Pile of Dross

For somewhat dumb reasons (not mine – I’m the smug smartarse who pointed out failing of logic, but anyway) I now have a Gizmo account – apparently our site networking folk prefer(allow) it to Skype. And it integrates with Adium, my current IM client, as a bonus.

Chuck me an e-mail if you want contact details.

Last week, I found a website that has been rendered unusuable due to Flash. And this isn’t a kneejerk Flash-hating reaction- the website had added a flash object that popped up when clicked on. However, the layering seem to be screwed up, which meant that the normal flash menu items which were hidden when the popup had been clicked were unclickable even when the popup hadn’t been clicked. Possibly this is a Gecko rendering bug (I tried both Firefox and Camino) but it sufficently irritated me that I wandered off in search of a way of eliminating flash problems. The obvious answer is of course to remove the flash player, but flash is used on various sites I visit for navigation menus and the like, so that’s not really an option. First I came across Nuke Anything Enhanced. A nifty little firefox extension that adds an item to the context menu allowing you to remove items from webpages, unfortunately the I can’t seem to get a context menu up on flash objects its not a whole solution. Next thing that I found was FlashBlock. Another firefox extension, this one prevents the loading of flash objects, leaving an icon to click on if you wish to show it. This in combination with Nuke Anything Enhanced made the irritating webpage usable again.

The power supply in one of my systems decided to die on Wednesday so I browsed over to Quiet PC UK to get a replacement, which turned out to be the same model as I’d bought for another of my systems a few months back so those two systems are now pretty damned quiet – humming gently away in the background, my oldest system is the loudest – it generates a continous whine. But I’m loathe to turn it off even though as a P166MMX it struggles to do more than one thing at a time, as its the first computer that was *mine*, not shared with someone, not for the whole family, mine. Its almost 9 years old and never had a serious component failure. It just keeps slogging away.

Either I’ve broken something or my iBook has worked out that I don’t want to start iTunes when I plug my iPod iN. Last time the iPod sat with the big tick that I could unplug it but I had music playing, this time my iPod didn’t appear in Finder upon connection of the cables.

I’d like to think its that smart, but my natural pessimism and Occam’s razor suggest that something gone a bit peculiar.

Got two 250GB SATA hard disks delivered from dabs on Saturday (I’m sure I vowed never to order from them again without getting it delivered to work, but what the heck), this was to replace one in a server that died, probably after the power dropped a bit too often.

Physical installation was painless, software installation less so.

The motherboard has a PDC20376 controller, which has some sort of RAID functionality, so I configure the controller to treat the two drives a a RAID 1 mirror, download and burn the debian stable netinst image and start installation. Everything going smoothly, both disks detected….oh hang on, both disks? Surely it should only see one “disk”?
Decide to stop and retry with testing netinst image – same result, sees both disks but no mirror.

Regroup at this point by doing a web search on the controller – ahha RAID functionality not supported by the driver, disappointing, but not a death knell – this is only going to be a linux system so we can live with software raid.

So go back into controller bios and delete array. Reinstall debian testing, get to partioning, apparently its unable to create partitions on the software RAID meta-device, hum and haw for a bit before deciding I can live with one muckle partition. New problem – no swap, realise that RAID 1 mirroring swap is pointless so repartition giving 1 GB swap on each disk and RAID 1 mirroring rest of disks. Rest of installation painless from then on, until system gets to point it needs to reboot.

System spits out CD, powers down, powers back up, does usual BIOS check stuff and then ….. nothing, not even an insert system disk and press a key prompt. Have moment of inspiration and go into RAID controller setup and create two RAID 0 arrays, each containing one disk, set the first to be bootable and then reboot the system. Success! The system happily boots and does some more setup and finally lands me at a shell. Do a cat /proc/mdstat to check raid is okay – informs me that array is unclean and is resyncing, slightly worrying, but assume a shutdown somewhere wasn’t clean and leave it, resync completes fine. Decide to reboot system as a further check, all okay – array comes back up clean.

What planet is the person who designed the iBook keyboard layout from that requires “§” gets its own key but “#’ is a hidden character (Alt-3)? And the swapping of “@” and double quote from the standard PC layout – why oh why oh why?

So I’ve had my iBook (14″ screen 512MB memory 60GB disk) for about 2 days now. A few thoughts:

Installation: What installation? Get it home, open the box, discover the box you lugged back in your arms contains a box with a carry handle on it, remove various bits of packaging, plug it and turn it on, job done. Well nearly, I couldn’t see any obvious way to get the MAC address of the wireless card from the setup procedure so had to set my access point to no access control.

GUIness: Still not quite used to the fact that you can shut applications down but they’re still running, so I tend to end up with far too much stuff running. I have had to Force Quit everything once so far.

Mail: nice but since I can’t unsubscribe from folders and my work exchange server has a *huge* Public folders er…folder containing vast amounts of stuff I have absolutely no interest in *and* if I set the mailbox prefix to INBOX to exclude it I lose my Sent Items folder, I’ve gone back to Thunderbird.

Safari: Can’t live without tabbed browsing so I’ve gone back to Firefox too, though tabbed browsing seems a little less useful when I have to hold the mouse button to get the context menu up, rather than the drumming my fingers on the mouse buttons I ued to do, though the touchpad scroll side to side being mapped to history back and forward is ticking me off. and I do seem to get the odd artifact on the screen

Battery Life: Well its much better that my other laptop which got about 2 hours usage before cutting out, I pulled this one out of my bag at 11am or so, brought it out of sleep and had it on reasonably constantly until I got the bus home shortly after 5pm and it claimed it could still go for another 30 minutes.

Interaction: I haven’t plugged my iPod in yet as I have a nagging suspiscion it’ll try and wipe it and I don’t want to be disappointed as interacting with other devices has been great – it found my K700i phone quickly on bluetooth, recognised my Canon digital camera when I plugged it in.

On the recomendation of one of Graeme‘s posts I’ve downloaded Adium, an IM client, which supports more protocols than iChat. I’ve also downloaded SSHKeyChain for the whole ssh-agent goodieness and then SSHTunnelManager as SSHKeyChain’s tunnelling config dialog appears to be horribly, horribly broken and StuffitExpander for expanding StuffIt files. I downloaded the GroupCal beta for syncing my work exchange calendar with iCal, which works well but to full replace Outlook I need to be able to accept meeting requests and GroupCal doesn’t seem to hook into Thunderbird.

I’ve been bad:

Dear Mr. Derek Ross,

Thank you for your order dated 07-NOV-2005, which Apple has received at the
Apple Store.

Yay, yet another OS to patch/update/generally look after.

Its strange, it seems that writing a few lines each day summarising my activites at work seems to drain my blogging energy to such an extent that I can’t be bothered writing about anything else. So what have I been up to since the last non-work, non-meta post on the 12th? Well i got older – quietly and without fuss, I’ve finished all 3 three of the books I was “reading”, been playing the new Sims 2 expansion pack and DOA 2 Ultimate, managing to get past 50 for the first time ever in Survival mode. I’ve transferred my dns and mail hosting from ProjectColo/Caladan to Dreamhost. I ‘ve (re-)watched all of Season 1 of the West Wing and I’m working my way through Season 2 and I fought my way past what seemed like half of Didcot exploring the new Woolworth’s in the town centre while attempting to find a suitably insulting card for my brother’s birthday. Really doesn’t seem much for over a fortnight.

[Edit - Bollocks, tack Scrubs 2 onto the start of the recently watched dvds list as well]

Just preordered Sims 2: Nightlife

I’m also toying with the idea of getting myself a new laptop, my current one has a fun trick of whiting out the screen at inopportune moments.