taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Found in an Ivan Krstic post about Sugar and the OLPC:

In truth, the XO ships a pretty shitty operating system, and this fact has very little to do with Sugar the GUI. It has a lot to do with the choice of incompetent hardware vendors that provided half-assedly built, unsupported and unsupportable components with broken closed-source firmware blobs that OLPC could neither examine nor fix. [...]

We had an embedded controller that blocks keyboard events and stops machine suspend, and to which we — after a long battle — received the source, under strict NDA, only to find a jungle of nested if statements, twelve levels deep, and no code history. (The company that wrote the code doesn’t use version control, see. They put dates into code comments when they make changes, and the developers mail each other zip files with new versions.)

Haha. Been there, done that. Sometimes it’s great not to have to work with custom hardware anymore…

Tags: best-practices, coding, drivers, embedded, hardware, version-control

Here’s a nice little (totally subjective!) story for Linux users.

At home, I have a HP Laserjet 1018 printer; it’s a dinky little USB laser. When I was setting up my Mac running OSX, I attempted to use it.

A common refrain from Mac users is that MacOS X just works — attempt to get something working, and the Mac will do the right thing with little friction, compared to the Linux situation which will involve complex config file editing and what-not. If this experience is anything to go by, that’s not entirely the case anymore. In fact, the exact opposite applied; when I plugged the printer into the Linux box and ran System -> Administration -> Printing -> New Printer, it “just worked” and I wound up with a working network printer within seconds. No such luck with OSX. Some googling revealed the problem:

• “I kinda found what I need to install, but I can’t understand what to do“
• A thread at macosxhints.com
• And at macrumors.com
• And at discussions.apple.com

In summary, the LJ1018 is just not supported on MacOS X. In order to get it working you need to install a third-party port of the Linux printing components foo2zjs, Foomatic, and Ghostscript, ported to MacOS X, and then get busy with the config file editing and undocumented tweaking and what-not. Ouch.

So there you go. Linux: it just works! ;)

(By the way, I was able to work around it by printing from the Mac to the Linux print server in Postscript; the CUPS print server will transcode PS to the native format.)

Tags: hardware, linux, macosx, support, theswitch

• Dabble DB : looks like a web-based version of good old Filemaker
  (tags: dabble-db databases web db spreadsheets analytics groupware)

• retrocomputing hackers reminisce about the 1541 diskette drive : skip to the comment thread, it’s fantastic. I used to know lots of this stuff (via Donncha)
  (tags: via:donncha commodore-64 hacks 1541 disks copy-protection drm hardware hacking history retro c64)

• MPLC racketeering Irish playschools : the ‘Motion Picture Licensing Company’ sent a letter to 2,500 Irish playschools, demanding a fee of EUR3 per child to cover license fees for the kids watching DVDs. However, it seems they themselves hadn’t registered as required by law, so were acting illegally in issuing demands… oh the irony
  (tags: mplc racketeering law ireland dvds movies mpaa licensing copyright legal children kindergarten playschools)

• Komplett’s new Dublin pick-up point is open : routing around the Irish couriers and An Post’s brokenness by allowing customers to pick up their items directly. a shame this is necessary
  (tags: an-post delivery couriers dublin ireland komplett components pc hardware)

Tags: 1541, an-post, analytics, c64, children, commodore-64, components, copy-protection, copyright, couriers, dabble-db, databases, db, delivery, disks, drm, dublin, dvds, groupware, hacking, hacks, hardware, history, ireland, kindergarten, komplett, law, legal, licensing, movies, mpaa, mplc, pc, playschools, racketeering, retro, spreadsheets, via:donncha, web

• Linux x86_64 frozen by heavy I/O on Dell PowerEdge 2950 : starting to think we may be running into this on our build machine; annoying. bookmarking for future reference
  (tags: poweredge dell hardware linux drivers performance sysadmin)

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Deletionpedia : hahaha. WP deletion gnomes argued that Deletionpedia should not have an entry due to non-notability, just 24 minutes after that entry was created
  (tags: wp wikipedia funny deletion processes bureaucracy deletionpedia)

