Purchased Netbook

I purchased a netbook this evening. The one that I bought is the Gateway LT3103u. It comes with Vista. Vista works on it and I've installed F11 on it. I've not verified that Vista still works.

I used unetbootin to setup the USB drive with Fedora 11 i686 livecd. However, I did have a video corruption problem with the X that came by default with the F11 Live CD. I had to use Ctrl-Alt F2 to switch to a console and switch back to X via Ctrl-F1. The video would look better. I rebooted after the install and was able to get through First Boot where I was able to enter the user account and other things. After getting to X, I went to the console and run yum update. There's 284MB of updates installing now.

Other than the X windows having the corruption problems, it looks like everything else has just worked. Atheros wifi seems to be working. Sound works. The machine has a decent sized keyboard and lcd screen.

I'll post additional updates here.

Update: I've not been able to get the Atheros AR9285 wireless to work under F11 yet. I've installed the latest wireless drivers from linuxwireless.org. So, I'm using the machine under Vista Basic most of the time. Vista Basic doesn't perform too badly. The machine does get a little warm, but overall it's a nice machine.

Vacation in Pennsylvania

My parents, Lee Ann and I went to Pennsylvania for vacation. We went to Gettysburg, Kutztown, Lancaster, and Hershey. The trip was good.

We drove around the Gettysburg battlefield doing the auto tour until it started raining. The next day we drove to Kutztown for the folk festival. We spent several hours there looking through the booths. The next morning we drove to Intercourse. We took the 55 minute buggy ride that went through a covered bridge. The ride was nice and we looked through some of the shops in town.

Before driving to Hershey the next day, we went back to Gettysburg to Boyd's Country. Thomas Kincade was doing a signing. My parents bought a small print, had him sign it, and got a picture of my dad with Thomas Kincade. We drove to Hershey's Chocolate World afterwards. You can take a "tour" of the factory for free. There is now real factory. It's just a ride with some videos and smells to make you think that you're going through a factory. The cost of candy is reasonable though.

On the way up, we stopped at the Green Valley Book Fair. I was able to get several non-fiction books that I had been putting off. Among the books that I purchased was "Fooled By Randomness", "Made to Stick", and "Not Even Wrong". These books sold for $4 - $7.

Eclipse Test and Performance Tools

I used the Eclipse Project's Test and Performance Tools for the first time. I needed it to help determine a problem I was having with network responsiveness for a project. After running the profiler, I was able to look at the execution time for the threads in a nice graph. The graph showed me where most of the time was spent by one thread. By modifying the run method, I was able to improve the performance.

Why Care About a Political Party?

Why do people care about whether or not a lives or survives? Paul Graham seems to have it right when he says that it's a part of someone's identity. The party is another form of religion. It's not just the GOP, but Democrats are the same way. Political party as an extension of religion is especially obvious in places like Iraq and Iran.

I don't care about any political party. They don't have anything to teach me about morality. Those that are in charge only care about furthering their own career.

I write this because it bothers me to see people talking about saving a the Republican party. Why does either party need or deserve saving? It's about change. It scares them. They wouldn't know what without the party machine to take care of them.

Updating software

In the previous post, I wrote about my frustrations with Windows and updating the software to fix perceived performance problems. My biggest beef is with the amount of stuff I have to download and how often I have to hit the Update Windows button.

I mentioned that I after I installed SP3 I had to go to the Update Windows page again to get additional updates. Prior to getting to the page for the updates, it had to update the authorization program. (If memory serves me correctly.) Why can't the MS update software download everything all at once and update the system?

On Fedora/RedHat/Ubuntu and many other systems, when it discovers update it downloads them all at once and installs them. I realize that Windows locks certain files and won't allow changes until it reboots, but why doesn't it continue installing the other things that is needed?

Also, why can't I download all of the updates and run them separately while not being connected? (Yes, I know the reason. Control of the software.) I can do that for the above Linux based systems. I can download all of the updates to a DVD and carry them to another machine and have it update the machine.

Fedora makes it even easier. If you have multiple machines on a network, you can have one of those machines act as the repository for updates. This means that when the repository machine is updated, the other machines can pull the updates from there minimizing your network traffic.

This means a lot now that you have providers such as Comcast and Time Warner capping data transfers. Which would you rather spend your bandwidth allotment on watching Hulu or downloading Windows updates to the 1 - X machines in your home? If you have 5 machines in your home and you had to pull down 200MB worth of updates, you just used 1GB of your data allotment.

It's not only Windows, but the latest release of Acrobat from Adobe asked me to install a language pack update that was 19MB when I clicked update. The Acrobat installer also installed Air which I didn't ask for.

Fixing Windows Again

Once again I've spent part of a day working on a Windows PC. The general complaint is that it's slow. I've decided not to wipe it and re-install the software yet, but I probably will if it still seems slow. This time around I'm applying updates for all of the software that is installed. Yes ALL of the software.

Part of the problem is that this computer connects to the Internet via dial up. You can't update the computer with dial up. You can tell windows to download updates. It will do it in the background, but on dial this is slow. So, I brought the machine home and doing the updates from here.

First thing this morning I told it to update and first thing it installed SP3. Yes, I could have taken that with me (I had already downloaded it) but why bother. After updating SP3, it wanted to update 3 other things for Windows which took another 248MB of download. I believe that it was some .Net update.

In addition to the Windows update, I'm updating FireFox, AVG Free, Java, Spy Bot, Flash, Acrobat (you really need to update Acrobat), and OpenOffice. After that I'll run spy bot and defragment the hard drive over night. Hopefully this will help.

There are efforts being made to get some type of broad band connection into the area where this computer lives. It's a small rural farming area that has one dial up provider. Once it's installed I think that I'm going to set up the machine for dual boot and see if I can the users to run Ubuntu.

I can't do that now since the modems they buy are WinModems. There are no drivers for them under Linux. I'd have them buy more expensive modems, but they usually get one per year fried due to surges in the phone line. (Yes a surge protector helps.)

I need to do the same thing for my parents. I've put off putting linux on their computer even though do have high speed. The reason for that is that they've got some programs that only run under windows. I think that I'm going to try it anyway.

Attention all Burglars

Apparently having your village in Google street maps is an invitation for more burglaries. It's ironic that everyone in the world now knows that Broughton in Buckinghamshire is an affluent place that might be a good place rob a home.