For better or worse, I am now floppy free. I have given away all of my Zip disks, I have destroyed all of my 3.5" disks, and at long last I've taken some scissors to my 5.25" disks. This is all part of the great purge for my upcoming cross-country move. I feel a little antsy about it, but in the end I think it was inevitable.
I had kept 3.5" disks for emergencies for quite a while and I admit that there were times (when dealing with legacy programs and such). And I also had some even older 5.25" floppy disks. Those things had some old Wordstar, dBase III, Wordperfect, Newsroom Pro, and other data from way back in the DOS days. At some point, my computers did not have 5.25" drives anymore and yet I still kept them thinking that someday I'd get that data off of them. That day never came, until recently. Over the years I had asked coworkers and friends if they had any old computers with that drive; no one did. I considered going to an old electronics shop or even Ebay to get one, but didn't for 2 reasons: 1) I didn't want to spend money just to transfer old data that might not even be readable anymore, and 2) for most of these years I didn't have a desktop to install it in in the first place; I was pure laptop for a good 10 years due to grad school and moving and such. I did eventually get a gaming desktop machine but never reconsidered getting a 5.25". I was all ready to just declare it lost when I stumbled across an old PC in my landlord's basement. I got his permission to cannibalize it but it turns out that I didn't really need to. I did try to take the drive out and put it in my desktop only to discover that I didn't have the right connector. But the old computer was already working and running Windows 95 I think and it booted. The drive wasn't actually attached in the computer but after swapping out the 3.5" drive with it and playing with the BIOS it actually worked. Now the transfer problem... no network on it and no CD-burner on it. Fortunately for me, my landord is a techy and he had retrofitted an old USB1 card into it. I panicked a bit when my first attempt using a jump drive failed due to compatibility. But eventually I tried out some other ones that did work and voila, I was able to get my 20 year old data off these obsolete disks. Not that I'll be able to do anything much with them but this is history and I'm sentimental.... and trying not to be. Hence when I finally got the data off... snip snip and into the trash. Actually, that felt quite good. Space is limited and I've been carrying these things around with me for 20 years.
2008-08-20
2008-04-27
iOMeGa!
I've been digging through my shite recently and among other things found a box with my old Iomega Zip-100 drive in it. This thing is relatively ancient. I mean this is pre-USB. It connected to the computer via parallel port. In the box also was about a dozen zip disks. And what's more, there was stuff on it that I had absolutely no clue if I had backed up or transferred to any other hard-drives. What to do, what to do. I did NOT want install drivers on my Windows system which is polluted enough as it is. Well, my freshly minted Ubuntu install was up and the computer it was on had a parallel port, so why not? I began looking up info about these parallel port zip drives for use with Ubuntu. I recall a decade ago getting it to work with my Toshiba running Red Hat (I think it was 5) and having to do some insmod's and ppa's and using mtools and the like; basically I remember it requiring some work. After finding an appropriate page I hooked it up.
OMG! Without doing anything else, up pops the ZIP-100 icon on my desktop and a Nautilus window with the contents. I utterly did not expect that. That rocked. I mean, who uses parallel ports to attach devices these days, outside of perhaps a legacy printer much less a block device? It's not so much that I expected it to not work easily but even with Windows I expected having to download some drivers or installs or something. Way to go Ubuntu!
It's amusing to consider how my stack of zip disks and the reader fit can all fit on my keychain via a USB key now. Those things were destined to go the way of the floppy; in fact I think the floppy outlived them. I don't think I ever liked them but for a few years I must admit that they were indeed practical. In light of the MiniDisc, I still think zip disks should never have existed. But for now, I'm just stoked that practically no effort I got it connected and was able to move all of that data off. I now look forward to getting rid of the beasties. The fact that it worked so effortlessly almost made me want to keep it around for amusement. Almost. Now to figure out the most consciencious way to purge it from my possessions.
OMG! Without doing anything else, up pops the ZIP-100 icon on my desktop and a Nautilus window with the contents. I utterly did not expect that. That rocked. I mean, who uses parallel ports to attach devices these days, outside of perhaps a legacy printer much less a block device? It's not so much that I expected it to not work easily but even with Windows I expected having to download some drivers or installs or something. Way to go Ubuntu!