• Atrivo/InterCage depeered : the ISP’s AS (AS27595) is now offline, due apparently to coordinated lobbying of its upstreams
  (tags: atrivo isps abuse intercage spam malware hosting)

Tags: abuse, atrivo, bureaucracy, deletion, deletionpedia, dell, drivers, funny, hardware, hosting, intercage, isps, linux, malware, performance, poweredge, processes, spam, sysadmin, wikipedia, wp

Green Karma – Carbon-offset your colo box must-read post from Chris. If you run a colo box, you should think about offsetting the ~2 tonnes of CO2 output it generates per year

sorenragsdale: Building a Cheap ZFS Server good set of details on MrN’s new ZFS-based home disk server

Tags: carbon, carbon-dioxide, co2, colo, disks, drobo, environment, filesystems, green, hacking, hardware, home, hosting, offsetting, readynas, servers, solaris, sysadmin, via:iloaf, zfs

ZSFA — I Want The Mutt Of Feed Readers Zed recommends Newsbeuter. must take a look

We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It. having worked on a project to do just this, believe me, this is doomed. DOOMED

Science Clouds ‘compute cycles in the cloud for scientific communities .. allows you to provision customized compute nodes .. that you have full control over using a leasing model based on the Amazon’s EC2 service.’ Wonder if they’d like to give SA some time ;)

Tags: appliances, apps, atom, cloud-computing, ec2, feeds, grids, hardware, linux, news, newsbeuter, oh-dear, open-source, rss, scaling, science, software, spamassassin, tablets, techcrunch, virtualization, web, zed-shaw

I needed to buy a new laptop for work a few months back, and after a little agonizing between the MacBook Pro and a Thinkpad T61p, I plumped for the latter. As I noted at the time, one of the major selling points was the quality of IBM/Lenovo’s after-sales warranty service, compared to the atrocious stories I’d heard about AppleCare in Europe. I was, however, taking a leap of faith — I had used IBM service to great effect in the US, but had never actually tried it out in Ireland.

Sadly, I had to put this to the test today, after the hard disk started producing these warnings:

/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:21:13 wall kernel: 
[2075890.116000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189461
/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:21:38 wall kernel: 
[2075914.824000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189460
/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:24:18 wall kernel: 
[2076075.072000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189462
/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:25:05 wall kernel: 
[2076121.932000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189463

It’s a brand new machine, and a Hitachi TravelStar 7K100 drive, with a good reputation for reliability — but these things do happen. :(

Interestingly, I thought this was a case of the Bathtub curve in action — but this comprehensive CMU study of hard drive reliability notes that the ‘infant mortality’ concept doesn’t seem to apply to current hard-drive technology:

Replacement rates [of hard drives in a cluster] are rising significantly over the years, even during early years in the lifecycle. Replacement rates in HPC1 nearly double from year 1 to 2, or from year 2 to 3. This ob- servation suggests that wear-out may start much earlier than expected, leading to steadily increasing replacement rates during most of a system’s useful life. This is an in- teresting observation because it does not agree with the common assumption that after the first year of operation, failure rates reach a steady state for a few years, forming the “bottom of the bathtub”.

Anyway, I digress.

I ran the BIOS hard disk self-test, got the expected failure, then rang up Lenovo’s International Warranty line for Ireland. I got through immediately to a helpful guy in India, and gave him my details and the BIOS error message; he had no tricky questions, no guff about me using Linux rather than Windows, and there were no attempts to sting me for shipping.

There’s now a replacement HD (and a set of spare recovery disks, bonus!) winging their way via 2-day shipping, expected on Tuesday; I’m to hand over the broken HD to the courier once it arrives. Fantastic stuff!

Assuming the courier doesn’t screw up, this is yet another major win for IBM/Lenovo support, and I feel vindicated. ;)

Update: the HD arrived this morning at 10am — a day early. Very impressive!

Tags: hardware, ibm, laptops, lenovo, service, support, tips

Argh. My Thinkpad’s power socket must have received a knock during the move. It no longer works with either of the two power bricks I have here — so it looks like it’s time to either (a) buy a soldering iron and some screwdrivers (incl Torx ones?) or (b) renew my IBM warranty service and send it in for some fixing :(

Bad timing.

