Xubuntu 9.10 on Acer Aspire One

One of the few things that I have done in my own time this fall is re-install Xubuntu (the recent version 9.10) on my AAO. Long story short, I felt the previous 9.04 Xubuntu install was getting pretty slow, and there were a few tricks that I wanted to try out. I also hoped that some of the issues with the previous version had been fixed. The results have been satisfactory.

The things that I did differently:

• Encryption. I chose to stick with encryption, but decreased the encryption level. Or at least I think I did--I seem to recall using a 256-bit key previously, while I now use just a 128-bit key. Considering that my goal is not really full data safety (I don't store anything confidential on the AAO anyway) but rather just making it not worth it for any potential thief to attempt recovery of any personal data from the AAO, I think a 128-bit key will prove quite sufficient, and any improvement in reading/writing speeds make it well worth it--more on that below.
• noatime. I guess this is quite obvious in retrospect, but I have now set up all partitions to mount with the noatime flag. This means that the file system does not update file access times, but it also cuts down on file system metadata writing significantly. And the AAO's SSD is slow. Taken together with the decreased encryption key size, write times have improved significantly-- I did not store the numbers, but I seem to recall getting write speeds of about 4-8MB/s before, and now get 32-36MB/s. So we're talking about a 300-800 percent improvement, and it is obviously quite noticeable. While current speeds are still not that great, the system now at least feels usable, as opposed to before.
• tmpfs. Another thing that contributes to the speed of the system, I now use multiple ram disks for locations that a) presumably are written to a lot and repeatedly, and b) won't contain anything that must be saved:
  • 128MB for /tmp
  • 24MB for /var/tmp
  • 24MB for /var/log
  • 64MB for my Firefox cache
  At least the Firefox cache makes a huge difference, I think. Previously I could open a bunch of tabs at once (say 20 or so) and come back 15-30 minutes later, at which point they might have loaded, or they might not. Now, you can start browsing in 5-15 seconds or so. And considering that I have 1.5GB in my AAO (and the system still just uses some 120-130MBs once it has booted up), 240MB is a very small price to pay for that. It could probably be tuned downwards a bit, but what's the point?

Other than these, I set up Xubuntu 9.10 pretty much exactly the same way I did 9.04.

What's improved in Xubuntu 9.10 (out of the box):

• More of the shortcut keys now work (volume up, volume down).
• The volume setting is stored between logins.

What still doesn't work in Xubuntu 9.10 (out of the box):

• The card readers. The card readers still don't work as they're supposed to. The left card slot auto-mounts and handles ejection; the right slot requires the media to be present at boot, and it can't be ejected. This should be the other way around.
• Perhaps as a consequence of above, the left card reader still can't be used with LVM. This is annoying, because even if I strictly speaking don't need it, I had really hoped to be able to add more storage space.

Things I haven't confirmed to work in Xubuntu 9.10 (out of the box):

• Hidden SSIDs. I have not tested if the wireless now handles hidden SSIDs or not.
• Camera. I haven't used the camera, so I can't comment on that. Then again, this may not have ever been an issue in the first place.
• Wireless Led. I haven't paid much attention to the leds, so I also consider the wireless led functionality somewhat unconfirmed. I think the led works--at least it seems to be flashing when I'm using the wireless, and it stays dark when I'm not--but I can't say for sure.

Various AAO issues that (of course) still apply:

