Monthly Archives: June 2005

Albatron *Really* Sucks

Hardware

So I have some complaints about the lack of support from Albatron. Here’s a fun little e-mail from them: 

From: RMA Support <tan@albatronusa.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:30:52 -0700
To: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
Subject: RE: Status?

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting AlbatronUSA/Monivision Support.

At the moment, we do not have any record of the invoice. Please resubmit
with your name.
[snip]

Reaaaallly…. Let me just check my /var/log/exim4 directory… 

2005-06-20 22:31:17 1DkZTh-0006Nv-JB => rma@albatronusa.com R=dnslookup 
T=remote_smtp S=21076 H=mail.albatronusa.com [66.15.159.40] C="250 2.6.0 
<20050621033048.GA8520@fritz.complete.org> Queued mail for delivery" 
QT=8s DT=1s

Ahh yes, thought so. Sent to you 4 days ago, even. 21K. Gee, perhaps it INCLUDES A PDF OF MY INVOICE, COMPLETE WITH MY FULL NAME ON IT AND IN THE HEADERS?

So here’s my dilemma. My system has one free slot. I popped a spare Ethernet card in it to restore network connectivity to my MythTV box (the problem that started all of this is that the on-board Ethernet on this Albatron motherboard went dead.) To do that, though, I had to remove the little plate that provides the S/PDIF optical audio output. I’m not using it yet, but had hoped to.

So…. do I risk sending my motherboard to a company who, in all likelihood, will lose it once it arrives (or take months to return it to me), or just deal with not being able to get audio output? (The new Stargate season starts in a few weeks, and I don’t want to miss it!)

Right now, I’m leaning towards giving up on the digital audio output and just telling anybody that reads this blog about how ALBATRON SUCKS.

There were a lot of helpful suggestions regarding their slogan “Spirit of the albatross” I mentioned in my last post. I suggested they should be “spirit of the weasel.” Some others pointed out how “Spirit of the albatross” was strangely appropriate. Here, Albatron, are some more suggestions for you:

  • “Spirit of Richard Nixon”
  • “Spirit of Digestive Biproducts”
  • “Spirit of Windows ME”
  • “Spirit of That Guy Selling Fake Rolexes In The Alley”
  • “Spirit of Blog Spammers”
  • “Spirit of Outlook”
  • “Spirit of Online Poker Sites”
  • “Spirit of Spyware”
  • “Spirit of That Crappy Paperclip In MS Office”
  • “Spirit of Microsoft Exchange”

(Yeah, that last one was really hitting below the belt, but they deserve it…)

Why I Love Haskell In One Simple Example

Programming

I recently implemented some new Haskell numeric types that, instead of performing calculations, can generate a rendering of the requested calculation or store units with it.

Here you see a transcript of my session with a Haskell interpreter. The mathematical statements I am entering after the “>” are standard Haskell expressions, and, as I demonstrate, normally evaluate to a single result.

Once I get a more powerful simplifier, I will probably write a LaTeX exporting function as well.

The entire implementation of this, BTW, is less than 200 lines. 

NumTest> 5 + 1 * 3
8
NumTest> prettyShow $ 5 + 1 * 3
"5+(1*3)"
NumTest> rpnShow $ 5 + 1 * 3
"5 1 3 * +"
NumTest> prettyShow $ 5 + 1 * 3
"5+(1*3)"
NumTest> prettyShow $ simplify $ 5 + 1 * 3
"5+3"
NumTest> prettyShow $ 5 * (Symbol "x") + 3
"(5*x)+3"
NumTest> 5 / 2
2.5
NumTest> (units 5 "m") / (units 2 "s")
2.5_m/s
NumTest> (units 5 "m") / 2
2.5_m
NumTest> 10 * (units 5 "m") / (units 2 "s")
25.0_m/s
NumTest> sin (pi/2)
1.0
NumTest> sin (units (pi/2) "rad")
1.0_1.0
NumTest> sin (units 90 "deg")
1.0_1.0
NumTest> (units 50 "m") * sin (units 90 "deg")
50.0_m
NumTest> ((units 50 "m") * sin (units 90 "deg")) :: Units (SymbolicManip Double)
50.0*sin(((2.0*pi)*90.0)/360.0)_m
NumTest> rpnShow $ dropUnits $ ((units 50 "m") * sin (units 90 "deg"))
"50.0 2.0 pi * 90.0 * 360.0 / sin *"
NumTest> (units (Symbol "x") "m") * sin (units 90 "deg")
x*sin(((2.0*pi)*90.0)/360.0)_m

