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Week of 4 October 2004

Latest Update: Friday, 08 October 2004 10:45 -0400


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Monday, 4 October 2004

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08:30 - I finished up the second article for O'Reilly yesterday. I think they'll run the first article (choosing components for the bleeding-edge PC) on Windows DevCenter starting tomorrow, and presumably the second article (building the system) starting next week.

One of the things I found out is that Xandros wouldn't load on the new system. That didn't surprise me. Xandros 2.5 uses the 2.4.24 kernel, so I expected trouble from the new system, with its 925X chipset, DDR2 memory, PCI Express video, and so on. I went off in search of distros that use the 2.6.x kernel, figuring I'd work my way up from a current Linux distro to a bleeding-edge one if necessary. The first one I grabbed was Fedora Core 2, which uses the 2.6.5 kernel. It worked fine, so I didn't need to mess with FC3 Beta, Gentoo, or one of the really bleeding-edge distros.


Speaking of FC2, I remember a few years ago when I was complaining about the lack of good GUI-based apps for Linux to do common tasks. One example I used was the lack of an equivalent for Nero Burning ROM. All of the tools I needed for burning CDs were available then, as long as I didn't mind burning CDs from the command line. The GUI-based Linux tools I looked at were primitive and ugly.

How things have changed in a few years. This screen shot is of the K3b burning app as it prepares to burn one of the FC2 ISOs. K3b still doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the latest Nero Burning ROM, but it has more than enough functionality for my needs. It also has a lot of convenience features. Note, for example, that it's automatically calculated and displayed the MD5 checksum for the ISO file I'm about to burn.

K3b burning ISO image

One thing I did learn after installing FC2 in its "desktop" configuration. After using Xandros for months, FC2 appears unbearably ugly and clumsy. Where Xandros is polished and integrated, FC2 is rough and feels like a more-or-less random collection of software. Xandros feels like a coherent desktop OS. FC2 feels like a random collection of apps masquerading as a desktop OS.

I can't wait to see Xandros 3.0. Historically, Xandros has released a new major version late in the year, but I'm not sure they're going to make that schedule this time. I assume that Xandros 3.0 will use the 2.6 kernel and the latest stable version of KDE, which means they have a lot of work to do between now and the release of 3.0. Still, it should be worth waiting for.


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Tuesday, 5 October 2004

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10:35 - I know what my next project system will be. Antec just sent me one of their new Phantom power supplies. It's a 350W unit, and it's fanless. That means zero noise. None. Antec says it "Generates less noise than a mouse. (A dead one, that is.)"

Antec Phantom power supply

So I've set aside the Phantom as the first item in a pile of parts that I'll use to build a PC that is as nearly silent as possible. No CPU fan, no supplemental case fan. The only noise will come from the hard drive and optical drive. That'll mean using a slow or mid-range CPU. As I recall, the best Zalman flower coolers are rated to cool up to a Northwood-core P4/2.8 in fanless mode, but I'll have to check that. On second thought, I may use one or two of the Antec 120mm case fans. Those things are nearly silent, particularly when running at low speed, but they still move a fair amount of air.



Barbara posted a picture of Tux, the new stuffed penguin she got me during her trip to Vermont last week. Okay, Tux doesn't look like a penguin, but he is, really. He's working undercover on a job he can't tell us about. Something to do with Redmond, I think.
 

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Wednesday, 6 October 2004

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11:35 - Wired just published The Long Tail, a long but interesting article that explains why the future of movies, music, and books lies in distributing to niche markets. Although it doesn't make the point explicitly, it also explains why the Internet is a deadly threat to movie studios, record labels, and publishers, all of which are aggregators. There are some minor logical flaws in the article, but it's well worth the time it takes to read it.



14:55 - I just bumped O'Reilly again about the review copies of Building the Perfect PC. They tell me they shipped today and should start arriving early next week. Sorry for the delay. I'd appreciate everyone who receives one posting a review to Amazon.com (and wherever else, but Amazon is critical...) as soon as possible. The more early momentum, the better.

O'Reilly also tells me that part one of the Building the Perfect Bleeding-Edge PC article is now posted on Windows DevCenter.

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Thursday, 7 October 2004

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I wrote an entry but apparently forgot to publish it, so I'll continue it below...


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Friday, 8 October 2004

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10:45 - Still chugging away on multiple projects, most with short deadlines. At least I got the two articles knocked out. Now I'm juggling two book projects, one small and one very large. I need to complete the small one this month, and I have an intermediate milestone on the large project coming due in a couple months.

