While Steve Ballmer is making threatening noises, DELL has been listening to their customers, and found out that there is big interest for pre-installed Linux. Dell was having some problems with sales earlier on, so this appears to be an attempt to improve this.
Very interesting. Maybe the untapped market here is bigger than anyone thought?
King Harald of Norway is 70 years old today. Congratulations!
I've been reading many articles about how hard the Vista upgrade process is supposed to be for everyone.
So what? The word "upgrade", long before the computer people got hold of it, used to mean the uphill direction of a railway line or a road. My copy of "A Policy of Geometric Design of Rural Highways" is full of discussions about upgrades, which, for example, might require climbing lanes if they are steep enough.
So, upgrades, being something that makes things hard or complicated is not exactly a new thing. Why is everyone surprised then? T'was always thus.
In related news, the work computer I have here is just now getting the IE7 "upgrade" -- hopefully it won't be the same kind of uphill struggle that that word implies. The machine, one of the few that I have that is running anything from Bill Gates' company, has been verified by same company as being genuine. Thank dog for small favors -- now let's see if the thing will work or has died utterly in the process.
The freight ship "Server" which was due to go from Årdal to Murmansk, lost power and ran aground outside Fedje on the Norwegian west coast. Now the ship has broken in half, and an estimated 270 tons of fuel oil has leaked out and caused a major disaster for the birds in the Herdla reservation, and people living on this island.
Some links (in Norwegian, but the picturs show the extent of the disaster)
On Hurricane "Per"
Oil spill picture
more links
The front part has been towed ashore, but the aft part is still out on the bank, in the storm, probably with more oil in it.
This is quite bad. Hurricane, 35 m/s (80 MPH) type bad. The strong winds and big waves has made it impossible to keep the oil sheet from spreading, and tonight we are expecting the storm "Per" to arrive. Though here, deep in the Oslo fjord, the storm will not be so bad, on the west coast and further south in Skagerak, there will be nasty weather. People living on the coast in Rogaland, Hordaland and Sogn are advised to stay indoors, and Swedish news sites tell us that they have stopped all rail traffic on the Swedish West coast.
People in Göteborg are asked to stay indoors tomorrow
Brr... I haven't seen much in the way of English-language links yet; and Aftenposten doesn't have much news about this at all, so mostly pictures for now, unless you can read Norwegian or Swedish.
Another JE with various things in it:
1. Today there was snow, again. No guarantee for it lasting, but it was sufficient to make it nice and white outside, and to disrupt traffic on many of the roads around Oslo. As happens every year, trucks and trailers with less than perfect tires skid every which way and everything stops.
2. I went out and had a look at a 1959 Wurlitzer juke-box this evening. A friend of mine is thinking about buying himself one of these, but I'll have to store it for him until such time as his wife can get used to the thought of the purchase. Will make it a fait accompli of sorts... Interesting insides, there is a number of relays and solenoids, a pair of vacuum-tube amplifiers, and a bunch of levers and wires and carousels that work the record player mechanism. A counter showed some 83000 record plays having been recorded. No idea if this was during the lifetime of this unit or maybe the counter had rolled over -- it had only 5 digits.
3. I got the car back last week. It needed replacement of the generator; this is a water-cooled unit, so there was replacement of cooling fluid also. That bit of fun && games came to 17000 Kr -- newer cars are expensive. With the old one, I'd get another alternator at the wreckers' yard, pay 700 Kr and do the replacement job myself, but that's how it is.
4. The controller for the new weather station is flaky; I think it is trying to do too much at once, so here is another use for one of the Picotux devices here soon. So far, however, there is very little temperature difference between 2 meter above the grass in the backyard, and the north wall. But that is something I'll get around to when I feel like it -- so far, a periodic re-boot of the controller is sufficient. The way I notice this is that the front lights don't come on in the evening.
Christmas turned out nice, I hadn't expected otherwise really. I got a couple nice books and a record, and a handful of other nice things, so I'm happy about that. Merry Christmas it is indeed.
On the 26th, before leaving, we heard from my uncle that one of the tunnels along E18, the major highway connecting here and there, had collapsed, and the whole freeway had been closed. So we (my father and I) drove back along the older road further inland (highways 35 and 319) and made it home OK. The tunnel that had collapsed was the southbound half of Hanekleivtunnelen (all the tunnels along that road are twin tunnels, one bore for each direction) and they now run two-way traffic through the normally northbound one. Hopefully that one won't collapse
Then yesterday I read in the paper, that this tunnel had started failing some 48 hours before the roof caved in, during the night between December 23 and 24. Some people living in the vicinity had noticed some bangs and noises, resembling the ones that they used to hear back when the tunnels were blasted out of the rock, on the evening of the 23.
