Redhatter’s Web Blog

Well, presently I’m reading through the semester’s lecture slides to familiarise myself with the content I’m going to be examined on shortly.

And I’m noticing there are some bad habits that lecturers seem to be keen on repeating… again, and again.  Here’s some of my pet hates, as a student.  These relate to the presentation of the material we’re given, the actual format they’re provided in is another matter.

Many of these were provided in PDF, which is good.  My first niggle however, is when they do their “print to PDF”… in black-and-white… but don’t adapt their slides to suit this monochrome medium.

The above image is from a real presentation.  Those studying “Professional Studies II” (EEB781) at QUT might recognise it.  It was shown to us in colour during the lecture… but now when we review our notes, we only have it in shades of grey.  Thankfully we’re not being examined on that chart!  Then there’s this little gem…

This is a small section of a slide… Must I say, that black looks great on dark grey.  Mind you, the same criticism could be levelled at consumer electronics designers, who think it’s great to microprint 2mm high light-grey text on a dark grey panel!  But I digress…  Colour doesn’t necessarily improve things either… as shown by this example:

If it isn’t masking much needed information by discarding the colour information… the other trap they fall into, is scaling bitmap images up in size, and/or deforming their aspect ratios.  I’ve got loads of examples of this, dating back over 5 years of studies… Here’s a brilliant example of the former.

Uh huh… you honestly are going to tell me you can read every word of that?  Well yes, if you look closely, you can make things out… but why should we?  That slide is so blurred and pixellated, it’s hard to see what is being said.

Here’s the lesson… Vector graphics are your friend.  You can scale a vector to any size you like, and it won’t pixellate.  SVG is great for this… EPS isn’t too bad too.  Or WMF.  They all allow for graphics that can be scaled to any size.

Some things of course, are inherently bitmaps, such as photographs and scanned images.  If you must use a bitmap… make sure it’s a decent resolution to begin with. Making a bitmap smaller (by resampling) is fine… but don’t try to make it bigger… it’ll look like utter shite.

And of course, if you do try to resize a bitmap (or any graphic really, vector or bitmap)… at least preserve the aspect ratio.  Nothing looks worse than a stretched and distorted photo…

If you look closely, you can see the top-left photo has been stretched (made bigger!) horizontally slightly (not too bad, but still).  The worst is the bottom-right photo, which has been compressed vertically.  It’d be okay had the image been compressed horizontally in proportion… but instead, it looks squashed.

Just about every presentation package I have used, provides the means to scale images while preserving their aspect ratio.  Some do it by default… some require you to hold down Shift or Control whilst dragging it out.  In either case… it’s trivial to do.  If something doesn’t fit the hole in your slide… consider cropping the bits that aren’t needed so that it matches the aspect ratio of the hole.  But don’t squash it!

Anyway… that’s enough ranting from me… about time I got back to my studies.

… is not a pretty tale at this point.

At the moment, I’m a bit pissed off. Some inconsiderate bastards in my neighbourhood are playing crap music at top volume (Yes… I’m talking about YOU, at the Settlement Road/Kaloma Road intersection!) — so loud in fact, that wearing earmuffs with a 80dB attenuation rating, does not stop the noise. However, this isn’t what I’m really annoyed about.

I’ve switched all the radios off, and the mobile phone… in this state of mind it’s better I don’t go talking on air, as I’m likely to say something I’ll probably regret. Likewise the phone. I’ve just tweaked my blog’s config, so now this won’t appear on planet.gentoo.org or anywhere else stupid enough to syndicate the entire blog.

Worth noting, that save a few isolated examples, my presence doesn’t seem to be wanted at all. A couple of the senior devs (and former devs) in the Gentoo/MIPS team for instance — regard me as an incompetent idiot (I have IRC logs and email archives of this), I’m only tollerated because they need the numbers.

My big beef at this present time, is where my future is headded. I’m almost through my education. I’ve been at it now, non-stop, since 1991… 7 years of primary school, 5 years of high school, a year of straight IT at Griffith, and now, 5 years of IT/EE at QUT. Well almost… it will be 5 years at the end of the year.

I’ve managed to organise some work experience with a mob out at Laidley. This is great news — it means I might have some chance of graduating this year. However, it’s a long commute from Brisbane to Laidley… and I’ve just been given a direct order by my father that I’m to be home by 7:00PM! Wonderful… it was going to be a struggle accumulating the hours up as it is.

The work experience issue is a big problem on my mind. Where as most students I’d imagine, at this stage of education, would be filling in job applications for graduate positions… this isn’t an option for me. Without the industrial experience, I don’t graduate!

This is a point I can’t seem to get through to people. If I were to apply to a graduate position, they’ll expect someone who has done the 60 days experience as required by the Institution of Engineers. Someone who already has this experience will instantly get preference over someone like myself who hasn’t been successful obtaining this experience.

