The p-Code Machine

I, as many others, read about Canonical’s decision to use Yahoo as the default search provider. When I read the headline I assumed without doubt the decision had to be made because of the recent search results privacy debacle of Google. However, after reading the article a bit later, it’s a business move… They get paid to do this…

The most problematic part of this all, is the notion, it’s all okay, “because it’s easy to change back”. This is the biggest bullshit argument in history. First how easy it is to do anything is very relative… There are lots of computer users which are simply not capable of changing this default, or any default at all anywhere… I suppose this is the audience where they intended to receive this revenue from… Since lots of default-changing-capable folks will most likely be changing back to Google anyway.

And of course there is a bigger point to be made here. I don’t want any external party to have any influence on how my operating system is defaulted. I mean… Will the release after Lucid have the Picasa/SmugMug uploaders disabled in F-Spot, only leaving the Flickr uploader available, because Yahoo paid for it. The other uploaders would obviously be “easy” to add back, because then it would be all okay… And an advertisement here-or-there never hurt anybody too…

While I do get it’s not particularly easy to build a stable company on open source software, and we shouldn’t expect Mark to endlessly pour money into Canonical, but we could ask ourselves, how viable Ubuntu would be in the long term if these kinds of decisions need to be made.

I’d much rather have them cut back on shipments of free CDs amongst other things…

We all know quite well that in general phone camera’s suck. The cheaper phone’s usually have completely unusable camera functionality and the more expensive ones sometimes have bearable camera functionality. In practically all cases, they have significant noise. Effectively getting rid of that noise makes a phone camera that more useful. While experimenting a bit with GIMP, I noticed just about any denoising method destroyed detail and did not effectively deal with the noise in my images. Until I tried something different… Despeckle:

Open up your noisy phone camera image in GIMP, then go to Filters, Enhance, Despeckle… And obviously the Despeckle dialog turns up… Enable the adaptive median (but leave recursion off). Set the radius to 1, and leave the black and white levels at their defaults (respectively 7 & 248), and behold the results:

A few days ago I’d been fiddling with creating a FreeDOS bootable USB stick, with little succes actually… But there’s an easy way which works on all operating systems which run qemu, I’ll be focussing on Ubuntu Linux.

First download the Balder FreeDOS floppy, and save it somewhere convenient on your disk. Then connect your USB stick to your system, make sure you unmount the stick’s filesystems before proceeding:

# sudo umount /media/usbstick

Then wipe the USB stick using dd to make sure it’s completely clean. This step is not really required, but this does make sure you won’t run into any other problems later on. Make sure you know you have the correct device file, making a mistake with this can really screw up your Ubuntu install, as an example I’ll be using sdu:

# sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdu bs=1M

Then we start qemu booting from the Balder boot floppy image:

# sudo qemu -fda balder10.img -hda /dev/sdu -boot a

If all goes well you’ll see FreeDOS booting from the floppy drive.

A:\>fdisk

Then partition a single large volume, the following should have the same effect:

A:\>fdisk /auto C:

Then format the partition and copy system files:

A:\>format C: /V:FREEDOS /S

Then you can copy any other DOS utilities you might need from the Balder image to the C: drive, which in essence is your USB stick. Then close qemu. Then we can verify if the stick boots properly like so:

# sudo qemu -hda /dev/sdu -boot c

If you want to place some extra files on there like a BIOS flash utility and a BIOS upgrade file you issue the eject command, and then disconnect and reconnect the USB stick:

# sudo eject /dev/sdu

I hope this works for you as well. Good luck and be careful!

For crying out loud!

Last week I ordered the Ogio HipHop Messenger Bag from the Ubuntu Shop, which I received this week. And it’s a truely excellent laptop bag, it’s quite roomy indeed…

The usual suspects inhabiting the bag are obviously a laptop of  some sort and it’s corresponding power supply. Another indispensable item would be a nice travel mouse (in whatever variety you would like: wired, wireless or bluetooth). Since wireless access is not available everywhere, it’s a good idea to keep a couple of feet of (snagless) Cat 5e UTP cable in the bag for wired network and/or Internet access.

Modern laptops usually have an SD card reader built-in, however if you use CompactFlash you’re pretty much screwed, so keeping a cheap generic USB card reader in the bag is often a good idea.

Having operating system reinstallation media in the laptop bag is a good thought for longer trips as well… The Ogio HipHop messenger bag actually has a CD sized compartment for this particular purpose. Having some writable media (like a USB memory stick) in the bag can be useful at times as well.

