This post is basically inspired solely by the fact that I have bought a new keyboard and need an excuse to do a lot of typing on it. After finally having enough of interference, non-responsiveness and battery changes, I ditched by former wireless keyboard and mouse combo and bought a couple of new ones - a Logitech M500 corded mouse and an Illuminated keyboard. It has a nice, laptop-style key feel with just a little more travel, with the added bonus of keys that light up for use in a dark room.

I love it. Ubuntu picked it up without a problem, all keys working just fine. Windows detected it as well, but after installing drivers for it, insisted on a reboot. Some things never change. I didn’t bother installing the setpoint software that is included - no need for it in my opinion.

As a progress update on my dual-boot exploits, there have been good points and bad about windows.

The good:

The bad:

I think I’ll be dual-booting for a while longer, especially since MythTV will not be replaced any time soon. It has been interesting though, and I am learning the interface and all. I have noticed a lot of fixes since the Release Candidate that I was running last year on the other PC.

Well, not complete. But I did buy the Windows 7, 3 user family pack for $209. I’ll be installing it on the wife’s PC today. I also put it on as a dual boot on my ubuntu system, for a laugh. I managed to get it to activate, using method #2 on this page, from Paul Thurrott’s site. And after windows thoughtlessly overwrote the MBR on my drive, I even got my grub 2 menu back, following this excellent guide on the ubuntu forums.

One other thing I had to do on the ubuntu side of things is set the system clock to be local time, not UTC. I had to go edit the file /etc/default/rcS, and change the value UTC=yes to UTC=no. They seem to be playing OK together now. It’s just a shame that windows can’t see the data on my ext4/ext3/XFS partitions. I don’t know if I can be bothered putting my data on an NTFS partition yet, so it can be seen by both systems. I’ll see.

Well. I’m having a crisis of faith. Looking at going back to the dark side. Windows 7 Home Premium, 3 user pack for ~$210 depending on where you shop. With the Release Candidate soon to expire in the next few months on the wife’s PC, I have to either put XP back on it, or move to Windows 7. The 3 user pack is a good deal, normally it’s about $160 for a single user, but it is going to be very short-lived. It only ran a couple of months even in the USA. There’s a sense of urgency to this.

My wife couldn’t care less what OS is running (as long as it’s windows), so there’d be no problems with putting XP on, in her view. Realistically, I just need to get a decent backup program for it, because the Win7RC one is pretty good, while the standard XP one is rubbish by comparison. The only issue with the RC is while it is scheduled to run every Saturday at 3am, it seems to insist that the next scheduled time is December 30, 1899. Back in the days of steam-powered computers. I assume it is fixed in the release version of Windows 7.

Over the last few days and weeks, running linux has started to wear me down a bit. It is such a battle sometimes, to do stuff that would be simple in Windows or even OSX. Yesterday I wanted to install Google SketchUp – no native linux client, so installed through Wine. Go to run it, crashes straight away. Then it’s off trawling forums and web searching for fixes, workarounds, all of that. Then there’s flash player. Still buggy, still get sound lagging behind so speaking is out of sync. There’s always more work, a lot of the time. F-Spot is a piece of crap, crashing all the time. Picasa is a half-arsed effort, just a windows program running under wine, really. Just doesn’t look right.

But still, there are aspects of linux that I love. MythTV is the killer app, in my opinion. There is nothing in the proprietary software world that is so capable and unrestricted, with nothing locked down by media companies. I would miss that the most if I went back to windows. Being able to scroll anywhere without first clicking in the window is something I wish windows had, when I’m using it at work.

Anyway, I’ll keep thinking about it, and pick it up on boxing day if I decide to. Otherwise, I could put that money towards hardware. I need a new screen, which I’ll get regardless, but that $200 could go towards a solid state hard drive. Mmmm, fast.

In the couple of months since the last folding@home performance post, my priorities have shifted somewhat. I am now after maximum stability, lifespan and minimum power usage. I’m still using the Q9300 with the linux SMP folding client, but I have now dropped its speed back to stock and even undervolted the chip a little. As a result, as I am typing this, the power draw of the system, monitor, modem and router fluctuates between 73 and 80 Watts, even with folding using all cores. That’s pretty impressive. Power bills were just getting a bit too high for my liking, especially since I am paying a bit extra for wind power. The other power usage drop has been the switch from electric to gas hot water - that made for a big difference in off-peak usage, which has now dropped to zero.

The RAM in both PCs is now 4GB as well, mainly because it is so damn cheap. I dropped the other PC back to stock speed as well, and stopped the notfred linux folding client that was running in a VM. I tried experimenting with having the machine sleep after a certain period, but with no success. I couldn’t wake the machine back up without holding the power switch in to shut it right off, then switching it on again. It took a while to come back up, too, especially if it was reading 4GB of RAM contents back off the drive. So I gave up - it’s set to spin down the disk, and that’s about it. It’ll do. Even with just my Quad core PC running at stock, it still gets ~4400 points per day in F@H, not too shabby.

While on the subject of the second machine, the Windows 7 RC is looking unlikely to stay on there very long. I had two choices for when the Release Candidate expires: buy a full version of Windows 7, or put XP back on. Well, there is the third choice of Ubuntu, but I can’t seem to get approval from the Mrs on that one. Might have to dual boot…

With the price of Win 7 looking to be a couple of hundred dollars, I thought I’d rather spend that money on a hardware upgrade that will actually make a difference in performance. So I’ll probably pick up a Solid State Disk drive in the next month or two, with possibly a dual boot, XP/Ubuntu setup. It should fly. And it means I’m not giving any of my money to Microsoft.