It's amusing to consider how my stack of zip disks and the reader fit can all fit on my keychain via a USB key now. Those things were destined to go the way of the floppy; in fact I think the floppy outlived them. I don't think I ever liked them but for a few years I must admit that they were indeed practical. In light of the MiniDisc, I still think zip disks should never have existed. But for now, I'm just stoked that practically no effort I got it connected and was able to move all of that data off. I now look forward to getting rid of the beasties. The fact that it worked so effortlessly almost made me want to keep it around for amusement. Almost. Now to figure out the most consciencious way to purge it from my possessions.
Hardy har har
Ubuntu 8.04 a.k.a. Hardy Heron was released last week. I'd been waiting for it for a few weeks. I had decided to re-up my home Linux installation on my Alienware computer. But rather than installing the beta, I figured I'd just wait for the actual release. At long last it arrived to breath some life into my desktop computer. I've had a few days to play with it and if I was never convinced before, I now feel that:
But as far as desktop computers are concerned, I was thrilled. I've always been a little accepting of the fact that Linux always takes some tweaking to get working. Usually that means a bunch of web searches and manual installation and editing of configurations and such. For the desktop though, just about everything worked instantly and the only "hassle" was to get the multimedia up to snuff (not included by default for licensing, etc. reasons). But that's one thing that over the past few years has been wonderful, practically everything is available to install very easily. If I had to scratch install Windows, that would require a couple days of manually loading in all the software, dealing with all of the bloody registration notices that keep popping up over and over again when you do, all of the multiple "updates" to account for the difference between the CD version and the latest updates... well, everyone knows that Windows and all of the software isn't quite as quick as they suggest. In modern Linux distros, the package manager makes it as simple as clicking a bunch of check boxes and letting it go.
Early highlights for me:
Linux is absolutely ready for the desktop.I mean, I've used 7.10 on and off and that was great too, but I never used it often enough and is for the following reason:
That is why, in this case I installed it onto my desktop computer. Granted, I have not tried Hardy on any of my laptops but that will come in time.
Linux may not be quite ready for the laptop.
But as far as desktop computers are concerned, I was thrilled. I've always been a little accepting of the fact that Linux always takes some tweaking to get working. Usually that means a bunch of web searches and manual installation and editing of configurations and such. For the desktop though, just about everything worked instantly and the only "hassle" was to get the multimedia up to snuff (not included by default for licensing, etc. reasons). But that's one thing that over the past few years has been wonderful, practically everything is available to install very easily. If I had to scratch install Windows, that would require a couple days of manually loading in all the software, dealing with all of the bloody registration notices that keep popping up over and over again when you do, all of the multiple "updates" to account for the difference between the CD version and the latest updates... well, everyone knows that Windows and all of the software isn't quite as quick as they suggest. In modern Linux distros, the package manager makes it as simple as clicking a bunch of check boxes and letting it go.
Early highlights for me:
- Installation was largely unattended and quick.
- Windows partition auto detected and available.
- Compiz loaded cleanly (after NVidia drivers uploaded).
- I was able to get my basic working environment setup very quickly thanks to package manager.
- Some things like audio and such which were always a little flakey seemed to work out of the box.
- Had to do digging to allow network shares with Windows.
- Multimedia of course.
- Still puzzled why things like c/c++ development stuff isn't default, this is Linux afterall.
- Downgrading Firefox3b to Firefox-2 for some reason required some digging to get right (hint: delete .mozilla from home directory). Sorry, but I need my Google toolbar.
2008-04-19
Fear of the upgrade
There was a time when I would constantly upgrade to the latest version of software. I was a junky for new useless features. There was sometimes a secondary reason, like keeping certain file types up to date (due to the unfortunately still present but thankfully diminishing days of proprietary file formats). That changed as the years passed. I now find myself skeptical of upgrades. Oddly, the inevitable increase in bloat (both in size increase and speed decrease) is less the reason than the problems that invariably get introduced. It seems that these days an upgrade signifies an introduced incompatibility, instability, or worse.
