I’ve updated the hardware page to reflect the new Latitude. In case you were wondering.

Things were looking a bit dreary a few days ago, as the nincompoops at Dell tech support were thinking my Latitude Cpt’s motherboard was cooked. Turns out they were wrong (did I predict that?), and that the issue was something to do with  the RAM–swapping half of the Gateway’s RAM (Wow! 32 MB!) solved everything, right up to CrunchBang throwing a kernel panic due to insufficient memory to boot off the CD with.

To be fair, Dell did question the RAM, but we agreed that 133mHz RAM would work in a 66mHz slot, which it did. And I, my techy cousin, and my programming teacher all agree that there is no such thing as “too fast” RAM. Go figure. I hate am not a big fan of hardware.

And now I’m not quite sure what to do with the darn thing. 32MB RAM and no hard drive does not an awesome laptop make, but since I’ve only put $5 into it I may hit up eBay for some parts (ooh! 20GB HD for <$30!). So I guess the ideal scenario would be to get Arch with Openbox running on it, with maybe a 4-6 GB Windows partition tucked away somewhere to satiate my love for StarCraft LAN gaming. Or if I only upgrade the RAM, I could maybe put Slax or Puppy or something on it…on second thoughts, maybe not.

…but it works!!

At a garage sale yesterday, I scored two laptops for $5 each, which excited me greatly. One’s a Dell Latitude CPT (one of those turn-of-the-millenia ones that advertises the fact that it works with Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98. The other one is a Thinkpad 390, which looks like a very well thought-out laptop (I’ve been craving a physical knob for volume, which it has, and it also has a slider for brightness, and fold out feet to tilt the keyboard). Unfortunately, neither came with a power supply (thus the $5, down from $10). But fortunately, my Inspiron’s power supply was the exact thing needed for the Latitude.

Testing the Latitude at the garage sale resulted in the three keyboard lights turning on, the NumLock light turning off almost immediately, the other two staying on, with the power light, for a few seconds, and then the entire thing turning off. No fan activity. No video. No happy “I’m a computer and I’m in use!” noises at all.

The guy at the garage sale pointed out that it had no RAM (ergo the Thinkpad, bought for parts). So I went home, and after a bit of a go-around with multiple laptops, screwdrivers, vice-grips, my sister’s boyfriend’s magical screw-removing talent and the Ubuntu Forums, I learned that the Thinkpad RAM was probably no good, and that even with known-good RAM from the Inspiron, the Latitude did the same thing.

So I called Dell’s tech support robot, which told me after five minutes of pain that I had to speak to a live technician.

The live technicians had some sparkling advice:

• “Are you sure the power supply’s good? Try it with a different plug.” If I don’t have a battery, and the power supply is making multiple lights turn on, odds are it’s good. Also, I’ve been using it with great success with the Inspiron.
• “Oh, your hard drive (borrowed from the Inspiron) may not be supported, we refuse to accept responsibility about it.” Um…I should still see the Dell logo, and be able to enter the BIOS…
• “That hard drive has Windows XP on it, which is licensed for different hardware–it won’t be authorized.” I pointed out that it also has Linux on it, and that regardless <see above>.

So it took me the better part of 90 minutes to learn that, probably, the motherboard was toast. Although their incompetence before telling me that has me kind of doubting anything that comes out of their mouths, so I’ll probably ask for a second opinion at school.

Oh–and you’re probably wondering why I had plural technicians. The first one gave me a line about how the hard drive and RAM weren’t supported, and I lost patience and said, very evenly (it’s no good getting visibly angry), how erroneous that was. She didn’t respond, or hang up, or put me on hold, or anything–I just had a live, quiet line. I said, “Hello” a few times, and then just hung up.

You gotta love OOP: classes inherit from superclasses, yet Superman inherits from man, superhero inherits from hero and Superbowl inherits from…game. It’s just like real life, guys!

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Please, forgive my sarcasm, OOP is the paradigm that I either love to hate, or hate to love, depending on the weather.

• Write a >500 lines ncurses application in Python.
• Master Vim.
• Properly install and use Arch Linux.
• Figure out why I stopped using Openbox, what can be done to fix the problems, and resume Openbox usage.
• Propose, write, submit and get paid for an article for Linux.com.
• Acquire basic GIMP skills.
• Figure out why I have so many problems with StarCraft in Wine–it’s very jerky, slow and stuttery.
• Figure out what the non-GUI-related holes in my Python knowledge are, and try to fill them.
• Vastly increase my Gaelic skills.

…if I get 5/9 done, I’ll be very happy.

A few months ago, David Pogue wrote about basic tech tips everyone should know. I share his frustration–I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched someone use a computer, and said “You know–if you just type in “tsmacdonald” and then press <Ctrl><Enter>, it’ll go to “http://www.tsmacdonald.com”.” Or, “Instead of going to Google, why don’t you just use the little search bar in the top-right corner of your browser.”

And now I get to play the part of the fool.

