Cyde Weys Musings

A year ago, Drinian was in Akihabara, Japan and he happened to pick up some Laughing Man stickers. He didn’t end up using most of them though, and he figured I would get more enjoyment of them than he would, so he gave them to me. I highly suspect that he was correct, because I’m having a blast with them. Unfortunately I only have three left, so I have to start rationing them carefully, but here’s what I did with one of them.

I bought a new computer recently that has been serving as my primary GNU/Linux desktop for the past few weeks. I initially wanted to build a computer from parts, because there’s a huge hackerish appeal to it (and because it’s usually cheaper), but then I came upon a fantastic deal on a Dell small business computer that I couldn’t turn down. But it just left the hardware nerd in me a little bit unsatisfied. It’s just another Dell box; it’s totally blah. Hell, it even came with Windows Vista stickers on it (which I have since removed); yecch! Laughing Man sticker to the rescue!

Luckily, the Laughing Man sticker was just the perfect size to fit directly on top of the Dell logo. My computer has gone from corporate to geeky. It’s gone from slaving away on mundane tasks to joining a Stand Alone Complex and fighting in the guerrilla Free Software movement against Big Proprietary Software. Err, something like that. So thank you Drinian for the stickers!

Now if only I could replenish my supply of Laughing Man stickers without having to cross over eleven time zones.

Having just gotten a new computer a scant two weeks ago, I’ve all ready failed at resisting the urge to start pimping it out. I should point out the whole point of this endeavor was to make a cheap computer. Well, today I added another 2 GB of RAM (at a cost of $25) and a 400 GB hard drive (transferred from another computer). I’m lucky I all ready had that hard drive laying around; otherwise, I’d be out another, what, $80?

So the total price of my “cheap” system, if you don’t have any components laying around and have to buy everything from scratch, has ballooned to over $500. And that’s not even the end of it. I thought I could get away without a discrete graphics card; well, now I’m finding out that maybe I can’t. I’ve been playing around with Compiz, the 3D desktop manager, and also gotten interested in running some 3D Windows games in Wine. So it looks like I will need better than Intel Integrated graphics after all. And with the recent news that ATI is beefing up their Linux support, it’s proving hard to resist.

I still contend it’s possible to build a decent GNU/Linux desktop computer for $300. It’s just not something I seem capable of. I have the upgrade bug. The first time I happen to examine top and notice that I’m using swap space (gah!), I’m off buying 2 GB more RAM. A similar thing happens when I fill up all my hard drives (the whole reason I added this 400 GB hard drive is because the 500 GB one the system came with is all ready full).

If this post seems a little glowing, don’t be alarmed; it’s because I’m still basking in the brilliant sheen of my new GNU/Linux desktop (which I am composing this blog post on as I type these very words — and these words, too). That’s right, I went through with my plans for setting up a GNU/Linux desktop, though I didn’t actually use the parts list I threw together two weeks ago. I ran across an amazing deal through Dell’s small business site (instant savings of nearly half off!) on an Inspiron 530 and I jumped on it. For $360 ($407 after shipping and state taxes), I got a nice little Dell mini-tower with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 processor, 2 GB of DDR2 PC2 6400 RAM, 500GB SATA hard drive with 16 MB cache, SATA DVD burner, keyboard, and optical scroll mouse. It ended up being about the same price as the parts list I put together, but the performance is marginally better, with the added possibility of upgrading to 4 GB of RAM. It also came with Windows Vista Home Premium, which I suppose would be a value add-in for some, but which just made me wince at how much cheaper I could have gotten this system without paying the Microsoft tax. Anyway, Vista’s in the trash now, where it belongs, and the price was good enough that I’m not worrying about it.

Installing the OS

I was going to install Kubuntu on my new system, but I opted for Ubuntu instead on a recommendation from Drinian, who says that Kubuntu isn’t quite as well put-together. The only reason I wanted Kubuntu was because I wanted to run KDE instead of Gnome, but it turns out that’s incredibly easy to accomplish in Ubuntu (just install the kubuntu-desktop meta-package in aptitude, then set your login session to KDE). So choosing Ubuntu over Kubuntu hasn’t left me disappointed in any way.

