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Technology

I will get a Mac.. someday

And that day is getting closer.

Today marked the start of MacWorld, and in typical Steve Jobs fashion, he unveiled a slew of new things. I won’t get into all the cool software, but Jobs did unveil the iPod Shuffle, a flash drive iPod, and more imporantly, the Mac Mini.

A headless Mac G4, you buy this wonderful little piece of technology, and bring your own monitor, mouse and keyboard. It is tiny, cute and semi-powerful (for a Mac). It lacks a decent video card, but who games on Apple machines anyway.

I think this is a smart move for Apple – with the success of iTunes, they may be able to pull off their Switch campaign yet. Starting at $499 for a G4 1.25 gHz with a 40 gig HD, to $599 for a 1.42 gHz with an 80 gig HD, you can upgrade ’em to DVD burners, wireless as well as bluetooth. Introduce yourself to the power of Unix in a cute form factor.

Hit the above link for lots of pictures at Gizmodo, or visit the Mac Mini page at the Apple Store.

Why DRM is Evil, and what it means to your DVD Collection

Cory Doctorow discusses why you can’t legally back up your DVDs and who is to blame. Suffice to say, DRM, Digital Rights Management, is evil.

Cory Doctorow, European OutReach Coordinator for the EFF, is a science fiction author, DRM expert, and blogger.

One of my favorite authors on the evils of DRM, he once even gave a speech, at Microsoft, on the evils of DRM. From the speech, introducing himself to the crowd, he sums up what he does:

I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I’m not a lawyer — I’m a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net

This may be better suited for my technical blog – and speaking of irony, I was going to link to it, but silwenae.com isn’t responding. I registered paulcutler.org to test out Nearlyfreespeech.net, a webhosting company. I had first heard of Nearlyfreespeech when Bugmenot.com came under fire. Bugmenot is a website dedicated to providing logins to sites that require registration, so you can bypass giving your personal information to sites like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or most newspaper websites. Nearlyfreespeech hosted them after Bugmenot was dumped by their current host.

Webhosting is an odd business. Prices have come down dramatically in the last few years, and most webhosts are just resellers rebranding others services, like ThePlanet. They offer control panels to make it easy for non-technical folks to get their websites up and manage their email. Nearlyfreespeech isn’t all that different, as their servers are colocated within one of those type of hosting centers, but they differ in a few areas. There are no monthly fees – you pay for the bandwidth you use over time, minus any credit card fees after you give them a deposit. There are no frills – it’s not for newbies. They actually give you more control over the sites you use, but you need to know what you’re doing.

Most webhosts will give you a set number of things: email accounts, how much bandwidth you can use, subdomains (xxxx.paulcutler.org with xxxx being a subdomain), how many databases you can have, how many other domains you can host on your site (for instance, with silwenae.com / pixehost as my webhost, I can have 5 more domains, as I have movietuesday.com and jholzer.com hosted there as well), etc. Nearlyfreespeech basically says do what you will, just pay for your traffic, with one exception. They don’t do email, just web hosting.

As I was talking to Fazin yesterday, who helped with a database import problem I was having, he pointed out the lack of email. This is a challenge, as silwenae at silwenae dot com has become my email address for everything over the last few years. I’m pretty interested in migrating from pixiehost to nearlyfreespeech, but now I have to research email options. When silwenae.net was up in it’s heyday running a linux distro called e-smith, e-smith had awesome email integration built in. But when I decided to run my own true linux server out of the house, as opposed to a distro that made it very easy to setup (with caveats), email hosting is something that is complex that I didn’t go with as I taught myself sysadmin stuff. From running Fedora Core, to now Ubuntu, I’ll need to figure that out as I debate my options for email, but that’s another post for a different time.

So far, I’m happy with nearlyfreespeech. It’s always been up, I can have multiple users, and for someone like me who just runs hobby sites, it should save me some money. (No matter what I tell myself, silwenae.com and such will never be big traffic generators). Silwenae.com on pixiehost is currently down again – even my wife who was hosting her site with them transferred to a new host. Now I need to get off my butt, get the silwenae.net server in my basement up this weekend, figure out my email and then start transferring websites.

Jinzora

Interesting… Jinzora, an open source music web management system, has announced they are working on version 2.0, that will offer an option of their normal PHP scripting, or a MySQL option.

