Be careful when driving. Taking your eyes off the road even for less than two seconds, on a road you know well, can be expensive. In my case, 2 new tires and an front-end alignment from hitting a pothole, and all I did was glance down at the passenger seat.

I guess I should be glad that I didn't swerve into the other lane or flip the car.

A while back I went on a hunt for social networks and I found Ning, which is a network of social networks and some tools for creating new networks. It seemed like a nifty idea at the time and I joined a few networks. All was right in the world.

All at once I started getting emails from the group creators that the groups are going away. I looked into this and it turns out that Ning is eliminating its free service and everything is going to be pay-based. I suspect that MOST of their customers are going to abandon ship in search of something new, much like what happened to Talk City some years ago.

*sigh* So much for that.

One of the sticky points I have encountered with my Linux installation is getting a fresh kernel compiled and running. When I have compiled it and used it to boot, it panics, not seeing the hard drive. My system has SATA hard drives in it.

The default kernel with CentOS 5.4 is 2.6.18-164, which works fine but I would like to upgrade so I can compile a new wireless driver and a new Wacom driver (more on those, and the reason I need a newer kernel just for those, another time). Fedora won't install properly on my system and I am not interested in installing Ubuntu (so please don't suggest I switch to Ubuntu or a derivative because I won't do it) so my very best option is upgrading the kernel. Much easier said than done.

The first time I compiled the kernel, I imported the configuration from the 2.6.18 kernel and accepted defaults on new settings. The result was a kernel that could not see the hard drive. Fine, I went in and manually turned on support for all SATA controllers and chipsets, then recompiled. The result was exactly the same. I also tried digging through the menus on the menuconfig, looking for anything that might cause the issue and found nothing. So, finally, I ripped open the initrd's for both the 2.6.18 and 2.6.33 kernels, unpacked the modules and did a comparison of modules that are present to talk to the SATA controller - the new kernel has all the same stuff as the old and much more too.

I am at a loss at the moment. I am sure I am missing something subtle but I don't know what it is. I have seen systems where all ATA support had to be in a module, not native, but my configuration matches the old kernel in that way. I have tried everything I know to try for now. I am still using 2.6.18 - it works, but I am frustrated.

I suppose I could try installing just the kernel RPMs from Fedora on top of CentOS and see how that plays out... I have little to lose at this point. IIRC the latest Fedora uses kernel 2.6.30 which is sufficient - as long as there are kernel sources in the distro.

*

On an unrelated note, where is everyone? It's even quieter than normal around here.

Connecting to a wireless network is something I need to do on a daily basis and has represented the most interesting challenge on my migration from Windows, not because it is hard in and of itself but because there is more than one way to do it and these ways are not necessarily cooperative with one another. The two methods I have found involve using wpa_supplicant and NetworkManager. Both have pros and cons.

The first method I found to work was relying on wpa_supplicant. It's not a pretty solution but it works well and is consistent in its reliability. It gives a little more granular control and it does not require setting up more passwords beyond the wireless encryption key. It is a little fussy to set up, being very particular in what it expects you to feed in, but once it's configured it's all but invisible. My initial setup of wpa_supplicant took me 2 days, simply because I never had set it up before and I made a lot of mistakes. When I added support for a second wireless network of a completely different type it required even more fuss but I finally got it ironed out.

The main drawback I can see with wpa_supplicant is that it expects you to know the name of the network. New network means you have to add stuff in the wpa_supplicant.conf file. That's fine if you have a limited number of places you take your system, but I can see that becoming a nightmare for traveling.

Then there's NetworkManager, a nifty graphical utility for setting up wireless networks. Click on the network of your choice, enter the wireless encryption key if applicable and you're off to the races. It even sets up the network interface. Simple and easy. Because it gives a list of available wireless networks it doesn't require that you know the network name beforehand.

That said, I get SELinux warnings when I run NetworkManager and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get rid of them.

I made the mistake of starting up NetworkManager when I already had wpa_supplicant set up. They took to fighting and my connectivity died. Apparently you shouldn't run both together. This was my first experience running NetworkManager and I wasn't sure if I could just use it to see the networks out there (which is what I was trying to do).

Of the two methods, I prefer wpa_supplicant for connecting to my own network here at home. Elsewhere, I think I would use NetworkManager more just for the convenience.