Off the top of my head the first program that I purposefully abandoned upgrading (versus just didn't need to use anymore) was PaintShopPro, from back in the early 90s. It was freeware or shareware then. It was small, fast, and useful. Then at some point the upgrade was no longer free to get. It became around $30 and later $100. I kept the old free version around for many years and refused many upgrades. Eventually I abandoned it for other things, but I still remember liking it a lot. A copy may be lying around on a disk somewhere.
Another example is MusicMatch. It was one of the first decent mp3 ripper-players around. I was fond of it not as much because of its real quality (it was good but kind of clumsy in some ways), but rather because the owners did something absolutely right: free lifetime upgrades. Now that policy deserved my money. I despise being forced to buy essentially the same software over and over again every year or two. For every software purchase, there should be at least 2 free major upgrades or like 4 years of upgrades included. But lifetime? that was awesome. Then Yahoo bought it, but I remained pleased because at least they still honored the lifetime upgrade. I saw an end to that coming when they changed the name to Yahoo Jukebox. Eventually it was unrecognizable as MusicMatch. And eventually, I stopped installing it and even stopped using the old version. Why? because I upgraded once too often and it kept pestering me to upgrade, and then gave me a stern warning that my version's days were numbered due to an interface change (basically a forced connection with Yahoo Music that I didn't want). Oh well.
Apple software gets my goat because I'm convinced they purposely break something just to keep things more proprietary. e.g. every new version of iPod firmware seems to be designed to break other peoples attempts at using their product not in the "vision" of Apple. iTunes is similar, only every major update seems to cause my iTunes to stop working properly. My new rule is to wait two updates minimum before updating.
These are kind of trite examples. The major one is Windows. Now there's an important piece of software that they force you to re-buy every couple years whether you like it or not. My latest excursion, I got a laptop last year that had ONLY Vista as an option. Of course a month after I got it the backlash forced Dell to offer an XP version. I stuck with Vista though because I didn't want to buy another copy of XP and also I'm lazy. I admit that it has some added niceties, mostly trivial in my opinion, but DEAR LORD IS IT ANNOYING. It has never stopped pestering me for something or other whenever I boot. I'm always getting these damned bubbles popping up in the corner, especially annoying when I'm playing WoW. Every major piece of software wants to put crap in my taskbar and wants to poll for updates and yadda yadda. Windows of course is the second worse offender (first being McAfee), especially with its constant "are you sure", "do you want to allow this", etc. It drives me nuts. The real issue here though is stuff just doesn't work cleanly in it that worked fine on my XP box. Even stuff that's certified for Vista in some way encounters problems.
As if that wasn't bad enough, along comes SP1. After some pestering, I allowed the update. And wouldn't you know, iTunes won't run. I was getting a "iTunes has stopped working" message before even the window popped up. Dangit, I wanted to swap in some stuff onto my nano NOW. I spend a couple hours scouring the interwebs for some solution and even tried the ol' uninstall and reinstall. The searches were kind of scary with all the notes on how iTunes and Vista were problematic from the get-go; I felt lucky that I got it to work at all. It took me a while to get the right incantation of the Google search to get me to this link which at least one solid and tangible solution to try. I downloaded the noted patches but turns out I didn't need them. For the benefit of the search engines: the trick that worked was Control_Panel -> Programs_and_Features -> Quicktime -> Repair. It runs now and thankfully even though I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, my library info remained intact. A miracle I know. Sigh, I really wish I didn't HAVE to use iTunes... but it's the only iPod compatible program I'm aware of that supports the "resume playback where you left off" (or "save played position") feature that I need for audiobooks and podcasts. That's the critical deal-breaking feature.
Backing up to the upgrade subject, I do not sport this upgrade fear on Linux. Maybe it's because nearly everything I use on Linux is below version 3 with a non-trivial chunk of it below version 1. This basically means that most of it can still be a bit unpolished and upgrades are welcome. But there's also this sense that when it comes to open-source software, it really feels like the upgrades are needed somehow. Most updates really are bug fixes and often times optimizations. When new features are added, it's as if by committee it was decided that the new feature really was a good idea. Another related reason might be the tendency that when some piece of software gets old -- like versioning past 3 to 4 but often much sooner -- that by then something else similar but cooler comes out and people move to that even when it's in alpha. Yes, upgrading and changing and tweaking seem natural in the Linux world, but it works because you don't have to pay for each update and it's often not even required. Sigh... it always feels like I'm just on the cusp of going completely Linux, but for the durned expectation that everyone uses Windows and may only make drivers and software compatible with Linux as an afterthought, maybe.
