Computers

Windows will make you bald

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Today I had to set my Sister (in-law) with an e-mail account and access to it via my moms Desktop. So of course the obvious question is either she needs her own user account (in windows) plus the e-mail account or ma’s outlook would have to be setup to deal with the multi-login.

So I created the new user account for her, gave her an icon for outlook express next to the recycle bin and internet explorer (v6.x) on the desktop, set a wall paper and user pic (she loves Betty Boop).

Trying to find the docs on Bellsouth/AT&T’s website for creating a new e-mail account was not exactly as quick as I hoped but still easy as pie. I used my PC for that and RvS crashed in the process lol.

On Ma’s PC while logged in as the new user account for set up. I got a pop up from the windows security center just to tell me info I already knew. The Dell Support Center came up too, which we haven’t seen come up in many a year now ! Internet Explorer came up 404 on the pre-set home page (dellnet or some thing) and outlook express gave an error about the computer having no internet connection. Told it to go fsck itself and moved on and arranged for a pop-up less user log in.

Either AOL must have/had an in with Microsoft or a nice hackling plugin because outlook was set to launch AOL Instant Messenger on start up! And a general option for it too, like what the heck man. Now M$N or some thing from Microsoft I could understand but not AIM rofl. Although that PC’s got the good AOL client for AIM, the install is like 3 years old so it’s a version before AOL bloated the thing out. Which is really why I took to using all in one messengers like Kopete.

So I had to get that disabled, change the user picks, change the user names to match blah blah. Norton 360’s added toolbar in IE6 is not exactly welcome by my family — note to self, under no condition allow users to use IE as a default browser if I’m ever tasked with admining windows machines. And ban all Nortan and Mccfee products on machines with less then 768MB of Memory. In point of fact, make sure they pay extra for the psychiatrist bill for working with Windows.

So kicking about with Windows XP, Dell, Outlook Express, and AOL it was no problem to set up. But oh boy oh boy will you never find me using Windows for more then “Gaming” and similar reasons while Microsoft and other companies still are in power.

I’m a Unix man by nature and have a militaristic mind set. I value clear concise no shit assessments and not being nagged by pointless and flashy programs popping up taking several seconds to display only to tell me what I already know or worse try to sell me some thing 8=)

Windows, wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot long cattle prod if I had a choice… Still it’s the only decent platform for playing *real* video games on. Experience has shown the consoles are, uhh I’ll zip my trap before some googler flames me <_< hehe.

This reminds me of why I do not want to buy Microsoft VISA, why my laptop and file server run Open Source unix based operating systems, and why I use few programs that are known to “annoy” me. I want to get work done, I know how to read the fine manual, and software that bitches at the user should be fed through a hex editor, operating systems included 🙂

FreeBSD, now that is a sensible design… it won’t nag you ever ten minutes or so.

With similar hardware specs between my laptop and ma’s desktop, the only other principal difference being I have a Sempron Mobile (AMD budget model laptop CPU) and hae has an early Pentium 4 (when 2Ghz was new and costly). My laptop running FreeBSD runs faster then her Desktop running Windows XP SP2 + NAV and now Norton 360 – even while running KDE on the laptop. Programs like Norton remind me why I’ve heard jokes about system admins automatically having a users quota reduced for trying to run heavy programs on time sharing systems hehe.

RIP nVidia GeForce 6200, PoS@256mb

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Well, to make a long story shorter..

Whent to join TG#1 to kill some stress but it was full, supper was soon so I switched to TG#3 instead and went to join Duke for a round.

Before the round started I had to getup and do some thing and ma moved my chair out so she could get to the printer so I had to wait. By the time I got to sit back down my computer had already had the monitor blip and the PC restart — from running SWAT4:TSS to showing the BIOS start screen… if there was any error message before that I didn’t get a chance to see it.

On each restart that followed the monitor was all funky and kept blipping on and off as if the signal wasn’t working.