Update: oh look, it’s working again! phew. I guess I should probably set aside some time for warranty service here anyway though…

Tags: hardware, hassle, ibm, laptops, thinkpad

Wow, I can’t believe I still have to do this in 2007 — Taiwan really needs to discover FreeDOS! Here’s how to run a DOS BIOS update on a PC without using Windows (in my case, it’s a Dell laptop).

• Grab the FreeDOS “ripcord” boot floppy image from the FreeDOS RipCord Bootdisk page — the 2.88MB version: FDSTD.288.gz (that link’s a local mirror).

• Grab the BIOS updater app from your PC vendor’s site. In my case, I used ME051A10.EXE, a BIOS update from Dell.

• Run:

  gunzip FDSTD.288.gz
  sudo mount -t msdos -o loop pwd/FDSTD.288 /tmp/bootiso

• ensure there’s enough space, and copy the app into the disk image:

  df /tmp/bootiso
  sudo cp ME051A10.EXE /tmp/bootiso

• Then make an ISO, using mkisofs’ “-b” option to ensure it’s bootable:

  mkdir /tmp/floppycopy
  cp -Rp /tmp/bootiso/* /tmp/floppycopy
  cp -p FDSTD.288 /tmp/floppycopy
  mkisofs -pad -b FDSTD.288 -R -o /tmp/cd.iso /tmp/floppycopy

• And burn it:

  sudo umount /tmp/bootiso
  sudo cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -pad -v -eject /tmp/cd.iso

• Now, take the burned CDROM, and boot it.

Answer “N” to all questions when booting, otherwise you’re likely to see an error like “Cannot operate in Protected environment” when you run the BIOS update.

Thanks to the Motherboard Flash Boot CD from Linux Mini HOWTO; very helpful. I hope the next time I have to do this, they just issue a bootable ISO image instead…

Tags: bios, bootable, booting, cd, cdrom, dell, dos, floppy, freedos, hardware, iso, msdos

I’ve been running into problems recently (since several months ago at least), with USB hardware on my Thinkpad T40 running Ubuntu Hoary Dapper; in particular, every time I plug in my iPod or one of my USB hard disks nowadays, I get this:

[5008549.187000] usb 4-3: USB disconnect, address 14
[5008550.143000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 18
[5008552.643000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 27
[5008557.393000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 43
[5008557.893000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 44
[5008558.643000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 46
[5008558.895000] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: port 3 reset error -110
[5008558.896000] hub 4-0:1.0: hub_port_status failed (err = -32)
[5008559.893000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 48
[5008562.643000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 58
[5008563.143000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 59
[5008563.643000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 60
[5008570.143000] usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 85

This repeats ad infinitum until the USB device is disconnected.

I had this down as a hardware issue (since it started happening just after warranty expiration ;), but some accidental googling revealed several other cases – and a workaround:

sudo modprobe -r ehci-hcd

Run that repeatedly, each time replugging the device and monitoring dmesg via watch -n 1 ‘dmesg | tail’ in a window, until the device is finally recognised as a USB hard disk. It generally seems to take 3 or 4 attempts, in my experience.

This LKML thread suggests hardware changes can cause it, but this hardware hasn’t changed in years. Annoying.

Anyway, this is ongoing. This tip seems to help, but it might be just treating a symptom, I don’t know — just posting for google and posterity… and to moan, of course :(

Tags: bugs, disks, ehci-hcd, hardware, ipod, linux, storage, usb

Ever wondered what today’s internet meme images would look like on mid-’80’s home computing hardware?

Wonder no longer!

Tags: c64, commodore, computing, funny, hacks, hardware, internet, meme, today

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing links to an article at TechCrunch that lists Better and Cheaper Online File Storage as a product that needs to be made. However, Ben Laurie does the sums on online storage as a useful backup medium, and found them not exactly compelling (e.g. 100GB of data will take 75 days to upload over an 128Kbps link).

