Some Brisbane Guy

I don’t know what the situation is like in turbo-consumer USA, but here in Australia lots of people, especially old-school IT people and smaller businesses, still like to build their own PCs from commodity parts when they need a new desktop or server box. That’s all fine and good fun when you’re building a box for home, because spending the extra time building the PC is part of the fun. But I really think that for business, it’s kind of dumb.

The experiences I’ve had with name-brand pre-built PCs have been excellent. I’ve had an old Toshiba laptop with a broken screen (from being walked on), it just kept working with a monitor hooked up. I’ve still got a Dell server that’s a fair few years old now and it just chugs along at the ISP, without so much as a hiccup since it was put there. At work we have a HP server that was $1600 including Windows Small Business Server 2003, that thing is great as well, it hasn’t missed a beat.

I’ve also worked in places where they tried to skimp out and use commodity hardware. It just doesn’t work, and the people who have to use the gear get jaded and cynical. At one place I worked they had a tennis ball and cricket bat for when the network/server went down! Great stuff. The business was paying top dollar to their IT company for this sub-standard commodity equipment, might I add, and I would assume that they still are to this day.

Despite Dell having a few problems, I really think buying from Dell, HP or IBM (or ASUS) is the smart choice. How could you really think that building a one-off PC from a mish-mash of parts is going to be as reliable and well-sorted as a name-brand manufacturer’s? What is the chance that your one-off will be better than the thousands of machines all exactly the same, with who knows how many hours of research and development time to iron out any glaring problems, and then field testing by anyone who’s bought the same product before you? I’d say the chance is pretty small.

You don’t even save that much money anyway. Dell and IBM, for example, now have servers, desktops and notebooks under $1000. Especially for a business, even if the cost is a few hundred dollars more for an equivalent machine, I think that money is easily going to be spent later on in repairs, consulting (if you need a consultant to help you fix, say, data corruption caused by your dodgy hardware), lost business revenue or productivity because of the downtime, or new parts. Not to mention the stress placed on you and the possibility of decreased morale and cynicism because of having to work with substandard gear.

So next time you’re thinking about building your own machine, unless you have really special needs I’d seriously consider saving yourself the trouble and buying a pre-built box. It really is worth it, in my opinion.

Fading curtains be damned, let’s save the daylight! The cows won’t know what’s hit ‘em and we’ll crash our cars but hell, let’s throw caution to the wind and git ourselves some extra sunshine lovin’ in the evenin’ time. All you have to do is sign the Queensland Parliament petition. It’s not one of those dodgy online petitions that some bogan mother of five from an outer south-western suburb started — well, maybe it is, but it’s on the official Queensland Parliament website.

Premier Beattie said in March that he won’t budge because it’s important that our time is closer to that of our Asian neighbours. I say phooey to that, what about our (arguably less distant) neighbours in Murwillimbah and even as far afield as Sydney and Melbourne?

My signature’s there, I am daylight savings fan Number One. There’s no point wasting the sunshine on those crazy hours before 7am, nothing interesting to see here, people, climb back into bed and snuggle up to whoever it is you paid good money for because mornin’s are fo’ sleepin’. Let’s save the daylight and enforce compulsory beers and barbeque at my place every afternoon. You’re shouting, unless you’re pretty.

Google has released a web-based RSS reader and aggregator that is pretty nice. You can read all posts from all the feeds you subscribe to in a chronological order, or you can just read from a specific feed. It has lots of AJAX and a pretty smooth interface with shortcut keys that really speed up using it, although some people say it’s too slow. But I don’t read 1000 feeds. My issue with it is that it’s web-based, and while I’m employed building web software and I love the web as a universal platform, I still have to go to the website when I want to read my feeds, they’re not delivered to my desktop like in my email client. To state the obvious though, the cool thing about being web-based is that your customised feed list is available from any computer, even down to which posts you have read. That’s tidy work, and Daniel is gonna love it.

Here’s a couple of screenshots:

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird until now to read RSS, which works OK for me; it doesn’t aggregate all feeds and adding new feeds is a touch clunky. But adding feeds in Google Reader is kinda clunky, too.

Which nicely delivers us to Reader’s ability to import an OPML file containing a list of feeds so that you don’t have to edit your feeds manually. As I said, I was using Thunderbird to read RSS before this, which stores your feed list in an RDF file. Luckily, Kevin Hemenway has created a Perl CGI script that converts Thunderbird’s RDF file into OPML. All you have to do is provide a URL pointing to your RDF file, which you can find in your Thunderbird profile, somewhere like:
C:\Documents and Settings\glenn\My Documents\Thunderbird\default.oto\Mail\News & Blogs, and it’s called feeds.rdf.

