Timehorizon.net

Hey,  a bit later than planned but better than never, this has spent a few months in my drafts folder while I sorted something since long forgotten.

Following my post about Ubuntu and all the fun there is to be had there, I feel it’s only fair to give Windows 7 the same opportunity to impress. I installed it over Christmas, having acquired a studenty copy of the professional version, replacing my 3 year old XP install.

Installation

As the easiest to install windows like ever, this should be easy. I added a new hard disk and told the installer to do its thing. It lost some points here for

1. Not detecting my xp install and offering to import files/settings/etc, Ubuntu did this
2. After installing and rebooting, it simply popped up a dialog saying the install was broken and could I please reinstall. Worked the second time.

BSODs

From XP being totally stable, Win7 would bluescreen maybe 4-5 times a week, usually after logging in. I did the whole crash dump analysis thing but they were all over the shot with no consistent driver failure. I eventually narrowed it down to one of my existing hard disks, that had worked fine up until the day I installed 7, and appears to continue to work fine attached to my netbook via USB. It would appear then disappear after some usage (sometimes simply touching a file, other days it would work for hours first). Removing it cleared up the BSODs. I have another external USB drive that Win7 won’t read, so it seems to be fairly picky in this regard.

Networking

While I am sure that if everything in your network runs Windows 7, homegroups make it nice and simple to share everything, there is no easy way to simply set a folder to share with everyone when everyone is windows XP machines, getting that to work requires digging into the advanced options in multiple places, else you keep getting popups asking for credentials.

Printing

1. Browse to machine running xp, double click on shared printer.
2. Windows 7: “Dude, theres like totally no drivers for that printer, wait, I’ll just search online”
3. …
4. “Sorry, nope. You wanna have disk?”
5. Printers manufactures website: “Use the driver provided with Windows 7″
6. Swear, spend an hour trying things like the vista driver, googling problem.
7. Find solution here, you need to set it up as a local printer on a remote port, instead of a network printer, if that makes any sense.

Windows media player

The new one is slow, bloated, sometimes stutters, I still prefer media player 9.

MySQL

For whatever reason this is slooooow, talking 10-100x slower than XP for some queries, not sure why yet, needs looking into.

Nice bits

• Hardware accelerated desktop without all the crashing of the Linux one.
• The window manager has some nice new features, shaking windows and the half screen by dragging it to the side. However my keyboard lacks the windows key required for some of the fun stuff
• UAC, I think it pop up about the right amount and is not really annoying.
• Native DVD burning, finally.

Still playing with go, I finished my bmp package, it’s here, or on gopaste, No known bugs, but just the code for the moment, I have not done a makefile or test script. Not sure what to code up next..

-R

So this week Google released Go, a new programming language they designed to be a bit like C++ but without the kitchen sink. It compiles fast, is type safe and has pointers but without the arithmetic, and is garbage collected for extra awesomeness. It’s sort of object orientated, you get types and methods, but not inheritance. Concurrency is made easy by goroutines and channels to communicate between them.

Currently works on Linux and OS X, for i386 and amd64, with the unique selling point being how fast it compiles (like instantly). Currently there’s a basic set of packages/libraries for accessing OS fuctions/networking, with higher level stuff for serving/manipulating HTTP/HTML type stuff. No suprises that the first programs written have been twitter clients (command line and a local web based one). Comes with a sort of butt-ugly brown gopher logo.

So to have some fun with go, I wrote this simple 100 line or so program that reads a .bmp and then uses the built in png library to convert it to a png. Works with the basic .bmps as outputted by ms paint and IrfanView on winXP. Other weird bmps with colour palettes/compression need not apply.  Next I need to think of something that needs concurrency, so I can give goroutines some love.

http://timehorizon.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/bmp.go

This post is my version of the ‘I installed Ubuntu on my PC and this is what didn’t work’  blog post. Many people have done them, and some even get read if written by people with interesting blogs beforehand. Hopefully it may help someone fix some Ubuntu problems of their own.

I have run Ubuntu on my backup/fileserver for a few years now without problems, it runs samba, hosts a couple of SVN repos, dishes out some custom DNS and other server-ish tasks just fine, only stopping when the power supply explodes or a hard disk dies (both have happened twice now). So a couple of months ago I cleared out a hard disk and decided to install it on my desktop as a dual boot with windows XP.

Bootloader

Ubuntu installed without a hitch, it detected my XP install and offered to configure the bootloader to allow me to select either to boot. After it finished installing I rebooted and windows XP came up as if nothing had happened. This may be my fault because I have the HHD boot order changed in the BIOS, and after using its menu to select the right disk, Ubuntu did boot. I installed grub onto the windows disk, and can boot Ubuntu from there, but can’t get grub to boot windows, despite much fiddling with the boot line options, etc.  Also in the process somehow broke UUIDs in grub, so have to specify the root location using a path. Decided that using the BIOS’s f8 boot menu to choose the HDD and OS is simplest option.

Firefox

Firefox is slooooow, and I mean anywhere between 4-8x slower than on Windows XP, Pages still come up nice and fast, but trying to scroll through them is just nasty, and anything that uses a fixed background is worse, see here for a page demonstrating the issue. Trying to scroll the page makes it eat a whole CPU core, I have tried various 3.0 and 3.5 packages, some are better than others (I think the Mozilla ones are best, but all struggle). Looking at bug reports it seems we are still playing pass the buck between gnome, firefox, some rendering libraries, video drivers, etc on the source of the problem. I am currently using the development version of google chrome instead, which even with plugins enabled, does not crash very much, and can scroll slashdot discussions at more than 3 fps.

