I took the plunge into Hardy Heron already. So far I have mainly good things to report. I had issues getting the NVidia driver to work right with my 8800 GTS 512, but after utterly uninstalling the one that envy installed under Gutsy Gibbon and installing the NVidia driver through recovery root prompt with a -f to force installation, the driver's installated fine. Another hardware-related issue arose from btnx, which I used to map a couple mouse buttons, seeming to be a little confused. I had to redetect buttons, for example, then the newly remapped buttons work fine in most things, except that Firefox doesn't seem to be consistent with it. I'll have to experiment more to see if I can figure out what's happening.

But as I said, so far, mostly so good. I want to play with the new task scheduling to see if I can break it. Seems like CPU usage with BOINC using no more than 80% of the CPU is a bit odd. I mean to say that CPU usage had a pattern when looking at the System Monitor in Gutsy, but not so much in Hardy, where both CPU cores tend to stick around 100% usage more of the time... Ah, I forgot about the file indexing, that's probably rolling in the background and since I turned off the indexer tray icon I'm just not seeing it. Durr.

The Firefox 3 beta that's included with Hardy needs some more work, but I expect updates to come in as the application's development reaches release. Inclusion of a beta as a main browser in a desktop OS is a bit odd to me, but it's just about fully baked, so no biggie.

Seems like Hardy's a touch more responsive than Gutsy, but I haven't pushed it hard, as I said above. I think the thing I like most about Hardy is the commitment to be supported for three years.

Now I'm off to play with multimedia apps to see how they do.

Internet access here at the haus was amazingly slow for the last couple of days, even after some warm reboots of the firewall/router, changing DNS entries, etc. I didn't spot anything on cox.net's network status about an outage, and was getting normal network speeds on the internal network. Traceroutes to multiple external sites weren't consistent as to where there might be an issue. I took my time troubleshooting because I didn't have a good reason to need full Internet speed and figured that cox.net would find the problem in a couple days if it was in their network.

I finally looked at my firewall/router logs when the problem didn't resolve by day three and found a bunch of malformed ICMP packets hitting my external IP address from multiple external sources. It looked like my router was under a light DDOS attack. Why? Hell if I know, I don't have anything running back here that might be of interest other than my file server, which stays powered off when no one's using a system on the network, like all the client systems. The router was saying that the packets might have been a JOLT attack. Reading further, I discovered that JOLT attacks target Windows boxes trying to lock 'em up, so someone may have thought I had a Windows box available at this IP address that they wanted to lock up for some reason. More likely it was some automated script kiddie activity. Again, wtf? Stupid script kiddies fishing for whatever joy they can, I guess. Maybe since my firewall/router didn't go down, their automated setup just kept at it, trying to knock it down before moving on. Would have been fun to tie up their resources further, but my wife and I gotta have our IntarWeb when we want it.

Simply turning off the target system usually resolves a JOLT attack according to the above site, so I cold restarted the firewall/router, effectively dropping the target completely off the Web for a couple minutes, and when the thing came back online, poof, Internet connectivity returned to normal speed. I'm not seeing malformed ICMP packets coming in like they were before, either.

My unknown assailant probably has chalked up another Windows box or router locked up and moved on. Whatever. Hope their system(s) overheat.

Got a new 500 gig hard drive the other day to replace the 120 gigger I've had for long time. I knew it would be rough replacing my existing hard drive with another one thanks to my dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Gutsy configuration, but I wanted to do the deed to learn what was involved. I'm funny that way about computers.

The story that follows is primarily geared toward techies. Other readers may want to leave the entry now, heheh.

Tools used: Ubuntu Gutsy AMD 64-bit CD, Recovery is Possible Linux boot CD, Windows XP Pro original setup CD.

Both drives are SATA drives, and because of the way that the SATA controllers are physically placed on my motherboard, my old drive is seen by Linux as /dev/sda2, while my new drive was /dev/sda1. Since my motherboard BIOS has a setting for which hard drive to boot from, this is fine.

I started by adding the new drive into the system and booting up under Ubuntu. I ran gparted to partition the new drive. Since my original drive was initially formatted as a single NTFS partition, then I added Ubuntu on as a dual-boot, my first partition is the NTFS Windows partition, second partition is ext3 for Ubuntu, and then I have an extended partition with 2.5 gigs of Linux swap space. I mirrored this setup on the new drive, roughly matching the proportions of the NTFS and ext3 partitions but leaving 3 gigs for swap space.

I rebooted the system into Ubuntu Gutsy using the Live CD so I could manipulate file systems "from on high". I can't express how cool Live CDs are to me now. Anyway, I copied the old Windows and Ubuntu data to the proper new partitions using rsync. Here's where I blew it on the Windows side to start with, but more about that later.

I had the presence of mind after reading some other Ubuntu hard drive upgrade stories to find out the uuid of the new partitions and edit both the /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab files on the new drive to update their uuid entries with the new partition information. Note for the future: Looking under /dev/[disk]/by-uuid/ you find links to the /dev/[partition] so you can figure out which uuid goes to what partition without guessing. Lost about an hour to guessing on those before I figured that one out.

I rebooted using the Recovery Is Possible (RIP) CD, which I now highly recommend in any Linux user's toolkit. I dropped to a command line from GRUB (type "c") and typed in "setup (hd0) (hd0,1)" to install GRUB into the new MBR and tell it to look at the second partition on the drive for boot information (remember Windows is on the first partition). That went fine.

Then I pulled the old hard drive out of the configuration and booted into Ubuntu Gutsy. Bada boom, bada bing.

