January 2006 Archives

Last thursday, Thunderbird 1.5 was released. To best new featuers are real-time spell checking (i.e. as you type.... I was so used to this on the mac, systemwide, that any program that doesn't do it on Windows is IMO broken...) and auto save...

It seems to now boldface any folder whose subfolders have unread messages, so that's nice. It doesn't show how many, but maybe that's some obsure "advanced config" parameter. It also now does auto updates, and the default setting is horrific - it will by default just download and install any updates when they become available. Lots o' confidence there in Thunderbird developer land, I suppose.

(Aside : Hopefully a different lot than the Firefox people - I added an extension from Weather.com this morning for Firefox, and after that, Firefox wouldn't come up. No window, no dialog, nothing. I tried starting by holding down shift, ctrl, etc hoping that (like many mac apps) it would start in standard-no-extentions-or-other-stuff mode. No luck. Uninstall/reinstall? Nope. Finally I noticed that it kept the extentions after the uninstall (what a nice option that would be on uninstall...) so I blew those away and now it works again... I wonder how long it would have taken your average non-professional user to figure that one out, like my father....)

I'm starting to get used to the T43 and WinXP. One of the major irritants was its sloth - I'd sit there sometimes with the disk light pegged on for quite a while. It was like using an old mac.

I noticed that the standard drive, some Fujitsu 80G thing, was only 5400 RPM, and I knew how to fix that. I bought a Hitachi 0A25015, a 100G 7200 RPM unit, and a copy of "EZUpgrade", a USB 2.0 shell with software allegedly for laptop drive upgrades. I say "allegedly" because I just wasn't able to get it done. I would try, and it would fail about an hour in with "Failed to read from the sector 1 of the Source disk". Now, that sounded really scary. Sector 1 seems like an important one.

Tech support suggested that I run some WinXP sector checking program, which I did and hours later, it reported no problems. I tried to copy the drives again, and same error was reported.

I decided to try to find other software. I found Acronis who offered a free download of their DiskDirector package. It had a tool for making bootable images of disks, and amazingly, it looked exactly like the EZGig software. (It turns out they have an OEM program...). Anyway, I tried it anyway. sure enough, about an hour into it, "Failed to read from the Sector 10265332 of the Source disk". A ha! EZGig seems to truncate the message (assuming they OEM-ed it from Acronis). I told it to ignore. Several more times, too. 10 hours later, it was done.

I switched drives, powered up the T43 and after telling the BIOS to keep going even though the new drive wasn't supported (it made the stock drives look bad, I suppose), up it came. It feels so much faster. I have to do some perf tests to see, but the machine really snaps now. Eclipse comes up in 10s of seconds rather than over a minute. Maybe the old drive was broken....

On Wednesday, I went to an Intel Linux Strategy Summit at a lovely lodge outside of Portland, actually over the border in Washington. To get there, you need to cross the Colombia river at a dramatically named bridge, "Bridge of the Gods", which refers to an old Native American story of a landbridge that crossed there. I imagine that the area is just gorgeous, but it was hard to tell in the rain and fog that morning as I drove out.

Anyway, I left at about 10pm to get back to Hillsboro. It's dark there (out in the sticks) and I was worried about missing the bridge on the somewhat pastoral state road that winds along the Washington state side of the Colombia.

My fears weren't justified :

Or "Darklandia" as Danese calls it. They don't drive like they do on the east coast. I have to be careful. (It's slower here...)

I'm very used to - and attached to - the UNIX shell experience (It was very good on OS X). I've been trying to mimic it on WinXP using Cygwin, but the shell program use ctrl-c/ctrl-v for cut and paste. I guess if I think about it, it can't - I need ctrl-c to kill things, at least on the command line. However, I need to do this somehow with the keyboard - Right now, I have to go to that little menu in upper left, click on it, click edit, click paste.... I can't stand it. It really slows down work. In mac-land, I had cmd-c, cmd-x, cmd-v for this. (And those keys worked in every program... what's up with that? Windows had had 22 years of consistent Mac UI to copy that one single feature and still hasn't... )

So the solution that I'm trying is running Ubuntu in VMWare. So far, so good - VMWare is very slick, and Ubuntu installed w/o a hitch. I'm not sure if I like the UI, but we'll see. I need to figure out how to mount the windows file system in Ubuntu so I don't need to duplicate things like source trees and such.

Let OS/2 be free....

Now that I'm using Windows XP, I'm just another target in a vast sea of insecure operating system installations. The current one is cool - Windows XP is now at risk when users look at .... pictures!