Now… 60 days in this case, is 60 8-hour days. So with the above kerfew in place, that pushes that well past 80 days. And I’ll be studying during this period too, so I won’t be able to travel out to Laidley every working day to get the experience.

Why did I go to an outfit that’s so far from home? Well, I had little choice. Outside of Campbell Scientific, and Powerlink, nobody else has been willing to talk to me. I’ve sent off numerous job applications, if they contact me at all, it’s an impersonal letter saying your offer was declined. No explaination why. And the job sites are pretty much barren with respect to job ads.

I realise the vast majority of job vacancies aren’t advertised… but what’s 70% of nothing? By my maths… nothing. It seems you have to know people… and in there lies a problem.

I feel like someone’s smashed both my legs, then told me to go take a hike. Yeah, very funny! If I was suicidal 6 months ago… you can imagine what my mental state is at the present time. Here’s hoping this is temporary turbulance, and things will settle. There is the possibility of getting paid work with this company in the future (presently it’s unpaid)… in which case, it’s “See ya later Brisbane… I’m moving out!”… yeah, I’m sick of this rat race and I want some peace and quiet!

I’ll be glad when this year’s over… then I can see where I’m at. Hopefully I’ll be done with uni… and it’ll be off to find work. Exactly where I do not know — my ideas of what to do have shifted quite a bit since I started. The engineering studies have been a valuable — I’ll see how it is after I’ve done some industrial experience. At the very least, I can say, I have tried.

All else fails… I might talk to the TAFE or something, see if I can fast track an electrical tradesmanship… as that’s most closely aligned to what I know, and there seems to be a lot of demand in that field at this time.

Time will tell… but for now, I just had to get the above behemoth off my chest.

Hi all…

There seems to be a little confusion as to whether the PS2 is supported by Gentoo. To clarify, it isn’t. There was never any effort to officially support the PS2. Some unofficial work did begin some years ago, however that work ceased fairly early on, and there has been no interest in continuing it.

There are a number of technical reasons why the PS2 is not supported.

First and foremost, the CPU is a real bastardised piece of work. It implements a custom instruction set, which is a hodge podge of MIPS I, MIPS II, MIPS III and MIPS IV, with some special instructions thrown in. It doesn’t fully implement any of the aforementioned instruction sets. So binaries such as my mipsel1 stages, will not work — you’ll hit illegal instruction errors fairly early on.

Secondly, the patches necessary for the kernel, and toolchain, are based on a really ancient set of packages. The kernel released with the PlayStation II Linux kit (2.2.1), was a year old when the first PS2 hit the shelves. Not so bad then, but the kernel was never properly maintained. Even today, unofficial efforts have only gotten as far as 2.4.3x-series. The toolchain is still quite ancient, at best, gcc-3.3 from what I recall, is the best they’ve got. Maybe they’ve got as far as 3.4… who knows…

Thirdly, the memory on the PS2 is restricted to 32MB. This is soldered on-board, can’t be upgraded. Gentoo/MIPS will not build most packages with 32MB RAM. Once upon a time, I could just build stages with 64MB on my Qube2, if I shut down things like MySQL — not anymore, I need 128MB to do this today. uClibc could be feasible, but you’d still have problems with the “special” CPU. Virtual memory doesn’t help — even if you had 2YB of swap, it wouldn’t stop builds dying.

Other MIPS-based consoles, such as the original PlayStation (MIPS R3000-based) and the PlayStation Pocket (MMU-less MIPS32r2) are also not supported for similar reasons.  And we (MIPS team) don’t support the PlayStation 3 either — for that, you should talk to the PowerPC team.

Now… I have no complaints about answering questions about what we support/don’t support… but a few points… (this is where my rant starts by the way)

1. Write properly when in the IRC channel. If it’s one thing that’ll quickly get my back up, it’s SMS-like chat on IRC. I’m tolerant of spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, but I won’t tolerate laziness. If a word has vowels in it, include them! It’s not like it’s significantly more effort to press an additional button on a keyboard. If you’re using morse to drive the computer, or have a physical disability that makes typing difficult, fine, declare this up front, and all will be okay, but otherwise, there’s no excuse.
2. Read the documentation! It tells you what we support, and what we don’t. It’s likely your question is answered there already.
3. If we can’t help you with some non-supported platform, we mean it… don’t pester us about it, we’re not going to start supporting a new platform in 5 minutes flat.

People who know me, will know I’m quite a keen supporter of open source projects. I’m not nearly as fanatical about it as others, such as Richard Stallman, but I try to support open source as much as I can.