Windows wasn't booting right yet, because I hadn't put system information on the Windows partition yet. DOH! So I booted up the Windows XP setup CD, told it to reformat the first partition, and let it start installing off the CD. There's a point partway through the XP installation where it restarts the system to boot from the hard drive and install more off the CD. This was where I pulled the CD out of the drive and booted instead into the RIP CD configuration, because at this point I know the Windows XP system information has been written. I also know that in the process, XP has overwritten the master boot record with its own boot information, so I redid the GRUB setup trick from the RIP CD again and rebooted into my Ubuntu Gutsy configuration. The Windows XP partition mounted as usual because I have it automount on startup in Ubuntu Gutsy, so I rsync'd files from the old Windows configuration to the new one, then rebooted the system into Windows XP. There have been a few hiccups with Windows, notably things like the desktop.ini files showing up all over the place because they aren't hidden anymore, and the recycle bin got corrupted, but overall things look like they're playing well. Why? rsync probably didn't keep Windows file attributes, my attempt at getting at the Windows admin password through an Ultimate Boot CD utility to boot into a Windows XP recovery console mangled some parts of the registry, or both. Either way, I'll probably copy old to new through Windows XP next time.

So the new drive's now running both my Windows XP and Ubuntu Gutsy configurations and I've pulled out the old drive to keep as a spare. The new drive's noticeably faster than the previous one, which is nice. Total time on the upgrade, including headscratching and booboo resolution was about a day. Total work time was probably about 8 hours, most of which was copying files hither and yon.

This exercise has shown me a few things. I have a much better understanding of Linux's hard drive "guts" and where in Ubuntu to look for device and boot configuration data. Ubuntu is easier to migrate than Windows XP. I don't think I have a use for the Ultimate Boot CD anymore, much as I used to like it. Recovery Is Possible is an excellent resource for Linux hard drive upgrades and recovery. Most importantly, though, I now know that I can rebuild my entire configuration from backups if there's a catastrophic meltdown. This last one makes me mighty happy, and I feel like my Ubuntu-fu is almost as good as my Windows-fu now. Am I going to get Vista-fu? I'll try not to for as long as possible. I'll just keep getting mo' better with Ubuntu.

I'm still using Linux for my primary desktop for the foreseeable future and wanted to weigh in on the state of multimedia compatibility. Well, at least my own experiences. To catch up some readers, I've jailbroken my iPod Touch, it's running the 1.3 firmware, and I'm able to connect to it in Linux through SSH. Which brings me to the crux of this, a commentary on the state of multimedia apps on Linux. Frankly, they're behind Windows apps, which makes me grumpy enough to not put links in this post.

Amarok, for whatever reason, doesn't play well with my GNOME-based Linux setup. I have no idea why, but it locks right up on startup. Maybe I should try it again since the KDE libraries have been upgraded recently. This left me with gtkpod as my Linux iPod-related music manager. gtkpod wants to look at my existing file library when it starts up, when I change some information on a song, etc. It becomes a click, do something else for a few minutes, click, do something else for a few minutes routine. Not good. Synching to the iPod Touch is slow, mainly because I have most of my music library in Ogg Vorbis format that gtkpod happily converts to mp3 for me on the fly. This I like.

On the Windows side, there's iTunes, which is functional but system-intrusive, and the latest beta of MediaMonkey, which I purchased because it does what gtkpod does, doesn't intrude like iTunes, and is fairly speedy except for the ogg-to-mp3 conversions. iTunes doesn't let me put 3/4 of my library onto my iPod Touch because it doesn't want to even look at Ogg Vorbis files in its default configuration. Screw dat.

So my best iPod Touch manager is a Windows application now. 'Sokay, I'm in Windows playing games fairly often anyway. But it's irritating. The problem is Apple's dopey attempt to control the iPod's content. This is hardware that's being marketed to tech-savvy, Apple, the community will find workarounds. Open it up! I have an iRiver H340 that I can directly access like a hard drive (actually it is a hard drive) through USB. No special software's needed, I just plunk files onto the thing. If there's something new on the unit when it powers up, it updates its database and away we go. The iRiver also plays .ogg files, which probably make up over 75% of my music. But you guys have probably heard about that enough already in my blog.

OK, so after writing this so far, I noticed that my Audacious configuration is playing my freshly-ripped music with pops and clicks. I dropped the CPU usage on my BOINC configuration without any relief. Thinking maybe it was the original file, I played the same file flawlessly through XMMS. DAMMIT! I'll play with it more some other time.

My point is this: Linux's amazing flexibility has a serious drawback in the form of a lack of stable and cohesive media handling. While I'm no slouch when it comes to doing crazy stuff to get something to work on Linux and understand the value of such as learning experience, I'd rather not have to do it. I'd also rather be able to have one or two applications to do my media than one that's better at handling my 5.1 speaker setup or WMV files or DVDs with deep menu systems than another.

Linux leet hax0rz, please can I have something that works as well for me as MediaMonkey for organizing my music and interacting with my iPod Touch, and something with the excellent playback capabilities of foobar2000? I'm too dumb and busy to figure it out on my own. Actually, I may try foobar2000 using Wine. I already know MediaMonkey doesn't work under Wine.

Sometimes I miss Windows's "it just works" when it comes to multimedia.

I've now got a jailbroken 1.1.3 firmware iPod Touch. Some of the apps I was using didn't quite work right with the new firmware but that seems to have been resolved with a bit of upgrading. I learned some things about how ssh works to get the iPod Touch syncing back up with Ubuntu again, too. What good is a toy if it's not edjikayshunal? The deeds are done and I'm good to go, back to using it as my primary in-car music source. Aw yeah.

Best of all, no iTunes was involved, though I find myself browsing through the podcasts once in a while.

I dove into the three Sandman graphic novels that one of my stepdaughters gave me for Christmas last week and utterly devoured them. There's unbelievably good stuff in there, and now I have GOT to get the last graphic novel to finish up the story because the ending of the last book I have leaves a gigantic change that needs resolution. Mr. Gaiman, I salute you and thank you again for this amazing literary journey.

I'm still cruising through The Secret Adversary and enjoying its breathless sensational pace and the whole English society setting. One of the protagonists calls a friendly young man a brick in one sentence, and while I thought at first that she was berating him unjustly for dimwittedness, I learned from context that she meant he was rock solid and dependable, as one example. Another fun difference from current usage is that "cute" is used to mean "smart". It's fun.

