My main home workstation (previously named katherina, after a distant ancestor) was originally bought a few years ago — probably 2002 or 2003. Since then, it’s had its motherboard upgraded twice, new hard disks, and then even was moved to a completely new machine back in January. Throughout all of that, it’s still running the original sid that I put on it when it was new, dist-upgraded since then, copied to new disks via tar and netcat, but never reinstalled. So it’s probably been less than my average of 10 years on a given Debian install.

But it’s time. For one thing, despite the fact that I was one of the people that helped start Debian’s amd64 port (then known as the pure64 effort), I’ve been running i386 on my 64-bit workstation. For another, I want to switch from XFS to ext4. And finally, it has not escaped my notice that my laptop running Gnome with xmonad feels a lot faster than the far more powerful desktop running KDE4 with xmonad, plus Gnome integrates better with xmonad. And there are some nice gnome bits installed by default that my KDE system doesn’t have, and 400 packages installed on my system that are no longer in any archive. I could, of course, clean that stuff up — but all this adds up to enough of an excuse to start from scratch.

I continue to be very impressed with the quality of squeeze. This will be a very nice release when it comes out.

There’s been a lot written about the Amazon vs. Macmillan dust-up. I’ve seen a lot of posts by people that work for publishers saying that there are costs to making a book, and that $9.99 just won’t cut it for an ebook. They say that publishers invest in typesetting, editing, selection, art, and various stages of quality control. All of that is true.

Too bad they aren’t doing it with ebooks.

I’ve had some books published, and while the process varies from publisher to publisher, the editing process usually involves technical editors (people that check my facts), copy editors (people that help the writing and grammar), cover designers, and QC staff. Often I will see PDFs or printed pages at the final stage, and at that point can catch things like bad table formatting or lines split at inopportune places. My point here is that there’s a lot of editing going on, and there are many pairs of eyeballs looking at the printed page before it goes to the presses.

In the year or so since I’ve owned my Kindle, I can absolutely guarantee you that this process is not happening with ebooks. Most of the time, it is quite obvious that nobody has even looked at the finished product. Some intern has whipped up a quick conversion from whatever typesetting software they use, give it a quick glance, and call it good. One of my own books, Real World Haskell, is available in Kindle form. O’Reilly took better than average care of that process, but even so, I certainly didn’t approve screenshots before it went out like I did for paper (not that I’d have had time after the paper project was done anyway.) From memory, some of the flaws I’m aware of:

• Huston Smith’s Why Religion Matters included some illustrations, but they were scanned at such a low resolution that the text was completely unreadable, even at maximum zoom.
• All electronic editions of Lord of the Rings, not just the Kindle version, suffered some serious issues including missing words and deleting 19 characters after each instance of a particular letter.
• Shmoop converted Project Gutenberg versions of The Iliad and Odyssey, but converted each line of Gutenberg text to a Kindle paragraph, wrecking word wrapping.
• Countless examples of hyphenated words in the middle of lines (probably from someone forcing a hyphenation point in a print edition), paragraphs that should have been block-indented but weren’t, etc.

In some of these cases, it is quite obvious that a human didn’t even bother to look at the result. Harper Collins got a huge black eye after their LOTR fiasco, and still took quite a long time to fix it.

Now, if the publishers were actually going to put as much care into the quality of their ebooks as they do into the quality of their paper books, then sure, I’d pay almost the cost of a paperback. But very few of them are doing that. It is quite obvious to me usually by the end of the first chapter of a book whether anybody even looked at the result of their conversion.

Bottom line: If they’re going to sell me an inferior product, don’t expect me to pay near full price. If they can get their act together on quality, only then would they have room to start arguing for higher prices. If all you’re going to do with the ebook is run the paper version through some buggy filter, you haven’t incurred much additional cost, and it is plainly visible to all.

Note: I would like to say that Lonely Planet and O’Reilly have done good jobs with the tools available, and while their results aren’t perfect, they have done a good job working with rendering their sometimes very complex print layouts for a Kindle.

I have recently been evaluating small laptops, and wound up purchasing the Thinkpad X200s. It arrived a few days ago, so here are some first impressions.

The Hardware

The X200s is, in a word, awesome. It is light and portable, built solidly, and very fast. With the 6-cell battery, it feels light. The 9-cell makes it physically bigger and heavier, but even so, it is still a light unit even then. The fans run only rarely, and battery life looks to be towards the upper range of what I was expecting, so I am pleased with that.

