Category Archives: Technology

Going Back to School and Tablet PCs

General, tc1100 tablet

Back in 1999, due to changing employment situations, I moved to Dallas, and then to Indiana. I’m back in Kansas now, and figure it’s about time I finish my computer science degree. I’ve got a full-time job now, though, so this means evening classes. Not all that much fun, but hey, it works.

One thing I’ve noticed is that there is far less available for part-time students as far as financial aid and scholarships are concerned. It’s almost as if we don’t exist.

Along with that, I’ve also been toying with the idea of purchasing a tablet PC that runs Debian. But I don’t really know where to go to learn about the different models. I found a comparison from last year, but I’d really like something more current. Acer seems to have a nice model, but it’s almost impossible to find it for sale in the USA anymore.

Any suggestions for a lightweight (around 3 pounds), decent tablet PC that doesn’t cost a huge amount of money? I’d like one that’s convertible (has a keyboard that can optionally be used).

Reiser4 Experiences

Software,

I’ve been a long-time user of JFS, but have grown unhappy with it for various reasons. So, I decided to try out XFS. It proved no better than JFS or ReiserFS 3 with data integrity during a crash.

Next step: Reiser4. I’ve been using Reiser4 for the past month or so on three different machines. I must say that I’m quite impressed with it. It is a stellar performer and it also recovers well from crashes. I mount all my filesystems with the nopseudo option, which essentially makes Reiser4 have standard Unix filesystem semantics in every way. I’m very pleased with it so far.

Thank you, darcs

Software

Here’s a use case for Darcs.

All the blogs hosted here run Drupal. I have a whole slew of add-on modules, themese, and a few patches. It’s a pain to manage them all, so after moving to Drupal 4.6.0, I decided to store my Drupal tree in Darcs.

Drupal 4.6.1 just came out. I used darcs_load_dirs to load it into my upstream repository, then darcs pull to pull it into my main tree.

It worked perfectly, first time. Very, very nice.

Now maybe in this particular case, Arch could have done as well, but I sure was impressed at how easy darcs made it all.

When Newsreaders Aren’t

Software

I clicked on a headline for an article titled Firefox news readers run the gamut. Sounded interesting; I’m not particularly happy with slrn, but I use it because there’s nothing better.

I thought it would be odd that there would be more than one newsreader, and one integrated into Firefox no less. So I was curious and clicked the link.

Surprise — it wasn’t talking about news readers at all, but rather RSS aggregators.

GRRR.

A news reader should be for *Usenet*.

Speaking of which, RSS is superflous. One could use NNTP to publish headlines and summaries anyway, and not require the development of a whole slew of software for yet another annoying protocol.

Trying out XFS

Software, ,

I’ve used most of the different filesystems in Linux. My most recent favorite has been JFS, but things like starvation with find have really been annoying me lately. To summarize, here is my experience with filesystems:

  • ext2: very slow, moderately unreliable
  • ext3: somewhat slow but reliable
  • reiserfs: fast, unreliable (cross-linked data after crash issues)
  • jfs: usually fast, somewhat unreliable (similar issues after crash, plus weird charset issues)

The one major Linux FS not in that list is XFS. So I decided to give it a whirl, switching my 40GB /home on one machine to XFS. So far, it’s been good.

There are two articles at IBM developerworks about XFS that were useful. There’s also a useful filesystems comparison from Novell.