HalfLoaded.com

So, I found a way to download, burn and install Fedora. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal but I’m roaming house to house until Rose and I find somewhere to live. I survived Iraq with Fedora 8 and I really wanted to try out the latest. I really enjoyed 8. It was stable and served me well on my journey.

But, being the geek I am, I couldn’t resist but install the latest and greatest. And, two days later, I have no regrets. I can honestly say that this is the best distribution I have tried. I used Ubuntu 8.10 as soon as I got home to see what had changed on the Debian front. I wasn’t all that impressed. While it operated smooth, it was missing a few bits which I really wanted. It was lacking the latest OpenOffice.org, Mono and Eclipse and it excluded the Empathy IM package which I wanted to try. It also didn’t have a ready-to-go NetBeans installation in its repositories.

There is really nothing much to say about the installation of F10. The installation was smooth and easy. Everything just worked. When it first booted, I noticed an immediate difference. Not only did the boot process look different, it also booted a lot faster than F8. This is due to the inclusion of Plymouth as a replacement for RHGB. I wasn’t sure why it looked so plain though. It was just a black screen with a progress bar across the bottom. After some searching, I found that adding “vga=0×318″ would allow a more graphical boot screen at 1024×768 with 16M colors. After the change and a subsequent reboot, it looked more like one would expect.

I would have to say that the folks working on NetworkManager have done an outstanding job. I didn’t my Kyocera KPC650 Verizon card with me during installation. However, it didn’t matter. I just plugged it in while working from the desktop and NetworkManager detected it and I was able to connect in seconds. This was much smoother than using wvdial or any of the other older methods. It is also considerably better than Windows approach.

After adding all my bits, I found that I didn’t need to reference any documentation to get my system 100%. It just was. Everything was there and working. I did add the RPMFusion repos to yum but this is as simple as clicking on the download on their site. Viola, libdvdcss, gstreamer-ugly, et. al. were all there and ready.

I do have one complaint with Gnome. The default image viewer application is just too simple. It doesn’t offer any photo touch up tools or anything. I really wish the folks at Gnome would begin pushing gThumb as the default. It is fast, lightweight and simple enough to use as the default. Yet, it offers those that want to crop or adjust color the tools necessary to get the job done.

In conclusion, I would recommend F10 to just about anybody. It is as stable as any release I have ever tried. It is also as bleeding edge as they come. Those two rarely come hand in hand. It’s nice to see they got it right with Fedora 10.

A really interesting post was placed on the Royal Pingdom blog that compared average load time and up time of operating system websites. The author took measurements from October 17th through November 17th. He used 16 Linux distributions, Apple.com and Microsoft.com. While his results were interesting, I felt a correlation between page size and load time should be included. I asked the author about this and he responded, “from a user perspective it doesn’t really matter what size the web page is. All that matters is how they experience the load time.”

I created the chart below based off his data and a current size snapshot of the same web pages. I used a Firefox add-on called lori or Line-of-request info to measure the complete size of the page including images and anything stored in cache.

The following two charts show the actual size of each page including scripts, images and html and their speed to load in KBps based on the data from Pingdom.

OS Vendor Website Speed (KBps)

OS Vendor Page Sizes (KB)

Conclusions

• Most popular, well funded operating systems have main pages which, regardless of size, have ample bandwidth
• If all linux sites are combined, the average speed is 130.35KBps. The median speed is 70.84KBps.
• I’m not sure if the Suse Enterprise site load time was measured correctly. It measures in at a whopping 388KB! However, its load time averaged 591ms giving it amazing results. I am wondering if the flash heavy website wasn’t being measured correctly in Pingdom’s tests.
• There seems to be a direct correlation between the funding, bandwidth and bloat of the website. I guess if you have all the bandwidth you could ever want, file size doesn’t matter. Unless you want to be nice to those of us with SLOW INTERNET!
• It is interesting to point out that even those with the slowest transfer speeds will still usually beat out the loading of the bloated pages from a users perspective. This is ultimately what really matters as pointed out by Pingdom.
• PC Linux OS could really do themselves a favor and get rid of some bloat!
• Apple and Ubuntu seem to be the most balanced between size, bandwidth and load times.

So, as most of those who know could have guessed, I’ve become the computer fix-it guy over here. Between our firewalls, proxies and lack of reliable phones, troubleshooting is made difficult. The past week, I have had to fix four computers. That makes nine complete format and OS reinstalls. Of those, all nine had Windows Vista installed. I’m not a Vista guru but it seems to me that Vista was rushed to market. In every case, the only resort available was to upgrade them to XP. I say upgrade because the stability and performance after moving them to XP was remarkable. Every Marine was glad to have the reboots snappy and system stable. Most of them just figured the slowness of their computers was due to the laptop and not due to the bloated operating system Microsoft released.