Off the top of my head the first program that I purposefully abandoned upgrading (versus just didn't need to use anymore) was PaintShopPro, from back in the early 90s. It was freeware or shareware then. It was small, fast, and useful. Then at some point the upgrade was no longer free to get. It became around $30 and later $100. I kept the old free version around for many years and refused many upgrades. Eventually I abandoned it for other things, but I still remember liking it a lot. A copy may be lying around on a disk somewhere.
Another example is MusicMatch. It was one of the first decent mp3 ripper-players around. I was fond of it not as much because of its real quality (it was good but kind of clumsy in some ways), but rather because the owners did something absolutely right: free lifetime upgrades. Now that policy deserved my money. I despise being forced to buy essentially the same software over and over again every year or two. For every software purchase, there should be at least 2 free major upgrades or like 4 years of upgrades included. But lifetime? that was awesome. Then Yahoo bought it, but I remained pleased because at least they still honored the lifetime upgrade. I saw an end to that coming when they changed the name to Yahoo Jukebox. Eventually it was unrecognizable as MusicMatch. And eventually, I stopped installing it and even stopped using the old version. Why? because I upgraded once too often and it kept pestering me to upgrade, and then gave me a stern warning that my version's days were numbered due to an interface change (basically a forced connection with Yahoo Music that I didn't want). Oh well.
Apple software gets my goat because I'm convinced they purposely break something just to keep things more proprietary. e.g. every new version of iPod firmware seems to be designed to break other peoples attempts at using their product not in the "vision" of Apple. iTunes is similar, only every major update seems to cause my iTunes to stop working properly. My new rule is to wait two updates minimum before updating.
These are kind of trite examples. The major one is Windows. Now there's an important piece of software that they force you to re-buy every couple years whether you like it or not. My latest excursion, I got a laptop last year that had ONLY Vista as an option. Of course a month after I got it the backlash forced Dell to offer an XP version. I stuck with Vista though because I didn't want to buy another copy of XP and also I'm lazy. I admit that it has some added niceties, mostly trivial in my opinion, but DEAR LORD IS IT ANNOYING. It has never stopped pestering me for something or other whenever I boot. I'm always getting these damned bubbles popping up in the corner, especially annoying when I'm playing WoW. Every major piece of software wants to put crap in my taskbar and wants to poll for updates and yadda yadda. Windows of course is the second worse offender (first being McAfee), especially with its constant "are you sure", "do you want to allow this", etc. It drives me nuts. The real issue here though is stuff just doesn't work cleanly in it that worked fine on my XP box. Even stuff that's certified for Vista in some way encounters problems.
As if that wasn't bad enough, along comes SP1. After some pestering, I allowed the update. And wouldn't you know, iTunes won't run. I was getting a "iTunes has stopped working" message before even the window popped up. Dangit, I wanted to swap in some stuff onto my nano NOW. I spend a couple hours scouring the interwebs for some solution and even tried the ol' uninstall and reinstall. The searches were kind of scary with all the notes on how iTunes and Vista were problematic from the get-go; I felt lucky that I got it to work at all. It took me a while to get the right incantation of the Google search to get me to this link which at least one solid and tangible solution to try. I downloaded the noted patches but turns out I didn't need them. For the benefit of the search engines: the trick that worked was Control_Panel -> Programs_and_Features -> Quicktime -> Repair. It runs now and thankfully even though I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, my library info remained intact. A miracle I know. Sigh, I really wish I didn't HAVE to use iTunes... but it's the only iPod compatible program I'm aware of that supports the "resume playback where you left off" (or "save played position") feature that I need for audiobooks and podcasts. That's the critical deal-breaking feature.