And I had been driving through that tunnel some 14 hours later, in the early PM on the 24th... brr! (cue X-files music)
Yesterday the shop called about the car. Evidently they do do some work between Christmas and New Year. The generator had perished, and has to be replaced. This is a water-cooled unit, they said, so that meant expensive... just hope I've got enough money at hand now, or there won't be a particularly happy new year.
There's also rumors shown in some German newspaper and reported in a Norwegian one that the encryption called AACS on the HD-DVDs has been cracked, and DVD-Jon is interviewed about this, he is claiming this is for interoperability since it was a matter of playback control not copy-protection. Guess there'll be another test of the DMCA ere long, and tons of opinion posts on Slashdot, Technocrat, Groklaw, and elsewhere. Very interesting.
There are some 150000 people in this area, and it appears nearly all of them are queuing to park at the mall Sandvika Storsenter. Christmas shopping...
I went to Holmensenteret instead. Much nicer, but not all of the big chain stores are there. Not that it mattered, there was a christmas-time sale of music and movies, and I got some of these and some books, to give away. This also has a Vinmonopol store, where all the wine and spirits are, and that in itself is a big draw. And the parking structure is big so there is never any hassle with finding parking there.
Still, this mall seems to have problems keeping certain stores in face of competition from Sandvika, Liertoppen, and Trekanten, three of the large malls in this area.
There is no Clas Ohlson store other than Sandvika however. On the last junk auction, I bought a hand-held radio, but one of its battery packs had given out, so I opened it up, and found six AA-sized rechargeables inside that I'd like to replace. And there are suitable replacements available at the Clas Ohlson stores.
So I thought I'd go to the mall in Strømmen, on the other side of Oslo, and have a look there, but the traffic turned out to have gone to rush-hour proportions already, so I just went home instead. And wouldn't you know it, but just as I had about 3 kilometers left, the charging-circuits in the car gave out, and it started flashing a big red warning with a battery symbol and "visit the workshop"... so I just got home, opened up, verified that the fan=belt was still intact so that engine cooling worked right, and then called the "workshop".
Now, this is December 20, and in a few days, most of Norway will shut down, so of course, they couldn't guarantee any quick turnaround. They would fix it eventually, whenever that would be. But at least I got the car into the queue there, so that it will be fixed. Having it sit without power outside here isn't very useful, so there I was.
I took a taxi home, and I might be able to borrow one of the cars that my sister has. Good thing they hadn't left for their Christmas trip to the west yet...
I've seen the lights! They don't appear very often, but since the sun had a flare yesterday, tonight the aurora borealis showed. And there finally was clear skies, after N (*) days (and nights) of cloud cover...
They were the best northern lights I can remember seeing for a long time too: greenish-blue, looked like some enormous curtains or piles of ribbons, and some of them moved back and forth. Others were paler columns that appeared, moved, and disappeared. Behind it was a lower level glow that persisted throughout.
There are too many street-lights and exterior lights on the houses around here, but there are some darker places just a little north of here. Then there is the big parking lot at Tryvann, but the illumination in the tower up there gets in the way, and the lights in the visitor center or museum or whatever that other building up there is, also are a nuisance. But I know of another parking lot at the edge of the woods, and that proved to be nice and dark and quite a bit closer to home too... By the time I got there, the light-show was over, just the diffuse glow remains, but I know where to go next time.
(*) N being some indefinite, but rather large positive integer.
What is it about software running on Windows nowadays? There are all these programs that generate pop-ups wanting to be updated.... getting in the way of actually having things done. Stealing focus oughtta be punished along the same lines as stealing tanglible property.
It used to be just Windows Update every other Tuesday or so. Then Opera has occasional notifications about new versions, but these only come up when I start it, so they don't get in the way when important things are happening. And then there is the anti-virus that updates new definitions a couple times a day, stealing focus in the process, though I've become used to that now and let it run its merry way.
But at least, these have learned how to manage their updates without usually requiring a reboot. Windows update sometimes does, but considering that there may have been holes deep in the system that have been patched, that isn't too surprising.
So here I was, typing happily along, then wanting to read mail
This however was work-related, and so I opened it up in the Adobe Viewer there. Then some of the fireworks started... Nothing to do with the PDF itself, but the Viewer had suddenly decided that right now, this very minute, was when it would want to pull down updates to itself. I might have hit Return at some point and that would have been taken as as Yes to a question I never saw...