I’ve long been frustrated by trying to track down RSS feeds on websites. Sometimes there’s a huge “Subscribe!” button, and I’m fine. Sometimes there’s a little RSS logo or “Subscribe” text lurking somewhere, and it’s harder to find (I actually picked up the habit of doing <Ctrl><F><”Subscribe”> to see if I could find it faster). And sometimes I just can’t find it, period. A friend of a friend has a webcomic, and I ended up asking for a link to the RSS feed on the Facebook fan page.

Enter Firefox.

If a page has a feed, Firefox shows the RSS logo in the far right part of the address bar. Click on it, and you’re taken to Firefox’s standard subscription page, where you can pick your favorite feedreader. No pain, no frustration, and a minimum of time.

People often think that StarCraft is just about winning battles, and forget the human/alien side of the war. They also commit serious faux pases in dealing with their units. To remedy the situation, I’ve compiled the following list of tips to make everyone happier.

• When Terran and Zerg units are first trained/mutated, they don’t have very much experience. Build a few Supply Depots/Creep Colonies, and have your soldiers practice their marksmanship hitting them. Then, have your soldiers fight each other–don’t worry if some die, they must not have been as good, and would’ve dragged you down in battle.
• Protoss units warp in from Aiur, so they’re trained all right, but they don’t really know their way around your planet. Have them tour your base(s) extensively, and then take them on a hike through the countryside. If you skip these steps, they’ll be disoriented, and won’t fight well.
• Wraiths should always move in a squad of six, with a Battlecruiser commanding them. Otherwise they won’t have as good leadership or squad dynamics, and won’t fight as well.
• Vultures are too cocky. Send them to the corner of the map for punishment, and don’t do anything fun with them until they get less cheeky. It might go faster if you periodically punish them with Firebats.
• SCVs/Drones/Probes are way too unappreciated. Give them a 5-minute break every ten minutes–they deserve it!
• Any person (Terran) that dies deserves a funeral.  A funeral should be led by the highest-ranking unit you have, and everyone should attend. Don’t forget that there are three people per tank, and several hundred per Battlecruiser.
• All Zerglings are twins (they come out of the same egg, right?) and one twin should never be separated from the other for more  than sixty seconds until they’ve matured past the age of twenty minutes. You have no idea how traumatic that can be.
• Give Zealots one minute to sharpen their swords before and after battle.
• When you don’t look at idle units, they lie down and rest. At least 8 out of every 24 minutes should be dedicated to sleeping to keep everyone healthy, so make sure you stop the activities of units and scroll the screen away from them for the alloted time. Don’t wake them up prematurely!
• People with parasites/the plague/infestation/irradiation might be contagious. Take them out of battle and out of contact with everyone else, and then bring in several Medics to treat them. It might not look like the Medics are doing much, but they are–they’re just respecting the sick unit’s privacy.
• Dropship captains run out of gum every ten minutes. Take them to a Command Center–they’ll get more.

This may seem demanding, but just remember that the better the morale, the better the performance in a fight. Happy hunting.

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Note to people expecting this to be something Linuxy or Pythonic: I’m sorry. Sometimes I need to entertain myself mindlessly. And StarCraft does work very well under Wine.

Note to people who are very confused about their StarCraft strategies now: Read the title.

This blog really came into its own recently. After putting Jaunty on my new old computer, I was left with a very vanilla Ubuntu install. For the most part, I knew what packages I wanted, and where I wanted my panels, and so forth, but I’d completely forgotten stuff like getting the text on my panels to be white, or how to get ViGedit. Yes, I could’ve Googled around for a while, but instead I just got the instructions right off this blog (that would be the panel here and ViGedit here). Five minutes, problem solved.

I know it’s not really that big of a deal, but it’s nice when the work I put into something starts reciprocating (I’ll be happy if the ads cover the cost of the domain name. Very happy).

In other news, I’ve started a 20-page research paper about ReactOS, AROS, Haiku, FreeDOS and MenuetOS. Expect it to be done next year. I’ll keep you posted though.

My programming class just learned about methods a few weeks ago (I spent the time reminding myself why I like Python so more than Java–compare “def” with “public static void, no–String, no–Color, no–Aaaaah!”). Which means that for the last week we’ve had a group project, glued together by the members writing different methods, and somebody (aka “me”) gluing it all together into a coherent program.

It’s definitely not the awesomest thing in the world, but maybe somebody will find a terminal-based Hangman game entertaining for…a few minutes? Or else you get bonus points if you make a GUI, make it object-oriented, make it an applet, or port it to C or Python.

*Note: It reads words from “word.txt”, so edit that if you want to change the word list.

Zip

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As I said a few days ago, people have a tendency to complain when Linux doesn’t like their hardware. The converse of that, of course, is that people rarely speak up when things just work. Here’s an exception to the rule:

When I installed Jaunty on my spiffy new laptop, the following things happened:

• I got a pop-up window offering to install a driver for my wireless card (Broadcom driver). After a click, password and reboot, wireless worked.
• My entire screen worked at full resolution.
• I was greeted by that loud jungle drums sound when GNOME started up (sound works), reflexively, I hit the mute button on my keyboard, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked. So do the volume up/down buttons.
• In fact, I have no complaints whatsoever about hardware performance under Linux.

Yes, I know that just because I had success doesn’t mean everyone has success, but can we at least acknowledge  that many computers do work? Thanks.