Bring It On

I kept this blog running on the .Text 0.95 for far too long. I needed to patch the thing couple of times myself and to add a thing or two (CAPTCHA) just to keep it running. Plus, it was the only ASP.NET 1.1 application on the machine so it had to go

For a long time I contemplated about switching to the Community Server. It’s a commercial product but at the same time Open Source and free as in beer. Since I like to customize my blog engine with a bit of code it is important to have source. It’s also important that the engine can import my existing .Text database.

While an importer exists for older versions of Community Server (CS) , there is another problem – I need just the blog engine, not the forum, file and picture gallery and whatnot. CS is big and complicated, I need something simpler.

I’ve had Subtext on my radar for quite some time. It stagnated a bit a after it was announced but really picked up the pace from the middle of 2006. It’s a direct descendant of the .Text codebase and can import your database in a couple of seconds. At least for me, the upgrade was flawless.

If you’re thinking about upgrading, my advice is just go for it. You’ll get actively maintained product that you can submit patches to. There are several nice skins and building a new one shouldn’t be much harder than it was for the .Text.

(Edit) Things are not as smooth as I expected. Posting from BlogJet has been slightly problematic. I’m not sure if I should stick with the .Text as the type of my blog or should I move to the MetaWeblog API. I can’t get categories for my previous nor set the category for this post. The categories are imported correctly though, including all of the old posts’ categories.

Internet has come a long way since the end of the 20^th century. Large percentage of developed world countries’ population has broadband and the Web site content producers seem to count on that.

Here’s an example: while on a short vacation in Serbia this February I was forced to connect to the Internet through a 56Kb dial-up connection. As I browsed the Internet, I ran into many interesting things that were too much for the dial-up to handle like software downloads, videos and whatnot. So I just locked the tabs in Firefox and left them for later.

One day I had to restart the browser for some reason. At the time, I had about 30 tabs open, “saved” for later. When I re-opened the browser, I had to wait 30 minutes(!) until all the pages loaded – it was about 11–14MB of content. An average page, text and graphics (no videos) was about 300KB. Not dial-up friendly!

Still, this was a bit extreme, opening 30 tabs all at once. But think about Windows updates for a moment. Between now and Windows XP Service Pack 2 (which is what most of the new machines had installed up to recently) Microsoft has issued over 60 updates. Updating the machine over the Internet is a major PITA in this case. It would be nice if someone with a fast connection could download all the updates, burn them to a CD/DVD and give to a poor soul still on a dial-up.

Microsoft does issue ISO images of the security patches, but on a monthly basis and for several OSes at once (Windows 2000, 2003 Server, XP) and for many languages. If you just want an ISO image of all the patches and an easy way to install them, I recommend Offline-Update. The link is to English version of an article describing the utility (hosted in Germany, done by a guy from the University of Kiel), the download is on the page 4.

Before you start downloading, it would be good to check if the target machine needs the updates in the first place. At least this is easy and supported by Microsoft – all you need is Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. The picture to the left shows the scan results of my system. I’m on broadband, so naturally I’m always up-to-date, but if I weren’t, the missing patches would show up at the top of the result list.

Overclocking the car? Am I insane? Well, some people think I am, but that’s not the point

If you’re one of those that assemble their own computers – either because you’re control freak like me, or because you want to get the best features for your money – you know that often the best price/performance ratio is achieved through overclocking.

Usually this means raising the speed of the FSB and letting the CPU follow. This doesn’t work just like that – you need to raise the voltage to the CPU, often to memory too and sometimes even to the bus itself.

If you don’t raise the voltage all kinds of weird effects crashes will ensue. In my case, my mistake was that I did not stress test my new machine after overclocking. On top of that, I added another 2 sticks of 1GB memory modules and for some reason this wouldn’t work without raising the voltage even though the memory wasn’t overclocked.

After raising the voltage, everything worked (and still works) just fine.

And this has to do with the car how? Turns out my car’s (Peugeot 206, nice equipment but nothing too fancy) board computer was showing symptoms of craziness. It wouldn’t crash like a regular computer would, but on a cold start, it would report various (different) problems each time. If I restarted once or twice, everything was fine.