So it threw up a couple background windows with progress bars and went on its way. Oke, I thought, so I get the nice shiny new version. Being used to xpdf and evince, that just appear and just work without any further ado, I'd think this was much the same.
It wasn't, it popped up a top-level box asking if it was OK to reboot right now. Uhm? for viewing PDFs? gimme a break. Is this thing so strongly intertwined with the OS really? I mean, all it is supposed to do is show me the contents of PDF files that I might want to look at... but no, it is so bloody important that I have to pause the mail replies I was writing, saving and exiting everything and let the reboot proceed. Aggravating....
After the reboot, it came up again, evidently it had more stuff to insert, so no real use of the computer, and then another reboot. This thing is called Acrobat, is that why it wants to go so much up and down? Or is it just me being used to insmod-ing kernel modules in Linux and unpacking tarballs and
After the second reboot, the PDF viewer came up again empty. And just sat there filling the screen. Weird, but I could close it, and that was the end of this strange trip. It hasn't bothered me since, I'll grant it that.
In contrast, I installed Fedora Core on the Dell portable yesterday. That is an entire OS with a pile of applications. From scratch. Even that went smoother than this. I had to look around for the i8k kernel module that handles the fan and temperature controls on a Dell portable, but that was already in the kernel and the i8k.ko file was in there, just insmod it somewhere early and there we are.
And the machine runs a lot cooler with Fedora than it used to do with the previous Red Hat 9... possibly something to do with power controls being more optimal. Whatever, this is great news. This 4 year old Latitude became even more useful.
Elsewhere, the two-yearly fire and chimney inspection took place on Thursday. I should get more extinguishers and replace the batteries in the smoke alarms... As for the chimney, it looked ok, I have to put up a ladder and platform for them on the roof, so it can be swept
And it is still unseasonably (though not unreasonably) warm. A customer in Texas said that there had been freezing temperatures in Texas City, just to the south of Houston
Finally
As the saying goes. But these latest e-mails that try to install a Trojan have some serious factual errors in them that, perhaps, should be made common knowledge so as to thwart the social engineering aspect.
1. "Our firewall has detected worms in your mail" - Firewalls stop network connections, they don't look at E-mail data. Antivirus packages, mail scrubbers, and so forth do that. Not firewalls.
2. "Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available." Yeah right. Maybe if they used UDP without any checking that might have been the case. But E-mail goes over TCP. Either you get it or you don't. Not halfway or "partial". No way no how. Busted...
3. "The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment" Unless the mail server is from the days of steam-driven paper-tape storage equipment and 5-bit Baudot teletypes, in which case someone has done a rotten job of interfacing it to the internet; there is MIME types and all sorts of good mechanisms to package mail with more than 7 bits per characters. 7-bit ASCII went out of style about 20 years ago... Internet has been operating on 8-bits since forever anyways...
4. "The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment". You don't say? As I said above, there are plenty of ways and means of packaging this kind of semi-binary data.
Ugh...
But people that don't know the ways would tend to be impressed by the technical-looking mumbo-jumbo, and click on the attachment and chaos ensues... The invaders of Troy were successful using this trick several thousand years ago, and this is an attack method that still works. Seldom do we see cases when a little knowledge is worse than no knowledge.
Month: Another month, Mensis Octobris, the 8th month as per the Roman reckoning, and still not that cold outside: minimum last night was 11.2 C. This is at least 5 degrees more then usual for this time of year. I suspect that when winter finally comes this year, it is going to be really sudden. We'll see. I've got me a little project for recording more of the weather, notably humidity and rainfall, so we'll see how this will turn out.
Mercedes: And now both cars are off to the shops. The newer one is having a warranty replacement job of doors and quarter-panels, which already had been rust-eaten. Some problem with the W210/S210 series of Mercedes evidently, so the previous owner had booked it for last Monday. It is now 8 days gone, and hopefully I get it back late this week or early next week.
More Mercedes: The old Mercedes is at a different place, it has had to get new rear brake cylinders and pads, from the discovery of less than perfect brake action during the periodic test. Surprisingly enough, getting parts for it is still reasonably straight-forward, but as with everything, things take a little time.
Moving around between A and B: So instead of German stars, I have a small French lion as a lender vehicle. It does its job of getting me from A to B and back, but it feels rather perfunctory compared to the usual rides. I tried it on a longer trip this Sunday, but it wasn't taking the curves even as well as the old Volvo did, so it turned out to be a little less than fun. No crashes or problematic skidding, just tedious. So for now it's back to the A-B run.