Unfortunately, installing Ubuntu GNU/Linux still wasn’t as easy as it should have been. I blame the problem on hardware incompatibilities, most likely with the SATA controller on the motherboard. The installation CD wouldn’t boot without passing the kernel parameter “all_generic_ide”, which is something I can handle but the average computer user is likely to be turned off by. Then, after the installation completed, my system wouldn’t boot from the hard drive for the same reason, so I had to boot back into the LiveCD environment, mount my boot partition, and then edit grub’s (a bootloader) menu.lst to pass that same kernel parameter. So, yeah, GNU/Linux isn’t exactly friendly for the masses, at least not on this hardware. Curiously enough, I had this exact same problem when dual-booting Fedora Core (another distribution of GNU/Linux) on my previous desktop. There’s definitely some room for improvement in this area by either the Linux kernel developers or the Ubuntu packagers. There’s no real reason this can’t be one of those things that “Just Works”.

Naming the system

But after the minor hitch with “all_generic_ide” , everything else worked just fine. It was the smoothest GNU/Linux installation I believe I’ve ever done. The GNU/Linux graphical installers have become quite advanced, completely putting anything Microsoft offers up to shame. Actually, the part of the installation process that took the longest time was picking a name for my new computer. I have a long history of naming computers after various mythologies, deities, or nerdy things (Ixion, Dark Anima, Fyre, Quezacoatl, Geminoid, Phoenix, etc.), so I wanted to continue the theme. I figured since this is the first time I’ve ever used a dedicated GNU/Linux system as my primary desktop (as opposed to Microsoft Windows), I wanted to emphasize the change this brings to my computing life. So I got into a lively discussion on IRC with someone who apparently knows a good deal about ancient Greek/Roman mythology, and his best suggestion was the Roman god Vertumnus, who is “the god of seasons, change and plant growth, as well as gardens and fruit trees”. I liked both the change aspect and the environmental aspect, so Vertumnus it was.

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I find it rather quirky that downloaded videos continue to clock in at convenient CD-sized chunks: 175 MB for a half-hour show, 350 MB for a full-hour show, and 700 MB for a two-hour movie. Nowadays these sizes are mostly just a relic, but there used to be an actual reason for these specific file sizes: people were burning the files to CDs, and they had to fit. I know that was a big concern for me. Each CD could thus fit one movie (or half of one, depending on length and/or quality), two full-hour shows, or four half-hour shows. Back when hard drive space was a lot more expensive than it is now, it was actually cheaper to use a bunch of CDs. It was even worth the inconvenience of putting up with all of the messiness that using CDs entailed. I remember having a constantly maxed-out 768 Kbps ADSL broadband connection and a 40 GB hard drive; you can calculate out how much CD burning I was doing. I still have many hundreds of burned CDs up in my old bedroom, untouched after so many years.

Nowadays, a good do-everything DVD burner is under $30, and blank DVD media is way cheaper than CD media on a per-megabyte basis, yet still those silly file sizes persist. I can’t see any reasoning to it besides inertia. Yet by the time DVDs became commonplace for storing data I had already stopped using optical media for those purposes and no longer cared about discretized file sizes; I was using hard drives for bulk storage. Sure, hard drives were still a bit more expensive on a per megabyte basis, but not having to put up with all of the inconvenience of burning data to DVDs, storing them, and then rooting through them later on to find something made it worth it. But now there’s no excuse for optical media. A 500 GB hard drive is under $100, so you spend less than $1 perDVD’s worth of storage. And the hard drive space can be used over effectively an infinite number of times, while the DVD is limited to one usage. Optical media just doesn’t make sense anymore.

I realized this a week ago when I put together a parts list for a new computer and plum forgot the DVD drive. I remembered all of the essential components, but the DVD drive didn’t even cross my mind. And it’s no wonder. Thinking back in the past several months, I can only think of one instance in which I used my DVD drive. That was to install the drivers for a USB data cable I bought for my Yaesu FT-7800R amateur radio transceiver. A week later, things went wrong, and I had to reinstall the driver, only I had already lost the driver CD. No biggie; I located the drivers online in less than a minute. So the one use of my optical drive in recent memory wasn’t even necessary.

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The other day, I was realizing that I don’t use GNU/Linux as often as I should. Sure, I run it exclusively on my servers, but I still use Windows on the desktop for the most part. That’s more out of habit than out of any need. Everything I currently do in Windows I can do in GNU/Linux, except for the games, which I’m playing more and more occasionally these days. I was dual-booting my current desktop with Windows XP and GNU/Linux for awhile, but it proved to be inconvenient. My computers’ uptimes, both servers and desktops, are typically measured in months (only going down for crashes and power losses). It takes awhile to reboot and restart all of the applications I typically have running, so I don’t do it by choice. Thus you can see the problem with dual-booting: it entails constant rebooting, which I had to do as often as I felt like playing a Windows game. And then once I was in Windows I wouldn’t want to go through the hassle of booting into GNU/Linux only to boot back into Windows the next time I wanted to play a game. It simply wasn’t working.