Instantly my brains thinking monitor, monitor cable, graphics card, fans, and motherboard for possible problems. Hooked up the monitor I got from the Library for a few bucks, same effect. Opened the case, blew the crap out of it with a can of air. Yanked all of the PCI family cards out, Audigy 4, TV Tuner, GeForce 6200 e.t.c and gave them a go. Cut my finger trying to get the graphics card out of it’s PCI-Ex16 slot, freaking plastic lever was to buried to see which way it angled.

Unscrewed the main (looked 90mm) fan from the case but the power connector was to short to pull it clean for cleaning… Couldn’t get that unplugged so I pulled out the (E)IDE cable connecting the DVD-ROM’s and one of the 512MB RAM DIMMs and still couldn’t get the flib’n thing out.. So I ended up cleaning it with a paper towel half over the PSU, half over the mother board : Needless to say I didn’t even want to mess with the issue of getting to the CPU.

Managed to get that screwed back in and then I had to pull the main power off the motherboard to get the RAM slot back in (the slots are right under the worst tangle of power cabling!). The inside of the PC was dusty but not that bad, most of it was just on the fan blades and the front side vents (veeerrrryyyy bad) but still cleaner then Ma’s Dell and that things been running forever without a cleaning, like once in 7+ years.

Booted her back up and still no luck although the main fan was running a heck of a lot better the temp was still normalD. I noticed though that my motherboard had a port for a monitor on it with a cover. I remember there was a note taped on it when I first set up the computer < 2 years ago.
Interestingly while the monitor was displaying screwy when plugged intot he Geforce 6200, maybe even some kind of pixel array during the computers startup. It was perfectly fine when in the BIOS setup, maybe because it would have to be used at a really low level dunno. Set the BIOS Video configuration from AUTO to Integrated, restarted and changed ports.

Using the onboard 128MB Intel GMA it works… RVS works fine to but RvS will work with just about any thing made after the stone age if it supports the right features.. With how over-optimized RvS is you could probably run it on a Cuisinart without trouble : SWAT4:TSS on the other hand is quite sensitive to ATI/nVidia drivers and essentially resulted in an impossible to kill application.

All of the other computers here use AGP so Ic an’t even test the card or a different card in the slot, so I hope it’s the GeForce 6200 and not part of the Motherboard..

So it looks like I have to either give up on S4 or buy a new Gfx card.. I know I’ve often thought about upgrading if finances allowed but this does not make me happy. Data failure is cheap, use backups but when the hardware goes nuts what do you do?

Upgrade to GeForce 8400GS and it’s fixed… Guess it was the GeForce 6200 going bad :

AMD Knocking me off the chair

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The other day I bumped into an AMD K6 family processor and looked it up when I got home, when I read some thing about trasnlating to a RISC like instruction set I nearly fell off my chair… Today I looked up a little more. I would guess the K6 is probably up this ally as well.

RISC86 Microarchitecture

The Nx586 processor fully implements the industry standard x86 instruction set to be able to run the more than 50,000 applications now available. This implementation is accomplished through the use of NexGen’s patented RISC86 microarchitecture. The innovative RISC86 approach dynamically translates x86 instructions into RISC86 instructions. These RISC86 instructions were specifically designed with direct support for the x86 architecture while obeying RISC performance principles. They are thus simpler and easier to execute than the complex x86 instructions. Note that this approach is fundamentally different than RISC processors, which have no support whatsoever for the x86 instruction set architecture. The RISC86 microarchitecture also contains many state-of-the-art computer science techniques to achieve very high performance, including register renaming, data forwarding, speculative execution, and out-of-order execution.

The benefits of this approach are several. First, the performance advantages of RISC design are applied to the x86 instruction set. Second, the execution unit can be smaller and more compact. Third, the execution units can be more specialized to give specific performance enhancements. Finally, it will be easier to add additional execution units in future designs. The RISC86 microarchitecture not only gives the Nx586 processor high performance today, but also allows for significantly higher performance in the future.

AMD Website, Nx586

cpu-info.com, Nx586

KDE4 goes gold !

