my 2 * 2 test matrix!

Now a few ideas that could help other people doing similar installations - the first thing that you should know is about file systems and 'partition styles/labels' - probably most people interested in computers already know that you can format a 'disk' (actually a partition/slice) in just one of the many possible 'file systems' and different operating systems might see it as read-write, read-only or not at all depending on the precise combination of OS and file-system. At this point (December 2007) Linux is by far the most competent OS in this regard - you can write OK on almost any type of partition including FAT/FAT32 (old DOS/Windows 9x), NTFS (new Windows) and HFS (old Mac) but in order to write on HFS+ (new Mac) you might need to disable journaling first! OSX 10.4 and 10.5 also seem to be able to read NTFS (but so far not write), read-write FAT/FAT32 and also can read-write EXT2/EXT3 (Linux) partition with ext2fsx. Under Windows 2000/XP the EXT2/EXT3 (Linux) partitions can be read/write with ext2ifs and ext2fsd (can be somehow risky but I had very good results with ext2ifs_1.10c). The bottom line is that so far the absolute safest way to 'share files' is by using FAT32 (but permissions will be lost and files can not get past 2 GB). Another safe option seems to be Samba (windows-style network file sharing) and maybe even EXT2/3 !!!

However there is another tricky point on cross-sharing disks - the 'partition styles/labels' - the PC-style partitioning is generally the best supported with the exception of old PowerPC systems that can only boot from disks with Apple partitioning style (which is not normally recognized by Windows, so plugging an external 1394 disk with that partition style in Windows or connecting an Mac in target mode will not 'work'). Again, the most versatile is Linux, which can recognize and create both styles even when booted from a LiveCD :)

Booting Linux is also more complex/trickier on Apple (and especially PowerPC) machines - normally a very small (1 megabyte, 0.001 GByte) hidden HFS partition is created and from there a boot-loader called yaboot is started, which then will boot Linux itself - but that process is nowhere near the power of GRUB that you can use on a normal x86 machine :) Anyway on x86 all recent distributions get a 10 on setting the bootloader, but on the iBook only SUSE managed to handle installing a boot-loader OK and then booting OK from that - Ubuntu got an error installing the boot-loader on an external 1394 disk and Fedora 8 did not have support for FireWire booting :(

The Linux boot time is OK under PowerPC - Ubuntu seems to be slightly faster but SUSE is also OK. Both are slower than Tiger but in the same range as Leopard (or close enough). On the Dell X300 Ubuntu is also the fastest Linux in this recent tests (also faster than the Ubuntu on iBook) but not as fast as XP :) (and maybe soon I'll also be able to say how fast Vista will boot on X300, but I don't hold my breath on that :) )

One part that I liked to experiment with was the '3D window manager' - I am 99.99% happy with Compiz/Fusion on Ubuntu but on x86 SUSE I also decided to get the latest 'development builds' in order to get 'separate wallpapers' and in the end that was perfectly possible as you can see in the screenshot from the right (click on it for the full image) - but it was far from simple and generally the degree of integration in SUSE does not seem to be as advanced as in Ubuntu (among other things only Emerald window manager seems to be stable enough while both GTK and KDE default window managers will sometimes crash; another potential problem is that a patched Nautilus is needed for the 'separate wallpapers' trick so overall that might be less than ideal at this point and as a result I never tried to achieve the same results under Ubuntu). I was not aiming so hight on the PPC 3D eye candy and I believe that on SUSE I never activated the 3D part, but on Ubuntu PPC it seems to work as well as on Ubuntu x86 and both are more usable / spectacular in this regard that Vista or OSX (and that is especially nice since we speak about two rather old computers - rather underpowered after modern standards).

One small gizmo that I liked a lot under SUSE is the 'international clock applet' - you can see it on the second screenshot - but after some searching I was also able to add it to Ubuntu from here! (it seems to be a Novell contribution that looks to be also very well received on Fedora where some extensions are already planned). Also in the screenshot - the SUSE 'Start Menu' which probably might look a lot more friendly to people that have only seen Windows before than the default Ubuntu layout (with the menu on top) and also the top of the YAST window (with the Emerald decorations and transparent borders).

The equivalent screenshot for KDE is also here - this one is with the default wallpaper and the green OpenSUSE 10.3 theme - generally is very nice how SUSE implemented the entire green theme in both KDE and GNOME and the similarities also go to the 'Start Menu' positioning - but while the KDE version is somehow more Vista-like, I consider it less usable this way (cascading menus might not be very easy for 'mouse beginners' but it is CERTAINLY faster for power users).

Another feature that I first discovered by accident on KDE under PowerPC OpenSUSE was the 'multi-finger trackpad' - a two-finger tap is actually a middle-click and a three-finger tap is the right-click - OBVIOUSLY that should have been REVERSED (the far more useful right-click should have been generated with the simpler two-finger tap), but the feature is VERY HANDY on the iBook (where 'engineering for morons' was more important than actual 'usability for normal / power users', and also where the bottom-right-corner-tap does not seem to work). The very good news are that the same feature was also present under PowerPC Ubuntu (and also under both SUSE and Ubuntu on x86, but on the Latitude that is far less of a problem since the bottom-right-corner-tap does work very well and is more convenient - and you also have two real buttons anyway). In case on your PowerPC Linux none of the above tricks work I believe you might need to use F12 for right-click and eventually F11 for middle-click.

Wireless connections might still be somehow tricky for certain configurations - the X300 is using a Broadcom 4324 a/b/g that has NEVER worked OK with any native Linux driver - however it works VERY well using ndiswrapper on all the Linux distributions that I have tested this year - setting ndiswrapper can be somehow trickier in certain conditions (for instance on the latest Mandriva) but usually is not a problem (but first you need to blacklist bcm43xx) - and as a result it pretty much worked from the first attempt under both Ubuntu and SUSE (on Fedora there was a problem with updates/repositories and they are rather strict on non-open drivers so I never got that one working in the short interval while I looked at it).

The wireless adapter in the iBook is a Broadcom 4318 but ndiswrapper is not an option on the PowerPC architecture - so I was a little afraid. Getting that to work was a long struggle but in the end I got that working quite well under Ubuntu and acceptable under OpenSUSE - just remember that with WEP 4318 seems to only work in Linux PPC with 'open authentication' and not with 'shared authentication' (which also is not more secure so there is not a huge point in using it).

There is however a small problem with the SUSE 'network manager' - under both PPC and x86 that one is sometimes VERY tricky and I have even seen it once refusing to connect with the wired ethernet cable - the Ubuntu version was A LOT better!

However that is not the SUSE deal-breaker - the HUGE problem with OpenSUSE is the actual 'package/updates manager' - it is INCREDIBLY SLOW and some of the related programs that have a GUI are incredibly intrusive and badly designed, popping windows and stealing focus all the time. Even only the 'initial startup update check' is able to get the CPU to 100% for quite some time and generally the entire experience can become very unpleasant if you are used with the speed and efectiveness of the Debian package management utilities (which are also used by Ubuntu). Also Mandriva was almost as good so maybe I was a little spoiled before trying SUSE, but in the end I can't see myself using it on the long run :(

Always a very tricky part in Linux is the power management / suspend / hibernate / resume - and in this case things are even further complicated on the proprietary iBook by the use of the external FireWire disk - as you remember Fedora wasn't even able to start and both Ubuntu and OpenSUSE 10.3 can only boot after a COLD START - it seems that a warm start can mess some things in the 1394 part (and also in the video init part, which I could also see with the Tiger original setup disk!)

On the iBook so far only OSX Tiger seems to be able to suspend / hibernate / resume OK, OSX Leopard is OK on suspend but is messing things after resuming from hibernation (which might be excused from Linux but not from the latest over-hyped Apple fad) and both of the major OSX versions seem to keep the FireWire devices powered when in 'Sleep state' so it might be possible that the FireWire commands to get disks to sleep might not be a standard after all :(

Neither Open SUSE nor Ubuntu are able to suspend or hibernate on the iBook - the bcm43xx driver might be part of the problem (it certainly is on the X300, but on the iBook there is no ndiswrapper alternative) - actually SUSE only lists a command to suspend to disk and after activating that it gives an error but does nothing bad, while Ubuntu only lists a command to suspend to RAM which seems to be perfectly executed ... it only has fatal problems when trying to resume from that state :)

On the Latitude X300 both Ubuntu and SUSE will suspend / hibernate / resume just fine, but with a number of tricks (the very first one being that in my configurations bcm43xx must be blacklisted, the second is that on Ubuntu it is much better to NOT use the default new experimental modesetting Intel video driver) - and a nice touch is that on hibernate SUSE is also updating the GRUB configuration so that it will directly restore from that point. Suspend/resume seems a tad quicker on Ubuntu than on SUSE (and almost as fast as the one in XP, which is as good as the one in OSX Tiger on iBook). On OpenSUSE there is also one extra trick involved since s2ram needs extra parameters - so I had to search a lot on the net before learning that I have to create a file /etc/pm/config.d/s2ram and add a line S2RAM_OPTS=" -f -m" there in order to have everything working perfectly!

The overall impression was quite positive and on the Latitude X300 Ubuntu is certainly staying on the internal disk, SUSE only until the next interesting Linux to test and for the moment I am keeping both Ubuntu and OpenSUSE on the small external HDD together with the old OSX Tiger just since it seems such an advanced PowerPC recovery HDD :)

One final note - a small rule that I have with my reviews is that at least one week must be spent using mostly the stuff that is reviewed before actually starting to write about it - that (and the fact that I also have real work to do) explains why most of my posts seem somehow delayed when compared with some of the hyper-optimistic articles made for money / services / self-promotion - when for instance people claim that Leopard is faster you have to wonder if they have EVER really tested it on a PowerBook/iBook ... but I guess that the full truth might have not been so easy on the fanboys, which in turn would have just went to other sites depriving the site/author of revenues ... so everybody wins if we just live in a fantasy world without any connection to the reality ... oh well, everybody wins except for the morons tricked by the hype - but in the long term even that is a good thing since certain people only learn by paying hard :)

Small update on hdparm and smartctl

2007-12-15T05:01:00.001-08:00

1. There are now versions of both programs not only for various *nix-exs but also for Windows - for instance http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/ ! (so being lazy in regard to Linux is no longer an excuse :) )

2. With certain HDD models (especially notebook drives) the power-management settings (for the less experienced - think unexpected disk noise, premature disk failure and so on) can be very complex - I have previously seen a Samsung disk where 'hdparm -B' and 'hdparm -M' were never able to disable the frantic head loading/unloading no matter the combination of values, but instead 'smartctl -o on' was able to improve things a lot; a much more recent Western Digital also had similar problems which this time could be also seen in Windows (at a slightly more reduced scale) - the ideal combination for that WD1200BEVE is so far 'hdparm -B 255' and 'hdparm -M 254' ... if you have more time you should experiment with other values - on an older disk I had something like below in a Ubuntu startup script ...

hdparm -B 248 -S 61 -M 128 /dev/sda
echo 30000 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
echo 8 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
echo 24000 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs

UPDATE:
It looks like some disks (the above WD1200BEVE among them) can be very tricky in regard to handling advanced power management - setting a normal value with 'hdparm -B nn' under both Windows and Linux will work just fine ... UNTIL the next standby !!! After that the advanced power management value is set to 128 under both Linux and Windows - which is less than desirable :(
Under Ubuntu the fix was the easiest - just one more symbolic link to my custom hdparm-B script - this one as /etc/acpi/resume.d/99-hdparm-B.sh :) I will have to see the equivalent under SUSE 10.3 but the tricky part might be Windows - I might need a small program to stay in the tray and listen to power-management events and then run a command (each time after a resume or only when on AC ?). Ideally that program should be a service but for the moment that seems a little too much ...
Another interesting question might be if the hdparm -B parameter should actually be 16 bit (and the high bits somehow control the value after suspend/resume) ?

More HDD woes ... and some from DRM :)

2007-12-08T05:11:00.000-08:00

As a result of some of my previous posts I now got a name in my circles as the 'guy to ask about notebook HDD problems' - which resulted in actually seeing a number of weird HDD problems and even being paid to solve such problems for other people - and this short post will be about small tricks that I have learned with a number of such disk operations.

First a short note on the actual HDD brands - it is VERY hard to say in advance that a specific HDD model will be better over time than another similar model - generally each company might have good models and bad models and even good batches and bad batches, but almost always the 'verdict' can only be seen after more than a year of use and the statistical data is very thin or very late - I really don't care that today we can say quite clearly which was the best 8 GBytes notebook HDD since nobody will want to buy one (or be able to find a new one). Some clues can be taken from feedback on sites like newegg.com but anything with less than 30-50 feedback can be very misleading and even more upsetting can be the fact that many models were replaced and as a result there is no statistical trace of some of the worst models - like Toshiba MK1032GAX. Another important thing to remember might be that 'revolutionary first models' very often have unsolved problems - you can see that today on some of the first 'perpendicular recording' models. Obviously when picking a new HDD to replace an old one inside a notebook you must pay attention to the bus/connector type (SATA vs classic ATA) and also remember that 120 GB is a safer bet than 160 GB for older BIOS versions.

Copying the old information can be very easy or very hard - if the old disk is good and you already have some decent software and hardware tools you are in the first scenario but with a bad or partially bad old disk things can be a nightmare. You obviously need a way to access BOTH the old and the new disks at the same time - so you might need at least an external (cheap) enclosure - but in extreme situations you might need adaptors and a way to place the disks inside a desktop. A simple copy without any 'partition moving/resizing' from a good HDD should be the safest choice - and almost any software should be able to handle it.

However it is a lot more difficult to copy bad disks - even partially bad that have the bad sectors already marked as such - PartitionMagic used to be among the best programs for custom disk copying but it will fail with incredibly cryptic errors when seeing a NTFS partition with bad sectors - and when you get to that point and you don't have a huge amount of money (or time) a Linux solution might be the best alternative - a LiveCD with GParted (with Clonezilla as an alternative) - and even in that case you might actually need to use ntfsclone from the command-line. Generally in my recent experience I have found that GParted/ntfsclone are the best for a 1:1 copy, PartitionMagic can be very good AFTER the 1:1 copy to extend a partition and keep it in a bootable state (but even it can often fail on shrinking partitions). A wise idea is to run Windows CHKDSK as soon as possible on the new copy - and in case the old partitions had bad clusters a very handy tool might be a Vista bootable install DVD - you can get to the command prompt and the Vista CHKDSK can now check and eliminate previously bad sectors with the new /B switch !!!

After a successful copy you might want to check first the bootable status (and if you have a more complex booting scheme just marking a partition active might not be enough and some extra effort might be needed) and eventually then take a look at how DRM/protections have 'survived' the copy - one of the absolute worst offenders in that regard is the full Acrobat 7 which you might need to reinstall - and as I have recently seen while helping a friend, you will need to - 1) uninstall + restart, 2) install 7.0 + restart, 3) install 7.05 update + restart, 4) install 7.07 update + restart, 5) install 7.08 update + restart, 6) install 7.09 update + restart = 6 RESTARTS for a fu**ing 'PDF corrector' !!!

After you get everything running you might also want to think on the long-term HDD-error-prevention, and that might involve a number of things:

useless load-cycles prevention - that is very important in certain versions of Linux, also very likely in OSX; what makes things worse is that different drives will show different results, but things are certainly not good if you hear the disk heads parking every 2-3 second or so ...
if you are very good with respecting 'planned administrative maintenance' then Spinrite is certainly a major option - and running a full test every month or so will keep your data alive for a loong time; however most people are not that good with 'regular maintenance' and in that case you should at least activate SMART on the hard-drive and eventually activate "automatic offline data collection" (with smartctl -o on) - that will sometimes result in strange HDD activity when there should be none, but with that enabled problems might be detected / self-corrected at much earlier stages.

What can you do with the old disk ? Probably nothing that involves important data, but in a not-so-surprising way a clean 'reformat' might show something that looks like a perfect disk - since on write the HDD firmware will force the reallocation of the bad sectors - but the SMART data will show the actual number of bad sectors (and give a better idea of the extent of the problem). A small problem might be that no USB enclosure that I know of will pass SMART commands, so for such advanced use you will need to have the disk on the ATA/SATA bus ...

I will end the post with an interesting link to an article by a Mac fan which in turn links to some other posts - I guess now the image behind the 'marketing curtain' no longer looks so rosy ...

Why the Kindle will die ...

2007-11-25T01:45:00.000-08:00

I was a little surprised by the latest 'news' on the gizmo arena - the 'ebook-readers' - until I have realized that one of the 'reporters' manufacturing this story is David Pogue - at that point it was just clear we were speaking about paid advertising and no journalism.

But Sony first and now Amazon are failing to understand a number of simple points:

- the price is essential - for 400-500 US$ today you can get a decent Windows notebook with a COLOR screen 4 times bigger; at the same price point you can get the new Asus EEE which is A LOT cooler (and somehow open-source); or you can get TWO of the amazing OLPC notebooks (but in the current Xmas promotion you will have to donate one to less fortunate kids);

- another reason why the pricing is dead-wrong is the 'DRM-connection' - if you want to convince people to pay for LOCKED ebooks (that cost about 0.0001 cents to make) about the same price as for paper books at least you should give the reader away for free! and if you really try to SELL it as a stand-alone product then most likely 99.99 is the right pricing point for something like that!!!

- the only way to sell such an overpriced gizmo with even more overpriced DRM content would be to place the Apple logo on it and start the media machine (with the last part actually Amazon trying to do by getting Pogue - but unfortunately the famous SteveJ reality distortion field is just missing :) )

- as long as the special paper-like (passive) screen is still expensive the ABSOLUTE best way to start selling it (and bring it into mass production, which will bring prices down A LOT) would be to add it as an option to new high-end models of subnotebooks / convertible / tabletPCs on the face of the lid opposed to the 'normal' (active) screen - by default it can be programmed to show the manufacturer logo (and this way Dell will also avoid the infamous "circle of light" generated by their stupid protruding logo) but it should also be possible to use it to display whatever else, including to read books for months !!!

Update - here is a link with extra talk on the matter - however some of the (otherwise) good observation from there should be clearly started with a "on the medium term" - since on the (very) short term some other approaches might work a lot better (like my own suggestion above), and in the (very) long term there are really zero chances to keep your customers captive so you should avoid investing in such a company ...

Another fuck-up in OSX Leopard :(

2007-11-21T14:09:00.000-08:00

Just discovered this one today, but it looks like there are so many bugs inside Leopard that you can hardly navigate them in the Google results ... and of course Apple is not quite recognizing any of them :)

This one might also never be fixed - until very-very late (like October 2005 or so) no Apple computer could hibernate - and when that 'new and amazing' feature was 'invented' (almost certainly by Steve Jobs :) ) it was only activated on the high-end line of laptops - the PowerBooks ! Of course that since an iBook G4 was almost identical inside it was only a matter of time until many people figured out a simple way to also activate it - you can take a look for instance at this post (which however is rather inaccurate in how things are on Windows and Linux).

Well, guess what - Leopard somehow managed to screw that too - the iBook still hibernates but on wake-up the trackpad is dead (and apparently also bluetooth). The list of bugs is however a lot longer - but you will not see that too often since the fanboys and the media are too busy sucking-up to SteveJ ...

Update - here is a great article on some of the OSX problems (I really like the part with the Blue Screen of Death - that is now quite present in OSX :) )

And an observation that might also explain a lot - many of the macmorons that you see mumbling on how OSX was alway amazing and never had any problems are actually newcomers with at most 2 years of experience or so - but 10.4 Tiger also had quite a number of problems when it was very fresh (but nowhere as many as Leopard).

Leopard - as bad as Vista but the hype is ten times worse :(

2007-11-09T12:34:00.000-08:00

As you might know from this post, during the last weeks one of the most pleasant surprises that I have had was the new Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon - finally a Linux that works really well on my X300! And since that set me in the mood for experimenting more exotic operating systems, I have decided to also take a look at the "latest and greatest" from Apple - OSX 10.5 Leopard.

The 'test bench' was an iBook G4 with 1 GB RAM - a computer almost 2 years newer than my Dell X300 yet in so many ways inferior (with the only excuse it was about half of the price compared at the moment when both were new) - and since that iBook G4 1.33 GHz still is probably the second or third fastest ever 12'' model from Apple (after the 12'' Powerbook 1.5GHz, which is only MARGINALLY faster) the results of my tests are a perfect description of THE BEST performance you should expect from Leopard on a PowerPC notebook from Apple!

Since you have probably seen by now the title of the post I will not delay the main result any longer - on the older non-Intel notebooks Leopard is SLOW and unimpressive - just like Vista on older machines :)

Booting to the point where everything stops freaking the HDD is almost twice slower than with Tiger (and in the same range as the PPC version of Ubuntu - more details on that towards the end of this post) and I HATE WITH EXTREME PASSION the new dock (and to a lesser extent the transparent menu) - fortunately " defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES ; killall Dock" will make it usable again :)

As long as you are not starting a lot of programs the performance is again OK - but starting a program that now has the same code 4 times (from which only one is usable on your machine) was definitely not the best way to make things faster; and again the new Spotlight seems intrusive, and on top of that FSEvents are written to disk even if Time Machine is NOT activated so no surprise that everything feels SLOOOW !

So the very first piece of advice on upgrading your PowerPC machine to Leopard is just that - DON'T !!! Just put those money towards buying a new Intel machine - since yet again Apple has certainly screwed its customers.

If you MUST upgrade just be certain that you first make a backup copy of all your Tiger system - if you do that wisely on a FireWire HDD you can boot it from there (and even restore it back when you become bored with Leopard). And since we are talking about external HDD drives - get a HUGE one - you will soon need it with Time Machine :)

Almost everything that was hyped in Leopard was a huge disappointment - Spaces is a rather pathetic virtual desktop manager (you don't even get a different wallpaper / icons on each desktop - something that I had in the virtual desktop manager that I use in Windows since around 2000; and also is totally lame the way how the order of windows and the active/focus window is NOT remembered on each desktop).