Only one of them I was able to salvage. I found a nice little hack to reset any users password using Linux and some intuitive programming. This is definitely one of those “must have”’s for the toolbox. The funny thing was, once I restored the Marine’s password, he asked if I could put XP on his laptop just because Vista was so annoying, bloated and slow.

I was also reading a story on how RedHat plans to capitalize on Microsoft’s release of Vista and the slowdown in the economy. I guess both of these type of events have, historically, led to the adoption of alternative software and operating systems. I really hope so. It would be nice to see some more competition out there. Mac has made a nice stand recently with their products. I guess we will see.

For me, I look forward to the late November release of Fedora 10. I’m going to be building up a new computer based on the “Ultimate Budget Box” on Ars Technica’s website. Sub-$500 isn’t bad for a full system with speakers, LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Plus, it only pulls 90 watts which will help with the electricity bill.

Anyway, I guess this is all wishful thinking.

The other day I was contacted by a Cpt Miller with the Connecticut Army National Guard (CTARNG). It turns out that the entire CTARNG uses the program I wrote called Active Directory UserMod Assistant. Cpt Miller needed some modifications made to make it work in his environment. I was able to help him out with his mods. It was a bit odd getting a request like that in Iraq. He didn’t know I was here but it was nice knowing that the program I wrote is helping out the Military.

The tricky part was coding without Active Directory and without any of my reference materials. The changes he was looking for were fairly trivial. I was just excited to do some actual work on a computer besides another roster in excel.

I’ve been having a strange issue with a PCMCIA card on my wife’s computer. Every time the machine is rebooted, you are required to “Scan for Hardware Changes” in device manager. It does not automatically detect that the PCMCIA card is still plugged in. After searching google high and low for a solution, I thought about seeing if I could write a script that would automatically run a hardware scan at logon. Here is what I came up with:

1. Download DevCon.exe from Microsoft: DevCon.exe
2. Extract either the 32-bit or 64-bit executable to C:\Windows\System32\
3. Create a file called: “devcon_rescan.cmd”
4. Put the following text in it:
   @echo off
devcon.exe /rescan
5. Copy the file to C:\Windows\System32\
6. Open the registry editor: Start –> Run –> regedit
7. Go To: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
8. Create a new string value called: DevCon
9. Right click the new value and select Modify. Type in the path to the batch file you made (i.e. “C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\devcon_scan.cmd”)

Hope this helps somebody.

I finally got around to the latest version of adumass. This was a major release as it fixed some pretty serious bugs and also greatly improved the UI and backend code. I also added a few functions for data validation. Thanks to all those that have helped and submitted support requests. The next version should have a translation pack for those users that don’t habla englais.

I’ve been constantly perplexed by the poor performance of the latest wordpress version. Today I finally got an error letting me know that my Bad Behavior plugin had banned me from logging in. At that point, I got pissed. My credentials were cached but for some reason, it identified me as a bad host. A quick rm -fdr on the damn directory fixed that. And, low and behold, all the performance issues I have been experiencing were fixed. Note to self, before bitching to your ISP, check all your bases to make sure it wasn’t something you were doing.

I was on my daily (actually, more like hourly) visit to slashdot and was amazed when I came across a story mentioning a school I had attended. The story was on the use of Wikipedia as a means for students to submit their research papers. This is one of those things that seems so obvious. Yet, this is the first time I have heard of it. What happens to normal term papers? They get graded, returned to the student and thrown in the recycle bin. If only more educators would embrace open sharing of knowledge and ideas, these type of ideas would be mainstream. There is a real hatred in academia of wikipedia, especially as a source. It always stuck me as odd. The whole premise of what wikipedia is and why it has become a staple in internet society seems to be much of what educators preach. Yet, they seem to scowl at the mention of wikipedia.

A lot of the comments left on Slashdot had some great ideas for educators.

• Have students update wikipedia articles with citations and corrections
• Have students submit articles for peer review by thousands instead of just classmates
• Have students expand on stubs or missing information in articles

The interesting piece of this all is that academia is already required to publish much of their students work in journals. However, journals do not offer the freedoms that wikipedia does. Wikipedia separates rich from poor, haves from have nots. It allows anybody with internet access a portal for finding solid, general information about a subject. It cites references for further research.

My personal belief is that the distaste for wikipedia in academia is not because the information is not factual or inaccurate. It is because students (and people in general) have a hard time deciphering fact from fiction. It takes a certain amount of effort to actually look at something and decide whether the information can be taken for fact or should be looked into further. This is just the same for journals though.

Teachers should spend more time teaching common sense… If that is possible.