Personally, I am not a fan of MS Office. I have never liked it, but I use it out of necessity as I get handed Word documents and PowerPoint presentations all the time. I need to access, create and modify files of these types but I am not willing to spend the money for Office, especially if I am going to get out of Windows once and for all. So, I started looking into compatible office suites.

Obviously, there is OpenOffice. It's actually a very nice suite and I like the price a lot. I have had little difficulty using it to create new documents that are every bit as useful as their MS Office equivalents. However, I have discovered that OpenOffice does not handle Office documents too well. While these types of files open and are readable, the formatting is almost always off, often by a significant amount. I am not sure why even simple documents get so poorly formatted, but it's better than nothing I suppose. I decided to keep looking.

I am ok with WordPerfect, but there's no Linux version and MS Office compatibility is again lacking. Nothing to see here, which is disappointing but there's nothing that can be done about it right now.

I finally found SoftMaker Office after an extended search, and I found it in a roundabout away - I followed a lead on a discount on another one of their products. When I found them, they were offering one version back as a free download for a limited time. I tried it under Vista and was startled at how well it imports MS Office documents. It is by no means perfect, but it's a lot closer than OpenOfiice in that regard. I finally broke down and spent the money on their 2010 edition for Windows and have had only the most minor of troubles with it. Since there is a Linux version and the MS Office compatibility is in that version too, buying a second license pack for Linux is not a hard decision for me. The cost is low, the footprint is low, the usability is great and it's VERY compatible.

I am open to other suggestions as well before I commit, though. I suspect the main Linux suite in use is OpenOffice, but I have been surprised by others around here in the past.

With my system running Linux now and having successfully gotten the wireless working, I decided to go find a site that would remotely test my box to see if I have any security holes. Under Vista I have a security suite loaded that blocks port probes and whatnot, so I was curious to see how well the built-in firewall hides my Linux box on the Internet.

The only thing it uncovered was that my system responds to ping requests from the outside. All ports were closed to outside access and no services could be contacted from the outside, which is good. While responding to pings is not a huge security problem, it does make my system a little more visible on the net than I like. But, it is certainly fixable.

Wireshark also provides some interesting information. I was surprised to see all of the traffic flowing to my box, but in every case the traffic had a good explanation - email client, Firefox, instant messenger if I had it loaded and running, jabber from my ISP's servers, etc. It's a tool I will run on occasion to maintain a sanity check on traffic. I know, it's a lot like holding a bucket under a waterfall but I don't need to be overly paranoid. I have used security suites under Windows what give similar feedback and I occasionally picked through the output, and once in a great while I would see something odd like a probe for port 31337.

I have chosen a root password that I can't forget, no one else would ever know unless they know something specific from the past and is likely to never be cracked by a brute-force search.

Do I need an antivirus? It probably doesn't hurt to have one on here but I don't see a need right now. I am not silly enough to log in as root and run everything as the superuser, though I have no problems opening a terminal and working as root to install/uninstall/tweak/administer. I haven't set up sudo yet, though it's on the list.

Though it is probably a paranoid move, I start the network interface manually instead of letting it start up on system boot-up. I would rather have complete control over my system's access to the net.

I should have made this migration a long time ago. It is being driven now by work-related things, though it has been just basic laziness that prevented me from switching over sooner. Up to now my system has been an entertainment device, though I do a few things on here that are more serious (like taxes and balancing the checkbook). I really don't game on here anymore, so there's nothing to really keep me in Windows anymore.

I have been in the process of moving away from Windows completely and over to Linux. I have chosen CentOS because it is essentially Red Hat and I plan to pursue Red Hat certification later this year in connection with my job. The migration has been an interesting process.

My target system is a laptop with two hard drives in it, which allows me to keep Windows for now while I finalize my configuration. It has 3G RAM, wireless connectivity and a small collection of USB devices connected through a hub.

The install was smooth enough, and getting dual boot working has been trivial. That was about the only easy part.

Getting the wireless up and running was a hassle. Going to Intel's website and researching my particular adapter, I discovered that the native kernel, 2.6.18-164, needs to be patched to enable the wireless adapter and support it properly. If I am going to patch the kernel, then I might as well upgrade to the latest... I downloaded the sources for 2.6.33.1 and built it, and it panics on boot because it cannot locate the hard drive. I looked through the initrd.img file and found nothing missing and verified that the correct modules are present and loading. I went through .config manually and turned on support for ALL SATA controllers and built the kernel again, with no joy. I decided to take a shortcut with the native kernel to see what would happen and dumped the firmware file from Intel into /lib/firmware. After a little bit of fiddling with wpa_supplicant, I suddenly had connectivity in spite of what Intel's documentation said.

