Last friday I suddenly decided that I was going to install Linux on this machine's spare partition.
Now, I've not had good luck with Linux in the past, partly because the tulip-chip NIC drivers dislike my other machine, which has two Linksys cards in it, and partly because I'm the sort of user who almost always knows enough to be dangerous, but only usually knows enough to fix it.
I've used several distros, including Corel, Debian, and Slackware. I've also tried using NetBSD.
This time, I decided to use Mandrake 9.0. I also installed it on the new Dell, which only has one NIC, and that is a 3com.
So far so good. (I'm running under it right now.)
If only I could get it to recognize my tablet, then ... well, I'd probably use it at least a bit more often. There's still Lightwave, Paint Shop Pro, and Painter 6 to think about.
I managed to break my Dell's installation of Mandrake. I was reconfiguring and recompiling the kernel (again) in order to try and get my wacom tablet working. (It doesn't seem to have helped.)
Now Linux does a kernel panic and complains about not being able to find init. This is even if I use the failsafe mode.
See what I mean about knowing enough to be dangerous but only occasionally knowing enough to fix it. Bleh.
Anyway, I think I've found out how to fix it. We'll see tonight.
Yes, I managed to get Linux fixed last week. Eventually, though, I ripped Mandrake out and installed Redhat 8.0 in its place to see if that would get the tablet working (slightly ... I can now click on things, but still no pointer control).
Redhat seems to work slightly better than Mandrake (once I got past the three or four installations I needed to perform to get the thing to boot properly). At least, it seems to read my burned CDs more reliably.
I was annoyed by its lack of NTFS support so that I could mount my Windows partition, which seems to be some weirdo political decision on the part of Redhat itself (in spite of their stated reason for not including it). Still, that's easily solved by a page I found on the net. I am also having a harder time configuring certain things under Redhat, but I assume that'll go away in time.
Apparently, the reason that our internet access is out is because Insight "detected a signal leak or ingress in violation of FCC regulations" at the house during their recent maintenance, so in order to prevent interference from aircraft and other such, they installed a filter on the line.
So we've been offline for nearly a week, not because of the upgrades, but because they decided to simply cut our access. Which is fine and all (assuming that this isn't "excuse #19"), but they told us about this by mail, so it took us DAYS to find out about it. And they apparently can't schedule someone to fix the problem until Friday.
Personally, I think they should have put the filter on, walked over to the house, told someone what they had done and why, then immediately asked when it would be convenient for us to have them fix the problem (right then being a valid choice). If nobody was there (unlikely) then they should have left a note.
I would like to reiterate how much I hate and despise cable internet access. Never had anywhere near this many outages, nor this level of customer non-service with DSL. And it was pretty much the same speed to boot, and had less issues with security. If Pete hadn't insisted on keeping his present cable modem account when we moved in, and if we had an actual need for a land phone line (or DSL didn't require a land account), then I'd be on DSL right now.
In other news, I saw Matrix Reloaded last night. Didn't have the problems with it that some people did. Also didn't really think it was Gods Gift to Hollywood. It was entertaining and had some interesting points to make. The anime influence on the plot (and action) was more apparent here than in the first movie.
The niflheim.net domain used to belong to somebody else. You can tell, because of the volume of spam mail that is sent to addresses that no longer exist. Spam is also sent to addresses that never existed in the first place, or to no address at all.
All of this is considered “unrouted mail” by my host. I dump it all into a special account that I set up for this purpose, with a 5 meg disk quota, and never check. (I had cleaned it out once, a month or so after I set it up, but ignored it ever since.) The idea was that it would eventually fill up and start bouncing.
It turns out that the mail software ignores the disk quota, so the mailbox just continues to grow. One day last week, I decided to check the account. It has been accumulating mail ever since.
10953 messages.
50 megs of my host's disk space.
All of it, every last piece, spam. I do not like Green Eggs and Spam. I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
Then it hit me. Recent versions of Mozilla contain Bayesian junk mail filters. (Mail filters that can be trained on the specific mail that you get to recognize what most frequently distinguishes good from bad mail.) 10953 spam messages is a lot of training.
Now, I know that the Bayesian filter in Mozilla isn't the best in the world yet. And I don't actually get a lot of spam at my real email addresses anymore (I've been canny about posting my addresses, and I can change them on a whim.) But on a lark, I decided to download and clear out all of that mail, and punch it through the filters. Several hours later (even on a cable modem … mail servers are slow) my junk mail training file was 11000 messages richer (I also marked all of my email list and ordinary email as Not Junk). The training file is 2.6 megs. Does it help?
