Category: Geekitude

Computer ads through the ages.

This has been linked to from everywhere, everywhen, but here it is incase you’ve been under a tech-media rock for the last couple days.
PCWorld has put together a great Youtube collection of television computer ads. Some are hysterical, some are pitiful, some are sad. I’m particularly mournful of the loss of the Apple Newton, one of the finest pieces of technology ever designed, IMNSHO.
See the collection…

Join my BOINC team!

I nudge about this occasionally, but here’s a quick reminder.
I have an active team using the BOINC distributed computing system called the Stonekeep General Computing Facilities. It’s a conglomeration of a dozen or so users with a few dozen machines running BOINC. These machines run distributed tasks that range from searching for extraterrestrial signals to analyzing protein structures. Cumulative computation statistics from all the team members are collected by BOINCstats and displayed against other teams around the world.
We’re trying to break into the top 1000 teams among the 52,000 currently registered with BOINCstats. Right now we’re hovering around the 1020-1025 mark:

If you’d like to join, download the BOINC client and join one of the active projects (I recommend Seti@Home (Listen for alien signals!) or Folding@Home (Analyze protein folding to help understand various diseases), or Rosetta@Home, a similar protein analysis project).
Do some good research -and- join a global project, and all you have to do is have a computer turned on.

More gloom for Palm, and the X5 Bluetooth Headphones

P5190129.JPG
I have been looking for writing this review for quite some time. A grand triumph in geeky innovation, platform utilization, and clever use of available technologies. A step forward in mobile communications, entertainment, and convergence in the media, communications, and personal networking space.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it turned out.

Continue reading “More gloom for Palm, and the X5 Bluetooth Headphones” →

Hack! Upgrade! Modify! Tinker!

When I was but a wee geek lad, I remembered happy weekends spent tinkering with my wonderful geek toys, learning what they could do, finding new programs for them, or writing my own. Cloudy rainy days were perfect times to spend 40 hours straight in the basement, fiddling around with my Franklin Ace, or playing Wizardry.
Looking back on that now, I realized those many hours were spent with no external communication other than an occasional phone call. I wasn’t on IRC, or chatting via IM or even really doing more than one thing at a time. One program, one computer, one task. I boggle at that now, wondering how it held my attention.
yawlToday I’m getting an echo of those times. My primary desktop machine, yawl, has been getting my squinty-eye look. Normally I consider machines fairly static, hardware wise. Upgrading, tinkering, modifying, and improving are limited to basic things like “I’m out of memory, I need more.” But in looking at yawls performance, I decided that the machine could do with some tuning.
The first thing that was needed was a kernel modification. I was getting sound stuttering and abysmal network performance with my Linux 2.6.16 kernel as delivered by Debian Etch. Some research on the net showed that this is frequently cause by the kernel not running in ‘pre-emptive’ mode. A newly downloaded kernel, a make-kpkg and dpkg -i later, and I had a machine that was much more responsive and not prone to stuttering when moving large files around on the network.
“Right!” said I. What’s next? Wellll, I had already upgaded the machine from the stock 512meg to 2gig. When running huge environments like Eclipse + JBoss, coupled with the voracious Firefox, things can get filled up pretty fast. This machine only supports 2gig of memory, so I can’t really go past that (though there are bugs in KDE, specifically in the tool ‘korgac’ that are showing massive memory leaks – if I do not shut down korgac manually before I go to bed, I’m out of memory in the morning. It’s that bad). So I had to look elsewhere.
The Dell GX-260 has a pretty abysmal video system, using an embedded Intel VGA board. While I got it running under X at 1280×1024, it wasn’t as zippy as I wanted, and I really wanted decent GL performance so I could tinker with XGL. The Intel board simply could not do it.
Off (virtually) to Newegg where I ordered a new nVidia GeForce2 6200 card for a whopping $44. It needed to be half-height (since yawl is a small formfactor machine), and this morning, I happily installed it into the machine. Installation was a snap, but then I faced… THE DREADED KERNEL CONFIG.
Now, okay, it’s not THAT bad. But nVidia support in Debian etch is not as streamlined as it could be. As I type, the kernel has just finished rebuilding, with the nVidia modules built as well. In a few minutes, I’ll hit the the reboot, and we’ll see if the new drivers work.
Beyond that? A new hard drive might make sense. With all the intense loading and unloading I’m doing, the WD 20gig drive I’m using really isn’t scaled for this sort of use. A 10,000 RPM drive with a large buffer would probably be a huge improvement.
Tinkering. With my machine. To make it better. I feel like all the mod-hackers that tinker with their machines day in and day out, overclocking, modifying, and scurrying around for parts to get the best performance out of their machine. I used to think that “The CPU was it. Fast CPU = Fast machine.” Yawl has a 2.26gig P4 in it. But it needs good support to run at speed.
This is fun.