I tend to agree. An online host isn’t great as a backup host, since, in my experience, there are two types of backups required:

• The important small files (for example: encrypted password lists, my address book, my ~/bin directory)
• The massive big filesets (for example: MP3s, photos)

The first kind of fileset is amenable to an online backup-storage service, at first glance. However — in my opinion you’re better off going the whole hog for these files, and using the distributed, versioned backup method of putting it in a good networked revision control system, and checking it out everywhere, so you can also make changes and check in from any host; otherwise, you face the perils of syncing up a single backup from multiple “writers”, without conflicts. So far, none of the online file storage services offer SVN as an access method, so a shell account at a colo server still seems more useful on that count.

The second kind of fileset, as Ben notes, will take donkey’s years to upload and sync as a backup mechanism; and the economics are hardly compelling for the service provider.

I think I prefer Brad Templeton’s idea to deal with large-data backups –

I propose a software RAID-5, done over a LAN with 3 to 5 drives scattered over several machines on the LAN.

Slow as hell, of course, having to read and write your data out over the LAN even at 100mbits. Gigabit would obviously be better. But what is it we have that’s taking up all this disk space ? it?s video, music and photos. Things which, if just being played back, don?t need to be accessed very fast. If you’re not editing video or music, in particular, you can handle having it on a very slow device. (Photos are a bigger issue, as they do sometimes need fast access when building thumbnails etc.)

This could even be done among neighbours over 802.11g, with suitable encryption. In theory.

As a commenter notes, Linux has support for this already, in the form of software RAID and the network block device.

So: take an external IDE enclosure, add a GumStix board running Linux with software RAID, LVM, and nbd, and add wifi. Then add DAV, SMB and NFS export of the disk, and some decent UI code to organise the volumes into a single exported RAID volume (hopefully automatically!), and it’d be a pretty compelling product, in my opinion!

(hey Craig! I said GumStix! ;)

Tags: backups, disks, gumstix, hardware, linux, lvm, nbd, product, raid

Hardware: I’ve been needing a decent backup solution, since I’ve got 60GB of crud on my hard disk that isn’t being rsynced offsite yet. So I bought myself a nifty DVD writer from woot.com a week ago, supporting DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-RW, and DVD-R, and a spindle of 20 DVD+Rs from Target. Little did I realise the world of pain I was entering.

Did you know there are no less than 6 barely-compatible DVD formats? Prerecorded DVD, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, and DVD-RW, from the DVD Forum, and DVD+RW and DVD+R, from the ‘DVD+RW Alliance’. Interoperability is, needless to say, a total mess, even with the Sony 4-format drive I picked up.

I eventually managed to burn myself a DVD+R backup of bits of my home dir, making several coasters in the process (DVD+Rs apparently do not support simulated-write dry-runs, at least not with growfs). So, great!

Next thing to do was try it out on my laptop’s internal CD/DVD drive to make sure it worked. Needless to say, it didn’t.

Apparently, single-session, single-track DVD+Rs are virtually identical to DVD-ROMs, which most generic DVD-reader drives support. However, Sony drives do not support setting the ‘book type’ bits, which is the trick that turns a DVD+R ‘into’ a DVD-ROM-compatible disc. Guess why (hint: it’s Sony). Yep, that’s right, paranoia about piracy. Well, thanks a bunch, Sony — my backups are now of decidedly limited usefulness, since I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to read them again! (more info from the OSTA.) I think I now see why Woot were flogging them cheap.

I’m not sure where to go with this — do I have a spindle of 17 shiny frisbees? I have a very nasty feeling I’m heading into dead media territory here. What a mess…

Aaaanyway. Here’s some possibly-useful bookmarks.

• burning DVD-compatible DVD+Rs, for those of you with non-user-hostile hardware
• reasonably helpful list of command lines for linux DVD burning

OTOH, I got to watch the BBC’s new documentary, The Power of Nightmares, a fantastic history of the two parallel ideological worlds of al-Qaeda and the US neo-conservatives. Mind-boggling, but highly recommended.

Tags: backup, drive, dvd, dvd-r, dvd-rw, hardware, mess, sony, spindle, the, woot

Hardware: Slashdot: Nokia’s Linux Handheld. It’s to be called the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, and runs on an open source development platform called Maemo.

