This Old Blog

I've spent some pretty intensive work time on my M685 notebook over the last months. My first Gateway, the M680 has been wrapped up in storage since October of last year. The M680 is the Pentium M-based Gateway on which I installed Suse Linux 10.0 (before it became openSuse). In the past few weeks, tucked in between my primary job on OneTESS and proposal work with SPARTA, I slowly began to investigate if the M680 was worth the effort of upgrading the Linux partition beyond Suse 10. The answer is absolutely yes. After installing and tweaking Suse 10, I had a pretty solid development system. I still had to add additional libraries and upgrade some of the default tools (such as gcc) to more current versions, but overall Suse 10 on the notebook was very satisfying and effective. Rather than automatically upgrade from Suse Linux 10 to openSuse 10,2, I decided to check out three distributions to see if I should upgrade to openSuse, or pick another distribution. For testing purposes I ch...

I walked into work this morning and turned on my notebook, and what am I greeted with but a Symantec AntiVirus Notification that there is adware, Adware.CPush , as part of the Second Life uninstaller. This showed up after a forced upgrade of the Second Life client software over the weekend. I barely have time for a first life, let alone time to waste in Second Life. I got involved October of last year out of curiosity, based on comments from Dr. Roger Smith of PEO-STRI. Since then my sojourns into Second Life have been infrequent at best, and every time I have fired it up I've been forced to download and install one client upgrade after another. Looks like it's time for me to move on and reclaim a bit of disk space being consumed by the Second Life client. UPDATE Looks like I was too trusting of Symantec. The detection of Adware.CPush in the Second Life uninstaller was a false positive. I found an entry on Roger's Information Security Blog that detailed the same problem, ...

Criticizing a product as poor as the Nokia tablets accomplishes nothing in the long run. What's the point unless you can find something better? From a technology standpoint you can make a very good argument that the Apple iPhone is better, but the iPhone still has some significant disadvantages, not the least of which is the need to get an AT&T Wireless contract. It looks like such a better product may be shipping around mid-August. Manufactured by Asus, the Eee PC is a folding ultra-portable with a 7" display. Unlike the OLPC, the Eee is aimed at the general market. From what I've been able to gather, the Eee should come with the following features: Display： 7" 800 x 480 CPU & Chipset: 900MHz Intel Dothan based Pentium M CPU, 910 mobile chipset OS: Linux and Microsoft Windows XP compatible Communication: 10/100 Mbps Ethernet; 56K modem WLAN: WiFi 802.11b/g Graphic: Intel UMA Memory: 512MB, DDR2-400 Storage: 4, 8, and 16GB Flash Webcam: 300K pixel video camer...

It's no secret I despise the Nokia 770. That's why I didn't rush right out earlier this year and spend another $400 on the N800, just 10 months after I'd spent my initial $380 on the 770, and after countless hours working with the 770 and complaining about what was wrong. Hey. Everybody needs a hobby, right? Well, in perusing the LinuxDevices site I came across an article detailing how the 770 had dropped down to $140 on buy.com and shop.com. Sure enough, I went looking on buy.com and found it for $139 brand new and still in the box. I thought it was cheap enough to get a spare. But when I chatted with my friend Matt about buying a spare, he asked "Why?" Even Matt, who owns one and is more hard-core geek than I am about these things, smiled and said it wasn't worth the money, even at that low price. Matt's advice was like divine guidance, and because of Matt I'm $140 dollars richer. Bless you, Matt. Of interest to me were the snarky comments about...

No, I didn't buy an iPhone, but it's not because I don't want to. Oh, how I so want to. The reason I won't buy an iPhone is that T-Mobile is my provider, not AT&T, and T-Mobile doesn't sell the iPhone, at least not in America . And I'm so very happy T-Mobile is my provider. I was once an AT&T Wireless customer - back in 1996. Back when every minute was charged, and roaming fees would eat you up alive. And service was absolutely abominable ( and it looks like it still is ). After a year of very costly and very bad service (in which one monthly bill ran over $300 in 1996 dollars), I ended my contract with AT&T in 1997. It was the start of a nine-year fight to get away from them completely. AT&T decided I owed them another $127 because I ended my 12-month contract after 12 months. I wrote them a letter saying I did not, and why. Nothing came of it, and I thought it was at an end. I was wrong. AT&T never forgot, even though through the years I ha...

Back in February there was an exchange between myself and Adam Williamson (adamw) of Mandriva . Adam asked " What is it ?" and I answered " Why it is ." Basically, adamw wanted to know why I was so in love with Ubuntu (7.04 alpha at the time), and asked the rhetorical question what was wrong with Mandriva. The last time I'd used Mandriva was back when it was still called Mandrake, so my experiences were definitely dated. I took up adamw's suggestion that I try out an early beta of Mandriva Spring 2007 Live CD. So I pulled down an ISO, burned a CD, and attempted to boot it on europa, the box with Suse, AMD, and ATI. The CD never went beyond the initial boot screens. As it approached the point where it would show the full graphic desktop the screen went completely black and the system locked up. I couldn't toggle into a command line screen to diagnose the problem. It was locked up solid. So I rebooted and forgot about it. Recently, however, I've been ...

I wrote in an earlier post how I thought Dell's selling of Ubuntu was a joke. The number of machines was limited to exactly three (yes, three), with very little in the way of options. Turns out that folks who wanted to purchase them for business use can't get Dell's Complete Care for them , while another hopeful buyer couldn't even purchase one for business use . Yeah. Dell knows how to sell Linux. Dell is really committed to Linux. Sure they are. You want to know what Dell is committed to? Making money. Being number one. Making money and being number one with Microsoft products (and Intel for that matter). Here's what landed in my Yahoo inbox today. Dell goplay, where Dell ties XBox 360 gaming into their latest gaming PC running - Windows Vista. I get Dell spam all the time selling Wintel. I have yet to get one email from Dell selling Ubuntu on Dell hardware. Not one. Dell's Ubuntu site will stay up just long enough to satisfy the critics, until the critics ti...