Time Machine is also nothing less than the 'Apple marketing distortion field' in action - not only was a rather similar feature present since Windows Server 2003 and in the consumer market with Vista about one year ahead of Leopard - but the Windows version is also more convenient - since it does NOT require a separate HDD (just like with the two buttons mouse the MacMorons seem to want to carry a lot of extra luggage with their notebooks - recently I have seen one almost crying when he discovered how helpless he was without his external mouse; and now I guess people will also start carrying extern HDDs to get Time Machine working ???). Also in Vista people can have the better Time Machine (ok, it's called unsexy - Volume Shadow Copy) OVER NETWORK - so again - when was the last time when the MacMorons really had anything valid to say ??? The only good thing about Time Machine will be that the 'marketing pressure' might make Microsoft move some of the better features from the Server on normal machines but other than that ... And two other ways in which Time Machine is PATHETIC - the user interface is AWFULLY SMALL (since 'oh so shiny-looking' was far more important than actual usability - it always is with MacIdiots) and I also see in the near future a lot of morons discovering that they don't get ANY recovery for changes that take place when the backup HDD is not plugged-in (which should be kind of obvious even for the typical Mac user) but also even with that HDD plugged-in you don't get the versions between backups (which is 1 hour at best)!!!

So yes, Apple missed a HUGE opportunity here - the actual way for the perfect Time Machine would be something that I will call (and try to trademark :)) ) 'The Versioning Machine' - Apple could have done something like that by moving entirely to ZFS but that was not the case so I guess that now Linux has the very first chance to do something like that ... and it might be possible that even the always-slow Microsoft might get ahead even more in that matter ...

So to sum all Leopard stuff on older PowerPC systems - 'nothing exciting' - and you know that is the case when the only new feature that I REALLY liked was the official Apple support for generating a right-click when tapping with two fingers :)

And since I had the external FireWire HDD handy I also decided to test the status of the latest PowerPC Linux - I have tested Ubuntu 7.10 and Fedora 8 but making those work from the external HDD was quite a struggle - Fedora 8 is still not starting at this point but helped in starting Ubuntu (which has a strange problem in yabootconfig) - Ubuntu is almost usable but the Broadcom-based WiFi is still a problem and power-management is far from perfect - but the 3D effects are better than in OSX :) With Ubuntu you should also keep in mind that F12 is a trackpad right-click, F11 middle-click and FN+Delete is the actual Del key. The preliminary verdict is that overall I kind of like Ubuntu on the iBook (uBook :) ) - but generally you can not expect a lot of support for an architecture that Apple pretty much buried so the future of that is far from bright ... (and a final mini-prediction - in 2 years all support for PowerPC 32 from Apple will be gone - meaning NO OS support, maybe the same in 3-4 years for the 64 bit version).

Mandriva 2008 vs. Ubuntu 7.10 (and a special note about a serious problem with Linux on notebooks)

2007-11-04T06:47:00.000-08:00

It is that time of the year - when new versions of your favorite (or less favorite) operating systems are launched - and there were quite a number of interesting new things floating around so I decided to have the latest rematch between my favorite Linux distributions - and if you stumbled upon this post you already know that my 'number 1' was Mandriva - the very first Linux distribution that was able to suspend and successfully resume on my old Dell Latitude X300 - wireless was also working (with ndiswrapper) but the 3D eye-candy was not really ready for prime-time :( However even without 3D the USABILITY of Mandriva was at that point miles ahead of Ubuntu - but that was quite some time ago, and the question was if the same could be said about the latest distributions!

The quick answer is that there were some serious surprises - most of them pleasant but not all :( I have first tested the new Mandriva 2008 - and while overall it was still looking a lot more polished and very well integrated there were two important showstoppers - there were a number of minor problems making Broadcom wireless adapters a serious pain (bcm43xx open-source driver seems to be broken for certain newer b/g and a/b/g cards, and on top of that blacklisting bcm43xx was not simple - I have found quite a number of posts on that matter ...) but the final straw was that the suspend/resume mechanism was no longer working as well as in the previous (2007 Spring) version (which is surprising, since that was based on an older kernel) and the 3D part (CompizFusion) was still not perfectly integrated into KDE (and the decorator was still crashing sometimes) :(

The really nice surprise was coming from Ubuntu 7.10 - in my previous test with 7.04 the level of support for my configuration was totally disappointing and the overall impression was of 'unfinished' and 'more concerned about competing on looks' - especially when considering the huge media frenzy around Ubuntu - but what a difference a few months can make in the Linux world! The new Ubuntu 7.10 is a LOT better - it is more polished, there are a lot less 'loose ends' and the vast majority of the drivers were working amazingly well !!!

Obviously there are still minor problems - first of all an essential part of the bcm43xx driver (the 'firmware cutter') was left out of the installation CD (which is stupid since it only takes 28 kbytes), then obviously the same bcm43xx driver was still buggy in Ubuntu and not working with my Dell internal card - but with Ubuntu blacklisting that driver and installing ndiswrapper was a very simple task - and once bcm43xx was out of the picture the very nice surprise was that suspend/resume was 'just working' and so were most/all of the special ACPI function-keys!!! (including brightness and sound, I guess that the recent deal with Dell helped a lot on that direction). The minor exception was the actual closing of the notebook lid (also reported by some other owners of X300) - the hint on that matter was that the problem was somehow related to the LCD panel itself - and indeed some extra search proved that other people had similar problems - the problem is a new experimental driver for Intel integrated video cards which somehow - even if clearly marked as experimental - is by default installed by Ubuntu! The solution is to replace it with the older i810 driver (and set a fixed primary display for the precise screen resolution of the actual main screen) - and with that suspend/resume now works like a charm even with the notebook lid!!!

The really nice part is that now all the 3D eye-candy works very well - as you can see in the screen captures from the right (you can click on them for bigger versions) the venerable X300 can do on Ubuntu the same nice task-switching as in certain operating systems that are not even able to be installed on this almost modest configuration - namely Vista (top picture) and OSX (second one) - I was a little surprised that I was almost always using the first one with the keyboard (Win+Tab) and the second method almost always with the mouse (a nice 'screenedge' set for two of the corners - one for the current desktop and the most used one for all desktops). There is also a very nice feature (called Expo) to see all the workspaces (the third capture) - and everything is using 'live images' (you can get a hint about that from the last capture where the media player was working hard). The only minor drawback is that the viewports can not have different wallpapers (something that I was able to have in Windows for many years now with an old but trusted virtual desktop program called XDESK - which unfortunately was not able to do live previews since Windows itself did not have the needed features before Vista).

In both Mandriva and Ubuntu the software management features are quite impressive - automatic update managers as good as with Windows (and unlike Windows, it certainly will NOT install anything against your wish) and installation support and package management that neither Windows nor OSX have by default! Ubuntu update manager seems a tad better since it also lists the number of megabytes that will be downloaded and the speed for patching things is quite good (even if the Windows version of Firefox patched itself more than one day before Ubuntu and Mandriva updated their repositories - but that is more like an exception in which open-source projects were competing between themselves, since everybody knows that patching IE can take a lot longer for M$ :) ).

The result is that I now have on my X300 both Mandriva 2008 and Ubuntu Gutsy - but for the moment I use Ubuntu more (and this entire post was done from Ubuntu) since it seems to be faster (including the standby/resume speed) and with the right changes a little 'nicer to the eye' :) So the winner of this latest round is Ubuntu - but the competition is far from over :)

HOWEVER there still IS a potentially HUGE problem for Linux on laptops that neither one of the above distributions seems to fix by default (or even entirely acknowledge it) - the problem is related to head parking/unparking (the more precise term would be 'head loading/unloading') - and the root of the problem is in the actual firmware of the vast majority of the modern notebook hard-disk-drives - by default those disks will have a very aggressive (and rather stupid) policy on unloading the heads - with the result that UNDER LINUX (and a few other variants) a HUGE amount of load cycles are done in a very short amount of time with the result of highly accelerated aging of the hard-drive and very often disk failure in less than one year ! The problem was initially blamed on the laptop-mode packet but that is very often not active and as a result many people tend to dismiss it without actually checking the relevant numbers! The really worst part is that in both Windows and OSX those type of 'wild load/unload cycles' are not present - most likely since those operating systems will replace the power-saving policy from the HDD firmware with their own policy!

The immediate fix for people that are not afraid of a small amount of tweaking would be to add somewhere in the Linux startup scripts a command or set of commands that will activate a less destructive policy - most often 'hdparm -B 224' will be enough (and coupled with longer times for dirty writes and noatime mounting has resulted for me in reducing the load_count from over 5000/day to well under 500/day and still very good HDD power management - probably even less heat than in Windows but at the cost of slightly more load cycles). Depending on the disk model 'hdparm -B 255' or 'hdparm -B 254' might be needed (that will entirely disable that advanced power management - but since in neither of the above Linux distribution there is no explicit separate policy for putting the HDD in standby that might result in a little more heat - but I doubt most people will note it). Unfortunately that is not a 100% fix and you should first check the result of your 'hdparm -B NN' command with 'hdparm -I' - since it seems that there are certain disk models where 'hdparm -B' is not enough (very bad are certain Samsung models where smartctl must be also used). The long-term fix would be that good Linux distributions will test that on more hardware and come with a decent fix by default!

There were also a number of other things that I have disliked in those latest distributions - very unpleasant was the fact that Ubuntu already seems to have a HUGE list of things that will be done for the next version but almost all are useless or low-priority eye-candy - so in the end of this post (and in the spirit of the Ubuntu bug tracking system - where at no 1 is listed the REALLY important stuff - the people that have seen that will understand) I will take the liberty of listing ONLY 3 major goals for each of the two distributions.

Mandriva:

1. FIX THE NOTEBOOK HDD PROBLEM !

2. Stop releasing stuff before it is seriously tested (especially on notebooks, today notebooks are increasingly important and a system that can not suspend and restore is a dead end) - it is the second consecutive year when something embarrassing is happening to your last major release of the year :(

3. Keep the good work with parallel KDE / GNOME support (and generally where usability can be configured by the actual user and is more important than eye-candy).

Ubuntu:

1. FIX THE NOTEBOOK HDD PROBLEM !

2. Stop trying to be just an OSX clone and start getting some usability hints - get icons where 'maximized' is more than 2 pixels different from 'restored', get at least one dark-blue scheme that will not hurt the eye (the old blubuntu is not a bad starting point) and generally get all the GOOD things from Windows (which by the way, since 2000 had clear rules on when focus can be stolen from the user - while in 2007 in Ubuntu still at least once per day I find myself cursing some stupid application that has stolen my focus since the window manager is too dumb to care !!!)

3. Keep the good work with a lot of testing on a lot of different machines (if possible get Dell to do some testing too) - and also don't try to be 'nicer looking but a lot slower' in the tradition started by Vista and now continued by the new OSX Leopard (but more on that maybe in my next post).

Small update on how to 'check the numbers':
a) if you do not have smartctl installed you need to go to a terminal (command prompt) and first enter 'sudo apt-get install smartmontools' ;
b) then you can do 'sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda grep Load_Cycle'
c) if you don't get any output take a look at just 'sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda'
d) if your 4 months old notebook HDD already has over 300000 cycles (and no manufacturer guarantees it over 600000) then you probably have a small problem and all the talk around this was not just defamation from M$ :(

Some quick iPhone thoughts

2007-10-13T03:49:00.000-07:00

I have played a little more with an iPhone (actually helping a friend to 'liberate' one) and what surprised me at first was the total play for 'desire' against anything else that could matter (like actual use). I have to admit that there was a part of me saying 'I must have one' from the very first moment I saw it ... yet in the end the rational part won :)

So what problems did the rational part see? Many actually, here are just a few:

- the price is now almost OK in US, but not so much in the rest of the world; it is however visible that the next generation (probably January-February) will probably have at the same price twice the storage and many other important features!

- the 'screen keyboard' is just AWFUL no matter what Apple is trying to convince you (actually I might be a LOT faster using Palm Graffiti);

- as designed by Apple the way you will use the iPhone is strictly limited to stuff that will make Apple rich - you will pay huge amounts of money to co-monopolists like AT&T, you will only have applications that Apple wants, and most of them will be restricted in ways that will bring more money to Apple (for instance almost everything will only work with an internet connection, so that 'poor telecoms' will be able to make more money for Apple); and don't even get me started on the idea of ringtones, wallpapers, games and so on ... Apple just loves when you buy the same stuff from them over and over again :)

- the iPhone can be somehow 'liberated' - but that will just meet increasing opposition from Apple and I just don't care for a device that I have to crack every two months or so even if I LEGALLY OWN THE DEVICE !!!

In the end I will certainly not buy for myself the first generation iPhone, and if Apple insists on keeping the second version locked that will also be a niche product just for Mac-fans ... and the only good result after the iPhone will go the same way as the Newton will be that it has 'pushed' WinCE and most important Linux in the right direction!

MacFans screwed again :)

2007-09-06T02:14:00.000-07:00

I wasn't even the first to say it ...
But now is the right moment to start shorting AAPL ... it will only go down from here ... my prediction is under 100 before the end of the year ...

How Yahoo is actually using your spam...

2007-08-18T03:02:00.000-07:00

I have quite a number of email accounts, and some of them are from Yahoo - but one or two of them are a little special in that I only use those with Yahoo Messenger (and almost never for email). But quite for some time there was something a little strange about those accounts - somehow every 2-3 days one piece of spam was able to get in the mailbox, but surprisingly it was doing that just before the moment when I was logging-in with the messenger ! If I don't use that account at all (neither messenger nor web mail) the amount of spam that 'gets by' is NOT increasing in the normal 'linear way' suggested by the above ratio (1 uncaught/2 days). Also the spam does not have anything 'special' about it - in the Bulk/Trash folders there are hundreds of similar emails that have not been able to 'fool' the Yahoo spam filter.

So for some time I was thinking about that more as something in between Yahoo having some limits to their filters and Yahoo actually choosing to test the choices from their spam filter against me from time to time 'just in case' - which actually sounds cool ... but something wasn't feeling just right ... and then it hit me!

Actually the 'challenge emails' are almost exclusively on the accounts that I only use for Messenger ... and with more and more users doing that Yahoo doesn't exactly get a chance to make people see/click one of their ads ... but if they let that email pass that will make us go to the web interface and the ads are now having a MUCH better chance (which actually is not true in my case, but most likely is accurate in 90% of the 'normal users').

Now don't get me wrong - I do understand that Yahoo must 'make a living' from those ads - but now that I finally realized what's the idea behind those 'mishits', things are somehow less annoying ... but obviously still annoying :) And the entire story just is a reminder that waaay too many things now are paid by advertising - which obviously doesn't quite favor the quality of the service/content :(

Why the iPhone is no revolution (and why you might want to avoid it)

2007-07-01T01:56:00.000-07:00

Well, this is NOT another technical talk about some minor or major feature that is missing from the iPhone - if you want to read that type of info please take a look here, here, here or here !

The major point of this post is the almost total lack of innovation in the iPhone - which is not such a huge surprise from the company that claimed to 'invent' the modern computer UI after actually stealing it (together with M$) from XEROX ...

It is not only about technical innovations - there were touch-screens in mobile phones long before, and there are products with a lot better specifications already on the market - the problem is that the iPhone as a 'revolution in mobile phone PHILOSOPHY' is a major failure!

The first and most important failure is the one in regard with openness and control - Apple could have remained in the history books as the company that forever changed the mobile phone landscape (in the same way as initially M$ and later GNU/Linux changed the Personal Computers world) by 'setting the phones free' - instead Apple decided to play the same 'keep the customer hostage' game (which they also play on DRM and iTunes) so that the real innovator remains FIC ... And in case you don't really get why openness is so important just try to move your stuff (info, contacts, email, music and so on) from one closed platform (let's say Apple, the most restrictive one) to some other closed platform ...

The second "iPhone failure to innovate" is the one related to locking customers in long-term phone contracts - that is one of the oldest tricks in the mobile phones market and you might have expected Apple to try to come with a better idea - but no, Apple is so desperate (since the iPod cash-cow is dying) that they will take any quick fix available - even if that involves locking their customers with a single mobile provider ... and picking the one that isn't exactly famous for service quality or fair play is just what you would expect from a company that only cares about money ...

It remains to be seen if a future version of the iPhone might come with something better ... but somehow I doubt that ...

The major 'good thing' that I find in the new iPhone is that it will make things a little more competitive on the mobile phones market - but the key word here is probably 'too little, too late' :(

Dell notebooks + preinstalled Ubuntu = still pathetic :(

2007-06-06T02:03:00.000-07:00

You can take a look here and second page here (pages might be very slow) - however the final result is still very poor - suspend does not seem to be able to resume and only WEP seems to be available (and even that only works sometimes) - you might actually get better results with some other distributions that are not 'preinstalled' by Dell ...

And since we are on the subject of Linux distributions - Mandriva is still my favorite but right now Fedora 7 looks very promising - it comes with kernel 2.6.21 by default (which is a few revisions better than Mandriva) and seems to have better support for the latest things ...

Small Apple stuff

2007-06-05T05:48:00.000-07:00

Some good points why only rich loosers will jump on the initial iPhone ...

And in case you wonder - Apple still has 100% control over your iPod and you have little to say - see this post ...

However there is one Apple criticism that I don't share - as long as the hidden info discovered in the DRM-free tunes do not contain stuff like credit card info I (also) do not see any real privacy issue !

Pricing - Windows vs Linux vs Apple

2007-05-26T06:37:00.000-07:00

A very nice page about Windows vs. Ubuntu on the new Dell configurations can be found at http://www.cs.uml.edu/~ntuck/dellbuntu/ - however the systems are pretty much the minimum usable configurations so it does not quite make sense to compare that 650 US$ notebook to the 2000 US$ MacBook Pro :)

However if you go a little on the higher end for a notebook that is basically as good as the minimal high-end Apple correctly configured, the Dell 1505 with Ubuntu preinstalled will take you to about 1700 US$ - with Core 2 Duo T7200, 2 GB DDR2 667, 160 GB SATA, DVD writer, 256 MB video card, modem and 3 years warranty (and the Vista Home Premium configuration is also in the same price range).

The 'bad Apple' of the race (pun intended) is the MacBook Pro - by the time you add the same configuration / functionality as the above you get to ... almost 2700 US$ ! But of course OSX 10.4 is obviously so worth the extra 1000 US$ - who cares that in 6 months (at most) it will be obsolete (and you will need another 150 US$ to upgrade), and who wants an operating system that is really free (Linux) or one that looks better (Vista) or which supports pretty much all of the existing games (XP, and many Apple fans will install at least that one anyway). Oh, and I forgot - the Dell will have all the keys that you will normally use (unlike the Mac) and a two-button touchpad :)

And a small update on Linux + suspend/resume - it seems that things are not 100% there yet :(

Many updates ... and why desktop Linux is not here yet ...

2007-05-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

First of all a small jab at "Why people really don't switch to Linux" - maybe it's also about the reasons from that post, but the fact that only in 2007 I am able to reliably do suspend / hibernate / resume in Linux is certainly part of the real reasons - yes, we all know that actually Windows itself took about 5 years from the very unsafe Win95 suspend to the usable level from Windows 2000 but we are now in 2007 and the most hyped Linux distributions (like Ubuntu) STILL can not do it 'by default' !!! And don't even get me started on WiFi and WPA ... I am still recovering after my previous post :)

Now some short updates to an older post - in "Geek tools ... for a pre-computer notepad" I was mentioning that in the Uniball 207 series I was considering the standard 207 gel pens not heavy enough for my taste - but I have now tested the (slightly more expensive) Premier 207 and that one has an amazing silicone grip (a friend joked about it and called it 'almost erotic') and has a much better weight - highly recommended!

Also a very pleasant surprise were the 'standard' Parker gel refills (black) - right now those hold two important records in my book - first for the most amazing and intense black color and second for the fastest drying gel ink - almost as fast as the one from the Uniball Jetstreams (but those are NOT gel inks)! It is also acceptable when you can not hold it in normal / vertical position - not as good as the PowerTanks but better than any other gel pen that I have used. The only drawback is the price of the Parker refills - but for how much I am handwriting today it is not a problem and as a result those are currently by favorite choice (together with the heavy metal pen mentioned in the above post).

And as a small bonus a link to a recent Apple convert that is starting to see what's behind the hype - Four Things He Hates About Apple - he also seems to be a fan on Uniball 207 :)

About Ubuntu spinsters, mac-zealots and what the real Linux people use on their systems ...

2007-05-12T06:37:00.000-07:00

For some time now I was hearing a lot of rumors about how amazing Ubuntu is - including some daring posts on how Microsoft should start having nightmares about it ... but surprisingly mostly from pathetic Apple losers that somehow managed to realize that Apple will never be a threat for Microsoft (or for Dell for that matter) - and can only survive by 'hopping' to the next thing that might (iPod) or might not (AppleTV) be 'hot' for the moment.

But since I was anyway going to redo my Linux installations (on both my dual-core Opteron primary desktop and my 1 kilo Dell X300 - twice lighter than the best Apple ever managed to get so far) about one week ago I decided to also get the latest Ubuntu Live CD (7.04) and try to give it a shot - if it was going to be good I could keep at least one of the 2-3 installations ... if not ... the EXT3 partitions were anyway going to be erased so it was only a loss of some time ...

The Live CD was starting OK on both systems - but it was mostly in the default configuration mode - and I was also expecting a friend with a lot of Linux experience (and another distribution as a backup - see below) and the most important test was going to be how well could things go on the X300 (which was always VERY tricky in Linux) - so that's how I started the tests. While the installation went fine the final result was rather unimpressive - the CPU was not very well throttled, also the wireless part was not working by default and most important of all - suspend and hibernate were not even close to working (which was always a huge problem in Linux on the X300, but with Ubuntu at least the crash on restore was looking spectacular, almost Apple-style - for 60 seconds we actually believed it was a desired visual effect and that's how it was supposed to work) - so on the subnotebook Ubuntu was voted out without even a single remorse ...

On the desktop the hardware was a lot more 'standard' - so most of the normal things were working by default - but again the new 3D part was not working, the CPU was always kept in the 'performance' (hot) mode and again suspend/hibernate was not looking good - so again Ubuntu was a small disappointment ... and worse of all, it managed to seriously f*ck things on the (rather complex) Vista + OSX boot process from a PATA drive that I keep as a second drive after the SATA which is the 'default boot drive'. After 10 minutes of fixing the boot problems I finally managed to get things back to about the same point where I started - Ubuntu was not a keeper, but the best part of the story is yet to come!!!

