Michelle’s Carpet Bag

Since the unexpected disconnection of my cell phone early in June, I’ve been suffering from a lack of on-demand data access. The constant email drip I was accustomed to is long gone, as well as the anytime, anywhere web access. Moving overseas is a lengthy and difficult process, with the result that I haven’t yet been able to sign a new phone contract. Instead, I’ve had to make due with prepaid cards.

I didn’t think this would be so difficult since I have a Blackberry Bold, which has wifi capabilities. Imagine my frustration when I discovered that prepaid cards don’t allow this functionality to work – thoroughly annoying since the hardware exists and I specifically bought this phone & had it unlocked for that reason.

How is it possible that this practice is viewed as ok? Why should I have to buy wireless data coverage in order to connect to my own broadband network at home? The two should be completely disjointed. To make matters worse, I can’t buy a data plan with a prepaid account. I have to sign a 2-year contract, something I am not ready to commit to until I have settled down somewhere.

I can’t be the only person with this problem. I will eventually sign up for a data plan, but in the meantime I want to be able to use Google Voice while I’m in range of my wireless network. The T-Mobile system of not allowing the hardware in my phone to function properly is technologically senseless and frustrating. If anyone has worked out a solution, by all means post it.

My first experience with woot.com was a huge success. The quad-core PC I ordered prior to my arrival in TX was a wise purchase. I was finally able to break it out of the box last night and was very pleased with the result.

Thanks to twitter (I know I use that phrase way too often), I was made aware of a daily offering that was exactly what I was looking for. @sbourke’s recommendation was all I needed. Sitting in the backseat on the M25 at the time, I managed to create an account and place my order via my blackberry. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into having never used the site before, but I’m glad I made the purchase. I had been planning on building my own PC, but the price of the system I wanted was a little high.

Along came woot. A refurbished HP machine with all the power I need and none of the extra expense. I’m duly impressed with the performance of the AMD X4 9550 quad-core coupled with 6 GB of RAM. The Vista experience is like night and day in comparison to my previous dual core processor. It’s so good, in fact, that I momentarily considered not replacing it with Ubuntu. That moment didn’t last long.

I am almost afraid to admit it, but I haven’t had a new laptop since 2002. I used that one like a desktop, so I never bothered to replace it. Lately, however, I have been increasingly more frustrated with not having a good mobile solution. My Bold does fairly well, especially now that it has Wifi, but it’s more of a social device, rather than anything I can get work done on.

Enter: the Compaq Mini 702EA. I did some research before going to try out a few different models in person, and I walked into the store planning to buy a Samsung NC10. Since I do a lot of high-speed typing, it’s a necessity to have a decent-sized keyboard. Perl is miserable with fiddly symbol keys. After visiting three different stores, it was clear that I had very few viable options, simply because nearly every keyboard is built for pecking. If you calculate the length of my fingernails, the equation just doesn’t balance – either my dainty fingers are too big for the keyboards, or they need to start making bigger keyboards. I’m sure I’m not alone in this desire.

Not only am I able to type almost normally on the 92%-sized keyboard on the Mini, but the internal specs are fairly standard. The hard drive size is disappointing, but still preferable to an 8- or 16-GB solid-state drive. 60 GB isn’t bad for a device that I will mostly be using for remote access and web browsing. Plenty of room to install the programs I’ll need to get my work done, with a little leftover for a movie or two.

What surprised me the most, however, is how speedy the little guy is. Lightweight, both in spec and physical weight, doesn’t necessarily mean light in speed. For such a ’slow’ processor, running programs locally isn’t nearly as sluggish as I expected. Perhaps this will change once I’ve installed all my favorite programs, but so far I like what I see.

Possibly the most petty advantage to this netbook is it’s style factor. Netbooks aren’t exactly known for being sleek, but this one certainly fits that description, if only in comparison with other netbooks. Style is not a feature to be underestimated. I like what’s under the hood as much as the next girl, but the outer package can’t be ignored.

It is currently running on XP, which is a pesky downside, but not exactly a deal-breaker. I would have liked to have linux out of the box and saved my Windows tax, but it’s not a huge deal since it was a decent price weighing in at £250 from Staples. I can’t imagine a fresh ubuntu install taking too long. That is next on the list. But first thing’s first: dissertation submission! My new little friend, the Mini, will help me out with that.

