LinLog

Desk upgrade

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

The second half of my latest upgrade arrived from NewEgg today. I ordered two more gigabytes of RAM - one for my desktop, one for my laptop.

As a brief aside, the laptop upgrade was much smoother than I expected. I'd never tried upgrading a laptop, so I wasn't sure how hard it would be. Turns out adding more RAM to my Inspiron B120 was actually pretty easy. I just followed the Dell service manual. The process was pretty much "open up the correct panel, then slide in RAM module."

The desktop upgrade arrived just in time, since I was about to disassemble and move the system anyway. That's because I just finished "upgrading" my computer desk.

We've consolidated office space, so Sarah and I are now sharing one large desk. Of course, I still have to finish putting the doors and drawers back in and get some keyboard trays, but it's basically done. I built it out of kitchen cabinets and laminate counter. It's a little higher than a normal desk, but it should serve us well. It will also be a lot sturdier than the pre-fab fiber-board desks its replacing.

Reverse DVD pain

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

While all went well with purchasing that DVD set off eBay, all did not go well with watching it. The first disk didn't play correctly in either of our DVD players. Yet, oddly enough, it was fine in my PC. Isn't that the reverse of how it's supposed to work?

The DVD set is a Japanese release of the first season of Kyo Kara Maoh. It's an all-region disk that has both the Japanese and English dubs. I'd have preferred an American release, but they didn't have any boxed-sets available yet and buying the disks one at a time would have cost at least 6 times as much. The disks came in imaculate condition, with no visible scratches or defects, still in the factory shrink-wrap.

We have two stand-alone DVD players in the house, one for each TV. One is at least 5 years old, the other about 2 or three years old. Both of them displayed the same problem when playing the first disk in the set. During playback, I experienced random pauses, ranging in duration from just a moment to several seconds. The pauses seemed to become more frequent and longer lasting the longer than disk played. However, the pauses did not appear to be due to disk defects, because they never occurred in the same places. In addition, the entire third episode was completely unplayable. The video was garbled and the had frequent pauses and skips, eventually just hanging. And, of course, the menus are seriously messed up and only sort of work.

The weird thing is that when I put this same disk in the DVD-ROM drive on my PC, it plays perfectly. No pauses, no glitches, and both the third episode and the menus are fine. Normally, what with CSS and all, you'd expect it to work the other way, with the PC having problems while the stand-alone appliance works flawlessly. But not this time.

I'm still not sure exactly what the problem is. I've read that newer DVDs can expose bugs in older players. I do know that the DVD is a little wonky, what with having only 1 title, but 48 chapters, not to mention weird subtitle settings. But it seems odd that both players would have the same bug. So far, the all-seeing oracle, a.k.a. Google, has failed to turn up any answers. Does anyone else have any ideas?

Windows has problems with FAT32?

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Here's a weird one. For some reason, my Digitalway MPIO FL100 MP3 player can't see files that are copied onto the removable SD card from Windows. But files copied from Linux show up fine. Is it just me, or does that seem a little backwards?

What happened was that I wanted to listen to a few podcasts this morning. I didn't feel like running downstairs to get the SD card out of the MP3 player, and I didn't want to download them from work, so I just dumped the files on my USB thumb drive before I left the house. When I got to work, I whipped out my portable USB SD card reader, copied the files from the thumb drive to the SD card, and slapped the SD card back in my MPIO. I turned the player on, started browsing the playlist and...nothing. The files just weren't there.

My frist thought was that something must have gone wrong. Maybe I disconnected the card too early and the files didn't copy. So I hooked the SD card back up to my Windows XP workstation and checked. Hmm.... The files were definitely there. Were they corrupt? Didn't seem to be. The file sizes looked right and they played in Windows Media Player.

Maybe it was because the card was almost full. It's a 1GB SD card and there were only 6MB left. Maybe the MPIO can't quite address a full gigabyte. So I moved the files I was trying to play off the card, deleted a few old files, and moved the new ones back. OK, now I've got about 50MB free, which has always been enough before. But when I plugged the card back into the MPIO, it was still a no-go.

After a few more unsuccessful variations on this same process, I started to wonder if the problem was with the SD card reader or even Windows itself. After all, this never happened with my internal SD card reader on my home Kubuntu system. So just for the heck of it, I fired up a copy of Kubuntu running in VMware. I plugged in the SD card reader, moved the MP3s off the card, unmounted and remounted, and moved them back on. This time, when I put the card back in the MPIO, it saw the files. I was able to select them in the playlist and they played perfectly.