• Slow SSD. If it has not become clear already, let me say it explicitly: The AAO 8GB SSD version has a slooooow storage medium. Without the noatime flag and the ram disks, the system was borderline unusable. With them, I have pretty much not seen any temporary system freezes anymore (ok, maybe once or twice in several months, as opposed to several times every few minutes). On the one hand, I'm not sure what to expect for 300EUR (200EUR after sales discount), but on the other hand, you nowadays get pretty slick netbooks for 400EUR, and it has only been one year after all.
• Wireless Issues. This is something I haven't written about (that much) before, but it seems like there are some serious issues with the wireless. If the wireless is under heavy stress, as in downloading a few MB file, it sometimes crashes completely--in Linux, I get a kernel panic followed by a complete system lockup, requiring a hard reset (keeping the power button pressed until power is cut from the system). I previously thought it might have been due to the slow SSD, but storage now works pretty well (and Firefox cache is on a ram disk), so I'm less likely to believe it to be the culprit anymore. This is quite unacceptable IMO; just consider that your system would freeze completely every time you try to watch a Youtube video longer than one minute! And it is just wireless; wired works fine. As it is now, each time I update the system (about once a week) I worry about side effects of the system crashing whenever the updates are larger than a few MBs (which they almost always are); it happens about half of the time (and sometimes more than once per update, if the updates are large enough). I usually end up using the wired network to do any updates.
  If this only happened with the AAO, I would not care that much--again, I'm not quite sure what to expect for 300EUR. Unfortunately, similar things happen with my old Acer laptop as well, which back in the day cost significantly more. And it is not just a Linux thing, either. I run Windows XP as well on that laptop, and I got weird and sudden freezes there as well (ironically, far less so under Linux). So wherever the issue ultimately lies, both my Acer computers have had the same symptoms.
• Poor battery life. I get about two hours of use from my AAO when it's fully charged. As I tend to stay near power outlets, it's enough for me, but the standard tends to be three to four times that nowadays, with some netbooks pushing towards six times that. So... yeah.

So I don't know. I may have to go back on the recommendation of AAO with Xubuntu. I still think Xubuntu is an excellent OS for a netbook and a definite improvement over Linpus Lite, and I have got my system set up so that it works for me... but I don't think the AAO 8GB SSD is for everyone. If you want a really cheap netbook (read: disposable, which was what I was aiming for), you can probably get one used for next to nothing by now. And if you do, I think Xubuntu is an excellent choice. Even with a 512MB system, I'd consider setting up a 64MB ram disk for the Firefox cache, and you'd have a decent read my e-mail and browse the Web system whenever away from your primary computer. I'd also go ext3 (or maybe ext4) rather than ext2 just to decrease the risk of data loss if the system completely freezes due to issues with the wireless, or other issues.

But if I were looking for a netbook today, and were willing to spend a little more than an absolute minimum, I'd probably look into the Samsung N120 netbook, as I hear it has received very good reviews.

A Small Report, Episode VIII

Another three months have gone by, just like that. Except that they're actually four months this time, not just three.

However, I do have an excuse of sorts. When I wrote my previous post, I had no idea that we'd soon have spring all over again at work, with tremendous pressure to get things completed by an insane deadline, but that's pretty much what happened.

Hm. At first, I was planning to write about that. But on a second thought, although I think we've done some extraordinary work in the last four months, I think I'll skip it. It would feel too much like bragging, and too much like marginalizing similar efforts made by others. I'm quite sure that everyone in my profession has some horror stories about crunch time, and the next story will always be embellished to top the previous one. So no. Suffice to say, I don't think that anyone on the team has had any life outside work for the two first months (although we did get to sleep sometimes), and very little in the last two months.

But hey. Christmas vacation, right? Maybe I'll actually manage to write several posts before going back to work?

Merry Christmas!

A Small Report, Episode VII

Allergies are killing me. Well, no, not really, but they are still giving me a pretty hard time.

It seems summer has become a difficult period for me. For a few years, I have felt... drowsy, I suppose, in the summers. Anti-histamines have helped against this, though, so I have written things off as some sort of developing allergy. Last winter, I had an allergy test to verify that theory, but it came out negative. In spite of this, I have experienced the same symptoms this summer as previous summers, and they may in fact be increasing in severity . Additionally, the last week or so, I have also experienced physical symptoms as well--a slightly running nose, a feeling of my head being full of phlegm, and slight fever from time to time. I'd write it off as a summer flu (and come to think of it, I might have done so last summer), but taking anti-histamines immediately improve my physical condition for half a day or so (at which point I take a new dose).

