Software

Xubuntu 8.04 on IBM ThinkPad T-21

You wouldn’t think an eight-year-old laptop would be good for much.  Its PIII processor and paltry 512mb of RAM, plus its puny 30 gig hard drive just don’t add up to a lot of firepower.  This wasn’t a problem until a month ago when a couple new Microsoft patches came out that just bogged it down.  Even a fresh build didn’t help.

But the IBM ThinkPad T-21 is just too good to throw out.  It was a maximally-engineered model with a carbon-fibre frame, a crisp, easy-typing keyboard, and a great screen topped with a titanium lid.  And it was cheap: it sold for three grand when it was new, but I bought for my son a couple years ago for one-tenth that much.

I tried Ubuntu on it but running Ubuntu is a young laptop’s game.  Ubuntu is intended to compete with Windows Vista and it’s really needs a P4 with a gig of ram to run well.  (Vista needs much more) An older machine like this one needs a lighter, more stripped-down OS.  Then Webs05 sent me this email:

Xubuntu 8.04 is [great]!  There is no other way to put it! So far I am having super amazing results. And I am currently installing it on Katie’s laptop, which means they fixed A LOT of previous issues. Katie’s laptop is the old X23… Anyways, try it out. I am going to be writing a post soon.

Well that’s interesting because the ThinkPad X-23 is a smaller but otherwise very similar machine as far as the operating system is concerned.  And I did try it out, splitting the HD into two primary partitions and putting the /home in the second partition, with / and /swap in the first partition.  It works great, it’s reasonably fast, it suspends well, and the wireless works fine.  It even set up the Broadcom 54g wireless card with no problem. 

Xubuntu is Ubuntu without all the gingerbread; it doesn’t waste CPU cycles trying to be pretty.  And it works: this old laptop has a new lease on life.  I’m putting a new battery in it and giving it back to my son.

One little thing though: do you suppose the Ubuntu people could quite naming their releases things like “Feisty Fawn” and “Gutsy Gibbon”?  It just sounds kind of Disney, like a character on one of their “video-only” kids’ movie releases.  Couldn’t they call it something cool like “Great White” or “Leopard”?  Oh wait, that one’s taken…

Posted by George on 04/28/08 at 09:38 PM
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Facebook wants to be the next Microsoft

...at least in the respect of “Non standards-compliant, increasingly bloated, complex, and irrelevant”.  Not surprising since Microsoft owns a small chunk of Facebook.  Could 1.6% ownership be enough influence to steer them away from the emerging OpenSocial standard?

“Facebook is a supporter of open source and sees value in any contributions the foundation may make to the industry. Facebook is not joining this foundation, but the company remains focused on advancing Facebook Platform to benefit the developer community and help users communicate and share information more efficiently… Facebook will continue to work with other trusted partners to explore new initiatives around data portability,” Facebook’s spokesperson said.

Bblbbitt!  Yeah, a “new initiative” about every 11 months, with no connection to the previous ones.  In other words, “When we say; ‘data portability’ we mean ‘frustrating divisions between our product and enormous chunks of the market as a whole’”.  Seriously.  If you work with Microsoft software you know that it isn’t even compatible with itself over more than two iterations. I can open a Word 6.0 file on my Linux machine more easily than I can on my Windows box. 

Posted by George on 03/28/08 at 05:59 AM
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OK, Dreamweaver is officially pissing me off

I’m trying to insert some level-specific style information into the header of a .dwt, right?  And Dreamweaver is not letting me.  I have spent the last two and a half hours wrestling with this finely engineered piece of bloated crap software, reading online documentation and trying everything under the sun in the hopes that it will let me put 54 damn characters into a frakkin’ template. 

I would prefer to complete this simple task in about one minute in a code editor like BlueFish or Notepad++.  But DW is our standard, and I need to be fluent with it.  I am tired of being a dope with an important piece of software that everyone here uses. Besides if I get hit by a truck, it’s important the work I leave behind meet institutional standards. 

Anyone know any secret incantations to make Dreamweaver CS3 listen to simple instructions?


