Fiat Lux

As the semester has started to pick up steam, my calender has started to fill up with classes and study group meetings, due dates and reminders, as well as regular non-school stuff. Normally I’d be loading all of this into my trusty Tungsten C, but this semester I’ve been strangely reluctant to do so. In fact, for the first time in about a decade, I found myself yearning for a simple paper calender to write my appointments down in.

Then today, I found out that PalmSource, makers of the PalmOS, has been acquired by a Japanese software company. What exactly that means for people who care about PalmOS-based PDAs is unclear right now, but my guess is it doesn’t bode well.

My Tungsten C is a couple of years old now. It’s still chugging along quite nicely, but eventually it will need to be replaced. What’s going to still be on the market when I go to replace it? And will what’s out there meet my needs?

I’ve pretty effectively reduced my dependence on Microsoft products over the past year. Thunderbird has been working well as my e-mail client, and the Palm Desktop as the PC side of my PIM. In addition, Firefox has replaced Internet Explorer as my browser of choice, and iTunes does a fine job of managing my MP3s, although those apps are not going to be affected by my choice of PDA. If I were to buy a Microsoft-based PDA, I’d have to switch back to Outlook, and I never liked Outlook. I used it because I felt that I had to.

Microsoft’s PDA OS has improved significantly from what I saw when I used it back in 2000, but I’m just not very enthusiastic about the idea. Given the choice of getting an MS-based PDA and going back to Outlook, or going to a paper solution, paper looks like a much better choice.

There are other alternatives. By the time my Tungsten finally rolls over and dies, Apple may well have come out with an iPod capable of being an effective PIM as well as a music storage device. Or other new devices may come out that work for me. We’ll have to see.

UPDATE: Amid a bunch of self-congratulatory “I told you so’s”, David Berlind at ZDNet agrees that this is definitely not good news for the PalmOS.

According to the WaPo:

The Smithsonian Institution is entering the highly competitive world of music downloads by offering the Smithsonian Folkways collection of ethnic and traditional music in an online music store.

…

The Web site, www.smithsonianglobalsound.org, will allow searches by artist, geographic location, language, cultural group or instrument. All of the Folkways archives, including photographs, can be downloaded onto a screen. Also in development are scrolling translations of some of the music for use on a personal computer.

I’m looking forward to checking out their offerings.

Against my inclinations, I’ve had to close comments down for all but the most recent posts here at Fiat Lux.

Overnight, my installation of MT-Blacklist stopped working. According to this thread over at Jay Allen’s site, the error I’m getting is caused when a web host upgrades perl without rebuilding the Storable perl module. I have a support ticket open at my web host to try to get this fixed, but in the meantime I’m closing down comments to prevent being drowned in crappy comment spam.

Thanks to MT-Close2 for helping to automate the comment closing process!

I can’t get through to any of the Blogger-hosted blogs in my blogroll today. I hope they get their issues straightened out soon, because web traffic to blogs is likely to increase significantly for the next week or so.

Finally implemented MT-Blacklist this morning and it was so easy I wonder why I waited so long. Jay Allen rocks!

Now I need to find a replacement for Outlook 2003, which is annoying the hell out of me. Any suggestions for a good Windows-based PIM/email client?

The computer is more or less functional again, although I have been dragging my feet reinstalling software packages. I’m only about halfway through that particular quagmire so far. I am very tired of reinstalling and resetting all the little settings and options and filters to get things the way I like them, but of course until I do get them all set just so, it doesn’t feel like I’m using “my” computer.

The only good thing about this whole mess is it has caused me to take a hard look at all the crap I have installed and question exactly how much of it I really need to have on my system. For example, do I really need WinZip AND WinRAR? Multiple FTP clients and HTML editors? Old games that I used to like but haven’t played in ages? Bottom line, NO.

Switching to geek mode for a moment:

After years of debate and delay, an IPv6 nameserver is finally live. For years, IPv6 had been held up as the replacement IP space for when the current supply of IP addresses runs out. That was always deemed an impractical solution because of the technical difficulty of adapting existing Internet infrastructure to handle both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses simultaneously. So IPv6 languished.

By repurposing IPv6 for next-generation Internet uses (such as putting IP addresses in appliances and cars), the question has been neatly sidestepped. It’s telling that ICANN implemented IPv6 support only for Japan’s (.JP) and Korea’s (.KR) country codes at first.

I’m looking forward to seeing what new devices or applications come out of this move.

I lost most of this weekend to the ongoing drama of my computer upgrade. On Saturday FedEx delivered not one, but two replacement motherboards. The vendor screwed up again. Now I have to pay to ship yet another piece of hardware I didn’t need.

At any rate, I shut down the old PC and started putting the new PC together. After assembling the old and new parts into the new PC case and powering it up, we experienced exactly the same problem with the secondary IDE controller.

