Your lightbox effect still sucks

Why? I’m glad you asked.

Silly me. What was I thinking? That I might be able to read the labels on the diagram?

It isn’t bad enough that I have to put up with that crap just to upload a picture to this site. Add to that the fact that it’s overdone, cliché and a waste of bandwidth.

It was passé four years ago, and it’s definitely not new or innovative. It slows things down, gets in the way, makes it difficult to maneuver and as you can see, defeats its own purpose if the screen dimensions don’t accomodate it.

Oh, and if you trap a login in that lightbox effect, I will officially never use your site, your service or your product, ever ever again, for as long as I live.

A silly, but obvious, mistake

For a very long time now I have advocated taking the “quiet” option out of the kernel boot line, mostly because it lets me see what is happening inside the mind of the computer at startup. If there are errors or inconsistencies, they usually appear on the screen and I can track them from there.

At the same time, I am well aware that on my very old systems (by that I mean this one and this one), the video hardware is slow or underpowered or out-of-date, and as a result long streams of updated text can slow down some processes.

As an example, there is a difference of about 2-3 seconds in the time it takes to decompress a kernel on this machine, if I don’t ask tar to give a verbose readout of every file that is inflated. That I blame on the ability of the screen to keep up with the action.

There are some other factors involved — things like filesystems and framebuffer dimensions and so forth — but it should not have surprised me (like it did) to see the same computer boot a little faster (like it did) when I added the quiet tag back to the kernel boot line. (Like I did.)

Makes sense really — the framebuffer snaps to the better 800×600 resolution, then starts streaming boot information, which takes a long time to refresh and scroll. And why bother if the machine is stable and doesn’t need troubleshooting?

So anyway, if you’re also using a very old machine and you also rely on the framebuffer, remember that you might want that “quiet” tag, even if K.Mandla says to take it out. Just more proof that I don’t know everything. Yet.

Poor man’s SSD: One week later

It’s been a week now since I held my breath and punched the power button on my 14-year-old laptop, and watched it come to life with a CF card for a heart, instead of a traditional hard drive. And despite conventional wisdom warning against the viability of an experiment like this, the longer I use it, the more I am prepared to set up a similar drive in other old systems.

First I can tell you that in the short space of a week I have seen no loss of available space or performance — in fact, I have a small correction to make. I mentioned earlier that boot times for the card compare to the 40Gb 5400rpm Samsung drive that was in this machine, but they’re quite a bit faster. I don’t hold that out as a for-sure endorsement of a speed boost from CF cards, mostly because I reconfigured the kernel from scratch when I did this, and that might be part of the reason.

But to see a 6-9 second drop in boot times from switching from a mechanical drive to a CF card … it’s inspiring. I couldn’t possibly guarantee that sort of boost in every machine, but at US$30, it’s certainly worth a try.

But speed isn’t the only bonus. Two days ago I turned off every fan in my house, every household appliance that made any noise, put my ear against the palmrest and the only sound I could hear coming from this computer was the weak buzz of the electric current through the speakers. The machine is completely, utterly, totally silent from boot to powerdown, with the only exception being the grunt of the floppy drive when it probes for a boot disk.

It’s almost ironic: People search high and low and pay premium prices to put together a machine that masks its own noise. And for roughly US$40, I have a computer that, if I close my eyes, I don’t know if it’s on or off. It’s not exactly a hot commodity, I’ll admit. But given the choice to spend US$40 for a silent machine or US$4000 for a machine that suffers to control its own racket … well, I think you know what I’d choose.

On top of that, the temperature these days in my part of Japan is cresting 30 degrees on a daily basis, with a considerable uptick in humidity. At the same time, there is a very distinct difference between the surface temperature under my left hand as there was with the mechanical drive.

I wrote a long time ago about environmental effects on this machine’s cousin, and I can’t help but wonder if this drive-swap wouldn’t have alleviated a couple of those issues. A day late, 100 yen short.

