The Trend Towards the Small

Buying Hardware - Again !


A few weeks ago I decided that the little Asus that I bought back at the end of last year really needed a CD/DVD reader/burner. I decided on a little white Lite-On and changed my supplier, for once, and sourced it from CompUSA online.

Now, I have the feeling - gained from looking at their web sites - that either TigerDirect and CompUSA are owned by the same people or else they use the same web design company ! Their sites are amazingly similar and, after you've bought something, work identically.

Now don't get me wrong - I don't think that this is bad in any way, as I really like TigerDirect. Anyhow, Above is the little white burner that's replacing my old HP 300 single-layer DVD burner. It's very nice, and powers off the USB port on the Asus, so I now have optical disc reading and writing on-the-go.

And Again
Next to hit the wallet was the DD, who informed the AG and I that she would need a computer for school work next year (she'll be 15). Deep within me I really don't agree with the "need", as surely many parents won't be able to afford it, but I decided to bite the bullet anyhow, so asked her to do the research and tell me what would be good. She came back with a well-reasoned case so, much to her surprise, I think, I agreed, and a package arrived for her last Friday.

Having seen me happy with my 17" Acer, she asked for the Acer Aspire One, so I paid my normal visit to TigerDirect and here it is.

It comes with Windows XP - she specifically asked for that and not a Linux version so that life would be easier for her in school. I know that OOo works quite happily with MS formats, but not (yet) the XML ones.









As you can see, it's a blue-black PC very similar to the Asus that the AG appropriated from me!
It has 3 USB ports, microphone and headphone sockets, a LAN socket and a VGA socket, just like the Asus. The battery is a 6-cell LiON model, just like the Asus, and the screen is 10.1". It has the same Atom cpu, 160 GB hard drive, SD-card reader, and gigabyte of memory, easily expandable to two. The one thing that it does not have that the Asus has is a bluetooth link. Not that I've used it yet, but ...

Two things that it does not have are a floppy drive and an optical drive. I just asked her from chance whether a floppy drive would be useful and the answer was an enthusiastic "Yes", as floppies are very much the standard medium in schools. Shows how much I know! So a box will set off from the east coast, very soon, with a USB-powered floppy drive. Coincidentally, I originally bought it with my own big Acer, because it doesn't have a floppy drive either. I've never ever used it!

The need for an optical drive is a very different thing - you can't do without CDs and DVDs. So I opted for the Samsung shown above, as Tiger Direct didn't seem to have the Lite-On that I bought.

The Acer comes, as I said, with Windows XP. That's going to mean a registration session with Microsoft sometime soon. It also comes with an install of MS Office 2007, good for just a few weeks. After that you have to pay. Minimally $168 dollars. That's a lot to ask of someone who's only paid $300 for the entire PC and OS. Luckily, I have a copy of MS Office that she can use - as I don't, having upgraded to OOo - but many people don't have this luxury and have no knowledge of the alternatives in the marketplace, such as WordPerfect Office, OOo, and Star Office. All of these will produce pretty much everything that MS Office will, and cost less or are free.

The next software to ask for installation was McAfee's anti-virus software. This being a NetBook and very often bought by or for a young age-group, I think that the inclusion of an anti-virus pack is an excellent idea. However, this again is a limited-time offer, demanding that the user pay up after 90 days. There's another $79 (on offer right now at $49), but their web-site is strangely silent on the matter of updates and whether or not they charge annually (like most anti-virus products). We'll be looking at Avast too, I think. They have a personal version that costs only an annual re-registration.

Finally, it comes with a copy of Carbonite. This is an online backup program, that claims to take a look at your system when you stop using it for a while, and, if anything has changed, sends off an encrypted backup to Carbonite to keep for you. Their site claims that single-file recovery is "easy" and that you can also restore your complete PC if, for example, it's stolen. The cost is $5 per month and, to be honest, I think that it might well be a very good investment for a netbook that spends a lot of its life on the road.

Unforseen Consequences Department
I think that it's a good bet that Yahoo! didn't think twice when they retired versions 6 to 7.5 of their IM service (YIM), forcing upgrades to their users. Sure, you can get Yahoo! IM client for Linux, but who wants to have an IM window open for each of Yahoo, AIM, MSN, gMail, and who knows what else?
Yahoo kills Yahoo Messenger 6-7.5 and Pidgin fails
Pidgin is an open source program that allows you to have IM connections with people on pretty much every IM net, all in one window (or more, if you want) so you can keep the rest of your desktop for you. Pidgin, it seems, operated on the YIM version 7 protocol, so stopped seeing YIM when that protocol vanished.

It's taken just a month for Pidgin to work out what happened, move to the newer protocol, and get new versions out - it runs on Windows and Linux, and supports over 60 different user languages!

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
Yeah, well. That's true, and all that, but Mozilla are kinda pleased right now: Firefox is reaching its billionth download this week. Yes, that's billionth with a B! The polling guys are saying that they have over 20% of the browsers-in-use market right now. Wow!

