Category: Computing

I have several road trips coming up in the next few weeks (LA, Sacramento), and I wanted to burn myself some MP3 CDs with good driving music. Unfortunately, when I ripped the bulk of my CDs into iTunes, I did so using AAC encoding. I guess I was trying to optimize space. Oops.
Anyway, yesterday I created a “Smart Playlist” in iTunes with the following properties:

• “Kind” includes “AAC”
• “Kind” does not include “protected”

This gave me a playlist with 7,467 entries. I selected the whole list, and told iTunes to convert them from AAC to MP3. This will create 7,467 new items, of course, so when everything checks out I’ll delete the AAC files.
So far it’s been running for about 14 hours on my 1.83GHz Mac Mini, and the iTunes folder on my external 1TB drive has grown to 155GB. Conversion speed seems to be 45-50x…
(And yes, I did back up my iTunes library!)
UPDATE: The final glitch was tricky: how could I use the smart playlist to remove tracks from my iTunes library? “Delete” simply removes the tracks from the playlist! The answer was to select all tracks in the playlist, right-click, choose “Get Info“, and change the “Artist” for every track to “Zzzzzzzzzzz“. This took a while to run… Then I went back to my library, chose “Zzzzzzzzzzz” from the Artist list, selected all of the corresponding tracks, and deleted them. There has to be an easier way… such as an Automator script?

One of the side effects of switching digital cameras has been that stuff takes longer. More pixels per picture (and new modes that generate more images) means that it takes a lot more time to do even basic photo management. And I’m not actually very well equipped to handle this: for perfectly good reasons, it turns out that although I have quite a few computers, they are all pretty puny by current standards. I have a Mac Mini and a MacBook Air, both with CPUs in the 1.6GHz range, both with fairly slow disks. The MacBook Air has 2GB of RAM, the Mini just 1GB. (The fastest machine I own, my accursed HP DV4-2045DX laptop, just went back for service – AGAIN!)
So naturally my thoughts have been turning to getting some horsepower. A Mac, of course – that HP has cured me of any interest in Windows. I figured that I wanted something like this:

• At least 3GHz 2+ core CPU
• 4GB RAM
• 500GB HDD
• Superdrive

My first impulse was to simply get a new Mac Mini. However after maxing out all of the options, I got:

• 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo
• 4GB RAM
• 500GB HDD
• SuperDrive
• Wireless Mouse and Keyboard
• Total price: $1187

That felt quite a bit more expensive (and slower) than I’d expected. Out of curiosity, I looked at the minimum configuration iMac:

• 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo
• 4GB RAM
• 500GB HDD
• SuperDrive
• Wireless Mouse and Keyboard
• 21.5 inch LCD
• Total price: $1199

So instead of buying a Mac Mini I can spend an extra $12 and get an iMac with a 15% faster CPU and a stunning 21.5 inch LCD. Something doesn’t make sense here….

I just posted this one-star review to Amazon.com:

I bought my DV4-2045DX at Best Buy, on a whim. Soon after I got it, I headed to England for a family visit, and I decided to take this laptop along instead of my usual MacBook Air. Bad idea. Soon after we arrived, the machine began to malfunction. The symptoms were fairly consistent: I would close the lid (configured to “sleep”), and soon afterwards the logo would light up and the fan would come on. If the machine was unplugged, this would drain the battery in a few hours. Opening the lid did not wake the machine: the screen was blank, the keyboard unresponsive. More seriously, the power button wouldn’t work: holding it down for 5 or 10 seconds wouldn’t cause the machine to power down. The only way to stop it was to unplug it and remove the battery. After this, restarting was hit or miss. Usually, the machine would blink the CapsLock and NumLock lights in a pattern indicating “CPU failure”.
I struggled through the trip, and when I got home I called HP. They sent me a prepaid FedEx box to return the machine for service. I did so, and monitored the status of the service order on their website. For a couple of weeks it indicated that they were waiting for a part to repair it. Finally it was returned, two days ago. The service slip indicated that the problem had been reproduced during tests, and the CPU had been replaced.
I booted it up, loaded some software, and closed the lid. The problem returned in a few minutes: fan on, catatonic, wouldn’t power down, “CPU failure” after pulling the battery. I called HP, and they gave me a new service number. I’m still waiting for the next step.
Perhaps this is just a lemon, but the “waiting for a part” is suspicious. It suggests that this may be a common problem Hopefully HP will replace it this time. (I wouldn’t mind a refund, but that may be too much to hope for.)

