Firefox pausing, freezing

I've been annoyed for a while now about Firefox constantly freezing up for a couple of seconds at a time. And today I've fixed it. To do the same, go into the options, and find the Plugins section, and disable Shockwave Flash. In fact, disable any Adobe product.
Flash is evil and should be banned.

Giving up Torrents.

Yes, I've given up the use of Torrents. I'm now using an alternate source of content, I've gone back to using Usenet Newsgroups.
First, why have I given up the use of Torrents? The Torrent protocol is awesome in its efficiency and for many files, availability of content. I've often achieved 8Mbps via torrenting files from peers. The one downside is that your IP address is necessarily publicly available to everyone in the swarm. This means of course that you can be tracked, and if your ISP is given a good reason, can be contacted. Now just in case you accidently download some copyrighted material, which some company kicks up a fuss about, you could receive, like a friend of mine recently, a warning from your ISP to cease and desist. There have been rare cases where people have been sued. This is extremely unlikely for any given individual, but still possible.
The alternative is to either use an anonymising proxy, or VPN service to torrent through, but this costs money, and slows down the torrent feed. I've opted to use Usenet Newsgroups. Yes, they are still alive and well, and predate the web. All the interesting stuff is in the binaries newsgroups, and free newservers just don't host them, because of the volume of traffic they have to support. So you need a premium news provider.
I'm using the Newsdemon non-expiring block plans, which means I can download content from the server at about 12Mbps at a cost of around 10c per gigabyte. It's not a lot of money. Because this is a simple one to one download, it's much harder for anyone else to see what you are downloading, and if you are really paranoid, you can enable SSL connections, so even your ISP can't snoop on the data. If you want.
While this gives you access, there are a lot of bait, virus and trojan downloads on the binaries groups, so you can't just go and download stuff that looks ok, you need to go via an NZB indexing service which finds real content for you. I use NZBMatrix. The premium version costs £7 for 10 years. Next you need something that can download content from NZB files, and I am using http://sabnzbd.org/. It's an awesome little service that runs on your PC, and you can set it up to automatically schedule the downloading of your bookmarks in NZBMatrix during your off-peak bandwidth usage.
Then there's this other little awesome service that runs on your your PC called SickBeard. It knows all about TV shows, and uses sabnzbd to automatically download TV shows you are interested in, as soon as they appear in the newsgroups. Once configured, they just start appearing on you local disk, ready to be streamed to your media player.
The end result is I can sit on the couch, bookmark a video at NZBMatrix via my iPad, and a short while later it's available for my media player under the TV. Or via SickBeard, it is as simple as receiving an email saying the latest episode of my favourite TV program is now available to watch, and just, play it. [Thanks to a friend at work for the heads up.]

[update - 10/12/2012] NZBMatrix has just gone down. Change your Sickbeard search provider to "Sick Beard Index".

Review of "The Australian" iPad App

I've been using the iPad app "The Australian" since it was released.
There is a lot to like about the app, but there are also some significant issues which need to be addressed, and some issues which clearly News Digital Media are struggling with, most obviously the advertising vs usability tradeoff.
First of all, there are many excellent features in this app. It is cheaper and much more convenient than buying print media, and perfect for reading on the bus. It only requires a connection to actually sync down content, making it better than a website with the wifi only iPad.
The navigation is not too bad, plenty of categories, and you can read in a choice of three font sizes. The 'share' button is useful for when you do have a connection, and want to share via Facebook. The recent addition of the 'Gallery' adds excellent topical photographs every few days.
However, there are a few problems, most of which should be easily addressed, yet the early rate of improvements seems to have slowed to a crawl.
Sometimes selecting a news article during a content sync will crash the app.
Sometimes rotating the screen forcing the aspect change while reading an article will crash the app.
Somtimes dismissing a full screen ad before it has loaded will crash the app.
The crashes are very annoying, and it seems to me there are thread race and possibly resource usage problems that need to be addressed, and really shouldn't be that big of a deal for professional developers, and something they have probably already fixed and is waiting for the next release.
Advertising is always going to be tricky. I understand that it helps to fund the production of the content and the software development, and keeps the subscription relatively low. However, if the advertising continues to be as horribly intrusive as it currently is, and has been since an update in December, I can't see that they'll keep enough volume of customers to make any of it worthwhile. I can deal with a full screen popup ad that happens occasionally, and that I can dismiss. What is horribly annoying is that now there is a small ad on every single page, and even if the ad space isn't used, it still exists, empty.
The trouble with this advertising is that it completely cramps the layout of every content page. I had to switch from portrait view to landscape view to get a comfortable line width, sacrificing page length and having to scroll much more. Also, you can't now effectively use the left side for scrolling since you then touch the ad. You can't dismiss the small ads, so they are a constant distraction from the article, and end up having no impact, because you try to just ignore the space entirely. They only thing worse that could be done here, is to make the ads flash or animate. I can only suggest News does some proper usability testing, and maybe look at being able to slide the ads out of the view, leaving only a tab, or at least allow the ad to scroll up the page with the content so it doesn't remain for the whole article.
Minor annoyances that should also be looked at include adding a page scolling indicator like every other iPad app that has a scrolling page, so you know where you are up to when reading the page. Also annoying, when you change aspect ratio, the page resets to the top of the content. It would also be useful for the font size setting to be more persistent. Probably the video needs to be compressed a little more as you have to wait for most of any video to download before starting to watch.
Hopefully we'll see some further improvements over the next couple of months, otherwise I'll be looking around when my subscription is up.