The screen is a very high-DPI one, and quite bright. However, it is also one of the only drawbacks: its vertical viewing angle is quite poor compared to most other screens I’ve used recently, meaning I’m frequently adjusting it to get the best angle relative to my head.

The keyboard is a pleasant change after having using the Eee 901 for so long. I hadn’t realized just how much of a pleasant change it would be.

I was concerned about the lack of a touchpad, but it appears that the touchpoint device is a lot better than it was on the Thinkpads I used a few years back. I miss a touchpad, but not very much, and far less than I thought I would.

Debian Squeeze

Of course, one of the first things I did with it was to wipe off Windows 7 and install Debian. Now a word about Debian. I rarely do fresh installs. I normally tar up my machine and move it over to new hardware when needed, and upgrade the software over time. However, I wanted to make this a 64-bit install and had no suitable image to move over. I decided to try the default Gnome install in squeeze since I hadn’t tried Gnome in awhile and was about due to give it a shot.

I was very impressed. Squeeze will make an awesome desktop OS. Everything worked perfectly out of the box. It suspended and resumed. X came up in full resolution without me having to do anything. Ethernet worked, and I was helpfully invited to supply the non-free firmware for the wifi on a USB stick during install time. Hardware brightness and volume keys work. The docking station is fully compatible with Linux. Sound works. The hardware “lock screen” key even works. Bluetooth works out of the box. It is a well-integrated, extremely fast, and smooth setup.

Cups is installed out of the box by default, and accepts network printer broadcasts by default too. So I snapped in an Ethernet cable, and when I went to print a few minutes later, I just could. It didn’t even strike me as special until later. Yes, that’s right — I plugged it into the network and, with absolutely zero action on my part, could print to all the printers at work or at home.

The update-manager that Gnome uses by default (I wonder if Debian’s KDE installs yet use one? I have never seen one in KDE) is a wonderful work of simplicity compared to Windows 7’s madness. You click the update icon, click the button to start updating, and 30 seconds later get a message that 45 updates have been installed. With no ominous “reboot now” message. This is no surprise to me as a long-time Debian developer, but I just wanted to highlight it here. I think I should file a wishlist bug on update-manager asking them to improve the wording in the box to say “There is no need to reboot your computer” :-)

I still have my gripes about Gnome. It only lets me choose some pre-defined settings for screensaver timeouts, for instance. I still feel that KDE gives me more control. But Gnome seems to be better integrated with the entire system, faster, and less buggy. This difference is especially acute at login time. This laptop logs me in far faster than my Core 2 Quad machine at home running KDE (from sid) does.

So, of course, my next task is to integrate xmonad with Gnome. Should be fun.

Now, a final word on why I wrote this. None of these components have been a surprise really to me (aside from the completeness of the hardware support for this laptop). But what I want to bust is the myth that somehow Debian is difficult to use on the desktop. It isn’t. This setup was easier by far than the Windows 7 install I did on a different machine recently. Although it has less eye candy than Windows 7, it exudes solidity, performance, power, and yes, ease of use in every way.

Two days ago, I posted about looking for a new netbook or notebook, and asked for people’s advice. Since then, I’ve done some investigation based on these suggestions.

Rejected Candidates

First, I’ve outright rejected several options. The Thinkpad X100e was out, mainly because it doesn’t compare favorably to the Acer 1810TZ. The X100e’s battery life is worse than the 1810TZ, it is heaver, and has a single-core CPU. Secondly, the EeePC 1201N was ruled out. Again, its battery life was quite a bit worse than the 1801TZ, and also worse than my existing Eee 901. Finally, the EeePC was out because of its extremely slow performance.

Remaining Candidates

I took information from notebookcheck for models I was interested in, and those suggested in the comments at the earlier post. After reviewing them, I made a comparison chart showing issues that matter most to me.

Candidates: Battery Life

Let’s start with battery life. The X200s presents an interesting picture here. In the 9-cell battery, we can expect over 15 hours of life in idle mode, and 7 hours when surfing the Internet over wifi. This was best in class performance for the idle and surf tests, but when under load it drops to one of the worst ad only 2.57 hours. This could correlate with what Lars Wirzenius commented, saying the X200s battery life is poor: obviously it is doing a lot of power management in software to achieve its runtimes, and if a default Linux installation isn’t doing that power management, battery life could be poor.

