It is the end of Friday. I've spent this entire work week using Beryl (Compiz) on both my home and work computers. It is supposed to be the next great thing in desktop management. I have to admit that it looks cool. I like it when the windows wiggle as you move them around. But, I'm not going to continue using Beryl. Why?

The transparency is OK, but I'm a developer. I have one window open with requests from the clients. I have another window open with the results of my current code. I have a third window open with the code I'm working on. It is difficult to work when the windows keep turning transparent on me.

The drag/resize functions on the windows are very lagged. I know I don't have the latest and greatest video card in either computer. But, having to grab a window two or three times just to move it slows me down a lot.

I need the desktop manager in my toolbar. It shows all four of my desktops that I actively use. I can see what programs are running in each one because the icon for the program appears in the little mini-window. I can switch to each desktop with a simple click. In Beryl, I had to ctrl-alt-left mouse button-drag to spin the cube around. That requires two hands. The alternative is to collapse a window to middle mouse button-drag the desktop. That's a click and a drag. I simply don't see the benefit.

If Beryl had a replacement for the desktop manager, I would be happy with clicking it to switch. The issue appears to be that Beryl uses four screens, not one screen with four desktops. So, it is more difficult than the old desktop manager.

As for real productivity measurement, this was a very unproductive week. It took me a couple hours to get Beryl running on my home PC. I kept getting the white screen. Then, once it ran, I got a black screen when I tried to shut down. At work, it took two full days of messing with things to get it to work. Then, I had to drop my resolution down, which drastically decreased by desktop space. I tried smaller fonts, but that didn't help much. Finally, once it was running, I spent a lot of time spinning the cube around to check one window, then another, then another.

It appears that Beryl simply isn't for me. It is great to look at, but it makes tasks take longer than they do with the plain old KDE desktop.

If you've been fixing computers for friends and family as long as I have, then you know this one very well. Family member spends all hours of the night downloading music, games, porn, and every known virus and worm to his computer. It dies. You are asked to fix it. If you are like me, you do an fdisk-format-reinstall. I don't have time to waste on virus removal tools.

Now, what if you've done that and the computer locks up during the install. You try again and it installs, but now Windows XP refuses to allow SP2 to install. Restarting, it complains of a disk error. You try again. It installs but you have a completely new error now. Hmm... bad memory or bad disk?

You do a very thorough check on both the memory and disk. Both are fine. Still, the random problem that appears to be data loss continues. So, you put completely new memory and a completely new drive in it. The problem remains - and is actually worse.

You take the computer into work where you systematically swap out all drives, memory, video card, network card, fans, power supply, and finally the motherboard and CPU. Still, the computer runs fine. It just has a terrible problem with data loss that causes the operating system to fail.

You go back to the same old question. "Did you do ANYTHING at all to this computer in the last week, month, or even year?" Of course, the answer is "No." You ask again and again and again until you get the answer. "I cleaned the dust out of inside of it."

First thought - he damaged the motherboard. But, you changed the motherboard. In fact, you changed absolutely everything inside the case. The only thing you didn't change was the case, the little door on the front of the case, the power and reset buttons, the power and HDD lights, and the mono speaker. Then, it hits you...

"Did you just get dust out of it?" The answer comes back right away.

"There was dust and a bit of stuff that looked like tin foil in the front." It wasn't tin foil. You are certain it was lead foil in the 1/4" gap between the back of the speaker's huge magnet and the bottom of the hard drive bracket. So, you remove the speaker all together, put all the original parts back in, reinstall the operating system and, magically, it works fine.

Who decided it was a great case design to put a big magnet 1/4" away from the hard drives? There's a good three days of my life wasted on someone else's idiocy.

At least twenty years ago, I realized that the purpose of the universe is to piss me off. Others have thought that this was a rather ridiculous notion, but if they get to know me, they start to notice that it is rather justified. My life is a string of events that all have a similar theme - seemingly random events that exist for the sole reason of trying to piss me off. Here's an example:

Six weeks ago, my wife complained that her camera's battery wasn't holding a charge. I checked it and, sure enough, the battery was pretty much dead. I searched online and found a replacement. They are a bit expensive for batteries, but cheaper than buying a new camera. All was well.

Four weeks ago, my wife asked me to help her look for the battery charger. She was afraid she lost it when we went out of town the weekend before. We searched all week and couldn't find it. Again, I searched online for another one. I had two choices, pay Sony a huge price for the charger and get free shipping, or pay a distributor a discounted price with a hefty shipping charge. I bought it straight from Sony. The day after it arrived, she found her original battery charger.