Updates:
  • The normal procedure is to open the Assets panel, select the template in question, and click on the “edit” button at the bottom.  But this did not work with the template that prompted this post.  It appears the template has to be created from the higher-level template using the “Nested Templates” function to make a template you can actually, uh, edit. This aspect was less than crystal clear from the documentation to say the least.
  • And my biggest problem with these omnibus Swiss-Army-Knife programs is they make for sloppy, disorganized code and even worse file management.  It’ll make sure something ends up on the web but it can’t think about taxonomy, etc.

Posted by George on 03/19/08 at 04:21 PM
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Linux-alicious

On Sunday I set up an Ubuntu system for my son to use while he visits over holiday (it will be a step down for him but better than no computer).  But for all its well-intentioned interface smoovieness, Ubuntu is a bit bloated.  If you want quick and clean, (above all quick) there are distros that have all the extra baggage pre-removed. Geekalicious goodies from InformationWeek Daily:

  1. Five tiny Linux distros that pack a punch
  2. 7 Reasons why Linux won’t succeed on the Desktop.  I had read this one before and it makes some great points.
  3. Why Linux will succeed on the desktop.  This one unintentionally illustrates a couple points from number 2, but opens a new thought: KDE4.  Though it is still in beta, I am definitely going to have to look into that some more.  But it won’t be for machines that would use the tiny distros.  The developers clearly have the Mac in mind.  Anyway the author believes Gnome needs to go away for Linux to succeed.

Unfortunately one great opportunity for Linux is the utter failure of Vista.  I would rather not see Linux succeed the lazy way, by default.

Posted by George on 11/20/07 at 07:48 AM
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But at least the interface is pretty

I get email, lots of it.  Chopping through the uncontrolled undergrowth in my inbox, Outlook informs me that I have 224 unread messages.  They’re probably mostly spam but I’d like to flip through them anyway.  So I set up a “Read” column icon in the message sorting pane and clicked on it.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.  Hey Micro$oft, do you think you could pull a couple young geniuses off the program to innovationalize transparent animated title bar interfaces, and get them to fix basic functionality? 

Posted by George on 11/12/07 at 09:17 AM
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Windows Vista is so bad that Dell, Fujitsu, HP, and Lenovo customers want XP back

As if Excel’s inability to do basic arithmetic weren’t bad enough, Microsoft Vista is so awful that users and manufacturers have pressured the company to allow them to go back to using Windows XP.  (From Corpus Callosum)

Let me get this straight: Microsoft spent $6bn to develop Vista, and a year after it hit the market, major manufactuers are asking for the old Windows™ back?  OUCH!  Who’s in charge of product design at Microsoft, Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown?

Seriously, someone with an eight-figure salary ought to be fired over this.  Maybe the next version of Windows will run on SUSE the way Apple’s OS runs on a *nix base. 

Posted by George on 09/25/07 at 06:03 PM
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Microsoft Excel’s New Math

We tend to trust numbers that spit out of spreadsheets, right?  I mean, computers are objective and trustworthy!

Not so much.  Excel 2007 has a major bug.  If you multiply 850 times 77.1, the answer comes out to be 100,000.

Maybe it’s time to update Pierre Gallois’ famous quote:

“If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no one dares criticize it.”
- Pierre Gallois

How about ..."And even if you put good numbers into Excel, tomfoolery may still come out.”

Even my old slide rule, with its 3-sig limited accuracy, delivers 65,5xx… a much smaller error, and easy enough to resolve to the full number with a couple more steps.

Updates: 

  • In the comments Ed posted a very good link below to Joel On Software Explaining the Excel Bug - especially interesting because Joel worked on early versions of Excel.
  • and Mark at Good Math, Bad Math, discusses The Excel 65,535=100,000 Bug and floating-point operations as related to display and printing.

Posted by George on 09/25/07 at 08:42 AM
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Ahh… I finally dumped Linux and got back to Windows!