This looks really nifty. ARM processor, 800×480 pixel resolution, GTK+, 2.6 kernel, wifi, 3 hours of active battery life, and a clever panning system to get around the clunkiness of scrollbars on a touchscreen.

I note particularly that they seem to have planned to include an RSS reader based on Liferea.

The Maemo site looks interesting, in that it’s clearly a bunch of switched-on, open-source-comprehending developers who set it up; it’s built using Apache Forrest, they use Bugzilla for issue tracking, Mailman for lists, the terms of use for user contributions explicitly call out OSI-approved licenses as a requirement, there’s plentiful references to Debian’s apt as the preferred means of installing developer platform software, and Maemo apps are distributed as Debian packages.

There’s clearly been quite a lot of work going on behind the scenes. There’s already some third-party apps out there, such as those on INdT’s Maemo apps page, and the the SDK tutorial contains copious detail, suggesting it’s been seeing some use.

That SDK tutorial is full of tantalizing glimpses into Maemo’s operation.

It all looks very promising, and nicely hackable! I’m looking forward to a closer look at one of these. It’s especially good to see such a solid comprehension of the open source model by such a major company. (If only they could have a word with their patents department ;)

Update: They’ve ported WebCore to GTK+. Mobile Gazette has more info, too, including this worrying line:

And although Nokia hold several patents for (the Maemo development platform), they intent to open up access to their intellectual property to aid development.

(My emphasis.) That line is not encouraging, seeing as it seems to be a pretty typical cross-compilation platform as seen in embedded systems development. But hey, let’s see the patents first.

Tags: debian, development, gtk, hardware, maemo, nokia, platform, sdk, source, tutorial, use

TV: here’s a quick update on my PVR box progress. I have a very extensive /etc/LOG which I should probably just publish as-is, really, rather than trying to make it legible ;)

Anyway, the hardware arrived last month, but the main VIA EPIA ME6000 board was non-functional — it could never get as far as powering up the CRT for the BIOS self-test. So it was RMA’d back to http://www.mini-box.com, and they sent out a replacement, which arrived a couple of weeks ago.

I finally got to checking this out the weekend before last, and hey presto, it powered up nicely. There followed a whole week of busy nights doing a load of cautious hardware hooking-up, not-so-cautious KnoppMyth installation, and thoroughly non-cautious hacking crazily at the desired enclosure with a hacksaw (because I was too cheap to buy a Dremel).

Things got a little hairy with respect to CPU temperatures, but some looking at specs (the VIA Eden CPU can deal with up to 90 degrees C!), and repurposing of a bin-bound case fan together with some soldering and snipping, has that under control.

Eventually, we’re now at the stage where it can:

• watch live TV in perfect realtime, pause, rewind, timeshift, ffwd, etc. (the PVR-350 output is good)
• record our desired shows (bloody Antiques Roadshow! argh), according to the TV schedule
• play mp3s
• be ssh’able and sftp’able via a wifi USB dongle
• expose its schedule and allow recording via MythWeb
• expose its full desktop UI via x11vnc

and it looks good doing it, too. Credit goes to the MythTV guys for a fantastic job on their project, especially with its well-polished UI.

In addition, I have to plug KnoppMyth heavily. They’re dealing with an awful situation with hardware compatibility where bleeding edge features like MPEG2 decoding and TV out are concerned, and doing a great job — there’s been several occasions where I’ve been staring down the barrel of a daunting patch/rebuild/test cycle, and then find out that KnoppMyth includes that component built-in for free.

But — on the other hand — no credit to the hardware vendors. As I link-blogged yesterday, VIA is doing the classic ‘throw it over the wall’ trick with respect to their linux support — video drivers are written and deposited on their website, with scant documentation and virtually no support.

That’s bad enough, but even worse is the situation with Hauppauge’s PVR-250 and PVR-350 TV encoder/decoder cards. I realised soon into the setup process that other options for these should have been considered – Hauppauge have done a great job at confusing the issue for driver developers, as far as I can see. Here’s an example. When you buy a ‘WinTV PVR-350′ card, you may get the same box with the same manuals etc., but including these bonuses under the covers:

• one of seemingly about 5 different tuner chips, which you’ll need to edit /etc/modules.conf for;
• one of about 3 different remote controls with differing output codes;
• a good chance you’ll have to enter two mysterious ioctls to fix the colour registers, because recent PVR-350 models have changed these somehow and everything shows up as purple-on-green through its TV-Out.