However, I suppose I’m a much bigger supporter, of open standards, than open source. I don’t mind if a project implementing a standard is proprietary commercial software — if the underlying standards it is built on, are open, that makes it possible for an open source implementation to be created. This gives users a choice — they may choose for various reasons to go for a commercial solution, or they may choose open source, it’s entirely up to them.

Now I realise that many of you will be reading this on planet.gentoo.org, and thus I’m likely preaching to the converted. I’m mainly aiming this at organisations that are completely blind to the issues faced. I’m hoping some of those might see this post.

Some might ask, what’s wrong with closed standards? There are a number of issues regarding closed standards.

• Vendor lock-in: it locks people in to buying from particular vendors, for better or worse.
• Inflexibility: If you don’t know how it works, how can you modify it to make it do what you want?
• Control: Who controls what you do with the application? Or the data produced?

If you’re using some closed system, and you run into technical difficulties, the only people who can help, are the makers of that product. You can’t easily switch to another product, and you’re completely at that vendor’s mercy. Some charge extortionate rates to fix even trivial problems, if they help at all. Now granted, there are some good players out there, and if you strike one, great… but if things change for the worse, you’re stuffed.

The ability to understand how a system works is particularly important. Not just with troubleshooting… but also with experiments. Users of a system may have ideas that you as a company have not even considered. Now if it’s open, they can either modify themselves, or hire someone to modify, the system to suit their needs.

Experimentation in one’s spare time is a great way to learn too — university can’t teach you everything. But if the system is closed, how can they experiment? The ability to learn about a system is greatly stifled, when you can’t play with the deep internals at the protocol level.

Control over what you can do with the data produced by a system is a hassle. Remember that you, as the vendor, do not own the data produced by someone using your product. As far as the user is concerned, it’s their data. If I put an audio or video clip of my own work up on my site (which I have done on occasions), it’s not companies like Fraunhofer, or Microsoft, or Apple that own the content, it’s me. And I want the right to be able to share that clip under my terms.

The only reason why the Internet is popular today, is because of open standards. You would likely not be reading this, had it not been due to open protocols such as IEEE802.11b, OpenVPN, Ethernet, TCP/IP and HTTP, and open formats such as HTML. Look at what happened to Compuserve… The Microsoft Network… AOL… Ring a bell? They were all closed networks, that died out because the open wild of the Internet was more appealing to their users.

It isn’t just an issue in the information technology realm. Allow me to look at the problem in another context. Amateur radio, would not exist today as a hobby, if it were not for open communications standards.

If you look past the obvious social and competitive aspects of amateur radio, you see there’s another aspect, the experimentation side. As defined by the ACMA LCD (I’m sure it’s similar in other countries) …

6. Use of an amateur station

The licensee:

1. must use an amateur station solely for the purpose of:
   1. self training in radiocommunications; or
   2. intercommunications; or
   3. technical investigations into radiocommunications; or
   4. transmitting news and information services related to the operation of amateur stations, as a means of facilitating intercommunication

The two points I’ve highlighted in bold above, are rather important. Put in layman’s terms… if you’re not in the hobby to talk to people, it’s mainly there for experimenting with the technology.

There’s another restriction here too … we’re not allowed to use cryptography, or any kind of secret code, it must be public domain. (e.g. I could, for instance, theoretically use UTF-8 on CW, encoding ones as a dash, zeros as a dot, and using RS-232-like encapsulation. Morse users would get confused however.)

Now suppose FM, for example, were a closed standard — that is, you had to pay some company royalty fees to use them. (Yes, I know that almost did happen way back in the 1930s, but anyway.) How well do you think that’d sit with radio amateurs, who typically like to build homebrew equipment? I don’t think it’d be liked much at all. In fact, if it were secret, it may very well be illegal in some countries. Thankfully this isn’t the case, and even emerging standards like D-Star, are fully open.

Now… back to the IT situation. We can see that a system where the protocols and standards used are fully open, can work. I have to ask why IT thinks it’s special, and insists on closed standards?

Looking at the educational environment … it’s here more than any other place, where we need open standards. How can students be expected to learn about something, if they can’t conduct their own experiments? Experimenting in one’s own time is a good way to gain a better understanding of the topic of study. It’s people graduating from these universities, that will be carrying the industry forward, and I really do think the present industry, should assist by being as open as possible.

Why is it, that universities like inflicting this poor choice of closed systems on its students? Yes, I’m looking at you, Queensland University of Technology, with your extensive use of Microsoft Office, Windows Media codecs (for recorded lectures), Cisco VPNs, Microsoft .NET framework, and numerous proprietary apps/standards.

QUT have a number of labs for each faculty, but also central labs. The central labs have OpenOffice installed, however the labs for Faculty of Engineering, and Faculty of IT, do not. So sure, I can work on some assignment on my personal laptop (running Gentoo Linux of course) — but if I have to email it to the lecturer, I have to either convert it to a PDF (my preferred method), or some have the gaull to ask for it in Microsoft Office formats.