There are a few less obvious things I tend to keep in my bag:

First of which would be a USB-Serial (RS232) converter, and a Cisco Rollover cable. It’s not that I need these on a continuous basis, but if I don’t keep these permanently in my bag, I will have forgotten them when I do need them.

Another item I rarely need, is Tylenol and some bandaids… Keep them in your bag, and one day they will come in handy (be it for personal use or someone else).

Keeping a random (interesting) magazine in the bag as well can be handy to pass time during public transportation amongst other things. I’ve heard of other people carrying an English dictionary as well.

If you own an iPod, keeping an iPod sync/charge cable in the bag can be a good idea. I generally put a few standard usb/mini-usb cables in there as well.

And last of course, I keep a pen or two, a notepad and some business cards in there too.

I recently acquired a Western Digital Elements Portable 500GB 2.5″ drive. It’s a no fuss drive, this is as simple as it gets. The drive looks quite nice, again because it’s simplicity in it’s design.

After zeroing the complete disk surface no bad sectors were reallocated, since the drive (as most WDC’s) can provide SMART information via USB to DeviceKit/palimpsest. This may sound as-if it’s the most common thing in the world, but it’s not, it’s not a fair assumption any random USB drive will supply SMART information via USB.

The drive can do about 28MB/sec sustained (benchmarked during the full surface wipe). So this is a real world figure for sustained sequential IO.

Another nice feature is the fact that the drive does not seem to require a split USB cable to draw more power from the host system than a single port can provide.

For those of us who don’t regularly look at their shadow files, it seems Ubuntu (or glibc, however you like to look at it) has deprecated salted MD5 for it’s password hashes, and has moved to salted SHA512 for a relatively big security margin.

I read Fedora 12 has already stopped shipping GIMP in their default installation, and Ubuntu is about the follow suit. Considering I’m a hobby photographer you might think I’d be opposed to this move, but I’m not. The rationale for this move is very valid indeed. F-Spot has become a quite capable piece of software, these days it does just about everything most users want: crop, adjust saturation, adjust contrast and remove red-eye. For most “normal” people GIMP is quite scary, luckily shows like Meet The GIMP ease this problem considerably.

Having said that, I am still slightly sad about this, GIMP is one of those iconic open source applications that have been around for more than a decade. Luckily we’re not saying farewell, just until we visit next time.

A while back a friend had a problem with his HP Mini netbook, which has a Marvell Yukon 2 Fast Ethernet NIC. When the netbook was booted without having the Ethernet cable connected, the NIC would not show up at all, as in it wouldn’t be visible on the PCI bus. This is because of very aggressive power saving. The problem with this power saving tactic is that as far as I know, PCI wasn’t really designed with hot plug capability in mind, and powering down a chip to the level where it’s not visible on the PCI bus anymore, is more or less equivalent to PCI Hot Plug.

Early server solved this issue by having a special chip on the motherboard the handle the PCI Hot Plug events. Later on this was more or less standardized by using ACPI to handle this for laptops and possibly some desktop computers. And indeed the HP Mini needs ACPI PCI Hot Plug support to allow the Yukon 2 chip to be detected on the PCI bus after it’s been booted.

Somehow Ubuntu does not “detect” ACPI PCI Hot Plug is required and does not load the appropriate module. Luckily this is easily fixed by adding “acpiphp” to “/etc/modules”, and presto the Yukon 2 works as expected even if no Ethernet cable was attached during boot.

Recently I tried to upgrade the BIOS of my Intel DQ35JO motherbord, with which I’ve been pretty happy. After the upgrade to the most recent BIOS (11.22) my Linux kernel (2.6.28-16-generic/amd64) failed to boot, producing the following error message:

PANIC: early exception 0e rip 10:ffffffff8041f9b4 error 2 cr2 ffff87ffffffffff

Downgrading the BIOS to a somewhat older version (but newer than what a started with) solved the issue again. So I set out to finding out in what BIOS revision the regression snuk in:

• 09.42 works
• 09.91 works
• 10.16 works
• 10.56 fails
• 11.22 fails

So when upgrading your Intel DQ35JO motherboard, I recommend you stick with BIOS version 10.16 for the time being. I reported this issue to Intel, and I was told the issue would be passed along to the engineering department (with little guarantee this would be fixed). But Intel being Intel I have good hopes this will get resolved with some patience…