One of the things I enjoy doing occasionally, is witting from a “fake perspective.” Usually this consists of me picking a stereotypical character and using lots of made up phrases and words to get the point across. Its typically pretty funny, and at the same time fun to do. I heard about the TSA blog and “Blogger Bob” a few weeks ago and I thought it was fake. I thought it was someone doing exactly what I described. But it turns out it is a “serious” blog, by the actual TSA. It was specifically this post that was discussed on digg and various other internet outlets that led me to believe it was fake. Also realize, that until today, I hadn’t actually been to the site to see that URL was tsa.gov.
It got me thinking it would be fun to start a fake blog that was a fake a character and discussed the troubles of his/her life. Being realistic though, I know I don’t have the time for it. However, I’m thinking about making it a category on this blog and occasionally doing an “out of character” post. We’ll see what the ol’ Smitty brain comes up with.
So I read this article this morning
Dell: Decent Customer Service Is Going To Cost Extra
The over-and-under of the article is that similar to the XPS support, if you want to talk to someone in America its going to cost you extra. The biggest problem I have is that as a company you have just admitted that support in India is not the same quality as that in North America. I know that is not suprising to the user base, but it is a little surprising for a corporation to admit that they are employing lower quality support. Also the direct quote that gets me is this:
The technicians are empowered to address a comprehensive range of issues across the breadth of Dell’s product line.
So the implication there is that normal customer service (in India) is not empowered to address a comprehensive range of issues across the breadth of Dell’s product line. If you can’t afford to offer quality service, I don’t want to do business with you.
So before I start let me just state my bias here, so that it is clear. If I had not chosen to pursue a career in the field of engineering, I would have likely been a biologist or a marine biologist. Aside from marine biology, the biggest thing I was always interested in where the poles and Alaska. So I would say for a laymen, I have a half-way decent understanding of Alaska and its ecosystem.
For the last few weeks, The Discovery channel has been advertising their Expedition Alaska special program. I assumed that with the popularity of Deadliest Catch that they were trying to capitalize on the recent surge of interest in that area. That was fine with me, as my previously discussed interest in the area.
So without disucssing the whole plot line of the show, I'll just say that the premise was that a group of 6 different "scientists" that were going to study various parts of Alaska…for signs of climate change. Uh what? Yeah, the whole show is about how Alaska is going to tell them if Climate change is taking place.
The short version of this rant goes like this:
Expedition Alaska, what you've just showed is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever seen. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in the viewing audience is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
The whole show was bascially just "shock value" crap and no data to indicate climate change was occuring or that it had caused any of the issues. I don't want to sound like one of those "global warming is fake" people, but I have a hard time believing you can study something related to the scale of the earth for less than 20 years and claim to completely understand it.
The scale of some much of this "research" is the same as saying "last July, I saw people in Wisoconsin wearing shorts and t-shirts, nearly 4 monthes later there was 3 feet of snow on the ground. I conclude we are entering an ice age."
Here is some lube science, I think you might need it.
My non-gaming Ubuntu system seems to be down for the count. At first I thought it was a hardware failure in the hard drive. I ordered a replacement and quickly saw the same behavior. I did some testing and it started to seem like it was a power issue. If I removed the hard drive from the power bus, the system would boot up and run. When I would connect the hard drive the system would fail POST. I swapped power supplies. It seemed like that did the trick. I had the system back up and Ubuntu reloaded on the new hard drive. I was just about to put it back under my desk when it started locking up again. I did some further testing and examination and now the system refuses to pass POST. At this point, I suspect the mother board or processor are hosed.
The system had a pretty good run. It was the first serious gaming system that I built after college. I think I built it in 03/04. It took me through COD, COD2, COH, and WoW. After retiring from gaming, the system made an excellent “bitch box.” Originally running Windows XP. I used it for all my browsing and office work. Eventually, I moved to a dual boot setup with Ubuntu and XP. After about a month of two of no longer booting Windows I took the full plunge into Linux. Now, I’m finding myself very lost without it.
I’m thinking about replacing the system with a shuttle rig. Using some current parts(memory, HDD, DVD) from the dead system, I can probably be back up and running for right around $300. Running a 2.0gHz Core 2 Duo. It also gives me some room to eventually upgrade my RAM and add a PCI-E graphics card. There isn’t a lot of upgrade path with a shuttle rig, but at the same time the box I’m replacing has also outlived its upgrade path. In order to upgrade that system, I would need to buy a new PSU, mobo, and processor. In the end I think that would probably cost me more.
In any event, I think its going to be a few weeks before I drum up the funds for the rig. So until then, I’m a sad panda.
So as a recent nerdery project, I decided I would like to get Xubuntu running on an old iBook G3 700Mhz we have at work. There has been a lot of hype in the tech world about sublaptops like the Asus EEE. I thought it might be fun to create something similar with the iBook. I also figured if I could get Wireshark (used to be ethereal) running on it and maybe Eclipse. A dedicated box that would just be setup for development would be handy.
The Specs:
CPU: 700MHz G3 PPC
Memory: 384M
HD: 20G
USB: x2
Display Size: 12″
Wired Lan: Yes
Wireless Lan: No (but there is an expansion port for one under the keyboard, which I found impressive).
Overall I got it up and running Xbunutu and I’m honestly impressed. I did hit two snags in the setup.
1.)Ubuntu publishes two different versions of the PPC distros. The LiveCD and the “alternate CD”. They don’t explain very well on the download page what the alternate CD is or how it is different. They just state it might be better for lower horsepower machines. So the difference is that the alternate CD is just a “Standard” Linux installer. You fire it up, pick your language, format your drive, install Linux, setup the network, setup your user and boot to Linux. You do all these same things with the LiveCD but you do it from an image of Ubuntu running X out of memory. So I would advise anyone doing this, to use the alternate CD. The LiveCD would not work for me on the iBook. It would uncompress the Kernel and start to load and then the machine seemed to hang. The alternate CD booted up perfectly and installed with no problems.
2.) After the install, during the first boot up the machine seemed to hang at the splash screen. After about a minute it bumped me out of start up to a busy box prompt. A quick google showed this problem could be fixed by running “modprobe ide_core” at the busy box prompt and then “exit”. This resumed the boot process with the “ide_core” module loaded. I still is not clear to me what this module does, but adding “ide_probe” to
/etc/initramfs-tools/modules has fixed the issue on boot up. I still haven’t found any good documentation on what ide_core does or what it is responsible for.
The back end of the blog was pretty hosed after the recent upgrade. I had used a couple of plugins to help manage the backend better and with the current changes they got borked. I was able to nuke them and get back to the default backend. I've been using Firescribe quite a bit anyway so I think the default backend is good for now.