If I comment that I don’t have the money to purchase Microsoft Office, the comment usually is something along the lines of, “Ohh, well you’ll just have to use the computers here.” Yeah well… how about I email my stuff in OpenDocument (ISO26300) format, and see how YOU like walking out of your cozy little office, into the library, and using a computer other than your own to view some file you’re expected to read. Exactly, you don’t like it … why should we be expected to put up with it?!

If that isn’t bad enough, they’ve now dropped using Java apparently for a teaching language. They instead use Scheme for the first years, then go throw them in the deep end with .NET. Way to go for consistency! Probably worth noting that they know nothing about Mono, and expect everyone to use VisualStudio.NET.

I really do think this is highly hypocritical of the university, and it’s an attitude that really disgusts me. Sadly I know they’re not the only ones doing this — some are even worse in this regard. (Then again, some are really open source friendly.) I have good reasons for using the software I do. I at least give you, the choice of using anything that opens OpenDocument formats — which is quite a lot — just sad that your office suite of choice isn’t among them by default. That’s not my fault, and you shouldn’t blame me for that.

I’ve complained directly to them about this before … so I’m now taking this complaint onto the world stage. Don’t like it? Tough.

I try to practice what I preach. One site I maintain, the Asperger Services Australia site, does make use of open standards. Sure Microsoft Office is used internally to write the documents that get uploaded (I’m working on that, give me time), they are converted to PDF. PDF of course is another open standard, ISO32000.

Any multimedia on the site, uses the XIPH foundation codecs Theora and Vorbis. Sure, I get the odd question from a Windows or Mac user about how to play the files, but thanks to the Cortado player applet, and ITheora, I’m able to make the video play for 99% of users out-of-the-box, and cater for the other 1% by allowing them to download the file and play it any number of players that support Theora and Vorbis.

This is handled automatically in most cases, the user isn’t even aware of the underlying architecture. However, if curious, the underlying architecture is open and present for them to look at.

I think it somewhat ridiculous, when looking at science fiction shows such as Star Trek, depicting (fictional) alien craft, produced by completely different lifeforms, are somehow 100% compatible at every layer of the OSI stack. We haven’t even got this today, and every computer on this planet was built by the same species!

I really do think this closed-standards war is hurting more than it’s helping. It’s about time we cut the nonsense, and actually started working together. Protocols and formats, used by systems really should be open for anyone to implement. I don’t mind closed implementations of those standards, that’s fine, but the standards themselves should be open.

Anyway… that’s enough of my ranting… glad to get that out of my system.

Well, once again I’ve got a bee in my bonnet … and once again, it’s Microsoft that I’m whining about. This time, it’s not the office suite that “Works” by name (but not by nature), but rather, their pathetic excuse for file system management.

I’m sure most people have heard of the FAT and NTFS file systems. I’m sure that NTFS has some nice features. I’m also quite sure there’s a reason why FAT is so popular on flash drives, when better alternatives exist for this role (such as JFFS2). But one thing I hate about BOTH file systems, particularly on their reference platform, is their ability to fragment files.

As some of you may already know, I do a lot of network administration work for Asperger Services Australia who run a network of 5 Windows XP-based workstations hanging off a Gentoo Linux server. Sadly, Windows XP is a necessity on this network, as they require Microsoft Office to communicate with government departments (who haven’t yet seen the light that is ISO26300, but that’s a rant for another day), and they also use MYOB for their accounts (in the absence of decent open-source accounting software configured for Australia’s rather complicated tax laws, I’m happy for this to continue).

The maintenance is generally not to bad. However, over the last few days, I’ve been doing some much needed work just before I get whisked away to work in some distant location. Part of this, is file system defragmentation.

Now, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t seem to recall too many issues regarding fragmentation on any legacy Unix systems. Either the problem was ignored, or it didn’t exist to any significant degree — otherwise I’m quite certain that there’d be tools alongside fsck to defragment a file system. I don’t see any for EXT2/3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, HFS/HFS+, FFS or UFS (in its various forms). Some filesystems, like HPFS, I even seem to recall in the OS/2 Warp 4 install, it mentioning how HPFS doesn’t need to be defragmented, since space gets automatically allocated before writing begins on a file. Which is ironic that NTFS should be suffering from fragmentation so bad, because Windows NT did, back in v3.x days, use HPFS as its native filesystem. Therefore I ask this question:

Why are Microsoft operating systems so lousy at managing file systems?!