My Daily Conversations with Eclipse, Pt II

My ongoing conversations with Eclipse (see this older post for Pt 1)

dbs “Edit that.”
eclipse “no.”
dbs “but it’s open in the editor.”
eclipse “nuh uh.”
dbs “*enter*enter*enter* CMON!”
eclipse “nope”
dbs “owait, i’m in the svn browser aren’t i?”
eclipse “_I_ knew that. Don’t know what your problem is..”
dbs “fine, java perspective, now edit.”
eclipse “if you insist.”

An old programmer…

… can learn new tricks?
As part of my current contract, my employers are embracing new procedures and techniques for application development. While the normal buzzwords of “EXTREME PROGRAMMING” and “Agile Development” are being bandied about, they’re not being whole-hog embraced, with the managers marching zombie-like into an undeliverable product schedule. We’re trying new techniques such as scrum product development, and utlitizing sprints to structure short-term deliverables and milestones.
Since I got the core of my production programming experience with this same company almost 18 years ago, when there were only 3 employees, me being number 3, I find it fascinating to see the same programmers trying new tacks to take on the complexity of developing modern code.
In the Good Old days, our entire code base was perhaps 80,000 lines. One developer easily understood every aspect of the application, and could comfortably keep up with customer and internal needs. The current codebase is over a million lines and growing, and no one programmer understands it all. This is not a disaster story, it is one companies’ normal evolution as they grow and expand. In this case, they have lucked out to have a person in charge who is not only a brilliant programmer, but also an open-minded manager and a good communicator. He recognized the pitfalls of 20 years of development on his product line, and is making careful, planned, and deliberate changes to the company’s development methodology.
Of course, the panic element for this is… the changes being applied involve shifting their platform onto a framework I designed for them over the last 18 months. No pressure, really. It’s only the future of this company and it’s 20-some odd employees, not to mention the respect and 20 years good will of the owner. The same owner who gave a young programmer his first production development position.

QuickReview: Synergy2

Have to point this handy tool out to folks.
My busy deskBecause of the complexity of my desk, I can’t really have a pile of keyboards and mouse lying around. I switch between machines constantly, and switching keyboards would just drive me batty. I had been using X2VNC for quite a while, which, while ‘okay’, had it’s own quirks. One of which was it couldn’t work in reverse (I could go from an X host to a Windows box, but not the other way around). It also wouldn’t let me slide from an X display to another X display. Pretty limiting.
Enter Synergy2, a simple client-server tool set that lets you configure multiple displays to a single ‘server’ that controls the mouse and keyboard. With Synergy2, I’m able to configure all my machines in whatever configuration I want. At the moment I can slide my mouse off my primary Linux display onto my WindowsXP box, across it’s display, and onto my laptop.
That’s pretty neat, but.. the kicker? Synergy2 manages clipboard cut n paste operations across machines. If I slide over to hunter (the laptop running Ubuntu linux), highlight something and click ‘Copy’, then slide back to my primary desktop on yawl, I can just click ‘paste’ and it works. This is miraculous to my eyes!
If you run more than one machine on your desk, I highly recommend Synergy2. Available in apt repositories everywhere.

MIT Flea. Geek joy!

I do so love going to the MIT Fleamarket, aka the swapfest. It hearkens back to my days of attending the Trenton Computer Festival down in NJ every spring. That was a 3 day long affair with acres and acres of toys and goodies. The MIT flea is far smaller, taking up (in todays case) 3-4 floors of a parking garage, but Zach and I still had a good time.