I should mention weight too, since a 2Gb hard drive is rather heavy and its replacement is rather light. To be honest though, the entire computer is quite hefty, so yes, there is a difference between before and after, but not so much as to be a huge selling point. In a lighter machine it might be a better option though.

Two things have definitely come about, in the early days of this little experiment: First, I really want to find another CF card, either new or secondhand, and drive it into the ground. I won’t call the CF-card-vulnerability mantra a myth yet, but I have yet to see exact numbers — in terms of either lifespan or writes or total data — that I can expect, which means I really want to break one. Purely in the interest of science, of course. I try to dispel as many myths as I can.

Second, I want to get another one and put it in this machine and see how it affects battery life. As it stands that computer will run for almost two hours before the BIOS alarm triggers, and that was with a power-sucking 2Gb hard drive in it. I have a feeling less would be more, in terms of power consumption over time.

And as a final note, just for the record, I set up this card with ext2 partitions only, with the noatime flag set everywhere. I also have 128Mb of swap space, but if htop is to be believed, it’s never touching it. And I set my swappiness to zero to encourage that behavior.

In the mean time, I shall continue to use it, and see if there really is an expiration date. Or if I will outlast it.

P.S.: You can’t accuse me of not doing my homework on this issue. Just as a cursory investigation on the life of CF disks, here is (1), (2), (3), (4) and (5).

More for the console: vlock, catdoc and more

My posts these days have gotten way too long. That essay about the Debian server, for example, put me to sleep when I looked at it again this morning. This time I shall try to be concise with a few more console gizmos.

I usually don’t need a screen-locking application, and if I did I believe screen itself would probably suffice, but if you want something dedicated to lock out terminals, vlock is a good option.

Locks one tty, locks all ttys, and has a few more options as well. If you’re a faithful follower of the aforementioned Unix Philosophy, you might prefer this in conjunction with dtach and dvtm.

I mentioned some document converters the other day, then found two or three more: catdoc, wordview and word2x. catdoc is still in the Arch repos and worked fine for me, but the other two were less successful.

I see that word2x is already five years out-of-date, so it may be that it’s just past its prime. wordview is a wrapper for catdoc, but only spat out errors on my end. I probably needed something to make it work though.

I also spent a short time a day ago trying to build tmsnc — not that I could use it at all, because I don’t have an MSN account. And it was a very short time too, because the source code (circa 2006) has trouble under Arch, or again I am missing a dependency I don’t know about. In any case, I added a note to the AUR page for it. A screenshot would have been fun, but that’s as far as I would have gotten.

Finally, I know about the googlecl tools; I am sure I was as interested as you when I heard about their release. And thanks to everyone (there were quite a few) who wrote to draw my attention to them.

Unfortunately, the tools themselves don’t seem to support the small slice of Google’s services that I use. I really only use GMail, and at present it doesn’t seem to be part of what googlecl does. If you use Picasa, Calendar, Contacts, etc., then take a look.

That’s it for now. See? Nice and short.

Five unattached ideas

Once again I seem to have accumulated a few small items of note — not big enough to develop into a full-size post, but not small enough to ignore altogether. Enjoy, if they appeal to you.