At this point, the question is: What the hell happened? According to fsck.vfat, the SD card uses a FAT32 filesystem with long filename support and doesn't show any errors. Theoretically, Windows should be able to read and write that with no problems. And it can - but not in a way the MPIO can read. Is there some extension to FAT32 that Windows uses but Linux and the MPIO don't? Is this due to some implementation-specific detail where the MPIO agrees with Linux but not Windows? There's got to be some rational explanation for this. Does anybody have any ideas?

Loading up the iPod

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

This is going to be a short one, because Sarah and I are on our way out the door. We're taking the weekend to go to the lilac festival. To that end, I finally loaded up basically all the music we have on her iPod.

Is it just me, or are the iPod apps available on Linux a little lacking. I like the iPod integration in Amarok, but there doesn't seem to be a simple and obvious way to say, "Just dump this 10GB directory onto the iPod" or "dump the new files in this 10GB directory onto the iPod."

GTKPod, on the other hand, makes it relatively easy to dump large directories onto the iPod. However, have you seen the user interface? I found it more than a little confusing. For instance, why is the "save" button the one that transfers the files? That just doesn't make sense to me. And neither does the rest of it, frankly.

I guess I'm going to have to do some more research on this iPod stuff at some point. But not today.

DHCP fails on boot in Feisty

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

On Friday, I upgraded my laptop to Kubuntu Feisty. For the most part, it was uneventful. My only immediate complaint was that this upgrade, too, took 24 hours to complete. There are just too many places where the upgrade tool prompts for user input, so if you walk away, it end up taking 5 times as long as it should.

However, later on, I did find one problem: my wireless network wasn't working. It's an integrated Broadcom BCM4318 which uses the Windows drivers through NDISwrapper. NDISwrapper was still working and the wireless extensions seemed to be functioning properly. Moreover, the interface was up. It's just that it never got an address from the DHCP server.

After some experimentation, it turned out that just restarting the network devices with sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart got things working. Same thing if I did an ifdown and ifup or even manually ran dhclient. Once the system if booted, pretty much any network re-initialization will fix things. It's just on initial boot that I don't get an IP.

Another thing is that if I use the knetworkmanager to reconnect my wireless access point, I lose my IP again. For some reason, the progress never gets past 28%, the "Activation stage: Configuring device" stage. I suspect there's some relationship, but I really have no idea what it is. I'm not that deep into the bowels of Ubuntu configuration.

The immediate fix was to simply add /etc/init.d/networking restart to my /etc/rc.local. That gets us an IP at login time and keeps Sarah from calling me in because she can't check her e-mail. In the long term, I'd like to figure out what the heck is causing this. There's a bug in Launchpad that looks similar, but I didn't see a fix.

Sabotaging productivity

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

This week, .NET Rocks had a great interview with Jeff Atwood. Jeff is a really insightful guy and listening to him was as much fun as reading his blog. In fact, this interview inspired me to start listening to other episodes of .NET Rocks. Well, that and the fact that Carl Franklin co-hosts Hanselminutes, which I also enjoy.

One the topics the interview touch on was Jeff's Programmer's Bill of Rights. It enumerates six things a programmer should expect if he is to be productive.

I found this both depressing and comforting. It's depressing because, as Jeff pointed out in the interview, these things are neither unreasonable nor hard to fix. You can basically just throw money at them without putting in any real effort. These conditions should not be widespread enough that anyone needed to bring them up.

As for comfort...well, it's just nice to know you're not alone. I'm currently one of those poor schleps Jeff talked about who's still working on a single 17" CRT monitor, a three year old PC, and sitting in a cubicle right next to one of the network printers. I'm not even within sight of a window and my cube is literally just barely big enough to fit my desk. I write my code in SharpDevelop because my boss won't spring for a visual studio upgrade. Two years ago it was, "Well, we'll wait for the 2005 version to come out instead of buying 2003." This year it was, "We'll wait for the 2007 version to come out instead of buying 2007." And last but not least, despite the fact that we write mostly reporting-heavy information systems, I use the version of Crystal Reports that came bundled with VS.NET because, as crappy as it is, it's the best thing available to me.

I have to agree with Jeff, Richard, and Carl. The message you get from a setup like this is clear: you are not important. We don't value you as a person, we don't value your work, and we're certainly not going to waste money on making your life easier. The net effect is that morale, especially among the more clueful people in my office, is in the gutter. There's misery galore and productivity is next to nothing. But fortunately we work for the government, so nobody notices. And no, that was not a joke.