Two weeks ago, my wife mentioned that an orange light on the camera comes on sometimes and it won't snap pictures. I didn't see a problem when I tested it. Then, she mentioned it was happening more often. Finally, last weekend, the orange light came on for good. The camera was dead. So, I took her out to buy a new one. The whole time, I was thinking about the new battery and charger I just purchased.

Well, guess what - no cameras available are compatible with her memory sticks, batteries, or charger. So, I had to buy a new camera (which luckily came with a battery and charger) and new memory sticks. We get home and I test her new memory stick in her mouse. She has a mouse that lets you put a memory stick in it and reads it through USB - very nice for moving pictures from the memory stick to the computer. Of course, the mouse failed to read the new memory sticks. I looked up the documentation and found that I had a version 5 mouse. I needed a version 7 to read the new memory sticks. So, I searched online and purchased a new mouse. I wonder what the next ordeal will be in this thread of bad luck.

That is just one way that the universe has been trying to piss me off the last month. Don't get me started on the nine weeks it took to get my database server ordered, getting my roof reshingled and finding out that they didn't fix the hole that was the reason I called them in the first place, or having both of my computers restart whenever they feel like it. As I stated, the purpose of the universe is to try and piss me off.

Who has had a computer that restarts without warning at completely random times (even while editing the BIOS)? My computer had issues with restarting a few months ago. It lasted for a few days and stopped after I updated my kernel. So, I figured it was something wrong in the kernel and left it at that. Then, three weeks ago, it restarted. When I say it restarted, I don't mean that it threw some error, shut down, and began booting up again. I mean that it made a loud click, the power shut off, the monitors went black, and then the happy BIOS report began as it powered back up. What would you do? Blame a power spike? Blame a software bug? Wonder if there's a ghost pressing your reset button?

My first suspicion was the memory. A few days earlier, I added another gig of RAM. So, I reseated the memory sticks and ran memtest86 all night. Memory checked out just fine and memtest86 never restarted. Perhaps reseating the RAM was the fix. Then, it restarted again.

OK. It isn't the memory. Perhaps it is power. I went out and purchased a brand new 800W UPS to ensure a nice steady flow of electrons into my power supply. I turned it on everything was great. I went back to doing work and figured I fixed the problem. Then, it restarted again.

So, memory is OK. Incoming power is OK. I know the video card sucks more power than it should. I reconfigured the power cables so it had a line all to itself and the hard drives shared another one. It restarted right away.

Maybe a component went bad. I removed the floppy and DVD drives. I removed the extra network adapter. I replaced the power supply and fans with spare ones I had from when I initially put in super-quiet fans. It ran fine for many hours. I began to wonder how I could detect which device was causing the restarts. Then, it restarted again.

At this point, I lost my temper. I unplugged everything that could be removed. I even unplugged the reset switch, just in case it was causing the trouble. Nothing worked, so I took the computer to a repair shop before I broke something. They checked it for three days and only had it restart once. They blew out the dust and gave it back to me, suggesting I get a new keyboard and mouse. I went a step further. I took the computer to my office and plugged it in there. I found a trick to force it to restart: "ping localhost > ping.log". Apparently, high network traffic while writing to the hard drive forced a restart. I decided to pound the hard drives to see if I could get one to throw an error. I tried "cat sda", but that ran fine - no restart. Then, I was told to try running bonnie++. I've never heard of it, so I downloaded it and tried it. After severely abusing my hard drives, I found DMA error warnings. Further investigation indicated that my BIOS was autodetecting my 333MHz RAM as 400MHz. I set it to 333MHz and suddenly the "ping localhost > ping.log" trick wouldn't force a reboot. The bonnie++ program ran without any DMA warnings. I solved it! I took my computer home and worked all night without a single restart.

The following day, I was back to doing work and, without warning, a restart. I checked BIOS - RAM was still set to 333MHz. I checked my tricks to force a restart and bonnie++. It wasn't RAM. So, I completely disassembled the computer. I took absolutely everything apart, cleaned every part, put new goop on the CPU to keep it cool, blew out dust from every crevice, and then I found something odd. When I removed the CPU's fan, I found thick white dust caked all over the main GPU. I washed it off with rubbing alcohol and there was some discoloring, possibly from overheating. Could it be that my assumption about the video card causing the problems was actually the video card overheating? I put it all back together and now I've been working for three days without a single restart. Please pray for computer that it doesn't restart again.