A MySQL option is very intriguing, as I may be able to replace Netjuke, which has had one update to CVS in the 4 months as they work (or not work) on Netjuke 2.0.

I’ll have to keep an eye on this, and maybe even test out the current 1.1 version of Jinzora.

Technology Woes

Spent the weekend on and off attacking my to-do list.

Got the den cleaned up, a bit. Most everything off the floor.

Spent a good chunk of the weekend trying to stop the lockups on my Ubuntu desktop. It’s definitely a Nvidia bug. Started with X freezing, but the mouse pointer works. Found the bug on nvnews.net, but no solution. Asked for help on the Ubuntu forums, but no luck there. Asked for help on the TCLUG, but can’t even get to my mail now with the frequent lock ups.

I’ve installed and un-installed the Nvidia packages from Ubuntu, messed with my XFree86-4 configuration file, including making sure the modules are right, and even trying with and without the DRI module as some posts indicate. It definitely has something to do with the GL functions – the screensavers and GLXgears lock it up instantly.

The next two things to try are swapping 4200 cards, and maybe trying to build the Nvidia drivers from source (ugh).

I did get Vino working on the laptop – that’s pretty cool as I can just use the remote desktop functionality to read my email on my box from my laptop in the living room over the wireless connection. I’ll need to play with the screen resolutions a bit, as my desktop has 1600×1200 and my laptop is 1024×768, which makes it a bit hard to read at times.

All of this makes the case for getting my Athlon64 up and running – it might be my solution to dedicate that box as my primary linux box.

I disconnected my Linksys router I use as an access point. For some reason, unlike my D-Link A/G router, the Linksys won’t serve as a passthrough to my server, so any device connected to the Linksys won’t have internet access. I attempted to hook up a second D-Link, a vanilla 802.11g, but couldn’t get it to work like my A/G. It’s a pain in the ass to do it too, as I have to dedicate one machine to it, turn DHCP and all that fun stuff off, but I’ve learned I’ll have to have a second box hooked up to the A/G so I can figure out what settings I’m missing to get it to work.

To top it all off, I’m in the living room watching football, and my UPS freaks out. It’s probably my own fault as I don’t drain it periodically like I should, but it starts beeping and won’t stop. I’ll have to re-evaluate my power needs for my den. It’s just more to add to my to-do list. One step forward and two steps backwards.

Ubuntu – Holy Cow

So I knew Ubuntu was good, just see my last two posts. But I had no idea it was this good.

I took the liberty of installing it on my HP ze4600 laptop tonight. Popped in the CD, booted it up, clicked enter, and it hung. Repeat, hangs again. Guessing it’s an APCI problem, add a noirq to the boot command line, no go. Google around, see the F1 key is options before boot, and there it says add “noapic nolapic” to the boot command. Voila.

Normal install, quick and dirty. Boot up for the first time after installation is complete.

What’s this? My Synaptic touchpad is working? Double-clicking the pad is just like double tapping the mouse button. Awesome! I never did get this to work on FC2.

Looking up at the panel I see the wireless networking strength meter. Interesting, mouse over shows it sees device ath0, my D-Link AG660 PC Card that’s in there! (I don’t use the Broadcom builtin 54G, bad Broadcom for not supporting linux!) Fire up the networking settings, add the ath0 and WEP key, disable the ethernet, and wham! bang! Full wireless network support!

I spent days hacking at madwifi getting that to run on FC2. The first FC2 install I had it worked fairly easily, but after a reinstall I couldn’t get madwifi / atheros support to work to save my life. And here’s a distribution that installs this stuff by default.

I am going to make it a priority to get my music re-tagged, organized, backed up, and migrate my server over to Ubuntu in the next month or two. I’m in love, swept off my feet, by a polished, linux distribution run by Canonical, powered by Debian. I’m in awe of the work they’ve done, and am going to support them as much as I can.

Grrr – Spam

So not only is email spam a problem, but Zoe’s blog has been hit by weblog spammers. Time to download some plugins.

Each post has 4-6 comments with regular text quotations, but then the poster’s name is a link to online casinos. You’re telling me online casinos need money so badly this is what they resort too?

I’m a little angry. Got some hacking to do tonight!

Taking the plunge

I took the plunge last night, inspired by my post yesterday, and installed Ubuntu on my linux box I use for chat, email, surfing, and listening to music.