I haven't started Battle Royale or any of my new Bill Bryson books as my wife's tasked me with reading some of the baby-related books that she's been going through. I may have to give Battle Royale back to its owner unread.

Not that interesting this post, there's been a lot going on in meatspace these past couple of weeks. Content here will pick up, though.

I got my iPod Touch syncing through Ubuntu Gutsy via gtkpod! It's not a full solution, because gtkpod doesn't handle some of my files correctly, possibly due to directory depths on my file server, so I have to look into that further, but gtkpod will convert my Ogg Vorbis files to mp3 format and send 'em to the iPod Touch. The full solution was, frankly, laborious. I'll go over all of the general steps, though, and let people hunt down the details because I sure as hell can't find them now.

• Ensure Wi-Fi is working at home for the iPod Touch.
  
• Set the iPod Touch to not autolock. Very important step while working with the Wi-Fi, avoiding many connectivity issues.
  
• Jailbreak the iPod Touch. I ended up leaving mine at 1.1.1 firmware release thanks to issues with the 1.1.2 jailbreaking.
  
• Install the BSD subsystem and OpenSSH onto the iPod Touch through the newly-available Installer.
  
• Set up OpenSSH on my Ubuntu system.
  
• Set up SSH access to the iPod Touch.
  
• Use ipod-convenience to set up a mount point of /media/ipod on my Ubuntu system and test it.
  
• Install the latest and greatest gtkpod. Configure it to point to my music library and the iPod Touch. Manually get gtkpod to add library subdirectories because it doesn't seem to go down more than a couple of directory levels. Test synchronizing a non-mp3 to the iPod Touch. Adjust as needed and retest. Repeat until it's working.

iTunes is still useful in case I totally blow out the iPod Touch or I feel a deep sense of urgency to upgrade the firmware. At this point I haven't got either of those issues, but I am interested in some of the podcasts I can get through there. I might rent movies through iTunes, too, I dunno. If I do, it'll be to watch 'em on my computer rather than the iPod Touch. I don't get why someone would want to watch a full length movie on such a tiny screen.

Anyway, this means my iPod Touch is now officially a useful toy for me rather than just interesting to dink around with. Thanks to all of the hackers and developers who are opening up the iPod Touch under Linux. I'm hunting for online tip jars for you people...

I did a quick review of this blog just for grins and was surprised to see that it's been going for almost two years now. So I survived all of 2007 without running some version of BBS or forum, the longest lapse in doing so in a couple of decades. I miss it sometimes. Other times I think about the amount of time I spent on it vs. the amount of time I have to do such things now. Still, it was a great social thing for me, and I don't regret much of the time spent at all. I wouldn't be nearly as good at figuring out how to do things on computers without that experience, wouldn't have my excellent stepdaughters because I wouldn't have met my first wife, and just wouldn't be me without having run The Place of Magic.

I know it's cliche to look back on the past at the beginning of a new year, but I think it's important to see where you've been to try to keep the journey so far in perspective so it's easier to focus on what's ahead. Unfortunately for me, there's a lot of regret involved in some of my past decisions. I was young for too long... heheh. But again, I wouldn't be me if I hadn't done things the way I have, and I'm pretty happy with me right now. Overall.

But enough about that, I've been considering some system upgrades lately that are much more interesting. I made the mistake of buying Unreal Tournament 3 recently and while it's playable on my system, my nearly two-year-old video card's just not up to the task of displaying sci-fi violence with Unreal Engine 3. The NVidia 6800GS-based card's treated me extremely well, even better than my last ATi card did for its "lifetime". I have my eyes on an NVidia 8800GTS video card with 320 megs of RAM, but other than playing this one game, I don't have a reason to upgrade. Really, I don't. Compiz Fusion is fine under Gnome with a considerable amount of visual bling, I just have the ol' hardware lust thing going again. I should put the money toward credit card payments. Dilemmas, dilemmas.

So the next day after writing the above I got a new video card in NVidia's 8800 line. While Windows XP installation was a breeze, Ubuntu seemed to fight every step of the way, first by blanking the screen out and turning my monitor off while the opening splash screen was going, and then by beating down just about every attempt I made to get the video drivers installed. I even installed links, the text Web browser, so I could search the Web because I couldn't get X to come up consistently.

Many thanks to the Ubuntu support forums and posts from the developers of Envy for helping me to resolve these two issues. The last issue I ran into was that the currently-released NVidia driver for this card pegs the fan speed at 100% and sounding like yet another jet engine of dooooom. The latest beta of nvclock has the option to force this particular card into auto fan speed mode, which is very quiet, but getting nvclock set up was a bit problematic as well, including a brief trip through dependency hell. I Learned Stuff Overall.

How's the video card? It's so fast I hardly even see it. Unbelievable. Unnecessary. But awesome. Half-Life 2 with everything turned all the way up is smooth as silk. Unreal Tournament 3, too. And everything else I have on here.

So back to reading things. I have trouble reading non-nerdiness and nerding at the same time.

This post saved without links so you guys can give Google a bit more of a workout.

HowTo Convert a Friend to Linux starts out hilarious and proceeds into thoughtful and helpful advice on this nerdtastic topic. One thing I thought was most interesting was the lack of dual booting or usage of a secondary system for Linux immersion. Both of these things have proven invaluable for me, a PC gamer who needs Windows to play many games on, and those fallback measures should prove at least useful for others.

In other news, IPv6 may be coming to a root DNS server near you on February 4 of this year. What does this mean? It means that full end to end IPv6 over the Internet will become possible without the use of any IPv4 (aka "The Way TCP-IP Is Now") hardware. It also means that sysadmins should check their DNS servers and firewalls for compatibility, though not IPv6 compatibility but with the ability to send and receive packets over 512 bytes in size. See the article for more details.