The other standard in terms of battery life was the Acer 1810TZ, with 12 hours runtime in idle usage and almost 6 when surfing the net with wifi: that’s an hour longer than my Eee 901. It was also the best performer under full load of anything on my chart.

Disappointing results were turned in by the HP 2530p. Even with a 9-cell battery, it couldn’t match the 1810TZ’s battery life. The Dell E4200, with its 6-cell battery, fared even worse — though I should note notebookcheck hasn’t tested the E4200, so those figures come from elsewhere.

Candidates: Size and Weight

Looking at weight, the X200s and E6200 turn in amazing weights at under 3 pounds for a 12″ notebook. HP’s 2530p is the heaviest in the group at 3.84 pounds with the 6-cell battery (the 9-cell will be heavier but I couldn’t find specs on it). The 1810TZ checks in at 3.1 pounds, a bit more than half a pound heavier than my Eee 901.

Considering size, the E4200 is the thinnest in the group at just 0.79 inches thick. The 2530p is also thin, but is one of the deepest. The Eee 901 is smallest in terms of length and depth, but it is the thickest of all.

Candidates: Performance

Here you can really see why I complain about the Eee 901 being slow. On the PCMark 05 test, it had a third of the performance of the 1810TZ. The best performer was the X200s, followed by HP’s 2530p.

In terms of hard disk speed, the E4200 was fastest due to its SSD (though I suspect these tests are not fully evaluating write performance). The SSD on the EeePC 901 didn’t help it; it finished with less than half the speed of the E4200.

Conclusions

From this chart, it looks like there are only three really interesting models: the X200s with its top-of-the-line performance and display, the HP 2530p, and the 1810TZ with its stellar battery life. The disappointing battery life on the E4200 rules it out for me. The battery life on the HP 2530p is modiocre, but it has a touchpad.

For the 1810TZ, my main concerns are size of screen and the fact that the screen is glossy. I am not at all a fan of glossy screens.

For the HP 2530p, we’ve had an HP 2510p in at work. Its size is virtually identical to the 2530p, and felt a bit bigger than I’d like. It was also lighter than the 2530p, but still a bit heaver that I’d like to see. But the 12″ screen might be worth it.

The X200s lacks a touchpad, which is a major annoyance in my book. I have reports of 7-hour battery life on it with the L9400 CPU under Ubuntu. Another person has reported 12 hours on Arch Linux using a power saving guide (which looks helpful in general as well).

Considering size and weight, the X200s is lighter than the 1810TZ, though only by a little if using the 9-cell battery. It’s very slightly bigger in every dimension than the 1810TZ, but perhaps not enough to influence the decision.

What are your thoughts?

There’s a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of system administrators. Unless you’re one, it’s probably hard to grasp the full weight of it. This week has been full of reminders for me.

This afternoon, shortly after lunch, I got word that people were having trouble with phones. A few minutes of testing showed that calls within our city were working fine, but it was completely impossible to place or receive long-distance calls. A little while later, a local newspaper’s website indicated that numerous cities over a multi-county region, all served by the CenturyLink local telephone company, were out of service in this manner. I figure that represents hundreds of square miles, or a patch of rural Kansas roughly the size of Los Angeles.

Adding to the problem was the fact that emergency 911 services are accessed via these long-distance lines that were down. For roughly three hours, 911 was completely down across this entire area. What’s more, many cellphone towers and Internet access options were also taken down, since they feed from these same lines.

This adds up to a situation that could very easily cost lives due to delayed response of emergency medical, fire, or police services.

In the end, the problem was traced to “a bad controller card on a Titan 5500 owned by AT&T.”

Now, here’s the system administration angle: If you worked for the phone company and had to troubleshoot a problem that you knew had taken down emergency services for thousands of people, what kind of pressure would you be feeling? Would you be able to keep your cool? I’m glad that I don’t have that kind of job.

I also wouldn’t like to be the engineer (or, more likely, accountant) that decided that they didn’t need any more redundancy to provide good service to the area. Especially considering this is the second time in the last year or two this has happened.

But, ironically, yesterday I signed a purchase order for a new Asterisk PBX (corporate phone) server. When selecting a machine for that task, I am always completely conscious of the responsibility on my shoulders: several hundred employees rely on the machine that is ultimately my responsibility to select. Our own access to 911 would be cut if the machine were to go down. I never forget that the correct operation of the systems that our team sets up and deploys could help save someone’s life, and that a malfunction could cost the company dearly in terms of revenue, productivity, image — or worse.

