9th February 2007
In a previous entry, I mused over a move from Windows to Linux, a suggestion being that Fedora Core Linux would be my base operating system with Windows installed in a Xen virtual machine. That, of course, led me to wonder how I would swap my current situation about: Linux in VM, Windows as host. Meantime, I discovered something that makes the whole process a little easier: VMware Convertor.
The Starter version can be downloaded free of charge, while the Enterprise edition comes with VirtualCenter Management Server for corporate use. What it does is to make a virtual version of a real computer, a process that takes drive imaging much, much further. I have given it a whirl and the conversion seems to go well; the only thing left is for me to fire it up in VMware Workstation - I believe that Player and Server will also run the VM that is created and, like Convertor Starter, they also can be downloaded free of charge; Workstation does everything for me, so I haven't looked beyond it, even though it did cost me money all those moons ago - and get through licence activation issues without leaving me with no authorised Windows installation.
9th February 2007
I have just discovered that if you have a number with a leading zero, such as 08, it is assumed to be an octal number, that is, one of base 8. The upshot of this is that you get errors when you have numbers like 08 and 09 in your arithmetical expressions; they are illegal in octal: 08 should be 10 and 09 should be 11. Of course, as luck would have it, you get exactly these expressions when date/time processing. Luckily, you can force things to be base 10 by having something like 10#08 or, when extracting the minute from a date-time value, 10#$(date +%M). Strange as it might appear, this behaviour is all by design. It is dictated in the POSIX standard that governs UNIX. That said, I'd rather it if 08 was interpreted as an 8 and 09 as a 9 rather than triggering the errors that we see, but that could have been seen as muddying the simplicity of the standard.
8th February 2007
Recently, I have revisited an old website that I used to have online in and around 2000 that has since been retired for a while. One thing that it had in common with this blog was its focus on computer technology. While I don’t remember blogging being bandied about as a term back then, a weblog would have fulfilled the site’s much better. One of the sections of this old world website was dedicated to Linux and UNIX; this was where I collected and shared experienced my experiences of these. These days, unless it is held in some cache somewhere (rather unlikely, I think), the only place that it is found is what I bundled together in a tar.gz file for transfer to Linux. Irony strikes…
Back then, my choice of Linux was SuSE 6.2, followed by 6.4 from PC Plus DVD. It was the first, and only, Linux distro that I bought after exploring a selection of distros from cover-mounted CD’s in books and magazines. While I did like it, it wasn’t enough to tempt me away from Windows. I had issues with hardware, and they got in the way of a move. Apart from what some might judge to be clunkiness, there were fewer impediments on the software side.
I am a DIY system builder and there were issues with Linux support of my hardware, particularly my modem. Rather than being in possession of all the electronic wherewithal that a full modem would need, it got the operating system to do some of the work. The trouble was that this locked you into using Windows, hence its Winmodem moniker. Besides this, my Zip drive was vital to me and SuSE didn’t support it out of the box: a kernel recompilation was in order and could involve losing any extensions that SuSE had actually added. Another foible was non-support of a now obsolete UDMA 66 expansion card.
But improvements in hardware support were coming on the scene. Support for printing with CUPS, scanning with SANE and audio with ALSA was coming along nicely and has matured nicely. Apart from cases where vendors refuse to help the Open-Source community and bleeding-edge hardware that needs drivers to recoded according to the demands of GPL, things have come a long, long way.
Software-wise, the only thing holding me from migrating to Linux was my use of Microcal (now OriginLab) Origin, a scientific data visualisation and analysis package that was invaluable for my work. Even then, that could be run using WINE, the Windows API library for Linux. OpenOffice could easily have replaced MS Office for my purposes, unless formula editing was a feature outstanding from the specification. GIMP, once I had ascended the learning curve, would have coped with my graphics processing needs. After committing myself to non-visual web development, Bluefish and Quanta+ would have fulfilled my web development needs. Web technologies such as Perl, PHP, Apache and SQL have always been very much at home on Linux, so no issue there. At that stage, experimenting with these was very much in my future. Surprisingly, web browsing wasn’t that strong in Linux then. Mozilla was still in the alpha/beta development phase and needed many rough ends sorting, while the dreadful Netscape 4 was in full swing with offerings like nautilus coming on stream. Typography support was another area of development at the time, which fed through into how browsers rendered web pages. Downloading and compiling xfstt did resolve the situation.