Machines: As for machines and hardware, I am still thinking of where to put that noisy Poweredge so I don't have to listen to it. Then the HP9000/370 has to be found a new table, it is currently in the bedroom and will be full of dust ere long if it is to remain there... at the other end of the size scale, I've played a little more with the Picotuxes, they default to unsigned characters evidently, and the data-storage is big-endian, like the HP is. Nice to know when trying to port code that crashes with weird "should not happen" type errors... I'll have a go at some of it with Valgrind again.
Meatballs: Then I've been noticing what can only be called "meatball-molecules" when taking Swedish meatballs out of the freezer. They tend to stick together, two or three, and more, so I guess a suitable notation borrowed from chemistry would be Kb2 or Kb3 or even Kb11... Kb from the original name Köttbullar of course.
I have the 1964 Mercedes back, and it looks a lot better already. Polishing will be next.
Then I finally got around to mowing the lawn yesterday, before it became too much of a meadow...
And then, I'm 45 today. Doesn't feel very different from being 44 yesterday.
The old car is finally off to get its paint job this morning. How long ago is it that I was talking about doing this, now? Well, eventually I get around to turn things around, eventually. Expect it back by early next week, it is only the front right fender after all.
Next will be polishing and the roadworthiness approval test, which is due by the end of October, and then during the winter sometime, I'll get around to fix the gearbox, which is making ugly noises. Wheels turning slow indeed.
By now I have tried hooking up 2 of the free-standing Picotux 100 units, and tried out some more of the programming functions, both vis a vis the network and the serial port and GPIO lines. These systems, like the Picotux 112 already on its own circuit-board, have a read-only root partition and a read/write-able
1. An LM317 makes a decent 3.3V supply, but it has to be fed from somewhere above about 6V for proper operation. I got hold of some low-dropout 3.3 V regulators, LP3852, and these can be fed from the same 5V supply as the surrounding glue-logic, so that is better. I used a wire-wrap arrangement, and soldered-on thin wires on the first unit with a 317 and a 7805, and I made a small circuit board for the second unit with the LP3852. All the IO-lines are pulled up to 3.3 V with 33 kOhm resistors, so they have a predictable High state when used as inputs. Fortunately I have this lamp with a magnifying glass, so I have a chance of seeing what I am doing with the 1.27 mm pitch connectors...
2. The serial port runs a console at 38400 Baud, as part of the busybox. One way that I have been thinking of using this, without having to re-flash the units, is to connect a microprocessor to this port, have code there sit and wait for the # character at the end of the sign-on message, then have it give a command
3. Since the Picotux runs on 3.3V, the voltage levels on the inputs and outputs are approximately the same as regular old LS-TTL. This makes interfacing quite easy. Having just 5 lines makes it necessary to do some kind of parallel/serial conversion in order to read the 8 bits coming out of an AD converter or control the 3 bits for selecting 8 channels in front of the ADC, so some trickery with shift-registers and multiplexers is indicated.
4. There are actually 9 different bits that control things outside from the program. There are the 5 nominal input/output lines, and the 2 serial data lines, which may be re-appropriated if the shell using them can be closed, another bit that controls the green LED next to the network socket, and a sixth IO line, which is used for the initialization-signal on poweron, but it may be reassigned afterwards, and at least used as another output.
5. The programming has so far given no surprises. Networking with sockets works just like one would expect, and the gpio library turns the IO-lines High or Low as requested. Shell-scripts work when beginning with the #!/bin/sh line (but not otherwise!) the only defined user is root, and there is a telnet daemon listening, which allows logging in without a 38400 Baud terminal. Which the old glass-ttys here don't support, as they are bound by the old RS-232 speed limit of 19200 Baud...
So what will I do with these? I can foresee replacing at least two of these old PCs sitting around recording thermometer data or controlling the outside lights and battery charging of the old car, with smaller, less power-hungry, and more reliable equivalents. The PCs may remain, but now they can be turned off when not really needed. Electricity is bound to be expensive this winter....
Another of them maybe I'll use with a DCF77 clock, to receive and interpret the time signal, and get accurate time when offline or out travelling. I already have some hardware, an 98 kr alarm clock from Clas Ohlson suitably doctored to control the receiver and read the received signal from the outside.
I'll probably think of more applications once I've finished these.
"How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars." -- Steve Martin
