Be my guest: After Web 2.0

Up front: a vocal and public thank-you, for sending links or notes about sites or distros, to anyone who does. I always appreciate it if you take a second to write and tell me about something. And I often overlook news or interesting events, so it helps.

A couple of days ago I got a link to a post about frustrations with Web 2.0; it’s available in German or in English. At the end, there is a call for a “Web 3.0,” which would somehow unify all the top-shelf services, into a giant orgiastic ball of social clickery. (Hyperbole is mine. )

To answer the original note I got: I really don’t have an opinion one way or another. Let me explain.

I complain a lot about bloat and unnecessary frills and useless Web services that don’t really offer any content, just splash and dash. And I stand by those comments.

Sites with lightbox logins or endless flash-driven utilities are impediments, and those fripperies are just masking the fact that a site or a company has nothing substantial to offer. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

In short, to quote an American friend from a long time ago: “You can put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still a pig.”

CLI-based programs do a great job of lopping off all the dreck and dredge, and leaving you with the information you wanted in the first place. To paraphrase myself.

From that, you might infer that for me, things like Facebookendsterwitterspace are obstacles to be removed, before I can get what I want out of the Internet. And you’d be right.

But more so, whether or not there is a unifying social network service is of little interest to me, mostly because I don’t use those services to start with.

If you do, and you look forward to a day when Facebookendsterwitterspace becomes a reality (and when Ubuntu latches itself to it automatically), that is fine with me.

If you happen to be something of a hybrid, and enjoy using those services from the command line (which is not impossible), I can only assure you that you are probably not alone. Someone will no doubt write a tool that will interface with it, and keep you rolling.

I’m in the mood today that says if you use it, and you like it, and you feel no pain from the demands it makes on your system … then by all means, enjoy life. The world is out there waiting for you to explore it, one mouse click at a time.

And I also am in the mood today that says if you’re like me, and you don’t need Web x.0 to make your life complete, then … well, then life goes on.

A retro retro desktop facelift

Now that everything is up and online and business is more or less back to normal, I realized I had gotten a little tired of looking at this …

And instead decided to put this together.

 

Well that’s a giant leap forward. Nothing like swirling together a vague tribute to an IceBuntu desktop, which was itself a vague tribute to the old Feisty Fawn desktop. Yeah, I’m really going out on a limb there.

Ah well. I’ve never suggested I was particularly avant-garde. My interest lies with resurrecting the hardware, not designing the desktops.

On the other hand, I see now that ConnochaetOS has IceWM and a few other additions in its repository; I may see how this behaves at 150Mhz. Probably not good, but worth checking. Science!

Battery smackdown, now and then: No contest

About a month ago, I got this wild idea to have a kind of battery smackdown … mostly because I own two machines now that predate the turn of the century but still have working batteries.

And because I noticed the other day that the battery on my X60s, which I keep on hand as a small sliver of contemporary computing, seems to be dwindling. Despite its meager three years on the planet.

But there’s no point in it now, because it’s dreadfully obvious that the X60s’s battery is terrifically weaker than the battery, for example, in my Mebius.

That one, the one that is ostensibly 14 years old now, will wind its way down to nothing, trigger the BIOS alarm and cruise to a gentle stop in about … oh, two and a half hours.

That’s right. A 14-year-old battery lasts about two and a half hours. Earth hours. No gimmicks for daylight savings time either, or whatever that’s called in America. (What the heck is that about, anyway? )

Call me lucky, but it’s not just that computer either. The battery in the Fujitsu 133Mhz machine is lasting roughly an hour, even if it doesn’t have the remarkable endurance of its contemporary.

By comparison, the X60s, even though it is a Thinkpad and even though I do prefer this brand and make to just about any other … rolls in at around 45 minutes, and that’s under low stress and with minimal system load.

Okay, now you can critique my experiment from any angle you like. Yes, I know, the power demands in a Pentium MMX laptop running a CF card as a system drive are very low.

And I know a core duo with a 320Gb hard drive needs quite a bit more power to do its thing. Apples and oranges.

I have reputation for (unfairly) pointing out inconsistencies between generations of hardware; there’s even a video on this site somewhere, siphoned from YouTube, showing a lowly MacIntosh starting from a floppy in less time than a year-old Windows-driven machine.

My concern isn’t so much with the hardware discrepancy. It’s for the collective mindset that says these deficiencies are somehow acceptable.

Fourteen years ago we had technology that allowed for perfectly silent computers that started in a matter of seconds and batteries that lasted more than two and a half hours.

Now there seems to be some sort of regression, where computers need five minutes to start, power supplies that outstrip a microwave oven, a half-dozen fans, and batteries that may or may not last the duration of a bus ride to work.

Go ahead and tell me about your netbook now, or your hermetically sealed desktop machine that emits under 10 decibels and betrays my contentions. I will accept your counterpoint as an exception.

But not the rule. For me, the rule says we have lowered our expectations, and don’t think anything of it. It’s my job to remind you of how things were. And suggest how they should be.