The bottom line on Ubuntu - more hype than substance for the high-end user. It might not be a bad choice for somebody that knows nothing about computers and will get it fully pre-installed - since it is rather friendly and safe (actually even safer in the Live CD version) but once you have existing hardware where it must run, things can easily go wrong. I also first liked the 'African theme' but that is not so easy on the eyes after the initial contact and has to be changed, it was also nice that it automounted the OSX partition, but the main good thing that I got from Ubuntu was the curiosity to give GNOME another chance ... I might also take another look at Ubuntu on my iBook G4 but I don't expect too much on that pathetic hardware either ... (update - it starts OK but enabling the 3D effects leaves 'noise' on screen and is not 100% usable; also power-management does not seem to work very well).

And now to the actual pleasant surprise - my friend is a long-time fan of Mandriva Linux - back from the days when it was called Mandrake - so we started with two DVD versions of the Mandriva 2007 Spring PowerPack - one for 32 bits and one for 64 bits. The HUGE surprise was that after the problems with Ubuntu on the Dell X300 ACPI / power management part, Mandriva installed and started just perfectly !!! I could not believe my eyes - after almost 4 years I was now able to suspend / hibernate in Linux on the X300 - and successfully resume :) The CPU was also using by default a dynamic policy - generating far less heat - so Mandriva was the clear winner on the X300. Even the new '3D desktop' part was starting OK - so during the next days I took Mandriva for a real-life test in the 3 installations that we did - 64 bit on the desktop, 32 bit on the desktop and 32 bit on the laptop, with almost half of the tests on the notebook!

I will not get into full details - but generally things were working quite well - actually most normal things were working OK since more than two Mandriva version ago, but now having low power mode and suspend / hibernate / resume I could really use the X300 as a notebook in Linux 'full time'!

The first part where things got tricky was the wireless connection - simple unprotected WiFi was working OK for years in Linux, in recent years even the number of native drivers was decent, but anything involving some security was very tricky. More than one year ago I gave up on having wireless on Mandriva since it was only working as far as WEP, and that only with ndiswrapper and with some strange bug where it was leaking memory to the point where it was only usable for 15 minutes :( With the latest Mandriva 2007 Spring the wireless was detected OK with the native drivers, but for some reason WPA was never actually working (which still is a big problem in some configurations, see below). After a few hours I was very close to give up again, but then I decided to try with the latest Dell 2000/XP drivers and ndiswrapper ... and huge surprise - things work just fine even with WPA !!! I still suspect that by using this convoluted approach the power-saving mode is not optimal for the wireless part, but it works and actually even in Windows the Dell driver was not optimal by default, so ... WPA still remains a problems with the native driver, and it is also a problem with the VERY old orinoco-based 802.11b-only (no g) card from the even older Dell X200 - and unfortunately on that one the Windows drivers are not recognized by ndiswrapper :(

The other tricky thing is the new '3D desktop' part - the really impressive option (actually better eye-candy than OSX - or Vista for that matter) is Beryl - however that one is not (yet) integrated very well with KDE (which previously was always my choice on Mandriva) - it is still highly usable with two-three problems - one is that the 'virtual desktops' are not perfectly integrated, the second is that KDE is not 100% ready to see the <Win> key as a <Super> modifier (and instead will see it somehow as the <F13> standard key) and the third is that in some conditions (and pretty much always on LogOff) the '3D interceptions' can go wrong ...

I was anyway happy using KDE without the '3D desktop' when I also decided to take a look at how things are in GNOME with 3D - and again a very nice surprise - in GNOME things are A LOT better by default!!! The virtual desktops are slightly better (and the taskbar knows when not to show applications that are from a different '3D virtual desktop'), the <Super> key is a modifier and can be configured as it should be, and the '3D interceptions' go wrong a lot less (but are not 100% OK yet); <Alt>+Tab will go to the new 'preview task switcher', <Win>+Tab will activate the '3D ring task switcher' and on my system <Win>+Escape will activate the 'all desktops window picker' - which is virtual desktops + OSX Expose in one - too bad that one is not very keyboard-friendly (yet). You can also assign commands to different corners and in my case I have also defined the "`" key as the 'reverse Tab' for both Alt and Win - the X86 name of that key is 'grave' (from grave accent) - and all are being set from "Beryl settings manager" (under Applications / System / Configuration / Other). That being said KDE is still the more mature option that I use on the desktop, but GNOME remained for the moment the default on the notebook...

So in the end I now have 3 new Mandriva installations that work surprisingly well, that will get their updates in a very friendly way and that indeed some day might be a nightmare for BillG but LONG before that it will be a HUGE problem for SteveJ - however right now it is a very powerful tool in the hand of the more technical people that would like to keep their freedoms away from the convicted monopolist (MS) and also from the company not (yet) convicted but a LOT worse in regards to freedom - Apple of course.

PS - the post was 100% written on the Dell X300 under the above Linux in Firefox over wireless with WPA and a few 'suspend to RAM' and one 'hibernate' before finishing it :)

Updates:

a) it might not be very clear for a newcomer - Mandriva has both KDE and GNOME (and they have obviously worked a lot to have certain things working in a common way), while Ubuntu is only GNOME and for KDE you need Kubuntu (which I have now tested - looks slightly more usable than the plain Ubuntu but still less interesting than Mandriva);

b) with KDE + 3D Aquamarine (the window decorator) will crash a lot and there will also be problems from time to time when trying to log-off;

c) however in Mandriva KDE is a LOT better on sessions, log-off and many other 'shortcuts', and also has very good keyboard usability (especially once you get Win to be Super_L - see some of the comments); GNOME is sometimes very poor on keyboard shortcuts and in Mandriva there is far less session control :(

d) still things can go HORRIBLY WRONG with Beryl + certain focus combinations (for instance a protected screen saver can start but the focus can never get there - which means you can no longer get back to your programs);

e) enough about 3D eye candy - the real huge step forward with this version was power-management - things work very reliable on that - but suspend / hibernate / resume is still slower than in XP; the same can be said about boot time - even if Mandriva is already using a 'parallel boot' optimization that according to them can get 20% improvements in some conditions!

f) and a final link (very little, but related to the new 3D desktops) about another Linux (SUSE) used by somebody that is a top-level FOSS contributor - Fear and Loathing in Cupertino :) And here another one about something that is not even Linux ...

What's wrong with Archos 204 ?

2007-04-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

Maybe you have seen the old news - Archos now has a new model in the Gmini XS 20x family - the 'new' 204 - which will just be another failure typical for the companies where 'managers' and 'marketing experts' have a much heavier influence than engineers or the real consumer research :(

So what's wrong with the 'new 204' ? Many people jumped on the 'no movie' problem - which is actually only a very minor drawback - watching movies on a 1.8'' screen is so pathetic that even the kings of 'lame by trying to be too cool' - Apple of course - weren't too attracted to it ...

The real problem is the disk size vs. product price - in case you have 'Mac-memory' (meaning that you forget in a few months how 'pathetic' x86 was ... until Steve 'the God' Jobs discovered it ... ) the 204 is the 4th consecutive model in so many years ... with the same 20 GB HDD and for about the same price !!! And while almost 4 years ago XS200 with 20 GB for 200 US$ at NewEgg was a killer deal, today at about the same price Archos could have easily placed in PRECISELY the same case and with the same battery life a 40 GB version for a production cost that was even LOWER that the original XS200! Actually since the original was the 2mm thicker version Archos could have even placed an 80 GB version in the same size or 40 in the slimmer version - but somehow it seems that Archos is living in a world of protectionist pricing where the competition is ultra-thin (I have just described France, the same country that was dreaming that the Minitel will kill the Internet) - and just like most of the other companies from there that could not care less about what the consumer wants, Archos is slowly moving to a smaller and smaller 'niche' - with the portable video players remaining the only segment that keeps them afloat ... and at this rate it will not be for a long time :(

So, in case you are an investor in Archos and you are wondering if things will get any better - I will put the entire 'philosophy' of the market in a single phrase - if DURING THIS YEAR they'll be able to have a small XS 240 (40 GB) for the audio fans, either a 60 or an 80 GB at a LOW price for the video fans and a 2-8 GB flash USB-stick format for the 'joggers' then 2008 might not be the last year for Archos ... but if none of those take place the prospects of your investment is rather bleak :)

Who killed 'Inspector Gadget' or how gadgets were taken over by gizmos ...

2007-02-18T23:41:00.000-08:00

This will only be a short post since there is not a lot to say - the status of our "future gadgets" is bleak :(

The problem is part of our 'human nature' - unfortunately most people are shallow and not very smart - and as a result the dumb, shallow, expensive and 'obsolete even before launch' products are winning over the smarter products ... the victory of marketing over technology :(

So when buying your next gizmo keep that in mind and vote with your wallet!!!

Geek tools ... for a pre-computer notepad :)

2007-02-03T02:36:00.000-08:00

There are all sorts of jokes about how you know that you spend too much time on a computer when you tend to push a scroll button on real paper, or that you know you are old when you still remember that initially spam was meat and the ultimate geek tool was a pocket protector - well, back then writing on paper with a hand-writing tool was pretty much the only widespread way of taking notes and writing tools were very cool.

Today handwriting is almost a defunct art but that is unfortunate since the advance in technology has brought to acceptable price levels some very amazing writing tools - and this post will be a short review of some of the coolest that you can find at a decent price - but when I say cool I mean 'with a great technical merit' and not 'so incredibly expensive that will make you feel special' - if you search for a justification on buying some hugely overpriced piece of marketing - be it a Rolex, an Apple product or a MontBlanc gold pen - then you have landed on the wrong blog!

One recent (but not so great) idea was that you can "Save $200 in 2 minutes and have the worlds best writing pen" - not a bad thing to try, but the Mont Blanc refill itself is rather expensive, is normally intended to be used on a capped pen and there are many other better alternatives - the very first in line are the Pilot gel refills themselves (shown as the inferior choice on the article above only since the price is much lower, but unlike the roller refill it will also survive for a long time uncapped) - overall good, inexpensive and widely available!

However the main competitor to Pilot is UniBall - distributed by Sanford in US - and you can find some very cool stuff in their (very long, not all available with Sanford) product list - this post might help you with some details on why some models might fit better in some conditions and so on ...

First a word on ergonomics - I personally love a writing tool that is THICK and HEAVY - none of the inexpensive 'uniballs' are heavy enough (and for an alternative see at the end of the article) but most of them are thick enough - but people that like very thin pens might not be happy with the same choices as mine ...

Another matter of taste vs. convenience vs. technical limits is 'click vs. capped' - most people (including myself) agree that a 'click pen' is more convenient but I really like better capped pens - I always place the cap on the non-writing end when I use the pen so I never loose it and it makes the pen a tad heavier, and capped pens can NEVER leak in your pocket and will not dry out when properly capped!!!

Some of the best clickable pens from UniBall (that I have tried so far) are the 207/Signo series and the RT (retractible) PowerTanks.

The Signo/207 series will use gel-based refills and some consider them better (and less washable) than the Pilot G2 refills. The standard tip is 0.7 mm - which combined with the gel ink generates a good line width - but many people favors the "micro" tip - 0.4 or 0.5 mm I believe. I have not yet tried the Limited and Premiere versions - which might be heavier and a better fit for my taste - but anyway the ergonomics are decent.

The PowerTanks are an amazing feat by themselves - it's the japanese (UniBall is from Mitsubishi) version of the Fisher space pen - it will write in unusual positions (or zero gravity, but I have not tested that myself :) ) and will work on rather heavy conditions - as far as I know there are two possible tips (1.0 and 0.7 mm, but the actual line width is more like 0.4 and 0.3 mm) , 3 colors and click/capped versions - I find the 0.7 tip too thin but the 1.0 black capped version is my personal choice for writing in unusual positions or conditions!!! However the PowerTank is NOT the ultimate smooth writing tool - actually even the 1.0 Powertank tip is less smooth than the 0.7 tip of the gel Signo/207 and also not as permanent (but will dry quicker and will work in any position).

Even smoother than the gel pens are the rollers - Vision Elite is very smooth (and the main marketing point is that it will not leak in planes at high altitudes) - but the 0.7 mm (normal) tip will generate a rather wide line (and it will not dry very fast) while the 0.5 mm (micro) tip is a tad less smooth when you write at certain angles - still good, but my personal gripe with the Vision Elite line is that it's rather thin for my personal writing style ...

My personal favorites so far from the UniBall product line are the Jetstreams - the 1.0 mm tip writes with a very usable line width and with two nice features - incredibly smooth AND incredibly fast drying !!! The grip is better than the Vision Elite (and it looks even better on the Jetstream RT, but I have not tested that one ... yet) and it seems it might also be the favorite writing tool for left-handers :) Ideally a metal Jetstream RT might be my ultimate choice - but that one does not exist ... so far :)

However my non-proprietary overall favorite for the moment is an ergonomic no-name metal pen (something similar to this or this but with a better color) - it is using Parker-style refills (including gel refills - which are very smooth, and normal ink ballpoint refills - which can be FAR cheaper and write longer but are not as smooth and permanent) and the ergonomic grip plus decent weight make for a very pleasant and easy writing!

Cool boot stuff for 2007 ...

2007-01-09T13:33:00.000-08:00

On 2006-12-30 Knoppix 5.1.0 was launched and then on 2007-01-04 there was a small update with Knoppix 5.1.1 - Knoppix was always cool but the new 5.1 version adds the latest Firefox 2 (actually Iceweasel) , OpenOffice.org 2.1 and many other nice things (drivers, programs, games and so on) - and on top of that there is now some hot "eye-candy" for people that still have Vista/OSX envy - a 3D desktop called Beryl! The default boot files (Linux = 1.93 MB and minirt.gz = 1.16 MB) are just fine for CD booting but if you want to do a more tricky USB/HDD boot there is another minirt.gz on the knoppix forums (about 2.52MB) that fixes most things (but not all).

The main thing missing from Knoppix is entirely the fault of NVIDIA restrictive license on their drivers - basically in order to see the 3D desktop features on such a card you will have to do a more conventional install and get the binary-only NVIDIA drivers :( There is also still a small potential boot problem even with the large minirt.gz - even if you go for a boot from an ISO image on the HDD, any KNOPPIX folder on the same partition where the ISO file is located (KNOPPIX folder that might contain for instance the DSL-frugal files) has the potential of crashing the boot process - and for a solution for those situations see below on the details of my 8-in-1 USB magic boot device :)

Overall Knoppix remains the best general open-source LiveCD available and is highly recommended!!! As you will see below I have also placed it on bootable USB drives and I have remastered my old bootable mini-DVD+RW and there is also a Knoppix DVD image that has even more programs, but for very specific needs bigger is not always better ... and for those situations there might be some other tools!

One of those specific tools is a cool boot mini-cd called Trinity Rescue Kit - before going any further I need to say that ideally you should remember to burn that ISO on a mini CD-RW for reasons that will become clear in a few moments.

Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK for short, currently v3.2beta) is a not-so-graphical liveCD dedicated to those moments when your system was somehow severely damaged - TRK 3.2beta is a few months old but a few days ago a somehow funny post from Reddit revived my memories about it - the link is about a virus that was able to actually infect the anti-virus, which in turn quarantined himself :)

And precisely in those hostile conditions is where TRK shines - the miniCD will boot a clean Linux system (that can write even NTFS file systems) which can then scan (and eventually cure, or at least delete) even the most malicious virus or even rootkit. What is nice is that TRK will detect your network connection and will try to update virus definitions to the absolute latest, so in theory it should be able to catch even very, very recent stuff. What is nicer is that TRK 3.2 can now use not one, not two, not even three but actually FOUR different anti-virus engines - the basic 100 MB or so ISO will only have the open-source ClamAV, but TRK can download install and use trials for F-Prot, AVG and BitDefender - and all of them can obviously load their own updates from the net! The absolute icing on the cake is that from the same clean Linux system booted from that LiveCD you can re-master the ISO - and if you have a lot of RAM and you are an expert in cdrecord you can even burn de ISO back to the mini CD-RW from the same TRK command line - you can now see why a CD-RW is a good option :)

TRK might also need some very minor polishing, but overall it is also a highly recommended boot mini-CD and in my overall top-3 list together with DamnSmalLinux and MoviX !!!

And like all of the above (Knoppix, DSL, MoviX), TRK can also be booted from a USB device - either in a very simple but exclusive way - see the trk2usb command, but one FAT16 partition on the USB drive will be dedicated to it - or in a more custom way (which might need some manual editing of the initial ramdisk image).

Obviously for my old Archos XS200 with a single 20GB (actually more like 19GB, since HDD makers always like to steal a little from your disk size) FAT32 partition I had to go for the 'hard but fun' way - and in the end I had to live with only about 17 GB of MP3 files on it (I also have some portable stuff on it), but I can be proud with my own new record of different operating systems that can be started from it - not counting GRUB (which is 'almost' on OS in itself) or Syslinux I can boot:
- BartPE (chainloader /ntldr.bs - a bootsector saved from disk before installing isolinux);
- XP command console (chainloader /cmdcons.bin - the Win2000 command console can also bypass some passwords but I have other tools to do that in BartPE);
- SpinRite6 (kernel /boot/memdisk initrd /boot/SpinRite.img);
- FreeDos image coming on Knoppix (kernel /boot/memdisk initrd /boot/balder.img);
- KNOPPIX 5.11 (with and without beryl, in a folder /KNOPPIX.511 with knoppix_dir=KNOPPIX.511 cheatcode and with the big minirt.gz);
- MoviX (2 kernels, since vesafb is needed with certain video cards);
- DamnSmallLinux (several options; in a folder /KNOPPIX);
- Trinity Rescue Kit (with a simple chainloader +1 that goes to the original syslinux from TRK, with a second-level boot menu; also with a small change to /etc/mountcd.sh from initrd.trk).

So in the end my aging MP3 player still is the ultimate cool multi-boot device ... of course as long as the host computer can boot from a USB disk :) And if not I can still listen to music so I can still have fun :)

My 2007 predictions

2007-01-01T07:25:00.000-08:00

Well, you can see my 2006 predictions and how those turned out, but the real question now is more like what 2007 will bring!

Technical:

1. Big overpriced companies will have a hard time - Google stock will drop most, Microsoft and Sony will also go the same way but Apple might be the hardest hit.

2. The new Apple cell phone will flop (meaning it fail to reach 3% worldwide) - but since the Apple marketing strategy is not based on large sales with decent margins but instead on small sales with huge profits from the ~~suckers~~ fanboys it will survive as always.

3. VOIP will get even bigger.

4. MySpace and YouTube will fade away.

5. Most spectacular results in 2007 will not come from computers but instead from medicine.

Non-technical:

6. Major recession in US (might spread to other markets, but in a rather selective way).

7. Major stock burst (mainly US).

8. Middle east will get worse.

9. Oil will reach 80-100 US$ / barrel (mostly since US$ will fall even further).

10. No major epidemy but instead a lot of smaller-scale problems plus the constant global warming becoming even more visible :(

Overall things don't look that well for 2007 ... but maybe I'll be proven wrong :)

My 2006 predictions outcome

2006-12-08T03:23:00.000-08:00

2006 is almost gone so now it might be a good time to take a look at how accurate my own predictions have been - and maybe in a future post I might also take a look at predictions from some other sites :)

I had five technical and five non-technical predictions for 2006:

1. MS Vista will be late and both Vista and OSX 86 will fail to meet expectations.

Well, Vista was late and normal end-users will only get it in 2007. OSX86 was just OSX recompiled, Apple has not even reached the 4% mark and Leopard will not be seen at least until the start of 2007. But the certain sign of failing to generate real interest is that in the torrent world there is a full OSX86 patched disk that can be directly installed on most higher-end 'beige-box PCs' - yet somehow almost nobody was actually interested ...

2. Apple will seriously lose market share in the MP3 segment and will probably have a few other flops; but it will survive - too many people want to feel "different" :)

This might be my 'least clear' prediction - in absolute percentage points it was true, and also the fact that Samsung had the best USB-stick MP3 player (YP-U2), SanDisk the best flash-based miniplayers (Sansa e2xx series) , Archos does have better video-and-MP3-players and Microsoft has launched a player with some wireless features (Zune, of course) yet somehow Apple still is the main seller of MP3 players just shows that people can be quite dumb in their quest for 'coolness' :)

3. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray will be late and will be "almost flops" in 2006.

100% true - I don't feel the need to comment too much on that - maybe just the observation that Sony somehow managed to be even worse than I expected :)

4. Blogging and podcasting will stagnate and most people will realize that there is a HUGE amount of noise (and more and more spam).

True again. And funny that 'podcasting' is a name claimed now by Apple, so remaining people will have to call themselves 'netcasters' :) It is also sad to note that spam email is now on the rise and that many new blogs are now mostly 'content spam' that even reach places like reddit and digg.

5. P2P might see a new rise - and that might also bring a big change for Google.

More traditional P2P was not so 'hot' BUT:
5a) torrents probably make up more than 50% of the internet traffic;
5b) places like reddit or digg were so hot that netscape.net was relaunched;
- so overall that was also true (even if Google so far did nothing).

Non-technical:

6. There will be at least one MAJOR terrorist attack.

That would be a rather wrong prediction - except for the fact that over 650000 people probably died in Iraq :(

7. Economy will stagnate in US and certain surprises might come on the currency market.

True, but it seems most people expected it so it was no huge surprise so far...

8. New, even bigger scandals and flops will be revealed around the Bush family and the republican party.

Well, the republican party lost both the House and the Senate ... and Bush reached the lowest approval ratings ever ... lower than Nixon ...

9. Oil will rise to new record levels.

True, but the election cycle and some anti-speculative measures slowed that down a little.

10. Civil liberties will continue to be eroded :(

Again - sad but true :(

Overall around or over 90% true - but since most predictions were rather generic I guess it might not be so impressive as some of the 'experts' with about 20-40% hit rate but which after enough years will hit something big by accident or simply by the power of statistics (see Dvorak, Cringeley and so on).

Small companies sometimes try harder ...

2006-11-16T14:27:00.000-08:00

Small companies sometimes try harder while established names do almost nothing and over-hyped ones have pathetic failures ... (that eventually are hailed by fans as huge steps).