Pournelle has decided to take a serious look at Xandros Linux. We spent quite a bit of time on the phone the other day talking about the advantages and disadvantages of making the change from Windows to Linux. I told him that I've been using Xandros Linux almost exclusively for three months, and I'm pretty happy. It's not perfect by any means, and I was upfront with Jerry about the downside.

For example, Jerry depends on FrontPage, and there really isn't any Linux equivalent. Mozilla Composer is an adequate WYSIWYG HTML editor, although I wish it did more of the things FrontPage does. That was brought home in spades this morning, when I prepared Barbara's digital camera images for use on her travel page. With FrontPage, I could simply have inserted each image, right-clicked on it, and autothumbnailed it. FrontPage automatically replaces the full-size image on the page with the thumbnail image and creates a link to the full-size image. With Composer, I first had to create the thumbnail images manually using Irfanview. I then had to insert each thumbnail manually into the page and link each thumbnail manually to the full-size image. What would have taken me two minutes in FrontPage took half an hour with Mozilla Composer.

Frankly, I'm surprised that the OSS community hasn't produced a FrontPage equivalent. We have analogs for the other Microsoft Office products, such as OpenOffice.org and Evolution. Only FrontPage is missing in action. I remember looking at FrontPage before it was a Microsoft product. Back then, it was published by a company called Vermeer Technologies, Inc., which is why FrontPage still produces subdirectories with _VTI in the names. FrontPage hasn't changed a whole lot since Microsoft bought it. If a small company like VTI could produce such a product, I don't know why the OSS community can't do the same.



Ah, it wasn't that I forgot to publish my entry yesterday. I published it, but to the wrong directory up on the server. Mozilla Composer really is pretty deficient as a site management tool, and it has its flaws even as a simple HTML editor. Last night, Barbara was attempting to create a page for her trip to Vermont last month. After several false starts, I finally gave up and created a separate subdirectory for the page. I put the HTML page itself and all images, full-size and thumbnailed into that directory, thinking that should make it trivially easy to get everything published up to the server. Alas, when we tried to publish, it blew up with an error message.

I didn't have an FTP client on Barbara's system, so there was no convenient way to look at the structure of things on the server. I fired up Xandros Networks and installed gftp from the unsupported site. When I ftp'd over to the server, the problem became obvious. There was no /vermont-2004 directory on the server. The stupid Mozilla Composer publish function can transfer files, but it doesn't know how to create a new directory. Arrghhh.



And, in other news, it's possible we'll be writing an astronomy book (or two or three). It's just in the talking-about stage for now, and I can't mention which publisher, but it is intriguing.



12:45 - Barbara and I used to joke that our recommendation was the kiss of death. We'd recommend a product, say Onstream tape drives, and weeks (or days) later the company would enter bankruptcy. Alas, our knack continues. Hitachi, which eased its way out of the CRT monitor market a year or so ago, in August also announced its departure from the flat-panel display market. That's unfortunate, because Hitachi made some of the finest FPDs available. Fortunately, there are also excellent models available from Samsung and others, although we recommended the Hitachi models in Building the Perfect PC.

And, speaking of displays, Barbara called from work yesterday to say that they were selling 17" Dell Trinitron monitors for $25 each, as the law firm she works for converts to using FPDs exclusively. She asked if I wanted one of the 17" monitors? Sure, why not? I told her to grab two. It's hard to beat $25 for a 17" Trinitron monitor, even though they were probably made by a third-tier manufacturer. Heck, $25 is less than the price of a decent set of KVM cables, so if I get a year or two of light use out of them I'll be happy. Barbara hauled them home from work yesterday and I parked them in the den temporarily. (Barbara and I have a different idea of what "temporarily" means.)

So I started cleaning up the den today. There were three minitower systems sitting next to the sofa in the den, and three monitors. I'm now down to one minitower and two monitors in the den. I moved the Kick-Ass LAN Party PC back into my office, where it will function as a Windows XP test-bed system. I also moved the Bleeding-Edge PC I just built for the articles. It will probably become my main system eventually. Once I can get Xandros running on it, which may mean waiting for Xandros 3.0. For now, it runs Windows.

I put one 17" Dell monitor and a Microsoft keyboard and mouse on my main working surface, which is a 6'8" by 3'0" solid-core door, secured in place by 2X4 ledger strips on two sides and a two-drawer filing cabinet on the third. The second will go in the work room to replace an antique 15" Mag display that's barely working but had been good enough for what I used it for.

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Saturday, 9 October 2004

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Sunday, 10 October 2004

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