1. For a few weeks now I’ve been living without sound in centerim, which probably sounds like a strange thing to say. By “sound” I mean the little beep that chimes when someone comes online or sends a message. A quick glance through the configuration told me that centerim spawns aplay to trigger the sounds, and the same command from a terminal kicked out errors. So whatever audio configuration I’ve been using has been interfering with audio files of certain specifications, to include the default ones that come with centerim. Rather than troubleshoot what could be a kernel-level problem, I downloaded a few public domain beep sounds with dimensions that aplay could handle. centerim is noisy again.
2. It’s always possible that I misunderstand what people are looking for when they ask questions on the forum. I try to take that into consideration when I make grand sweeping generalizations about things like this. But it seems like it should be a little easier to set up random terminal colors and trigger them through a .bashrc/.bash_profile configuration. I know the original poster is probably working with the Gnome terminal, and I haven’t actually tried to do this yet so I am probably imagining things beyond my ability, but something tells me a simple randomization array — sort of like this one — should be able to set colors when a prompt opens. And within screen, it seems like it would be easier still. I think. Maybe. Sort of.
3. Thumos sent a link the other day to a blog post that gives a quick rundown on three different terminal management suites — the omnipresent house favorite screen, tmux as the young upstart, and a wild card in the seemingly bulletproof duo of dtach plus dvtm. The article is a bit scarce on details but is a good overview if you’re considering switching, or if you’re just starting out on the path of the Dark Side. It also puts me to shame by throwing in the category of “Unix Philosophy,” which I admit I sometimes overlook. Whatever solution you pick, feel confident in knowing that you are doing the right thing. And a quick note of thanks to Thumos.
4. I feel silly now because a few months ago someone emailed me with a “time tracker” application for the console, and now I can’t remember what it was called. I have searched through my e-mail account thrice but unfortunately, it’s been nearly impossible to find again. The words “time” and “tracker” are not unique enough to pin down the e-mail, and without the name of the application, I am a little stuck. I remember installing it and that it listed “projects” you were involved in, with a simple start-stop timer function so you could see how much of your effort was going into one or another. If you have an idea, or if you were the person who sent the email, please do me the favor of telling me again what it was called.
5. For as much of a love-fest as Ubuntu users have for their beloved Firefox, I’m always mystified that the slice that has to ride the newest, freshest versions doesn’t just download the precompiled Linux version and point all the shortcuts and aliases at that. Not only will it satisfy that urge to run Firefox 3.6.8.0.0.0.1-alpha5, but it will update itself, it’s smart enough to seek out the presence of Flash, et al., and it’s confined to a single self-reliant folder that doesn’t require any outside libraries (well, except maybe for dbus-glib and alsa-lib ). I use that over the firefox package in Arch on the big machine, and I’m running a step ahead of current anytime the application is publicly updated. And if you’re on an old machine, there are still outdated versions compiled to use GTK1 (yes, GTK1) at lamarelle.org.

No bonus this time, sorry. I’ll find something extra for the next time these little things crop up.

A Debian server at 150Mhz, 32Mb

For the past four or five days I have been running the Mebius laptop as my home file server, torrent slave and music player. I jumped to put a larger hard drive into the machine when I realized Debian could configure the network, the sound card and the hard drive (at its full 120Gb size!) without any extra effort from me.

But I’ve already taken it down and switched back to the Thinkpad and Crux for that role; neither Debian nor the Mebius is wholly to blame for the change. I made the original swap for the experience of setting it up in Debian stable, and to see if a machine running at 150Mhz can fill those roles as easily as one running at 550Mhz, but better than one running at 120Mhz or 100Mhz. (And maybe even 166Mhz, if that’s worth adding.)

Up front I’ll say that with the exception of the weirdo graphics card and weak LCD, the Mebius is quickly winning points in this household, and not just for having a working decade-old battery. It’s easy to get into — I can swap hard drives by pulling only six screws and it does not require any technical acrobatics — it’s got enough peripherals to keep it out of the “inconvenient” category, and seems to be holding up well under experimentation.

Furthermore, with only a quick swap to a newer drive (of any size! ) and suddenly it’s a good deal quicker and a great deal quieter. Oh my goodness, but the whine and clatter of those 4200rpm drives is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. But with a little more speed, the tendency to swap becomes bearable and the machine becomes a lot faster. No more waiting for that lunker 2Gb hard drive to catch up with the action.

And to be honest, all of those points make it more valuable as a testing machine than as a server. I can, in most cases, pop any CD into the drive and see exactly how “lightweight” a distro is. No more beating around the bush and pointing the finger of practicality at 300Mhz for your Ubuntu-based distro. I’ve got a machine here that will either call you crazy or call you a liar, and sometimes the truth hurts.