Also, I defined this in my source file:

test :: forall a. (Num a) => a
test = 2 * 5 + 3

Now, it can be used: 

NumTest> test
13
NumTest> rpnShow test
"2 5 * 3 +"
NumTest> prettyShow test
"(2*5)+3"
NumTest> test + 5
18
NumTest> prettyShow (test + 5)
"((2*5)+3)+5"
NumTest> rpnShow $ test + 5
"2 5 * 3 + 5 +"

You can grab the very early experimental code with darcs get http://darcs.complete.org/num.

Haskell has no built-in support for numeric types with units, arbitrary symbols carried through computations, etc. But it was trivial to add it. This kind of extensibility is a key part of why Haskell is so amazing.

Kansas Weather

Outdoors

So, we’ve made it through the Kansas monsoon/unpredictable season. The flooding, tornadoes, lightning damage, hail, etc. stayed mostly south of us this year, though the ice storn hit us hard this winter.

Now it’s time for the boring weather season. The boring weather season occurs when there is no need to give a 7-day forecast because every day is the same. In this case, it’s “Highs in the mid 90s, lows near 70, south winds 10-20 MPH” every day according to the National Weather Service.

Though Friday will shake things up a bit. That day, the winds will be from the south at only 10-15 MPH. Got to keep us on our toes.

Don’t Buy Albatron

Hardware, MythTV

My MythTV box has an Albatron KM18GPro motherboard in it. Last week, the Ethernet port on it went dead. I can plug in a known good cable, and don’t even get LED activity on the port. Plug the same cable into any number of other machines, and it works fine. (This is repeatable across different cables and switches, too.)

So I submitted an online RMA request to Albatron. Despite their claim of “instant confirmation” when an e-mail address is supplied, after submitting the form, it says to call them if there’s no response after 48 hours. I also submitted the proof of purchase as they requested.

Since there wasn’t, I called them and got a voice mail box. Left a voice mail. It was never returned. I also e-mailed their RMA team. No response. I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that my warranty expires in a few weeks.

It’s now been days since I first contacted them. This is absolutely the worst hardware support I’ve ever received from any vendor — taking days to even *respond* to a problem. I recently had a problem crop up with my Sipura SPA-841 phone, and got a replacement on its way to me within 12 hours. That’s right, a *phone* got better service than this motherboard.

I’ll never buy from Albatron again.

Their site says “Capturing the spirit of the albatross.” I think they got it wrong. It should be “capturing the spirit of the weasel.”

Mail Reader Comparison

Humor

Have you noticed how most mail readers stink? After a KMail frustration today, here’s a comparison to help you choose your next mail reader.

  • Outlook: Always looks normal, then suddenly e-mails your 6GB PST file to Russian spammers or Microsft and deletes it
  • Thunderbird: Your choice of 42 fully themable crash messages in 30 languages
  • Gnus: Crashes, after first consuming 2GB of system RAM
  • Lotus Notus: Makes you wander through virtual filing cabinets for 2 hours to find your e-mail, *THEN* crashes.
  • Pine: Sends a satisfaction survey to the University of Washington every time it crashes
  • Elm: Impossible to distinguish a crash from regular usage
  • Eudora: Crashing the same way since 1985
  • Mac Mail.App: Can handle up to 5 simultaneous animated segfaults at once
  • Evolution: Crashes, but never really dies…. or does it???
  • Hotmail: Crashes are “to serve you better”
  • GMail: You must receive an invitation before we prevent you from deleting your mail… and no, that is not Mr. Ashcroft at the keyboard.
  • KMail: Pops up a new dialog box every 5 minutes to inform you that it’s crashing again, “just in case you didn’t know”
  • Mutt: Crashes can be removed by just the right .muttrc
  • MH: Crashes, then presents the core file as new mail

Tips to avoid being accidentally recruited as a spy

Humor

The Register has a funny article about things that British spy agency MI5 is telling people to be wary of when they travel abroad. Two favorite quotes:

In a blow for the traditional holiday romance business travellers are also reminded: “If you are required to report intimate relationships with the nationals of certain countries to your Security Co-ordinator, make sure you do so promptly and honestly.”