So I now see the problem with my initial attempts at using GNU/Linux on the desktop. I simply don’t have the patience to put up with all of those constant reboots and interruptions in my computing environment. I’m too lazy. I’m simply going to get another desktop to use exclusively for GNU/Linux, while making every effort to only use my current Windows desktop for playing games. And luckily, making a desktop computer is cheaper than it’s ever been. Here is a current parts list I put together just yesterday for a killer GNU/Linux desktop.

The specs

• $90 — MSI Saturn 945 Intel Socket T(LGA775) Intel 945GC 2 x 240Pin Intel GMA 950 Barebone - Retail
• $132 — Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 Wolfdale 2.53GHz 3MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor - Retail
• $38 — G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model F2-4200PHU2-2GBNT - Retail
• $95 — Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

This complete GNU/Linux system costs only $355. Throw in shipping and we’ll call it $380. That’s a really cheap price considering how powerful this system is. Avoiding the Microsoft tax by choosing a Free operating system pays huge dividends when the overall system is cheap. Allow me to explain the choices I made in putting this system together with individual analyses of each other components:

The barebone system

First of all, I save a lot of money with this computer by building it into a barebone system. A price of $90 for a case, power supply, and motherboard is really hard to beat. You can easily spend over $90 for each of those individual components (and in fact, when I built my current desktop, I did). Getting a good barebone system is an excellent way to save a lot of money on a low-end desktop. If you’re not building a low-end desktop, I wouldn’t bother. The limitations can be significant. For instance, the motherboard that ships in the barebone I picked out supports a maximum of 2 GB of RAM; fine for a low-end system, but you really want 4 GB of RAM on a medium or high end system. And the power supply is only 250W; again, fine for a low end system, but don’t expect it to be able to power, say, a high-end discrete video card. And naturally the motherboard doesn’t support dual video cards, which would be an upgrade path you might want to keep open on a system you’re outlaying more money on. It also doesn’t support quad-core processors. So there are limitations, but for a low-level system, you won’t run into them.

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I bought a fused power cable at the hamfest in Maryland this weekend so I could install my mobile ham radio in my 1996 Ford Taurus. There was just one problem: getting the cable from the battery in the engine compartment to the passenger compartment. In between these two sections is the firewall, and the firewall on the Ford Taurus is notoriously hard to get through. Many other vehicles have unused or underused grommets that a cable can be passed through, but preliminary investigations on the web revealed only one unused grommet in the Ford Taurus, but I couldn’t even locate it. I’m writing this blog post so that anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation will know what to do, whether they’re powering a ham radio, subwoofer, amp, whatever.

Since I couldn’t find a grommet to pass the cable through, I ended up drilling a hole through the firewall near where the gas pedal wire goes through the firewall. I chose this location to drill because it was one of the few spots that was relatively unobstructed on both sides of the firewall. I was worried about the wires potentially interfering with the movement of the gas pedal in the passenger compartment, but I came up with a solution (more on that later).

The place you want to drill through is directly to the left of the circular metal pad surrounding where the throttle wire passes through the firewall. Drill from the inside of the vehicle; the engine compartment is way too cramped. The foot well is cramped too, but doable. You’ll have to lie with your back on the lip of the doorway and your feet on the ground. I recommend using a power drill plugged into 120VAC from an extension cord. Battery-powered drills are more bulky and might not fit in the cramped space inside the foot well, and you’re going to need a lot of power to get through that firewall (you are drilling through fireproof metal, after all).

Fig. 1: The hole in the firewall where the cable passes through. The two black cylinders contain the fuses. The hole in the insulation is a bit bigger than the hole in the metal firewall underneath, which is just big enough to fit the cable.

My power cable consisted of a red and a black wire joined together, so it was significantly larger in one dimension. Thus, I had to cut out a tall hole that would allow the wire to pass through. A neat trick is to drill two separate close-by holes with a smaller drill bit, then keep drilling with larger drill bits until the two holes merge. Then you’ll be able to fit your non-circular wire through. Also, I definitely recommend wearing a heavy duty leather glove on the hand that’s holding the drill. I wasn’t, and I left a good bit of skin on the sharp steel vent when I scraped my finger against it after the drill abruptly pierced through to the other side of the firewall.

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According to OCZ’s enthusiastic press releases, the future of human-computer interfaces is right around the corner. They’re releasing the Neural Impulse Actuator, a device that you wear on your forehead and use to control a computer with your thoughts. Yes, really. No, it’s not fake (that’s the first thing I thought too). It’s very real, and there are other reports on it from people who saw it at CES.

