JerryKnight.com » Computer

Surprisingly Unsurprising.

Jerry — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:56:11 +0000

I have to say, I’m quite unimpressed with the announcements made at MacWorld by Apple. Perhaps Apple set the bar too high last year with the unexpected release of the iPhone, but I would have expected more from Apple in 2008.

iPhone Updates – New features include: location on maps, movable icons, and multi-recipient SMS. All of these features have been available using 3rd party software (requiring a relatively simple hack to unlock everything). They continue to (seemingly) ignore 802.1x authentication and Exchange syncing. I guess the only potential upside is that Apple acknowledged the upcoming iPhone SDK that will hopefully allow legitimate 3rd party applications. I don’t expect them to have simple, straightforward licensing, and they’re certainly not going to remove all their encryption and hardware protection and grant full access to the iPhone, so I don’t know how useful the SDK will ultimately be.

iTunes Movie Rentals – Yawn. There are much cheaper, although less snazzy, ways to rent movies.

AppleTV Updates – Don’t have AppleTV, but the updates seem to only allow movie rentals, so the yawn continues here.

Time Capsule – (a network-attached storage device for Time Machine backups) This adds the ability that should have been available at the release of Leopard. It looks proprietary (meaning I doubt other types of NAS will work), so current Airport Extreme owners are probably up a creek. For those lucky enough to not have an Airport Extreme station, this will double as both a NAS hard drive and a wireless base station (and print server) so it’s not all bad.

MacBook Air – It’s thin. It’s light. It has an LED-backlit screen. The battery will last a while (5 hours of wireless usage), and the trackpad is a little better. Everything beyond these features is a significant step backwards from even a MacBook. Slower processors, non-upgradeable 2GB memory, one (1!) USB port, no ethernet (optional USB attachment), no optical drive (optional USB attachment), no Firewire (optional USB.. wait, no). It costs more than a fully loaded MacBook, which is only 2 lbs. heavier and has a much faster processor, faster and bigger hard drive, marginally less battery life, etc. At the end of the day, the MacBook Air is still just an expensive, underpowered laptop. How much is it really worth to have a lighter laptop? (Although the added accessories to make it as usable will more than make up for the lower weight.) The only bright side to this thing is that it will prompt lots of technophiles to throw vast amounts of their money at Apple, which I hope will fund a real computing revolution.

Oh, and what about multi-touch? A multi-touch trackpad has actually been in the PowerBook/MacBook for a while, and the new one only allows a couple extra features that may or may not see much use. This is the smallest possible upgrade that Apple could have done while still being able to mention “multi-touch.” Wake me up when they release a multi-touch screen or a multi-touch keyboard interface. Given Apple’s yearly release cycle, it may be a while.

Now it’s up to Canon to release something impressive. Otherwise, I’ll have to suspect that for me, 2008 will be a technological lull.

Still Alive

Jerry — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:16:31 +0000

I’ve been off of IM for a few days and generally less available online. My home computer has had something of a mishap, and I’m not sure how the recovery is going to go. As far as I can tell, the CPU block of the water cooling system sprung a slow leak, and the drips of coolant (water + antifreeze) were causing random malfunctions and shutdowns. By the time I realized the problem, the leak had sped up, leaving a small puddle on the video card. The very technical term for this situation is “not good.”

I pulled all of the water cooling system out and let the system dry out for a couple days, and tonight I’ll put on the stock CPU fan and see if there was any permanent damage. Needless to say, if I go back to water cooling any time soon, it will be a high quality system (with sealed heat exchangers).

Update: Looks like no serious damage was caused by the coolant leak. (That reminds me of Star Trek for some reason.) I installed the stock cooling fans on the CPU and video card, and put a normal fan on the case where the radiator used to be. Dodged the bullet this time.

The System Is Down.

Jerry — Wed, 02 May 2007 06:28:42 +0000

Late tonight, a very annoying and blood-boiling shriek erupted from my computer. Although the noise was too loud to pinpoint, I had previously heard the sound and traced it to the water pump, but that time the sound stopped after a system restart and a handful of death threats.