These days, I have virtual machines set up for Ubuntu, Fedora Core and Mandriva while openSUSE is another option. I spent Saturday night poking around in Fedora (I know, I should have better things to be doing…) and it feels very slick, a world away from where Red Hat was a decade ago. The same applies to Ubuntu, which is leagues ahead of Debian, on which it is based. With both of these, you get applications for updating the packages in the distribution; not something that you might have seen a few years ago. Support for audio and printing comes straight out of the box. I assume that scanner and digital camera support are the same; they need to be. Fedora includes the virtual machine engine that is Xen. I am intrigued by this but running a VM within a VM does seem peculiar. Nevertheless, if that comes off, it might be that Fedora goes onto my spare PC with Windows loaded onto one or more virtual machines. It’s an intriguing idea and having Fedora installed on a real PC might even allow me to see workspaces changed onscreen as if they were the sides of a cube, very nice. Mandriva also offers the same visual treat, but is not a distro that I have been using a lot. The desktop environment may be KDE rather than Gnome as it is in the others, but all the same features are on board. The irony though is that, after starting out my Linux voyage on KDE, I am now more familiar with Gnome these days and, aesthetically speaking, it does look that little better to my eye.
So, would I move to Linux these days? Well, it is supported by a more persuasive case than ever it has been, and I would have to say that it is only logistics and the avoidance of upheaval that is stopping me now. If I were to move to Linux, then it would be by reversing the current situation: going from Linux running in a VM on Windows to Windows running in a VM on Linux. Having Windows around would be good for my personal education and ease the upheaval caused by the migration. Then, it would be a matter of watching what hardware gets installed.
7th February 2007
With a good amount of snow forecast for parts of the U.K., one’s mind does turn to weather matters. Interestingly, AccuWeather is now powering browser plug-ins for all the major PC browsers and not just Firefox: Internet Explorer and Opera also get a look in. I have already tried out ForecastFox, the offering for Firefox, and had a brief look at the others. The IE add-on, I tested it with IE7, slots in neatly into the browser’s toolbar. Unlike ForecastFox, only the current weather and the forecast for the next day are shown for the selected location, with a link to AccuWeather for a 15-day forecast. The Opera widget is not docked with any toolbar, a bit of an irritation to put it mildly, but it does offer similar information.
These gizmos do highlight differences in the units used for weather information around the world. The U.S. is very much old school in its use of Fahrenheit (means next to nothing for me, I have to say) for temperature and miles per hour for wind speed. Other parts of the world measure temperature in Celsius (also called Centigrade) with wind speed measured in either metres per second or kilometres per hour. I find m/s strange for wind speed, but mph or kph are fine; while I think in terms of miles, my hillwalking is causing me to become more and more conversant in kilometres.
6th February 2007
Windows Vista is only out a week and the incompatibilities are already rolling in. Yesterday, it was iTunes that hit the headlines, with Apple making an announcement on its website. More importantly for the likes of me, dues to its effects on my work, SAS has announced that Vista compatibility will not be assured until it launches SAS 9.2. This is not exactly a surprise because they have been advising against using Internet Explorer 7 with their products as they have not carried out their validation. Given that this company is cautious about operating system support anyway, it may be that SAS 9.1.3 runs on Vista without their having validated it to the standards that a large enterprise user would expect. Now, the BBC’s Robert Peston writes an open letter to Bill Gates in his blog following a lost weekend with a laptop running Vista. His problems were hardware related.
There is one surprising thing about all of this: test versions of Vista have been out since last summer, with OEM ones available since November or thereabouts. Why have other software and hardware vendors not being looking ahead for this sort of thing? SAS’s advice regarding IE7 is in the same vein and even more surprising. Though I realise that there is only so much that can be done with a non-final version or, for that matter, in two months, some forward-thinking surely could have been employed. While I know that full legacy compatibility is a big job, it does look as if someone sat on their laurels. Or else, they are not allowing the release of Vista to upset their development and launch schedules and, given that Microsoft’s offering is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, they might well have a point. I think I’ll sit on the fence for a while longer…
3rd February 2007
Having done a reinstallation, I have now got OpenSolaris going again in VMware and cloned the VM in case I go on a wrecking spree once more. I am going to leave VMware tools uninstalled for now so that I don't encounter the display problems I previously experienced. Speaking of how it looks, I uploaded a screenshot here; the difference between how it looks and the appearance of its ancestor is enormous. Having sorted the VMware/ZoneAlarm clash, networking not works as it should, and I can access the web through Firefox. Now that everything is all set, the real explorations can begin.
2nd February 2007
Brain Livingston has described an intriguing way to go using the retail Upgrade editions of Vista to do a fresh installation without having either Windows 2000 or XP installed in the latest edition (free – there is a paid version, but I veer away from information overload) of the Windows Secrets email newsletter: install it twice! After the first time around, it cannot be activated because there is no previous version of Windows installed, yet it is possible to do a Vista to Vista "upgrade", the second installation, and that can be activated. While it is strange behaviour, I suppose that it placates those who think that the full retail packages are far too expensive. They even think that in the U.S.; but "rip off" Britain is getting a lot worse deal because we are not seeing the benefits of the low dollar at all. If all was right, we should be getting Vista at half of the price that we are paying for it. It's enough to drive you to going the OEM option or not upgrading at all, especially since XP will be supported until 2011 (I have seen 2014 mentioned in some places). Livingston will cover the whole OEM discussion in the next edition of Windows Secrets, and I, for one, will be genuinely interested to see what he has to say.
