Computer Retirement
I've been thinking a lot lately about my computer situation. At home, right now I have: - little router box; on 24/7 (Cyrix MediaGX 233MHz)
Aging desktop machine; on 24/7 (mid-tower case, Athlon 1.33GHz)
HTPC/PVR; on only when I'm watching or recording something (mid-sized desktop case, Sempron somethingorother)
PowerBook G4 laptop; usually on 24/7, though occasionally it gets turned off (ppc 1GHz)
I've noticed recently that I haven't been using my desktop all that much. In general, it just sits there eating power and making noise. In a way, I want to retire it and just turn it off permanently, and just use my laptop for everything.
However, it has four main advantages over my laptop: 1. slightly faster processor (the laptop can't handle some video using more computationally-intensive codecs)
Flash plugin (laptop is running Linux on ppc, and Adobe doesn't support that; all the open source Flash players I've tried are useless for my purposes)
better-supported video (albeit through an nvidia binary driver; the laptop has an nvidia chipset as well, but Linux on ppc is not supported)
storage: I have a 1TB array in there
1 isn't all that big a deal, since I have the HTPC for watching video, and it's been able to handle pretty much anything I've thrown at it (720p H.264 with 5.1 audio is fine).
2 isn't that bad either. The only real downside is that I lose out on YouTube; people do send me links to funny videos, and I feel bad when I say "I'm on the laptop and I don't have Flash here." Eventually, I figure the open source Flash players will achieve some measure of parity with Adobe's and the problem will disappear (or maybe Adobe will start supporting Linux on ppc, which is unlikely). If there's something I just have to see, I can always reboot to MacOS and watch it there.
3 is a bit annoying: I like real window transparency. I find it very useful because I work with a lot of terminals open. Making them semi-transparent helps me find the one I want when I have many piled up. It's also just fun and nifty. But I can (and do) live without.
4 is the problem at this point. Due to some annoying recent financial occurrences, I won't be building my low-power file server any time soon. My HTPC case isn't large enough to accommodate the drives, and I don't really want to spend the money on external USB/Firewire enclosures for a temporary solution. I'm a bit stuck here.
I guess, in the near-term, I'll leave things as-is. Maybe I'll turn off the desktop machine at night sometimes to save power (and thus money) and reduce noise. Sure, people won't be able to download stuff off my computer overnight, but... well, too bad.
Recently I've been experimenting with not logging into AIM/Jabber/etc. from the desktop. I've just been chatting on the laptop, and that seems to be working pretty well. For the past several days I haven't even touched my desktop. I think this clearly points toward the idea that I'd rather sit on the couch with my laptop while doing computer stuff than at my desk. And for occasions where I'd rather use the desk, I can always hook up the laptop to my monitor, keyboard, and mouse (though I guess I'd need to buy a USB keyboard).
So we'll see. I'll continue my experiment until the weekend, and maybe start turning the desktop off after that.
Bugzilla Permissions
Finally! I can't wait until 3.0 final (or, rather, 3.0.1 or 3.0.2) is released. It'll be nice to be able to properly restrict permissions on b.x.o.
Bugzilla Permissions
Finally! I can’t wait until 3.0 final (or, rather, 3.0.1 or 3.0.2) is released. It’ll be nice to be able to properly restrict permissions on b.x.o.
Mail Clients That Don’t Suck
I really want a MUA that doesn't suck. I suppose "doesn't suck" is a bit prejudicial. I have a few requirements unrelated to suckitude that have to be met before I'll even consider a client, one of which being it has to be gtk2-based on X11.
For years I've used Thunderbird (and Mozilla Mail before that, and Netscape Mail before that). Like its cousin, Firefox, it tends to be a memory hog. It also has a bunch of annoying bugs: the in-memory message cache gets corrupted often if it has more than one connection to the IMAP server; folder names stay bolded (and they keep the new mail icon) if the mail was marked read from another mail program (e.g., on another machine). It also just tends to do weird things, like after a while spin the throbber forever, and never stop.
Don't get me wrong, Thunderbird is a great mail client. But I have a machine at work that only has 256MB of RAM. No, upgrading it isn't feasible right now. What I have to work with is... well, it's what I have to work with. With both Thunderbird and Firefox open, my system quickly starts swapping, and it kinda sucks waiting 30 seconds just to switch to another window.
I recently installed Claws Mail on my laptop (a renamed Sylpheed-Claws, apparently). I installed an older version, Sylpheed-Claws 2.6.0, on my machine at work, since that appears to be the latest version available on Ubuntu. Both versions seem to be a huge improvement over the last time I tried it (over a year ago, I guess).