I should have noticed that this started approximately at the same time the car had slight difficulties to start when cold.

The problem was banal – the battery did not provide enough voltage to the car, including the board computer. When the battery was replaced everything was back to normal. Damn, today even the car needs to get enough voltage to work properly.

Clearly, we have finally reached the limit of the 32–bit processor architecture. 32–bit processors can address exactly 4GB of memory, in an ideal world. The problem is not that your average app will require a lot of memory, but that the total of all your applications will require more than 2–3GB. In reality, some of the address space is reserved (but not used!) for I/O, so you can’t have the full 4GB. The net result is that you can use roughly 3GB of memory on 32–bit Windows XP. If PAE (Process Address Extensions) is not enabled, you are further limited to 2GB per process (this is a Windows imposed limitation). It looks like PAE is enabled automatically on Windows XP SP2 when you have 2GB of RAM or more, at least on my machine.

Modern PC with Vista, everybody seems to agree, will work well with 2GB of RAM. If you want to run a VM or two, you should probably install 4GB (or more, if your motherboard supports it). The same limit of about 3GB usable applies to 32–bit Vista too, which leads us to the only reasonable choice: 64–bit Vista.

Several years ago when AMD built the first desktop 64–bit processor I was really excited about the transition to 64–bit. Some of the business apps I had the chance to work with even required 64–bit machine, mainly because of huge memory requirements. But the transition was slow and especially 64–bit Windows XP did not spread as fast as I expected.

What prevents new operating systems from spreading fast is the driver support. Things are even worse with 64–bit OS-es because they require separate drivers. Microsoft has even stricter requirements for 64–bit Vista: all drivers must be signed. Good thing with Vista is that Microsoft requires from driver manufacturers to certify both 32–bit and 64–bit versions of the driver to get the “Vista ready” logo. Indeed, it took a couple of months (ignore the launch date of 31^st of January, Vista was done in November 2006) but there are Vista certified 64–bit drivers for all of the devices on my mainboard. Good thing is that I don’t have scanners, printers or other esoteric peripherals to worry about. If you do and you’d like to run 64–bit Vista, make sure there is a driver for your device first.

As soon as VMWare 6 goes out of beta, I’ll move my current installation of Windows XP into a VM, install 64–bit Vista and enjoy 64–bit goodness. It is amazing how technology allows scenarios previously unheard of – with the VMWare Converter, I am moving my complete setup, 32–bit Windows XP SP2 with all the drivers and apps installed, into a virtual machine that will continue working even after I wipe out the drive and install a completely new OS.

I used to be a hard-core hardware enthusiast. I was reading hardware oriented sites daily and always on the edge of technology, updating my home machine all the time. It is worth mentioning that I was still a PC gamer then and that a lot of the upgrades were triggered by the advances in the graphics cards technology.

But then I tried console gaming and got myself an Xbox. Finally realized that the PC gaming is nice, but expensive and that if I did not need to play games, my machine could survive several years before the next upgrade cycle.

Still, 5 years is a lot of time for a computer, so this winter I decided to build a new desktop/server/multimedia machine. Timing was good as the choice of the processor and the chipset became trivial (IMHO). Here’s what I picked:

• ASUS P5B-E, because it overclocks well, but almost any Intel P965 chipset based mobo should work good enough
• Scythe Ninja (rev.B) cooler to help with the temperature because of the overclocking, this is a big and quiet cooler that can even be run in a fan-less mode
• Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 (1.86GHz), deliberately picked the slowest and the cheapest model because they overclock like crazy
• G.Skill DDR2–800 (or PC-6400) memory, got this brand because they were the cheapest one having a decent (4–4–4–12) performance, at first I got 2GB, but then prices dropped so now I have 4GB (should be useful when running several virtual machines)
• NVidia 7600GS based graphics card with 256MB of memory, this is more or less recommended minimal configuration for running Windows Vista (128MB of memory and older cards will work as long as they support shader model 2.0)
• Western Digital Raptor 36GB 10K rpm as a primary (OS) drive and Western Digital 320GB (KS model) as a secondary drive; 10K rpm vs more common 7200 rpm is visible, but the price is such that for the data drive you’re better off with something cheaper with a lot of capacity
• Quiet case (with noise dumping material) with a quiet power supply – I chose Antec Solo because it looks good and is not too big, has only one 12cm ventilator with a very slow rotational speed (and noise) and Antec NeoHE 430 because of its high efficiency, very low noise and modular cabling – you only use the cables you need reducing the clutter in the case
• Samsung 205BW monitor to replace my CRT – yes, I had CRT monitor up until recently – this Samsung is probably the best wide screen LCD with a 1600x1050 resolution that you can buy for under 300€