2nd February 2007
Having been programming (mostly in SAS as it happens) on Sun's venerable Solaris operating system platform at work since the start of this year, the chance to try OpenSolaris x86 edition in a VMware virtual machine seemed a good opportunity for advancing my skills.
Before this, my exposure to Solaris was when I was at university and things have moved on a bit since then, not least on the technology side but also in terms of my own skills. In those days, my mindset was fixed by exposure to macOS and Windows with their point-and-click functionality; the fact that the terminals that we were using were ancient didn't make for a positive impression. You can see below what I mean. And the concept of tackling a command line, even one as powerful as that in UNIX, armed with a good book was somehow foreign to me.
Mind you, in those pre-Safari days, getting your hands on books not in the university library was an expensive outing for the student finances. Armed with years of programming and web development experience, the UNIX command line now looks like a powerful tool to be used to the greatest advantage. Years of exposure to Perl and Linux have made the tool a less daunting one for me. Also, the availability of shell scripting makes the Windows batch file language look positively archaic. The default ksh shell (I believe that it is ksh88) in Solaris is not as friendly as it could be, but bash is available on demand, so life isn't that uncomfortable on the command line.
To date, my experience of OpenSolaris has been brief because I wrecked the installation while trying to sort out an annoying graphics issue that appeared after installing VMware Tools (drivers for various pseudo-devices) on OpenSolaris; I have yet to put things back. The installation procedure is pretty painless for what is a technical operating system. The Community: Tools section of the OpenSolaris website has articles on installation and installation under VMware is discussed on Developer's Quarterdeck Log.
As regards a desktop environment, you have a choice between the ubiquitous Gnome and Sun's own CDE, of which I have seen plenty at work. As it happened, I installed the developer edition, but there are the usual Linux mainstays on the desktop: StarOffice (in place of OpenOffice), GIMP, Mozilla Firefox, etc. One thing that I wasn't able to sort out was the internet connection, and that may be because ZoneAlarm was blacklisting VMware at the time of installation. All in all, it looked like a far friendlier environment for users than that which I encountered during my early years on UNIX. I must get it back in action and take things on from here…
1st February 2007
Though it seems strange to say it, I am making good use of Word’s blogging capabilities. Having had WordPress.com’s blog editor mangle one of my posts – incidentally while using Opera as my browser - is the cause of this turn of events.
When setting up new accounts, there are a number of presets available to be used to work with major blogging providers such as Blogger, WordPress, and Typepad. This is not all, though, as it is possible to hook up to other blogs in a more generic fashion. In fact, I have able to hook up to my other WordPress-powered blog; hosted on the same server as my personal website and with all the associated programming and scripting handled by myself. Where you have a number of accounts set up in the application, a drop-down menu appears in the post so that you can select the account to be used.
Speaking of dropdown menus embedded in the post, you can add categories to a post from the blog server’s own collection, and you can have more than one in any post. This feature is a boon, as is the ability to edit posts that are already on there, yet Word only seems to show a subset of all the posts on the server, about 20 I think, rather than each one. Another caveat is that you need to use a separate window for each post, or you’ll end up overwriting posts in error. Whether this is a result of RSS feed settings or is intrinsic to Word itself remains something that I have yet to discern. As it is Word, formatting, insertion of objects such as hyperlinks and images is very much part of the package. That said, uploading images via this route was not something that I tested until I was writing this post, but it seems to work well.
Apart from the irritations discussed above, I did find Word crashing a few times, but no data got lost thanks to its seemingly excellent file recovery capabilities, a definite counterpoint to some of my experiences with Word’s file recovery feature in previous versions. Eventually, the Office Diagnostics tools kicked in to see if all was well and, after carrying out both hardware (memory, hard drive, etc.) and software checks, an installation repair was performed. Let’s see if this resolves the issue. Even so, the crash repair and diagnostics were not something that I had seen to the same extent in previous versions of Office, and they did look pretty impressive.
In summary, Word does seem to be a good blogging tool, but I wouldn’t use it on its own because of its inability to download a full list of posts for editing. A blog’s own interface will remain necessary for that. Also, Word is far from being the only “offline” blog editor out there, and I am tempted to have a look at the likes of BlogJet and w.bloggar.
31st January 2007
After trying to get WordPress.com to amend the Andreas04 theme and getting nowhere, I decided to jump ship and try the Andreas09 one instead. The permalink titles are more sensible on this one so I'll see what Technorati makes of them. Even though I have had to change theme, the wonders of CSS have allowed me to carry over elements of the colour scheme from the old to the new. If you really want to witness the raw power of CSS, pop over to CSS Zen Garden where the same HTML code is rendered in extraordinarily different ways thanks to CSS. There is even a book written by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag to go with the website.