As soon as I unpacked my first server and began setting it up, I quickly gained an appreciation for the sysadmins at all the various computer labs I’ve used over the years. It’s a true skill organizing all the cables and working out the logistics for how best to connect everything with the space and furniture at your disposal. In my case, simply adding a single CD-sized box turned out to exponentially increase the mess in my office. I’m having second thoughts about that furniture purchase from years ago – perhaps a glass corner desk wasn’t the best decision?

I starting looking into various solutions for organizing everything. I tried buying a KVM box that didn’t come with any cables, so I spent a good while ordering each separate cable, only to find that half of them came with the wrong connectors (male instead of female and such), despite my elaborate planning. 

I sent everything back and decided to get an all-in-one package, which is what I should have done in the first place. There are a large number of solutions out there, with wide variations in price. At the moment, I have two machines that I want to use the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse. But I’d also like for that network to be expandable, since I’ll be building a new PC within the next six months. I was therefore looking for a four-port switch, and what I found exceeded my expectations.

The Aten CS64U is slightly more than just a Keyboard-Video-Mouse device. To begin with, it also includes a speaker jack, so that one set of run-of-the-mill PC speakers can also be shared.  And unlike most home switches out there, it uses USB cables instead of PS2, providing extra expansion capabilities through the use of a USB hub. For now, I additionally have my printer connected, which means that every time I make the switch between machines, I’m also able to print easily using a device that may or may not be set up for network printing.  And an important aspect not to be overlooked is the delivery itself – shipping was included in the cost and it came quickly via courier.

All this translates into a somewhat expandable small home network setup consisting of one monitor, one keyboard, one mouse, one set of speakers, one printer, and two linux boxes, all shared easily by a simple 4-button key combo. I can comfortably add two more machines to my system without having to worry about cables or compatibility issues – every OS is supported and setup consisted of nothing more than plugging everything in and switching it on. I give this device a 5/5 for its simplicity, capacity, and price point. It’s just what I needed.

I’m usually guilty of being that jerk that sits at the back of the audience and stares ahead stonefaced during stand-up comedy. I’ve rarely been to a show I’ve really enjoyed – I just don’t find it very funny. There are two exceptions – the first was Dan Antopolski’s rap about sandwiches at the Wolfson Howler in Michaelmas term. “Bread, filler, bread…that’s a sandwich!” The rest of his show wasn’t exactly my kind of humor – the truly low point was a strange song about babies at the end. The second exception is a big one: Demetri Martin, in all his blazing glory.

Because it’s clear that I don’t enjoy standup, if there’s a comedian out there who can actually make me laugh, it’s an accomplishment. Demetri wears the crown in this respect. I started off watching Person, which had me practically rolling on the floor. I can’t remember the last time that happened – possibly the first time I watched Napoleon Dynamite. His sense of humor is perfectly aligned with mine – random, intelligent insight into life. He doesn’t resort to shock value to entertain his audience. He has ideas that are truly surprising & creative, leaving me giggling with glee.

I’ve been watching Important Things, his new show on Comedy Central, which is every bit as humorous.  It looks like he has a movie coming out sometime this year, Taking Woodstock, which I’ll be seeing on opening day.

All these great new distributed networking ideas keep coming to mind, but most of them get dismissed with the ‘I can’t afford it’ trump. Being a student certainly has it’s advantages, but when it comes to satisfying my interest in expanding my home network, it’s not much fun not having any cash flow.

I’ve recently gotten the itch to build my own PC, as unsatisfied with my desktop as I was. It was a rush purchase years ago just after moving to the UK, changing jobs, & losing access to a company laptop. It was fine for remote-desktop working from home, but everything was painfully slow, thanks to it’s entry-level Vista setup.

After seeing how great Xubuntu performs on the lightweight server I recently set up, I decided to wipe Vista from my PC altogether & try out the newly released Ubuntu beta, Jaunty Jackalope. Imagine my surprise when I looked more closely at the PC that had been slogging along for the last 2 years and noticed that it has an AMD Core 2 Duo 64 processor. The reason I was so surprised is because it never felt like a dual-core processor. In fact, it was noticeably slower than the 7-year-old Dell laptop I still have running XP.

I merrily burned the 64-bit version of Jaunty onto a CD and set to work on installation. After the several-hour-long process I had experienced with my Intrepid install last week (due to the low-spec nature of my lightweight server), I was pleasantly surprised to see the entire process finished in around 20 minutes. But what really knocked my socks off was the boot time. It took 24 seconds to show me a login prompt, and another 12 until I had a full desktop. WOW!