It’s absurd. The results are threads like this and a truly daunting setup procedure, which (of course) everyone blames on the software (and Linux itself).

Anyway — how am I doing vs. Brendan’s progress? ;)

• pro: my X display sizes are good
• pro: no need to switch audio outputs
• pro: I’m not using a separate cable box, so no need to hack up something IR to switch channels for me
• con: I can’t yet watch AVIs or other video files, which I think he has working.

More on the latter when I eventually solve it. (it’s tricky. I suspect I’ll need to run two X servers with two TV-Outs to do this acceptably, and that’s uncharted waters.)

Tags: box, hardware, job, knoppmyth, log, progress, pvr, schedule, tv, update, via

Linux: after about 3 months of tweaking and twisting, performed by someone who’s been using UNIX for over a decade, I’ve finally got sound working the way I want it on my Linux desktop. In other words, I can hear sounds made by Flash applets, and I don’t have to shut down the best music player on the platform every time another app wants to make a sound.

This is pretty clearly absurd.

So here’s my open letter to the developers of the various systems (GStreamer, aRts, ALSA, EsounD polypaudio, et al):

• Please DO do some testing with crappy sound hardware. I don’t care if your sound system works great with a SoundBlasterLive 2006 with the kryptonite connectors, I have a laptop, for god’s sake. That means software mixing is essential, because cheapo hardware doesn’t do hardware mixing.
• As an extension: please DO include software mixing by default. ALSA’s pretty good in general, but having to hack out 55 lines of hand-tweaked config file before software mixing works, is insane. (Especially when the Wiki documenting that is full of notes that some of the magic numbers may not work on your hardware.)
• Please DO use existing APIs if possible. That means esd. I’m looking at you, aRts. At least the latest sound project, polypaudio, looks like it’s getting this right.
• I DON’T care about network transparency, realtime response, or having a wah-wah pedal effect built into my sound server. That’s just silly. Use a modular architecture to allow that in future, but concentrate on getting the basic stuff working first!
• Please DON’T hardcode output device or output ’sink’ names into the source. Looking at the kgst component of KDE here.

Meh.

Anyway, here’s the scoop on what I had to do to get software mixing working in both GNOME, KDE, and Firefox, on my Thinkpad T40 running Debian unstable. Once I figured out the magic incantations, it now seems to be working without stutters or hangs.

Sometime in the next few months, of course, I plan to upgrade to Ubuntu Linux, and all bets will once again be off ;)

Tags: alsa, hardware, kde, linux, output, polypaudio, software, sound, tweaking, use

Linux: Everyone who’s used a non-MS system will have learned – typically the hard way — that not all hardware is equal. Not just in terms of specs, flexibility and power, but also in terms of whether or not it can be used at all.

Most hardware vendors consider their specification and interface documentation to be their crown jewels; giving access to these without a signed NDA is impossible. On the other hand, for free software developers, signing an NDA makes life quite difficult — it can be done, but nobody else can help you maintain it further without signing an NDA, the resulting code may ‘disclose’ too much of the ‘IP’, and so on. In a lot of cases, the vendor isn’t interested in giving access to the specs, even with an NDA — it’s their IP and why isn’t the customer just using Windows?

The end result: lots of hardware with crappy support on non-MS operating systems.

Things aren’t as bad as they used to be, though — since nowadays the high-end hardware is more likely to support standards, and Linux is a top choice on embedded hardware (set-top boxes for example), so it has a much higher profile. But cheap, end-user oriented PCs still wind up with components from vendors who couldn’t be bothered with non-Windows customers, and that can mean using a hacked-up, reverse-engineered driver and hoping it works. (That’s not to denigrate reverse-engineered drivers. some of them work great. But fundamentally, the vendors are making a mistake here.)

So it’s pretty impressive to see that LaCie are now sponsoring development of k3b, the CD/DVD burning application for KDE!