That was a short description of the current status (end of 2006) on the larger-sensor digital photography market - the established names are Canon (which did basically nothing of any interest recently) and Nikon (which just launched the D40 - a low-cost crippled D50).

The over-hyped company is Leica - and the pathetic failure is the M8 - a camera that costs about 5000 US$ yet has some quite embarrassing bugs ... not to mention that it is inferior in almost any way to a Canon 5D (which currently costs only about half of the M8) ... and in the almost only area where it is superior - size - it still fails to the ultimate test - real pocket size - and in that is obviously inferior to models like Fuji F30 or Ricoh R3/4/5 that cost about 10-20 times less!!!

The small companies that try harder are Pentax, Sigma and maybe Sony/Minolta.

Sigma is still the only DSLR using a Foveon sensor - but unfortunately they seem to be very late with their new model and they also got the price totally wrong - so as a result they have no chance of getting a larger market share any time soon :(

Minolta was the first company that promoted in-camera image stabilization for a DSLR - but they rather failed as a result of not placing the consumer first and were later bought by Sony which just launched the A100 - not bad and in the same class as D80 and 400D and with the extra IS it might still be a hit ... or Sony might get a second chance in 2007 with a full-frame sensor (or almost) - but they should pay more attention to the prices or the Sony management might have the same fate as the one from Minolta ...

However, the best news at the end of this year are coming from Pentax. First of all they launched (almost half year ago) the K100D - a camera that has all the features of the new Nikon D40 (including the low price) and on top of that has image stabilization (called anti-shake at Pentax) with all lenses and can use almost all decent Pentax lenses made in recent times (unlike the latest Nikon - that company is trying to screw its customers into buying new fancy stuff every few years or so ... and Canon is not far from them). The K100D is such a hit it might seem difficult to be able to top it but Pentax is trying really hard to do just that - in a few days they will start selling the K10D - a higher-end camera that is in the same price range as the 400D, D80 or A100 yet has again even better image stabilization, smoother images and on top of that some pro-level features like weather-sealing that are normally only found over 2000US$ ... and for that (and many other things) the K10D certainly deserves our award of the COOLEST DSLR OF 2006 !!! Obviously Pentax are not perfect either - they are a little late with some of the higher-end sealed lenses needed to complement the K10D (and the price and quality of those lenses also might be very important for their future) ... but in 2007 I hope they'll be able to continue being the small company that is working harder so that I'll be able to award them some other cool rating from this site :)

Coolest all-in-one super-boot-cd

2006-09-28T02:40:00.000-07:00

So you have a great WinPE boot-CD with not only your favorite tools (like Total Commander) but also with a lot of various WinPE versions and more important - a lot of cool recovery tools (like ERD Commander, PartitionMagic or data-recovery stuff). You also have another nice CD with the latest KNOPPIX version, eventually another one with a much smaller DSL or one with the media-oriented MoviX. Everything is just fine ... except that you have 3-4 large CDs that will never fit inside your pocket :(

But since today DVD drives are the norm there is one alternative - what if you could place all the above onto a small 8 cm DVD+RW - that will perfectly fit in a pocket and will be the ultimate "all in one mini-DVD".

For my own mini-DVD I have decided to combine my long-tested all-in-one WinPE version (with a lot of extras like Spinrite and much, much more) + KNOPPIX 5.0.1 + MoviX - so I have used the same build+boot method as in that WinPE CD - meaning that the ISO was created with Microsoft CDIMAGE.EXE (which can map duplicate files to the same block and will manage to fit 2-3 similar Windows versions in barely more space than a single one), and for boot options the original BSCRIPT was used. The CD structure was the same as for WinPE with a few extra folders - one named KNOPPIX, two other named MOVIX and MPLAYER.

Small hints - with CDIMAGE the option "-j1" should be used with KNOPPIX; also with only one KNOPPIX I have just used the latest at that moment - but please be aware that v5 has a small bug so it will expect the folder to be KNOPPIX - while older v4 versions were ok with any folder name and passing that as a boot parameter (that is a good trick to have v4 + DSL as a dual-linux boot option). Linux boot was achieved with BSCRIPT commands like "onkey 6 bcdw /boot/isolinux/isolinux.bin /boot/isolinux/linux initrd=/boot/isolinux/minirt.gz ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 nomce BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix".

The final result boots quite well on a large variety of computers so for the moment is my ultimate "all in one boot/recovery tool" - it is a LOT safer than a non-write-protected USB stick and will boot on far more computers (USB boot is still a little tricky on older systems) - however I also keep a bootable DSL + movix version on a small iPod shuffle (together with some relaxing music) 'just in case' :)

If you want more details on similar stuff you can take a look at some older posts here, here and here - or you can search on Google or your favorite torrent site for "boot CD" !

Something else I predicted long ago ...

2006-09-10T11:09:00.000-07:00

Well, it's a little scary when I am right so many times in a row but I can't stop gloating about thise one - so yes, after so much time when the message (from the sales) was so clear now some journalists can finally see it :) (also see one of my recent posts here).

But just to show that Apple has only got to the top spot not since they were amazing but most likely since the competitors were sucking even more - Amazon is just trying to pull a Sony :)

SoftHints - more programs that should be part of Windows!

2006-09-06T06:01:00.000-07:00

First of all please let me have my seconds of gloating - only 4 days after I suggested that Google should also extend scanning to magazines we have an article in NYTimes with that :) Obviously I would have liked a vastly bigger selection and I would not mind some smarter integration with Google advertising (so that I could check for free the entire scan of the 1956 Popular Photography for instance) but it's a start ...

Now back to SoftHints - that was launched in this post as suggestions for very valuable tools that Microsoft should simply buy (at a probably incredibly low price compared with other M$ 'investments') and add to the more advanced (and expensive) versions of Vista - the very first suggestions were Total Commander and WhereIsIt ...

This post will be about other such small programs - but this time the first two from a single source called XdeskSoftware - they also have some other programs but here we will only cover the most important stuff.

The very first program is called Xdesk - it was providing virtual desktops for different versions of MS Windows since the previous century and normally I would consider that more advanced tool ONLY for power-users ... but since now even Apple seems to be wanting to go that virtual-desktop-way I suppose it might be the right time for Microsoft too ... I believe they (Microsoft) had a number (3 ?) of similar free virtual-desktops power-toys but none was anywhere close to Xdesk so why not ... And what is also amusing is that some time ago Xdesk also added something not entirely different from Expose (but without the hardware acceleration - that I believe might only come with specific support in Vista) - so with that the Mac-envy will be placed to rest again :)

The second program is called XFilesDialog and is more 'everyday use' and less visible than Xdesk - it will only become visible on file-dialogs and some other file-related programs but can grow on you very fast and you will soon discover you can't live without it anymore - I believe the program was a HUGE hit for various older Windows versions (where the file dialogs were of a fixed size, and the program was enlarging them) but even today it is still a must-have Windows power-toy for it's history of cross-program files and folders and favorites and the very quick navigation!

As a small extra I will add a quick reference to another program that I "can't live without" - IrfanView - this one is freeware (the first four suggestions were all commercial products) and is a very handy tool in viewing local folders with many pictures inside - like in the XFilesDialog example above Microsoft has tried in XP to add some of the basic features - but again the non-Microsoft program is still miles and miles ahead ... so why not make another small author happy and in the process add to Vista a tool better than anything the Macs have :)

So now you have it - please let me see what you believe about other such invaluable tools that should be part of Vista!!!

CoolHints - next take :)

2006-09-02T03:19:00.000-07:00

CoolHints was an idea launched on this blog about cool things that companies should do to their (mostly existing) products - since the original post Apple did nothing worth mentioning but Archos have launched the 404, 504 and 604 - reviews can be seen on CNET and on PCMagazine - however they seem to still lack a decent HDD (60-80 GB is my first CoolHint for them, and the second would be CF and SD slots) and insist on neglecting the smaller Gmini XS - so I'm still waiting ... Sandisk on the other side launched the new c200 and is putting more and more pressure on Apple :) The only two suggestions for the c200 are a full SD slot instead the miniSD and a direct USB connector (so that you can use it as a thumbdrive too - in this respect the Samsung YP-U2 is superior).

Ricoh was also a small disappointment - they have announced the Caplio R5 and while it looks quite very nice the extra megapixel will be totally worthless if noise will not be improved over the R4. What they have also missed was the opportunity to also add a MP3 player as my CoolHint was suggesting - the very little available info suggests that the R5 might not even have the voice recorder from the R4 :( However Samsung knows better that you must 'stand out from the crowd' (and the market for small digicams is quite very crowded this fall) - so their new NV3 does have such a MP3 player - you can see a review here - and I can bet that Samsung will sell more of that (certainly photographically inferior) model than Ricoh will sell the R5 :(

So my CoolHints for the Ricoh R6 will be - MP3 player, focus-assist with LED/pre-flash and lower noise at high ISO. I also have a CoolHint for the Ricoh GRD2 - get a Foveon sensor - the GRD is certainly a luxury/rare item and a Foveon sensor will work on that direction (in the same way as the MP3 player will add NOTHING to the photography part of the R6 - but it will also not take away anything - yet will certainly appeal to the CONSUMER).

The final CoolHints are for ... GOOGLE :)

First of all the rather silly one - if they are so serious about scanning books why not going the next level and start scanning magazines - there are moments when I would really love to take a look at how things were looking 50 years ago - for instance you can take a look at PopularPhotography ...

And now the serious one - since Google is looking more and more like an investment fund why not actually use some of that money for something long overdue (and where a lot of small companies have failed before) - the elusive world of MICROPAYMENTS - a lot of people were writing about that starting probably with Jerry Pournelle and Dvorak but in some way Google already did a part of that - and today most of the blogs get their money from advertisers via Google - but wouldn't it be really nice to not depend exclusively on advertisers and instead have a way to pay for the real value of the content - no matter how small it is ?!

Not the best news for Apple ...

2006-08-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

Well, first for the fanboys claiming that Apple was the original inventor - well, it seems that Creative might actually be right - but since the wise business decision was to avoid a long court battle I guess they weren't so eager to just prove Apple wrong again ... and they took the money :)

Far more dangerous is the fact that Apple is no longer the 'cool player' - the latest Sandisk is twice better for the same price and has a LOT of extra features (including a decent inexpensive way to change your battery - not the total ripoff that you get from Apple).

In other news Dell is silently exiting the MP3 player market - they were never serious about that and the product was pathetic so no loss here ...

SoftHints - programs that Microsoft should consider adding to Vista ...

2006-08-21T02:46:00.000-07:00

In a previous post here I went on the record saying "another important suggestion would be to use the huge pile of Micro$oft money and buy a few small companies with 'power-user toys' that should be added as optional features in the higher-end versions of Vista" - it was only a coincidence that weeks after that Microsoft bought Sysinternals (AND Winternals) and I certainly consider that as a very wise move - the only small problem is that those amazing Sysinternals tools from Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell are pretty much on the 'very technical end' and free in the first place while the other even more advanced Winternals programs (like ERD Commander) were very much enterprise-oriented and will most likely remain non-free Microsoft tools!

So what should be next ? Obviously Microsoft marketing experts might have their own agenda - but here are by very first two suggestions (from a longer series, just keep reading this blog during the next weeks :) - and we'll also continue with some CoolHints !)

The very first suggestion would be Total Commander by Christian Ghisler - it is certainly the most famous, longest supported and pretty much the best of the commander-like file managers or orthodox file managers and it will be a great power-toy to extend/replace your Windows Explorer! What can I say more - if you are a power user you probably have some idea of what I'm talking or you can just try the evaluation version and see for yourself, if not ... your bad :) It will also be a well-deserved moral (and probably not only) reparation since Microsoft (pretty much illegally) forced the author to rename his product from the original Windows Commander (used for more than 10 years) to the current Total Commander ...

The second suggestion is also a small program called WhereIsIt and is a very usable 'catalog manager' to keep track of your disks/archives and not only - again a power-user tool but my feeling is that with the advance of digital photography many people will discover that it's a good idea to keep archives of your ever growing collection of digital photos ... and searching in the WhereIsIt thumbnails certainly beats searching by manually inserting each CD/DVD and viewing each file one by one :)

So now you have the first SoftHints - feel free to comment and add your own and keep an eye on this site for the next group of suggestions!

SteveJ pulls a BillG - in at least 3 different ways :)

2006-08-08T05:09:00.000-07:00

My 2006 WWDC predictions were just way, way ... how should I say this ... too optimistic - from the 6 listed I only got about 3 - the new desktops are here , Leopard is NOT impressive (but see below) and indeed some 64bit hype was somehow mentioned ...

The main "surprise" was the obvious 'Vista envy' - and on top of that they also managed to "copy" the 'Vista delay' - so now Leopard is not only quite pathetic but will also be late - and it will come after Vista :)

I also find incredibly funny the crash of the demo machine - I believe that after copying the automatic backups (from many others, including Windows) and the virtual desktops idea (again something you could easily get in the last century on Linux or Windows) Apple also decided to copy the "crash during worldwide demo" part - after all why should only BillG be embarrassed and not also SteveJ ?

So let's count again - onstage crash - check, delay - check, stealing features and presenting them as 'innovation' - check, so YES - SteveJ pulls a BillG - in at least 3 different ways :) WOW, Apple hype is getting thinner at such a speed :)

Apple - any surprise ahead ?

2006-08-04T04:44:00.000-07:00

Well, after half year of announcements that were no surprise ('the x86 architecture is vastly superior' - maybe a surprise only for a brainwashed MacZealot) or even worse (the boombox and leather case) we are now close to WWDC and the media is again full of rumors - yeah, right, we haven't seen that before :)

What I expect ? The OBVIOUS :
- new desktops with the latest Intel Core2 Duo;
- a new iPod - probably the 8 GB nano, eventually some cellphones;
- Leopard (not so impressive);
- quite likely a new Merom-based MacBookProExtreme - as usual announced weeks in advance over Dell and delivered at about the same time;
- maybe some plans for a new 64 bit future (but I doubt, even if the 'bragging rights' would be needed - since there is almost nothing to brag about in the latest Apple products - a new transition so close to the last one would be very bad news);
- finally - but I don't hold my breath on this one - the "all screen iPod" - but if it will be anything less than:

(and with less than 80 GB) most people will be disappointed.

I will end with a few links - the first about how a Mac (and a PC, by the way) can be hacked in 60 seconds , then a funny one with a love-hate Apple relationship and the best of all - the fake diary of SteveJ - hilarious as only something so close to reality can be !!! (the best one is where SteveJ looses his iPod, including the Walt Mossberg's rave reviews for next week, which he just finished WRITING :) )

CoolHints - today for Ricoh, Archos and even Apple!

2006-07-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

OK, today I am inaugurating a new feature of this blog - I am calling it CoolHints since it's simply about suggestions for great products that should be done (very soon) by simply changing or adding something very simple to an existing product - but since it is 'directed' to an existing product it's not a generic wish in search of a company but instead a very specific HINT for a specific company - they can take it with no strings attached (at most I would like from time to time to get my hands on the new product for a review) ... or they can spend huge amounts of money on overpaid managers and marketing 'experts' and then just ask why nobody buys their latest products that have failed so pathetic :)

I got the original CoolHint idea when reading some posts on the dpreview Ricoh forum - one of my web friends is now a regular visitor and big R4 fan - and in quite a few threads here, here and here a lot of great photography-related suggestions were made about how Ricoh should improve R4 and the next models - and while I am also a fan I can't stop thinking that I only got the R4 as an 'all time in my pocket camera' and while I would certainly want some (most?) of those suggested photography-related features the one function that might actually dramatically raise Ricoh sales would be a new mode - the R4 has a photo mode, a video mode and a voice memo mode but a GREAT NEW FEATURE (that would actually sell it to many NEW customers) would be a new MP3 PLAYER mode !!!

It makes a lot of sense - the R4 is very small and many of the owners are taking it everywhere and today a 2 GB decent SD card is about 50 US$ so you can EASILY dedicate 1 GB from it to your favorite MP3 (or OGG) songs or audio books, you can attach the case to your belt and just listen to them when you have nothing better to do !!! And in the first version Ricoh should TOTALLY forget about DRM models - just support MP3, nothing fancy, don't "overdo it" (but USB2 high speed is needed; also use decent headphones and a standard connector). Obviously such a mode is only usable on very, very small cameras and if the R5 will not have it I can bet that the next generation Panasonic FX (or Casio) will have it and steal Ricoh sales! (actually I believe that I have already seen a Benq with something like that - but the size was too big and the photo part was awful). Also recording to WAV files (in voice-memo mode on the R4) is sooo last century - why not recording to a more decent format ?

The second CoolHint in this post is also related to MP3 players and goes to Archos - almost two years ago they had a major hit with their Gmini XS200 - a 20 GB HDD-based MP3 player that was then extended to XS202 - a 20 GB MP3 player with better battery life, and then XS202S - a 20 GB MP3 player about 2 mm thinner - can you see a pattern here ? :)

Now, two years ago 20 GB was HUGE (at that time the size was the same as the iPod mini - which only had 4-5 GB, and HALF the size/weight of the 20 GB normal iPod) - but today that is nothing to write home about - so my very strong suggestion to the nice people from Archos is to have a look on the net - Seagate, Toshiba and their old-time partner Hitachi have ALL launched (or at least announced) single-platter 1.8'' disks using the new "perpendicular recording" technology with AT LEAST 40 GB in capacity (I believe Seagate is saying something about 60 GB, and all have models with 80 GB or more in two-platters configurations).

So now is the moment for a new Gmini XS240 (or even XS260/280 if you go for the 60/80 GB model) - since it will be a "drop-in extension" of the old model it will need NO NEW research or technology - AND SHOULD BE DONE BEFORE OCTOBER !!! (only if you want to keep any market away from Apple and soon Microsoft, if you don't and some moron upper manager believes that only the AV series can save you then you should just tell that to your investors!) A new color screen might also be a good idea but is not a must and should actually be avoided if it will not be perfectly visible in both low-light and strong direct sun or if it will delay the product!

The final CoolHint goes to Apple, is also about a MP3 player and I even had another post on this matter here - the entire idea is that everybody thinks it will be cool so why does it take so long to make an all-screen iPod ?

My only extra suggestion is that iTunes could still be the default option but just for a change make it an USB standard mass storage device on which people can just copy a bunch of MP3 files - Apple is maybe the market leader today but that is changing much faster than people might think so now it might be a good time to actually LISTEN to your customers ... I can even remember a time when Apple was the market leader in personal computers and today some people are 'proud' with a market increase from 3.3% to 3.4% :)

Teach your old XP some Vista-like tricks :)

2006-07-28T02:40:00.000-07:00

OK, Vista might need a new powerful (and probably expensive) computer and on top of that is always late, so for the moment why not getting 90% of the security improvements on your old computer running your old Windows XP ? Unfortunately those "tricks" are only helping on the security part (you will not get the 3D eye-candy from Vista), are providing most benefits for people running with administrative rights with Windows on NTFS partitions and also will not work in Windows 2000 - but if you fit the above conditions (most XP instalations do) the programs described below WILL WORK NOW, ON YOUR EXISTING SYSTEM !!! (with only minimal changes in your existing workflow).

The BIG IDEA is that the vast majority of today programs-related security problems (that excludes social engineering in which the user is dumb enough to provide himself the means to be hacked) are coming from your browser or similar internet-related programs running in interactive mode and the implementation of all the real threats requires writing some code/files on your disk (running as a user that also has administrative rights) - and the first SOLUTION to that is coming from Microsoft itself !!!

DropMyRights is a small program written by Michael Howard and published on the MSDN Security Developer Center that can solve all the problems above but requires a little tweaking - that I consider very simple, limited and worthwhile ! All you need to do is to download and install DropMyRights from the link above and then create new shortcuts (or edit existing ones; and the MSDN article is even having screenshots of that) so that you will run your browser(s) (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, whatever else), your email program(s) (Outlook/Outlook Express, etc.) and your messengers (Yahoo Messenger, MSN/Windows Messengers, Google Talk, AOL IM, GAIM, etc.) with non-admin rights !!! Also keep in mind that you should run using DropMyRights any new and unknown program from the net and you might even run MS Office programs like that (especially when opening some totally unknown document with internet jokes and so on).

There are two main things to remember - some programs might handle multiple instances in a rather unusual way and starting a second non-admin instance when already having one instance running as admin might not work as expectd; ALSO remember that running as a non-admin will not let you save files in other places than MyDocuments and will not let you install (or sometimes run) ActiveX stuff - installing new stuff will not work (in messengers too) and obviously you can't do Windows Update like that :)

This is probably the best approach for experienced users that can easily analyze when some action involves certain risks (and will not forget to run their browsers from the non-admin link), but there are some other solutions for less technical people - probably the next best thing is a small program called RunAsAdmin - from here, here or download from SourceForge ! While the main idea of the protection is pretty much the same as in DropMyRights (which was probably the original inspiration, see here) the implementation is now a little on the reverse side - you just run ALL programs as non-admin by default and just have a very quick/simple way to start programs that require admin rights - that approach might be slightly safer and will work better for less experienced users but care must be taken since unusual things might happen when complex programs are not quite non-admin-friendly !!!

Obviously Windows XP does already provide the precise same approach taken to the extreme with Fast User Switching (not available in all configurations) - you just keep two sessions running - one for the admin stuff and one for everything else, and then with WIN+L fast-switch from one to another - you might loose some minor things like copy + paste from one to another, but is probably the safest one "out of the box"! And if you only have Windows 2000 using separate users is probably the only safe approach for the moment - but on 2000 you don't get the fast user switching so things are rather ugly :(

So now you have it - security tricks without buying anything - hardware or software :)

More and more people switching ... can Apple see the trend ?

2006-07-26T08:13:00.000-07:00

Well, Apple managed to sell more notebooks than in previous quarters - which is not such a great achievement since for the last 1-2 years Apple notebooks were quite pathetic (and so were the sales), 'culminating' with the end of 2005 when everybody knew the PowerPC Apple route was a dead end - so the only reason why somebody would buy an iBook or PowerBook was to just have a relict of some old times :)

Far more interesting is the "switching trend" - my feeling is that most of the buying was done by die-hard MacZealots or eventually newcomers dumb enough or rich enough to buy for the feel-good sentiment of being different / special - the same way some people feel special for buying a 5000$ Rolex "since their time is invaluable" ... but obviously forgetting that a 75$ solar GShock will be 100 times more accurate than the "Rolex Superlative Chronometer", last longer and survive far tougher conditions :)

Anyway, in spite of the huge effort Apple was doing to encourage switching platforms the most interesting (and important) defections were NOT towards OSX but instead the other way around - this year probably the first of the major ones was Mark Pilgrim, then Cory Doctorow and so far the latest seems to be Bryan O'Bryan - and the most interesting part is that following the links will provide some clues on the reasons behind those dramatic changes for people that in the past were so major disciples of the Apple monopoly !

