Another Opinion Among Many

Ironically, I was griping today to my friend, Kory, about losing my jumpdrive. I had just discovered Portable Apps and had loaded a few to make my computing life a bit more comfortable when away from home. I don’t know where I put it after loading up Miranda Messenger and testing that it would connect to the Yahoo! network from port 80, the HTTP port which your web browser uses. I pulled the USB stick out of the front of my computer after installing this app and promptly misplaced it. I spent 1/2 hour looking for it, going over the house several times. To no avail, I could not find it.

Well, Angela just found it in the dryer. Yes, its at least gone through the dryer for 1/2 hour and more likely than not, its also gone through the washer as well. So, my little 256mb Lexar Jumpdrive Secure II USB Flash drive can, at minimum, survive the heat and tumbling in the dryer and still function!

I haven’t used the secure features of this drive yet, but its nice to be able to plug it into a computer and have it simply become recognized by the operating system. I’ve yet to try it on a machine running Mac OS or Windows 9x, but I can vouch for a quick recognition with Windows 2000 and XP, as well as instant recognition under Linux.

By the way, the picture is almost a full sized image. Its about 4 mm shorter than the real drive. It reminds me of a tiny pocket knife.

Nobody paid me to write this.  I am just amazed that this thing still works.  This doesn’t mean that I won’t accept payment for the good review, though…

After I saw that my “Archivist” plugin pulled a post from Dec 25, 2005, I remembered an article that I just read on Hans Reiser at Wired.  Interviewer Joshua Davis interviewed Hans Reiser from Prison and wrote the interview.  The interview got Slashdotted.

If I hadn’t tried Reiserfs (at version 2.9 or 3.0) and saw how much faster my desktop worked with this “unstable” filesystem keeping the pidgeons in their holes, I may not have paid much attention to the whole sensational drama surrounding this true Linux geek.  So, where is Nina Reiser? Hubby’s in jail, arraigned on murder for a body that can’t be found.  I think that she’s in Russia and he’s going to rot for nothing.

So, what does this mean for Reiser4? Is there going to be a Reiser4? Are the traditional supporters going to return? Suse? Hello? Of all the filesystems I have tried on the same kernel of Linux, Reiser had the best speed (especially v4), followed by EXT3 and then XFS/JFS.  Microsoft’s filesystems didn’t keep up at all, running at the same speed as EXT2.

Surely, something good will come of this whole mess.

I’ve had a bit of a time lately with my CD Burner taking 10 minutes to burn a CD, which is ridiculous, as some newer machines can burn a whole DVD in not much different time. I didn’t get around to figuring out deeply what I could do about it. I checked the Device Manger (right click on “My Computer” and choose the “Hardware” tab. Then, select “Device Manager”) and I noticed that my CD Burner, which was on the middle of the UDMA cable (the slave position) was in PIO mode, even though I had selected “DMA, if available” as the preferred mode of the IDE controller (you can see this by double clicking the “Primary IDE Controller” in the Device Manager). Well, there is a cause for this and also a fix. More likely than not, Windows “decided” to use the much slower PIO mode when it encountered more than 6 CRC errors at one point or another. This can happen if you put in a scratched CD. If you’re a regular visitor, you know that I have kids. I’ll say no more about that.

The good news is that there’s a solution and its everywhere on the net.  It does involve editing the registry and changing a few values (or deleting and reinstalling the device - not my favorite option, since it is the disk controller that has my hard drive on it).  The even better news is that I found a page that explains the procedure, or, if you’re too lazy, you can use a little script they came up with to do the editing for you.  I ran the script.  After a reboot, I got UDMA2 for my CD Burner and a full CD (697MB at normal size and 800MB ISO images) in just over 3 minutes, which is good enough for my old machine.  Its nice to have that back.  The CPU isn’t stuck at 100% while I burn a CD either.  Now off to try Linux Mint…

So, I’ve been all over the computer this weekend. I downloaded the ISO image of the Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO edition to play with. I’ll be doing a review of it later, after I get to try it out a bit. This is the first time that I installed Vector after two others, so its was a good test of a new situation for me. There was a bump or two but, otherwise, it went well. Wait until you see the screen shots. I had to modify the configuration file for the bootloader to boot the other operating systems, which is a bit disappointing, but I anticipated that. It was yet another distro that didn’t recognize my Envision monitor properly (none of them do) but at least there was a message after configuration that stated I may have to adjust things. That was nice.

I’ve also put in a few refinements to the new theme. I hope that you like them. Notice that my middle section (former sidebar) has a slightly different layout. I’ve slid the blogroll (the entire one this time) to the bottom of the section and replaced the side column with tags, so that finding things by subject is easier. That has actually led me to think about another caveat of using the Wordpress loop this way, that I will have to resolve. It involves the use of the if is_whatever() and else conditional tags.

You may also notice that the Links page is fleshed out a bit and seems a bit more complete.  I’ve tried to add descriptions to all the sites that I have linked to.  I had a bit of an issue with my database a while back and lost all my categories for the photo album, so I’ve been working on getting that back in order again as well.  Bear with me on that one.

And, to thicken the plot, I’m also doing this on one of the latest nightly builds of Wordpress 2.3 (still alpha), which seems to be working alright, except for one small thing that I have to test some more.  I haven’t seen any new tag functionality over UTW, but there are some other neat things that I like.  By the way, did anybody who upgraded to 2.2 notice that plugins that cause problems will be automatically deactivated instead of borking your whole site until you FTP in and remove or rename the offender.  Its getting better.   There’s been talk about an upgrader.  We’ll see how that goes.

I was perusing the pages of Ebay today, as I often do.  I usually use the prices on Ebay to gauge what I should expect to buy a used computer part locally.  I’ve found that most things I can get here for around the same price as shipped, and I have the advantage of being able to go to the person I bought from if I have any questions, etc.

I was looking through the page on SDRAM for my computer (its a P-III) - particularly the 512MB section (the maximum rated for my board - go big or go home).  I’ve noticed this phenomenon before but haven’t publicly ranted about it.  I guess that now is the time, then.

To all Ebay MISLISTERS, why do you do that? All this does for the shopper is to make them angry at you for wasting their time and the will hate you for it.  I actually refuse to knowingly buy from anyone who does this, because there are others who want to get their point across clearly.  They will be the ones that eventually get my money.

What is mislisting? Its my new term for listing an item in the wrong category to get it seen because it is junk and you know it.  I don’t know how many listings that I’ve gone by which are listed in, say the 512MB SDRAM category that are not that size at all.  Why do you insist in listing 4×128MB as 512? Do you think that I’m stupid?  Do you think that I’ll settle for your offer instead of what I came for?  Of course I won’t.  List in the right category or don’t list at all! You suck!

A few people who know me have noticed that I’ve made myself “available” on a venue that, frankly, I didn’t think that I’d be into.  I have become a member of the Facebook community.  This was not really because I want to spend my whole day “poking” friends, although I might do it once in a while.  Its fun to poke a friend once in a while.  Heh heh.

The reason that I joined is bacause its the new social venue for what may become an actual Linux Users Group.  I don’t know for sure where things are going to go, as there are only 7 members so far, and only two of us have actually posted anything on the wall (me being one, and I know nothing about Facebook at all).  But for those who are in the Fredericton area who might want to know more about Linux (or GNU/Linux) or who want to meet up with others who are into the alternative operating system, please check out the Facebook group Linux Fredericton.  We will welcome anyone who wants to get involved and help spread the Linux love.

I played You Don’t Know Jack with Macbros tonight and it was pretty close, or was it:

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