C’mon guys, you’re supposed to be the market leaders. Where’s the bloody leadership? Why can’t you develop a file system driver for your operating systems that prevents, as much as possible, any fragmentation of the disk? I can understand if the disk is just about full, needing to fragment a file, but even then I notice other file systems manage fine… but why does this need to happen on a practically empty disk?!

I spose I should show you the horrors that greeted me yesterday and today. Below, are the fragmentation reports generated from one of the boxes I look after. Admittedly, I don’t think I’ve ever ran defrag on them in the year or so this particular one has been in service — I didn’t think it’d be a problem with a mostly-empty disk. I was wrong (the full reports can be viewed here, and here):

Volume OS (C:)
    Volume size                                = 29.28 GB
    Cluster size                               = 16 KB
    Used space                                 = 9.34 GB
    Free space                                 = 19.94 GB
    Percent free space                         = 68 %

Volume fragmentation
    Total fragmentation                        = 13 %
    File fragmentation                         = 26 %
    Free space fragmentation                   = 0 %

Volume APPS (D:)
    Volume size                                = 45.23 GB
    Cluster size                               = 4 KB
    Used space                                 = 912 MB
    Free space                                 = 44.34 GB
    Percent free space                         = 98 %

Volume fragmentation
    Total fragmentation                        = 21 %
    File fragmentation                         = 42 %
    Free space fragmentation                   = 0 %

21% fragmentation on a disk that’s 2% full?! WTF is going on? Microsoft’s OS is so lazy, it fragments files in a partition that’s so empty, it could duplicate the files another 49 times over. If they’re concerned about performance when appending to files, then why not leave a 1MB growing space or something? There’s plenty of space — use it wisely.

I’m not sure what the strategy is in various file systems out there, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard for Microsoft to take a look at how it’s done, and implement it in their own systems. It can’t be too difficult, because almost everyone else seems to handle the situation fine.

I guess it’s just another example how the Redmond-based slap-dash software company continue to rip us off and hobble the IT industry.

The following is a bit of a rant, involving my beef with one of Microsoft’s lesser known products, the “Works” productivity suite. More specifically, its interactions with a certain HP DeskJet 2360 (IIRC) printer.

A friend of ours does treasury work for a small business. The business owns a Dell laptop (reasonable spec machine) running Windows XP, and they’ve recently bought a HP Deskjet 2360 printer to go with it. The accounts are done in Microsoft Works 8 Databases. The business sells home-made goods such as knitted rugs, various forms of artwork and other hand-made products.

The accounts database basically stores each sale made — linking that back to the individual who produced the article being sold. The database produces invoices to be sent to each of these people, listing the items sold, the total revenue generated from their goods, and the amount they get (less the commission). Pretty simple stuff.

For reasons unknown, this decided to break a few weeks ago. The machine stays disconnected from the internet almost 100% of the time. Here’s the symptoms:

• When we try to print via the HP printer on the laptop in Microsoft Works, the application crashes, sending a crash report to Microsoft.

• The HP printer, works flawlessly in every other application.

• If we install Microsoft Works on a second PC with its own printer — we can print successfully.

• If we then connect the HP printer up to the second PC, install the drivers, then try to print, Microsoft Works crashes in the same manner as on the laptop.

Microsoft Works, when using the HP printer, crashes regardless of the content of the document. Create a new spreadsheet, type some random gibberish in two adjacent cells, select File->Print, and bang, down she goes. This is ludicrous, as the printer works with everything else, and Works works with any other printer. But this combination of printer and application causes problems.

We’ve tried installing updated drivers from HP’s site, with no success. We’re downloading updates for Microsoft Works, in the hope that may fix the problems, but I’m not holding my breath. This product would have to be one of the few products whose name is an oxymoron.

Microsoft Windows is such a soup of proprietary code mingling about, I’m amased anything works. Why they don’t dump their antiquated print system and use CUPS like everyone else (even Apple uses it) is a mystery. (I’m sure it’s doable on Win32.) There’s no excuse for these peculiar interactions — I’ve never had these ridiculous problems under CUPS.

In the meantime, I have OpenOffice 2.3 downloading for Windows and Linux. I had a play with OpenOffice Base (version 2.0 and 2.1) and it seems that should be able to do the same thing as good, if not, better than their present suite. It’s worth noting that the database is used much like a spreadsheet presently, thus doing a proper relational DB design will be beneficial.

I can’t quite figure out how to get the reports generated by OpenOffice.org to work the way I want… I can customise them to a certain degree, but once I try to do anything fancy, the whole lot breaks. Maybe the Sun Report Builder is the answer here — I’ve got it downloaded, but I need OpenOffice 2.3 to use it (and that’ll be another hour or so).