It is not without merit to note that ALL those top-line defections were from OSX towards Linux - which is a very clear sign that the most important thing for those (rather experienced) people was now the OPENNESS (or lack thereof) of the platform (and of their own personal data) - just another confirmation that Apple would have been a far worse monopolist than M$ if they haven't failed so pathetic :) Next to that there were also the problems with the zealots and generally the fact that the entire platform is to be entirely controlled (especially any form of profits) by just one player - Apple itself!

Apple might still have a shot with their media monopoly - but that chance is getting smaller and smaller and my own feeling is that Apple is going the same route as Sony - more and more failures and a final survival based only on a very small group of rich zealots milked for their money in exchange for the pathetic "feeling different" reward ...

Top-cool MP3 players and more ...

2006-07-23T12:12:00.000-07:00

Today it seems fashionable to make lists of best or worst products (for 2006, really, when did this year end ???) and so on, so why not a list of the best MP3 players a non-fanboy can get for their real value and features ?! (at the middle of 2006 - give or take a few weeks).

For a MP3 player SIZE MATTERS - so instead of mixing all MP3 players together I will eventually name a top dog in each size-based category, eventually with some 'also running' mentions and some quick reasons behind each choice - and at the very end there will be a few words on why the new M$ Zune might not change things so much ...

So let's get started - the very first category is USB-stick-size MP3 players - the iPod Shuffle was always a very bad choice in that category (big price for the memory provided, no screen, equalizer or anything else) yet somehow only recently we have finally seen some valuable contenders - and the winner is ... the Samsung YP-U2 - it is just the ultimate memory stick that has them all !!! (with the right firmware tweaks - shame on Samsung for not providing everything by default! also the availability of the 1 and 2 GB models worldwide leaves a lot to desire!). There are many other MP3 players of the same size but too often the designers leave out the USB direct connector so we will not even mention those ...

A second category is that of very small flash-based players - in this category the USB connector is no longer required and the screen is very important but the size and weight is essential - this category was mostly initiated by the iPod Nano but (as with all Apple products) after the initial start they just could not provide enough value for money - so the absolute winner here (so far) is the SanDisk Sansa e2xx series - better than the competition in almost every single aspect of a real-world MP3 player ! There were also a number of alternatives from lesser or better known names but while Apple is very happy generating an industry of expensive cases and protectors for their products they would rather force you to buy a new iPod every year or so instead of providing a simple replacement battery !!!

Those two categories pretty much close the flash-memory-based choices available in 2006 (the rest of the year will at most see some 8 GB models launched), so the remaining MP3 players are hard-disk based; it is however not fair to place all them together so we'll have to create at least 3 extra categories to correctly cover the desires and needs of most users.

Initially I was thinking that a separate category for players based on 1'' or smaller disk-drives will not be needed since the competition from flash-based players is just too strong - but currently you can get a Creative Zen Micro or one Archos 1xx series for at least 30-40% less money than a flash player of the same capacity - so for certain users those might be perfectly valid choices! (just be careful not to drop them too often).

Then we have a category of small (yet with decent storage) but mostly music-oriented players - even today my very first choice would go to Archos 2xx (20 GB so far but a 40 GB version at the end of the year might not be impossible) since it is so small yet so perfect for somebody that just wants music! If you would like more you might also take a look at some other (seriously bigger and more cluttered) alternatives - in order the Creative Zen Vision M or even the fifth generation ipod (you might want the older 4th generation if you only have firewire).

And we are now to the final category - where small size only means that you want something much smaller than a notebook and eventually with better battery life :) Again the winners are some not-so-well-known models - the Archos AV 500 , the Cowon A2 and eventually the Neuros 442 - all have large screens, multimedia and USB-on-the-go capabilities (with a special mention for iAudio X5 - smaller screen but apparently better USB-to-camera connectivity; too bad none of those has RAW picture capability since it will certainly be a huge hit for many pro photographers - especially the 100 GB Archos version!).

A lot of noise was done recently by the "Microsoft iPod killer" - I was looking at that as the last hope for breaking the Apple monopoly but it seems that more likely people will be seriously disappointed - apparently Microsoft was designing the new features in order to please the music industry - while some hopes remain (and I'll have to wait for the real thing to emerge) I am afraid that so far I was never impressed with a product that places some (more or less hidden) interests before what the consumer wants :(

Start selling your Apple stocks :)

2006-07-21T02:27:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it - the latest financial results from Apple were published in the last days - and after the initial 'media frenzy' settled a little the 'second look picture' is not so good - it seems that 2006 is indeed the year when the iPod dies :) OK, I used that line since it's catchy - the truth is that iPod will not die anytime soon but it will (soon) have the same fate as the Mac - it will become statistically irrelevant !

In itself that is not so surprising and initially many analysts were happy with the Apple growth from the notebook market - that one is however very misleading since it might very well be a 'one time hit' (I know that 'one hit wonder' sounds better but the only wonder on the MacBookPro is how much heat can it generate on your lap with all that inflated price) - the rise in sales was compared with previous quarters that were quite bad and IMHO it's only a direct result of sales to the 'traditional MacFans' - once that 'resource' is depleted sales will dramatically fall (most likely after the next semester when 'back to school' then 'end of year' sales will keep things at a decent level, but after that things might not be very nice).

There are a few things that might also help a little - iPods with bigger drives, maybe even the elusive 'full screen iPod', maybe even the 10.5 OSX upgrade - but nonetheless the trend is quite clear now - downwards ...

Small cool news ... even if some of them might look bad :)

2006-07-19T12:17:00.000-07:00

Today Panasonic is trying to prove me wrong in my megapixel prediction - they have just launched FZ50, LX2, FX50, FX07 and FX03 - all basically upgrading with more megapixels some corresponding previous models - but the trick is that actually the images just have a large amount of in-camera noise reduction and I expect that the in-depth reviews that will soon surface to just show that more is not always much better ... That being said FX50/FX07 pair (the difference seems to be 99.99% just the LCD size) looks like a decent upgrade for FX01 and for people that can afford it the new LX2 (probably together with the almost identical but even more expensive model that will probably come under the Leica name) might be a good camera to carry inside your pocket - but most existing LX1 owners (and also some Ricoh R4 owners :) ) will not feel ANY pressure at all to upgrade!

It is however fair to also say that even if the megapixel benefits will be probably invisible over older models correctly processed with a good noise-reduction program, the ordinary customer (on his first digital camera or upgrading his older 2-3 megapixel camera) will still get a decent deal - since 99% of the users will never care about any digital postprocessing, so for them the in-camera noise reduction will just be a large bonus!!!

Since we are on photography here are two other very nice Ricoh R3/R4 links that I might have missed with my original R4 post - a Ricoh Caplio R3 review with a LOT of valuable information and hints (and the site has many other interesting pages) and a second Ricoh Caplio R3 review ! (R3 is pretty much an R4 with an older sensor, LCD and firmware - but the tricks on those pages are also very valuable on the R4 - Ricoh cameras seem to reward users that are not afraid to learn a little). And here is another interesting page - it is called 'Enough already with the megapixels' :)

And back to the world of computers - in a previous post I was suggesting it might be a wise move for Microsoft "to use the huge pile of MS money and buy a few small companies with 'power user toys' that should be added as optional features in the higher-end versions of Vista" - probably BillG is not reading my ramblings but I am still happy that Microsoft has just acquired one of my favorite small software companies - Winternals/Sysinternals - well done Mark and Bryce !!!

And since this post was so much about newer photo stuff not being so much better than the older things I will end with some words on how some of the new stuff that looks terribly wrong is also not so bad after all - if you take a look at the link you will see a rather interesting article by George Munday decrying the direction taken by the latest business models in professional photography - but while I understand the pressure on the author I certainly can't agree with his conclusion that the business model is deeply flawed - much cheaper content is simply the natural evolution that we see today in ALL aspects of life (including hardware, software, music, film and so on) and content creators of all kinds will just simply have to learn how to live with that !!!

Is the future of digital photography (in part) already here ?

2006-07-16T12:52:00.000-07:00

Just a short time ago I was rambling about some of the things that I would like to see in future digital cameras - and somehow the future is now coming much, much faster than expected :) The bad news are that no new or amazing non-Bayer sensor was launched (but at least for the moment I can still hope), however the good news are that what I was calling 'cumulative exposure mode' / 'multi exposure mode' is already (partially) here !

The technology is now coming from Casio (another small player - remember how I was saying that most revolutionary ideas will not come from the major players?) and instead of using it for a much higher dynamic of the image they use it for something a lot different - it is now called "anti-shake" (you can see some pictures here) and in theory the image taken with a short exposure is used as a non-shaken base on which color is added from the long exposure image - the results are not so great (and IMHO are vastly inferior to both sensor-based and lens-based image stabilization) - and the camera itself is not so amazing after all - both here and here you can see that my prediction on the megapixel race on small sensors is for the moment quite true :(

But the most important part of the story is HOW EASY that idea is to implement - I believe that in the most basic form a simple FIRMWARE UPDATE can add a 'dual exposure mode' to most of the decent digital cameras from the last year or so by simply taking two images as fast as possible one after another - the first with a (very?) short exposure time and the second with a (much?) longer one - and then just provide a PC-based program to 'join' them together for either better 'sharpness' (as Casio is trying to do in-camera) or just for a much better dynamic range !!! And yes, many cameras already have an "auto-bracketing mode" but only a few have a usable bracketing range and probably no camera is optimized for the minimum time between shots - and with only 2 images a smart firmware can take the second shot only 1-10 ms after the first even without any extra special RAM while with the standard 3 shots you either need a LOT of fast RAM or the delay will be in the 200-500 ms interval (or worse - meaning 'as fast as you can push again') as it is with most cameras :(

And speaking of "High Dynamic Range" imaging or HDR - there are at least two links that I should have added to my previous post but I will correct that mistake now - one is to the High dynamic range imaging page from Wikipedia (and contains lots of links itself) and the other is a page called The Future of Digital Imaging - High Dynamic Range Photography - and on that page you can see what amazing results a "tone mapping filter" might be able to do with the right input (maybe even the two images from the firmware-only suggestion from my previous paragraph!)

So in conclusion - even if digital cameras are becoming almost disposable there are still hopes for interesting things to be seen in the near future :) Maybe even a 'cumulative exposure mode' in which the first image is read from the sensor without 'erasing' it and the longer exposure is started 'on top' of the initial image - but probably not possible to be done on 'normal' sensors :(

Digital photography for the future

2006-06-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

My post on image stabilization and innovation in digital photography got me thinking a little on what the future might bring to this area ... of course that it's so easy to fall to the extreme and say either that the megapixel race will last forever or that innovation is already stopping and not much evolution will ever be seen ... but the truth is probably in between :)

I am also quite proud of my technology predictions and especially those related to photography - I still have the magazine where at some point during the previous millennium I said that APS film will die and 35 mm film will become a niche market ... which was pretty much 'spot on' and maybe now I have a chance to see how good my new predictions are going to be in the future digital world ...

So what can the future bring to photography ? There are obvious not-so-technical things that will make a difference - like for instance the omnipresence of phones with a camera (and maybe we'll finally get the videophones that were so 'right around the corner' ... about 50 years ago :) ) but let's neglect the social part and focus more on technology!

There is one unusual thing that could improve even existing cameras - and that is better FIRMWARE - pretty much all consumer cameras are somehow rushed to the market and then NEVER see a firmware update since engineers are a little too busy rushing to the market the next generation of cameras! Even the more competitive brands like Ricoh are not always paying enough attention - for instance they could very easy add a few tweaks to their current best-selling camera - the Caplio R4 - and make it more appealing to the serious users without any sacrifice for low-end users (and they already have most of those software routines working in the more expensive GR Digital model - I am speaking about the RAW files and some manual time-vs-aperture control).

Image stabilization is already here - a little on the limited side at this point but things can only get better - and we might even start to see the use of sensor-based stabilization for 'movie mode' too! (obviously not from Canon - they have too much invested in lens-based stabilization).

I find hard to believe that the megapixel race will continue - maybe the CPU megahertz race might be a small hint on that - but while on computers the power consumption was the major limiting factor on digital sensors the enemy is the noise - and you can already see that the 8 megapixel sensors were generally slightly worse in noise than a 6 megapixel of precisely the same dimension! This also might be the major problem on the road towards decent cameras of ever smaller size - so I don't expect huge results on that either - but my R4 is small enough as it is :) The other major hurdle for the megapixel race might be (surprisingly) consumer education - most people with some digital camera experience can now realize that 8 megapixels can barely provide visual benefits over 6 megapixels for consumer-size sensors (and the difference from 8 to 10 will be mostly invisible on those sensors) and that other features - like zoom, low latency, low noise or stabilization - are far more important when choosing a camera!

There ARE however other things that could be improved and probably the most important of them all is about the 'non-bayer sensors' - Foveon has promised a revolution not entirely different from the one with image stabilization but so far has failed to deliver - that has a lot to do with the existing desire to preserve the 'status quo' (so again I can bet that none of the existing major sensor manufacturers will be involved) - but probably also a little with the technological hurdles that need to be surpassed (3 layers are hard to build one on top of the other in a VERY precise way) - maybe a wiser approach would be to first get to a simpler 2-layers structure for one of the 6 megapixel sensors only with much better color reproduction and much lower noise than the existing 6 megapixel models ! (and avoid marketing that as a 12 megapixel sensor anyway - Foveon was almost killed by such a marketing gimmick)

One other strange idea that I would like to see at least tested - but maybe I should first get a patent on it :) - would be something around the 'cumulative exposure mode' or at least 'multi exposure mode' - in which basically the camera will have two readings of (almost, or at least as close as possible) the same image - first using a time T and then another one taken with something like 4*T up to 16*T - with the right processing that might actually have the result of providing 2-4 extra bits of dynamics and finally surpassing the range of the best film!

So in the medium term I see no major danger but also no huge changes to photography as we have it today - maybe we'll see some wider/panoramic models, maybe a bit more stereoscopic stuff, eventually even things with software-enhanced-depth-of-field but all of those will still be based on the same 'focal plane paradigm' - but maybe one day somebody will also think of digital holography :)

The small gems are not coming from over-hyped companies

2006-06-17T01:08:00.000-07:00

The statement in the title is not ALWAYS true - after all large and famous companies have the resources to do some important research - but the problem is again and again "defending the status-quo" - Microsoft is innovating only to keep users locked on their platform (and Google is also going on the same route), Apple is only interested in customers that will buy a new "overpriced but cool" MP3 player or notebook every half year or so (and as a result products tend to last less and less) - but the same is also true for digital cameras and this post will be a micro-review about such a small gem!

The top players in the digital camera market are probably Canon and Nikon in that order - on both the high-end and on the consumer market - and that's where the problem starts to show - both of them have a very, very large selection of models artificially created by simply holding certain features that will mostly cost nothing (firmware) of very little to implement but when missing will eventually push the consumer to a more expensive model or eventually to an earlier (but not quite needed) upgrade.

The most obvious moment of that consumer rip-off was the story of digital image stabilization (about 1-2 years ago) - for a long time Canon had a line of professional but VERY expensive image-stabilized lenses (1-2 models around 500 US$ and most of the rest in the 1000-3000 US$ range; and to tell the entire truth the quality was probably worth the price - FOR A PROFESSIONAL making a living out of that!) and Nikon was going pretty much on the same route - but there was no chance to break this marketing model from inside - and the innovation could only come from outside - so about 1-2 years ago Minolta (a much-much smaller player) launched the first digital SLR with image stabilization on the sensor that later spread to the consumer models and basically became the most important and practical innovation since the apparition of digital cameras. (sadly Minolta did not exactly survived - they first merged with Konica and later were sold to Sony).

Today the story is not dramatically different - neither Canon nor Nikon have sensor stabilization on their SLR models and Sony is the only one with such a product in development (based on Minolta legacy) - but the pressure from smaller players have forced both Canon and Nikon to add image stabilization to their consumer models - but again only in some models in order for the consumer to be forced to pay the maximum amount of money for their products ... so basically the most promising consumer models today are coming from Panasonic and Ricoh !!!

And this pico-review is precisely about a little-known gem from the second company - the Ricoh Caplio R4 - at this moment probably the only true pocket-camera with 7.1x zoom (28-200 equivalent of film) and image stabilization! (click on the image below for the Ricoh product page).

Ricoh is today a small player on the US digital camera market (actually they are no longer on that market directly) - so unlike for instance the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01 (which is also a small gem in itself and probably second only to the Ricoh R4) there are VERY few competent reviews - the best I could find were this one from ephotozine and this one published in Digital Lifestyles - but the Ricoh Talk Forum from dpreview is a very nice place and extra information can be found there! The camera is also difficult to find in US (mine was bought from popflash and they seem to be very nice).

However Ricoh was famous back in the days when film was king for the GR1 - probably one of the best point-and-shoot cameras that you could actually carry in your pocket and together with some other famous models like the Yashica T4/T5 or Olympus Stylus Epic have created history! (and serious photographers with over 20k$ worth of pro equipment were often using such gems for candid photos or just in order to have a decent camera at all times with them).

But technology evolved (mostly for the better I might say) and today for a very decent price (if we adjust the prices it is almost at the same level as the T4) you can have an incredibly small digital camera having a zoom with astounding range (28-200 film equivalent), image stabilization and usable noise!!! And just in case you still regret film-based point-and-shoot a little - you can take about 600-700 pictures with the R4 and only one (very tiny) extra rechargeable - compare that with the volume of 20 rolls of film and only then complain about technology :)

So now about the camera itself - yes, the noise is bad if you compare it with an EOS-1DS Mark II , but then again, the full R4 is smaller and lighter than only the battery from that SLR; and once you stop comparing it to cameras from a totally different class you can discover that the R4 is quite usable and the pictures can be great with a little tweaking. What is most important is that for a non-pro such a small camera can take pictures that a large SLR will never be able to make - since it will be left home! Even in low light the image-stabilization or the top ISO setting will be able to provide some results - of course that Neat Image and a little photoshop might help after that but the results can be quite lovable. The macro is amazing and the camera feels quite quick so my entire R4 experience was very pleasant so far!

As always there are things that can be improved - the battery/card cover could be (far) better and the small 'case' provided by popflash was indeed needed, but most important of all there could be one small extra firmware feature that would dramatically improve the entire R4 - in the ADJUST menu one extra option for a quick time-versus-aperture compensation would probably make this camera as close to perfect as we can get from just firmware !!!

So the final conclusion is that very smart gems can be found once you open up to brands beyond the 'market leader' - the Ricoh Caplio R4 is just one of them but examples can be found in any domain!

Vista - will it fail ... or not ?

2006-06-04T06:42:00.000-07:00

The latest major public beta of Microsoft Vista has generated quite a number of reviews - so I will not go the same way - but from them there have been quite a number of 'opinions' from people that have almost no clue - I speak about people that either imply that they spend 99% of their time on Macs (or eventually Linux), people that have no idea what a huge scale beta means or generally how computing in a real enterprise is done - one of the most pathetic is here - huge and useless.

Let's first settle claims about failure or about OSX 'superiority' - if one year after the launch Vista will only have that pathetic 2.5% OSX has it will certainly be a failure, but until then the jokes are on OSX !!! Also people should seriously question any 'expert' making such claims - you will certainly see that laughable opinion among the MacFans that can't handle two mouse buttons but anybody with a little experience (and brain) knows that the superior operating system is the one that MOST PEOPLE are using on THEIR (existing) hardware and which runs THEIR (existing) programs! (and not something that would require buying expensive yet inferior or overheating hardware and ultimately will make you boot XP to play your games :) ) And before closing that subject a few links - first a brilliant parody of the new Apple ads, then a very funny reminder that modern Apple hardware is not only overpriced but also sucks and finally a very good take on the entire Apple philosophy based on their history!

And now back to Vista - the most important point is that the latest public beta is certainly a step into the right direction - hardware support is definitely better (but obviously far from perfect), the security alerts are FAR less intrusive than before and generally things seem to be going in the right direction - the main complaint is that things are just a little late and this beta should have been ready months ago!

There are also things that I would also like to see improved - for instance I would like tighter resource management (using 1 GB of RAM just because it's there is not a good enough reason), better notebook support (Aero should not mean that the power usage in the graphics card should become bigger than the one in the CPU) and better default support for advanced users - maybe an idea would be to add one initial option to the setup so that people could go to a Custom setup and get less dumbed-down defaults. And let's not forget - better API documentation!

Another important suggestion would be to use the huge pile of Micro$oft money and buy a few small companies with "power user toys" that should be added as optional features in the higher-end versions of Vista - most advanced Windows users would enjoy things like file dialogs extensions, clipboard history, advanced options for tray icons, a quick and small Windows equivalent of QuickSilver, virtual desktops and last but not least an easier way to see all windows tiled - the new Win+Tab looks cooler than Expose but looks might be deceiving - so why not buy such an existing tool - there are quite a few available for XP - and adapt it to the desktop composition model in Vista !!?? Also it might be an idea that all but the 1-2 lowest level retail Vista versions should contain MS Works or even a very-very basic MS Office - AppleWorks is no threat but on that segment OpenOffice is already an important competitor for Microsoft and generally the more expensive Vista versions should provide a slightly better value for money!!!

So the bottom line is that Vista will very likely NOT fail - it might eventually disappoint some people but definitely less than for instance the Apple products of 2006 - where the high expectations generated by the usual media frenzy were not met by the subpar execution of the actual products - so far nothing says overheating, overpriced and non-standard notebook better than a MacBookPro :)

However (unless some major goodies are added inside) Vista will also NOT be the MAJOR hit Microsoft might hope - it will mostly come preinstalled on the new high-end computers but low-end systems and certainly older computers will more likely use some older version of Windows for the remaining of their life!