IPv6 is definitely coming, folks, and while IPv4's still going to be going strong for years, IPv6 is eventually going to beat it down. My prediction is that in five years IPv6 will be the predominant protocol used in new networks. Late this year I plan to look at my network hardware and nodes and see what I'd need to upgrade to IPv6. I probably won't make the switch, even partially, until 2009 at the very earliest, but we'll see.

Feedbooks.com, one of my favorite online book sources, has a rough beta of their iNewsStand software available for the iRex iLiad. I haven't tried it yet, but this service is poised to be a killer app for any ebook reader that supports it, able to bring in RSS feeds, Web-based news, books, Sudoku puzzles, and possibly other information and interactivity right onto the ereading device. It appears that FeedBooks already has a working Kindle version of this application. Bravo!

In other iLiad news, I find that browsing on the thing is just too slow. But reading a lot of text or PDFs on the iLiad is like night and day vs. the iPod Touch. There's no comparison at all. One funny side effect of the iPod Touch's touch screen is that the more you use it with your finger, the more finger grease ends up making reading a little tougher. It's never enough to seriously affect usability, but it's there. The screen's too small for serious text reading, but it's fine for interactive fiction and general Web browsing. Decent for Google Reader, too, with Google's special mobile device formatting. But for anything of decent size, the iLiad's the way to go. I like it more than regular paper books now.

I've been exchanging paper books with a friend lately and recently finished up her copy of Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. I liked it a lot as a variation on the usual "world of dark scariness" type of story. There are vampires and shapeshifters and other Others in it and all of this works in the context of the stories, with explanations given as needed while the plot unfolds in each of the three parts like a chess game. Readers may be able to guess what's going on before the end of each story, which is also extremely fun. The absolutes of morality figure strongly into the novel's overarching plot and themes, and by the end of the final part, readers have a full understanding not only of the main character, but the nature of the epic struggle between the Light and the Darkness. There is also a hint of information about a third group, the Inquisition, which oversees the actions of the two more active groups, leaving plenty of space open for more exploration. Night Watch is an English translation of a Russian book, and so some Russian mannerisms, such as stating a person's full name fairly frequently during conversation, show through, but these don't detract from the book so much as ensure that the reader knows the action happens in a non-English-speaking part of the world. I'm looking forward to reading the next books in the series.

My friend seems to be into dark sorts of stories, having also loaned me a modern Japanese Lord of the Flies tale called Battle Royale and another book called Wraeththu. Battle Royale is almost unreadable for me, basically looking more like a gratuitous slaughterfest than a revisitation of the morality play that Lord of the Flies presents. I'm going to plow through Battle despite the occasional survivor count notices plastered throughout the text because it's supposedly much more subtle than it seems. Wraeththu, written by Storm Constantine, is about Young Hermaphroditic Mutants In Love, and after reading the first novel of the trilogy between this book's covers, I can't stomach more. I don't understand why there are so many weird names for places, people, and things, or why most members of this astoundingly powerful new race have such gigantic, sappy relationship hangups. Constantine has generated a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting pregnant with interesting story possibilities, but it seems as if he's using it as an outlet for Anne Rice-esque passionate vampire stories that are dissimilar enough to Rice's tales to avoid being lumped wholesale into the same cauldron with Poppy Z. Brite and others of that genre. I guess I'm not into "standard" romance genre fare, even with mutants and magic.

I'm definitely more picky about literature than I thought I was a few months ago. Maybe it's that I have so much to read now via my iLiad and my threshold for what I want to spend time on has risen as a result. I also got three Sandman graphic novels and some Bill Bryson books from one of my stepdaughters for Christmas and dammit, they're calling to me, so maybe that impatience is a factor right now... I'll post something more about Battle Royale after I finish it.

And finally, I started in on an Agatha Christie public domain novel called The Secret Adversary. So far I'm enjoying it as a variation on my usual fare and as a fine introduction to Christie's general writing style. I see why her work's so popular, with its engaging dialog and characterizations. I've been warned, though, that I shouldn't try to figure out who's done what until the very end, as Christie's notorious for bringing in extra characters and such during the final exposition scene, making correct deduction extremely difficult if not impossible in her stories. It's fun light reading, making a fine contrast with my other recent reading.

Happy holidays, folks! Hope this finds you all well and nerdly! It's definitely finding me that way, even though I'm having to venture into the Big Blue Room for social interaction. Actually, I like the familial gatherings, but the nerd in me twitches for a keyboard and Intarweb access despite enjoying the food and conversation.

My big geeky "present" so far this fine season has been a 16 gig iPod Touch that my place of employment gave me for my part in the extensive amount of work that my department has done for the company in the last year or two. And the fact that said extra workload has finally completed. To be honest, I wouldn't get one of these things myself, but for free, I'm finding it a hugely fun toy.

Why wouldn't I want an iPod Touch of my own? Well, for starters, the vast majority of my personal music library is in Ogg Vorbis format, which the iPod doesn't play. iTunes will play them, but the iPod doesn't. I already have a 40 gig iRiver H340 that plays my music and with Rockbox installed, I can have some other fun with it as well, so I really don't need a personal music player. I also, after working with it for a while, dislike iTunes a bunch. Gimme something like foobar2000 or the Audacious music player that isn't tied to Windows and, well, doesn't suck.

Don't get me wrong, iTunes does its basic job fairly effectively, managing content and synchronization from system to iPod nicely, but its playback quality isn't so hot (I have a 5.1 speaker setup and a near-audiophile pair of ears) and its inability to deal with directories of music for organization is a massive drawback for me. Since iTunes doesn't understand Ogg Vorbis tagging, probably 75% of my music comes up as "-" in iTunes's listing with no artist, etc. Brilliant. I'm not about to go through all of my Ogg Vorbis songs and convert them, thus my conclusion that iTunes sucks for music playback and library management for my particular configuration.

So I've been looking at how to use the iPod Touch for other tasks than music playback, and found some very interesting tasks for it to perform as well as the possibility of non-iTunes library management and iPod synchronization.

