I've read several stories about the sudden shift from netbooks with Linux to netbooks with Windows XP. And there are arguments about price or accusations of shenanigans, and the observation of the user base being lazy.

This latter is close, but the lazyness isn't just on the part of users, but on certain newspapers' and banks' choices of interfacing software. And it might not be lazyness as such; resistance to change is more accurate. Having to change the way one is used to things being done seems to be harder the older one gets, and it is hardest for those who never knew more than one system ever, and knows that system well. I've seen this in several other situations at work. It is probably where the saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" comes from as well.

I have had the opportunity of seeing the process of a long-time Windows user getting comfortable with Linux. Beyond the fact that we have a mouse and a GUI with symbols to click on, the innards are as we know, fairly different.

This is a different way of using Linux than I do, having known how to use and program UNIX systems long before there were any MS-Windows at all, and I don't have the same banks, and I don't care about the newspaper video offerings to the same extent.

There is also a third place where there has been some less than helpful messages; that had to do with playing DVDs. I'll get to that in time.

So, here it begins: Vista did work flaky, with occasional refusal to start-up or shut down properly, so the owner of the computer had spoken with several friends, many of whom had suggested trying Linux. I am one of these and there are several others, and all of us had some varying ideas as to which distro would be the best one.

First we tried Fedora 10, as one of the friends had recommended that, and I have used various varieties of that as well, so that was tried. Installing was easy enough; making the maching dual-boot with Vista as another option in the start-up menu was easy for someone like me who is skilled in the art. Even a secondary partition that held non-OS files, was available from the Linux system, and clicking on .DOC files caused them to be opened in Open Office Writer. Even plugging in the printer, which is attached with an USB cable, worked painlessly: a dialog opened up identifying the printer and asking if the defaults were OK. Subsequent attempts to print documents and webpages were all successful, and not very different from what one would do in Windows. After all, Firefox runs both places.

However, soon some desires for changing from the defaults came up, modifying the font sizes, moving the taskbar from the top to the bottom, and where was the control panel? So I showed how things could be grabbed and dragged around the screen, and that the control panel as such was replaced by some fairly easily discoverable dialogs under "preferences". This is a matter of relearning, but nothing really terribly difficult.

Then the bigger stumbling blocks appeared, in order of difficulty:

• Watching Flash videos from the newspapers VG and Dagbladet.
• Accessing MSN
• Getting the bank's certificates to work
• Playing DVDs
• Watching the videos provided by Aftenposten

The first one was not so hard. Adobe's flash plug-in was downloaded and installed and we could now see the video offerings on VG and Dagbladet. The videos on the third major newspaper, Aftenposten would not work however, as these are not Flash but something else

Then for MSN, I've used Gaim before, and now this is called Pidgin, so it was pulled down through the "Add/Remove programs", installed, started, and run.

Next was the bank. This uses some kind of certificates, and the online information indicated that this might be windows only, unless one was lucky and got it working on Linux ... WTF? I'm using a different bank, which does not operate that way at all, and mine works fine on any OS that supports a graphical browser (Firefox, Opera, whatever) We've left this one for later.

The first big headache came with DVD playing. No player was available at the system update place, and the reasons given were, paraphrased, that we did not support patented and closed systems, so go complain to the providers. Or take a hike, we're sitting on our high horse and ain't moving off.

This might be the correct stand from a legal point of view, as the legality of non-closed decoders is questionable in some countries at least, and then there is the legal questions about the mixing of the legal closed-source decoders with GPL licensed components, which thus makes the publisher wash their hands of the whole mess. However, we sit here, and we want to see the movie on a DVD which we have purchased and thus have the right to watch...

Trying obtaining the VLC media player therefore, but that came as a .tar.bz2 file, and how do we install that? I know, unpack, configure, make, make install; but is this something we want to have everyone and their dog to be forced to do? First, there has to be a compiler in place. This is, surprisingly and somewhat alarmingly, no longer the default even on recent Linux systems. Then having got the compiler into place, and performing the necessary command-line-fu of tar -xvjf (try explaining this to someone coming in from the cold) then the ./configure generated a need for something called "mad". So go and google for that, and get another file, .tar.gz, this time, so unpack, now it is tar -xvzf (again, having to do a crash course in Operating System Concepts and having no good answer to the question of why there is several kinds of zipping files). But unpacked that and then ./configure, and now it needs several other varieties of codecs and suchlike, and this endeavour is given up.

Even persevering like this is way beyond what many other users would ever want to do, and it ends up looking like "linux is hard", ie. arcane.

A couple weeks later, on another suggestion, we try Ubuntu. There is a second computer available, and the disk is partitioned and this is made dual-boot as well, so now we have Ubuntu on one maching and Fedora on the other.