The real meaning of the new Mac ads

2006-05-08T00:55:00.000-07:00

Well, as usual the media had the same overinflated coverage of the new Apple campaign - and the ways in which the Apple ass was kissed were rather 'innovative' - up to an article that in the title is saying that the ads will fail only to explain in the text that the ads are great and will actually not fail :)

The truth is that most people find the new ads rather odd - and many people try to guess the reasons behind that - but if you pay a little attention and use an open mind things are quite clear!

It is very easy to note that the ads are not about the hardware/technical part ( that would be quite difficult since the current hardware is inferior and pathetic ) and are also quite strange since it's about a Mac vs. a "PC" - even if today a Mac is just a glorified PC - but that is just the sign that Steve Jobs doesn't yet have the guts to attack the hand that almost destroyed him and then added insult to injury by saving Apple not so many years ago - obviously I speak about Bill Gates and Microsoft :)

Also the ads are not primarily designed to push people towards a Windows-to-Mac conversion - some people say it's about setting mindshare - but if we look deeper we see that there is almost no real message for an existing Windows user (I believe no serious corporate 2000/XP user has seen the crash or even the viruses that Apple is implying in the ads) but instead the campaign is repeating the same stereotypes loved by the existing MacFans - so the obvious conclusion is that the main reason behind the ads is to just make those existing customers feel somehow special - which obviously was needed since almost everything Apple was saying in the past was just being proved wrong - starting with the inferior PowerPC performance that was simply becoming embarrassing to the point where a switch to the eternal enemy - Intel x86 - was needed, and more recently the constant increase in bugs and vulnerabilities in OSX ...

But why does Apple need to somehow reassure existing customers that their computers are great ? I mean, those people already have those computers - so they should be in the "already converted" camp, shouldn't they ? Well, not quite so ... once we get past the top 10% MacZealots that are too brainwashed to accept that Apple is "milking" them we get to a large number of Mac owners that might feel a little unhappy - after all many of them have paid 3000+ US$ (maybe some of them less than one year ago) for PowerBooks that seem to be now 5-6 times slower than a far cheaper Dell Latitude :)

Another reason why Apple should be a little concerned on keeping existing customers is the "cool factor" - by definition (for most Apple customers) you are NOT cool if everybody else has the same gizmos - that is already visible on the iPod part but until recently getting a PC about 200-300% overpriced from Apple was quite exclusive - not any more! - the 10000 US$ Dell XPS desktop is now the exclusive item (and was quickly sold out) and new lines of ultra-expensive notebooks are coming from many companies with FAR more x86 experience than Apple so some people will almost certainly choose that road!

So yes, Apple needed to reassure their existing ultra-thin base that they are special and they will keep being special as long as they will buy overpriced Apple gizmos - and in that the campaign will probably be a success - but on moving people from Windows to Macs almost certainly not - for that we'll have to see in 1-2 days the new lower-cost MacBooks (non-pro, just amateurs) and the new DIFFERENT campaign for those :)

Shouldn't we make our choices based on facts and not words ?

2006-05-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

We live in a world in which we "love to hate" certain companies - that is OK, but what is not OK is to somehow assume that anything that competes with one of the things that we dislike is automatically "perfect"!

The best example is Microsoft - most people have strong feelings against them - but that does not automatically make every overpriced gizmo made by Apple the "best choice" - the dangerous myth of total OSX safety was busted, their servers are being hacked and the MacBookPro so far was proven an overpriced, overheating, noisy (whining?) piece of junk, yet somehow the media is full of bullsh*t on how Apple will kill Microsoft ! Oh, and let's not forget - the Microsoft monopoly is bad but the iTunes one is good ?

A special word must be said about the open-source competitors - I do respect those a LOT more than certain overhyped companies that love to burn their customers, but again we should also avoid thinking that everything GPL is automatically perfect - Firefox has only now fixed a list of problems almost as long as the entire 2005 Internet Explorer bug list and no Linux distribution was ever able to suspend and resume on my Dell X300 - yet somehow if you dare raising such obvious problems you are doomed - the Linux zealots are second only to the MacFans :)

And my favorite for this week - Google - which has basically almost a monopoly on its own yet in the last 5 years the quality of their search results was just constantly going down - is now whining that IE7 will not use them as the default search engine !

So - shouldn't we make our choices based on facts and not words ?

Small stuff ... for now ...

2006-04-06T01:38:00.000-07:00

I'll start with a good article on computer complexity from the net that somehow completes my older post on features that still matter - maybe the title (suggesting that software sucks) is not the best choice but it seems to work great :)

In other news we had Apple BootCamp - here are a few of the less obvious things about that:

- isn't it a little strange that Apple only published that after a few other projects already did similar stuff ?

- wouldn't it be normal for a system that is about 1000 US$ overpriced (over a competitor that is cooler and has far more features) to have that option preinstalled ?

- wouldn't it be the normal way to actually SELL the LEGALLY LICENSED version of XP (together with ALL NEEDED DRIVERS bundled on the CD/DVD) instead of providing a gray-area tool (which in the end might be mostly used for piracy)? I really wonder if Microsoft will sue on that matter ... the publicity of having Apple help installing WindowsXP on their own machines is not bad but getting money from selling legal licenses for that and the pressure from other more honest computer builders that do not promote tools to pirate competing software might be important too!!!

- if BootCamp somehow is not illegal (which is still a big if) - does this also mean that buying some OSX DVD and then applying a MAXXUS patch is also legal ??? I guess so :))

Monopoly (Apple MacBookPro) vs Competition (Dell Latitude)

2006-04-04T01:27:00.000-07:00

After about 30 years of brainwashing the macfans somehow believe that the price for Apple products is equal to or at most marginally higher than the price for products on a free/open market - let's take a closer look at that - now that both Dell and Apple are shipping their similar models (but with the distinction that Dell only announced them when it was possible to ship - and not months in advance only to create some media noise - like Apple did).

So we will compare two very similar top-level configurations - generally speaking the hardware level is a little on the overkill side and while with Apple you have VERY little choice, with Dell you can get a cheaper CPU (also with less heat than the Apple machine, that can not be hold on your lap) and you will pay less. Also with Dell you can go to a HIGHER configuration - for instance you can get 4 GB of RAM - but again that would be an overkill option for 99.9999% of the users, but you can also get a video card with 512 MB RAM, and that will just leave the MacBook-nonpro miles behind ... in the amateur class :) With Dell you WILL get a FULL KEYBOARD (and not the brainwashed Apple version), TWICE more mouse buttons (actually 4 times, and both the touchpad and the "trackpoint") and you can also get for 19$ extra full a/b/g wireless and many, many other options ... but with Apple you are mostly locked :(

The Apple configuration is:

2.16GHz Intel Core Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 - 2x1GB SO-DIMMs
100GB Serial ATA drive @ 5400 rpm
SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
AirPort Extreme Card & Bluetooth
Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
Apple USB Modem
AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro/PowerBook (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll
15.4-inch TFT Display

PRICE: 3497 US$
(and the modem is external, so is probably the mouse, probably macfans never move their notebooks :) )

Dell configuration:

Latitude D820:
Intel® Core™ Duo T2600 (2.16GHz) 667Mhz Dual Core
Genuine Windows® XP Professional, SP2, with media
15.4 inch Wide Screen WXGA LCD Panel
Graphics:256MB NVIDIA® Quadro NVS 110M
Memory:2.0GB, DDR2-667 SDRAM, 2 DIMMS
Hard Drives:100GB Hard Drive, 9.5MM, 5400RPM
Optical Drive - Modular:8X DVD+/-RW w/Roxio Digital Media™ and Cyberlink Power DVD™ 8XDVRW
Dell Wireless™ 1390 802.11g Mini Card
Bluetooth:Dell Wireless® 350 Bluetooth Module
Hardware Support Services:3 Year Mail-In Economy Plan

PRICE: 2554 US$

So yes - you CAN think that the Apple configuration is only marginally more expensive ... if in your case about 1000 US$ are peanuts :)

There might be two other "arguments" from the macfans - that Apple build quality is better - that might be true if we compare a 2000 US$ Apple notebook with a 500 US$ consumer-level Dell, but believe me - a Latitude is actually miles AHEAD of Apple in quality!

And the other "pseudo-argument" that you will certainly hear is that with Apple you will get OSX - leaving aside the fact that the MacBookPro does not have WinXP and that currently you can not install a legal (meaning non-patched) version of it (as a result of Apple restrictions and not the other way around) - OSX is just an operating system on which you will have about 100 times less choice and only the ILLUSION of marginally better security - maybe some people might think that at the same price point as XP Pro the Apple OSX might be worth it (if you are a real computer pro you already know that it is not) but when it costs about 1000 US$ MORE than XP Pro only an idiot will continue to claim it is a better option !

Small update: any user with at least some technical knowledge would expect almost identical results from computers with almost identical electronic parts (only the video cards are different but even on that I expect Dell to be better); however if a lot of delusional macfans still would like for somebody to kill a lot of time in a rather useless way and benchmark those two configurations I am OK with that as long as they will pay for the entire test - so if there are any takers I will open a PayPal account and if it goes over 7000 US$ (no, it's not a mistake, there ARE other costs in benchmarking stuff) I will order those two and actually kill some time just to show that one or another is probably on average 0.01% faster :) (and obviously I will keep both - small payment for my time but at least I will be able to later debunk just another myth - like for instance the one for "resale value").

Why Vista is NOT your most urgent upgrade

2006-03-28T12:12:00.000-08:00

All the recent noise about how bad is that Microsoft has pushed back Vista a few months is mostly missing a few important points:

- so far it seems that major and visible advantages will only be available for people running on rather recent configurations - I dare saying 512 MB RAM is required and 1GB is recommended, over 1-1.5 GHz Pentium M or Athlon64 or over 2 GHz P4, and for the new composition model and Aero interface most likely a video card with at least 128-256 MB video RAM and with certain features that I suspect will place the "entry level" quite high ... (but probably not higher than OSX does);

- some of the other "advantages" might be related to things like DRM content - which I suspect only few people are really missing - and new formats - like HD-DVD and Blu-ray - which just as I was predicting are not going to be so hot this year anyway...

- most people with an existing lower configuration will probably be much better with their current XP (or even 2000 in certain conditions); of course that the 95/98/ME should rather only be used for a machine that is never connected to the internet and that has such low resources that Windows2000 is not an option; Linux might also be an option but for a friendly GUI it might need more RAM than usually available on such old machines;

- the major drawback is if for some reason you want to buy a new computer during this year - obviously the first choice would be to wait until the next year and get a configuration with Vista preinstalled - but if you MUST get it before that you only have a few suboptimal solutions - like either getting a configuration with XP but with enough power for Vista and buy an upgrade at a later time OR ...

- just go with a low-cost configuration and use it like that for a number of years - XP is not going away anytime soon and with the correct configuration (including Firefox if you must browse unknown sites) you should be just fine for at least a few years - there is no major hurry to jump and pay another Microsoft tax just since the M$ commercials are telling you that!

- the fact that Apple is getting a new version of OSX every year only means that OSX was in a very pathetic state and that only around 10.3 became acceptable and with 10.4 is usable (but will still probably need another version to get to the same level of business usability as a correctly configured XP - which is just fine for the macfans since they just love throwing away money at Apple for the latest piece of eye-candy);

- so far there is one segment where the future of Vista is still in a very unclear state - and that is the thin-and-light notebooks - as far as I can say there is no ultra low voltage CoreDuo yet (and the low-voltage models are only very few and not so impressive) and what is worse - the Intel integrated video solutions used by 99% of those ultralight notebooks will NOT be able to use Aero ... so at least for that segment any delay is just welcome!

Dell buying Alienware might mean trouble for Apple

2006-03-27T00:28:00.000-08:00

Dell buying Alienware makes very good business sense for both companies involved but it might also mean trouble for Apple since Alienware is targeting precisely the same market segment as Apple - and that is rich morons that mostly look at a computer as jewelry where the bling factor is by far the most important thing - and by bling factor I do not mean only the shiny looks (even if those are a part) but also things as the megahertz myth, multiple-video-cards-performance and so on ...

Dell was already killing Apple from the low-cost end but with Alienware (and the fact that the PowerPC myth was so clearly busted and the Macs are now on the same x86 CPU that was proven superior) Apple will now feel serious competition "from above" - meaning faster systems with more bling factor and matching price tags - and many people will go that way simply since it will make them feel more special than Apple could ...

The same "diminishing feel special factor" might also mean trouble for the Apple iPod monopoly - a few years ago having a twice more expensive MP3 player could make a teenager stand-out from his crowd but today in US the crowd does mostly have iPods and many people will discover that other models will make them feel different - and in some cases it will also bring FAR better features for a better price - like in the case of the "nano killer" :)

Why the MacIdiots are pathetic ...

2006-03-25T06:07:00.000-08:00

Guess what - my previous post was "debated" by some of the MacFans - and apparently the very first one decided that I was wrong since the 1000$ 12'' iBook is ONLY about TWICE more expensive than the 550 US$ Dell that I have mentioned - so first let's settle that:

- the 550 US$ Dell B120 is a 14'' notebook that is almost twice less expensive than the 12'' iBook and almost 3 times better priced than the 14'' iBook;

- while that very cheap Dell is not 5 times FASTER than the 2000 US$ PowerBook (as declared by SteveJobs) it is almost certainly at least 2-4 TIMES FASTER that those low-end iBooks - and in case you have trouble understanding that (as is often the case with Mac zealots) I will repeat - it is both TWICE CHEAPER and AT LEAST TWICE FASTER !!!

- the iBooks are most likely A DEAD END - so not only you pay DOUBLE for a TWICE SLOWER machine but you get an architecture that was already abandoned by Apple!!!

Also somehow the first poster believes that the fact that I do not like the one button mouse and the missing keys is only a result of lack of Apple experience - so let's settle that too - I own an Apple for some time and I am working on my first commercial programs for that platform and so I spend about 30-40% of my time on that and I am BY FAR more efficient than maybe 90% of the Apple users - yet each time when I work on that notebook I still find the missing button/keys a major problem!

A few reasons why a Mac is still a bad choice ...

2006-03-24T12:05:00.000-08:00

There were a number of people trying to push the idea that somehow the recent Vista delay might be good news for Apple and that we might see a large increase in their sales - let's see why that is not quite so:

- the Apple notebooks are still extremely overpriced - while the typical born-rich macfan will pay almost any price Apple asks just to feel "special" most people will find that a 550 US$ Dell notebook is around 4-5 times less expensive yet will do just fine ... or even better in terms of backwards compatibility and support;

- for that HUGE price premium most people would expect to get a machine that has BOTH OSX and XP/Vista legally installed and supported!

- what is probably the MOST important show-stopper for any serious user - the 5-times-cheaper Dell notebook has 100% more mouse buttons and also around 100% more "control keys" - only really dumb people can believe that NOT having real PageUp/PageDn, Home/End, Delete/Insert keys is an advantage ...

- even if the Apple marketing machine will try to convince you that OSX is the most advanced operating system on earth that is simply "marketing bullsh*t" - some eye-candy might be appealing at first but in the end it will be just another distraction;

- and last but not least - it still is a TOTALLY CLOSED ARCHITECTURE !

Short post about Cory and click fraud ...

2006-03-23T05:02:00.000-08:00

In a post on boingboing Cory says that those Yahoo people are outrageous and somehow suggests that they would want to just block non-US visitors ... which is mostly bull**it :)

a) Yahoo people never mentioned your content and pages (which is as free as you want) - they would just need to stop their ADS, nothing else (just like in that contract, by the way);

b) the reason behind that is very simple - click targeting (and from some point on stopping the CLICK FRAUD);

c) Cory is either very stupid to not see that or more likely very fond of the vast amounts of money from that click fraud :(

UPDATE - the post apparantly was changed so that it no longer directly claims that Yahoo wants to block the pages of the blog but it still remains strange.

The real reason behind the Vista delay

2006-03-22T04:41:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I was the very first to say that Vista might be slipping a little from the original plan to ship in November - and now it seems that it will indeed be pushed to the start of 2007 ... but what is behind that delay ?

It is very simple after all - first Microsoft might have been a little concerned themselves (precisely for the reasons described in my own post) but FAR MORE IMPORTANT I suspect it was the pressure from the major PC builders (especially those with non-direct-sales) - having Vista just launched in November 2006 would mean that selling A LOT OF THE CURRENT MODELS would become very hard (close to impossible) to sell (since in no way those computers will be Vista-compatible) - so in the end Microsoft (unlike very often Apple) decided to let all those PC builders get their happy end-of-year sales, eventually even increase the free publicity for Vista with those sales (since the top-level expensive configurations will certainly have big "Vista-ready" stickers) and just have a home run at a slightly later moment ...

The moral of the story ? Just be very careful with any computer configuration that you buy this year :)

Small update - some other pages mention Jim Allchin and references to a strong connection with PC makers ! (even if somehow CNET thinks it might be bad for them - which is rather stupid since only around a minority of the current configurations are Vista-ready, just a few big and heavy notebooks and as far as I can tell absolutely no small and light notebooks !!!)

The nano killer !

2006-03-11T06:23:00.000-08:00

Well, just days after a small flop from Samsung we can now see a VERY interesting review of the SanDisk Sansa e270 (6GB) at CNET

Some very good news:
- bigger memory than the nano;
- better price;
- bigger screen;
- good user interface;
- voice recording function;
- good FM radio (and recording);
- Micro SD slot;
- better scratch resistance than the nano;
- EASY TO REPLACE BATTERY (most mp3 players might become useless after 1-2 years of heavy use if you can not do that)!
- JPG viewer;
- also video playback!
- both MTP and UMS (the standard USB Mass Storage) modes!!!
- much better battery life than the nano (20 hours)!

Basically the only advantage that remains for the nano is that it's thinner ... and the fact that it can play protected AAC - but if you were dumb enough to invest in a closed audio format kept hostage by the most monopolistic technology company then you probably deserve it :)

And in other news - it is now official that it will not be easy to install Windows on the new Mactel systems ... another proprietary/closed thing from Apple with the only purpose to hold customers hostage ...

Samsung does not quite get it :(

2006-03-08T02:46:00.000-08:00

The new Samsung YP-Z5 will be yet another flop ... (click on the picture to go to the full review site).

Here is why:
a) proprietary conector;
b) non-standard USB protocol (no USB Mass Storage = UMS);
c) no special feature worth mentioning (no video, the same memory size as the nano, price is not great and so on).
The only good thing about it is how scratch-resistant is (somebody learned from the nano embarrassment) - but it's too little, too late ... for that segment the only contender remains the Sandisk Sansa e200 ...

I can only hope that the YP-U2 will not go on the same route but since some Samsung managers seem to be incredibly dumb here are a few points:
- the standard USB stick features (the connector which needs no extra cables, the UMS feature and the slim form factor) are VERY IMPORTANT!!!
- capacity is VERY IMPORTANT - forget the 512MB version, 1 GB is minimum, 2 GB highly recommended, even 4 GB might be a hit!
- battery life is important; (but not more important than form factor, so it is OK to replace AAA with a very small internal Li-polymer battery);
- screen can be non-color but MUST be there;
- the neckstrap should be included;
- OGG and AAC formats should be also supported if it's only a metter of getting a better firmware!

Finally an iPod that I might like ...

2006-03-07T00:03:00.000-08:00

During the last days some new images have emerged on the net of something that might be the newest iPod video ... or maybe just another fake :)
Just in case it is the 'real thing' I have to go on record and say that based on those pictures it's the first iPod that I really like - here is a picture from engadget and you can click on it to see the corresponding article:

Now before people might start believing that I 'have seen the light and I was converted' there might still be MANY problems even if it is NOT a fake image:
a) screen coating (without it the screen will become messy or will be quickly scratched);
b) battery life (anything under 4 hours of video and 12 of audio is pretty useless);
c) capacity - anything under 40 GB will also be rather useless;
d) hardware and software interface - if it is not a an USB mass storage device the usability will be greatly reduced; and if you MUST use iTunes to add files on it then it's a dead end for most power users;
f) price - normally I would say 300$ is the top limit for the 40GB but since we speak about highly overpriced Apple products it will probably be over 400 US$, maybe over 500$ for the 60/80GB version, and at that price point I will certainly think twice :(

However the 'form factor' of the device from those pictures is IDEAL and I can only hope that some smart and decent company (and that excludes Apple :) ) will make something like that that covers all the points from above and also has:
a) a small pen and some PDA features - ideally a 'user-mode micro-Linux' - I don't think that it might be realistic to expect an open-source kernel in a DRM product but adding something 'user-mode' and that is easy to access without making the interface more complex for dumb users might keep everybody reasonably happy!
b) eventually a cell-phone module!!!

Vista ... will it suck ... or not ?

2006-03-04T11:56:00.000-08:00

As you might remember from this old post I was NOT impressed with the last year beta of Vista so I was quite curious on how things have evolved during those 2-3 months up to the recent build 5308 ... but to find my 'temporary rating' you will have to read on ...

The boot loader seems slightly better (there is a command-line tool called BCDEDIT.EXE and the older BOOTCFG.EXE that can be used with it) but it still does not 'play nice' with anything else - my normal stuff is on a SATA HDD and I test beta-like stuff (Vista, OSX) on a separate ATA HDD (with the SATA controller disabled 'just in case') - Vista refused to install itself on a non-active primary NTFS partition (the active partition was the old OSX 10.4.3) and some extra work was needed since after making that partition active and installing Vista I could no longer start OSX, then when I started OSX from the DVD and 'repaired' the partition table boot code (with OSX fdisk) I could no longer boot Vista and I needed that DVD and then the BCDEDIT utility ... in the end I got things working but the road to that was certainly not nice!!!

Apparently the 'eye-candy' part that I was suggesting in my previous post is now firmly going into the right direction - some new wallpapers were added and also some interesting screen savers - I wonder if they also fired somebody for that :)

The new "desktop composition model" is also working quite nice and a lot of things are now looking much better - but what surprised me a little was the very poor hardware support for video cards that I consider right now budget-level - like for instance the nVidia 6600 series - with that card the new Aero features were NOT activated by default !!!

