Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

I’ve been away from blogging. I’ve been away from doing Debian and Ubuntu work (although there has been a few package updates, as well as a new one.) I’ve been away from a lot of happenings (like how the excellent Knightlust got to convince my fellow townsfolk at Lourdes College Foundation to use FOSS,) but that’s fine, since I know there will be others who can keep up the flame burning.

I’ve been away because I’ve been looking at stuff. Lots of stuff. Various stuff. Stuff like Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and Inferno, and dabbling into distributed computing, working on an implementation of Plan 9’s file protocol. Stuff like thinking about programming, meditating upon it as an art, exercising a discipline of simplicity, clarity and frugality. All that stuff.

I first looked at Plan 9 last March, when I was wanting to go another round at the Google Summer of Code. While I was not selected, just getting Plan 9 to run on my machines (first as a qemu terminal, then as standalone CPU server replacing my old Ubuntu dapper install on my desktop) exposed me to `that other side,’ and that got me thinking about how software ought to be good. Of course, I could have just chosen to drop it all (after all, I wasn’t selected, so…) but I knew that if I stick long enough, I might just learn something.

And yes, I am learning something. Like how a lot of software isn’t really simple, just appearing to be. Or how sophisticated software development methodologies rob the clear picture gained from a well-thought, clear, and simple analysis of problems. Or when push comes to shove, I will have to make a choice, between tolerating software complexity and status quo, or facing it and attempt to simplify it.

Well, there’s much to tell, but I’m lazy, and I’d rather tell stories in bits. Anyway, I think I’ll have some time to spare, especially as I have accepted a new job at an up-and-coming company that, I hope and endeavor, will rock the local and international tech scene. And, while doing that, get around to make great tools to get my job done, and other people’s jobs too.

I’m getting back to the action.

In a yet futile attempt to write an April Fools’ Day joke, Palm Inc. will be offering palm leaves to Christian Palm buyers in observance of Palm Sunday.

Palm officials declined to comment.

Finally, I’m now on broadband!

I made the move today to Smart Bro as they have been touting a promotion offering free installation and a 384 Kbps connection via their Canopy system. As I’ve been mostly offline (or slightly online, counting the occasional GPRS modem connection on a GSM network) I figured that this is the best way at the moment to get broadband connectivity, as the only DSL choices available locally have been either seriously damaged (due to the last supertyphoon) or excessively priced (with unpredictable foreign-currency adjustments.)

So, needless to say, I’m now enjoying myself with this new investment. Adding to this, I also got a new Netgear WGR614v7 wireless router so I can share the connectivity with perlis. While not exactly as flexible as the famous WRT45G from Linksys, it surely does the job to sharing the Net, so I’ve no complaints about it. And I’ve no complaints about the service offered by Smart Bro, either; the installer did an absolutely good job of making sure that the Canopy SM is on the most receptive direction and even gave me some pointers on what to expect with such a connection. Actually, I’ve already made arrangements about the peeves experienced by other Smart Bro users by taking a cue from Joey Hess by setting up the right service caches and by being not too abusive with my expectations.

But, I still have a lot to expect with this new connection. After all, I still have a few more items on my TODO that needs doing, namely writing about what the hell happened to me since last month until now, and my future directions (erm, resolutions) for this new year. Ah well…

… but first, I need to do some monster dist-upgrades…

BTW: a UMTS (3G) signal has finally been broadcast in Daet, giving me a reason to also have smart-3g as a backup service in case the Canopy goes down. Yipee!

There was no power again at the office today (thanks to my boss for sounding me while I was laying in bed so I had a pretty free day today. This is the first of my Unexpected Series of Events (although, in retrospect, this is somewhat expected since we did lose power at the office yesterday, giving credence to Clair’s story…)

Read the rest of this entry »

[Imagine a picture of a perlish-white MSI MegaBook S262 here…]

(Or, Why a Broken Video Card is a Good Thing™.)

Yesterday, my nVidia geForce4mx-440 video card broke its advanced rendering stuff (OpenGL, accelerated X, et al.) forcing me to use its VESA mode for X. Of course, this wasn’t much of a pain for me since I don’t do much rendering or gaming nowadays (only for some parish projects,) but for my folks (who use this desktop when I’m away, of course this was a major problem. Well, at least for my Mom.

The breakage of the video driver meant that the Windows installed alongside my Kubuntu system could not start up normally; one had to press F8 at boot time in a splitsecond to catch the elusive Windows menu that allows, among other things, logging in to Windows under Safe Mode or VGA mode. The result would be to get inside a 640×480 desktop, with barely much room for movement; while its certainly possible to adjust to 800×600, the fact that one had to do that meant an extra step in using what really is a 5-year-old-and-hopelessly-outdated operating system. Not to mention the occasional flickers of the screen and random image corruption.