Nearly four years ago, we switched from an analog PBX, with outsourced support, to a digital VOIP system running Asterisk. Note that we use VOIP in-house, but do not use it externally. Anyhow, I can not say that the Asterisk PBX has been 100% perfect; I doubt that this could be honestly said of any PBX of any complexity.

I can say, though, that it saved us well over $100,000 AND has proven far more reliable than the system it replaced. Outages are exceptionally rare and brief now. Plus we have internal expertise to fix it, rather than having to wait for a technician to be dispatched from a city 2 hours away to fix anything. I know I don’t have the resources to build a perfect PBX that will never go down (if such a thing is even possible), but I take my responsibility regarding a reliable PBX extremely seriously.

We used to have a frequent problem: someone would call 911, then hang up. We suspected this was often on accident — maybe people hit 9 for an outside line, then misdialed their number. In any case, 911 dispatch would then call our main office, saying they got a hangup. A person or team would then go across our entire campus making sure nobody was in distress — that nobody had managed to dial, then passed out, for instance.

With Asterisk, I was able to help this situation. Whenever somebody calls 911 now, two emails are generated: the first contains details about the call, such as the extension number that called and the duration of the call. This goes to all people that are likely to receive a callback from 911. It may not always pinpoint the source (as with somebody using a wireless phone), but almost every time will give us a very good idea where the call came from. The second email is a recording of the call, and serves as an additional clue, but goes to fewer people.

I am aware that email isn’t a perfect medium, but: it let us make a dramatic (albeit imperfect) solution to a problem that very few institutions our size are able to address nearly so well.

There’s a lot of weight on our shoulders: keeping the accounting system up, the Internet links up, the web store or the sales phone lines, the shipping systems or the document archives up. These things going down can spell deep trouble in many ways.

And sometimes the systems we maintain might save a life. Such as this morning, when someone was feeling symptoms of a heart attack, used our phones to call a colleague for help, that person called 911, and an ambulance was dispatched. I know the system worked exactly as it should, because I had two familiar emails from Asterisk in my mailbox this morning when I got to work.

I read The Iliad recently; see my review of it here.

This article isn’t about The Iliad, but about Shmoop’s coverage of it.

I have never been a person who puts much stock on “study guides” before, and my own prejudice is that they have probably earned their reputation as useful for little more than a tool to help students pass exams without reading the material. However, I felt rather unequal to reading The Iliad; after all, it has been many years since I had been exposed to Greek mythology, and even then it was very brief. I had remembered from Amazon’s blog that they are offering some of the classics with a Shmoop study guide built in. I figured the $2.39 would be worth it. But I’m not sure it was.

The resulting ebook has two sections: the main text, and the Shmoop overview. The overview contains essentially the information available for free on their site. This information is pretty good. It has some overviews of the entire book, plus summaries of each chapter. They helpfully provide the “backstory” in the chapter summaries, so I know why certain gods are on the side of the Trojans and the others on the side of the Achaeans. It helped me figure out the point to some of the actions described on the text. These are linked to at the beginning of each book (chapter) of the Iliad, which was a bit inconvenient because I prefer to read them after reading the main text. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a big problem.

The summaries were written colloquially, sometimes too much so. I grinned as the “less grabbin’, more stabbin'” summary of the Achaeans being told to salvage armor from the dead later and keep fighting now. I cringed as “no way Jose”, and rolled my eyes as it described how one of the heroes got “owned”. That would have been less clear than the original for many.

I would probably have given the Shmoop edition 4 or 5 stars on Amazon were it not for numerous boneheaded mistakes they made.

The commentary uses one translation (Lattimore), while the included text uses a different one (Butler). That’s bad enough, but it gets worse: Lattimore uses the Greek names for the gods and heroes, while Butler uses the Roman ones. So you can be reading through the text, learning about Jove, Ulysses, Juno, and Mars. But the commentary refers instead to Zeus, Odysseus, Hera, and Ares. Now, some might have memorized the Greek and Roman names for everyone, but then such people probably aren’t wanting a study guide. I finally had to print out a page to help me understand the study guide. That is terrible, and completely inexcusable. They should have used the same translation for the text as the commentary, or at least have provided parenthetical notes throughout the commentary.