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http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/

This is awesome !!! I can’t wait to give it a go without LiveCD 🙂

The new Okular document viewer and Phonon multimedia framework are big interests for me. Oh baby is it gonna be a sweet road to KDE5 😉

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Holy glockomoly…. LaTeX makes XHTML look hard and that was a cake walk.

for the software,

pkg_add -r latex2e

Which of course fetches tex. Then I installed print/dvips via ports since there was no package on the mirror. Then I did a pkg_add -r of dvips2ascii because I’d like to setup my vimrc file for viewing files, since it already can handle pdf’s hehe.

So far the only bad thing that seems to come in mind about working directly in LaTeX is having to define label{} on elements that we want to ref{} later

latex handles the *.tex files written and makes the *.dvi, which dvips can turn into *.ps (PostScript), I think dvipdf requires dvips to work right not sure.

So essentially from LaTeX sources a lot of formats can be generated, while allowing a very easy writing experience in the comfort of ones favorite editing application.

ToDo: LaTeX

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LaTeX: from quick and dirty to style and finesse

Small LaTeX Tutorial

Learning TeX was on my to do list many moons ago but more or less fail off the chopping block because when I ‘need’ printed files that go beyond pure text I’ll usually use Vim to write up a quick doc using (X)HTML and CSS. Because I’d rather write a web page for printing then use a word processor…. MS Word, SWriter, KWord, Abiword, bah humbug — piles of crap.

LaTeX shouldn’t be to bad a starting point, I’m not sure if there is much documentation left for plain ol’TeX yet (also on the todo list).

I did try Lyx in the last and even TeXmacs (which does not use TeX but can export to TeX/LaTeX)… But like WYSIWYG HTML Editors (Nvu, Dreamweaver e.t.c.) I ruled them out as paper weights.

When I tried to learn Vim, I refused to use the GUI (gvim) and used it in console mode only… Couldn’t even figure out how to save a file at first and I dumped it for XEmacs. Sure enough some day I went back and learned Vim, *my way* in console mode and it’s like my arm or a foot… not a crutche but a tool.

The difference between a tool and a crutch, is a tool helps you get work done. A crutch is an excuse not to learn how to do the work. Whether WYSIWYG programs become tools or crutches are a matter of the end users future.

So it is much the same that I would prefer to learn Tex / LaTeX through code not through ‘easy’ interfaces. I learned XHTML and CSS because I was bored one day and decided I’m sitting down and learning to write a web page, I just hit W3C and the road laid before me.

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Well, been meaning to do this for awhile now since I had re-installed PC-BSD awhile ago in the course of an upgrade.

A list of all ports and packages I’ve ‘added’ to the base install (not counting depends).

Note that I installed a bunch of KDE packages on CD#2 since they were not in PBI format,

kdeedu-3.5.7        Collection of entertaining, educational programs for KDE
kdegames-3.5.7      Games for the KDE integrated X11 desktop
kdesdk-3.5.7        KDE Software Development Kit
kdevelop-3.4.1_1    IDE for a wide variety of programming tasks
koffice-1.6.3,2     Office Suite for KDE3