I would direct-wire this system, but the router is in a different part of the house.

When fighting with the kernel compilation issue I decided to try Fedora 12. The install never finished and after 90 minutes I had a dead box that wouldn't boot Linux OR Windows (GRUB was hosed). I won't try that again. I very briefly considered Ubuntu and even Mandriva but using either of those would get away from my intended goal of building something that is as close to Red Hat as possible. Going back to CentOS was easy enough - it just installed without any complaints.

Next up was the NVidia driver. I grabbed the latest driver for my card and tried to build it, and the installer came back with a complaint that it will not work with a xen kernel. Ok, fine, I don't really need the xen kernel anyway so I will use the base kernel and be done with it. Now the installer complains that the kernel sources are missing (this is a typical Red Hat install - no kernel sources on the box). I did find the xen kernel source, so I decided to see if I could make that work well enough to get my driver installed. I tweaked the Makefile and that was not enough. So, I tried a make mrproper and it complained a LOT about missing Makefiles in a variety of module directories. One by one I touched each file that was missing to make sure it did exist, even if it was just a zero-byte file. Finally I managed to get through the cleanup, imported the .config for the native kernel from /boot and then ran make modules_prepare. After that, NVidia was happy and built a driver that correctly worked with the native kernel. I cannot help but feel like I got very lucky on this one.

I am not a big GNOME fan and I am not particularly excited about KDE either, so I downloaded fluxbox and built that. Now I have a very lightweight window manager that I use for my user account. I left root as using GNOME, though I never log in as root directly.

I pulled down WINE and built that, with the intention of migrating Pegasus from Windows to Linux. WINE returns a simple message that some module is missing. I get no indicator that explains which module is missing so I am dead in the water at the moment. In the meantime I am looking for an email client that suits me to run natively under Linux. I know I can run VMWare instead but I would rather not have Windows on the system at all.

What remains - getting WINE to work, then getting a suitable office suite running (I am not particularly impressed with Open Office, as it's MS Office compatibility is not too hot. I likely will get a license for SoftMaker Office which is MUCH more compatible with MS Office formats). I still need to do some system hardening to keep out unwanted visitors. I haven't even tried to set up the printer yet. And I have not yet configured my tablet to work.

I have an application I wrote a couple of years ago that I have modified and messed with as time has permitted. With a new release of wxWidgets and a new release of Embarcadero C++ (formerly CodeGear, formerly Borland) I broke out the application for an update and the compile died a horrible death. Too many things have progressed between the updates, especially related to wxWidgets, so it is time to rethink the design.

This is actually a good thing. I have been unhappy with the underlying code for several reasons. It started as a hack that turned into a pseudo-designed application with an underlying class structure that worked, though it was a little tricky to maintain because of its original code design.

I call this a "hybrid" application because it is an indiscriminate mix of C and C++ code and design, some of the cross-mix very deliberate but a lot of it not so much. For example, one class handles reading files, yet uses traditional C library functions for handling said files (fopen, fclose, etc.). This will not change, as the stream libraries are slow and inefficient, even though they are mindless to use and have some safety features built in. More subtle, though, is the use of character arrays instead of string objects, which adds a lot of maintenance overhead when something doesn't quite work right.

All that is minor, compared to a more serious issue. I did not do a good job of keeping workhorse code and GUI code separate. That is, porting the application to use a different GUI would take a bit of work, as the class would need appreciable code changes to support the new library.

In a nutshell, this application as it stands right now is a hacker's delight.

I have started the redesign. The classes comprising the system are being more streamlined and tasks within the overall system are being redistributed. There will be a module that handles only the interface between the base libraries and the GUI. The code will stick very strictly to C++ except in the area of file handling, which is a performance decision.

In the end, I do not expect the application to be appreciably different on the surface, at least in the short term. The end result of this will be a better designed, more easily maintained application that can be expanded with a lot less effort and pain. It will finally be done *right* as opposed to being done "sufficient enough to work".

Ok, so where have I been and why am I not posting much?