What with travel to China, and travel to the UK, and work, and holidays, it’s been a little hectic. So let me sip on this excellent Old Pulteney single malt from Wick, and catch up on a few items.

• A month ago I blogged about the new HP laptop that I’d got for doing software development. I took it with me to the UK, since I knew I would need to be doing photo and video work which aren’t feasible on my work laptop. Unfortunately it started acting up while I was there, failing to come out of sleep or hibernate. When this happened, the disk and motherboard were powered up, but the screen was blank. Occasionally I’d see the CapsLock and NumLock lights blinking in a code that meant “CPU failure”. I nursed it through the trip, and checked in with HP when I got back. Yesterday I shipped it back for “repair”, which probably means simply replacing it. Fortunately I still have my Macs.
• We went to see “Up In The Air” today. Brilliant. Great writing, excellent acting. The interplay between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga was simply delightful. Highly recommended.
• That trip to England was hectic and unsettling in many ways. Lots of last-minute changes of plans, both family (my mother’s degree) and business. Yes, it was great to get together with family and friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in 40 years. (Sorry I missed you, Jenny!) But there were two quiet moments that stand out. The first was visiting Ely Cathedral, just before sunset, with the choir practicing for a concert. And then on our way up to visit my mother for the last time before we left, we drove through Windsor Great Park, and pulled over for a moment to enjoy the wintry landscape, with Windsor Castle just beyond the trees.
• When I got my iPhone 3G, I decided that the white model looked nicer than the black. That may have been a mistake. I’ve noticed a number of hairline cracks, at the corners of the connector cut-out, next to the mute switch, and along the sides. Apparently this is a known problem. It’s not clear whether all of the iPhones crack, or if it’s just that the cracks are only visible with the white plastic. I wonder if Apple will replace it.
• During the short break between returning from China and departing to the UK, I managed to finish ripping all of my CDs into iTunes on my Mac Mini. (Many of them had been in storage, and I’d only just retrieved them.) The grand total: 14,522 items from 1,228 albums, performed by 2,082 artists. They occupy 78.46GB of a little WD USB hard disk (and yes, I back it up!) and to play every track would take 52 days. I know it’s not an extraordinarily large collection, but ’tis all mine. And I must confess that I find the idea of 52 days of music just a little bit disconcerting.

From El Reg:

According to November 2008 stats (PDF) from Datamonitor – the international research firm headquartered in London – the world is still running 200 billion lines of COBOL code and about 5 billion lines are added to live systems every year. Believe it or not, between 1.5 and 2 million developers are still working with the 50-year-old programming language.

(Yeah, I’m looking at you, Ruby.)

Here’s a nice introduction by Todd Huff to the topic of graph databases: what they are, and why they’re relevant. The author starts by trashing all of the candidates:

So relational database can’t handle complex relationships. Graph systems are opaque, unmaintainable, and inflexible. OO databases loose [sic] flexibility by combining logic and data. Key-value stores require the programmer to maintain all relationships. There, everybody sucks 🙂

And then Todd gets into a nice discussion of one graph database, Neo4j. He cites a piece comparing Neo4j with Hadoop. Hadoop’s great for shallow data reductions, like log processing, but really bad for deep relationships.
And don’t just read this piece; bookmark it! Because at the end, Todd includes an excellent bibliography of related articles.