Pink Floyd
If you like the Floyd, give The Australian Pink Floyd a listen. I've been listening to them on NPR here in Philly for the last hour and I'm a fan. They're playing across the US right now. See a review on the TributeHub site.

TTFN

Linux or Windows

Last week I finally got a motherboard transplant to work - from living in an absolutely outrageously oversized case (big, rounded, scarlet, and with hips, no less) to living in a normal beige ATX box. I had to transplant some of the fans, of course, and there's an 8-inch fan that I'd like to put in too but can't find a good place for it (maybe I'll cut a hole in the case!).

This thing used to run Windows XP-64, which I got about 3 months after it escaped from Microsoft. It's been a good OS, although lacking in drivers initially. For example, HP never upgraded many of their drivers for it, but Brother and Konica-Minolta both did, so those were the printers we bought. See here for a review of it.

It's a reasonably powerful machine - 2 GHz AMD cpu and 2 GB of RAM - especially so when I bought it in the late summer of 2005. I ran a lot of virtual machines on it. So, once I re-housed it, I was faced with the obvious decision to make - which OS to use. Anything less than Windows XP was obviously out. I wanted a change from Windows XP/64, and, having regretted giving my son a machine with Vista on it for the last 16 months, Vista was definitely not going to be it!

Windows 7 isn't out yet, so that just about writes Windows off. I don't think it'll run Leopard, so I took a look at the Linux alternative. Ubuntu 8 looks nice - I've created a few machines with it and had a good result. I have a copy of Solaris, but who knows what IBM will do with it (why would they kill AIX in favour of Solaris?). I looked at a few others, decided I rather like the new KDE desktop and its features, and then found the Ubuntu 9.04 was out.

So I read all the reviews and, as it looked good, downloaded both the Desktop and the Server editions (there's a Netbook edition too, but I'm not buying hardware just yet!). I burned CDs on my trusty Windows laptop (the Acer Aspire 9300). Neither would load properly. Bad burns ? I tried. No - same error. Bad downloads! So I pulled them again. Burned again. Went to bed!

Next morning, I put the Server disc in to the reader and booted. After about 20 questions and enough time (just) for me to eat my morning bowl of porridge (see later), it was up and asking me to log in. Wow! I haven't seen an OS load that fast since we put Windows NT 4 onto a 4-cpu DEC Alpha machine! Up it came with a pure character interface. Oh sugar! I really don't feel like learning Linux command line this morning! So I Googled how to install GNOME, found the instruction (last post):
/etc/init.d/gdm start
and re-booted the machine. Now I get a black screen with a little graphic asking for name, and then password. After that, I'm in to GNOME's default background (light blue with a stylised "G" logo). Very clean, very nice. Off to work.

By the evening I was really ready to try things out, so I went exploring. The install seems to take up about 13 GB of space, including GNOME and all the applications that Ubuntu comes with, so the OS itself probably takes less than half that. Windows XP Pro takes over 8 GB and it's ten years old, so anything less than that is quite good, considering.

So, what have I been using it for? Well, so far I've been using it to burn backup CDs. I ran into a problem with my original Benq 1640 drive - Ubuntu doesn't see it as a burner - just a reader. I replaced it with a $30 Lite-On (five years newer and faster) and burns fly. What I'm doing is backing up all the stuff from the old disks that used to be in the Windows XP/64 machine but that's rather complicated. I mount the disk in a Firewire-connected carrier that plugs into an old Sony VAIO laptop (old enough that it runs on Windows 2000, and a coupon for Windows XP came with it!). The VAIO shares the drive, so my Acer can see it, and I pull the files onto the Acer and organse them. After that I grab them from the Acer with the Linux machine and drop them onto the disc symbol and burn them. As easy as Windows has been promising but with little helpful things like telling you if it thinks that the folder tree is too deep before just burning it and failing half-way through the disc.

I've been playing with the OpenOffice.org product. I also have it on my Acer, and also on the baby Asus machine, running under Windows. In both of these the JVM takes a long time to load and start, before the app. (Writer, Base, or whatever) is loaded. With Ubuntu 9.04 almost all of that wait vanishes. I can only think that the JVM is permanently loaded, but it's much faster.

TTFN

New Toys - Where Will It End ?

sic transit gloria mundi

which might describe me. I'm writing this as the first piece of English (or anything else, for that matter) that I've composed on my new Acer 9300 laptop. A birthday / Christmas / New Year's present to the Man of the House from Himself (via TigerDirect and UPS), of course, as nobody else would dare do such a thing :)

I'll only bore you a moment with stats (2 GHz 64-bit AMD cpu, 2 GB DDE2 DRAM, 17" screen) before going on to complain that the keyboard is, of course, one of those chiclet types with about 2mm travel but so what ? It's quiet, no heavier that the one it replaces (a Sony Vaio from 2000) and easier to type on. It has a built-in wireless network card, which is convenient for scribbling in one places, like standing one-legged in airports (I'm lousy as a stork, so I never do that), but it'll be too big for the tables in Starbucks (I hope), giving me an excuse to find somewhere else !