In spite of the flu-like symptoms, it is the mental effects that annoy me the most. Even with anti-histamines, my concentration is shot, my memory is clearly worse than usual, I'm rather irritable all the time and have trouble getting things done. This is especially true for evenings. I pop a pill before going to bed, which gets me through the night, and another pill to get through my work day, but once I get home it evidently starts wearing off. As a result, my evenings have been spent staring stupidly on the computer screen, or trying to make sense of some book, or trying to gather enough energy to do the dishes. Good luck with those.

So yeah. I realize I haven't posted anything (or otherwise been particularly productive) for the last three months or so. This would be the reason why. (Thankfully, it seems to be getting better now--we've hit a rainy period, and I'd assume that water binds the pollen. At least some sort of positive side to autumn.)

A Small Report, Episode VI

Wow, those three months really flew by! As I mentioned in my previous post, I've really been swamped with work. Thankfully, things are starting to be a bit sensible again--I still tend to do project related work more than 100% of my work week (meaning some overtime almost every week, and not really any time for anything else, such as courses and certifications) but at least there are now more people sharing the burden, so I no longer have that only you can save the universe feeling of doom hanging over me. (Yeah OK, so it wasn't really like that, but it sure did feel like it at times.) I actually managed to take out one week vacation time and went abroad for that time, although who knows when I will get the remainder, really?

So, being busy and all, I haven't had much time to do anything spectacular. Whenever I've had an entire evening to myself, I've tried to watch a movie, and I also have watched a fair amount. I've read a few books (mostly by Stephen King), ordered and read the twelve issue collection of the Lucifer comic book, and ordered the ten issue collection of Neil Gaiman's Sandman (going to order Endless Nights soon) and read most of them (for the second time; I read them all a few years back). But mostly I've been working.

Oh, and...

Xubuntu on Acer Aspire One

... I've installed Xubuntu 9.04 on my AAO almost as soon as it was available. I first installed and tested the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but although I liked the use of the desktop (menus and buttons, similar but better than Linpus Lite) I didn't like it as a whole, because:

• Windows were (at least by default) always maximized. Some apps got pretty screwed up as a result.
• Innovative as the task bar was, it still used up screen estate in a dimension that already is very limited (600 pixels).
• The My Computer bar (on the right of the desktop, which contained a list of all disks in the system) got very crowded when there were many disks connected at the same time (not a typical problem, I know, but still).
• It felt somewhat unresponsive.
• No alternative installation disk, so you didn't get as many installation options as with the normal distros.

So then I tried Xubuntu, by means of the alternative installation CD. After some tweaking (using LVM, encrypted partitions) I got it mostly as I wanted it. Again, 8GB seems plenty (but more would be useful--more on that below). Xubuntu (Xfce) offers a different navigation system than Windows/normal Ubuntu (and active by default in Xubuntu, too): You can right-click on the desktop and the Program Menu pops up right there and then. This means that you do not really need the task bar to host a Start Button, although you can still have it if you want to. This allowed me to minimize the use of the task bar(s): I only use one, and set it to be rather thin. It hosts a clock, a Show Desktop shortcut button and some other system tray applications (sound mixer, network, battery status). Since none of those are things that I really need to have visible all the time, I also activated auto-hide for the task bar, meaning that it slides down to show just 1-2 pixels or so whenever the cursor isn't on top of it. I additionally installed Launchy, so I can start programs with a few keystrokes even when the desktop isn't visible (and I thus can't bring up the Xfce menu), and Alt-Tab cycles windows, so it's all good. After decreasing the system font you don't really have a problem with the screen being just 1024x600, except when some programs (and some web pages) insist on demanding a larger screen. Most of the time, though, you tend to forget that you're just using a netbook and not a full laptop.