I backed up my Evolution and media files, but I forgot to export my GPG private key. Oops, I’ll have to create a new one and get my new public key posted.

I have to say I was absolutely blown away. First, as a text based installer, so what – everyone wants a GUI installer but there were only a few basic questions asked during installation, and then a few more after that to get it set up. It was, by far, the fastest installation of any linux distribution I’ve ever seen, including Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Suse and Mandrake that I’ve done in the last 5 years. A part of that is that package selection is pre-determined, and looking through the final package list of what’s on the system, I can’t say I disagree with any of them.

I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again – Gnome 2.8 is sexy. I changed Gnome to the Industrial theme right away, I didn’t care for the earth tones of the Ubuntu default theme, nor the fonts, but that’s just personal. Evolution 2.2 wouldn’t import my old Evolution files from my Fedora box. I have ’em backed up, but I hope there wasn’t anything really important there I really need. I did Google for importing, and found a page about importing Evolution email into Thunderbird. Fired up Synaptic, installed Thunderbird, started it, and my box locked up. Hmmm. Restarted, seems to work fine. Still using Evolution at the moment, just from a starting over point, want to try the Junk filters built in now.

Went to change my desktop background, and tried to download a blue Ubuntu background. Firefox locked up. Restarted. Hmm. Wonder if it’s a hardware thing or just me? Seems to be working fine though.

Some of the things that absolutely kick ass. Clean theme, no icons on the desktop. I like splitting the Applications and Computer on the Gnome panel bar thing. Samba functionality worked out of the box. Can completely see my server in the basement and can browse SMB shares. Linked to the shares on my desktop. I never could get that working in Gnome 2.6 / Nautilus on my Fedora Core 2 box.

Synaptic runs like a champ. Being a long time user of Apt from Freshrpms on Fedora & Red Hat, on a Debian based system it even feels better.

Next steps are getting full multimedia functionality, including DVD & MP3; Bluefish and some editor type stuff, and seeing if Rhythmbox can connect over a Samba share. And maybe importing my Evolution stuff.

Then I’ll be on to installing Ubuntu on the laptop and the Athlon 64! And if I’m really daring, wiping my Gaming box. Getting closer everyday.

Progress

Finally figured out what’s hanging my linux box – GAIM, my IM client. Can’t say I’m shocked, there have been a ton of updates lately.

It’s driving me pretty close to using Ubuntu Linux though. I’ve tried Debian, Gentoo, and have been (and still am) a long time user of Red Hat & Fedora. The box currently has Fedora Core 2 on it, and Fedora Core 3 hasn’t come out fast enough for me.

Gnome 2.8 is sexy.

Ubuntu, as a Debian derivative is very interesting me. 6 month release cycles (similar to Fedora), tied to Gnome releases, which are 6 months as well (close, but not quite similar to Fedora).

I am very excited about the community aspect of Ubuntu – Debian with all the updates, contributed back to the Debian core teams, funded by a .com millionaire to make a great Linux distro. As a huge Gnome fan, their Gnome integration looks (from the outside) fabulous. All the power of apt-get, with the power of Debian.

I always hated the Debian installer – I had to actually get help at a TCLUG installfest to get installed (damn network). Ubuntu looks to take some of that complexity away. In addition, their interesting choice of using sudo instead of a root account is intriguing.

I tried their pre-release on my laptop, but it wouldn’t boot, but I’m sure it was ACPI related. I just didn’t spend the 15 minutes needed to find the boot command. I burned the final version last week – I’m going to get on my linux box as I backed up my music and email a day or two ago, and then my laptop and AMD64 box right after that.

More to come.

Wiki added!

After some configuration hassles, I’ve added the Wiki!.

I even threw a FAQ up and added the link to the sidebar.

The configuration hassles were minimal, mostly involved re-reading the directions five times to enable mysql support with encrypted password. Then I had to change a setting in the php.ini file. The error code was a little misleading that it made me think it was a Wiki configuration problem, instead of PHP, but some googling around got me the answer.

The funny thing about it is the Wiki comes with a number of differently themes to choose from (I have MacOSX up now). The built-in WordPress theme for Wiki was the exact same WordPress theme I was using on the blog. Until yesterday that is when I changed. But it’s staying the way it is.