Well, before I trained it, it let through all 11000 messages. Afterwards, it lets through 1 or 2 pieces out of each batch of 50-70 spam mails. <=2% false negative rate. Since I went through and classified all of my known good mail, it hasn't yet incorrectly marked one of those. 0% false positive rate (so far).
Since mozilla's bayesian filter doesn't work as well as it most, these numbers are likely to improve as the software gets improved.
This is a list of the Extensions that I've found most useful for Firefox. Most of them can be accessed through the “Get more extensions” link on the Firefox Extension panel.
Adblock - Lets you easily block ads from certain sites
BBCode - Adds context menus for formatting stuff using BBcode, HTML, etc.
Bookmarks Synchronizer - Allows you to upload bookmarks to a web or ftp server and synchronize another machine with that file.
Copy Plain Text - Copies text without the formatting (for pasting into emails and such)
Downthemall - Download all the images on a page (or linked from a page) en masse. Could also be used for other file types, I suppose.
Flashblock - Replaces embedded Flash with a button that you can click to turn on the flash (I got tired of noisy Flash adds)
Forecastfox - Weather Forecasts embedded in the browser
IE View - Loads the current page in IE, for those odd cases where something won't work in Firefox.
Image Zoom - Allows you to zoom and fit images
Linkification - Surrounds plain text URLs with anchor tags.
MiniT - Allows you to drag-rearrange tabs.
Mozilla Archive Format - Allows you to save web pages as a single-file .mhtml archive, similar to internet explorer's. (Grab this from maf.mozdev.org instead of the regular extension page, as that one is out of date.)
MR Tech About - Puts some useful stuff in the Help menu.
MR Tech Local Install - Various things to help install themes and
Extensions. (Sorting of installed Extensions by name, install extensions from disk, turning off the time delay, etc.)
No Script - Lets you choose which sites are allowed to use Javascript.
Nuke Anything - Lets you temporarily remove a specific object from a web page.
Outfoxed - A useful Social Network thingy. Lets you rate pages as you browse, and lets you also see ratings of your informers (your friends, and others you trust, ideally). Check out the Nutshell overview on the site for details.
PDF Download - Lets you decide whether to save a PDF or display it in a new tab (as PDF or HTML). This is helpful if you accidentally click on one because large PDFs tend to freeze the browser while they download and render.
QuicktabPref Toggle - I use this to get access to certain options (like forcing other applications to open links in a tab), not for the toggle feature.
Sage - RSS aggregator, used to view updates to sites like mine.
Smiley Xtra - A database of emoticons, categorized, in case you dislike the ones on a particular forum.
Tabbrowser Prefs - Puts a new entry in the Preferences for Tabbed Browsing
Tab X - Adds a close button to tabs. I have the TabX-Ultra version that leaves the main toolbar's “close tab” button intact.
Text zoom - Allows you to enlarge or reduce the text on a site. This extension is not configured correctly for recent Firefox installs, but it can be made to work with some trivial editing.
Tinyurl Creator - Makes tinyurl much faster, since it makes one and copies it to the clipboard.
HTML Validator - Probably not useful to anyone but web page developers. It checks the HTML of the pages you browse to make sure it is valid. Beware … this tends to screw up form buttons on some sites (like Google)
MediaPlayerconnectivity - This does nifty things to videos and such embedded in web pages. Such as let you view them in a standalone browser of your choice. I find it useful to avoid being stuck with a certain player size on gamespot and such.
EditCSS - another one for people who write web pages. This lets you alter the CSS of the site on the fly, so you can see what effect certain changes will have.
This article (PDF), written by one of the folks at Linden Labs, pretty much summarizes the philosophy that led to the development of Second Life.
I tend to agree, especially on the difference between MMO-style “crafting” and actual creation, and the fact that the latter is vitally necessary for any virtual reality system to truly succeed.
As an example, behold my first vehicle (It really flies, though I didn't write the scripting for that. I will eventually replace the existing script with my own, because a Recognizer is not really an airplane, and landing one that pretends to be an airplane is sort of painful ^_^)
Also, there was recently a spot on Fox News about SL, which you can watch online here (direct link) or here (see the thumbnail on the right sidebar).
So, the Apple iPhone.
It looked pretty cool, I admit. I might have bought one. But not now.