Obviously if I have a Wi-Fi connection I can do a few things that the iPod Touch is designed for such as surfing with the built-in Safari, browsing YouTube videos, and perusing the iTunes store. But I spotted a note in the Ubuntu community docs that tells about mounting the iPod as a file system under Linux and decided that hell, the thing was free, I might as well mess with it.

First step was to jailbreak the iPod. Jailbreaking took me an afternoon of messing around because it appears that there's a broken component of the 1.1.2 jailbreak upgrade. I might have done something wrong somewhere for the three times I tried and retried, but it looks like a bug in some library management that's out of my hands. Not a big deal there, I've left the iPod's firmware at 1.1.1 because I'm too lazy to work directly on a local copy of the package myself. Once jailbroken, the possibilities explode for possible things to do on the iPod Touch. I have a newly-released test version of ScummVM on my iPod Touch along with Curse of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam & Max Hit the Road to play. Lights Off has sucked up entirely too many hours of my time. I've customized the regular interface look. I have several English dictionaries installed on it. I'm considering grabbing NES and/or Playstation emulators. I'm sure someone's working on MAME already. I have the interactive fiction interpreter Frotz on the thing that I can use with my purchased Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom for hours of fun.

Best of all, though it's particularly nerdy, I'm able to mount the iPod's file system on my desktop through ssh and screw with it directly. I can use the iPod to store whatever I want through this, and there are already two applications that will take advantage of this interaction to allow for syncing from Linux to an iPod Touch/iPhone. However, the package issue I mentioned above appears to be affecting my ability to install the latest versions of these two apps so I'm using iTunes under Windows for the moment to sync music and videos onto the thing. Once that bug's resolved, though, bye bye Windows iTunes. Don't let the door hitcha on the way out.

Thanks to my workplace for giving me something to spend several days happily dinking away on, thanks to Apple for giving the hacker community such a fun toy to play with, and especially thanks to all the happy hackers out there building cool things for this beast. One thing I'd like to see is a local-running version of the iDice web app so I can roll dice on the iPod even if I don't have a WiFi connection. The other is for someone to patch the iPod music playing stuff to play .OGG files. I'm not able to work on this 'cuz I don't have the focus now for programming that I used to. kthkbye

Things around here are getting close to whatever passes for normal. I've been reading a bit, but most of my extra time's been going into fiddling with Ubuntu. As a result, I have a good Ubuntu pointing device configuration story for the nerdy.

As some of you may know, multi-button pointing device manufacturers spend their time creating good button configuration utilities and drives for Windows and sometimes Macs. Hardly any of them create Linux configurators for their devices. While Linux programs are available that allow for absolutely incredible pointing device configuration, solutions that mimic the functionality of Windows or Mac configurators end up being Frankensteinian combinations of multiple Linux tools. Most involve relating the results of a lot of trial and error. This is such a story.

I've been wrestling with having a not-fully-to-my-liking pointing device configuration for months now, battling with it off and on without success until this morning. A special shout-out is in order for two Web resources: This page gave me a couple of vital pieces of information I needed. Coupled with the excellent btnx application, the keys to the kingdom were mine, so to speak. btnx in particular is an awesome weapon in the Linux mouse configuration arsenal, but on to the story.

I use a USB Microsoft Trackball Explorer these days for my pointing needs. You might want to keep that picture up while I describe what I'm doing here. There are two buttons near the thumb, one large lower one and a smaller one above it. I'll call the two thumb buttons "big thumb" and "little thumb". A mousewheel sits between the two thumb buttons. Two more buttons sit to the right of the trackball, one under where my ring finger normally is, and one under my pinky. I'll call these "ring" and "pinky" buttons.

So the device has four "normal" buttons and a scroll wheel, which counts as three buttons (the wheel button itself, wheel up, and wheel down are all treated as buttons). That's a total of seven buttons, right? Actually, Linux picks up nine buttons on the device. My testing has determined that any button configured as button 6 will browse backward in Firefox, and button 7 is a browse forward. However, none of the buttons on my configuration normally map as buttons 6 or 7. The ring and pinky are buttons 8 and 9 according to xev. Go figure.

The normal configuration for the Trackball Explorer is for the big thumb button to left-click and the little thumb button to right-click. The ring and pinky buttons are set up as back and forward buttons for browsing in Windows, but Linux, as noted, doesn't care much about them. The mouse wheel acts as expected. This default configuration leaves the right click in an awkward position where users can't hit both right and left clicks at the same time. I'm not sure who thought this up, but it makes zero sense to me from a usability standpoint.

So my first configuration change is to move the right-click functionality to the ring finger button, freeing up the little thumb button for something else in the process. The tool of choice for this task is xmodmap, whose particular usage for this piece is generally covered here, though not for this exact application. Go check it out. Before working with xmodmap, though, this page mentioned taking a little visit to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to ensure that the right driver's being used. On the Trackball Explorer, I have to have the Protocol line under the mouse configuration set to "ExplorerPS/2" or the system only sees 5 buttons. I spent many moons wrestling with duplicate mouse button functions before spotting this gem. Ensure that the number of buttons is set to 9 and ZAxisMapping is "4 5" for the Trackball Explorer. Make any changes needed, then restart X (I just restarted my system to be sure). Again, these settings are specific to the Trackball Explorer. Trial and error or Google searches should net settings for other devices.

Now xmodmap can reconfigure the buttons. Install xmodmap via whatever means you have available and set it up to start with your X session. The whole command line should be "xmodmap .xmodmaprc" so it loads its configuration file from your home directory. I built my .xmodmaprc file as follows:
pointer = 1 2 8 4 5 6 7 3 9

This switches pointer buttons 3 and 8 to move the right-click functionality to the ring finger button and set the little thumb button to do nothing. Run "xmodmap .xmodmaprc" from your home directory to remap the pointer buttons, and test by seeing if the ring finger button acts as a right-click in various applications. The little thumb button shouldn't do anything when clicked.