Still, though, there are some major annoyances. When I'm sending mail (which seems to take a bit longer than it should), the entire UI blocks and I can't do anything else (like read other unread mail). That's retarded. I can't open the account editor dialog when I have any mail compose windows open. That's also retarded. It just cries "I was designed poorly". Fairly often, it'll get into a weird state while checking for new mail (on IMAP), and it'll hang there and not let me do anything without restarting. Occasionally it'll get into a different weird state where it just isn't able to check for new mail anymore without restarting. Occasionally it'll get into yet another weird state where it tries to check for new mail, but keeps reading garbage from the server, and sits there in a loop, and needs to be restarted.
There are some functional annoyances, too, like no shortcut (or option at all, as far as I can see) to mark all messages in a particular thread as read. There also doesn't appear to be a keyboard shortcut to mark all messages in a particular folder as read, but I suppose that's ok. I also can't mark a message read without opening it, unless I temporarily hide the preview pane, which is annoying. It doesn't pay attention to the concept of 'subscribed' IMAP folders, so I can't hide my spam folders (and unhide them once a month when I go through them). I prefer that the client not remember my password for me; however it takes my security paranoia a bit farther than I care about: if I ever get disconnected from the server, it asks for my password again. I'd really prefer that it just keeps my password in memory (mlock() is your friend), and forgets it entirely when I close the app.
Weirdly, even if I set it to convert HTML mail to plain text, it still displays <a> tags as if they were rendered as HTML. So for phisher URLs embedded 'underneath' a supposedly-legit-looking URL, you see the legit URL, and clicking it takes you to the phisher's site. I of course know better than to indiscriminately click on fake bank URLs, but why offer the option of ditching HTML if you're... not actually ditching HTML?
The PGP support doesn't let me assign particular recipients to which I want to always sign mail by default (it only lets you do that on a per-account basis). I like to sign messages I send to various OSS-related mailing lists, but not for personal correspondence. (Otherwise, I do like the PGP support here better than Thunderbird/Enigmail.)
On the plus side, it uses memory much more efficiently than Thunderbird does, and it doesn't seem to randomly lose mail from its cache. I've decided I'm going to try to use Claws Mail for a month before really deciding if I can use it permanently, just to give myself time to get used to its quirks (just as I've been spending years getting used to Thunderbird's quirks), but it's not looking good. Having to restart the client 3-5 times a day because it breaks in some unrecoverable way is not acceptable, though this may be a function of the slightly-older version I'm using on my machine at work. After I use the latest version on my laptop a bit longer, I may go to the trouble of compiling the latest version for my work computer if it seems like it would offer an advantage.
So, anybody else have any Gtk2 MUA recommendations? (I'll only consider non-Gtk2 clients if they're perfect.)
Update: I noticed that you can edit keyboard shortcuts, so I was able to add a ctrl+shift+c shortcut for marking all read, and I changed the 'next unread message' shortcut from shift+n to just n. I also changed 'check for new messages' and 'check for new messages in all accounts' to ctrl+t and ctrl+shift+t. This all mirrors Thunderbird, so I feel a little more at home. I'm still missing a 'mark thread read' action, though. Also, I found Ubuntu packages for Claws-Mail (on their website, oddly enough), so I can install the latest version on my computer at work and not be basing my opinion on an older version of Sylpheed-Claws.
On Pizza Toppings
I don't really understand the "everything on it"-type pizzas, or the people who order them.
A pizza is a sacred object. In its most pure and unadulterated form, it consists of the following: bread (crust), sauce, and cheese.
Anything else, and you have the potential to destroy it.
Now, I'm not saying I'm a cheese-only man (or extra-cheese-only, even). Every now and then I'll have them throw on some sausage, pepperoni, or chicken... maybe even some broccoli if I'm in a weird mood. Olives can add an interesting taste.
But why, oh, why, would you want to put seven different toppings on it? At that point, the essence of the pizza is only a memory. How can you taste the sauce (arguably, the most important part of the pizza)? How can you taste the cheese? If you've piled too much on, the crust might not even be able to withstand the pressure, and collapse. Then what are you left with?
And what of the cacophony of topping flavors themselves? How can you tell them apart? They just blend into one mass of strange homogeneous taste. It's not good, ladies and gentlemen. It's not good.
So, I suggest you step back. First, go cold turkey. Spend some time ordering nothing but plain cheese. Try a few different pizzerias. The ones who can make a great-tasting plain pizza are the ones who really have talent.
Of course, it also helps to live in a place where pizza is, on average, good (i.e., not northern California). But that's a rant for another day.