I’ve never done this sort of thing with OpenOffice in the past — I’m very new to this. Ordinarily, I’d just make a Perl script to connect to a DB of some form (or parse CSV data), take a LaTeX template, substitute the necessary data in, compile each LaTeX document as PostScript, then use GhostScript to whack them all together in a single document. I can’t however, do this under Win32, and especially can’t expect computer novices to do that. Hence why I’m looking at doing this in OpenOffice. In short though, this is going to be an interesting challenge.

Update:

I’m pleased to report, that OpenOffice 2.3.0 (I realise 2.3.1 is just out) is doing the job nicely. The comment that the OpenOffice Base application I had set up, was easier to use, and I feel, will be more scalable than the system they previously used. OpenOffice Base+Sun Report Builder, is definitely a worthy consideration when you wish to set up a database-driven report generator that’s to be used by computer novices.

I discovered an interesting example of poor UI design today whilst checking the wireless configuration on my father’s laptop. The machine runs a factory installation of Microsoft Windows XP Professional (along side Gentoo Linux/x86) , and came with a little network configuration utility called IP Operator.

IP Operator exhibits several interface abnormalities and issues. The main dialogue is pictured left (click to enlarge). Firstly, it’s full of geekspeak, with acronyms even an experienced user like myself would get confused by. Some of the tooltips and UI elements mention terms like SSID (which I understand is the network name), RSSI (what on earth is that? presumably signal strength…), Link speed: 11Mbps (Is that good?!)… Indeed, the very name of the application is geek-speak. IP? Is that Intellectual Property? My father thought it was… (and that’s someone who does have a strong IT background).

The layout of the dialogue isn’t bad per-se, although it’d be nice if it respected the user’s choice of colour sheme. That said — notice the two little arrows just above the Disconnect button? Guess what they do — change the colour of the dialogue. Totally pointless — Windows XP already provides a means of doing that in its Display control panel.

As for keyboard navigation, most applications stick to underlining the mnemonic letter to indicate keyboard shortcuts. I’ve seen examples of this under Linux/Unix (Motif, X/Athena, Qt, GTK+, WxGTK and numerous other UI toolkits), Microsoft Windows, IBM OS/2, Apple MacOS and Mac OS X, SGI Irix … even DOS applications often displayed the mnemonic character using a different colour. As an example, the Firefox web browser I’m using now, does this…

File Edit View History Bookmarks Tools Help

Now, for a user like myself, I know that hitting ALT+F will get me the File menu, or ALT+H will get me Help. It works the same in every other platform I’ve used. Clearly for LG, this isn’t good enough, instead they opted to explicitly show the mnemonic character separately.

The only time I’ve seen this done legitimately, is when the interface is in a language other than English — and even here, I’m not keen on the idea — I recognise that in that situation, it is done because the keyboards are often designed with English in mind, and thus don’t provide a convenient means of entering in foreign-language characters. OpenOffice 2.0 as factory-installed on a Lemote Loongson, shows its menus like this:

LG even do this in the context menu for the system tray icon, as seen below.

Now here, it’s completely pointless. The system tray is quite difficult to reach via the keyboard — at least for me anyway (there may be some other shortcut for it). The way I reach it, is to tap the Logo key (or CTRL+ESC) switch focus to the “Start” button, then hit tab a few times to reach the system tray where one can use the arrows to move around (or it may be TAB/Shift+TAB… not sure). Most users would just use the mouse — much less stuffing around.

Indeed, LG probably want to have a think about how they present things to the user. I’m happy that I don’t have to deal with it 90% of the time — since it isn’t my computer. I’d have uninstalled it by now if it was (in fact, I’d have completely reloaded the box myself — I don’t trust factory installs). These days I look back to the days when the Interface Hall of Shame was online (there’s an archive of it here) — they’d have a field day with applications like Office 2007 and OSes like Windows Vista (with it’s totally new and fresh UI) … and probably have a dig at us too. But perfection is a journey, not a destination, so this is to be expected.

There’s been a rather disturbing trend lately.

In recent times, we’ve all seen a very high increase in the number of players in the portable computing market, and a significant reduction in the cost of laptops. People are demanding more features packed in, higher performance, etc. This is fine… however it seems laptop manufacturers overlook those of us who still use dated interfaces such as PCMCIA/Cardbus, Parallel ports, and RS232.

Now okay, I can see that there’s a need to cut costs, and that there’s limited space… but surely somewhere in these laptops, there’s room for a lowly MAX232 and a DB9 male socket? Most of the manufacturers cater for the “average user”, who probably has no idea what to use these ports for and thus never use them. There are, however, numerous places where one finds themselves needing a proper RS232 port. What on earth for?

• Serial consoles — a very convenient way to run servers that normally are accessed remotely.
• Programming various embedded devices — such as PLCs and microcontrollers.
• Driving simple logic devices — why complicate things with USB when parallel or serial port interfaces will suffice?