This is fine and dandy, resolving a major complaint I have with the way this device is set up by default, but at this point the little thumb and pinky buttons aren't configured to do anything. I like to set them to copy and paste in Windows, so I went about setting them to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V respectively in Linux since most applications "know" those key combinations as copy and paste. btnx has this power, and while there are some other solutions out there that might have the same capability, they require some serious research and kludgery to get working. btnx is rather elegant for this purpose.

Get and install btnx and btnx-config from this page and run btnx-config. Detect your pointing device and buttons as in the btnx-config instructions. Enable and set the little thumb button to KEY_C with a modifier of KEY_LEFTCTRL. Enable and set the pinky button to KEY_V with modifier KEY_LEFTCTRL. Don't enable any other buttons, because btnx doesn't need to mess with them. Restart btnx from the btnx-config Configurations screen and test.

Bada boom, bada bing. If you want to use those two buttons for something besides copy and paste, btnx is amazingly configurable, allowing for all kinds of variations. Like I said before, it's a must-have for mouse configuration.

As a side note, some of you might ask why I don't use two buttons set for forward and backward browsing on the mouse. Well, I actually have that functionality in Firefox after installing the All-in-One Gestures add-on. The add-on mimics Opera's built-in mouse gestures fairly well, including the forward and backward controls. Try it out, you might like the ability to browse backward by doing a right-click-and-hold then a left-click as much as I do. With this workaround available for Firefox, I decided to make copying and pasting just a mouse click away each to further reduce moving my hand away from my pointing device. Ergonomically sound, no?

I bit the bullet and installed the shell access thang for my iRex iLiad. My main goal was to change the default text reading font, but I decided to install FBReader for the iLiad instead, which has very nice text reading and font changing capability as well as adding some more document types that the iLiad can display. After tussling a bit with the installation and options settings, I've found that FBReader is a superior text reading app to the default .txt reader and set it up to default to a serif font instead of a sans serif. I have an easier time reading serif than sans serif over long periods of time.

I also installed an rxvt (shell terminal) designed for the iLiad, but I can't see myself using it much. Using an onscreen keyboard for a Linux terminal is odd, but the handwriting recognition is really awkward. First time I've ever written to a computer. My scrawling "cd .." kept coming out with three dots, for example. The handwriting recognition's close for me, but doesn't tolerate my writing idiosyncrasies well, so either I get used to how it wants me to scribble or I just use the slower keyboard. The ability to edit config files directly on the unit from the command line is extremely cool, though. I might find some uses for the terminal later.

I may try the iLiad Minimo installation next. Minimo is a mini-Mozilla installation that should allow my iLiad to connect to the IntarWeb through my wireless network for the vital browsing goodnesses that make my life complete. That's right, I'll be able to read Web funnies while pinching a loaf on a tablet-like technothingamabobber about the same size as a trade paperback, but lighter.

You know you're jealous.

With a bit of wire snipping and reconnecting, I've managed to get the 12- to 10-volt adapter and the Evercool fan into the NS4300N much more effectively, blocking MUCH less airflow and so far, appearing to work so good. Noise is reduced tremendously, to the point where the drives are what I hear rather than fan noise, though there is a small power supply fan that is barely audible. Temperatures seem to be hovering in the low 40C range, most spiffily chilly for a piece of electronica. If you have the means, I highly recommend doing this.

In other news, I'm still enjoying Great Expectations, coming up to the 1/4 way through mark. Seems like Pip's a fairly miserable young man so far, with plenty of interesting experiences, but still quite unhappy overall. I'm looking forward to a change, if one comes, and some tying together of what appear to be fairly disparate pieces of the tale. I find myself wondering why this is a classic. Maybe I'm looking too hard :(

I was one of the more than half a million people evacuated due to the wildfires in San Diego County earlier this week. In my particular case, we had to evacuate twice. My wife and I and our animals are finally all back home as of last night, all in one piece apiece. I was back home the night before and both of us went to our respective workplaces yesterday. My heart goes out to those people who have lost their homes, and my profound thanks go to all of the people helping take care of everyone (two- and four-legged) displaced by the fires. I hope the situation in Ramona improves without violence.

Anyway, my NAS tinkering stuff finished arriving yesterday, so I went at it, putting in a quieter 80mm x 15mm fan and a 12- to 10-volt converter to slow the fan down. I ended up with a bunch more cord to deal with that is reducing the airflow, but the thing is much quieter. I'm not real happy with the unit's temperature, though, after doing a bit of testing, so I've done a bit of cable repositioning and am still testing. If I have to yank the converter, which is also the source of most of the extra cabling and thus airflow reduction, I think I'll still be happy with the quieter fan. Temperatures in the unit crept up to 52C before I shut it down the other day and repositioned the cabling. Normal operating temp is 58C or less, so I wasn't real close to overheating it, but I wasn't loading it down at the time, just playing some tunes off of it. Under load, I could see imminent meltdown approaching.

In the current configuration I just told the unit to set aside 80 gigs on the drives for snapshot backups, which means one drive is working its tiny heart out, and the temp seems pretty stable at 49C. I'll check back on it later today after the ambient room temp goes up some more.

Parts? I got an Evercool EC8015M12CA fan and an Akasa Noise/Speed Reduction Cable 12V -> 10V 3-pin from Directron.com. Still iffy on the cable, but it's a possibility.

There are some tricks needed to get the connectors redone, and if I have a winning setup I'll probably get out a hot glue gun to solidify things instead of the temporary mess I have in there now, but it's not that bad.

Whoops, temp just went up to 50C in the unit. I'll check back on it in a bit. But that means most likely I'll just stick with the fan.