For the last two years, my workplace has been on the roadmap to dumping IMAP and installing Microsoft Exchange. At every meeting, I asked if IMAP access would be available after the change. My past experience has been that the MS Exchange administrators always disabled IMAP for "security reasons." For two years, the answer was always, "I don't see a reason to disable IMAP." Well, today is the switchover day. IMAP is turned off. MS Exchange is turned on. And... no IMAP access. I asked why there's no IMAP access. I was told to install Outlook and use Exchange. I explained that I don't have Windows on any of my computers. I was told to put Windows on my computer. My workplace is being Microsofted. I guess it is time to look for another job.

Earlier today, I posted a comment about how terrible Dell support was when I had hardware problems on my Dell servers/computers that were running Linux. Overwhelmingly, the response was that I had to be lying because Dell sells RHEL. Well, there was a mistake on my part. I didn't explain the time period in which I was trying to get support.

The first event took place in 2001. It was a Dell server that was just past 9 months old catching on fire. It blew smoke out the back and, when I got it open, I could see the charred remains of the motherboard. I called Dell and they asked me for some code. I didn't know what code they wanted, so I asked. They said that I could get it by going into the Control Panel and... I cut him off and explained that I never had a Control Panel because I was running RedHat. He explained that without some code that you can get from Windows that was installed when we purchased the machine, there was absolutely nothing he could do. I boxed up the server and sent it back to Dell with a note explaining what happened, a photocopy of the purchase order, a copy of the warranty that was included on a CD of PDF docs that came with the server, and a request to get a new server. Another service rep called me and told me that Dell doesn't warranty Linux, but she would replace the server as it was obviously a hardware problem - and it was a common one at that. Just a few months later, there was a recall on the motherboards and our other servers of the same model got new motherboards.

The second event took place in 2003 (if memory serves). It could have been 2004. Fedora was just released. I took one of our new Dell desktops, an Optiplex GX240 (again, if memory serves). I put Fedora on it. It worked fine for about a week and then started acting weird. It would crash for no reason. Files would corrupt for no reason. Then, it wouldn't boot. I did a complete format/reinstall. The same thing happened a couple days later. I called Dell support to ask about it - perhaps it is the hard drive. He said he was going to email me a program to run. I told him that I don't have Windows on it. He said that I had to install Windows to get Dell support. I asked if I could just send in the hard drive and get a new one since it was acting up so much. He said not until I install Windows on it and run his program. Since this was only weeks old, I said I just wanted to return it and get my money back. He transferred me up the line to a support person in the U.S. and I was told that the computer was known to have DMA issues. The drive was fine - disable DMA. I tried that and it worked.

The third problem occurred about a year later. We got a new GX260. The CD tray wouldn't open. I called and they asked me for my info. When he pulled it up, he said that he couldn't provide support because of my past history "abusing customer support" and that I would have to be transferred to a higher level of support who would call me back. After trying to get a call back for two days, I mailed the computer back to Dell with a note explaining that I had nothing to do with the agreement that my company ONLY purchase Dell computers. From that point on, I would purchase from Sun or Gateway. Every server I've purchased since then has been a Sun or Gateway.

I submitted this as a story, but it will surely be rejected, so I'm posting it here too...

For over a week now (8 days to be exact), our local Comcast high-speed Internet service has been blocking access to FedoraProject.org. It isn't just me. It is all of the people here that have Comcast. It is annoying, since yum comes preconfigured to use mirrors.fedoraproject.org as the main mirror site. But, it raises a larger issue with me. Why would Comcast block access to a Linux distribution website? What has Fedora done against Comcast? Is this a planned step in the path to having preferred Internet service to certain sites, but paying for access to others? Will I have to start paying an extra $20/month to access Linux sites? Since it is just Comcast doing it, and probably only in my area, I'm sure it isn't a big deal to anyone. However, that is just the start. They get away with blocking sites here and there. Then, they block more. Then, they charge a tiny amount for access to the blocked sites. Finally, the Internet becomes like cable with package deals. You want Linux sites, you have to pay for the package that includes home shopping sites, hedgehog lover's online magazines, and Indonesian news service.

UPDATE: I told the Comcast support person today that I reported this problem to Slashdot. "Who?" she asked. "One of the most popular Internet meta-news services," I replied. "Oh," she answered, "Let me look into this for you." After a few minutes she got back. "You are correct sir. We did have a block on that site due to excessive downloading traffic. It has been removed now."

You'd think I'd be used to it by version 7, but Fedora is a real love/hate sort of Linux distribution.

First, I do not have a DVD burner or a DVD player in my computer. Since some brainchild decided it was too hard to put the CD isos online, I had to download the rescue CD and do a network install. It took over 12 hours to do the network install because everyone was downloading off the network. Now, if they'd allow a bittorrent install... Really, they just need to put the CD isos online.