Then, a bit later, Windows finally gave up. Neither the safety of Safe Mode or the vega of VGA mode can save the user from the horror. A monitor with its status lights blinking, blinking, blinking… Mom would be in a panic.

And she has classes tomorrow, and she needs to print some things NOW!!! 

Ok, said I, System Administrator of the Desktop revan. I’m going to do something.

And do something I did. I promptly logged in to Kubuntu, cleaned up one of its partitions that used to hold /usr/local/ (a hangover from my old Debian install, and cp -pa‘d my way, backing up what’s in C:\Documents and Settings\ as well as some other important files. Then…

I was a bit stumped. What else I could do?

Reinstall Windows? Yeah, right. That could work, but then again I need to go through the hoops all over again, activating the damn thing (knowing full well that Windows Product Activation ceased some months ago) and grabbing the stuff needed to have a working system (office, internet, etc.) Of course I can simply use OpenOffice.org, but I figured if, I installed OpenOffice.org for Windows, then why shouldn’t I install yet another GNU/Linux system as well? That lead me to the idea of simply extending my /home setup in Kubuntu to cover the old Windows partition, but I figured too that this is awkward.

Then I remembered that Mom was nagging me to install Edubuntu some time ago, after having heard that is was really neat as an teaching system. Of course! This is the perfect time. The opportunity finally presented itself.

So, I finally fragged /dev/hda2, formatted it using ReiserFS, and promply installed Edubuntu.

Teh Ende Result: Sweet.

Well, my revan’s finally Windows-free, for the first time since it got to our home in August 2003. A fitting birthday change, indeed. Thanks to my b0rked video card. And Edubuntu!

Today I installed Ubuntu Dapper on the old Pentium 4 machine at St John the Baptist Parish. This machine used to be eliza, where I did some Linux-2.6 on Debian Woody baking. But, since this was a milestone of sorts for this system, I decided to rename it to arete, after Socrates’ ideal of the perfect human being (showing my influence to Philo 173.)

As usual, this install was yet another smooth, successful, working-out-of-the-box setup (arete’s HP Deskjet 3745 printer and ATI Radeon 7000 card running perfectly,) with only the Internal D-Link/Conexant modem the only thing needing gcc love.

Tommorow, I’ll set up migrating the old files from my Dad’s Windows partition over to The Excellent Distribution™, and have him explore it, as he plans to move over the newsletter publishing system he set up for the parish (from M$ Publisher) to Scribus.

Hat tip to all the Free Software that made this possible!

Thank you Ian Dexter Marquez for the USB flash key you sent me! Thank you Steve Kemp and Heiko Herold for your wonderful ports of bash and wget to Windows! And thank you JoshNet for the cafe connection!

I’m now using those tools to grab ubuntu-desktop and its dependencies via apt-zip; speaking of which, I think that wonderful piece of free software needs a little love… more on that later…

Every now and then I set a day for myself to bring my big old desktop CPU to an internet cafe to update my Debian and Ubuntu installations, dchroots and pbuilders, because I only have a dialup connection at home (and of all things, from a softmodem.) It became such a habit that I decided to make the most of it, and use the time it takes for me to go and update to go around every internet cafe in town and see how people would react to my GNU OS Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I was this | | close to working on a laptop. My tito was considering of getting a Toshiba Dynabook Satellite 2550S that one of his cousins was selling. He had me test the system, which I found to be terribly fast, considering it had only a Celeron-366, 64 MB of memory, and a 4 GB hard disk, with only Windows ME and Office (presumably all officially licenced) installed.

Unfortunately, for 25,000 pesos, the price was too steep. Pop wouldn’t hear of it, preferring 15k instead, since the seller told us that we needed to ‘convert’ the battery so it would become rechargeable (huh? more expense), as well as that we might have to upgrade the RAM and HD.

Thus, I had no recourse but to tell my uncle that even if the notebook was nice, he still needed to shell out extra for the upgrades, which, of course, would not sit well with him. Also, since this was a ‘chance’ bargain offered by his cousin, there really wasn’t any incentive for my uncle to buy the thing since no one else in his family would use it (three of his children are in Manila, finding no lack of computing, and all of them would probably use computers for games, which, would not be `ideal working’ for the laptop).

Oh well, that’s life here in Daet, it seems. If only I had the money to shell out, I would have bought the box myself; I think it is still an excellent machine to do work with, and given the increasing power rates, I might save some money as well. But, then again, if I had cash to burn, I’d get either an X40 or a customized Aviator AX7.

Now that would make an excellent birthday gift.