I jest. The machine is too flexible to sit alone as a server; it needs to be put to more intensive use. And despite the miracle that is Debian, there are still a few weak points in its armor.

For one, it too suffers from stuttering music playback with both mocp and other console-based media players, let alone the graphical ones. I have seen this on three different machines now and a half-dozen distros, and I do believe that short of downsampling the audio files or reducing audio quality, there’s not going to be much in the way of a solution.

In fact, a few minutes in Debian with some low-grade audio playback streams more or less proved my theory: A 24Kbps, 22Khz stream from the BBC in mp3 format played back flawlessly, but a 128Kbps, 44Khz from a local ogg file or mp3 from the ‘Net sounded like a secondary school brass band.

Which is a shame, really. You can call me crazy for saying this, but the Mebius has a different sound from the Thinkpad — a fuller and mellower quality. Roll your eyes if you must, but there are people out there in the world who still use vinyl albums, and will swear until they’re blue in the face that the sound quality is an improvement over compact disc. I can’t be that much more crazy for suggesting that an old ISA card sounds better than a newer PCI card.

Second, there are some subtle differences in software between Debian and Crux, and I must admit I prefer to build and sculpt software with Crux, if things have to be built from scratch. And with the machine working as a drop-and-download rtorrent slave, Debian stable’s 0.7.9 version lacks some of the things I am accustomed to from 0.8.6.

I could, and I tried, transplanting 0.8.6 out of the testing repositories directly into the machine as upgrades, but I ran into a net of dependencies that would also need upgrading, to include libc6 and some others that were drawing in a lot of still-deeper upgrades.

Building it myself was likewise abortive, since many of rtorrent’s changes since 0.7.9 would require me to rebuild things like libsigc++ and its underpinnings. After a while, it just got too hairy.

And like I said, if I have to compile things from scratch, I prefer to do it in a distro that is intended for building from scratch. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t knock Debian for being precompiled and stable — those are some of it’s strongest points. If I hadn’t grown accustomed to, for example, rtorrent with DHT or screen with the vanilla vertical split patch, it wouldn’t even come into play.

But in my case, it’s easier and smoother to build the entire system as a rolling release, than to try and transplant or rebuild so many core packages. One by one. At 150Mhz.

And finally, even though it has little weight since it’s a simple matter of adding a flag to a mount command, but all the machines I have now (even the Fujitsu Pentium, which has a brand-spanking-new kernel configuration in it) are running NFS4, and the default nfs-kernel-server package from Debian apparently runs NFS3. This let the NFS4 clients mount the NFS3 server normally:

192.168.0.6:/home/kmandla /media/nfs nfs noauto,users,nolock,nfsvers=3 0 0

This probably falls into the above category really, since the difference between the nfs in Debian stable and the difference between NFS in the 2.6.34 kernel with the current nfs-utils is again, the choice between building from scratch and installing a precompiled package. No difference in performance on my rough-and-tumble home network … and only one small flag that needs added to make things work … so maybe it doesn’t bear singling it out in this case.

But if the machine’s three main duties are to play music, serve a giant NFS share space and seed a few ISOs over rtorrent, then a machine that’s better geared toward experimentation is best used as guinea pig. The Thinkpad is no golden child; it’s a favorite but it has its fair share of eccentricities. At this point in time though, it’s best sitting on a shelf, always on and always online: serving, playing and downloading.

Dwarf Fortress for the console … sort of

Supposedly nowadays you can play Dwarf Fortress at the console, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. The 40d19 version for Linux which was released a few months ago allows you to set some options and send output to the console instead of its conventional SDL “translation,” if I understand it right.

For me it’s kind of a bad thing, since it draws me back toward the game again, and it took weeks for me to break away from it last time. I have gotten tips from people on how to get it working, but my results are not very impressive.

That’s a step forward for me, but there’s something missing. An email suggested using fbterm — which we all remember as the magic behind the wallpapered console, right? — plus the Terminus font, but to be honest, I don’t know if that’s better.

