Friday Physics Fun

{H/T Slashdot}

Utter Geek Boast

Last monday my main computer decided it didn't want to work anymore. It started showing all the signs of an overheated system with sudden crashes and hanging on rebooting.

One of my main forms of fantasizing is building imaginary computers, so I had a rough idea of what I wanted.

Any computer I built would have to be Linux and Windows friendly. So all components would require support under both OS's.

I had a perfectly good hard drive, graphics card and dvd burner for recycling into the new box.

What was needed was a new motherboard, cpu, power supply, memory, cpu fan and a case. A new hard drive wasn't really needed but would certainly simplify installing a dual boot system.

As for operating systems, I still have a perfectly good copy of Windows XP Pro (32 bit) and I still really like Ubuntu. I did decide to switch from regular 32 bit Ubuntu to 64 bit Ubuntu.

I ordered the parts on Tuesday. By Friday they had all arrived. On Thursday I downloaded all the drivers and did some research. Friday I continued my research in between work assignments.

Saturday morning, I got up, ate a good breakfast fixed my coffee and headed into our living room with my laptop (which turned out to be unnecessary), the old computer, a monitir, keyboard and mouse as well as the new components.

It was easily the smoothest build I have ever had. I highly recommend each and every item purchased. They all had decent instructions. All parts required were provided.

I used a live cd of Ubuntu 64 for boot testing. It booted readily.

For the OS install I used a couple of sleazy geek tricks. I never really uninstalled Windows from the old system. I merely re-wrote Grub so that it wouldn't boot to Windows (I am nothing if not lazy). To get Windows on the new computer, I re-re-wrote Grub on the old hard drive and turned it back into a dual booter. I then removed Ubuntu completely (after backing up all data). Booting back into Windows, I then removed all proprietary drivers, rendering Windows what one poster called 'agnostic'.

When the old hard drive was installed as the primary hard drive in the new system, it booted smoothly into Windows. There were an awful lot of nagging messages about finding new hardware, but the proper application of installation cd's soon cleared them up.

The next step was installing Ubuntu for a true dual boot. The computer had already booted twice from a Live Ubuntu cd so I knew it wouldn't be difficult. It wasn't. All devices were detected and configured. The dual boot was correctly set up.

In the whole process there was only one hitch.

We have a HP officejet 6500 all-in-one that I use almost exclusively as a scanner. The proprietary HP software had crashed when I installed it last week. It worked out of the box in Linux, so that is why I had 'uninstalled' Windows. Reinstalling Windows brought back the old bad installation. To make matters worse, when I installed Linux Ubuntu, it asked if I wanted it to transfer over my Windows files and setting. I foolishly clicked 'yes'. That meant that the scanner was borked in both Windows and Ubuntu.

I knew that it was futzed in Windows so I removed all the proprietary HP software and did a minimal install of just the drivers. Windows XP comes with a photo and scanning wizard that is bare bones but usable. I didn't realize that the printer was unusable with Linux until I tried it late yesterday. After a great deal of aggravation, I resolved the issue this morning.

The great irony is that the scanner was horrible with the HP Windows software. It is decent with the Windows barebones software. It is excellent in Linux. Xsane (a Linux scanning application) is poorly documented, but richly featured. It is fast, very configurable and plays well with others. HP supports their devices very well indeed in Linux.

All in all, it's been a fun, if very geeky, weekend.

A Quick Book Review

I just finished Daniel Suarez' new techno-thriller, Daemon. It did everything a techno-thriller ought to do, with decent character development, lots of twists and turns in the plot, a surprise ending, and alas a note signaling that there will be a sequel (I'm not a huge fan of series).

Only one thing challenged my suspension of disbelief. When I took a break from the book and actually did some work, I had a Windows related hiccup. Since the book is based upon several really cool ideas about interrelating bleeding edge technology and software, the thought crossed my mind that all the things that occur in the book, from the deployment of a complex series of daemons to the use of AI recruitment tools to the use of SUV's as killer vehicles (one of the villains is a Hummer) depend upon the reliable operation of untested software. Some of the code would necessarily be very complex and quite long.

If you read the book, and you ought to it's quite good, try not to think about buggy software.

You say half full, I say half empty

This article (H/T Instapundit) touts the advantages of the ever spreading use of cell phones. Not only are more people using the little devices, but they are using them to accomplish more and more tasks. That would seem to be a good thing.

Except my very first thought on reading the article was: "Jeez now they're going to be texting the 419 scam on my cell."

If that hasn't already happened, it will shortly.