For software I’ve installed since the first boot up,

cscope-15.6         An interactive C program browser
ctags-5.7           A feature-filled tagfile generator for vi and emacs clones
de-kde-i18n-3.5.8   German messages and documentation for KDE3
diablo-jdk-1.5.0.07.01 Java Development Kit 1.5.0_07.01
diablo-jre-1.5.0.07.01 Java Runtime Environment 1.5.0_07.01
docker-1.5_5        A dockapp with support for GNOME2 and KDE3 tray icons
doom-data-1.0_1     Doom data files (Doom, Doom II, Hexen, Heretic and Strife)
elinks-0.11.2_2     Elinks - links text WWW browser with enhancements
emacs-22.1_1        GNU editing macros
gmake-3.81_2        GNU version of 'make' utility
javavmwrapper-2.3   Wrapper script for various Java Virtual Machines
konversation-1.0.1_1 A user friendly IRC client for KDE
kscope-1.6.0        KDE front-end to Cscope
libdvdcss-1.2.9_2   Portable abstraction library for DVD decryption
libdvdnav-0.1.10_3  The library for the xine-dvdnav plugin
linux-flock-0.9.0.2 The free web browser that makes it easier to share with you
linux-mplayerplug-in-3.50 Embed MPlayer into browser
linux-realplayer-10.0.8.805.20060718_2 Linux RealPlayer 10 from RealNetworks
lynx-2.8.7d7        A non-graphical, text-based World-Wide Web client
mg-20050820         A small, fast Emacs-like editor
portaudit-0.5.11    Checks installed ports against a list of security vulnerabi
portupgrade-2.3.1,2 FreeBSD ports/packages administration and management tool s
prboom-2.2.6_2      A multiplayer-capable and modified version of ID's classic 
psearch-1.2         An utility for searching the FreeBSD Ports Collection
ruby18-atk-0.16.0.20071004 Ruby binding for ATK
ruby18-cairo-1.4.1_1 Ruby binding for Cairo
ruby18-doc-stdlib-0.10.1 Documentation for the Ruby language standard library
ruby18-gdk_pixbuf2-0.16.0.20071004_1 Ruby binding for GdkPixbuf2
ruby18-gems-0.9.2   Package management framework for the Ruby language
ruby18-glib2-0.16.0.20071004 Ruby binding for GLib2
ruby18-gtk2-0.16.0.20071004_1 Ruby binding for GTK+2
ruby18-pango-0.16.0.20071004_1 Ruby binding for Pango
ruby18-usersguide-20051121_1 Ruby users guide, in HTML format
rubygem-ini-0.1.1   Ruby INI File Parser and Writer
rubygem-rake-0.7.3  Ruby Make
rubygem-rtags-0.96  A Ruby replacement for ctags
scheme48-1.7        The Scheme Underground's implementation of R5RS
supertux-0.1.3_2    Super Tux is a side-scroller similar to Super Mario Brother
wesnoth-1.2.6       A fantasy turn-based strategy game
windowmaker-0.92.0_3 GNUstep-compliant NeXTstep window manager clone
wmappl-0.6_2        An application launcher dockapp similar to wmbutton
wmbsdbatt-0.1_1     Dockapp for battery & temperature monitoring through ACPI
wmclock-1.0.12.2_2  A dockable clock applet for Window Maker
wmdrawer-0.10.5_3   A dockapp which provides a drawer to launch applications
wmicons-1.0_2       Icons mainly for use in Window Maker
wmmatrix-0.2_2      A DockApp that runs a version of the xmatrix screenhack
xgalaga-2.0.34_2    Galaga resurrected on X
xpdf-3.02_3         Display PDF files, and convert them to other formats
zsh-4.3.4_1         The Z shell

This basically amounts to my standard shell (zsh), a few time wasters; xgaliga, supertux, wesnoth, and stuff to play doom.

A couple of useful tools; java runtime and development kit, exuberant ctags, cscope, kscope (just for the heck of it), and gmake because it’s essential to GTK+/QT based projects.

Window Maker and a couple of applets including docker and wmclock (the two I use).

xpdf because I’ve got vim programed to open PDF’s as read only text (using pdftotext)

A few extra editors, (gnu) emacs and mg (micro gnu emacs) just in case => I installed vim from source as I usually do so it’s not listed above hehe. Vim is about all I use regularly.

A couple of libdvd* ports to make use of my laptops DVD-ROM 😉

Web browsers lynx, elinks, and linux-flock, I also have netscape 9 installed manually to the /opt directory within the Linux ABI because it wasn’t in ports.

psearch, portupgrade, and portaudit for managing ports as I’m used to

The linux version of realplayer because although the many codecs I manaually installed for mplayer will play the real media I’ve asked it to, I never had time to twist Mozilla based browsers into using it instead of website foo asking me for a realplayer plugin..

konversation, the worlds greatest IRC client 😉

Various language stuff, mostly scheme48 and various Ruby things including GTK+ bindings. I used to have QTRuby installed manually but lost it during the reinstall/upgrade of PC-BSD. I’d like to experiment with a few C compilers and a few of the GCC based ports later.

I also have the German language files for KDE handy, using a program in another language can some times be a nice ‘crash course’ or pop quiz to ones own studies hehe.