I know the argument - "Go out and get a DVD burner! They are cheap!" Well, I spent my money on a 64bit system. How about getting some support for a worthwhile upgrade? As it is, I keep running into the argument - "Not everyone has 64bit machines, so there's no reason to support them!" So, everyone should just get a DVD burner, but screw those who got a 64bit system.

First thing after the install is to get my Nvidia dual-head card working. I know, the nv driver doesn't work well for dualhead displays. So, I added livna and installed the nvidia driver. It failed. I messed with it for a while. I gave up. I downloaded the driver source from Nvidia and compiled it. It failed. Then, I remembered the golden Fedora rule: "If you can't fix it, it must be an SELinux problem."

How do you fix an SELinux problem? No, you don't disable SELinux. It is there to protect you. Instead, you use audit2allow to find and fix the problem. But, audit2allow requires checkmodule. For some reason, checkmodule is not included with Fedora 7. So, you can't run audit2allow. I broke down and disabled SELinux. The nvidia driver works fine now.

I'm back in again. I copied my .mozilla, .thunderbird, and .ssh folders back. Unlike FC6, that didn't crash my whole system. I got my email, no problem. My saved passwords in Firefox are still there. I installed mp3 capability (because I refuse to re-encode my ITunes music in ogg). It is 5:38pm. I started at 11:00am yesterday. This is a record for me and Fedora - back online in about 32 hours. I hope I will be able to cut it down to less than a day next time.

Every time anyone writes any article about how terrible China is, Slashdot is quick to post it. Woohoo!!! China is evil!!! Everyone look!!!

Now, the Chinese government has drastically cut back on Internet censorship. Wikipedia - a hellhole of free thought - isn't being censored at all. You can read about it on Google News or on Digg. Can you see it here on Slashdot? Of course not. It doesn't make China look evil enough. How pathetic.

Downloaded and installed FC6. I did a clean install. When I tried the yum upgrade from FC1 to FC2, nothing worked. From FC2 to FC3, I ended up with a lot of weird problems. From FC3 to FC4, I spent days removing left-over FC3 packages that caused conflicts. From FC4 to FC5, I couldn't reboot afterward. So, I backup up all my files (including the hidden ones) to USB and did a format/install.

Six disks! Fedora is getting huge. I downloaded all 6 iso files. I don't have a CD burner - that is on my wive's Windows box. But, I found out that Windows XP now has built-in iso burning support from the desktop. Right click on an iso and the option to burn it is right there. So, I burned all 6.

I was good. I checked the media. It all failed. I tried to burn the first iso three times (even using cdrecord on a linux box as work). Finally, I remembered that my CD player does not support DMA. So, I had to install with ide=nodma. Suddenly all the disks tested good.

On to the install. Looks like FC5 - just a slightly different background. Personally, I like the bubbly look of FC5 more than the DNA look of FC6. I do not like the way it tries to force you to use Gnome. I've been using KDE since it was first available for slackware. Why do I have to change now? I had to go into the "customize now" prompt, remove Gnome, add KDE, and then look through all the other bloat FC6 wants to add: Bluetooth? I don't have any bluetooth devices. Power management? This isn't a laptop. HP Printer Drivers? I don't have an HP printer. I used to complain that Windows installs everything including the kitchen sink "just in case", but Linux lets you choose what to install. By making it an awkward option to un-choose the bloat, FC6 is turning into Windows.

Install complete - reboot. No network. What!? I had network access during installation. I check /etc/sysconfig/networking and find that I have eth0 and eth1. So, ifup eth1 and I have networking. What!? I have two network cards!? Yes. All the way through Fedora Core 5, the on-board network wasn't supported. Now, it is. So, I downed eth1 and put my cable in the onboard eth0 port. That's a plus for FC6, but you'd think it would make the active network device eth0, not eth1.

Now, compile my NVidia drivers - no, that fails. Just like when FC5 was released, the drivers won't compile. I did see something strange, installing kernel-devel installed both the i386 and the x86_64 source. I don't have i386. So, yum list | grep installed | grep i386 ... where did all that crap come from? I spend the next three hours removing all the i386 packages. I thought that it is possible that an i386 package would be needed by some x86_64 package, but no. So, I'm left wondering - I installed from x86_64 disks. Where did all those i386 packages come from? I was just lucky that I tend to do a minimal install first to make sure things work. Had I done a complete install, it would have taked a very long time to remove all the i386 junk.

Wow - there i586 and i686 stuff on here too. At least I got quick at removing things with the i386 junk.

Well, I installed the video driver from livna - maybe it won't randomly crash my... OK. If I run glxinfo, it crashes the X server.