In my experience, USB<->RS232 serial converters aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. We bought one (an ATEN one based on the PL2303 IC) to use with a Lego Mindstorms RCX kit we have (the IR transceiver connects via RS232). It works for hooking up to a serial console quite well… but it demonstrates all kinds of quirks when using it with the Mindstorms kit — the faults being intermittent in nature.

The same device, also acts up when I use it at university to program some Rabbit Semiconductor RCM4000-series microcontrollers. I tell the programming environment to use COM4: (the assigned device name under Windows XP) and that it’s a USB device. Things seem fine, until I try loading my compiled program onto the microcontroller… the loader fails to detect it. Switch back to COM1:, plug the microcontroller into that port, voila… everything works.

At the moment, I’m keen to keep my present laptop (Toshiba TE2100) going as long as possible. It has a few quirks (e.g. no OpenGL under Linux, issues with USB on resuming from suspend under both Linux and Windows XP, and a LCD backlight that started acting up recently), but largely works okay, and comes complete with all the legacy ports I require. The only thing I miss is a Line-In socket for ripping my vinyl records. However I realise that I may need to upgrade in the next few years.

My needs as a customer are unusual … a lot of people seem to want über gaming rigs or multimedia systems… for me, I’m after a workstation that’ll work well with Linux. So high-end OpenGL isn’t a priority, I’d sooner get a laptop with Intel graphics, and put up with somewhat lesser 3D performance under Win32, than deal with the pain that is proprietary drivers under Linux. Heck… even just good accelerated 2D is acceptable — I rarely use 3D.

Cardbus/PCMCIA is important, since I have a lot of legacy PCMCIA devices such as network cards that I’d like to continue to use — sometimes multiple network cards is useful. I sometimes do use my laptop as a router, and would sooner use one of the spare Xircom PCMCIA cards I have lying around, than fork out for a USB ethernet device (I have one… but they’re more expensive than PCMCIA cards).

A proper RS232 port is important for my needs as outlined above.

Presently, I’m holding off for as long as I can. I know I’m going to have fun getting a laptop with no OS (or failing that, Windows XP… I don’t like Vista, and refuse to buy it) from the usual suppliers. Looking around though, everyone seems to be keen on inflicting USB on me — sorry guys, not good enough! I’m watching what Lemote is doing with keen interest. Having used the Fulong PCs for a while, I’m really quite impressed by them.

Lemote do make a laptop version of the Fulong, with very similar hardware. I have no idea how much they cost (the Fulong PCs are about AU$260 depending on exchange rates) but I’ve found the Fulongs do almost everything I need to do. The upcomming Loongson 2F processor in a laptop would be awesome.

The Loongson 2E used in these Fulongs implements a subset of the MIPS3 ISA. runs at up to 800MHz, and draws 20W of power. The Loongson 2F apparently will fully implement MIPS64r2, exceed 1GHz clock speed, and draw just 5W. Some good power management, and I could see a laptop based on one of these, lasting several hours on a charge. And of course, it’d likely run Linux flawlessly. Gentoo already runs extremely well on the Fulong. The only downside being unable to run many proprietary apps.

I only hope that some of the major companies (Yes, Apple, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Toshiba, Acer… anyone else…) could reconsider their desire to drop these still-needed interfaces. While the general population might find them useless, that’s still no reason to take them away from those who do use them!

Yep… it’s another gripe… this time, Symantec’s (really Roxio’s tool) system recovery tool, “GoBack” is in my sights.

For a while, my father has been talking about getting back into using Linux. He recently replaced his dying IBM ThinkPad T22 laptop, with a much more modern LG P1 Express. The machine came pre-loaded with Windows XP, which was fine, we intended to dual-boot. On went the necessities (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice) and critical utilities like those provided in the Norton SystemWorks suite.

Well, the other day, we decided to actually do it. The machine has a 100GB SATA drive, plenty of space for both operating systems to coexist. We installed Symantec (actually PowerQuest’s product) PartitionMagic, and told Windows to shove over, leaving 40GB for Linux. It wanted to reboot to do the resize, this is fine — we shut down and rebooted as advised.

On the bootup, we get a dreadded blue screen (BSOD-like, but wasn’t a kernel oops) telling us that it can’t resize the partition with GoBack loaded. WTF? They’re both Symantec products?! Surely they should be aware of these limitations? Ahh well, seemingly not, so we reboot again disable GoBack via its bootloader menu, then try again. The resize goes off without a hitch, and we re-enable GoBack, and carry on.

A few days later, we got around to actually installing Linux. We decided on a hand installation of Gentoo Linux/x86 — dispite the laptop being a 64-bit capable Centrino Core Duo machine, we figured 32-bit would be safest for now. I pop in the LiveCD (actually, the 2006.1 prerelease… I never bothered to download a newer CD since this one worked.), and apart from the onboard ethernet card not working (fixed using a USB ethernet dongle), everything installed smoothly.