To follow up from my previous post, as predicted, after 10 weeks I have only made 15 posts to Twitter. Some stuff from people I follow is kind of interesting, but it’s mostly filler. At least the spam followers have dried up a bit now.

I guess I’ll keep going with the account, but it’s hard to come up with something worthwhile. Plus, 140 characters is so damn limiting - most posts there look like gibberish with all the abbreviations and shortened links. Is that really the future of the internet?

I’ve just changed the photo for the masthead of this blog, to a picture I took at the Otway Fly treetop walk. At least I know what this picture is, rather than the mystifying old one, which I think was a balcony or something.

I recently had an issue with my backup server that runs xubuntu, in that it would refuse to update any programs installed on it. Whenever I tried to run apt-get update, or apt-get upgrade, it would just return a segmentation fault. Actually the exact thing it would return was “Segmentation faultsts… 0%”, as if it overwrote whatever was meant to be there.

I did a bit of a search and found a fix that worked for me, and was pretty simple. There are two files that apt creates, that somehow got corrupted. On my system, they are called pkgcache.bin and srcpkgcache.bin, and they live in /var/cache/apt. I tried moving them to another directory, and re-running apt-get update, and what do you know, it worked! I later deleted them, as there was no need for the old copies.

For those who don’t want to move the files before deleting them (I recommend that you at least copy them somewhere else, just in case), the command is:

sudo rm -i /var/cache/apt/*.bin

The command should ask you to remove two files - it does in my case. I chose to put the “i” switch in the rm command just to be sure to prompt you before deleting.

I recently did a bit of switching motherboards and CPUs between mine and my wife’s PCs. She got the Abit AB9 and Core 2 Duo E6300, I got the Gigabyte P35-DS3L and quad-core Q9300. Yes, I fared better :) . But my wife didn’t really give a rat’s about it anyway. To sweeten the deal, I installed a shiny new copy of the Windows 7 RC, which I am quite impressed with. Especially with the backup function of it - much improved over the clunky XP backup. With the upcoming free antivirus from Microsoft, they are nearly at the stage of releasing an OS that can almost wipe its own bum, rather than rely on a myriad of third-party software to perform basic system functions.

But I digress. Because what this post is all about is running the linux Folding@home SMP client under a virtual machine in Windows. I initially gave it a go when the quad-core was running XP, and installed two of the notfred folding images, running under VMWare player. Folding performance nearly doubled, from around the 2000 points per day the WinSMP client got, to around 4000ppd. The only drawback was that VMWare player only supports two virtual CPUs, requiring two instances to be installed. I always wanted to run it under linux natively with four cores, so I did the system swap. It was pretty trouble-free - just plug the hard drive with the install from the previous system into the new motherboard, and Ubuntu picked up nearly all the changes in its stride. I had to do a bit of dicking about to get the network up and running again, but it was all good.

I have since overclocked the Q9300 to 3GHz, running the FSB at 400MHz rather than the standard 333. Folding now gets ~5500ppd from this machine, combined with the Win7 E6300 which gets around 2000ppd, I am now consistently over 7000 points per day, and climbing up the rankings.

The machine is running like a dream. Just figuring out now what the next upgrade will be: a new screen that can show full HD (1920x1080) or a solid state hard drive. Decisions, decisions.

OK, I’ve decided to join twitter and see if I’m one of the 60-odd percent of users who forget about it after a month. I mainly joined to follow other users, rather than post my own content. Anyway, I’ll see what comes of it.

Check it out here.

OK, it’s time for a change in direction. This is just a personal blog now. The grand plan was to turn it into some sort of tech site, something like a poor man’s How to Spot a Psychopath, but without the technical knowledge - and to get enough readers to support a few google ads on the site. I was aiming to make a bit of extra cash, maybe enough to pay for the internet bill each month. I had a trial of that, as mentioned in an earlier post, and earned a grand total of $0.00. From zero clicks on the ads. Fair enough too, because I rarely click on ads either. But in order to get visitors, I was trying to write for a large audience on topics I thought would get views.

All that achieved was to get on to google for a few search terms, and a ludicrous proportion of those were for a photo I took of a rather pointless Sony billboard. I could start pimping the blog around different sites, but I have figured that it would then pressure me to keep making updates. And frankly, I don’t have enough to say to make a daily post.

So now, I am going to write for a readership of one - myself. Sure, there’ll be the odd bit of blogspam with a youtube link every now and then, but I have yet to sort out a purpose for this site. All I can think of at the moment is to keep my writing skills up. English ended up being my best subject at high school, though not my favourite. My forte was spelling. In the early years though, I just somehow knew how to spell correctly. Putting those correctly-spelled words into paragraphs that people wanted to read took a lot longer. And now, over the years, I have noticed my skills dropping off. My job rarely requires any lengthy blocks of prose, and so my abilities have atrophied somewhat. Adding to that is nearly a decade of reading crap in web forums from people who consider spelling and grammar a luxury, and I feel that I have become almost dyslexic. I sometimes see spelling errors where there are none.

So I shall continue to tap away here, honing my skills, writing about whatever pops into my head. And greetings to those of you who have found this blog through google, although you have probably not read this far and have, in fact, hit the back button by now. Never mind. I’ll live.