The first steps are much the same; the printer and open office works right out of the box. The menus ars slightly different, but no big deal. And now there are some "bad parts" available so we can even watch DVDs without too much hassle. This is better than Fedora who basically told us to sod off and complain to the distributers and not to them -- so who do we complain to about a DVD? The distributer? DVDCCA? Yeh right.

We only have Aftenposten left, it still needs the "Microsoft Media Server (MMS) Protocol Source" it says. Bang smack into the clutches of Bill and Steve...

In conclusion, a successful netbook or desktop OS must be able to work well with a number of external systems, and do so right out of the box. Windows on x86 does this, even if not perfect, it is at least good enough; Linux on x86 does parts of this (Flash, DVDs if you use the right distro) but fails utterly on some of the others. On Linux 64-bit which I have here, even Flash seems to be iffy; and chances are that a similar situation will occur on ARM-based netbook systems, whether Linux or Windows -- no Flash until Adobe gets it ported. And thus a lot of different sites' content won't be accessible when browsing.

Looking around in the news, there's this story about the US$ 683 trillion's worth of derivatives, that no-one's quite sure about who owns or who owes all this money. So the Fed steps in, and manages to do 300 billion here and 750 billion there, and thus there is now somewhere like US$ 682 trillion. Within a couple of significant figures anyways.

Take one down and pass it around, as it were.

Now, I'm already aware that there is financial troubles afoot, and I don't pretend to be the first or only one who's discovered another bit of scary-sounding news. The article referring to the money as "used toilet paper" does not exactly sound like praise either, it sounds more like they're all in the deep shite, is what it sounds like. Or perhaps it is on its way to a fan spinning merrily around somewhere ...

But 680-whatever trillions, how many zeros is that? Many, for sure, Uncle Scrooge of Disney-style numbers almost.

Except that he's a fiction, and these vast numbers are evidently appearing in Real Life. Arguably the actual money behind it is imaginary, but someone apparently has been pricing these derivatives, and here is the tag.

And it's real, US, dollars, and if you go and shop for the daily bread, you may have to pay 2 or so of them for it. It is not like the funny money such as zimbabwe dollars where you have inflation that makes you have to pay 2 million today and 3 million tomorrow, and 600 million next month. These things are like nano-bucks and shrinking, they are a different kind.

This is at a level way outta my, and possibly, everyone's league. Consider that the Fed put in 1050 giga-bucks and it just nudged the third digit. I know of no-one else who has any giga-bucks in numbers like that to throw around and even they made only a minor dent. First time I've seen giga-US bucks look like a pittance...

So how many zeros is this. Although prefixes like mega- and giga- are appropriate, they're just not big enough. We're approaching tera- and exa-buck scales here -- I can't remember having had to deal with such enormous numbers since calculating doping densities in semiconductors, back in college. And then we were talking about atoms and electrons within spaces of cubic centimeters -- obviously tiny things, so it would make sense that there would be many of them. One gets used to that. Dollars however, needed no such decimal notational tricks, there were never too many of them either debit or credit.

First, getting rid of these stupid "-illion" things, so that it is possible to see and speculate on the scale of it: 0.683*10^15, how does that sound? Then subtract the 10^12 which the Fed coughed up, and of course we're down to 0.682*10^15.

There's pi*10^7 seconds in a year. Spend a dollar a second, and this amount would have been counted after 2*10^7 years! Spend, or earn, a dollar per microsecond instead, or, spend or earn an entire megabuck per second, and you'll still have to keep it up at that rate for 20 years solid.

But spend it on what? Or if earning it, who'll be paying? Doesn't seem to be anyone else.... Is it the next stage in the progression that goes: If you owe the bank a million dollars it is your problem; if you owe the bank a billion dollars, it becomes the bank's problem; if you owe the bank a trillion dollars, it becomes the govenment's problem... but if you, or someone, anyone, owes 682 trillion dollars, is it then the world's problem?

It seems crazy and unreal. It is perhaps "funny money" after all. There's a bubble about to burst here it looks like... Then there will be a matter of figuring out what to do so that this kind of bubble is not allowed to be created again. Gold or silver standard, whatever.