Over the last several months, I’ve been using a couple different flavors of Linux on my IBM/Lenovo X40 laptop, with the idea of writing a review of desktop Linux the way I did for the Apple laptop that I borrowed.  Of course, since I didn’t have to give Linux back in a month, I used it for a greater length of time.

As with the Apple, I didn’t try to become a super-geek in the OS being tested.  The parameters of the test were a knowledgeable Windows user stranded with the unfamiliar OS, sink or swim.

Linux worked pretty well, though there were a couple extremely annoying glitches.  In the final analysis I just preferred Windows XP more, and Windows is the native home for two of my six favorite applications. (Yes, I know it is possible to tuck then into Wine but then I’m not really testing the Linux apps, am I?)

This is only a review-preview.  I just started working on the actual review, which will be ready when it’s ready.  In the meantime, here Information Week’s very pessimistic assessment of Linux’ chances at desktop dominance.

Posted by George on 09/22/07 at 07:30 PM
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Microsoft Expression Web Editor: first contact

I’ve begun working with Microsoft Expression Web editor, and I must say, it’s a pretty decent standards-based ripoff of Dreamweaver.  But the code view has a blinking validation notifier that actually interferes with cursor placement - obnoxious! 

Will Microsoft ever create a good product without at least one feature that turns using it into a grinding endurance test? Stay tuned…

Posted by George on 09/13/07 at 09:09 AM
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“Web Developer” Firefox plugin

For sheer “amplitude of dude! you should totally check this out!” utility (and assuming you are involved in creating web pages at any level) here is the most totally awesome Firefox plugin for those in the HTML/page design crowd:

Web Developer

Sorry about the excess of superlatives.  It’s a free, incredibly useful suite of web/graphics/css analysis tools that fits right into Firefox.  And Webs05 knew about it since February and didn’t tell me. Of course, being younger and hipper, he’s always out ahead on this stuff…

Posted by George on 07/06/07 at 11:29 AM
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DIE!, foul creature, DIE!

I’m typing email addresses into a spreadsheet.  Excel helpfully turns them into hyperlinks that automatically start up a “new message” in Outlook if I click on them.  They reformat themselves into unreadable 7.5-point, blue, underlined type. 
I never asked Excel to do any of this.

After some investigation, I found out that the auto-correct options have been moved to “proofing” which is buried under the “Excel Options” button which is well isolated from the flow of menu items, under the new “Office” icon in the upper-left of the screen.  I drilled down and killed the offending feature, but IT WON’T DIE!!! I’m still getting tiny hyperlinks when I type in email addresses.

It’s probably because the spreadsheet was created in Excel 2003 - not that I care about the reason for Microsoft’s incompetence - but when will they get it through their heads that fancy isn’t necessarily better, and just because they can dream up a function is not a sign from heaven that we want it in our software.  I have seen many users reduced to screaming rage by the counterintuitiveness of their uncooperative applications.  Sometimes the voice is my own… it is difficult to be certain. 

Posted by George on 06/27/07 at 09:32 AM
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Software installation lies

I got a new Fuji Finepix S5200 camera, and like all new cameras it came with a CD full of software.  And man, they’re serious about it!  You’re looking at the business end of the USB connector cable.  They put a little sleeve on the USB connector that says “Important” (on the other side, it says “Achtung!” which I like even better.  It’s physically impossible to plug in the camera without handling this warning.

So I wonder, is it really “important?” what tragedy will happen if you are foolish enough to connect the camera without installing their crappy software? Will the camera get screwed up?  Will you have to send it in for service?  Lost in device-driver hell?

Try “none of the above”.  Windows will recognize the camera as a removable drive.  You can use My Computer to cut the picture files from the camera, and paste them into your “My Pictures” folder.  Then use your favorite picture software to manage the pictures. 

Really.  I’ve been telling people this for years: resist the gravitational pull of the instructions - don’t put that CD into your computer.  You don’t need it.  Being in computer support, I’ve encountered a lot of computers totally jammed up with aftermarket device software, conflicting utilities that try to make the process “easy” for users.  Just Say No.