You’ll need to upload your RDF file somewhere, so you’re going to need some free web hosting or something.

Then, visit http://www.disobey.com/detergent/code/tb_opml_service.cgi?url=
and tack your RDF file’s URL on the end of that location string.

Thanks to Kevin Hemenway for this little script, it’s great and saved me some time…that I have now used writing this blog entry.

Last week I finally actually bought some speakers for my computer/TV/anything with a headphone jack. I’ve had intentions of buying speakers for about two years now but just never got around to buying some. I didn’t want expensive ones, I wanted to spend under $50, and I didn’t care about 5.1 or anything. I just wanted two nice speakers (not awesome, just nice) and a subwoofer that doesn’t vibrate or rattle and has decent bass.

Well I finally greedily purchased a decent low-cost set of speakers like a kid buying a family-size chocoate. I guess they’re not that new, they’re not flashy and other brands have similar products, but if you want cheap good-enough sound then these guys could be for you. They’re the Creative Inspire SBS370 2.1 Speaker Set…and I got black because as if you wouldn’t. These ones have a nice remote (not wireless) volume and on/off switch, which is nice because it means I don’t have to move my hand too far from my box of doughnuts to change the volume.

I bought mine from Queensland Computer Group at Woolloongabba.

Well I haven’t seen too many spiders at our house since February, but the weather’s been getting warmer so I have been keeping my window open. Which is obviously a big mistake, since it’s so close to the ground and there’s leafy ground cover all over the place outside. Spider territory.

First I saw this little guy crawling up the wall. I am hoping he’s the same one that was in my clothes drawer last week, and there’s not another massive spider lying in wait for me somewhere in my room. So I got up to crush the little fella and close my window, when I move a pillow or two and there’s that massive beast in the pic above right there! I crapped my pants and got the broom.

So, as you can see I tasted victory.

In case you’re wondering, yes this violence was necessary, otherwise there’s no way I’d be sleeping tonight, with the possibility of being swallowed whole by a giant arachnid.

No animals were harmed in the making of this post. Only spiders, whose terrifying appearance and threat of painful (but not too toxic, in the case of the huntsman) bites justify their ruthless slaughter.

I use VBScript all the time unfortunately. It’s pretty handy, and it’s easy for beginners to get into. But it’s getting old and is really slow for doing web stuff, and really isn’t as flexible as C-style languages (like JScript and the newer C# and stuff). I can forgive it things like ReDim for arrays (and insanely copying the entire array just to add elements onto the end of it…but I guess you need to allocate memory somehow), but what I just don’t get is this:

Function tmp(blah)
Response.Write(blah)
Response.Write blah
tmp = blah
End Function

Response.Write(tmp("blah"))
tmp "blah again"
If tmp("blah")="blah" Then Response.Write tmp("blah")
tmp("blah again")


The statement that will cause an error in that whole block is the last line! Don’t even think about putting brackets around a Function() or Sub() call if it’s not a built-in one like Response.Write()…UNLESS it’s part of another statement like a Response.Write or If…Then.

I just don’t get why they would do this.

I’ve got an old Toshiba Portege 3110. Unfortunately the screen got broken, so now it’s a 40×25 display in text mode, or 400×600 in graphics mode. But I couldn’t help thinking that it would be a nice quiet, compact, low-power headless server at the least, and I haven’t seen GNOME or KDE for a while so I wanted to see what they’re like these days so maybe it would even do that with its colossal 128MB of RAM.

The little Toshiba has never had a CD-ROM, which does suck; but hey it’s the 90s right? Who needs physical media when you have the network? I’ve got a 12Mbit ADSL connection (hah, </brag>) and plenty of other machines so I should be able to get some Linux distro on there pretty easy you would think. Well, no.

You used to be able to boot a couple of floppy disks and install Redhat 9 via FTP, NFS or HTTP, which I did a few times. Other distros aren’t as easy to install this way, but some do it. I wanted to try Ubuntu, but couldn’t figure out how to install it that way so I went back to Fedora Core 4, thinking it would be similar to ye olde Redhatte. It is, but you need FIVE floppy disks. My floppy disk collection is dwindling and writing floppy images is pretty hit-and-miss not to mention slow, so I didn’t want to do that.