Got it all installed. I can boot (and the network works). I can finally add the programs I need and get back to work. I just with that Fedora made it easier to upgrade. At the very least, a fresh install shouldn't require immediate purging of unwanted junk.

What happens when I'm bored at work? I go back to failed projects I've worked on to see if I can get them to work. Just in time for New Years, I got WebPad working. It is not a replacement for wikipedia. It is a one-person online notepad for random notes that you can organize like wikipedia. Need a new page? Just add a link to an existing page and click on it. Now, I need to work on the regular expressions. It will be another couple years before I'm interested in doing that. Perhaps when I'm back in college next year working on my PhD.

I've been playing around with having the content of my webpage delivered in different styles since I first stuck a few lines of HTML together and viewed it with my Mosaic browser on my Amiga. I used server-side includes back then. Now, I use a combination of PHP, JavaScript, and CSS.

A couple weeks ago, I had the idea of creating a webpage that functions like a desktop. I searched the web for a good two days and found nothing. So, I started writing it myself. Now, I have something that is, at the minimum, functional in Firefox. I'll have to borrow my wife's PC to test it on IE. I don't know anyoen with a Mac so I can test it on Safari and IE-Mac. But, I hope it is functional on all browsers.

If you are interested in seeing it, my url is http://shaunwagner.com (you will initially see a page that allows you to choose a theme - choose desktop). If you test it, please let me know about any bugs that you find. I'd like to get this working on all browsers and give everyone the JavaScript for it. I think it makes web browsing much more funcitonal.

Of course, as soon as this becomes popular, web browsers will become mini-desktops that you can customize with your own icons (ala Bookmarks) and windows that you can resize and drag around (similar to tabs). Then, my JavaScript will be rather useless.

Usually the mass media is quick to link any two stories together to create the impression that there is a trend going on. In the past couple weeks, I've read stories of the rediscovery of many things once claimed extinct: a special grass in Santa Catalina, a snow leopard on Mt. Everest, a wildflower in Contra Costa County Park, and a woodpecker in Arkansas.
All of these species were listed as extinct years ago by ecologists. Are ecologists jumping the gun on calling species extinct? I remember "extinction" being the hot eco-political word back in the 80's. There were commercials on television claiming that thousands of species of animals and plants were going extinct every week. To take it one step further, there were claims that the cure to cancer "could" be found in some plant or insect, but if it goes extinct, it will never be found (hence, the plot of one of Sean Connery's worse movies).
I wonder how many other species that ecologists were quick to call extinct are still alive and well in some remote area of the world. I wonder why the mass media isn't on a feeding frenzy about this. News or not, there is enough here to create a good story full of half-truths and bad logic. You could spin it to claim that the cure for cancer is closer than ever now that once-thought-extinct species are popping up all over the world. Just think of the commercial revenue an over-hyped story like that would bring in.

I had an idea for a website. Surely, someone else has thought of this and already done it. The idea is to compare the cost of the crimes depicted in Hollywood movies to the amount they intended to make off the crime.

For example, consider the first Die Hard movie. I have a vague memory of it, but I remember that they had tons of guns, enough explosives to cover a whole building, highly advanced drills and computers, and a large, highly skilled, and expensive crew. They were trying to steal some bonds or something. If they had got away with it, would they have made any net profit?

It just seems that the criminals always have millions of dollars worth of equipment - to the point that some even have satellites. They can afford to purchase a satellite and put it in orbit so they can steal [insert something worth far less than a satellite here]. It just makes no sense.

Oh well, I searched the web, but I haven't found such a site yet.

I posted this as a Slashdot Question, but I seriously doubt it will pass through the editors...

In a classic executive knee-jerk reaction to recent news about keystroke recorders being used by spyware, I was asked to research non-typed passwords. Easy: Fingerprint or retina scans. There's also smart card enabled keyboards. I realized two major problems with those ideas: First, they are mostly kludge devices, so they act like keystrokes and get recorded just like any keystroke. Second, they are expensive.

My second idea came in a dream, or maybe a nacho-induced haze: mouse passwords. Have the user wiggle the mouse around and translate that into a password. I know that a mouse-motion recorder could record this too, but it isn't a keystroke. I wrote a javascript to mouse-enable password fields on a website, and... it is a pain to use. It is damn hard to do the exact same mouse motion twice in a row - let alone every time you want to login. But, I thought that all the genius programmers at Slashdot may be able to use this as a starting point. So, I put it on my website with all my other useless code: http://shaunwagner.com/projects/js

If you can make this work, I'd be rather interested in knowing how you did it. As for me, I'm off on the next executive knee-jerk reaction.