(The camera was on sale at Sam’s Club for $175 - really a very good deal if you can put up with all the consumer doo-dads built into it.  This is for times when only a 10x zoom will do - eventually I’m still going to get a waterproof pocket-sized Olympus Stylus 720 like Webs05’s, for everyday use)

Posted by George on 06/15/07 at 09:21 AM
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Microsoft Office 2007 - “The Ribbon”

As Don Norman says; “the biggest problem in design is keeping features out”.  Bloated “featuritis” is in full flower in Microsoft Office, to the extent that your friendly Office suite has many more controls than a Boeing 747 cockpit.

One way of coping with such complexity would be to reduce to essential features, but there is already free software that does that.  So Microsoft is faced with the problem of finding a better menu system.  The tabbed interface is a good approach to that problem, allowing larger interface components in an intuitive layout.

Continued...

Posted by George on 05/11/07 at 12:05 PM
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Microsoft is dead

Paul Graham, the venture-capitalist who wrote Hackers & Painters, founded ViaWeb, and took a major part in the rise of Yahoo!, is one of my favorite essayists.  And he proposes that Microsoft is dead.  They’d better read this essay carefully unless they want to wind up as a negative example in business classes.

Posted by George on 04/18/07 at 07:13 AM
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Slightly different Linux plan

I’ve tried to work with Linux a couple other times, but made a mistake in how I went about it.  Trouble is, I would put it on a separate laptop or in a dual-boot partition on my main laptop, so I still had the Windows option.  Well hell, I’m only human.  It’s just too easy to do the familiar thing and use Windows, which gets the immediate task done but doesn’t expand my skills any.

One reason it’s worth the effort to try is that Linux can be a real problem-solver for certain purposes.  And, we use Linux on at least three of our servers and our network administrator might like to take a trip somewhere or stay home with the flu once in a while.  So it would be nice if I weren’t a complete dolt around penguins.  (I don’t usually say Windows/Mac/Linux is “better” or “best” but they are variously suited to different purposes.)

This time I blew away the Windows partition on my main laptop, installing SUSE 10.x. So it’s sink or swim. There are friendlier “distros” of Linux, such as Ubuntu and - I can’t remember the other do-gooder distro - but I chose SUSE because it’s from Novell, a company that seems really serious about getting work done, and because that’s what we use on our three servers.  This is one of the annoying things about Linux; once you’ve tried one distro, well, you’ve tried one distro.

Early impressions: installation was geek-easy but not user-easy.  Some things aren’t working yet, like the SD chip reader so no pictures on the blog until I get that working.  The wireless set up perfectly on the first try - easy if you have the right chipset, damn near impossible if you don’t.  This laptop has an Intel ProSet wireless chipset.  (You can use an NDIS envelope to run Windows drivers on other chipsets, but this solution displeases me esthetically).  The oversize mouse pointer is beautiful - better than even Windows’ and much better than Mac, which was clunky and pixilated.  The video drivers seem of above-average quality.  I already managed to crash the file manager but it just restarted without a hiccup and the system went on running - very nice.  And it comes with a tremendous array of software, most of which has goofy names.  I spent an hour editing photos with “Gimp” last night and it is very comparable to Photoshop 6, maybe a bit easier to use (and runs considerably faster).  But why the hell did they name it “Gimp?” And of course it comes with OpenOffice, which I do prefer to Microsoft Office because of its cleaner design. 

UPDATE: I’ve got the suspend-to-memory configured so when I close the lid, it goes to sleep.  Couldn’t get the SD chip reader working - Webs sez it’s a chip issue so I picked up a tiny Lexar USB chip reader for eighteen bucks that works fine.  Slightly less convenient but now I can upload pictures again using “gnomeFTP”.  The center IBM pointer button scrolls after some configuring.  The wireless works great but I have to remind it to connect (which it does easily) when waking up the computer.  So far SUSE is a lot less slick than Windows out-of-the-box, but looks like it can configure up very well.  We’ll see if I go back to Windows after using it for a month. 

Posted by George on 04/11/07 at 06:07 AM
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