An oddity I noticed when I ran fdisk… Windows XP is installed on a NTFS partition (one of the reasons why I used PartitionMagic, rather than chancing it with parted). NTFS partitions show up as Type 0×07 (NTFS/HPFS) in fdisk… this partition was showing up as type 0×44 (Unknown), which I thought was bizzare. It was about 60GB in size, and thus I figured it had the NTFS partition inside, so I tacked an Extended partition on the end of that, and inserted my Linux partitions as logical partitions.

Everything was fine… grub installed without a hitch to the master boot record, in a few hours I had the machine booting off the HDD into Linux, talking to the network. Later I got X working (VESA for now… ATI X1400s aren’t supprted yet), and within a day, I had KDE, and all the basics installed.

At this point, I hadn’t tried rebooting into Windows yet … I assumed it was still working. I was badly mistaken. Windows XP would start to load, then flash up a BSOD (a real one), and reboot. Hammering F8, I managed to get it to show me what the BSOD was about… Bloody GoBack2k.sys! It broke normal Windows boot, it broke Safe Mode, and it broke the “last known good configuration”.

Right… so I searched and searched… nothing. Symantec’s website only told me that dual-booting with Linux was not supported: Helpful fellas… might I remind you it’s not your PC, thus I don’t feel it’s your right to tell people what they can run. It was looking like a reinstall, which I was not keen on.

Then I twigged… earlier I had noticed Windows XP’s partition was of type 0×44… what if Windows was looking for a partition of type 0×7? Windows XP is pretty stupid like that — where such a trivial difference would not phase Linux (so long as it had the filesystem drivers for the root), it really breaks Windows badly. The fix was as simple as:

# fdisk /dev/sda
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-7): 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): 7
Command (m for help): w

Soon as I did that… Windows XP was happy, I simply booted in, then uninstalled GoBack. The machine is now happily booting both OSes.

I post this here, for people who find myself in the same ugly situation. For those who are about to install SystemWorks… I recommend you do not install this shoddy piece of software. The rest of SystemWorks does its job rather well IMHO… but I say again, steer clear of GoBack — It Is Broken!

Ugh yeah… I’ve got a bee in my bonnet, and I’m having another winge.

I don’t know what the cause is, but for whatever reason, there’s been an increase in the number of people who, instead of properly typing words out, and at least attempting proper spelling and grammar (which I’ll admit, I don’t always get perfect myself), instead, insist on cheap shortcuts. Even on exams, there are people out there who would rather write “2″, “u” and “ur”, instead of spelling those words out properly.
For people who are from a non-English speaking background, yeah fair enough, they won’t know all the intricacies of the English language. But at least they try to get things right. The people I speak of, are those who have only ever known one language, English, have been taught (presumably) literacy skills at school, yet still insist on hard to read, cheap, dodgy shortcuts.
I’ve got a simple motto which I stick by:

If you want a question answered, and not mocked, make sure it can be read.

I don’t know about others… but I do get a lot of email, and I also have a lot of things to do in real life. I’ve got better things to do than to try and decipher a badly written email. Okay, there are some well-known acronyms such as “LOL”, those are fine. But dropping letters for the sake of it (laziness), is not on. On SMS messages, I can tollerate it to a point: you’re working on a telephone keypad, with limited space to write a message. On online games, I’ll tollerate it (to a lesser extent) as one has limited time to construct a message. I won’t, however, tollerate it on email messages, on chatroom protocols such as IRC, or on instant messenger systems, where one is presumably working on a decent-size keyboard and has ample time to write the message.
I mean, how long does it take to type “2″, vs typing “to”, “too” or “two”? How about “u” vs “you”? Are you really saving much time by dropping letters? I’d say no. Are you helping the reader understanding your message? Again, no. In fact, I’ve seen instances where someone has used “2″, and I’ve been left guessing which word they actually meant.

Grammar is an issue too… but less so. Probably the worst problem here, is people writing big long sentences with no breaks. Big blocks of text are hard to read too.

SI units are another point of confusion — more than once I’ve commented to someone about how quick their sub-Hz computer is, not everybody understands that SI units are case-sensitive. This is particularly important when asking networking-related questions… is “mbps”, MegaBytes per second, Megabits per second, Millibits per second?? Okay, B (bytes) vs b (bits) was never standardised, even though this is the common convention, but to be sure, perhaps MBytes or Mbits is better ;-).

Anyway… enough of my ranting… I’ve got it out of my system now. Just to say, next time you’re writing an email to one of us, please do us a favour, and write your message properly. Pretty please?