Everything worked from the first try. I was able to overclock the machine to 2.8GHz (!) via a single FSB increase to 400MHz which made the bus synchronous with the memory speed. It is plenty fast, looks good and is very quiet.

I am having trouble with the mastervac which is a pump that assist breaking in my Peugeot 206. When the pump does not function correctly, it takes more force to break. The problem is easily detected – you can hear a hissing sound coming from the general direction of the break pedal – it’s the air escaping when it shouldn’t.

So I took an appointment with local Peugeot service which was supposed to take place today early in the morning at 8:15. They did not have the part in stock when I called last week but they ordered it immediately. However it’s a holiday season now and everything takes a lot longer than usual…

The cool thing is that around 7:30 (?!?) this morning, I got an SMS from Peugeot service notifying me that the part is not available yet and that they’ll let me know as soon as they have it.

This is one of the few rare cases when I did not mind getting unsolicited SMS from someone

I finally got to upgrading the beta 2 of Windows Vista to RC1 last weekend. I did expect it to be better and based on many blog posts I also expected it to be quite faster.

But I did not expect the speed improvement I found. You have to see it to believe it. Occasionally it feels significantly faster than my current Windows XP Pro!

Besides from that, I have noticed improved networking in general – beta 2 worked fine with my wireless card, except when it didn’t  but RC1 just works. Boot times are still not as good as with XP but once Vista loads it flies.

Finally, a big disappointment – the processor throttling (aka SpeedStep on older Intel mobile processors) is still not working on my Intel Pentium-M (Dothan, 2 years old now). For an RC1, this is inexcusable.

Oh, yeah – the Flip3D (3D ALT-TAB replacement that stacks windows of open apps in 3D) looks significantly better, probably due to better anti-aliasing algorithm.

I have not had any crashes and all of my hardware works fine, but it was fine with beta 2 as well.

All in all, a must-have upgrade for beta 2 users. For others… well, if you’re not developing software for Vista, I see no reason to rush and install this.

I should have known that speaking about Vienna so many times to my wife will eventually lead to us having a short vacation there.

Last month my wife finally found a decent flight from Nice to Vienna (direct flights were unreasonably expensive before). We spent wonderful 5 days there, the weather was still good (middle September) and we saw a lot of places some of which were new to me.

The picture on the right is from Schonbrun Palace, luxurious “summer house” for the Habsburg rulers. It’s even more impressive when you see it live.

Vienna is full of places like this. There’s enough to keep you “busy” for days, just by walking in the center of the city. Castles, museums, expositions… many of them are hundreds of years old. We spent almost an hour just going through the silver collection of the royal family!

Highly recommended as a tourist destination.

I was under impression that once created a virtual hard drive for VMWare (Workstation) cannot be resized. Not quite.

What you can’t do is resize a hard drive of an VM which is a base for clones without getting rid of all clones and snapshots first. Then just run this command (extending the drive to 16GB, replace myDisk with the name of your disk and 16 with the number of GB you need)

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 16Gb myDisk.vmdk

It’s not finished yet. The problem is that the partitions on the virtual drive are still the same as they were. What you most likely want to do is to resize the partition(s) to match the disk size. If you’re on Windows XP, this might be tricky – the built-in disk manager will not allow you to do this from a GUI.

Fortunately, there is a very elegant solution that’s very easy to use that I mentioned before – GParted. Download the CD image, burn to CD, boot the VM from it and resize the partition.