On wanting to show some longer C program code, I got the "too many junk characters" -- well the characters are just the ones they should be, since it is OK for the compiler. The lameness filter sez otherwise.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
FILE *fpo;
char *exstring;
int escount;
int j;

escount = 10;
for(j = 1; j<argc; j++) escount += strlen(argv[j]) + 2;

exstring = malloc(escount);

strcpy(exstring, "(" );
for(j = 1; j<argc; j+=1)
{
strcat(exstring, argv[j]);
strcat(exstring, " " );
}
strcat(exstring, ")" );

fpo = fopen("kcal.c", "wt");

fprintf(fpo,
"#include <stdio.h>\n"
"#include <math.h>\n"
"int main() \n"
"{\n"
" double r;\n"
" r = %s;\n"
" printf(\"Result of %%s = %%G\\n\", \"%s\", r); \n"
"}\n\n",
exstring, exstring);

fclose(fpo);
free(exstring);

system("cc -o kcal kcal.c -lm");
system("./kcal");
return(0);
}

But I can show this in the Journal at least.

So I've dusted off the 468 scope again, the one I bought for 40 kroner or so, some years ago and had another investigation of its malfunction. It looks like there is something wrong with the ROMs as it doesn't get very far from start-up to halt. (pins 29 and 33 on the 8085 going both LOW). I've managed to find some memory dumps of these on the Internet, so I'll try burning 2764s and connecting these, then see what happens next.

Then there is the other acquisition, the HP3330B synthesizer. This thing works fine, so I've had no need to open up the box. But there's this interesting "remote control" connector on the back, and I have been able to procure the complete manual for this unit. Turns out this "remote control" interface includes a listen-only variant of IEEE-488, minus the cable-interface, so I could either construct that (just putting in some buffer-circuits) or make another parallell-interface, maybe via I2C or similar to a Picotux, so that I can put the synthesizer directly onto a local network. The signals are all 5V TTL-level ones, so there is just a matter of sticking some 74LS05 open collector inverters between the device and two PCF8574s, making both sides happy about the electrical loading. That was the easy part, figuring out this.

The slightly harder part is to verify which way is up and down, and which letters and numbers are used, although looking at omitted connections and seeing the correspondning non-connected fingers on the card edge sticking out, makes this an easily solved puzzle. There is basically 2 by 18 positions, and in the manual one side is numbered and the other side is marked by letters.

Running the synthesizer in sweep mode should make it generate pulses on the sweep-address outputs, so it should be reasonably easy to figure out where these are, and by elimination, which pins are the IEEE-488 set where the thing can be controlled.

The less-than-easy part has proven to be obtaining a 4 mm pitch card-edge connector. All the current places I've seen have only fancy 1.27mm and suchlike tiny-pitch connectors available now; the old and large 4mm pitch seems to be unobtanium... Even 2.54 mm, the old familiar standard, is getting harder to locate. And I haven't seen any 2mm pitch ones either, at least that would be somewhat compatible with the 4mm pitch connector, just removing every other pin, or maybe it can be aligned so that two pins match each finger. I will have to finagle something here... perhaps take one of the 2.54mm pitch connectors that I do have lying around, then pull out every other pin and cutting it up into slices and mount these on a circuit board, so that the spacing becomes the requisite 4mm.

I do not want to solder anything onto the card-edge and damage it.

Okay, what is up with the "home" page now? Looks like some unconnected CMOS input in the works, with what appears to be some random mixture of recently moderated comments, my own journal entries, comments that I have posted and other comments that I can't even remember having seen before...

Fortunately, the tabs there make sense at least, with Comments and Journals and Friends (which also includes Fans, Foes and the others) so not all is lost. It is not like I am threatening to leave as I've seen others here want to --

But the "home" page, that is a number of notches more curious than the "45 of 33 comments" seen on the front-page for the low-visibility stories, that I've never figured out.

And where has the slashdot.org journal logo selection gone to?

This morning, it was discovered that the earth underneath the metro tracks at Gjønnes station had shifted upwards. Picture here. The vertical alinement here used to be level -- now one track has a vertical curve like a hilltop, and the other is twisted sideways inwards towards the platform. The overhead wiring hangs in tatters -- some neighbor had seen a flash and heard a bang sometime during the night when the 750 V DC supply had shorted out --

There is a large mound of deposited rocks from a new railway tunnel that is being built nearby, and the weight of this eventually pushed the clay in the ground here downwards and made it move upwards under the metro track and Gjønnes station. This whole area is old seabed, from back when glaciers and ice had held the landmasses down.

I've had these Western Digital Worlbook units for a while now, and although I soon got the shell access to the Linux system on them, I didn't investigate them further until last week.

What I found is that there is an SMBUS/I2C function available on them, and that the kernel, right out of the box, contains the necessary drivers for this. The actual connection is to where an omitted RTC chip would have been. (The specific details is that U9 pin 5 is SDA, U9 pin 6 is SCL, U9 pin 4 is GND, and then get 3.3V from the serial-port connection, J4 pin 1) I hooked up a DS1621 temperature sensor chip there, and managed to talk to it via the /dev/i2c-0 device and the i2c-dev module.