Thinking that one busted mobo was bad luck, but two was not likely, Scott did a little more research and found on person reporting that unplugging the cable that powered the two USB ports on the front of their PC case solved the secondary IDE problem. We tried it and poof! Problem gone. It’s a little annoying to have plugs that can’t be used, but it’s not a deal breaker at this point because I only have 3 USB devices, one of which is rarely used, and there are 4 other working USB plugs on the back of the case. And right now I just want a working PC.

That leaves the next problem — the boot device BSOD we keep getting even though the system is seeing the CD just fine now. Scott fiddles and announces that it must be something relating to the CD drivers. I had trouble following his explanation, frankly. Whatever the problem is, it’s way beyond my level of ability to solve. He thinks that we might be able to fix it if we reinstall Windows 2000. Fine by me. Except when we did so, we discovered that my lovely HDs (the ones with about 40GB of programs and data) were the problem, not the CD. For reasons as yet unknown, the new system does not think they’re bootable, and Windows 2000 wants to reformat them before it will reinstall. This makes no sense to me because they were working perfectly well on the old setup and if you boot to a floppy, you can then CD to the drives and read them just fine. But they cannot be booted to now.

All along, I’ve made life more difficult on this upgrade because I did not want to reinstall my system. But now it seems that the one thing I most did not want to do is what I have to do.

To avoid having to reformat the HDs and totally lose my stuff, Scott pulls out a 70 GB hard drive that’s currently not in use, puts it into the new case, and starts installing Windows XP onto it. I then spend most of the rest of the weekend bit by bit reinstalling and reconfiguring some 30+ applications and deciding whether to reinstall another 20 or so. Some of them I haven’t used in a while but I like to have them just in case.

The only thing that kept me from screaming and throwing things is that I did not lose any data. Between the old HDs, my iPod, the backup CD I burned before starting all this, and my Tungsten C, I have a good copy, if not two copies, of all documents, files, MP3s, photos, fonts, bookmarks, etc.

I’m not quite done yet but the worst is over this Monday morning. My system is more or less looking how I like it and is running noticeably faster; and when I finally reinstalled the game that started this whole mess - City of Heroes - it ran smoothly and looks great. So in that sense I suppose it was all worthwhile. But still, I am not a very happy camper about the whole thing.

Here’s the new configuration, if you’re curious:
Antec case
Asus P4S800 motherboard
Intel P4 2.8 GHz CPU
2 512MB DIMMs
ATI Radeon 9600SE video
Creative SB sound card (old)
FireWire card
70GB Maxtor drive
Windows XP SP2

Hopefully I won’t have to go through this for another couple of years.

I’m sure I’ll get a bunch of smarmy comments from the Mac contingent over this, but I’m currently in the middle of a PC upgrade fiasco, and I need to get it off my chest.

I really like the new City of Heroes game, but unfortunately the PC I use, a homebuilt box, does a lousy job of running the game. The graphics card I have (a Radeon All In One) isn’t quite powerful enough, but due to the age of the motherboard, I can’t upgrade to a better graphics card without also upgrading the motherboard. Which means buying a new case and power supply, because the 4-year-old case won’t hold newer motherboards. And at that point you might as well go to 512MB of memory and upgrade the processor. Now you’re up to $500 worth of new hardware to run a $50 game.

Scott suggested new hard drive(s) as well but I drew the line there. And I decided that since I have so much free time right now, I was going to be the primary builder of the new box. I’m about 4 times as slow as Scott when it comes to hardware installation, but with him working and me not, it seems unfair to make him do it all.

That all leads us to the point of this post, which is a list of the 10 things I most hate about building your own PC:

1. Despite the huge pile of PC hardware in our office, some of it up to 7 years old, none of it is actually useful
2. There is no easy way to grab onto PCI cards when you’re trying to take them out of their slots, resulting in cuts on your fingers
3. Instruction manuals on the one hand omit key pieces of information yet offer pages of useless drivel on the other hand
4. Power supplies, whose huge masses of cables block critical space inside the PC case, don’t have enough plugs of the kind that you need and too many if the kind that you don’t need
5. I don’t get why you need 6 different kinds of screws to put one PC together
6. Operating systems that give a BSOD on boot-up if the CD drive isn’t found suck
7. Motherboards with secondary IDE controllers that don’t work out of the box or even after you’ve updated the BIOS also suck
8. Resellers who ship motherboards that have non-functioning secondary IDE controllers suck even more than that
9. Planned Obsolescence in general, for being the root cause of the entire fiasco
10. Having to do it all over again when the (hopefully fully functional) new motherboard gets here some time in the next few days

AOL engineer with his head up his butt sells 92 million AOL screen names to spammers. More info here.

The only good news is at least somebody got caught. Too bad for the customers, whose addresses have probably been sold and resold a whole bunch of times since then.