The good (as opposed to Linpus Lite):

• Passwords! Yes, you can set up your system to require login (as it should do). This also allows multiple user accounts, obviously, something that might have been possible with Linpus Lite but that I never got around to checking.
• Encryption. Yes, I realize it might be overkill, but I encrypted parts of the system. I prefer not having to worry about someone reading my e-mails and combing my browser cache for passwords etc. if the AAO were to be stolen... and let's face it, it's small enough that anyone can hide it on their person.
• Built-in Firewall. I can't tell you how much this means to me, but consider my previous rants on the subject, maybe you have an idea. Install Iptables-frontend of your choice and you're ready to go (I went with Firestarter because I've used it before, although it might not be the best alternative).
• A huge repository of software to install.

The bad (in out-of-the-box Xubuntu):

• The Wireless won't work (at least not well) on networks with hidden SSIDs. While not a show-stopper for me, it might be for some. You can force a connection (might take a few attempts, though) to a SSID that is not being broadcast, but I experienced complete computer freeze a few times when doing so. Hidden SSIDs seem to have worked in the past, so it is a bit unfortunate that something has broken this functionality.
• The card readers work varyingly well. The left-hand reader (SSD Expansion Slot) acts as a normal reader (hot-pluggable, ejectable), while the right-hand reader, which only allows a card to be inserted about half-way, only notices cards that are present at boot and does not allow them to be ejected. So they pretty much work exactly opposite the way they are supposed to!
• Even with the alternative install CD, I could not use the right-hand reader and the inserted 16GB SD card when creating partitions. Afterwards, it is also problematic to add it to LVM, and I have yet not managed to do so, as I worry it might screw up an otherwise fully functional system and am therefore somewhat unwilling to experiment. (If anyone has good ideas on how to do this, please do tell.)

The so-so:

• The boot speed is slower than Linpus Lite, but still fast enough that it shouldn't be an issue.
• Some of the shotcut keys don't work. In particular, I can't adjust the volume with them. The keys fire off reasonable events, though (xev to the rescue), so it should be possible to fix this.
• The volume level is dropped between sessions (set to 0% and disabled), which is annoying but not fatal in any way. Presumably also fixable.
• The built-in camera might or might not work. I haven't tried it in Skype, but I could not easily use it as a TWAIN source, at least. Still, I don't have much use of a low-res (and presumably low quality) webcam, so meh.
• You need to tweak various minor things if you want them to work. For instance, presumably you need to apt-install something to get the wireless leds to work.

I should also point out that the AAO (Flash-based) SSD is... well, rather slow at times. At times, the computer seems to partially freeze, but it comes out of it eventually. This happened with both Linpus Lite and Xubuntu, so it seems like a hardware issue. (Of course, the encryption I run on some partitions probably also slows the system down somewhat.) It's nothing critical, but still somewhat distracting when the computer is partially unresponsive for half a minute at a time. Heavy disk usage can also slow the system down to a crawl (such as opening lots and lots of tabs in Firefox all at once), but the partial freezes can happen at any time... although evidently not as a result of reading from a USB thumb drive. :-(

But other than that, I'm very happy with Xubuntu on AAO, I'm happy with the AAO, and I recommend the combination to anyone that wants a cheap netbook.

D&D 3.x Alignment 101, Part II

Right, so I'm swamped with work. I guess that's a good thing, all things considered. Still, a blog post.

First, a small addendum to the previous Alignment 101 post: This series looks at D&D alignment from a Core Set perspective only. In particular, it means that any views expressed in the Book of Exalted Deeds and the Book of Vile Darkness do not have any bearing on these posts.

You Might Not Be Good

Right. So, you might not be good. What does that mean? You're friendly to your neighbors, you routinely show up at the family's Christmas dinner (although if you still live at home, that might not be that much of a feat), you always help your friends with whatever they need, you go to church every Sunday, sometimes you even donate to charity. Of course you're good. Right?

Well, no. None of those things classify you as good. Some of them seem to suggest that you are neutral, and some of them don't necessarily aren't indicative of an alignment at all. The only thing that comes close is the donating to charity bit. I'm going to quote the section on good and part of the section on neutral from PHB3.5 again:

Good implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.

[..] Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships. A neutral person may sacrifice himself to protect his family or even his homeland, but he would not do so for strangers who are not related to him.