In your offline time: Warzone 2100

In the free time I had in the past few days, without a proper and consistent Internet connection, I spent a lot of time playing Warzone 2100 … again.

It’s a pleasure to watch this game develop. Occasionally I start up old real-time strategy games — in Wine or in Linux, as the case may be — but more and more they seem to lack some of the frills Warzone 2100 has adopted over time.

Plus, cutscenes are downloadable, which makes the campaign version more interesting. Not that they were critical to the action, but the overall presentation is definitely improved.

And every now and again I discover something new (or maybe I just didn’t notice before). For example, you can preset some combat options by right-clicking on a factory. New units are automatically set to those options.

Personally I find that very useful, just because I habitually tell each unit to retreat at half damage. I know, I’m a chicken, but at least I can conserve a little in big battles.

I also notice now there is a tutorial mode, as well as a fast play game, which is fun, if plain. Commander units seem more “influential” now, although that also might be my imagination.

Of course, I still run into little issues from time to time, and wonder if I’m doing something wrong. I cannot, for the life of me, complete the campaign mission preventing the “bad guys” from exiting the map. It seems impossible, since their transport is spawned as soon as you come within firing distance.

So I still, on occasion, rely on cheat mode. The problem was, without the Internet, I had no idea what the cheat codes were. Hmm. …

Surprise, surprise

Well this is a welcome surprise. It seems that the month-long delay I was expecting for Internet service at home was trimmed down to about 12 minutes.

That being the time it took me to clone Windows XP back on to the X60s, install the proprietary network setup software, feed it my account information and click a few buttons. Wow.

That’s quite the change from the month or so it took to get things arranged and working last time. I guess there’s something to be said for keeping the same connection and service provider. At this rate, I should be able to get the rest of the house in order in an hour or so.

And perhaps in a day’s time, the rest of this site will be ready to go. Good news, that.

P.S.: A small slice of irony: Literally minutes after I posted this, XP bluescreened. I couldn’t get my camera out fast enough before it had rebooted itself. Total uptime, about an hour. Sigh … is it any wonder I use Linux?

Life without the Internet

If the material on this site seems a bit empty or imprecise these days, it’s because I’m completely offline now. I’m at my new location, and many of the amenities (read: Internet access) are still spotty.

Life offline isn’t as bad as I had anticipated. After all, I do still technically have access to news, etc., while at work or from public sources.

But judging by my previous experience in getting Internet service started, I am anticipating a delay of anywhere from two weeks to a month, before I’m fully online and running top speed.

But this time I had the benefit of preparation, so I’ve made sure to download a lot of distros — for both upper- and lower-end hardware — to give me something to do, and something to write about.

And of course, I was lucky to have friends with large DVD collections, so I have borrowed some of theirs to keep me occupied.

Perhaps the oddest part of my new arrangement is the lack of open network connections. Perhaps that’s just bad luck, but for those who were about to suggest piggybacking off a local network, pickings are slim.

And most of those appear to be encrypted. Wireless encryption is nothing intimidating, but no, I won’t be cracking my new neighbors’ networks, just to check my e-mail.

Like I said, I can get online at the office and take care of whatever needs attention, through the course of a normal work day. And that’s enough for now.

P.S.: Written at 150Mhz, because the Mebius has a USB port and I can move this file off that way. Floppy disks? Well, the office machine doesn’t have a floppy drive. To me, that’s a shortcoming.

Xorg or Wayland: Color me disinterested

I laughed uproariously when the news filtered down to me, that Ubuntu was shifting its carcass toward Wayland, as opposed to the ancient monolith Xorg.

The rationale, as I understand it, goes mostly hand-in-hand with the press for Ubuntu to become something less than a desktop, and more of a clicky buttony thingy that hooks into Facebookendsterwitterspace.

That’s fine. It’ll be interesting to watch, but you know what? I think I will sit this one out.

Not for any dislike of Ubuntu, or distrust for the direction it is moving. You might call me old-fashioned, if only because the clicky buttony thingy doesn’t really turn me on. I’ll take a traditional desktop, any day.

Of course, if I had an interest beyond the computers of the last century, I might be willing to just try it out. Might be.

But ay, there’s the rub: Whether Ubuntu uses Xorg or Wayland or a day-old ham sandwich to project its graphical interface is hardly any interest of mine.

I learned a long time ago that I could move closer to my goals by omitting X altogether. When I jettisoned the aging, bloated crowbait, life suddenly turned beautiful.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Stepping away from X made everything better, and I heartily recommend it.

I’ll be honest, I still use it from time to time. I do have machines that predate contemporary framebuffer support, and in those situations, a very sparse version of Xorg is what saves it from giant-size block letters smeared across the LCD.

But I won’t pretend to care much if Xorg’s 25-year legacy is slowly and painfully extracted from Ubuntu or Fedora or Distro X. And oh yes, it will be painful … for someone, somewhere you can bet it will be painful.

No pain for me though. I will be the one on the sidelines, with the look of zen on my face, wondering what the big deal is.