Backing up to the upgrade subject, I do not sport this upgrade fear on Linux. Maybe it's because nearly everything I use on Linux is below version 3 with a non-trivial chunk of it below version 1. This basically means that most of it can still be a bit unpolished and upgrades are welcome. But there's also this sense that when it comes to open-source software, it really feels like the upgrades are needed somehow. Most updates really are bug fixes and often times optimizations. When new features are added, it's as if by committee it was decided that the new feature really was a good idea. Another related reason might be the tendency that when some piece of software gets old -- like versioning past 3 to 4 but often much sooner -- that by then something else similar but cooler comes out and people move to that even when it's in alpha. Yes, upgrading and changing and tweaking seem natural in the Linux world, but it works because you don't have to pay for each update and it's often not even required. Sigh... it always feels like I'm just on the cusp of going completely Linux, but for the durned expectation that everyone uses Windows and may only make drivers and software compatible with Linux as an afterthought, maybe.
2008-02-11
Love Ruby, Hate Rails?
Fairly recently I read a post (and listened to a podcast) decrying the Ruby on Rails community. A couple weeks ago I was talking to th dev crew of a company a buddy works at, and they seemed to wince when I mentioned that I do nearly all of my scripting now in Ruby. It became obvious quickly that it was because they had some bad experience with Rails. They obviously, as I've learned many people do, think that Ruby is synonymous with Rails and I find that unfortunate. I don't think my point came across that I use Ruby the scripting language, not Rails the framework. I've played with Rails but not enough to truly hate it. I remember liking it actually but then again I'm not a web developer and don't know what to complain about. I have little doubts that Zed is correct in his criticisms of Rails itself, not to mention the Rails community.
Still, I'm a little disheartened that that by all accounts the fate of Ruby is tied to Rails. Rails certainly did put Ruby on the radar (similarly to how Lua seems popular because of WoW) and that is a good thing, but the backlash could make it a bad thing. My only hope is that all that is wrong with Rails gets fixed in time. Well, I care less about Rails since I don't use it; I'm more concerned with the thriving of Ruby which has its own problems that I hope get fixed. I'd be sad if I were really forced to fully go back to Python or Perl.
Still, I'm a little disheartened that that by all accounts the fate of Ruby is tied to Rails. Rails certainly did put Ruby on the radar (similarly to how Lua seems popular because of WoW) and that is a good thing, but the backlash could make it a bad thing. My only hope is that all that is wrong with Rails gets fixed in time. Well, I care less about Rails since I don't use it; I'm more concerned with the thriving of Ruby which has its own problems that I hope get fixed. I'd be sad if I were really forced to fully go back to Python or Perl.
Time decimation
Alas, it has been over a year since my single post just over a year ago.
As it turns out, last year was just a mess overall and since no-one reads this it doesn't matter anyways. When I re-read my last post, on quitting WoW I had to laugh because a couple months ago I let some coworkers talk me into playing again. I'm doomed.
So I start up on yet another server from scratch but with some starting funds and get busy trying to catch up to my coworkers (still a long way to go). Just this weekend for no good reason I logged onto some of my previous servers noting that I still had characters from a year ago there. As I inspected them I realize that I didn't really know what I was doing back then. I hadn't even used any talent points. Well things tend to make more sense the second time around. Again for no good reason, I spent a little time cleaning some of those chars up knowing that they probably won't get much play time.
Ah well, enough of that. Let's see how long this lasts.
As it turns out, last year was just a mess overall and since no-one reads this it doesn't matter anyways. When I re-read my last post, on quitting WoW I had to laugh because a couple months ago I let some coworkers talk me into playing again. I'm doomed.
So I start up on yet another server from scratch but with some starting funds and get busy trying to catch up to my coworkers (still a long way to go). Just this weekend for no good reason I logged onto some of my previous servers noting that I still had characters from a year ago there. As I inspected them I realize that I didn't really know what I was doing back then. I hadn't even used any talent points. Well things tend to make more sense the second time around. Again for no good reason, I spent a little time cleaning some of those chars up knowing that they probably won't get much play time.
Ah well, enough of that. Let's see how long this lasts.
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