Notice that most of the things mentioned above pertains to people you relate to on a daily basis--your neighbors, your family, your friends. In addition, none of them actually suggest personal sacrifices (yes, not even the family Christmas dinner). The churchgoing is a red herring, it does not have any alignment component at all. That leaves the charity. However, that is left too vague to actually have any value. It could be a charity for homeless dogs, for instance, which while commendable is unimportant from an alignment perspective as opposed to, for instance, saving starving children in Africa. It also does not specify the amount you donate, and you rarely see people donate enough that it could be considered an actual personal sacrifice on their part. When Bill & Melinda Gates donate $$$ to charity, it's altruistic, but from a D&D alignment perspective, it is still not good, because it has little effect on them personally.

So what I'm trying to say here is, you need to drop whatever perceptions you have on goodness when you look at D&D alignment. Whenever there is an alignment discussion somewhere, you almost always have someone say But my character does <action>; of course he must be good! But <action> may have absolutely no bearing on alignment in D&D, no matter how much a shining example of goodness and virtue you think it would make the character in the real world.

D&D 3.x Alignment 101, Part I

OK, so I want to write a reasonably short post today. One thing that I have felt like writing about for a while is D&D 3.x alignments. It used to seem to me that every time you frequented a D&D message board, you got the same tired arguments about alignments, many of them based on erroneous understanding of the rules or fallacious arguments. (You seem to have less of these arguments nowadays, probably because alignment isn't as relevant in 4.0.) So, here's the first part in a series for better understanding of the 3.x alignment system. Some of these parts will contain opinions, but this part is pretty much direct from the rules. (If someone wants to argue about it, it would be nice if they actually read the rules before they answer. Thanks in advance.)

Neutral ≠ Mix of Good and Evil

I think that the good/evil is the most interesting axis, not least because it is more important to the paladin than the law/chaos axis is. So let's start with a very short look at what good, neutral and evil means, and in particular what neutral doesn't mean. Quoting from the 3.5 PHB (pg.104):

Good implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.

Evil implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.

People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships. A neutral person may sacrifice himself to protect his family or even his homeland, but he would not do so for strangers who are not related to him.

Now, you sometimes see people arguing that their characters can do evil acts to their hearts' content, as long as they do an equal amount of good acts, balancing them as neutral. Wrong! This may have been true in earlier editions (and I'm not going to dig out my 2nd Ed. AD&D or 1st Ed. D&D books to verify it) but it definitely is not true in 3.x.

Neutral does not mean a mix of good and evil. Nothing in its description suggests that you can do equal amounts of good and evil acts and come out as neutral; in fact, the description clearly rules it out. Neutral is its own category, something that is neither good nor evil. Think of good as a white sphere, evil as a black sphere and neutral as a gray sphere. You then split the white and black sphere through the centers and glue one white hemisphere to one black hemisphere. Somehow, the Frankensphere looks quite unlike the gray sphere.

		Saves People
		Yes	No
Kills People	Yes	N/A	Evil
	No	Good	Neutral

Look at the table above. (Understand that the term people is oversimplifying things. For this first part, think of people as strangers to which the character has no emotional attachment. I'll get to the great paradox about good characters killing others in a later part.) We see that good strives to save people and avoid killing people. Evil does not care about saving people, and indeed is ready to kill people whenever convenient. Neutral doesn't care about saving people, but does not kill people, either. Saving people and killing people at the same time is, obviously, a contradiction--you can't strive to save someone at the same time you kill them. (This also means that anyone ready to kill people is evil.)

The PHB does mention neutral as being a balanced view for some characters. And that works fine. As you can see in the table above, neutral does share some traits with both good and evil--just like good, it does not want to kill people, and just like evil, it doesn't care to save people. But neutral still can't share those traits that result in a contradiction, and that's why characters that alternate between good and evil just are evil. Lunatic evil maybe, or a calculated evil meant to let them get away with it, but evil none the less.