Maybe a little more readable, but nothing to distinguish between different icons and a lot of screen artifacts, if I can use that word for a console environment.

It does appear to be some sort of font issue though, where the default arrangement is spattering stuff everywhere. Perhaps there is a better font, or some other flag that I should be aware of. I suppose I should mention that starting the same setup under X was more or less the same.

Interesting though, that the music works fine for me at the console, and while it’s visually discombobulated, it’s still playing as it should. I just can’t see what I’m doing.

For future reference, I set this up by installing the dependencies listed for the graphical version of Dwarf Fortress in the Arch Linux repositories, then decompressing the 40d19 version into my home directory.

Inside the data/init/ folder is an init.txt file, and the magic happens by setting the PRINT_MODE variable to TEXT. I would also suggest sifting through some of the other variables, since most of them will be set for a graphical environment, and you will probably want to turn them off.

For fbterm, this is the command that was suggested by Kyle a couple of months ago.

fbterm -n "Terminus" -s "12" --font-width="12" --cursor-shape=1

Kyle also mentioned that sub-1Ghz machines suffer even with the console version, which may or may not be good news to you, depending on your perspective. For me, that would be a good thing … because it means less time lost playing Dwarf Fortress on a leftover Pentium.

In any case, if you’ve had better luck than me, please let me know how you got it going cleanly. I don’t need the distraction, but I do like challenges.

One floppy, dozens of tools

It may have been a tiny bit misleading the other day, to drop a hint at a floppy-based OS that superseded anything I was discussing at the time. It’s true that I do have something very useful and very flexible to mention — mostly as a note to myself, of course — but it wasn’t 100 percent accurate to allude to it in the context of floppy OSes.

Because technically it’s not a full-fledged OS. It’s just a boot disk … but what a boot disk it is.

That, as you might have guessed from the images, is the Slitaz boot floppy that doesn’t get much attention, even if it should. No one is to blame for that; Slitaz itself is so amazing that this little floppy is easy to overlook.

I’ve mentioned PLoP Boot Manager in the past — that’s on here. I’ve mentioned Smart BootManager in the past — that’s on here too. Plus memtest, three or four Windows-based options, network booting support and two great little tools for system analysis.

Those two — Navratil Software‘s NSSI and Erwan Velu’s HDT — deserve more attention by themselves. But swirled in with the long list of things you can do with the Slitaz boot floppy, the entire mix becomes the perfect instrument for taking a close look at the guts of a system.

 

People sometimes ask how to find out things like VESA version or ISA sound card addresses or mainboard chipset versions; there’s your answer. Pop that into the drive of any mostly-working leftover computer built post-1994, and you should be able to see exactly who, what, where, when and why of everything inside.

The fact that both of those tools are so light and so precise makes them valuable by themselves, but bundling them on the floppy makes the entire business irreplaceable. I know there are other floppy or CD boot tools out there, and really any two-disk boot Linux system will allow you to look at the general rundown on a machine.

But for example, NSSI also includes some basic benchmarking and diagnostic routines. You can rank the processor graphically against others in its range, test the internal PC speaker and even generate reports for other use. It’s got more goodies in than a candy factory. HDT has its own array of tools and options as well, and anything that NSSI omits, HDT no doubt covers.

I have a habit of saying, “This is a keeper,” and then something sits on the shelf for a month or two before I overwrite it with something else. But really, I’ve already run this through both the Pentiums I have in the house and I’ve slipped the floppy into a bag for when I visit the local recycling shop. The space it takes up is no indication of how useful it is … to some people, that is.

Poor man’s SSD

I hope your fingers are limber and ready for some exercise, because this next post is either going to infuriate you and trigger all kinds of keyboard action, or get you so wired to reply that you’ll fall into spasms from trying to punch at the “Leave a comment” button.

First, a question: What’s this?

If you said, “An 8Gb CF memory card,” you’re right. Now here’s another one for you:

If you said, “A CF-to-2.5-inch-IDE adapter,” you’re right again. Give yourself a cookie.