Windows update is finally working - and a new nVidia driver was available - but that one was also not working as expected, so I had to download the beta 87.15 ForceWare driver - after installing that a BSOD was generated on the next restart but somehow after that things started to work and I FINALLY managed to see the new Aero interface - and it is indeed quite nice (even if still needs some extra fine-tuning and a lot of extra work on the drivers part!!!)

A part of Vista that might have an even bigger impact that the visual part is the new 'security model' - now it seems like most of the 'administrative rights' that a user might have are still present but no longer 'enabled by default' - and the operating system will ask when an application is trying to do something potentially dangerous - the overall result is that running things full time from an administrative account have been placed at least at the same security level as in OSX - but so far it might look quite annoying for the real administrators (that were only logging as such in order to do some specific tasks) to be constantly asked if they really, really mean that ... and as with OSX the potential danger is that the average user might become too used to 'approving' every single action so in the end the dangerous programs might still be able to infiltrate into Vista (eventually with a little social engineering).

The new stuff might also break a lot of programs (including some of my small favorite tools) ... but that still remains to be seen ... and here comes the major problem that I see with Vista - if MicroSoft would really like to launch Vista in 6 months or so and if they want to avoid embarrasing situations they might be quite a lot behind the ideal schedule - if MS wants to make Vista a major hit they should provide to all (ALL!!!) Windows developers a rather stable and mostly frozen build for at least 6 months in order to be certain that the vast majority of programs will work 'almost perfectly' - and build 5308 is obviously not stable nor feature-frozen, not to mention that is far from 'for all developers' :(

There are MANY other features inside but those might be eventually left for another post - the overall result so far is that things are starting to look promising and I am more tempted to give some credit to an over-optimistic article like this rather than the pathetic one from here ! (don't even get me started on that last one - any so-called 'expert' that picks a Gateway with integrated video like that one and then complains about how software can't do miracles with his stupid choice simply deserves to be neglected).

There IS however one point where I am afraid that Vista might be a major disappointment - and that is for the rather advanced users - it is not a bad idea to be more user-friendly for the less experenced users but that can EASILY be done with a separate configuration for them - and that can even be the default one - but neglecting and upsetting power users by not providing an easy way to switch off some or all of the 'dumb mode enhancements' might be a very costly mistake for MicroSoft !

Funny ... what if M$ was more like Apple :)

2006-03-02T02:19:00.000-08:00

Apparently Woz believes that M$ should be more like Apple - so let's play a little 'what if' with that idea:
- first of all M$ would have to loose the vast majority of it's base and be reduced to a pathetic 2-3% of the market;
- they would also have to start screwing their customers as fast as they could - the current 'one Windows version every 2-5 years' should now become 'at least one new operating system every year and you will pay full price for it';
- Windows will ONLY work on a very, very limited hardware platform that should first be approved (for a huge fee) by M$; everybody that wants to sell that will pay a big per-CPU fee to M$;
- from time to time the hardware platform will be TOTALLY changed with basically minimal backwards compatibility so that the suckers will have to buy something new as often as possible; that will always be presented as a major step forward; and even if a few months before that new hardware was mocked as inferior, the moment it will be adopted by the company it will magically become the most powerful in the world :)
- all previous 3rd party programs will no longer work after 2-3 Windows versions or will work very poor;
- if anything of any real value is created by some other smaller software company the idea will be stolen and become a major selling point of the next Windows version;
- if by accident something interesting comes from inside the company it will under NO CIRCUMSTANCE be licensed to other companies but instead a monopoly around it will be created as soon as possible and customers will be locked into it with no escape !!!

Yep, I just can't wait for M$ to become more like Apple ... or not :))

Much ado about nothing :)

2006-02-28T11:38:00.000-08:00

After the first Apple announcement of this year had nothing surprising or exciting, the one from today was totally pathetic - I simply can't stop wondering how much 'bribe money' the media is getting from SteveJ ... or maybe the media is just incredibly dumb :)
Anyway the 'big news' were a new mini (intel-based, yet more expensive), iPod Hi-Fi (which is pretty much a dock with integrated speakers with the usual inflated Apple price tag) ... and a leather case for the iPod ... yeah, right, quite amazing :))

Features still matter ...

2006-02-28T01:26:00.000-08:00

This will be a short post related to WHY FEATURES DON'T MATTER ANYMORE: THE NEW LAWS OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY - while most of the ideas from there are generally right, there is one major point missing from that post - the idea is that we are now moving from a world of 'technology for the elites' to a 'world of mass-technology' and in this world maybe 80-90% of the people will be (temporarily) better with the 'less is more' rule, but the rest of maybe 10-20% percent (but which might represent more than 50% in the business/scientific area) will still be able to use more complex stuff with better results - so the world where we are all stupid users of a technology nobody can any longer understand remains for the moment located on Trantor ... inside the Science-Fiction books :)
And if you are wondering why 'less is more' will not be forever true you can just look back - a century ago (or maybe two) a world where most people could read was just fantasy and the 'less is more' advocates were very happy with 80-90% of the people being on the 'less' side ...

Why I am not cool with Apple ...

2006-02-25T01:30:00.000-08:00

There was one link 'flying high' in the morning that prompted this post - you can take a look at:
Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: iTunes, One Billion Suckers Served
(and you can also see some even more direct critics here).

While the links above are generally right they do not express a very important point - the reason why I raise my voice against Apple (and the MacIdiots that support them) has little to do with how popular iTunes can be (and to be honest that success is not entirely without merit) - the main reason is that Apple and RIAA are the single worst combination to make the choices for our future digital life - NO OTHER combination could be worse, even the 'eternal villain' Micro$oft looks good when compared with those two !!! I will not insist on RIAA but Apple has the longest record of anti-competitive behaviour and their ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL is based on LOCKING consumers into their stuff !!! (and if you believe that's only 'good american business model' then you are probably not aware it's the same business model as a heroin dealer).

The major problem right now is that the market is structured in such a monopolistic way that only very few alternatives can survive at the same time - so instead of some people having a choice to go with iTunes while others choosing a more open alternative (like mindawn.com - their legal FLAC downloads are AMAZING, only problem is that in order to survive on the long term they would need to have at least 1000 times more titles) - in a (very) few years there will be either only two alternatives (probably Apple and M$) or just one and no choice at all :(

So yes, in the end I would very much like that the choices for my digital future will NOT be made by people TOO DUMB TO USE A MOUSE WITH TWO BUTTONS!!!

Compression and stuff ...

2006-02-24T02:06:00.000-08:00

OK, some posts ago I have mentioned that I do not like StuffIt and some people asked why not and what can be used instead ...

The reason is quite very simple - archives and especially compressed archives should always be something with an 'open format' (do you really want to be forced to pay a tax in 10 or 20 years time just to be able to open your old documents???) - and generally anything that totally locks you into a closed and proprietary format is a VERY BAD THING - especially when you have OPEN and FREE alternatives !!!

So what do I suggest instead ?

Well, as a general purpose interchange-oriented compressed archive format nothing can beat the old ZIP format !!! In case you do not know all major operating systems have default support for that format (open-source since 'forever' :) , Windows since XP, OSX since 10.3 - the 'Create archive' in Finder is using precisely that ZIP format!!!)
By far the most important advantage is not the fact it is an open format (it is), is the fact that ANYBODY can probably open such a ZIP file on pretty much any computer platform that is even barely alive. The open part also pretty much gurantees that 10 or 20 years from now you will still be able to do just that!!!
A major project that was doing a great job with that is Info-ZIP - that code is behind many other programs and on that site you can find free programs (command-line and some GUI, with source code and for pretty much any computer platform around) to ZIP and UnZIP !!!
The only minor drawback is the 'compression ratio' - it is good for most normal files but not the greatest ... so here comes the alternative ...

For the best compression ratio (one that even makes StuffIt look pathetic) you should use 7z / sevenzip - it is a program that can pack/unpack 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR and can unpack RAR, CAB, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM and DEB, it is also open and source-code is available!!!
The Windows/Windows64 version also contains a very nice mini-filemanager - you can even configure that one in the Commander-style so it certainly is one of the greatest free programs that you can get !!! For the moment the OSX and Linux versions are 'command-line only' but there are extra free programs that can add a friendly user-interface on that and I am convinced that it's only a matter of time until a better UI will become available !

So now you know it - there is no reason to use that pathetic sit/sitx format!

OSX security myth ... busted :))

2006-02-21T13:05:00.000-08:00

Just a very short post this time - after the recent trojan and then the bluetooth OSX attack now two new (but closely related) problems have emerged - first of all Safari is starting to show the same security holes as IE or eventually things seem to extend to the general execution model itself so that certain problems can also appear even if using Firefox ... things are moving so fast that I can't even feel proud that ... I'VE TOLD YOU SO :)) (last two paragraphs)

Why cartoons are important !

2006-02-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

OK, this post will not be about technical subjects, this time it's about the 'Muhammad cartoons' - and why the western civilization should NOT be apologetic at all on that matter ...
Things are quite simple - around here there are MANY people (including myself) that share a common belief in science and logic - you could call it our religion but for us that term is probably NOT the best choice :)
Part of our beliefs - which after a very long struggle have become part of our freedoms - is that everybody is entitled to his own opinions as long as it is not enforced on the others - so to make the story short - we have our rights to mock religious fundamentalists - and that covers both the christian (even if the mocked guy is the president of US) and the islamic ones - so while the rioting mobs might have got a point if the cartoons were published by us in their newspapers we don't give a sh*t on such protest over OUR media and OUR freedoms!
A special message should also go to the 'apologetic current' from around here - maybe some of the christian fundamentalists would just love a world in which religion can enforce censorship at any moment but that is not going to happen - so you can also get lost !

Another cool rescue tool ...

2006-02-17T07:59:00.000-08:00

One very cool rescue tool that usually gets mentioned generally only at some point between 'late' and 'too late' is SpinRite - I have seen it first running on an old 286 PC quite a long time ago and yet a few versions and many, many years later the program is still here and can still 'save the day' (in some conditions).

What the program does is quite complex - apparently the current v6 still has inside the code to low-level format MFM/ESDI hard-drives - but I think that such disks are no longer produced since at least ten years ago - but on top of those original features that made it famous between old-time geeks SpinRite v6 can do two other things - in can 'refresh' the data written on your HDD (and in the process discover small parts of the disk that might be in danger of failing) or if the drive is already dying it can help recovering all or at least some of the data from that failing area and then eventually let the modern IDE drives relocate it to some other place !!!

The program is quite friendly - actually I would have liked a lot more advanced options for instance to test the surface with more than two patterns (a previous version was using 256 patterns or so, but that was a little overkill) and most important of all - I would like some way to control on what level of errors things get too dangerous plus an option to only try for a more limited amount of time to read certain bad sectors and just go ahead and relocate them - recently I have seen one case where it was 'locked' on a single sector for almost 8 hours - which is great if you had something very valuable there, but if you already have a backup it might be much nicer to quickly relocate that sector (and eventually some around it) and simply continue using that drive for non-important storage !!!

The only real drawback of the program is the price - at around 90 US$ it will be well-spent money for a company or anything business oriented but for a home user it might sometimes be cheaper to get a new HDD for a similar price ...

If you are on a very tight budget you might eventually look at some open-source projects - dd_recover and ddrecover (not the same thing), dd_rhelp (smart frontend for dd_recover), safecopy, recoverdm, cdrdao ... some of them can be added as a very small (670k) optional MyDSL packet and also KNOPPIX does have them - so booting from that live CD might be an alternative!!!

It is also nice how compact SpinRite is - in a world where most programs will come on a CD SpinRite can actually entirely fit on a 1.44 MB (freedos bootable) floppy !!!

Even nicer than a FDD might be some USB stick (or in my case the old shuffle) - if you already have a boot manager/loader like GRUB you will only need to add on the USB drive the 1.44 MB SPINRITE.IMG file (the 'image' of the boot floppy) and a 20k memdisk helper (which is part of the SYSLINUX project - another very cool project related to booting computers in more or less exotic ways) and then place a few GRUB commands like:

title SpinRite6
root (hd0,0)
kernel /memdisk
initrd /SpinRite.img

and you will be able to boot to another great tool from your USB drive !!!

Obviously you will only be able to boot on a PC - so far it seems that ON PURPOSE the latest G4 notebooks from Apple can not boot from USB (while older G3 models could do that just fine) - as with most other Apple stupid choices the technical information is quite limited but I will still keep an eye on it ...

More on Apple predictions - and not only mine :)

2006-02-16T02:10:00.000-08:00

I will start with a very dumb article from Dvorak - he obviously is another person pissed by the constant Apple hype and in some way he is ridiculing those fans to the extreme - the problem is that the subtle fun (I liked the final part - "Luckily, Apple has a master showman, Steve Jobs. He'll announce that now everything can run on a Mac. He'll say that the switch to Windows gives Apple the best of both worlds. He'll say this is not your daddy's Windows...") is totally lost on the average Apple fan ... and also unlike the ONLY other important prediction that he got right (the x86 Apple switch - being 4-5x times slower on the notebooks could no longer be hidden even by a master spinner like SteveJ) this one does not have a serious base !!!

I was keeping the best part last - if you read the last two paragraphs I posted on February 9 and then you take a look at THIS you will see that some things can move very fast :)) Maybe even too fast for my own prediction - now Apple really has to hurry with that antivirus and antispyware programs !!!

However while that first OSX trojan is quite pathetic it does something very important - it 'signals' the fact that 'hunting season' on overconfident Apple fans is now officially open - and things might be very dangerous during hunting season since both the president and the vicepresident might be Apple users :))

Interesting free stuff ...

2006-02-15T02:50:00.000-08:00

First of all - an amazing small OSX program that makes Spotlight look pathetic - I am speaking about Quicksilver - and if Micro$oft has ANY brains left they will buy those guys and get it as standard inside Vista !!! (and also keep the OSX version just to have SteveJ bite his fingernails :) )

Another small promising OSX program might be Jumpcut - it is a free clipboard extender. You might also want to look at iTerm (opensource OSX terminal) and eventually coconutBattery (to find out how many times your battery was recharged and how well is it still working).

I managed to also take a look at build 75 of KisMac (interesting and very friendly) and Adium had a new build also (and Google is your friend ...)

Objective C looks ... very interesting ... but the main problem seems to be the total lack of any future outside OSX ... (don't get me wrong, for 'real things' C++ is a few degrees of magnitude better but Objective C might have been far more interesting than C# ... the only problem is that C# DOES have a future!)

Finally something that is 'free' but on a totally different style - OSX 10.4.4 was 'patched' once again - see here and here ... and is quite funny that smart people will be able to run OSX and XP on their 'ultracheap beige box' LONG BEFORE those rich people 'milked' by Apple will be able to see XP on their non-standard x86 machines :) ... when you have a company with the main target to create monopolies (and ways to lock customers in) you should start wondering if paying for their overpriced stuff would be smart ... or rather dumb !!!

The cult of the Apple :)

2006-02-10T06:54:00.000-08:00

One very funny / interesting story - apparently things are not always so bright in the Apple world - not to mention the afterglow :)

The guy apparently did not know the first Apple theorem - the Apple products are very much "all or nothing" type - meaning that if it works you might be happy, but if anything at all disturbs the Apple karma then it will certainly be more of a nightmare :(

There are very strong reasons for that:

- in the first place, Apple products are designed primarily for not so bright people without any computer experience whatsoever - any attempt to think in a different way, any extra experience or knowledge that you might have will only make things worse since you will depart from the original target of the product;

- Apple products are of the worst non-standard and monopolistic type - since their target audience are mostly people that not only have no clue on the value of standards and interoperability but more important - they are proud on being so !!!
That in itself is not always visible when things go well, but certainly can't be missed when something goes wrong - not very unlikely a car with totally non-standard tires - you might never even notice that ... until the day you must replace them, and on that day it will cost you :)

- if possible NEVER pay for a product that locks you in a world with absolutely no alternative - while I have never paid for my Shuffle I would have NEVER even think about keeping it without the open-source iPod Shuffle database builder !!!

- do not try to reason with Apple fans - it's NOT about logic, it's about passion ... the passion to finally feel 'smart' and yet 'different' at the same time :)

The Apple revelation !

2006-02-09T04:38:00.000-08:00

If you have read some of my previous posts you might have noted that I was constantly amazed at the totally illogical activism of the Mac enthusiast - I could not understand how so many things that should have been so obvious to any remotely competent user were actually ignored, denied, misrepresented and so on…

But recently just after responding to such a comment on an older post ”I finally got it” … and it was quite an eye-opener :)

You see, in the PC world there are almost 100 times more people than in the Apple world and many, many levels of knowledge - generally if your grandmother calls you when she has problems with her email she certainly looks at you as her on-hand-expert for that problem, but the called grandson like the vast majority of people always know quite a number of other people that have a much higher knowledge in a certain computer matter or another, so while a LOT of people are proud of their experience I would dare saying that probably 90% of the PC users think of themselves as just that - a normal user - and they generally have the tendency of listening to what other users and especially the people they regard as experts say about a thing or another, and the tendency of learning more and more to constantly rise on the knowledge ladder ...

However, from what I can see in the Apple world at least half of the users think of themselves as experts - but since they also want to be modest they might use the term 'power user' - so you actually have a world where almost everybody ALREADY IS an expert !!!

That is generally a very nice thing - it shows that people are reasonably happy with that computer technology - and honestly speaking for many people that is a huge achievement in itself !

However overconfidence always can generate problems - think of the (drunk?) drivers that believe that they can make a steep turn at 200 mph without any form of safety belt :)

In the computer world things will be a lot less dramatic - by far the most annoying result is the constant hype around everything that Apple does :) Another unpleasant result is that in a world with so many 'happy power users' any form of 'outside improvement' has only little chances - and generally not even the the best ideas will survive on the long term since Apple might 'borrow' them for their next update cycle... (and also any form of major improvement of the users knowledge - if they already are experts why should they learn anything new :) ) That Apple world might also be a 'monopolistic dictatorship' - the only 'higher expert' in a world full of 'power users' is Apple itself - which becomes a supreme authority that dictates pretty much everything and in the process is taking a consistent cut from all the other members of the world :)

A very interesting danger when having so many overconfident users is on the security side - and that is even more dangerous in a 'monoculture' (in which most people use pretty much the same hardware and software both from the same unique provider)! So far the main reason why no major security problems have been seen was that the current generation of hackers were more interested in making easy money from the vastly larger world of Windows ... but that might soon change ...

I can not take credit for being the first with such warnings - just yesterday The Register was running an article from Security Focus on that - but I will make another prediction that I consider funnier - just months (if not days) after the first widespread OSX exploits will start (or even after only modest trojans or spyware vectors will become widely known), the same company that was always claiming that OSX is perfectly and totally safe 'as it is' and that no extra helper program is needed will launch an antivirus service - either something separate and rather expensive (but with a 'totally unique experience and service' :) ), or something a little less pushy linked to the existing .mac tax - but even that will be no innovation :))

Spyware everywhere ?

2006-02-06T00:37:00.000-08:00

Well, after recently installing (on an older machine owned by a friend) the latest Winamp (in order to minimize the risks after the extremely embarrassing Winamp CRITICAL SYSTEM VULNERABILITY ) , I have noted that the software firewall from that computer (an old and free tiny personal firewall that is no longer available but still works on older machines with windows 2000) was saying things like:
'Winamp' from your computer wants to connect to waweb-ntc0l-0.winamp.com [207.200.97.161], port 80
Another example of programs spying on their users ? Maybe not 100% that, but close - all the normal Winamp online stuff was actually disabled but somewhere hidden deep (probably on purpose) into General preferences -> Media library -> Online media tab ->Modify preferences button there is a setting called "Look for new Online Media Channels on exit" that seems to be enabled by default :(

That type of setting and the far more common one that is "checking for updates" are nothing new - most authors are probably curious on how often and by how many people their programs are used and for a free program that is not such a huge problem if you have a simple way to stop it (in Winamp case there is a way, but definitely it is NOT obvious).

Maybe more disturbing is when large monopolies with a bad track record are using very similar ways to log information about when you are starting (or stopping) their pre-installed programs and in the process also bother you with popup dialogs on how you should give them even more money just to upgrade to the latest (lame) version (even if you have just paid for the product 1 month ago) - no, this is not about M$ - I am speaking of Apple here and mostly about the iLife stuff - but obviously since their typical customer generally has no clue on privacy and security that remains a problem mostly ignored by the media and the general public :(

Dashboard things on an Apple notebook

2006-02-02T10:40:00.000-08:00

After my initial contacts with Apple OSX from my 12'' iBook (described in the first, second and third special posts) not a huge amount of surprises have remained to be discovered but there are a few other things that might be worth mentioning for any other newcomer to the Apple world.

One first observation on the pre-installed applications - there are quite a few, some of them might be of some use for most people (like the Dictionary/Thesaurus or the Calculator, maybe AppleWorks or Stickies ... but mostly for beginners), some might like parts or all of the iApplications (but I am not one of them - iTunes and iCal are usable and probably nice but you can never know when they will spy on you - in case you do not know Apple can probably build a very precise log of when each Apple user has started each iApplication, how many times per day, at what hour more often and so on) and there are some other which are there only for the "feel good" reason - how many people have ever used GarageBand for something real ? (but of course that people will feel good about their artistic side so ...)

Two other programs that everybody will probably need to install - one I certainly like - Adobe Acrobat Reader - the other I HATE but there is not much that I can do - StuffIt Expander - just another company that has somehow managed to impose a standard tax on stupidity :(

One interesting thing is the (new) Spotlight - while normally on a system with a better and more effective design I would have no need for it I was not able to stop it when I made my first steps on the iBook so I left it there for a future research - and while at times I certainly can hear the HDD working in the background (and sometimes even slowing me down) I have discovered that for a keyboard lover it might actually be the next best thing after a console or file manager with a command line - most often if you remember the name of a certain program it is much faster on a notebook to press COMMAND+SPACE , then a few letters from the program (or document) name, a few times on DOWN and then ENTER !!! But it remains to be seen if the tradeoffs are worth it on the long term so I am still researching that ...

Finally a few words on the Dashboard - the TYPICAL expression of the Apple philosophy - but you will have to read to the end to find out which is that :)

I admit that I liked the look of it - and I have placed quite a few nice widgets on my dashboard - but in the end:
a) it is simply an idea mostly stolen from Konfabulator (with only small changes so that it might be difficult to sue);
b) it can also be considered a virtual desktop manager for less brilliant people (you know, the same people that can not handle TWO mouse buttons);
c) the memory usage is HUGE and the benefits are rather minor most of the time.