So, given that it’s real, my next question was “How well does it work?” The likely answer is, not very well. It won’t be able to handle complex, nuanced thoughts. But it can tell the difference between, say, concentrating really hard or relaxing. I imagine there’d be a bit of a learning curve as well; the more you use it, the better you become at generating the exact neural impulses that it’s looking for (which may or may not be the same as “thoughts” as we currently think of them). It’s hard to know what those might feel like (perhaps imagining raising one eyebrow), but when you have the device plugged into a computer giving you constant feedback, you should be able to figure out what it’s looking for.

I am concerned about the resolution that this device will offer. Let’s say you’re trying to move a cursor around in two dimensions, a very common task. How accurate is it? Is the only way to get good accuracy to reduce the speed of the cursor, so that it might take a full minute to move the cursor all the way across the screen? It doesn’t seem appropriate as a mouse replacement, though it could do well as a sort of hotkey-based interface. Say each command consists of a sequence of three neural impulses — with just five different thoughts, you have a possibility of 125 different combinations, and thus, 125 commands. Not too shabby.

I could continue speculating about this device, but that seems kind of fruitless. We simply don’t know nearly enough about its capabilities and how it actually works yet. For now, it’s all just marketing hype. I’m going to wait until the first shipment of these goes out and the first in-depth reviews are published. If they sound promising, I’ll buy one. Here’s why.

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The Commodore 64 turns 25 this year, and amazingly, CNN seems to deem it important enough to merit a front page story. Obviously they have some nerds on staff, because this is far better than their usual sensationalist fare. I’m too young to have grown up with a Commodore, but I do envy everyone who had the experience of using one. From all I’ve read and heard, it sounds like a great system. It was also the best-selling personal computer model of all time, selling 30 million units over its lifespan of twelve years. I can’t even imagine a computer model lasting more than two years these days.

The great thing about the Commodore 64 is that it was affordable (at $600, it was cheaper than a lot of personal computers on the market these days, even adjusting for inflation) and it was hackable. You could get really close to the machine and write all sorts of neat programs out of the box. It turned a generation of kids onto programming. Personal computers these days don’t come with development environments and compilers. If you want to program, you have to go out and download the tools (and many people don’t even realize you can). The way the Commodore 64 did it was much better.

I think it’d be really neat to buy a Commodore 64 and experiment with it to see what the generation of nerds before me was using. It’s not too expensive (going for less than $100 on eBay, and certainly less in local used computer/electronic stores). I already have a bunch of older computers, including some SPARC stations, at my house, so why not add to the collection?

There’s not much to say about this picture other than to point out that NewEgg is pulling what I call a “Double Satan”. Look at how many product reviews they’re advertising as having. Hey, I want a CPU heatsink/fan combo cooler that uses demonic power to suck excess heat into the depths of Hell.

I just got a new credit card today and it came equipped with a feature that I didn’t ask for: a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip. Basically, RFID can be used so that you can just wave your card at a scanner rather than swiping it through (such a convenience). Also, since it works at a range of up to several meters, it means anyone with a scanner can scarf your information and possibly use your card. With the traditional swipe method, I can be assured that there won’t be any unauthorized charges, because I have to physically take it out of my wallet and swipe it through a reader. RFID, by contrast, could just be charged anytime, anywhere, without me realizing it at all. It wouldn’t even have to be a thief; it could just be some accidental charge at a checkout line.

I got this potentially very insecure feature without even asking for it. Luckily I know enough about this technology to know that I don’t want it, but 90% of the populace probably isn’t. Most people who get this credit card aren’t aware of this feature, which is hidden behind the cute name “blink”. So I called up and asked for a non-RFID replacement card (which will take 7-10 business days), and the drone on the telephone line tried to convince me not to, because they have a “0% fraud liability”. That’s right, apparently because I theoretically ultimately wouldn’t pay for charges when people snarfed my credit card info, I should totally be okay with people stealing through me.

In reality, of course, getting stolen from is a huge hassle to go through with the credit card company. You have to convince them it wasn’t you who bought the goods; since whoever snarfed your information had to be in close physical proximity, when they buy using your account it will also likely be in the same area, and so it won’t look nearly as much like theft as the stereotypical story of “Maryland woman’s credit card number used to buy two surfboards in Hawai’i.” And once your info is stolen, you have to get a new credit card number, which is also a hassle. Plus, I’m not totally selfish. Even if I ultimately don’t end up paying for it, I still don’t want to be benefiting thieves. The credit card company really needs to modify the script that they’re giving to their drones.