This time, the sound didn’t stop, despite the death threats, and as I watched, the CPU temperature rocketed to 150° F before I got the system shut down. It turns out that the shriek comes from a flow sensor attached to the water pump. The pump is no longer pumping, so my main computer is dead until I either replace the water pump unit or the entire water cooling setup. Either is a royal pain, but replacing the pump (if it’s even possible to find one in Waco) is better than draining all the water lines and assembling a new kit. The only other alternative would be to replace the CPU heatsink with the stock fan unit. Talk about lame.. but it would be less lame than a system that can’t run for more than 30 seconds at a time. A pumpless water cooling system is little more than a naked CPU, which would last seconds before burning itself out.

Update: Once I fixed the water pump problem, the system wouldn’t boot up. I figured it was some kind of heat stress from the water pump ordeal, but I tried again this morning and it worked. I still don’t trust the hardware at all, so I’ll be shopping around for upgrades.

I hope this isn’t true.

Jerry — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 05:38:58 +0000

This article sounds too absurd to be true, but if it is, it makes me really appreciate my job.

Triumphant Return of Multi-Touch

Jerry — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 20:33:28 +0000

Anyone who has seen or heard about my crazy keyboard knows how fanatical I am about the technology. Imagine a touch-sensitive surface (or display) that can track more than one finger at a time and interpret their independent movements as gestures. This is multi-touch. My keyboard uses it over the entire keyboard surface, and it allows typing, mousing, scrolling, and other gesturing on the same surface. No reaching for a mouse. A while ago, the company (Fingerworks, Inc.) was bought by someone. Nobody knew exactly who bought them, but it smelled like Apple, the Fortress of Secrecy. (I had a few specific clues.) Everyone (who cared) was worried that Apple bought them to absorb them and keep them from competing, like some other west coast company.. I knew that if anyone was going to bring the multi-touch technology to the mainstream, it would be Apple. Apple just announced their iPhone (lawsuits possible from the holder of that copyrighted name, Cisco). The input for this phone is entirely multi-touch (with the exception of the one button on the front). They didn’t even change the name of the technology. I heard that Steve said that they own the patent to it, and they do, since they have obviously bought the company that started it and did a pretty good job developing it before being bought. Now if they would just come out with an input device similar to my keyboard, my mourning for the fate of Fingerworks would be completely healed.

MythTV box is dead!

Jerry — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 14:19:38 +0000

So, for the first time ever, I’ve encountered a catastrophic failure in the Linux file system. Apparently, something went wonky (technical term) in the root partition (where all the important system files are kept) and nothing can run, not even the venerable fsck, which would be the only way to repair whatever damage was done. (As a side note, it amuses me that the spell check built-in to Firefox 2 finds no problems with “wonky.” That just made my day. Edit: That’s because it’s a real word.) So this means no TV until I rip the hard drive out of the MythTV computer and put it into my main computer to try to repair or rebuild the damaged file system. Doesn’t that sound like fun? I guess it’s good to go without TV for a while.

The Joy of X11 Configuration

Jerry — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:36:52 +0000

While still being worth it for obvious reasons, configuring X11 (X.org and XFree86 alike) has historically been a hair-pulling/head-banging task, though it is still lower than Apache 1.x on the HP/HB scale. Add to that the mysterious proprietary NVidia drivers. (I have no problem with the proprietary part, since it works, and it’s “free” with the NVidia card.) For my last X11 reconfig, probably over a year ago, I had to look up the ModeLine parameters (manually sets the resolution and refresh timings), but apparently X.org 6.8 has a wide range of built-in resolutions that it tries out. I probably could have even left out all of the options specifying the monitor resolution, since it may have magically found out the best resolution by asking the monitor. The only other glitch was the order of the two monitor outputs. I use the non-TwinView setup (can’t drag windows between monitors, but virtual desktops run independently), and when I swapped out the first monitor’s VGA cable for the new DVI-D cable, X11 swapped the monitor outputs. This caused the high-res monitor settings to go to the small monitor and the low-res settings to go to the big monitor. After a little HP/HB, I found an option that tells the NVidia driver which plug each display is supposed to use.