Sometimes it seems like our environment is tailored specifically to sabotage productivity. It's kind of like the keyboard they put on the laptops that the police use. I'm the happless IT guy who has to do configuration and maintenance on these laptops, and I can tell you that the only explanation for those keyboards is that I did something really, really terrible in a past life. They're ruggedized keyboards made of semi-hard plastic. The problem is that they're so rugged that it's completely impossible to type on them. You have to use the two-finger method because the keys are too hard to press with your little fingers. Trying to type with any speed at all is completely futile. And yet the cops are somehow expected to type up tickets and accident reports on these things. It's a wonder they even give out tickets anymore. Actually, maybe that was the idea....

I suppose this is what I get for taking an IT job when I really wanted to be in software development. In retrospect, maybe I should have stayed a full-time student that extra semester or two, finished my damned thesis and looked for a job with a real software company. But I thought I needed some experience and this was the best offer I got, so I took it. Unfortunately, I was too inexperienced to know that crappy experience isn't necessarily better than no experience.

Though on the up side, when I took this job is when I moved in with my (now) wife. It also provided the money that paid for that engagement ring. So in some ways this was the right decision. It's just the professional advancement wasn't one of them.

Now I just need to finish my damned Master's thesis and get the hell out of here.

Laptop battery life

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I finally got around to looking up solution to my laptop power problem. I'd actually never really worried about it, since I almost always use the laptop plugged in, but I read a blog post complaining about battery life under Ubuntu, so I figured I'd look into it.

My Dell Inspiron B120 normally got about an hour an ten minutes on battery. I never actually ran Windows on it, so I have no basis for comparison. However, I'd read other comments about people getting two to three times as much battery life on Windows. For instance, my brother's Inspiron 1501 gets about 3 hours.

The good news is that there's "laptop mode." By flipping on the ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE setting in /etc/defaultacpi-support, I gained about 20 or 30 minutes.

The bad news is that there's not an awful lot of other tweaking to be done. There are some other tips on the Ubuntu wiki, but I haven't found anything that seems to make a dramatic difference. At least, not anything I can configure with a truly intimate knowledge of the system.

So basically, it seems like we're kind of out of luck for the time being. But I'm not going to complain too loud. I'm just glad all the hardware in the laptop actually functions.

Semi-working OpenGL

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

After playing around with my /etc/X11/xorg.conf a bit, I seem to have OpenGL sort of working on my new monitor. I should probably still replace my aging ATI Xpert 128 card, but for the time being I can at least play ZSNES at a decent resolution.

The main problem was that my card apparently can't do 1440x900 resolution with 24-bit color. In order to get DRI working with anything above 1024x768, I had to drop down to 16-bit color. That does make things just a little less pretty, but I can live with it. However, even after that, the generated monitor setup still didn't work.

After hacking up my xorg.conf file, I seem to come up with something functional. I've been testing two monitor setups, with corresponding screen setups. The first, named "Generic Monitor," is the monitor section generated by the Kubuntu display configuration tool. It has about 16 modelines and looks oh-so-very important. The second is "Old Monitor," which is my simple, hand-written configuration. It simply has horizantal and vertical refresh rates and two modelines stolen from the other section. Both monitor configurations work for 2D graphics, but I've only been able to get the "Old Monitor" setup to work with DRI. For some reason, when using the "Generic Monitor" setup, the glxinfo command dies with a segmentation fault. Don't ask me why. I was just happy to get both OpenGL and widescreen resolution working at the same time.

Small problem with new monitor

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

All is not sweetness and light in hardware land. The other day, I discovered a problem with my new monitor. Or, to be more precise, it's a problem with using my old video card with my new monitor. It seems I can't get OpenGL support for my old 16MB ATI Xpert 128 card (Rage 128 chipset) to work in widescreen mode.

It's weird. I can get 3D acceleration no problem when running at 1024x768. But when I switch to the widescreen aspect ration and run at 1440x900, hardware acceleration is just gone. The card is supposed to support resolutions much higher than my monitor can handle, so I'm not sure why this is. I suspect it's the widescreen, as I haven't found anything one way or the other about the card's support for this.

I've looked at the X.org logs, but I don't really know enough about the inner workings of it to make much of them. I suspect it had something to do with the highlighed lines shown below, but I really don't know. I suspect I'll just have to get a new card. It's not like I'm not due anyway.

New monitor

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I got my new monitor today.

It's a 19-inch widescreen flatpanel. I ordered it from NewEgg for $170 plus free shipping.

The monitor this replaces is an old 14-inch CRT.

And when I say "old" I mean it - I've been using this monitor for over ten years. I'd been hoping this would break down so I'd have an excuse to replace it, but it never did. I finally ended up overcoming my inherent cheapness and replacing it anyway.

The difference really is like night and day. I can actually sit back in my chair and still read the monitor now. I'm really liking the wide screen, too. I've only used it for a couple hours, I'd say this monitor is probably the best $170 I've spend on hardware.