Naming Meme
YOUR ROCK STAR NAME: (first pet and current street name) Misty Camino
YOUR "FLY Guy/Girl" NAME: (first initial of first name, first three letters of your middle name) B-Jam
YOUR DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color, favorite animal) Orange Cheetah (I don't really have a favorite animal, but that was the first one that came to mind.)
YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, city where you were born) James Neptune (I think this one actually sounds more like a cool detective name.)
YOUR STAR WARS NAME: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name, first 2 letters of mom's maiden name) Tar Br Ki
SUPERHERO NAME: ("The", your favorite color, favorite drink) The Orange Guinness (I guess using a beer name is cheating, but my fav mixed drink changes often.)
NASCAR NAME: (the first name of both your grandfathers) Albert Arthur
FUTURISTIC NAME: (the name of your favorite perfume/cologne and the name of your favorite kind of shoes) Oldspice Sandal (Er, I don't wear cologne... oh well.)
WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother & father's middle name ) Barbara Anthony (Awesome, I get to be a transsexual witness.)
Help: Firewire Enclosures
For a while now, I've been wanting to put together a small, quiet, low-power file server. Right now, I have a 1TB volume (comprised of 4 drives in a striped LVM set, so no redundancy) in my desktop machine. Since this box is also a (somewhat public) webserver and subversion server, I leave it on all the time. It's in my bedroom, and is somewhat noisy, so I'd be glad to be able to turn it off sometimes, but I still want the public services on it to be accessible all the time if possible.
The other problem is that I'm rapidly running out of space on the volume. Right now I have about 85 GB left.
NewEgg was running a sale on the Seagate 400 GB SATA II drive around Christmas, so I bought two of them. I want two more, but I'm waiting on a better deal.
My original plan was to build a very small box with no storage in it, based on a mini-ITX board (or something similar). I'd probably buy a 2 GB flash disk for the OS. For the actual file storage, I was thinking about an eSATA enclosure, but the hardware for this is rather expensive, as I'd need a SATA port multiplier, as well as the eSATA-related hardware. I really don't want to spend that much on it.
James suggested I look into Firewire 800 (aka 1934b). Since Firewire is daisy-chain-able, I'd only need a single Firewire port on the computer itself, and, in theory, it's infinitely expandable (well, not really, but close enough for my needs). The assumption here is that the bottleneck will be the network (even with gigabit ethernet), so 1394b would be able to pump out the data plenty fast enough.
To start, I need two things: a 1394b controller that works well with Linux, and a 4-drive enclosure with SATA-to-1394b bridges. Bonus points if it's fanless or otherwise very quiet, but I'm thinking I can toss this in a closet, so that's not a huge deal.
So I started poking around. I have a couple leads on a decent 1394b controller, at an ok price. However, I can't seem to find drive enclosures at good prices. I'd really like to spend around $100-120 on the enclosure. The best I can find is this qBOX-F, which is $190. And it's not even quite what I want, because it requires an IDE-to-SATA adapter. And if you look at the specs, it says it only supports up to a 400Mbps data rate. Useless.
Anybody know of any 4-drive Firewire 800 enclosures that do SATA on the cheap? $100-120 (or less!) is ideal, but I guess I'd be willing to pay up to $160 or so if I had to. Alternatively, should I just stick with the older Firewire 400? (Hell, if I'm going to do that, I might as well just use USB2.) Any other options to hook up 4 SATA drives externally that I can do in under $200?
Wage Gaps
John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, says:
Think about this, and these numbers are in the battle for the soul of capitalism. The real income of the average worker in America has gone, from 1980 to 2004, from $14,900 to $15,900, OK? Well the real compensation of the CEO has gone from [approximately] $400,000 to $6 million, many times over. The CEO is making a statement and it is, "I built this company by myself and all the people that work here didn't help at all. They are entitled to nothing." Well, that is absurd. I have been a CEO for probably 35 of my years, 55 years in this business, an awful lot of them. I know it not to be true.
Really makes you think about the rich/poor gap and the erosion of the middle class.
Xfce 4.4.0 Released!
This is just a copy and paste of my /. story submission, but whatever:
After more than two years since our previous stable feature release, the Xfce Team is proud to announce the release of Xfce 4.4.0. This release features our new file manager, Thunar, as well as many improvements and feature additions to Xfce's core components.
Head over to our brand-new website and take a look at our visual tour, or go straight to the downloads.
Xfce 4.4.0 Released!
This is just a copy and paste of my /. story submission, but whatever:
After more than two years since our previous stable feature release, the Xfce Team is proud to announce the release of Xfce 4.4.0. This release features our new file manager, Thunar, as well as many improvements and feature additions to Xfce’s core components.
Head over to our brand-new website and take a look at our visual tour, or go straight to the downloads.