So in the end something just like all Apple stuff - nice for the eyes but shallow and in the end mostly useless :(

The media spin ...

2006-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows that we now live in an era where the people that own the media can choose how to "spin" history to their advantage ... and you can always find an incompetent reporter that will do any dirty work is needed even in some famous places that are slowly being destroyed from the inside ...

Most recent case - The New York Times - the guy manages to write a piece in which at the same time things are perfectly black and perfectly white depending on what he wants to prove - for instance first he will tell you that it was only a myth that x86-based PCs were faster but just a few paragraphs later he discovers that since Apple decided to switch to Intel there was a sudden huge speed increase (which we can probably trace exclusively on that move from Apple) and as a result now indeed everything is much faster in the x86 world and in that world nothing beats the marvels coming from SteveJ :)

The guy is either not aware or simply chooses to hide that the top AMD systems are still a lot faster than the highly overpriced Apple stuff or that in the free x86 market you can easily find many products with a much better performance/cost ratio, with a real keyboard and with both hardware AND software where you are not "locked in" just in order to be "milked" of your money ...

The media has obviously evolved and if you can no longer recognize it don't be scared - in a few years the Internet will send it right where it belongs - to the garbage bin :)

Other things to do on an Apple notebook

2006-01-27T23:57:00.000-08:00

This is the third part of the "first time OSX survival kit" - you can also refresh your memories with the first one and the second post - and also with the funny story of how I got into the Apple mess ...

In the two posts before I was mostly describing system-related settings and configurations (together with some small utilities to manage those better, a better web browser and the very important and almost "part of the system" Commander-like file managers paradigm) - in this one I will first focus on more general applications and only at the very end I will also reveal a small system-extender gem that has made all the conversion pain almost acceptable ... so please read on :)

One of the first things that you need on a computer is an office-like application - if you have a high-end PowerBook you only have an evaluation copy of the Mac version of MS Office - buying that will be an extra 500 US$ but that might be just fine - if you had the money to pay for the highly overpriced Apple system (that will probably never stop taxing you) why not paying a little tax to Micro$oft too :))

If you have an iBook you are a little better - you probably have a version of AppleWorks - with a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database, a drawing program, a painting program and a presentation program it might seem like a nice bonus and probably it is ... but mostly for your grandmother or somebody that has never used a serious program/computer before ... since once you get past that initial stage you might want something more advanced/powerful ... are you doomed to pay more than the price of a new full Wintel notebook for that MS Office ???

There might still be another way - OpenOffice might again come to rescue - but there is a small trick ... OpenOffice itself is either a M$ Windows or a XWindows application - so that's another important thing to add to OSX - fortunately X11 is free (and is a standard part of the OSX DVD since 10.4, but it does not come installed by default so you will have to actually dig after that DVD).

If you have X11 installed on your OSX you can get the latest OpenOffice 2.x from this page - but the X11 integration in OSX is rather pathetic so on the same page you will also find something even more convenient called NeoOffice - which is basically the same OpenOffice core much better integrated to OSX!!! There is however a drawback - the version for NeoOffice is a little behind the main OpenOffice one but even like that it will be a huge step forward from AppleWorks - and is FREE and OpenSource !!! You might also need to use the X11 OpenOffice version if you have one of the new Intel-based Apple machines but what can I say ... life is not fair :)

One place where I still need that X11 is "picture handling" - while from the "famous Apple programs" iTunes is usable (but will probably spy on you and try to lock you into a closed format), iPhoto is awful and since my favorite free small image-related program - IrfanView - is not available on OSX I have tried about 10-20 other programs and for the moment I am using a port of a second-best free Windows alternative - XnView - which has a version for OSX - but unfortunately X11-based :( Anyway it is usable and nice, so that part was solved OK for the moment.

Since there is always so much fuss about how great OSX is for multimedia I was expecting that area to be covered automatically - I could not be more wrong - I do not like iTunes and the Apple QuickTime Player only makes M$ MediaPlayer look like a major winner ! The alternatives are MPlayerOSX (the OSX port of the popular open-source MPlayer - also handy on Windows) and VLC for OSX (from VideoLAN, also free and also handy even on Windows, but there BSPlayer is the first alternative). MPlayerOSX is easier to use initially while VLC might need a HUGE configuration effort - but in the end both will work very, very well and if you are ready to spend some time with it VLC can also automatically pick subtitles and use exotic fonts and codepages so now I have changed the default association for AVI files to VLC and never looked back :) VLC can also be used for small "on the fly" music playlists, so that was covered too (but XMMS might also be of some interest).

Another part of the modern internet life is instant messaging - but the OSX version of Yahoo Messenger is pathetic and also crashes all the time, GAIM is a much better open-source project but the default version is also using X11 so in the end the best alternative so far was Adium - another open-source project somehow derived from GAIM but very specific for OSX - and so far it seems to work just fine !!! (but I sometimes miss some of the "gimmicks" from the latest Windows version of YM).

Another tool that might sometimes be useful is VNC - a form of open-source remote desktop - for the client-end popular choices on OSX are VNCViewer and Chicken of the VNC , while on the server-end one alternative is OSXvnc !

But the program that I have used most during this first days on OSX is Witch - it simply covers some of the many usability holes in OSX (like how to get by keybord to a minimized window in less than 20 keys) and while the program is not perfect it is currently (in my opinion) one the most important things to be installed on any computer running OSX. After installation you need to "Enable access for assistive devices" under System Preferences / Universal Access and also enable Witch itself and then you can go to some of the settings - I have initially defined the hotkey for cycling windows forward as COMMAND+OPTION+TAB and COMMAND+OPTION+` for backward, but since I also needed a cancel key and I was pressing COMMAND+OPTION+ESC all the time (which is the OSX "Force Quit" hotkey) I have now moved the main triggers to CTRL+OPTION+TAB and CTRL+OPTION+` (and CTRL+OPTION+ESC will cancel things).

There are still many new things and some of them might "make it" to a future post so until then just take care and avoid paying more "stupidity taxes" to companies like Apple or Microsoft :)

One quick word about the so-called "support sites for Mac" - AVOID !

2006-01-26T06:08:00.000-08:00

Some content spam on a previous post of mine was suggesting a site - which was:
a) down;
b) not running too much on Macs - the expression in the developers world is "not eating their own sh*t" :)

More on cool rescue tools and utilities

2006-01-25T07:59:00.000-08:00

As you already know I am a big fan of rescue tools and other "small and cool utilities", ideally combined with small hardware "gizmos" ...

On my 512 MB shuffle I already have GRUB booting Damn Small Linux and MoviX which only leaves around 400 MB of music - enough for a very cool gizmo that can play relaxing music AND also rescue/repair/check/boot/play movies/play DVDs on a large number of computers so that one was pretty much full and the only major step forward for me on that type of flash USB sticks + MP3 players might come when/if Samsung will have its 2 GB shuffle killer ...

However today I was too bored so I decided to re-organize my HDD-based MP3 player - 20 GB on HDD is a LOT more than 0.5 GB on flash-RAM so the target was to still keep at least 90% of the space for music but to see what amazing things I can place into the remaining 1-2 GB of space. Some of the stuff below was already discussed in my posts but towards the end there will be a few newer and very interesting things, so please bare with me ...

GRUB is so small and powerful so it was again the obvious choice for a boot manager and then I have added:

1) Linux bootable stuff

- KNOPPIX (v4.02 currently, CD version, around 700MB); this one is the large ultimate tool-and-utilities LIVE Linux image and while it is quite big it has a very large number of programs - from text and graphic editors and games to network security tools, so if a computer has enough RAM and can boot this it might solve most problems!

- DSL (v2.1b, around 50 MB) - this one is so small that I have added it "just in case" (also might work on some older systems with less RAM); I have also added Samba as a MyDSL package "just in case";

- MoviX (v0.8.3, around 30 MB) - if I only want to see some AVI/MPG or play some DVD this one is faster and much easier than going to the full KNOPPIX boot, and given the small size it was definitely a keeper;

2) Windows bootable stuff

- the Windows recovery console (around 10 MB) - the XP version is newer but the Windows 2000 version has a small "bug" that can sometimes become a feature - it will let you get to the recovery console on an XP system even if you do not know the Administrator password!!! The recovery console is a limited text-mode-only tool but it can fix a few things (MBR, boot) for a Windows installation or can disable a driver/service that creates fatal problems, so at 10 MB why not keep it ? However in order to keep it AND the next item a small trick was needed - the boot sector was saved as a separate 512 bytes file (BOOTCONS.BIN) and NTLDR was renamed as NTLDR_ and then the same change was made inside the 512 bytes BOOTCONS.BIN file so that when GRUB chainloads this one it will load that NTLDR_ corresponding to the recovery console!

- a BartPE full bootable Windows live image - probably under 200 MB but it depends on what you would like to place inside. You can find some info in the LangaList or some step-by-step details in the InformationWeek article but there are many other places with information on that matter! When building your custom BartPE image you will probably want to add as many (safe) net and storage drivers as possible and also most of your favorite tools - I am a big fan of Total Commander but the most important tool on a bootable live Windows image is probably ERD Commander that will let you do some nice tricks (even an older version might be very handy).

3) PORTABLE Windows applications

- there are many portable applications but most often I only need a few from here so I have a PORTABLE folder with:

- Portable OpenOffice.org (around 170 MB) - that solves text editing, spreadsheets, presentations and some other things; and unlike Microsoft Office this will never de-activate itself when you upgrade the HDD on your system :))

- Portable Firefox (under 20 MB) - safe browsing (and you can still have plugins and extensions);

- Portable Gaim (under 10 MB) - convenient instant messaging with no installation!

(there are also other portable applications available, so just keep looking for those that you feel you might need - and when using them on other computers never forget about safety !!!)

Now a number of final observations:

- things that are a form of "image" are safer than individual files - for instance it might be almost impossible for a virus to get inside BARTPE.ISO even on a USB drive;

- obviously write-once CDs are perfectly safe from this point of view (but not all PORTABLE applications might work like that);

- but USB is handy since you can update things easy, you can save your documents there and so on;

- a CD might have one extra important advantage for a "live Windows image" - when booting from USB a RAMdrive is used - so it is very likely that you will only be able to boot BartPE from USB on systems with more than 256 MB RAM; however with a CD you can boot BartPE even in 96-128 MB RAM; and I somehow remember that an older ERD Commander mini-CD could even start in 32 MB of RAM so that might be the ultimate rescue for older systems;

- also DSL and MoviX might have the same advantage over live windows when RAM is low;

- I do not believe that you can start anything with a GUI in 16 MB without swap :)

- there are still many older systems that do not boot from USB (and even the new ones can sometimes be VERY slow), so a "backup rescue tool" might be a 210 MB mini-CD - certainly not as cool and small as a USB stick but still usable; I believe that PuppyLinux might even be able to write back stuff on the boot CD as multiple sessions - so a 210 MB mini-RW might actually be the best alternative when USB is not supported but the computer has a CD burner!!!

Next things to do on an Apple notebook

2006-01-24T12:25:00.000-08:00

OK, if you have not already gave up on OSX until now you are probably either desperate to be "different" or (more like me) working on a bet or something ... so here is the second part of the "first week OSX survival kit" :)

If you would like to control some of the extra settings that Apple had "enforced" for the less "brainy" of its users you probably need the (freeware) Onyx - a nice article about it can be found here and generally it is a very needed tool for any power user!!!

Another "power user tool" is RCDefaultApp - that one is not a separate program as Onyx but instead a "preference pane" and can also be handy... (I personally consider totally not obvious (and stupid) the way you need to go to the "Get Info" extra window in order to have some very limited control on what program will be called for a given extension - I am still amazed every day how many stupid and illogical choices have been made in the so-called "friendly software" from Apple).

The final part of this post will be about sleeping and hibernating and all other "goodies" that I managed to find so far will be left for a third post ...

Probably by now you have noted that the term "Sleep" is present in the system menu (pretty much the same as "Stand by" in Windows) but nothing like "Hibernate" - for a long time OSX had a serious shortcoming on that which only very recently was partially fixed ... but definitely requires some "extra work" ... Also please note that Apple has so far only officially added that new feature to PowerBooks but that is pure bull*hit since all recent iBooks (and some of the older ones) are probably working just fine !!!

There is a decent article on the matter here, but the author either has no clue about Windows or is trying to spread FUD since he is saying things like "similar to Sleep, Windows 'Hibernates' while Linux 'Software Suspends' ... they are not as fast as Sleep mode ..." - so first let's make things CLEAR - both Windows and Linux have something at least as good as Sleep, they ALSO have something else which is different and certainly better in other conditions!

The article also fails to describe things very clearly so before following the link for the implementation details here are some extra words - probably again in order to not "overwhelm" the normal MacMorons, Apple has added that missing feature under the same name/command but the user has NO simple way to know which is what and to activate one or another !!!

The new feature is called "Safe Sleep" in the Apple very limited documentation and it is somehow interesting since it actually generates 3 distinct "sleep directions" - which however are not available all 3 as direct user options in any simple way :(

Basically the default Apple approach is that you still invoke the existing single Sleep command - HOWEVER depending on a system setting called "hibernatemode" then the notebook can go 3-way (the "hibernatemode" - is stored under /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist (and that can be set with pmset but also certain things depend on a separate NVRAM setting)):

a) the system can go to the usual Sleep (to RAM, with the blinking sleep LED), if you remove the power AND the battery everything is lost; (please note that a good notebook - like a Dell Latitude - actually has a special second battery for that and you have around 30-60 seconds in which to change the battery and the system will come back JUST FINE - but obviously the highly overpriced Apple cr*p could not add those extra few cents - so more profit for SteveJ and the loss is all for the morons with more money than brains);

b) the system can go into hibernate mode - just like any other much cheaper notebook in Windows; everything is stored on the HDD and no power is required from the battery or similar; generally from my experience hibernating in Windows is faster but that probably depends on a lot of factors;

c) the third and somehow more interesting way is the "Deep Sleep" - the system will apparently go to the "Sleep to RAM" mode (with the blinking LED) but without any feedback to the user (which is a STUPID thing anyway) the full hibernation info goes to the HDD so that ...

c1) if you come back without totally loosing battery the system will act as it was in normal Sleep and will wake up quick and normal;

c2) if somehow the power goes totally off then the system will use the hibernation info and will still wake up - but slower!

Probably the most tempting setting for "hibernatemode" is the third one (also 3 as the numerical value that needs to be used with pmset) - it simply is a "safer sleep" - but sometimes you might also want to immediately force the full hibernate mode (since sleep to RAM will still use battery power) and that can be done with some separate utility like SuspendNow !!!

The final words in this post will again not be easy on Apple - not only they have "stolen" the backup battery but they were also incredibly (and stupidly) cheap on other things - for instance there is no POWER LED !!! (of course that the already brainwashed morons will jump saying that the omission is part of the "elegance" of the Mac, but anybody that has pressed the power button on a iBook and then just sit there for a few long seconds without ANY feedback at all knows that all that is pure and typical Apple bull*hit :(

First things to do on an Apple notebook

2006-01-21T07:46:00.000-08:00

This is the first post on some of the small things (configurations, settings, programs) that might make life not great but at least acceptable on any of the Apple notebooks (especially if you are used with the non-brainwashed keyboard and trackpad from the "rest of the world").

My very first thing was to go in System Preferences under "Keyboard and Mouse" and choose better settings for the trackpad (I like tapping, tap-and-drag and so on). Ideally I might have been very happy (in theory) with a program called SideTrack (I mostly liked defining the bottom-right corner as a right-click) but on the latest G4 iBook it seems to work quite unusual (the precision was very strange) and for the moment I had to remove it.

Also very important on the Keyboard tab - check "use F1-F12..." - the name of the option is very bad but the explanation below is slightly better - with that checkbox the F1-F12 keys will work almost normal and in order to get to the non-standard (and rarely used) volume, screen and CD controls you will have to use FN+Fx key, which is quite logical and easy to remember!

I also found very important for me to "free" the remaining taken "standard Fkeys" (which I define as F1-F10) - in System Preferences under "Dashboard and Expose" I have moved "All windows" from F9 to Command+F12 (which is easy to reach since F12 is the top-right key) and the more rarely used "Application windows" from F10 to Command+F11.

Even if you do not like so much "normal" function keys you should definitely use some of the "screen corners shortcuts" - for me by far the most importants were "All windows" (bottom left) and "Desktop" (bottom right).

For a notebook (especially a lighter one like the 12'' versions) screen estate is very precious so you should also go to System Preferences under Dock and activate the "Autohiding".

Other things that you should not forget in System Preferences - under "Security" activate the "master password" eventually "require password ... for secure system", and if you must auto-login then under Accounts create a non-admin account and make that the default to "auto-login" - that way some of the risks with a portable or shared computer are kept at a more acceptable level.

The very next step should be installing Firefox - Safari is not bad at all (and quite small and fast for light use) but if you are serious about web pages you need Firefox and probably some of the most important extensions - Adblock, Flashblock and eventually a filterser updater !!!

I am also a MAJOR fan of Commander-like file managers - apparently the more precise term is Orthodox File Managers and if you follow the second link you might better understand why I consider so important that the standard Function keys must be "application-specific" and NOT something systemwide.

On that second link you could also see that in the Wintel world there are a lot of great such programs, but under OSX there are much fewer alternatives - a freeware muCommander and some shareware alternatives, but none was even close to what I wanted so in the end the best (and GPL) alternative was Midnight Commander - but on OSX things are not so simple as expected ...

One way would be to install fink and use apt-get, another pre-compiled version is here, but probably the best low-level one was to use DarwinPorts (binary dmg available on the downloads page) and then the specific mc version from there !!!

At the end of this first part things are already getting a little better ... obviously inside the limits enforced by Apple, so the most important advice from this post remains to never be "locked" on technology from a highly monopolistic company with highly overpriced products in the first place :))

Sony, Apple, ZoneAlarm = spyware without frontiers ?

2006-01-21T06:09:00.000-08:00

Sony did the rootkit ...

Apple did the iTunes mini-fiasco ...

Now it looks like ZoneAlarm will also spy on you ... more and more companies seem to be doing just that :(

WMF backdoor ... or not :))

2006-01-20T07:17:00.000-08:00

After the initial storm on the major WMF vulnerability (and the not so great way in which it was addressed by Microsoft) there was a second wave when Steve Gibson (a rather very knowledgeable old-time computer guru) at some point raised the possibility that the entire WMF vulnerability was in fact an intentional backdoor !

That would have been really interesting things so the media picked it very fast - and I have to admit that I have myself taken a quick look in the part of the Windows source code that was leaked a few years ago on the net - somehow intriguing the part of the code where the WMF bug was located was NOT part of the leaked code so things remained a little in limbo ...

But now an even more impressive guy and one of my favorites even LONG before he revealed the Sony rootkit - Mark Russinovich - has posted a more detailed description of his findings that seem to suggest that a poor initial design choice followed by the lack of review at the moment of 32 bit porting is far more likely than an intentional backdoor in the WMF case ... which is not to say that a backdoor might not be somewhere inside there anyway :))

Do you believe that ONLY Sony will spy on you ??? :)

2006-01-19T05:18:00.000-08:00

Well, you are wrong - Apple is doing just the same :))

The fact that some sites report that Apple is trying to do some PR damage control does not change the problem - most companies (with Apple and Sony on top of the list, Microsoft not far away) CAN NOT (and should not) be "blindly trusted" - if possible you should never be LOCKED on a product from any of those !!!

Cool MoviX stuff

2006-01-18T01:53:00.000-08:00

Here is another cool project that can bring new functions into an old USB stick, iPod shuffle or even old unused mini-CD - MoviX is a very tiny Linux media-center distribution with 3 subprojects - MoviX = simple and very effective text-mode UI at around 30 MB, MoviX2 = GUI at around 50 MB and a special eMoviX that around 9 MB (but no advanced interface) is intended to be "embedded" on a CD together with a movie and act as a "self-contained movie experience" - with a movie from a MoviX CD if you do not know how to view that movie simply boot from the CD and most often it will start playing automatically !!!

Since the space on my 512k shuffle is already very short (as you might remember I already have DSL there) and since the text UI on the MoviX version is very clear and effective that one is my favorite and now coexists with DSL and GRUB is used to select which one to boot ... as long as a PC can boot from USB :)

Most computers from the last 2-3 years can boot from USB without major problems (but sometimes the boot speed might be very low), but if you get in the region of the P2 or some K6 with less than 64 MB RAM things tend to get tricky - a CD might be the better option in that case but anyway RAM is very important in such configurations (generally most of MoviX will be kept in RAM to free the CD so that you will be able to place inside your own CD/DVD with the movie).

The smallest eMoviX is also worth mentioning - at 9 MB in 99% of the cases you can add it to a typical AVI file on a normal CD with a little "CD overburning" and who knows when it my prove useful and help somebody watch that CD ! The only drawback is the installation - for MoviX and MoviX2 there are decent Windows setup programs but for eMoviX things are more complex outside the Linux world ...

MoviX will also play OK most DVD media, and if you have added libdvdcss-1.2.6-1.i386.rpm (which can not be distributed in some countries, so you have to add it manually) it might probably even work with media from ANY region !!!

And since DSL was mentioned - the latest version is now 2.1b which seems to have improved things on booting from USB !

More reasons to NOT buy Apple computers ...

2006-01-17T15:32:00.000-08:00

I was planning on avoiding another Apple-related post but I can not resist - reviews of the new Apple desktops are starting to emerge and I could not miss two short comments ...

1. Still overpriced / underpowered - for that amount of money you can build a great 64 bit (also dual-core) Opteron 165 system with 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, nVidia 7800 - and that system will be in the non-overclocked state up to twice faster, probably close to 3x with a little tweaking !!!

2. Apparently you will NOT be able to run Windows XP on the Apple (and chances for Vista are not very clear either) - so in the end you might be far better with the Opteron system above and multi-boot at your own choice XP 32/64, Vista 32/64, Linux 32/64 (and eventually the leaked OSX86 - sorry, 32 bit only).