Note to self: next time create a VM with a large disk size – it expands anyway and only consumes as much real disk space as necessary.

The story continues from where we left off last time. Ubuntu 6.06 just came out and I decided to try it outside of the VM (I used VMWare exclusively for my Linux experiments before). Being brand new I hoped that most if not all of the devices in my laptop (now 2 years old) will be recognized. I also knew that the boot loader should be smart enough to recognize previous MBR and not kill it but offer it to me as another item in the boot menu.

The installation was generally smooth, not counting the fact that I was unable to use the “normal” install disk (desktop Ubuntu) but had to go for “alternative” install disk. For some reason, the desktop install (that also duals as a live CD) would not boot and would get stuck at the “mounting file system” phase. Alternative install disk only offers non-graphical UI, but that’s fine. There were more questions than XP and Vista combined asked me during the installation, but that is to be expected.

The installation was, subjectively (did not measure) the longest, but not by much. The fastest to install was Vista, then XP and then Ubuntu, but the differences are not huge. Looking at the device manager (screenshot to the right), the OS has recognized all of my devices, including wireless adapter. All of my hard drives were recognized too (external USB is nicely marked with an overlay icon), including XP and Vista partitions (mounted as read-only), screenshot to the left. Then I noticed that Wi-Fi is not working and even worse – the wireless card is not enabled, is not up, and cannot be turned on.

And that’s where the agony began. I’ll save you the trouble of finding out what’s wrong with my setup – took me quite a while until I found several forum posts, blog posts and finally this wiki page that made me understand what’s going on. You see, the wireless chipset I have is Broadcom BCM4309, which is 802.11a/b/g compliant. There are no official drivers and none of the computer manufacturers officially supports Linux, so you can’t get drivers from anywhere.

Actually, I was not completely right - the driver seems to be included in Ubuntu 6.06, but what you are lacking is firmware. For legal reasons, the Ubuntu team can’t distribute it but you can “get it” yourself. My complaint is that, as a user, I should have been warned about this and not have to search for the answer on the Internet and look into the system log (yes, the missing firmware problem is actually reported in the system log).

So how do you get the firmware? Why, you “steel” it from another driver, for example, one of the latest Dell Windows drivers. Insane? You bet, but it works. But you do need to install firmware cutter tool (the package name is bcm43xx-fwcutter), the instructions are on the wiki page I linked to. There are also differences in where the extracted firmware should be put, but you can see the location in the system log.

This is not all. In order to get “normal” UI for discovering and connecting to wireless networks that use WPA (you are using WPA and not WEP, right?) you have to do even more tinkering. Turns out you have to disable the built-in wpasupplicant and install Gnome Network Manager applet (again, see the wiki page for info). During the process, there are least two configuration files that you need to edit, both on a place that requires administrative privileges. At last, after all that, I was able to connect. Because you need a password for the WPA, Ubuntu stores it in some kind of secure storage for which yet another password is needed, plus you get asked for it every time you log in to the system (screenshot to the right).

Once online, everything worked just fine. The system updated itself (even kernel was updated in a first batch of updates!) and still continues to do so (see screenshot on the right). I was even able to get on the MSN Messenger using Gaim (screenshot to the left). Quite cool. Not everything is nifty– the suspend/hibernate functions do not seem to be working at all. The system does not react properly on closing the lid while manually hibernating the machine caused it to lock up in text mode. Both Vista and XP work just fine, except that Vista forgets the desktop resolution when waking up from the standby.

All in all, it was roughly as bad/good as I expected. Some amount of tinkering was necessary, even though not as much would have been necessary if only Ubuntu folks managed to warn me that even though my wireless chipset is recognized, the firmware can’t be installed. Ah well, maybe in the next version

One more thing: the order of installation for these 3 OSes turned out to be just right. XP installed first, then Vista recognizing it offered it in the boot menu, then Ubuntu recognized XP and listed that in the menu, but the loader is actually Vista’s and offers the two choices I just mentioned. So, to boot XP I have to wait for Ubuntu’s GRUB, then choose Windows XP, then I get Vista’s loader and choose “Earlier version of Windows”. Slightly involved, but works just fine.