Tom's Insights - Week of 11/5/01

Week of November 5th, 2001

Last Updated: October 26, 2001 19:28

Most Recent : October 9th
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Monday November 5, 2001

"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated..."

Greetings. Yes, busy busy busy. Instead of my daily routines getting simpler, recently they seem to be getting more complex despite my best efforts. Sigh. Life at Syroid Manor -- never dull, always interesting.

I'm starting to run out of viable excuses for my sporadic posts, so I won't make any. Be creative. Think up your own and fill in the blanks as appropriate. Sorry. I'm doing the best I can with what I've got. If you bear with me for a bit longer, I promise to return to routine posts ASAP.

Last week I sucked down and installed the final release of RH 7.2. I wanted to see what -- if anything -- had been polished/fixed/updated since the latest RC/beta. Mmmm. Unfortunately, the news is not good. On the wireless PCMCIA networking front, a key config file is still not created during installation (/etc/pcmcia/network.opts -- thankfully, I had a copy backed up to a remote drive). Furthermore, despite two days of efforts, I could not make PCMCIA/wireless networking with my Linksys card and PCMCIA-CS-1.3.29. I tried with kernel enabled PCMCIA, then without. Nada. And that folks, is a Grand Bother. I've had to leap through a lot of hoops over the past two or three months to make Linux work on my notebook, but I've yet to be stumped as far as getting wireless networking up and running. RH 7.2 stumped me. It seems RH are up to familiar tricks, releasing stuff before it's fully cooked and/or messing up working code between the final RC and boxed product. One of the security newsletters I subscribe to are brimming over with caustic comments regarding 7.2 -- apparently it was released with error-ridden kernel headers. Which translates into programs that install and run well as long as they're installed from the RH CD's, but if you make it a habit to download source and roll your own apps, you're in for a world of hurt and frustration.

Following close on the heels of my frustrations with RH 7.2, I downloaded redmondlinux.org's latest RC (beta 3?), burned the ISO's, and tried to install. Nope. No joy. The installer is clearly Caldera based, totally GUI, and does not recognize my video chipset. Hence, installation is a no-go. The configuration screens are unreadable. I know there's a way to add a startup option that triggers a text-only install routine, but I forget the exact placement and number of voodoo dolls required. Oh well...

You'd think at this point I would have paid my bill and moved on. Not so. That would, of course, be an intelligent approach. I'm not so blessed.

On Saturday I received a copy of Win XP Pro. I've heard a lot of pros and cons regarding Redmond's newest OS; given that I'm not normally pre-disposed to second-hand rhetoric, I decided to "give it a go" and see what was hype and what was substance. Mmmm (again). Overall, I like XP. I haven't evaluated security issues; I'm talking useability, and the new GUI. We'll do the "pretty" aspect first. Win XP definately sports a cleaner, crisper interface. Icons are noticeably more intricate and better looking. Fonts are sharp and crisp due to XP's inherent "ClearType" technology.

Now for the bad news. Don't expect wireless networking to work out of the box -- at least for Linksys adapters. They're working on it (Linksys have announced that XP drivers are due out "mid-November"), but I'm a bit surprised that with a product as hyped as XP, key vendors like Linksys do not have certified drivers ready to go.

Actually, my efforts to get my wireless card working followed a twisted and weird trail. I tried to do a clean install of Win XP on Saturday. Could not do so with the CD I had, so I wiped my HD, formatted it from a DOS/boot/ME disk, then installed XP clean. The wireless configuration did not protest, worked fine for about 8 hours, then slowly crapped out to the point where I couldn't access dick. Special. A degenerating device driver?? So I re-installed Win2K, built my base program install up to a workable point, mirrored my installation with DriveImage so I could return to a "know-good" point quickly (thanks for the reminder, Gary!!), then upgraded this installation to XP. Wireless failed to work from the get-go. Mmmm. Everything else works, including my built-in 10/100 Ethernet connection -- just no wireless. I installed Linksys' configuration utility, and the adapter is communicating with the base station, it's just not moving any bits or bytes when it does. Cosmic. The sad part of all this is I've become tremendously spoiled over the course of the last few months. I love to sit on the couch, check email, listen to CNN out of the corner of my mind, and "be around" for Landon and/or Danielle. I'm definitely bitten by the flexibility of wireless. It has, in short, changed my life and the way I do business. All of which translates into the fact that when I don't have wireless access, I'm crabby and I think that somehow my computing experience is incomplete...

Much to do; lots to report. I'll do my best to catch everyone up throughout the course of the week.

Danielle had a tooth pulled tonight. Leah was there, and said she was a trooper over the whole incident.

Landon continues to grow like a weed and expand his vocabulary in bits and spurts. Fun.

I've been evaluating Macromedia's HomeSite 5 HTML editor for the last few days (30 day trial available from Macromedia). So far, I'm impressed. Solid product. Lot's of features that don't get in your face, and lots of depth for those looking for an "everything plus the kitchen sink" approach. More as I learn more.

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Thursday November 8, 2001

It snowed yesterday. It snowed A LOT -- 12" best guess. We lost phone (and DSL, as it comes in on the phone line) connectivity for most of the day. DSL is back up; phone is still spotty. On one hand it was disconcerting to be out of touch with the world. On the other hand, it was kinda nice. Leah and I chatted for a good two hours without interruption.

I continue to hack on Windows XP. As noted, I have no wireless connectivity, which is a pain of major proportions. Plugging this sucker in every timec I want to surf or check mail is suddenly so unnatural. I've officially become spoiled by seamless and portable computing. But I press on in the name of science...

XP is, so far, working as advertised. I did find a "flaw" yesterday, however. After 3 months, my quest for a fully functional DVD drive has finally been resolved. Last week I had a lengthy conversation with a real live person at Dell and explained the problems I've experienced. She called me back within 15 minutes and explained they were shipping me a drive that fit in my removable drive bay rather than the fixed bay. It arrived yesterday. I plugged it in (XP doesn't protest like 2000 does when you hot-swap drives), and inserted a DVD. The OS immediately recognized it for what it was and installed the "InterActual" player. But the player barfed at my screen resolution (1600x1200). I installed WinDVD and everything worked as advertised. Mmmmm.

I continue to enjoy my explorations of HomeSite 5. Excellent and highly configurable HTML editor. Recommended.

Off to work for me... I'll check in later. Now to "Sync" this file with Hydras and check mail.

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Friday November 9, 2001

I now have wireless connectivity thanks to Jon Hassell. He wrote me after I posted Thursday -- and get this -- suggested I enable DHCP on my network, set the Linksys card to use DHCP, then switch back to fixed IP. It worked. A cosmic, totally illogical process that works. I'll be damned. I have no range with this driver, though. With Win2K I could easily sit on the back porch and work; now even moving from the living room to the kitchen table causes a signal loss. Oh well. The Linksys XP drivers should be out next week sometime.

I LIKE HomeSite 5. I've putting it through its paces all week, chewing up, and spitting out at least two dozen HTML and XML docs. The editor is solid; you can set the program to automatically validate tags, automatically supply a closing tag, and I do believe somewhere deep in its menu structure is macro that automatically makes coffee for me.

The snow is gone. It melted yesterday when the temperatures rose from around -2C to a balmy +5C. And in the course of this latest wild weather swing, our back alley has returned to a sea of sticky mud and ooze. Of course the alley is the first place the kids headed this morning. Sigh. Somebody should write a research paper on the apparent magnetic field that draws children to mud. The deeper, the stickier, the more attraction. Yet another cosmic phenomena.

Tomorrow I'll take some time and annotate some the things I like about XP, and some of the things I do not. I can't be bothered tonight. Long week.