Now if you can imagine where this is going, then you’re probably already seconds away from those spasms I just mentioned. But a little history first.

Way back in October, when I went on a short vacation and gallivanted all around the world with a Pentium laptop, I suffered a rather noisy and very unfortunate hard drive crash. In the time that I had remaining away from home, I thought about investing in a solid state drive, but there are two big shortcomings for me: size and price.

Price, because I don’t like dumping US$200 into a 14-year-old computer. I would be spending almost 20 times the value of the machine on a fairly-new technology that hasn’t really settled into a stable price bracket to start with. Pecuniary prudence prevented it.

And size, because to be honest, I don’t need anything in the 200Gb range in a console-based laptop that I only use for writing, scheduling, surfing, e-mail, note-taking, chatting, gaming, troubleshooting, experimenting, blogging, organizing, planning, making presentations, calculating, reviewing and more experimenting, and a few other small things. In fact, there’s nothing that I do that would require 20Gb, let alone 200.

So paying a lot of money for a giant sized drive that probably wouldn’t even boot in a BIOS this old would be throwing bad money after good. I’d do just as well with a teensy 10Gb drive, provided it was reasonably fast. And cheap. And light. And didn’t eat a lot of power. And wasn’t hot. And wasn’t noisy.

Well hey, SSDs aren’t much different from giant memory cards. And CF cards are two or three generations removed from state-of-the-art, so they’re pretty cheap. Heck, I can get an 8Gb card off amazon.co.jp for around US$20, and the connector is only US$14. …

“And that is how I got to where I find myself today.”

I’m US$34 poorer now, and just about everyone who heard about my plan pooh-poohed it as a ridiculous idea, that CF cards would degrade over time, that the IO drag would be a nightmare, that bad luck would follow me like the plague … pretty much everything short of biblical catastrophe would ensue.

But even Wikipedia mentions this combination as an alternative to SSDs. And the XO-1 shipped with NAND flash as standard, although what you see there is just your common ordinary garden-variety CF card, intended for cameras and whatnot.

And really, I think the pros far outweigh the cons. Weight is negligible. Noise level is absolute zero. Speed is on par with the 40Gb 5400rpm drive I usually use in the Pentium. Heat is nil. Power draw is next to nil. And mechanical issues, which drove me to this end in the first place, are next to nil.

Moreover, I consider this an experiment: If it falls to pieces after a few hours, so be it. I lost roughly US$30 and learned something about the way these things work. I would much rather that, than lose US$200 to a drive that didn’t like my BIOS and collected dust in the closet. I’m willing to take a chance.

In the mean time, I’m going to sit back, relax, count and recount the US$175 or so I saved on a full size SSD plus shipping, and imagine how I shall waste that money.

A close shave: Debian Etch floppy images

That was close. I didn’t realize that Debian’s latest release would eclipse Etch, and remove most every reference to the old installer structure from the main servers and mirrors. It’s only really important to weird people like me, who consider the floppy installers to be an excellent tool.

I kept copies of the boot.img, root.img and other floppies around because occasionally I still used them to build systems, skipping from Etch to stable or even testing. There are machines that still work, that don’t have a CDROM at all — this being one of them.

But when my disk jammed in the old Celeron machine, I lost my only copy of the boot.img disk, and this morning I realized that image isn’t around any more. And yes, the irony of that happening on the sixth-month anniversary of celebrating them is not lost on me.

Luckily I found an old, out-of-date repository here. Searching for directory tree structure “/etch/main/installer-i386/current/images/floppy” did the trick. Of course, searching for “boot.img” would just be pointless. …

My fear now is that I haven’t needed or tried using those floppies in a long time, and it’s possible that the expiration of Etch means that there are no repositories for the floppy install to download from. So maybe it’s pointless to keep them around. That would be the way my luck would work.

But for the future, and in the odd case that they’re still usable and still needed, I’ll upload a copy here. Trim off the .doc extension and decompress, and maybe they’ll be useful somehow.