But that’s not all. Everything on my PC is now smoking fast. File system navigation, network access, you name it. Installing new software couldn’t be easier, and setting up automatic file sharing around my network took all of 10 minutes, thanks to sshfs & autofs (helpful instructions here & here).

All this with nothing more than an OS change? I’m still astounded that I’ve managed to upgrade my PC without so much as spending a dime. No extra memory, no processor replacement, absolutely nothing. I didn’t so much as leave the house. This is a sure sign that the times are changing, that ubuntu is not only a serious competitor to Windows, but a superior one. Unless things go horribly wrong, I think I’m converted to open-source for life. You’ve convinced me.

I set up ssh on my new linux box yesterday, but when I tried to log in this morning after a restart, I wasn’t able to. After re-installing ssh and changing all my router settings back, I discovered I couldn’t even ping my box. This was at least a relief since it meant the problem was a network issue, not ssh.

It turns out that my static IP information was getting reset after each reboot. After a little digging, I found a step-by-step fix for this known issue.  It involves disabling the Gnome Network Manager, which is fine by me.

To my delight, after trying out the Twitter API, I found that it only took a few minutes to master. For my purposes, posting updates involves a single curl statement. Wrapping that sucker up in some lightweight perl code couldn’t be easier. In fact, all I had to do was add a line or two to my existing script that posts in a similar way to Pachube.

I’ve added a link on the right to my house’s twitter feed. Not the worst way to spend 10 minutes, that’s for sure.

After a difficult few weeks writing papers and getting very little sleep (more on those later), I finally found time to set up my new Viglen MPC-L. Out of the box, it booted up fine and I was able to connect to my temperamental router after assigning it a static IP and adding a few DNS entries for my ISP. With my network connection up and running, I gave the update manager a whirl.

To my disappointment, the version installed on the MPC (Xubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn) is already out of service and therefore no longer found on the main repository. Annoyed that a brand new box should come with an out-of-date OS, I set to work connecting to the old-releases repository. This managed to update most of my packages, but gave me errors on some and wouldn’t let me upgrade to a newer version.

So instead, I decided to do a fresh install. I haven’t attempted a linux install since my long-forgotten college days, so I figured better late than never.  I grabbed the iso for the latest version of Xubuntu since it’s lightweight enough for such a minimalistic box. I burned it onto a CD using a USB DVD drive after checking the md5sum, and plugged it into the MPC. Booting from the CD wasn’t very successful until I realized that none of the front USB ports are bootable. I was then shown the main screen for the boot disk, but when I tried to install it, I got a scary message about the kernel panicking.

Fortunately, a friend came to my rescue, having seen a similar message during his install. I added the boot option “pci=noacpi” since the MPC hardware isn’t acpi compatible.  This did the trick, and within about 4 hours I was good to go.

The CurrentCost setup itself was significantly less painful than the setup on Vista (no surprise there). It took all of 10 minutes to sort out. I didn’t need to hunt down any drivers; everything was included with Intrepid. The only piece of framework I had to install was the rsmb, which was a tiny download – no extra installation setup besides changing the name of my publishing feed.

I grabbed a copy of the source for talking to the message broker – again a trivial download involving very little setup, and within minutes I was pleased to see my little red graph back in business.

I’ve been wanting to install ubuntu for the last 2 years or so, but I’ve always hesitated to hand over my sole machine to the hands of open source. Now that I finally have an extra box to play with, I can explore the wonders of ubuntu without worrying about important software being unavailable. 

So far I’m duly impressed. Based on my experiences in the last few hours, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance I’ll soon be migrating my main box over to Intrepid. Time will tell….

I confess. My birthday isn’t until the 22nd, but I’ve already opened my brother’s present. And what a good present it is!
If you haven’t picked up a copy, this book should be number one on your next-in-line-to-read list. Or better yet, throw whatever you’re reading right now aside and start this one.
Yes, it’s that good. It’s about murders that occur over TCP/IP. And it’s chock full of interesting tech references that, for once, are fairly accurate.
I also hear there’s a sequel coming out. I haven’t even made it past Chapter 5 of this book and I already can’t wait for the sequel. Yes, it’s that good.
Thanks, Bryce!