Rev’s Thought Dump

After a week of hacking, Matthew Mastracci finally convinced his Cingular Treo 650 to boot linux! A link with pictures is included.

read more | digg story

I couldn’t help but post this as well. Also from Digg. I love that it comes on a Linux Live CD. I’m going to have to give this a spin at work later on.

I’ve been busy the last few hours paying Geek Tax: The amazing waste of time that you must endure when crap stops working.

Justin told me about it today when I was describing my sudden inexplicable problems with WPA and my new card.

After having everything in order the night before last I cuddled up in bed next to my love and her iBook and got ready to write some code. I fired up my laptop and zonk. No connection. I wrestled with it for a few hours last nigt before love enticed me back to bed and got me to forget about it.

Tonight between rounds of screeming and feeding with my little son, I worked on it some more. I totally wiped out wpa_supplicant and wifi-radar and started all over. One thing I found, madwifi has issues passing dhcp info. So I had to go with a static ip. When I used wpa_passphrase for my key it failed saying the key was wrong. If I plain texted it like linux journal said i’d need to. It worked fine. Finally I got all things in place, restarted wpa_supplicant and restarted networking and it’s back up.

For the moment.

So there is Geek Tax paid. I’m finding lately that I pay a LOT in geek tax.

If you run into issues with VMWare freezing on you – usually during power up or shutdown – check that your cpu frequency scaling is working properly.

I noticed I was getting errors trying to step the processor up and down. In Ubuntu I went ahead and ran:

sudo /etc/init.d/powernowd stop

And that took care of the problems.

UPDATE: It also smoothes out music playback.

If you’re using linux and having problems viewing text in flash make sure you’ve got msttcorefonts installed. Another suggestion – if viewing through firefox – is to make remove the plug-in and install it via the browser itself.

This particular issue came up when I was trying to view the analytics results. Wasn’t very useful if I couldn’t read what it had to say. =)

Justin emailed this to me:

I was watching “Veronica Mars” last night – it’s a hip, Buffy-esque teen drama about a high school girl who works for her private eye father. I nearly fell out my chair when they had this little blip of dialogue to introduce two minor computer geek characters.

Cut to Veronica at school, walking down the hallway. She can hear Pete’s voice and on rounding the door, can see Pete in deep discussion with Mac. She waits a bit before interrupting.

PETE: Wait, how can you even have an opinion on Ubuntu if you haven’t tried it? Two six kernel, Live CD, they even had GNOME 2.O the day Warty Warthog came out.
MAC: I’m sorry. I’m perfectly content with OS X. I have all the awk/grep-ance that I want without any need for that pitiful font de-uglification.
PETE: But the fonts are de-uglified and it’s free. You know, fine, you know, live in the dark ages.
MAC: I know what I like and I like what I know.
VERONICA: Hey, that iPod Mini is something else, isn’t it?

In my attempts to make Linux the only OS I boot to on my 64bit box I’ve done a number of things.

To stableize Linux (Ubuntu or Suse 9.2) I had to remove my 256MB stick from the system. Now I’m just at 512 pc2100 =/ But, the system runs much better. WinXP runs better in a VMWare machine than it does just booting straight.

So as I mentioned above, I setup XP in a VMachine so that I could access windows apps that I have to have for work or cross platform testing. Works great.

Now I’m on to games via Cedega. The big game that we’re playing at now is WoW. I’ve managed to setup Cedega 4.3-1 and get WoW installed. I wresteled with the video settings for a while and managed to get it to come up. Not full screen though, only 1280×1024. The other problem that makes it unplayable… You can’t target anything or activate it. Basically no right clicking. The cursor never changes.

When I get some time I’m going to try and down and compile Cedega 4.3.2 and see if that helps.

My system spec’s:

AMD64 2800+
512 pc2100
MSI K8N NEO Plat
ASUS ATI Radeon 9600XT 128mb
Dell 2005FPW
Ubuntu Haory

I’d be interested to hear peoples Cedega/Wine experiences.

Got Beagle installed on the laptop. So far so good. We’ll see if it makes bug hunting easier. I don’t notice it scanning my web history. But, it’s installed and I can fiddle with it more later, that’s what linux is all about right? =)

Running two+ builds at the same time, updating ubuntu, browsing the web, and indexing with beagle is really punking my poor Cel 466 laptop. Maybe after little Locke is born I’ll pick up a new laptop. Yeah…. riiiiight. =)

Tried out QEMU at work and was really surprised at how well it worked. But I grabbed the latest beta of VMWare (5) to run XP on the AMD64 when I get things switched. I’ve still got a few things to do first.. like get my SVN repository off there. Fortunately I did the flat file storage rather than berkley DB.

Brandon left this week. Fortunately my pro-active of my two demi-bosses took the week off so I wasn’t immediately overwhelmed with requests. Oh.. but the one I did get made me want to follow Brandon to his new gig. They asked me if I could quickly extend MSI’s functionality so that it would let you roll back our installs on an uninstall. So say someone installs an update to our product.. they want to be able to remove the update and have it put the original files back – by the next release – July 1st.

While this might seem like some cool functionality and handy… it’s not the way MSI works. You install a patch to a product and you’ve got to remove it all and reinstall the original package to go back. But yeah.. it’s not trivial.. and I’m already trying to finish the System Management application I’m working on and make all the changes to the current installs. And find time to switch the build system to NANT and all the installs to WiX.

Okay.. enough boring MSI/Install stuff.

No real forward movement on ReadyReply this week. I got maybe a couple methods in. But now I’m into the meat of defining data handling methods and the UI rewrite. I’m thinking I’ll get a large chunk of work done at the Mono Meeting this Sunday. This twice a month thing is a good idea simply because it’ll get me to focus more.

Oh and it doesn’t help that I’d rather spend all my time booted into ubuntu when the project is on the win partition of the laptop.

Ever since I installed netapplet I’ve had problems with wireless in ubuntu. I’ve since ditched netapplet..but it’s now a chore everytime I boot the system. It’s not persisting key information at all (should it be?). And to get things connected I find myself having to throw it in by hand with iwconfig. Not such a big deal.. but it takes for ever for it to take and actually get up and running. This kind of “this can’t be that hard” problem makes one feel like a real feeb.

So I installed KWifiManager after reading about it in Linux Magazine… sucked. Wouldn’t even bring up the configuration menu. And, even though it showed I was connected to my AP… when I ran a scan for AP’s.. it said there weren’t any. Hmmm. SO I scrapped that. Anyone have any suggestions for wireless managment? It can’t be that Windows handles this better.

Oh and Chris and Eric are right.. KDE ui blows.

And, I’ve yet to grok the multiple desktop system. I just don’t tend to use it even though I’m obsessed with desktop realestate. I like to have enough room to see everything in one window. If it’s off the screen I run the risk of forgetting about it. But perhaps that speaks more to my scatter brained approach to things.

There’s an app called Skippy which apparently spaces out all the windows so you can pick one and then collapses them back with your selected window top most. Kind of like in Nat’s demo at BrainShare this year. Maybe I’ll install that and check it out.

Oh well.. I’ve babbeled enough.. MonoDevelop is done building… time to start hunting bugs with Beagle. =)