There are several reasons. The main one is work - during the work day I have little time to participate. And because of the hours and distance, I have limited time in the evenings. Another contributing factor is the ever-changing kaleidoscope that is Slashdot. This is not the site it once was. When I have had time to post, more often than not I have been at a loss for words, mainly from being frustrated and worn out from the day. A good number of people that made this place interesting are gone. And, to be honest, my interest level has dropped.

There are good people still here, and some of them I would count among my real friends even though I have never met them (and those that I have met in real life shall remain my friends always). Others here I think exist to breed in the mildew-stained grout of the bathroom stall floor tiles and look for reasons to be loathed and looked upon with scorn. Others are just mysteries to me.

I have considered how to use Slashdot more, and I am drawing a blank. I though that I could maintain a basic journal similar to what I keep to myself, only public, but there's little need to share all of my thoughts with everyone. I considered making this placeholder for research. I considered going troll.

Why bother?

There are too many other things to occupy my mind right now. I'll post when I am in the mood.

I work quite a bit with different security suites for Windows. On my current laptop which runs Vista, I started with Panda, moved to McAfee, tried a different version of McAfee, switched to BitDefender, Trend, BitDefender, PCTools, BitDefender, McAfee, and finally (this week) AVG. In all cases I did a full uninstall before installing the next package.

Before loading up AVG, I unloaded McAfee and rebooted.

Windows Security Center reports that BitDefender is up and running. Huh? I did a full uninstall before, and I had it removed before McAfee was installed. I looked under \Program Files and there's no evidence it was ever there. Fine - I opened up the registry editor and removed every mention of all things BitDefender, and rebooted.

He's dead, Jim. It's so dead that it crashes almost as soon as grub tries to start Vista, and the pretty sequence of hex codes is mystifying. This is the first time I have EVER hosed up my system with the registry editor, and I use it almost monthly for the purpose of cleaning out junk left behind after installs. Glad I made recovery DVDs.

A restore later and BitDefender is still showing up as installed and up to date, even though the program is not present on the hard drive (anymore).

There are fun people there, posting fun things, like this. It's starting to feel strangely familiar...

Spent Saturday on a charter boat hauling sharks out of the water. Those rascals put up a decent fight. Fine eating too.

And I didn't even eat any of these. (SFW)

A few weeks ago I purchased a Wacom Bamboo small tablet for my PC. I liked it and I found the transition from a traditional mouse to be truly wonderful. That said, it was small and I wished for a bigger one.

Wait a sec, Gecko... What do you mean "liked"? What happened, you get rid of it already?

As a matter of fact, yes, I did. I have a niece who is very artistic and loves to draw, so I gave her my Bamboo and I gave her a full-up legal copy of SketchBook 2010 (and, yes, I deleted it from my system).

Now, sitting on my desk in the place of the Bamboo, is an Intuos4 Medium. I would have been content with a Bamboo Fun Medium but they're not usually in the stores. So, I went with a higher-end professional tablet.

The differences are vast. The Intuos4 is a LOT more sensitive than the Bamboo, having 2048 pressure levels instead of 512, and it picks up the slightest pressure when I am drawing or writing. The pen is more comfortable, the writing surface is more suited to my gorilla hands, and it has more functions available.

After using this I think I am about done with traditional mice and trackballs. It is so much more natural and comfortable to use a pen than to use a mouse. I certainly did not need to spend that much money for the same end result, but I am pleased with the product and if my hands feel better then it's worth the price.

I still have my full version of Corel Painter 11 so I have a use for the artistic aspects of this tablet. I have been amazed at how soft I can drag the pen and see results on the screen. Now I just need some ability...

I just bought a Bamboo small writing tablet for my system at home. It was a snap decision and was a purchase based solely on a whim.

I have learned a lot about it already. After spending two days with it, I wonder how on earth I ever used a mouse for so long to get anything done. A trackball is not much better. I wasn't sure I would ever get used to it when I started, but it's coming quickly. The only thing I lack right now is a scroll wheel, and I think I likely have that except that I don't know how to use it yet.

I can actually draw as badly on the PC now as I can on paper. With Corel Painter or SketchBook Pro loaded, I can actually do some spiffy things with it too. Apparently I am better than I thought. I am starting to understand how artists can do what they do on the computer.

What is my plan for this thing? I don't have one. I am just learning and having fun.