And:

Travelers should also look out for lavish hospitality . . . Presumably you will know if you are being recruited by British or American intelligence services because they will tie you to the ceiling and deprive you of sleep rather than seduce you with such luxuries.

Brightness

tc1100 tablet

I discovered by accident today that the scroll switch on the top of the unit will adjust the screen brightness in X. It doesn’t seem to work in the console, and I’ve done nothing to tell X about it, but it works. Woohoo.

Combined with that and laptop-mode and powernowd, I think I’m going to get 3 to 3.5 hours of battery life on this thing.

Unsolved Tablet Mysteries

tc1100 tablet

Things I’m not sure how to do yet:

  1. Adjust the brightness of the tc1100 screen in Linux
  2. Display xvkbd (or another on-screen keyboard) when the display has been locked via xscreensaver or KDE’s screensaver
  3. Make sure the ACPI thermal settings are correct
  4. Find a journaling filesystem that behaves well with laptops

About the ACPI settings… it seems like the fan is running more than it ought to, and also that the unit is warmer than it should be at times. Out under (from memory) /proc/acpi/thermal/THRM, I can find the current temperature and also the temperatures at which different things (fans, I guess) are supposed to be turned on. Strange thing is, that file that shows the temperature zones shows different temperature zones at different times. Also, the /proc/acpi/fan area never says that any fan is on, even when I can hear them.

Odd.

On the filesystem front — back when ext2 was about as good as it got, I used to tweak the kernel cache flushing code so that writes would only be flushed to disk every 30 minutes or so. My laptop was plenty reliable, and it would always do a sync before I’d close the lid anyway, so that saved on the disk usage. But these days, I’m not so sure how to do that, with either ext3 or reiser4. Any suggestions?

Tablet PC So Far

tc1100 tablet

As I mentioned earlier, I purchased an HP tc1100 tablet PC. It arrived earlier this week and I’ve been playing with it. Here are some of my initial impressions:

Debian stable (sarge) installed easily. The tc1100 has no optical drive, and I have no USB optical drive either. It also wouldn’t boot from a CF card in my USB card reader. So I did a PXE (network) boot. I had never known that Debian’s installer can boot over the network. VERY slick work, d-i team. During the installation, I noticed letter “Q” appearing on-screen periodically. I eventually determined that it would happen whenever I’d bump one of the mouse buttons. It also went away once I was using my own kernel, for whatever reason. The basic install was easy, no troubles at all. I was particularly impressed with the integration of ntfsresize these days. Being able to shrink down the XP partition to a very small size and then install Linux — very nice indeed.

There are lots of pages about the tc1100 under Linux, so I won’t rehash them all here. There are a few patches to the kernel to enable wireless support and the touchpad. All fairly straightforward. My unit uses the ipw2200 instead of the ipw2100 that everyone else seems to have, strangely enough.

The main thing I don’t have yet is suspend-to-memory (ACPI state S3). Standby (ACPI state S1) doesn’t have any noticable effect. With S3, the system will suspend, but crash on recovery. Can’t quite figure it out.

I did get hibernate (suspend-to-disk) working. I just have to shut down PCMCIA and unload the b44 Ethernet driver before engaging it, and then it’ll work fine. Not as nice as a true suspend, but still better than powering down all the time.

As far as apps go, the one that I really must mention so far is Jarnal. It’s an awesome program. At its simplest, it’s just a set of pages you can draw on on-screen. But there’s a lot more to it under the hood. First, it saves your work as a zipped set of SVG files, one per page. So you can load up your drawings into other programs later. Secondly, you can load up PDF files as the background, effectively letting you mark up documents and jot notes on them. Finally, there is a collaborative network mode that I haven’t even tried yet. Jarnal is GPL’d, but it requires Java 1.4.x. If if weren’t for that, I’d be uploading it to sid in a heartbeat.

I’ll keep posting as I have more thoughts.