Computer Woes

Right, so apart from what I said in my previous post I've also struggled a fair bit with my computers. To be honest, I think a lot of my free time has gone into that, and that is more than a bit annoying. I really don't want to spend my time working on something that will enable me to do what I actually want to do, I want to spend my time working on what I want to do.

Which brings me to my newly purchased Acer Aspire One, which I feel has consumed most of my evenings. I'd like to go on a long rant here, but I'll try to keep it reasonably brief. As I also mentioned, the Linux version does not come with a kernel that supports iptables, which as far as I know is the way to do firewalls on Linux (it used to be ipchains, but not any more). So maybe the AAO runs some sort of non-standard hack that I can't find any reference of, rather than the tried-and-tested solution, but as far as I can tell, there is no firewall support.

Now, my personal opinion is that you can live without anti-virus software, but you don't want to be without a firewall. This opinion is based on the fact that I have experienced far more port scans than virus alerts. Additionally, you can be duly diligent when it comes to opening e-mails and avoid using cracked versions of Microsoft Office downloaded from Russia, but it only takes one unpatched vulnerability (of a particularly disastrous kind) in a program that accepts connections from the Internet and your system might be hacked. At home, my wireless router drops incoming requests, but the point of the AAO is that it is supposed to be portable, right? So why does Acer not even support the possibility of a firewall? I mean, Ubuntu does not come with a firewall installed either (or at least did not used to), which I think is a bad call (Ubuntu may not have any services running by default, but you only need to install something like Skype and there you are) but at least you can install and start one with a few clicks. With the Acer AAO, not so much.

So, OK. I haven't needed to build custom kernels for Linux before (as I said, I don't want to spend my time building the foundation for doing what I really want to do) but it shouldn't be that hard, right? So I google some and find a link to the kernel source for the AAO, and download that. I take the config file that came with the AAO and go from there, adding base iptables support and some extra options that I imagine I might have use for, and some others for extra measure. The kernel does not compile at first, but that's OK, because the page I'm reading actually pointed out this problem and how to fix it (missing symlink). And then it compiles and I build the modules and install them and try out my new kernel. And at first everything seems fine, but as soon as the AAO tries to use the network, it freezes and the leds start blinking. So I restore the initial modules and the kernel that came pre-installed, and boot up again. Phew, everything seems to work again, except of course I still don't have any iptables support.

So what went wrong? Well, unfortunately, not being a kernel hacker (and quite frankly, not having much interest in becoming one, either), I have trouble finding out. But a quick check of the contents of the module directory shows that it initially contained far more modules than after I installed those I built. So I suppose that those missing modules are causing the issue, but that is just a guess. I could of course go back to the initial, unmodified config file, and build a kernel based on that just to see how many modules that results in...

... which brings me back to what I said at the beginning of this post: I really don't want to spend my time working on something that will enable me to do what I actually want to do, I want to spend my time working on what I want to do. Am I really expected to spend, I dunno, weeks or even months to learn the ins and outs of kernel hacking just because I want a firewall for my newly purchased laptop? The story above is condensed, but there was a lot of googling for information (turns out kernel building is not mainstream enough that there is an abundance of useful advice on it), downloading the software I needed to even make the attempt, and a fair amount of trial and error going on there, and I was really just skimming the surface and trying to get by with minimal effort there. The problem could be with the downloaded source, it could be the config file is actually outdated, it could be any of a number of things, and I have no idea of where to start, really.

And if not, am I expecting too much when I'd like that kind of functionality out of the box? I hear that Linux netbooks have a pretty high return rate, higher than Windows XP netbooks. I'm sure some of that is due to people thinking they are buying a Windows machine, and then they start it up and it is something else, and they don't want it so they return it... but I also think that some offerings make it really hard to like it. Personally, I don't think a netbook should be without a firewall, but that is actually a pretty low-level requirement. When it comes to the AAO, some pretty elementary stuff in no particular order:

• I should not need to wait hours for updates to complete because the updater (presumably) is hardwired to get the updates from Taiwan.
• I should not have to struggle to get the keyboard to type the letters that are marked on the keys.
• I should not have to type [Alt-F2] xterm [Enter] xfce-setting-show [Enter] and click [Desktop icon] [Behaviour tab] [Show Desktop on Right Click' option] [Close] [Close] in order to get a menu through which I can access most of my system, which also (incidentally) is the only way to install further software that is otherwise available in the repositories.
• I should not have to struggle to get a media player that can display DivX encoded video.
• I should not have to jump through hoops to get Firefox 3 rather than Firefox 2, especially as the latter is not even officially supported anymore.
• The system should not come wide open (no password, sudo at will) by default.
• The system should not accept a new BIOS password and then semi-arbitrarily mangle it (truncate at eight characters and convert to all-upper-case) because that tends to cause users problems when they try to use the password they initially supplied.

Really, guys at Acer and elsewhere, if you really want to sell netbooks with Linux, this is not the way to do it. I actually had a bunch of various tweaks collected from various pages that I had planned to apply, but what's the point? I no longer want to spend time tweaking my AAO, especially since it seems to be an uphill battle all the way, and I still can't get a firewall installed.

Forget it.

So here is what I'm going to do: I will play around with it for a few months, restricting WLAN use to places where I'm behind a separate firewall, like at home, and keep the WLAN shut down elsewhere. And once April 23rd comes around and Jaunty Jackalope is released, I'm going to install Ubuntu (or possibly the slightly more lightweight Xubuntu derivative), and get my firewall (among other things) out of the box. I'll probably lose the sweet 20 second boot-up time (although quite frankly, the system is still loading and there is not that much you can do at that point anyway), but I will get a lot more in return, I think--booting Intrepid Ibex from a USB stick seems promising enough that I'm convinced it is worth a try.

Is all of this a failing on my part, or on Acer's part, or is this no failure at all and just something you should have come to expect by now and roll with it? I don't know, and frankly, I don't care that much, either. I'm tired of expanding energy on being outraged (more like experiencing various degrees of disappointment) on stuff like this. You be the judge... and in the meantime, if you happen to know how to get iptables working on the AAO Linpus, let me know before April 23rd.

A Small Report, Episode V

Right, so it has been some five weeks. However, those five weeks included Christmas, so I feel perfectly justified in not having blogged every week. They have been some pretty uneventful weeks, anyway, at least on some level. I went on a two-week Christmas vacation to the Canary Islands, which was rather nice. The winter always gets to me a bit, being pretty much dark and gloomy for most of the day--dark when you leave for work in the morning, dark when you leave work in the afternoon. So two weeks of sunlight was refreshing. Also, we at least have some snow at the moment, which tends to make the mornings and evenings a bit brighter, and also of course we are getting more and more sunlight every day now that we've passed the winter solstice.

I've had some setbacks as well. I cracked a tooth on my vacation, and had to have that fixed. After that, I passed a kidney stone, which wasn't particularly pleasant. At all. But--knock on wood--that's now over and dealt with, and so maybe I've paid my pain bills for the time being.

I'm a bit disappointed in what I've accomplished since my last post. Gym is a no-no, unfortunately. I really have to start making an effort with that. I've read some books and and watched some movies. In particular, I read Stephen King's Skeleton Crew and the first part of George RR Martin's Dreamsongs during my vacation. I've read a little computer science literature, but not as much as I would have liked. I can't seem to do any painting lately, which is probably in part due to a) a difficult first subject and b) a lack of focus on doing painting (which means I put in perhaps 15 minutes per evening, if at all), but is still a bit discouraging. I've also tried to do some programming for fun, but have made little progress there as well (but I'll get back to that in my next post).

All in all, the start of 2009 has been a bit discouraging. My goal right now is to go the gym at least a few times before I write my next report, which should be in a few weeks. It seems reading books, watching movies, painting and programming is more or less impossible to do simultaneously, so I will to interleave going to the gym with something that can be done in small intervals, which means that painting is not an alternative for the time being. Maybe I'll return to painting in the end of February, or March.