I upgraded both my laptop and my desktop to Gutsy Gibbon through the Update Manager. Total install times were basically overnight for each unit, and the process was surprisingly painless on my desktop. Not so much on the laptop thanks to its video, but I've worked around that. So far, I'm impressed with the update. Not a lot of big changes, mostly just some smaller stuff, more speed, more prettinesses. But it feels mo' better, more smooth and steady. And printing is very nicely updated. I haven't checked printing from Wine, let's see... Well lookee there, a fairly complex document's printed perfectly without extra configuration. I think I'm gonna weep for joy.

I won't go into a decent review, there are plenty of other ones already out there. But if you're running Feisty, check Gutsy out. It's better in just about every way.

Except for one way: The issue on my laptop is that the ATi video isn't decently supported. In fact, looking at ATi's web site, I don't see a Linux driver for anything that resembles the video processor. Kind of fun. Under Feisty, I was using an ATi driver that I'd installed through EasyUbuntu. Now I just have a VESA driver installed that seems fast enough, just doesn't have 3D support. I don't play much on the laptop, so no biggie for now. I've seen that others have the same general issue with some ATi drivers, so being nothing remotely close to a driver programmer I'll just wait for a while to see what comes up.

In other news, my bunch of bits for tampering with tamper-resistant screws arrived, so I took the back of my new NAS off. Looks like a low-height 80mm fan on the back with a standard 3-prong power plug that should be easy as pie to replace with a variable speed or at least just quieter fan. I'll do some shopping later tonight.

All you Ubuntu zombies out there, Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu's 7.10 release, has been finally unleashed upon the world! I'm downloading the amd64 desktop torrent right now, though I'm still debating waiting on the installation.

Big updates include flashy desktop effects, printer installation goodness, and evidently some Firefox goodness in the form of Ubuntu-specific plugin management. There's gotta be some more under the hood for me to upgrade, but I have that technophile bug. My current Feisty Fawn install's running oh so well, though. Anyone do an upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy yet?

Wait, I have a laptop that's pretty much a crash and burn unit. MUA HAAAA! More details later after the upgrade completes on it... hee. Cool note: The Update Manager has an "Upgrade Tool" available in it, so I may not have to deal with a cold iso install. Again Ubuntu beats the shiznit out of the big OS's in customer ease of use... Hmm, the Ubuntu web site appears to be getting completely hammered right now. Might wait a few more days to download the update tool. The amd64 iso torrent's coming in strong, but the laptop's not an amd64.

In other news, my migration from the NAS Lite file server to the new Promise NS4300N is complete. It's awesome to just have a couple of systems to migrate over, I must say. I'm still stoked with the little thing, aside from the noise factor. I've ordered a set of tamper-resistant star ratchet bits so I can open the tamper-resistant star screws on the unit and tamper with the fan. While I applaud Promise's use of what seems to be a good airflow configuration, please PLEASE give us bozos who spent money on equipment the option of throttling the fan down or better yet the ability to set the unit into a smart cooling mode where low heat slows the fan down and high heat speeds it up.

And Great Expectations is enjoyful. I'm four chapters in and still trying to get a good feel for Pip's character, but the similarities between he and Huckleberry Finn are already intriguing. Dickens does some good dark humor, 'e does.

I picked up a Promise NS4300N NAS yesterday and a couple of 500GB Seagate SATA drives. Thank you, Fry's, for being my most-of-the-time one-stop comp-mecca. The NAS setup was easy-peasy on the hardware side, but starting the thing up revealed my least favorite part of this device. The fan's noisy as fuck-all compared to all my other computer equipment. I will resolve this shortly in my own special way (most likely changing the fan and some sound damping in the case), and have kicked myself for not reading the box more closely before the purchase to note that the words "quiet" and "noise reduction" don't appear. I must have mixed this unit up with another one while I was researching online. The noise is the only thing about the hardware that I can give a negative to. The drive trays went on easily, the drives slide in and out of the unit smoothly with definite feedback when you've pushed them into the unit far enough, and I just had to plug in power and a network cable. Very nice.

Feeling smug after the hardware install went well, the initial software setup had the small hiccup of requiring a boot into Windoze to get the Windows-based configuration utility to find the NAS box so I could set a static IP address. After that very slight irritation, administration's all done by pointing a browser at the IP address. Could I have tried to get to the NAS through Linux by checking DHCP addresses off my firewall/router and pointing my browser at it? Yeah, but I wanted to play by the manufacturer's rules.

The web-based admin interface is fairly straightforward with some exceptions. I told the box to set up a RAID 1 (mirroring) between the two drives and it gave me access to the volume while it completed its mirroring online. Nice touch to allow access during the RAID initialization. Next, I started looking more closely at the shares and security. Shares are simple to build, you just create a directory, but instead of having the protocols and access rights administration for the shares on one page, they're on separate screens, so admins end up bouncing around a bit to get everything set up. Not a big deal, just a little odd. For each share, there's user and group access to set up, giving quite a bit of flexibility. Once the user name, password, and mappings are set up, the NS4300N seems to have robust Windows security support. The NS4300N's NFS configuration requires entering the IP address of any systems that are going to access NFS shares on the NAS. I didn't see a way to use a subnet for this, so a network configuration where DHCP is used for systems that are going to access the NS4300N through NFS are going to have a rough time. As far as I can tell, every potential IP address that might access the NAS has to be entered into the dialog one at a time, or they can't reach any NFS shares on the NS4300N. For my configuration this isn't a problem, since most of my *ix systems have static IP addresses already. I added the first few potential DHCP addresses to the list just to be on the safe side, though.

Group configuration is easy in the NS4300N. Groups are listed with a leading @ along with all the regular user names in the share user access control screen. This leaves the potential for setting a group's access to X while a specific user's access can be set to Y. Most likely the user rights will take precedence over the group rights, but this isn't clear, though I haven't dug deeply into the docs for the latest firmware release to see if it has the goods on that. I could test or dig more, but I must again say that I've succumbed to laziness. My setup's not going to use groups since I have a whole two regular users.