Next, they really did a poor job of the main text itself. They have apparently grabbed the Butler ASCII text from Project Gutenberg, and cut and pasted it into some editor. I say this because each line renders as a paragraph; that is, the text doesn’t reflow to fit the screen as every single other book does. Worse, it’s too wide for the Kindle. So you get one line full width, the next only half as wide as the display (some of the first having wrapped), then the next full width again, on down. Butler is a prose, not a poetic, translation, so this is pointless. Moreover, the line endings are exactly where they are at Project Gutenberg.

So, what we have here is that somebody at Shmoop cut and pasted from their own website and Project Gutenberg, and nobody bothered to check if the resulting product was crap. At least with the new Kindle firmware you can read in landscape mode to prevent most of the lines from wrapping. Still, I’m very annoyed at this.

There are other flaws. They highlighted some passages in the text. Clicking on them goes to some commentary about it. OK, fine. But why are some passages highlighted in the text, and some mentioned in the chapter summary? There seemed no rhyme or reason. The highlighted passages commentary was iffy in quality. Sometimes it was useful, and sometimes it asked a question of the sort I might expect in a jr. high English question — “When has pride helped you in your life?” or some such. Worse, not all of the highlights linked to the correct place, and they also suffered from the Greek/Roman name issue.

In all, Shmoop has helped me understand The Iliad and place it in context. But they need to spend a lot more effort on copyediting. Even a couple of hours of someone actually looking at their Kindle product on an actual Kindle would have immediately shown these problems. They could have made a far better product with a few hours’ more effort.

Once a month, I take our recycling to the road. This is something far more annoying than most city-dwellers may suspect.

For one thing, the road is about 1/4 mile away. Over a month, we fill up at least three large plastic trash cans full of recycling. If I walked each of those there to be picked up, then walked them back to the house after, I’d have walked 3 miles.

So, I use our $75 pickup to get the trash to the road. The process is a long one, and it starts two days before the recycling is due to be picked up.

Monday, 5:30PM: Find an outdoor extension cord in the basement. Put on snow-suitable shoes. Go outside, plug the extension cord in at the elevator. Grab the battery charger, hook it up to the pickup. Unfurl and untangle the extension cord, plug it in.

Blog about it if desired.

Tuesday, 5:30PM: Go outside. Disconnect the battery charger, coil up the extension cord. Plug in the air compressor and get it going. Run the hose to the tire that keeps going flat and hope it reaches. Fill up the tire. Return the air compressor hose to the elevator, turn off the air compressor.

Go to pickup and actually get in. Remove the bungee cord from the brake pedal that is holding it up, preventing the brake lights from being on 100% of the time and draining the battery even faster.

Start pumping the accelerator. It’s not a fuel-injected engine, after all. Crank the engine. Stop cranking, pump some more, trying to avoid the hole in the floor under the accelerator. Eventually get it started, hopefully.

Roll down the windows to prevent the exhaust fumes from getting too strong.

Drive the stuff to the road. Unload the three cans, plus all the extra cardboard from Christmas that didn’t fit in them and is now soggy and snow-covered. Drive the pickup back to the yard. Park it. Replace the bungee cord on the brake pedal so it’ll start again tomorrow.

Wednesday, 5:30PM: Dress warmly yet again. Go to the pickup, hoping the tire is still inflated and the battery is still charged. I’m going to be optimistic and assume they are. Hope that the pickup starts after only a few minutes of pumping. Go back to the road, only to find that the Kansas wind has scattered the trash cans and their lid all over the county. With luck, I’ll be able to find them on foot. Sometimes, I have had to get in the pickup and drive down the road to find all my lids. Stash all of this in the pickup, drive it back to the yard, park, replace the bungee cord, and close it up for another month.

I’m promising myself that when I upgrade to a better pickup, it’ll be one worth at least $200.

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.” The City’s gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

—Horace Smith

Many of us that can afford an Internet connection still qualify as exceedingly rich compared to, for example, many poor people in Africa. On a scale of centuries, the ancient centers of civilization and wealth tend to collapse. Even Rome, with over a million inhabitants in its day of ancient prominence, shrank to only 20,000 over the course of history. Some other ancient cities no longer dot our maps.

It helps us, perhaps, to have some perspective. Those magnificent working monuments to wealth in New York, London, or Tokyo probably won’t be there 1000 years from now. What will?