VPN

The network manager cisco vpn hander needs a reboot before it will work, even though the installing the package makes no mention of this and does not request a reboot when its done, if you don’t you get an error about no valid VPN secrets, no biggie, just annoying.

Compiz

Random crashing every now and again for good measure, 100% crash rate within 5 minutes of starting to play fullscreen video. Solution: Disable Compiz (or buy nvidia apparently). Pity because desktop cubes and swooshy effects are quite cool

Powermate

I have a PowerMate, an external USB volume knob. Being a pretty obscure bit of hardware, I was not expecting it to work out of the box, and it turns out there is a package called Gizmo Daemon that was originally developed as powermated for controlling it. Installing this is slightly less than point and click, as it required some fiddling at a shell to get my user into the right groups to be able to access its input or something, but once set up it came with some nice python scripts to control what happens when I turn/press the knob, and display current CPU usage via the brightness of the LED. This all worked fine except that actually useful volume control bit. After playing with the python scripts and log files, I eventually determined that it was detecting my graphics cards HDMI out as the default audio device and changing the volume of that (despite everything else in the system using the right one). There is no easy way to change this in Gizmo, and I had to fix the problem by adding some lines to the alsa config, probably caused by Gizmod not asking ALSA if  an output is connected to anything before changing the volume.

Audio

Abandon hope all ye who enter here?

Why does the default volume control have more buttons and sliders than the cockpit of the bloody space shuttle? The pulseaudio volume widget seems to make more sense (plus you get per application volume) but it’s not even installed by default, let alone the one in the taskbar. The default media player (rhythmbox?) stutters when CPU/Disk usage gets high (opening firefox/open office). Windows XP seems to have no problem supplying uninterrupted music no matter what else the system is doing. No really, replace all the audio settings options with the pulseaudio ones and up the default priority/caching of the music player, and maybe linux sound would be maybe adequate in most cases. I am sure if it works being able to pump my laptops audio through my computers headphones will be very cool, need to try it sometime.

Now I need to go upgrade to 9.10, and maybe try turning compiz back on.

-Ralph

So I finished up my theme for the moment. It’s a start, and need some tweaking, as I am not very happy with the post boxes at the moment, and on this monitor its hard to tell what shade of green the header and title bars are, as it changes depending on where I am sitting, darker is better.

It renders best in Firefox and Google Chrome. Opera works except for the rounded corners, I assume Safari works, and I have not even tried IE (might check it in 7/8, but 6 can die a a slow painful death). Firefox does a much better job of the rounded corners, as Chrome does not seem to apply any anti-aliasing so they look a bit jagged. Browsers also seem to disagree about the exact location of the text in the header, but its a small thing and may be due to some unset defaults.

I removed a bunch of the extra stuff from the default theme like tags and categories, may need to come back and add them at some stage if I ever have enough content to warrent.

-R

I am slowly attempting to craft my own theme for this site,  it’s a fairly minimalist affair so far in while, grey and green, I am basing it on the HTML produced by the default one and only changing it where nessessary. The main index page is pretty much done, but individual post views, images in posts and comments still need some loving.

Theming wordpress has so far been quite simple, the default theme providing some very nice HTML that is easy to attach ones own CSS to. It’s functions look a little odd however

I would have done it with curly brackets and s0me kind of array myself, but its at least simpler than Drupals theme_base_theme_panels_panel_header($title) spaghetti function naming.

Will hopefully be back shortly with my new theme, then the debugging and introspection can begin.

I have re-enabled comments on posts after turning on the Akismet spam filtering plugin. This hopefully means I won’t get so much email asking me to approve spam. Will maybe look at the theme next.

This post is to purely show that I am alive, and may even blog some time, given the inclination, a subject, or the desire to vent some hatred on one of Hazel’s reviews.

-R

Its pretty cold out, and Ilya wanted it recorded that he survived the walk home from uni, so here it is. To quote:

“I managed to bravely struggle through, in a feat not unlike shakleton and hillary before me, through the arctic storm, there were dark times when i thought i might never see my loved ones again, but i remembered the spirit of those brave explorers and was inspired to fight on, knowing that my achivement will live on in the history books.

In other news I no longer play WOW, but will again some time. At the moment I am sitting here waiting for Audiosurf to unlock on steam. Great game and everyone should give it a try.

Big Hand aslo released their album, it looks like this. If you like ska you should go buy a copy.

See you in a few months

-R

For forty days and forty nights I have wandered the wilderness of Azeroth, stood, fought and died for the alliance in a war that seems to never end, from the comfort of Dun Morogh to the wastelands of Desolace. Now I have returned to see the light of day once more, and I am not sure if I will venture forth once more.

It’s a good game all right, just that its perhaps a little simple. The combat system and skills, etc are simple enough when playing solo, and group play is all about being squeezed into a even narrower role, maybe its just because I chose a prot paladin and cant stand healing stupid mages who have no idea about agro the whole time, but all too often everything is either too easy or you wipe, there’s no middle ground. Oh and don’t even get me started on the quests, if I have to kill another X rats to get Y widgets where only every 100th rat drops one I am going to scream. Oh yeah, murlocs suck too, not sure why, they just do.

But I will go back, because they have somehow made doing trivial things for incremental rewards the most fun I have had in a long time. Even with all the ninja looters, murlocs and general endless grinding its just so much fun, and I wish I knew why.

I shall give it a few more days, get some real life stuff done, then I shall be back.