Good timing too, I was about to buy a DVD burner ;)

Tags: access, dvd, everyone, flexibility, hardware, linux, nda, non, system, way, windows

Hacking: Amazing — the Action Replay cartridge is still around!

To be honest, I’m quite surprised that the PS2 hardware platform allows any of this stuff without some mod-chip-style soldering… but then, it’s pretty clear Datel have the technology to figure these things out. Impressive.

Aside: in my teens, I wrote demos on the Commodore 64 entirely in the Action
Replay’s built-in monitor. I tried using compilers that supported such luxuries as symbolic labels, variable names, etc., but the ability to halt the entire machine and debug extensively, with a single button press, was just too nifty ;)

Tags: action, cartridge, commodore, datel, hacking, hardware, impressive, platform, replay, stuff, technology

Hardware: So IBM Thinkpads come with a predesktop area — a hidden 4GB partition of recovery files, Windows XP install disks, windows drivers, etc. taking up space on the hard disk.

I haven’t used Windows much at all on this machine, given that I don’t use Windows when I can avoid it, but I did pay several hundred dollars for it – since it’s now impossible once again to buy an IBM laptop without doing so (or without paying quite a lot extra). So I want to keep it around, and I want to make sure I can reinstall if things go wrong.

Having a hidden partition just isn’t quite safe enough for me — because I’ve had hard disks go belly-up before, or scribble on the partition table, or so on — these things happen. Thankfully it’s easy enough to get CD-ROMs shipped from IBM support if you ask nicely, so I did so yesterday afternoon at about 3pm.

This morning at 9am, there was a knock at the door, and I received a package shipped from Durham, NC containing the reinstall CDs.

It’s great dealing with professional hardware companies again ;)

Tags: area, disk, hardware, ibm, partition, predesktop, recovery, reinstall, space, thinkpads, windows

Hardware: This weblog is jinxed!!

That’s the only explanation I can come up with. The day before yesterday, I blogged about exploding monitors and various halt-and-catch-fire software instructions. Last night, my monitor made a popping noise, emitted a faint burning-plastic smell, and shrank the display into a thin stripe down the middle of the screen.

Great. It’s dead as a doornail — I’m working from Catherine’s iBook for now. Quite a step down from the lovely 21-inch CRT. Argh :(

BTW, needless to say, I wasn’t running any scary apps — not even Freedom: First Resistance — the only possible display-hosing culprits were Firebird, KDE, ExMH or gvim ;)

Tags: day, display, explanation, hardware, monitor, night, noise, smell, software, weblog, yesterday

A glowing review of Win4Lin 5.0 from ‘Open for Business’.

Gotta say, I use Win4Lin regularly, and it’s totally flawless. I had a bit of difficulty getting it installed — the installer didn’t like my kernel for some reason, if I recall correctly, and I had to go grepping through the install script (!). But it’s fantastic once it’s running.

The really impressive thing is when it boots Windows (in a window on your Linux desktop) much faster than Windows boots natively on the same hardware ;) Still haven’t figured out how it does that.

It does a nice job of a virtual network interface too; easier to admin than VMWare’s fake-net-with-DHCP thing. It just insmods a new network module, with a new ethernet address, and that responds to arp requests alongside your ‘real’ Linux interface’s address. Then all the control of IP address, network etc. is under Windows control.

I haven’t found an app that doesn’t work with it yet. (Mind you I hear Direct/X isn’t supported yet fully, so most games are probably out.)

I’ve even used it to watch Quicktime movies — which is pretty impressive when you consider that they’re displaying to a (Win4Lin) framebuffer, which is then displayed to another (VNC) framebuffer, which then displays to the hardware.

Tags: address, control, framebuffer, hardware, interface, linux, network, thing, win, windows

Found on /.: Nuon have released a free-as-in-speech SDK for third-party developers to develop applications which will run on certain models of DVD players. According to ‘What Is Nuon?’, the Nuon DVD hardware is essentially both a DVD player and an open gaming platform. Incredible! Looks like I know now what kind of DVD player I’ll be buying — the one I can write my own apps for ;)

Tags: dvd, found, gaming, hardware, incredible, looks, nuon, platform, player, sdk