Some other small notes worth mentioning include gigabit ethernet, firmware upgrading is fairly simple (the unit shipped with the initial firmware instead of the 9/12/07 firmware), hot swappable drives, and RAID volumes are fully accessible while volumes are created or migrated from one RAID level to another.

That's about it. It's a simple setup, the unit has good functionality, there are some issues to overcome in the admin interface for larger installations, and it's a noisy little critter if that matters to you. Bada boom, I have a new file server in a very short time. I'd encourage anyone interested in the unit to head over to Promise's web site and download the latest manual for more details.

I had some printing issues in Ubuntu the other day. Seems that some applications don't much care for the HP printing system interfacing with CUPS, wanting instead to use the regular stuff that's built into Ubuntu. Not a big deal, but it was weird to me that some apps seemed to be fine printing to the HP drivers while others weren't. No, unfortunately I don't have a good list at all, but neither evince nor OpenOffice.org wanted to print until I switched back to the normal drivers. Go figger.

I've been reading through roleplaying supplements lately, along with some more serious reading (notably A Child Called "It", a very good book), and have found my English training going to work on the roleplaying supplements, finding logic holes, overall themes, grammar issues, and generally doing a rapid edit.

Finally, I've been playing more with vi and discovered an abbreviation system built into it. Ooh ahh, I've been looking for a way to replace this functionality from NoteTab Pro for a while because NoteTab Pro plus Wine under Linux has a bit of an issue with the cursor location not updating correctly visually when it changes. vi's impressing me more and more as I play with it, to the point where I've switched to using gvim, the graphical version of vi, as my main text editor on my Ubuntu installation. I'm such a nerd.

Been playing around with Enlightenment a bit lately and don't think it's for me overall. Gnome is kind of clunky-looking, but it's easy to work with and does what I need and expect from a Window manager, so I'll stick with it.

Funny thing, though: I'm composing this post using a Windows text editor I like under Wine, which is running under E-Gnome, which is Enlightenment with Gnome's menu panels tacked on. So I have application layers for Wine, Enlightenment, Gnome, and KDE ('cuz Ubuntu loads KDE libraries also) all loaded up and running relatively fine. I can run epplets, g-desklets, and other stuff to me heart's content if I want to.

On the reading front, I've finished up Gene Wolfe's The Urth of the New Sun and loved it. In some ways it was better than The Book of the New Sun, but I have a strong feeling that I'm going to get more out of Book on my second and third readings because of the way it and Urth are written. The man's a frickin' genius. Urth is a sequel, adding more understanding to many of the items that happened in Book, but rather than being an expository work, it expounds on it without seeming tired. Urth ends on another semi-question, like Book, but Severian's story seems extremely whole after finishing Urth.

The tale is one of time travel, a rise to power, and a transcendence and understanding beyond that earthly power to something universal, but so much more. The natures of the universe, humanity, life and death, power, time, and history all mingle together in a way that I have a whole lot of trouble describing in any detail. It's hard to say much more about it all except that I enjoyed it very very much.

Well, I was playing with rsync on my Ubuntu configuration and somehow managed to delete my home directory on my Ubuntu system.

Oops.

Fortunately, I'd been playing with rsync and had what I thought was a good backup from a few minutes prior to the deletion. Well, thanks to a mistake in my rsynce command line, the backup had everything but the hidden files and directories in it. That's the little stuff like email, program settings, pretty much everything besides my documents and such.

Oops.

So I hunted around a bit and had made a good copy of my home directory about ten days prior. I copied the hidden stuff back to my home directory, restarted, and was presented with messages indicating that I needed to do some chmod and chown work on the files. For some reason I'd done the copying as root instead of as my regular user name.

Oops.

So I booted Ubuntu into failsafe mode, did a bit of recursive chowning and chmoddery and came up fine, though ten days of email short. Not a big deal for me at all, fortunately. At least I don't think it's a big deal. Oh, I lost some birthdays in Evolution, I bet. Doh.

After verifying that things were ok, I created and tested a quick and dirty rsync backup script (actually just a single rsync command) to make sure that it was getting everything in my home directory with the correct permission information and copying it to the right folder on my file server. I then dropped it into cron.daily so my file server copy is now updated daily automagically in the background. So far, so good. Restoring works nicely, too.

Rsync Is Now My Friend. Especially since my NAS Lite fileserver includes rsync daemon capability. Mmm, NASLite.

To sum it all up, make sure you're in the right directory when you do an rm -rf and take good backups. Oh, and Don't panic! With some thinkiness, you may find you haven't quite lost everything to a catastrophic deletion.

Someone please come up with a better scanning interface than XSane or figure out how the hell I can get an ICM (color management file) for my HP 3500c. The version of XSane that's currently in Feisty doesn't have a configuration for scanners, only negatives and slides. WTF?

I can't manipulate the colors on an XSane preview in realtime and can't seem to figure out what color settings to use to get a decent scan out of it. I can get a grayscale scan just fine, but color management and the trial and error involved are killing me off.

If I really need a scan, I drop into Windows XP and resulting in a great scan in a couple of minutes. It Just Works. This is the only reason I still need Windows on here except for games. I hate that.

I've tried the Gimp plugin and because the output from XSane is so far off, the Gimp doesn't get enough to work with to get a good result. I've tried QuiteInsane, which errors out when I try to preview or scan, though it finds the scanner.

GRUH!

Oh, and the new Harry Potter book is the best of the series. I'm still fairly speechless about it. Rowling has blown her imitators out of the water, 'cept for the somewhat unnecessary but still kind of charming epilogue. I don't know where my HP book 6 is, which bugs me greatly. I felt like that book was spent mostly setting up book 7, and yet Deathly Hallows brings not only Half-Blood Prince's loose ends to a satisfying conclusion, but also a huge number of issues from previous books in the series. It's unbelievable. But I wanted to reread Half-Blood Prince again. I'll find it. In the meantime, I hereby present a virtual one-person standing ovation to J.K. Rowling for the entire Harry Potter series!