To cut a VERY long story quite short, I ended up downloading a cool distribution that boots off a USB device, like one of those keychains or, as in my case, an SD card. It’s called RUNT Linux . The old Toshiba of course doesn’t boot directly off USB, so I had to use the floppy image that comes with RUNT to bootstrap it. RUNT then detects the first USB device and boots off it, and you get network and all the goodness that 100MB+ of command-line Linux provides — including games! Bomb, but I only needed fdisk, ftp or wget, and lilo.

Next step is to somehow (FTP, wget) the FC4 ISO image(s) onto the hard disk of the laptop, which wasn’t too hard with RUNT. I tried with some other floppy distributions (um tomsrtbt and SYSLINUX I think) and this was a real hassle because of their sparseness of utilities available, but it was possible. So if you have a USB device and a port to stick it in, use RUNT. I was copying all four images onto the laptop, and the first time I did this I had a big partition the entire size of the disk. Of course Disk Druid (the disk partitioner in FC4 setup) wouldn’t let me install on the partition with the images, and I had no more space for another partition. fdisk time!

Next time I made a smaller partition leaving enough space for an installation besides, I think the partition for the ISOs was 2.5GB or so. But, in hindsight, this is dumb because all you need is the 6.5MB or so ISO (called boot.iso) that is provided to get the installation started, then you can do a network install over FTP or HTTP. So you really only need a tiny partition for the installation boot ISO, not 2.5GB. Although to run lilo, it’s easiest to copy the entire RUNT distro onto your hard disk so you don’t need to worry about any conflicts. So some commands to do this would be something like:

#mount the partition you created with fdisk that is about 300MB in size, to be safe
$ mount -t ext2 /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2
$ cp -r /etc /mnt/hda2
$ cp -r /dev /mnt/hda2
$ cp -r /bin /mnt/hda2
$ cp -r /sbin /mnt/hda2
$ cd /mnt/hda2

$ wget ftp://anothercomputer/somepath/boot.iso

This gets you a near-enough copy of the RUNT distro, so you can run lilo and boot that little ISO that you downloaded from a public FTP site or another computer of yours.

Oh, I almost forgot! You need to mount the ISO and get the stuff out of /boot and copy it locally, so that lilo has a kernel to boot. I think. Just do this anyway:

$ mkdir /mnt/fc4
$ mount -t iso9660 /mnt/hda2/boot.iso /mnt/fc4 -o loop

Now you can access the ISO’s filesystem as normal, and copy the /boot directory onto your hard disk’s /boot directory:

$ mkdir /mnt/hda2/boot
$ cp /mnt/fc4/boot/* /mnt/hda2/boot/

The next step is a bit tricky, you have to get lilo loaded onto the master boot record (MBR) of your hard drive. lilo is rad because it can boot directly from an ISO image! How cool. So you need to run lilo in a chroot jail so that it knows what hard disk it’s gotta setup, and you do that like this:

$ lilo -C /etc/lilo.hda.conf -m /boot/map -v -r /mnt/hda2

Oh, I’m pointing lilo to a configuration file that tells it to boot the ISO. You have to put this in /mnt/hda2/etc since you’re chrooting lilo to /mnt/hda2, so it thinks /mnt/hda2/etc is just /etc. This is what it contains:

lba32 # Allow booting past 1024th cylinder with a recent BIOS
boot = /dev/hda
disk = /dev/hda
bios = 0x80
prompt
timeout = 1200

image = /boot/vmlinuz
initrd = /boot/initrd.img
root = /dev/hda2
label = fc4_install
read-write


You also need to write lilo to the MBR. Do this with:
$ lilo -M /dev/hda -C /etc/lilo.hda.conf -v -r /mnt/hda2

So now, you should be ready to reboot, and hopefully Fedora’s installation screen will come up when your computer boots. If it doesn’t, you’ve done something wrong — my instructions are just a rough guide, I’m writing this from memory! Read the man pages and use Google like there’s no tomorrow.

By the way, if you don’t have an FTP server to serve up your ISOs and RPM files, and you’re running Windows chuck SlimFTPD on another machine on your network, and do an FTP install. Microsoft’s FTP server (part of IIS on WinXP etc) gets all confused because FC4’s FTP client mungs the URLs a little bit. If you have another Linux box I’m sure you will have no problems.

Well this was going to be a 5-minute post just so I remember that lilo chroot command, so I bloody hope this helps somebody