Four cool links, for later

Once again I have a few oddball links that I want to make a note of, so I can find them myself in the future. When I’m not terrifically pressed for time.

1. I’ve been in and out of more than a few floppy-based distros, and if you look at the “genre” intended on the ancient (but world-famous!) floppy disk, there don’t seem to be many left. That may or may not be the case, but wouldn’t you know it, the people and fans of Slitaz have an online tool that deserves investigation. This page is like an addictive drug to a person like me. What? I can download any of a number of customized floppy-based versions of Slitaz, write them to a floppy in a minute or two, and boot to them on my Pentium? Well, there goes my weekend! (P.S.: Thanks to Belak for pointing it out.)
2. Mostly for my own reference, the next time I see those cool little characters in names and links, is this page, which makes them all obvious and right up front. Granted, living at the console, most of those come through as question marks in elinks. But knowing they are there and how to get them is somehow … gratifying.
3. I have mentioned a half-dozen times my unnatural affection for Neverwinter Nights, BioWare’s seminal role-playing game of nearly a decade ago. By extension I feel obligated to mention that you can get the game in its final pinnacle release — the Diamond edition — at Good Old Games for a measly US$10, to include manuals, wallpaper, avatars, maps, etc. And US$10 for that is practically a crime. Not only does the game — still — have a native Linux client, but it actually works better in most upper-end distros (to include Ubuntu) than in Windows. While you’re at it, get copies of the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale series, for almost nothing.
4. One more, and then I have to get back to shuffling my household: If vim is awesome, vimcasts.org is awesome to the power of awesome. Not only does the presenter have a way cool voice, but the issues are explained clearly and concisely. And the end results — or really, the settings that will give you the end results — are easy to put into place. And let’s face it: What did you really want when you started vim for the first time? Someone to show you how to use vim.

That’s it for now; I’m stashing those here now so I can look at them later. I am going back to cardboard boxes and rolls of sello tape. Wish me luck.

Three months is not a bad run

At long last, finally, as things go, my neighbor’s installation of Linux Mint LXDE spun out of control into a digital fireball and splattered against the cold hard surface of reality.

Just for review, about three months ago I offered Mint for the 2.2Ghz Celeron, and was flabbergasted when I never heard anything else about it. Apparently it was working without interference or demand for months on end.

Which made me quite happy. Any time a day-to-day computer user can enjoy Linux without relying on day after day of unprofessional tech support (or professional tech support, now that I think about it) … well, that’s a good thing.

But all good things come to an end, and something — possibly a system update or perhaps a stray system setting — caused a splintering of that pretty little green world, and now it just constantly returns to the login screen.

I suspect something in the core graphics card libraries, but neither I nor my neighbor is keen on tracking down something teeny and discreet over the course of days, in hopes of bringing it back.

Instead, a fresh installation of Mint is in order. First a proper weeding out of the home directory and an emigration to an external drive. Then a system check and a reinstall, and a full update from there.

And if all goes well, then files and data will be restored.

Personally, I have faith. Mint LXDE made enough of an impression on the owner to ask for the same thing again, and I concur this time. That’s a grand total of two thumbs up.

Little hiccups like this can happen to anyone, on any machine. But three straight months with absolutely zero attendance from me … good grief, but that’s very rare. For me, anyway.

Audio in Debian on a Pentium MMX

As might have been predicted, my recent success with cmus on the Mebius has driven me to configure and install the sound framework on the 133Mhz Pentium too.

The goal, or at least the idea, here is to assign those two jobs to the same machine, and free up the Mebius for its natural talent as Linux Distribution Tester. The machine is just too flexible to sit on any one distribution for very long.

So after a few preliminary attempts, I have audio working in Debian on the 133Mhz machine. For the record, modprobe snd-es1688, as well as the alsa-utils package, gave me the controls and framework I was used to. And cmus, of course.

And results are as good, if not better than the Mebius. The Mebius’s speakers are terribly tinny. The Fujitsu on the other hand, has a little more presence and a stronger projection from its on-dash speakers. Which isn’t saying much.

The downside of this is that it can’t really handle much of a workload beyond that. If I am downloading a couple of ISOs at the same time, the processor becomes overwhelmed, music starts to skip, and I’m back to where I started from.

Such is life. I expect I might see a little better performance if I downscaled from Debian to Crux, but I don’t think it would make that much of a difference.

And the alternatives are not that attractive. I don’t want to resample an entire music collection to satisfy a 13-year-old computer, and the time it takes to configure and arrange a different sound architectures, on a 133Mhz PC, is likewise unappealing.

Nope, for now I’ll stick with what I know. I am content to focus on one role or the other, but not both at the same time … or at least, not under a heavy workload. If I need to download or seed ISOs, I can let it do that for a little while.

And in the mean time, I’ll listen to music on another machine. Goodness knows I have plenty left over to choose from.

P.S.: For the record, before the audiophiles in the audience tell me I should get an external speaker system and not rely on shoddy built-in laptop speakers, I can only say that is my plan. As soon as the move is complete.