Section “Monitor”
… Option “ConnectedMonitor” “DFP-0″ # or CRT-0, CRT-1, etc. depending on what is hooked up
EndSection

I still use the small 15″ monitor, even though it’s quite dim and puny next to the 24″ monitor. I tried running MythTV on the 24″ and while the menus, etc. looked fantastic at 1920×1200, the video was fuzzy. (640×480 enlarged around 6x doesn’t look very good.) I may switch it back to the bigger monitor if I want to watch something from across the room (or across the street), but at my desk, my beloved 15″ Viewsonic does a good job. This leaves me with an extra 17″ widescreen LCD monitor (with TV/Video inputs). Unless I find a use for it, it could be available to go to a new home. Note: I realize that most people will only understand the “Posted in Computer” line below. Pretty much, the new monitor works great after a short, but valiant battle.

Early Christmas Present.

Jerry — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 05:53:31 +0000

Thanks Mom & Dad!!

New depths of laziness

Jerry — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 05:45:01 +0000

I was pondering the abilities of my new phone, and I realized I could make it a remote for a couple things on my computer – mainly, music and TV. Since I’m too lazy to fix my computer’s infrared receiver box (and then too cheap to buy a shareware remote control program for my phone), I wrote a couple web pages to do the switching from the webserver. It works great now, and since I can connect to the wireless network in my apartment, it should respond pretty fast. All this so I don’t have to sit at my computer or lug around the wireless keyboard to control music/TV. Call it an exercise in system control via PHP. However, in the process of writing these pages, I had to reconfigure sudo (non-linux-geeks: it’s a way to do admin-level stuff without having to enter the admin password; read this to get a better idea of what sudo does). In the process of letting the webserver run commands as me, I corrupted the sudo config. No problem – I’ll just log in directly to root (admin account) and fix it. This was when I realized the admin password wasn’t working right. I had just been using sudo to do all the admin stuff for a while, and now I had neither that nor the admin password. Techno-babble Warning. Normally, fixing this would be a long scary process of booting from a recovery linux CD and manually mounting the root partition and fixing the problem directly. This probably would have required admin access to create the recovery CD, and besides, I was tired of restarting my computer, especially since earlier this weekend I had to do a panic-restart after mounting an NFS share directly on top of the home partition. But, since I’ve had problems with my 64-bit processor and some programs, I had a separate 32-bit system (dchroot) running, and sudo still worked in that setup. The only problem was that the main config files weren’t accessible from inside the 32-bit system. In a flash of brilliance, I remounted the root partition from within the 32-bit subsystem, fixed the sudo config file, and unmounted the partition (not sure if double-mounting a partition can cause problems). Saved from a huge headache! Although I may have just inflicted one upon my non-geek friends reading this! Sorry, but I did put a big warning up there…

Water cooling works better with water!

Jerry — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 04:57:09 +0000

Around 6:15 this morning, I awoke to a beeping sound coming from my computer (downstairs… I’m a light sleeper.). It turns out that my video card temperature sensor tripped an alarm by rising to almost 150Ã‚Â° F. The main processor temperature was over 130Ã‚Â° and rising. I couldn’t figure out why everything was getting so hot, but then I noticed that there were huge bubbles in the water cooling lines, and they weren’t moving. I coaxed the bubbles through the lines, but the water pump kept putting out more bubbles. Water cooling doesn’t work very well using air. (Deep Thoughts, by Jerry Knight) The water reservoir was almost bone-dry, and the water pump couldn’t keep air from entering the lines. After adding distilled water to the reservoir, the temperatures quickly returned to normal: 92Ã‚Â° on the video card and 90Ã‚Â° on the main processor. I can only guess that the pump and reservoir are not perfectly sealed, and the water is evaporating and escaping. At least the temperature sensor thing beeps at me when it gets too hot. Moral of the story: Check your fluid levels – in your car and in your computer, if you happen to be a water-cooling nut like me.