I'll be making a nice hardware modification (no loose wires all over the place) and there is space for an additional circuit board inside the cae. Only issue now is what kind of connector to use for the external i2c connection, for which I need four wires: Serial Clock, Serial Data, Ground, and Power for the pull-up resistors.

This opens up many interesting possibilities, imagine some kind of self-contained data-logging arrangement, where the system pulls information from sensors on the I2C-bus and stores it on the disk. Then just have this sit on the network somewhere...

Of course the USB-connector can be used for something similar, perhape even higher-bandwidth -- but the sensor hardware would not be that simple!

Finally, they managed to get a working fiber in here. The first one they pulled was no good, so the fiber-installing people had to come an put in a new one.

Then it was a matter of minutes before "We get signal!"

First thing I had to try was to download the Fedora 8 DVD ISO, just to see how fast it would be. This took some 20-odd minutes for 2.4 GB. I'm wondering if I got the whole thing, as that ISO is exactly 0x7FFFFFFF bytes long, which I've seen as having been a file-size limit on some 32-bit systems.... (such as the Western Digital Worldbooks) Since it is a DVD I'd think it is rather unlikely that it will have exactly this size. And I've checked that the file system on the machine I'm downloading to can handle bigger files, which it does, so any limitation is elsewhere.

But the fiber goodness is there: 10 Mbits/s in and 3 Mbits/s out, and there is a public IP-address assigned through a transparent modem, so there is the ability to run servers. Which will be of the "show the temperature here" variety at first.

Now that I have two different Internet connections here, there is the matter of having to loop around outside just so as to be able to access the fairly noisy machine sitting behind my back apart from USB-stick-net (the modern descendant of the floppy-net concept from the 1980s and 1990s) but eventually I'll be moving everything over to the fiber.

In other news, I've been doing a lot of moderation recently, getting the points 10 at a time instead of 5, but I've also noticed that a lot of Anonymous Coward posts show up at -1 now, even if their contents actually are at the very least Interesting, and even positively Insightful, even when they're not Informative. Looks like there is some new settings in slashcode: I modded one of these as Interesting, and looking at it now, it started off at -1, then it is 50% interesting and 50% informative with an up-rating of +1 for a total of 0. No idea where that Informative came from though, though this post is deserving of that as well; had I seen it as Informative in meta-mod, that I would consider Fair.

I hope there is not too much mixing up here, I'd hate to mod something Insightful and have it come up 50% Insightful and 50% Troll, although I have seen comments where that might be an appropriate combination... Still, this would be no big deal, as long as the direction on moderations agree, Insightful/Informative/Interesting, and Troll/Flamebait at least, where the specific choice is somewhat open as per the "don't sweat the small stuff" of the FAQ.

The fiber goodness is almost here. The electrical contractor responsible for the last branch lines from the poles along the road to the wall came by today. We had an appointment for today at 11 AM.

But after about half an hour of walking up and down the road, looking at the poles and cables betwene then, it became apparent that the company rolling out the fiber trunks hadn't got around to do this part of the neigborhood yet.

So I'll have to wait a bit longer; as I'm supposed to go out travelling sometime during the next weeks, I'll have to remain patient for a little longer. The hook-up cost is fixed, so this timing error won't cost me anything; no bill until there actually is an operating service here. Which is nice.

Stupid abbreviations again: 2k38 for 2038 ? Why the k instead of the zero? From component values, the unit or power of 1000 is occasionally used to substitute the decimal point, thus 2k7 is 2700 and 2k38 therefore becomes 2380; which year is too far into the future to even start worrying about....

2k038 or more usefully spelt: 2038, is of course when the 32-bit integer number of seconds since January 1 1970 goes from positive to negative in the early hours of January 19 (at 03.14.08), and that may or may not be any problem by then. Easy enough to test. On this machine, the time_t is 64 bits, so it will be OK (of course, the hardware will probably have died sometime in the intervening 30 years, but that's nothing to do with this.)

The Picotuxes however, have sizeof(time_t) equal to 4, so they will not make it past 2038/01/19, I just discovered. Consider this:

# date 011903102038
Tue Jan 19 03:10:00 UTC 2038
# date
Tue Jan 19 03:10:06 UTC 2038
# date
Tue Jan 19 03:13:59 UTC 2038
# date
Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 UTC 2038
# date
Fri Dec 13 20:45:56 UTC 1901
# date
Fri Dec 13 20:46:02 UTC 1901
#

Friday the 13. oh well, just adds to the scariness. Just goes to show that using Julian Day numbers and 1/86400 fractions of them makes sense. These will remain good a lot longer than me or anyone reading this will be able to care about it personally.