Just over a month ago, I bought myself an Asus EeePC 901 netbook, and wrote a blog piece describing my first impressions, including the process of installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix as the default OS. And then I started using the device, and didn’t think much more about it.
A couple of days ago, a friend emailed me, and asked, “I haven’t read any comments about [the EeePC 901] from you. Do you like it? Was it all you thought it would be? Would you buy it again, now that you have experience with it?” Good questions.
First: yes, I like it. I’ve made two trips to California recently, for job interviews and apartment hunting, and each time I took the netbook with me. Previously I’d have toted my MacBook Air, and while I miss Mac OS X, Ubuntu is fine for the basics: email, web access, word processing, blogging, twittering, and so forth. And the netbook is half the size, with three times the battery life, at a fraction of the price.
The latest Ubuntu WiFi works just fine – it’s almost as easy as OS X. Audio is a bit of a pain: the function keys work sometimes, but not always, so I occasionally have to use the volume widget. More annoying is the fact that even when the volume is zero, audio output can still cause the speakers to buzz and click. Odd.
Sleep mode works – mostly. I normally close the lid to sleep, then open the lid and press the power button to wake it. However on several occasions the machine has failed to go into sleep mode; on one occasion I retrieved it from my backpack after a few hours to find that the battery was drained and the machine was really warm! After that incident, I have taken to watching the blinkin’ lights on the front edge of the machine when I put it to sleep; if it fails to go to sleep correctly (about 20% of the time) I open it up and reset it.
I’ve recently been thinking about what gear to take with me when I’m travelling to Shenzhen for Huawei. Both the MacBook Air and the EeePC 901 are plausible: both can support Skype, so that I can phone home. (However the Mac has better support for L2TP tunnelling with services like PublicVPN.com.) Neither machine has a DVD drive, however, so I bought a bus-powered USB external DVD drive from LG which I can use to watch movies on either system.
The size of the EeePC 901 has not proved to be a usability problem. The keyboard, trackpad and screen are all just fine. The only nit is that the space bar seems 1-2 mm too high, and it’s quite sensitive, so that I tend to catch it after typing bottom-row letters. However those who know me will confirm that I’m a lousy typist anyway, so it may just be me.
Would I buy it again? I think so – if not this unit, then an equally light netbook, like the Asus “Seashell”. But the combination of size, weight, and battery life is pretty damn compelling; the 8.9 inch netbook is my sweet spot. It’s a shame that manufacturers seem to be giving up on this configuration.
Several people have asked if I plan to install Mac OS X on the EeePC. Right now, the costs – complexity, problematic networking, screen size assumptions in some apps, GUI real estate usage – seem to outweigh the benefits, so the answer is no. Now if someone came up with a foolproof way of reading a Leopard installation DVD and writing a bootable SD card, I’d be interested in playing with it. Until then, Ubuntu will be just fine.
(And yes, I am composing this on the netbook. Not to do so would be silly, wouldn’t it?)

I’ve just acquired a new netbook, and I’ve been Twittering about my early experiences with it. Several of my regular blog readers asked me for more details, and so I thought I’d put together a detailed write-up. More below the fold…
Continue reading “Getting started with an Asus EeePC 901 and Ubuntu”

One of the unexpected benefits of being between gigs is that I’m going to be able to attend all of Cloud Slam 09:

A number of friends – Werner, Rob, and Hal, for example – are going to be speaking, and it looks like an interesting agenda. And in these cost-conscious times, a virtual conference is the way to go. Nevertheless, five days in front of my computer from 8am to 7pm (and that’s EDT, or GMT-4, so it’ll be 5am onwards here in Seattle); that feels a lot like work! I must be sure to stock up on my personal fuel.

Here’s a wonderful intro to a collection of videos and instructional materials from the 1970s on how to program and operate a DEC PDP-11. First, toggle in your loader, then boot from paper tape…. Very cool, in a retro way. I did a lot of PDP-11 stuff back in the mid-70s.
[The videos are accessible on YouTube; the website with the other materials appears to have been brought to its knees as a result of being mentioned in Boing Boing…]