Todays haul:

  • A Rokenbok monorail toy for Zach. These are generally fairly expensive, but this unopened box (train and track and accessories) we got for $15. Can’t complain.
  • An HP print server to address my load problems on badge printers during busy events. (Durn HP 500 print servers? 3 ports? ITS SINGLE THREADED. Means only one printer can print at a time. Bastages.) $10.
  • A handheld ‘shake ’em up’ LED flashlight for Zach. I like the no batteries part. 🙂
  • A Cuecat scanner for the oft-delayed media inventorying project. $1.
  • A random AGP nVidia video board. It appears to be something higher end than my aging MX400 card. Has a DVI port on it and a cooling fan, so we’ll give it a shot. $5,

I really was tempted by a 500-piece 11.5oz poker chip set in case for $50, but I demurred. 🙂

LJ RSS Feeds suck it. New methodology ho!

Apparently LiveJournal / SixApart have collectively decided that external RSS feeds aren’t worth fixing. Rather that continue arguing against this idiocy, with help from Lisa and MTLJPost, I’ve set up Planet Geek to crosspost new entries both on the blog and directly into LJ.
How does that impact you, dear reader? Not in the slightest if you don’t use Livejournal. However, if you’re part of the teeming masses schizophrenically reloading your friends page, you can probably relegate the shayde_blog RSS feed to the back burner for now. From now on, anything posted to Planet Geek will automatically appear in my livejournal page in realtime.
Until I can figure out how to turn off comments in Livejournal, though, I ask that you please comment back on the blog, rather than in LJ, though it’s less of an issue now (under RSS feeds in LJ, comments were deleted after two weeks).
This ends this test of the Emergency Rant System. Had this been a real rant… well, it was actually. Deal.

Firefox, ALSA, Flash, YouTube, Google Video and SOUND!

This one’s been bugging me for a while. I run Firefox on yawl and hunter pretty constantly, and occasionally would like to view some of the videos posted on YouTube or videos.google.com. While the videos have been playing just fine, sound has never worked.
Sound is always a tricky thing on Linux machines. Although ALSA has solved many of the audio problems that have traditionally plagued Linux boxes, many applications have not ported to the new interface, and therefore won’t work on modern systems.
After finally getting frustrated enough to take the time to do some research, I found a post that described how to do it.
First, for all Debian based distributions, there’s a very handy ‘interface’ package called alsa-oss, which, according to the description:

…contains a program loader, aoss, which wraps applications written for OSS in a compatibility library, thus allowing them to work with ALSA.

Sounds good to me! First, I had to install the package:

apt-get install alsa-oss

Next, a change to Firefox’s configuration to tell it to use said interface:

cd /etc/firefox
edit ‘firefoxrc’ and change
FIREFOX_DSP=”none”
to
FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss”

Stop and restart Firefox.
That’s it! Enjoy videos in full sound and motion like sharks being attacked and eaten by octupi.

Cmon LJ, what’s your problem?

Folks who read PG via Livejournal may notice that the time it takes a post to show up there has gone from a tolerable 1 hour up to 6 hours. I really don’t like having to post something at 3 am so the morning reading crowd picks it up the next day.
I’ve opened a ticket with the LJ support group asking for the problem to be looked into, but so far no response.
If anyone has LJ RSS fu and wants to look at it, all the salient details are in the request.

Giving a bit back.

Back when I first started doing conventions, I wrote up a series of pages on how to convert iOpeners into X-Terminals. The idea was “this is a great way to get low cost terminals for your computer network”. I know the page gets a reasonable amount of traffic, but I rarely notice except for seeing it in the traffic reports.
This morning I got mail from a fellow in Malawi saying he was in the process of collecitng iOpeners and using them for low cost terminals in hospitals there, and had some questions about the setup. He was very appreciative of what I had published and said it was instrumental in getting them up and running. He was even using the boot image I had generated.
I happily helped him out with an install problem. Reminded me a lot of the old Usenet days “Hey, I know of a guy who did that. Drop him some mail, he’ll help ya out!”