I can see that sitting in aeroplanes is going to be fun, as the thing is only about 2" narrower than my hips, and that's got to be too wide for the little fold-down tablettes. Still, maybe I'll ust fly Virgin from now on and play all their in-flight games instead.

I've been wandering the internet in search of tidbits, as is my wont, and landed on Bill Thompson's article today in the Telegraph. When, in what seems not to have been a previous lifetime, I worked in a web company help produce a tool to make web pages, the problem of finding out just how many people were visiting the sites was quite a problem.Revenue comes from advertising the cost of advertising space is determined by "eyeballs", the estimated number of individuals who would look at the space. Many of our customers built sites that got you to identify yourself in some way (at least once) so that subsequent visits could be discounted (or not, depending on many things).

However, Bill points out that many of the younger generation discard identities with reckless abandon - sometimes because they're forgotten the password and can't be bothered to really think to remember it, and other times because they really deliberately want many identities (to trade amongst, for instance). This is probably going on in large amount - now that he mentions it I realise that I've seen it myself, and not taken any notice, but Bill is a more astute watcher of humans than I - and it rather makes a mockery of all the executives counting heads and asking for money based on that !

Have a fun weekend everyone. I've some programming to do.

The Last Day of 2006

It's been a long time, so probably nobody'll read this but me, so that explains why this is a bit monologish. I've just ripped three Michael Chapman CDs that I received as a birthday present. Michael's been a pro guitar player for almost forty years now, and familiarity just seems to breed respect. The problem with being a fan of someone like Michael is that, as nobody'll ever admit to having heard of him, you tend to have to do unusual things - like buy all your CDs from the man himself, as no shop or web site ever carries them, and entering the track names on GraceNote and CDDB yourself, as very often you're the first to be ripping the disc !

With 26 albums of his (I just went and counted !) I suppose you could call me a fan. If anyone has a copy of Americana, though, I'd dearly love to buy it. I have Americana II, and have heard some of Americana's tracks, buy want that CD ! Anyhow, I just got "27 06 05", which is a recording of a concert he did on that data at The Greys in Brighton, which is where I grew up.

For Christmas I got something seriously more modern - Smoke and Mirrors from Marillion, the two albums from the Holiday Weekend in 2005 at Butlins, Minehead. I haven't listened to the double CD Mirrors yet, but Smoke (the single CD) is great.

Recently I've been listening to internet radio instead of CDs, and getting a good strong dose of Prog Rock. Groups such as Sylvan, Frost, and Ayreon especially. I think that these three will certainly feature in my CD buying list in the next few months. Remember that Frost is officially no more, so try to get Milliontown before it's sold out. Sylvan's is a German site: there's also a Dutch band Silvan. Finally in this musical adverts spot, take a look at Heather Nova.

So, I've spent a very large quantity of my spare time since August getting my teeth into VB.NET 2005 together with SQL Server 2005. All I can say is that I'm very thankful that I didn't try in January ! The six months have provided a huge amount of information onto the web for people to find. Even so, I've easily spent $500 on books, as it's impossible to predict what you'll need to know in advance. Finally, however, the effort is beginning to pay off. However, it's been painful at times !

After over a year with an AMD-based machine running Windows XP/64 I suppose that I was getting blasé. I had got to the point of believing that MS tools worked ! After all, I had installed the Express editions of VB and SQL Server with no problems. This feeling of security vanished abruptly when I installed Visual Studio 8. I did all the things that the release notes commanded me to do, and didn't do all the things they commanded me not to do, and then looked at what I had. The install had added a new copy of SQL Server Express, which was not what I wanted . In addition, it wasn't running. In fact, I couldn't find any services connected with VS8 at all !

OK I though - time for a reboot (akthough the install hadn't asked for one). The PC never came back !

Not good !

Eventually, through Safe Mode and the rebuilder, I found that the video drivers had been trashed, but somehow in a way that prevented me from re-installing them. Every time I touched the video software either the screen went blank or else the complete PC just stopped dead.

So, I added a small - 40GB IDE - drive to the machine and unplugged the two 200 GB SATA drives. Fine ! I can recreate a new system. Well, for a week or so, and then it crashed again - "cannot find NTOSKRNL.EXE". Well, I could find it, but I couldn't blow it away and replace it, so that drive was moved down a notch and yet another drive introduced and XP/64 installed.

Now things went better - except that it refuses to boot without the distribution disc in the CD drive ! So my original C: is now D: and my original D: is E:. So none of the original installs work and I've spent countless hours in reinstalling software onto a system that, before Visual Studio, was working extremely well.

The moral of the story appears to be to do development on your second-best machine ! Right now this PC has become a second-best machine !

My other birthday/Christmas/New Year present was a shiny new Acer 9300 laptop with a gleaming expanse of 17" of LCD screen. Seriously neat, and I hope to review it here for you in the next little while.

Meantime, however, my better half is calling ... New Year's Eve festivities are calling. Best wishes and a prosperous New Year to you all.