[Update 29/3/11]
Troy Skillen of News Digital Media Support emailed me with:
"We are passing your blogpost to our Editorial and Product Teams and ensuring they take the time to read what you have written as we believe there are many points that can be taken from your piece moving forward. We are hoping the shortcomings within the app can be addressed sooner rather than later & are currently pushing for the advertising and crash issues to be dealt with as a priority."


[Update 9/7/11]
I've recently decided to not continue my subscription until the crashes are fixed. I've just had enough, it is very annoying. I'm using the SMH app now. Recently Troy Skillen (sic) emailed me with "We decided to push back the update after the release of Fairfax's enhanced apps as we decided there was more we could do to be competitive. We hope to be able to release more news about the update very shortly"

[Update 30/7/11]
I should note now that an update has been released, although I haven't used it yet.

Samba in Ubuntu 10.10 very very slow

After upgrading my Ubuntu server to 10.10, I found that transferring files to it was horribly slow. As in 200kB/s slow, over a 1Gb network. There were no errors, it was just horribly horribly slow.
After some searching on the topic, I found that the socket options line that was recommended in the smb.conf file in previous versions:

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY \

               SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192

was actually causing this issue. Anything specified here that is actually required seems to be default with 10.10 and the corresponding kernel, so I just commented this line out, and things were back to a reasonable speed.
I'm guessing that specifying the buffer sizes causes havoc with the current implementation.
Gah!

Help!

Ubuntu won't boot after I upgraded it to 10.10.
If you know anything about this and can help me, here's the support link.
Arrrrgh!

First eBook finished

Just finished reading my first eBook, Zendegi, on the Kindle app on iPad.
I was expecting it to be a little tiring reading on the iPad, but it wasn't my eyes that gave me any problems. The iPad screen is totally fine for reading in my opinion. I'm not even sure I would find e-ink that much better now. I found that once I adjusted the brightness of iPad to suit the conditions, it was great. Kindle has an extra slider for in-app brightness control as well, which is handy.

No, the biggest issue I had was the weight of the iPad, it's 600g or so, and you need two hands to hold it, so I guess it is like reading a decent sized hardback. If you are holding it up in front of you, it can get tiring. However, if you have it resting on your lap, or a pillow on your lap, it is actually more comfortable because turning pages takes only the slightest, smallest thumb jab, or swipe, rather than the wristy physical page turn of a real book.
I was using the Kindle app rather than iBooks, because iBooks has zero content in Aus, and the Kindle app is really nice as well. Touch a word, and you get instant in-page dictionary lookup, and if it is not a dictionary word, there is a link to Google to start a more detailed hunt for meaning. The page turning animation is not as cute, but I think that might get tiring after a few hundred pages, and the Kindle slide is really good.
One difficulty I had was that you don't have an immediate sense of what page you are up to, and in fact the pages aren't even numbered, because it depends on what size font you use. Instead, you can get a percentage done in the menu mode, but a tap away. It just feels a bit wrong not knowing how thick the book, or how many pages you have read.
The other thing I will miss is that now I can't display a physical reminder of the read on a bookshelf in the lounge room. Maybe I could make a cardboard box of the right dimensions and print out the cover and spine to paste on it.
Given it is cheaper, and in many ways better, I don't think I'll be going back to physical books unless there are supply issues, but that seems to be getting better all the time.

Android 2.2

Looks like Android 2.2 (FroYo, for Frozen Yoghurt) is looking really good. Not only is there a massive increase in speed, but this is the clincher for me: it can provide a Wi-Fi hotspot. On Friday, I should get a Wi-Fi only iPad, and didn't bother getting 3G because I just wouldn't use it often enough to justify the extra cost, and then having to pay for an extra data contract. No. However, if my next phone is Android 2.2 capable, I can just tether it to the phone's connection via Wi-Fi. That's just friggin awesome.
Today Dad showed me his brand new HTC Desire and damn, it's sweet. With FroYo, I could easily be swayed in this direction for the next phone. For now though, my Nokia E61 struggles on. Maybe it will throw a rod or something soon...

Portal is teh Awesome.

Portal is teh awesome. And now it's free. So download before it's too late. I just played the first 18 levels or so. Brilliant.

Upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx

I upgraded my Ubuntu domain server to Lucid Lynx. The upgrade went fine, and there are lots of little incremental improvements, which is great. What isn't great is samba not starting properly when the machine boots. I've found some references to this. Hopefully there will be a bugfix coming. Annoying.

How to fix Windows XP after using McAfee

McAfee borked your computer?

Install Free AVG. McAfee has been rubbish for a long time. I've personally seen it let through some nasty malware recently.
First, you'll need to fix your PC though.

Ubuntu DNS super slow

Problem finally fixed! This has been annoying the hell out of me for weeks.
It turns out the problem was with my
/etc/nsswitch.conf
file, which had the following entry
hosts: files wins dns
and I changed it to
hosts: files dns

That is, Ubuntu was trying to resolve hostnames using a WINS server before trying DNS. I don't even have a WINS server, so obviously this causing massive delays in resolving any name, making web browsing interminable.


Fixed.

Google Buzz. No thanks.

I accepted all the Google Buzz process and gave it a whirl and posted something trivial. And when that post hit my email, I wasn't happy. I don't want crap on email, I use Facebook a lot and it doesn't send me any crap, because I can turn it all off. Also I realised I suddenly had a public searchable profile attached to my gmail account. I think I'd prefer to keep my email off web searches for now.
Plenty of backlash in the media too, and how to be free of it. I'e turned it off.
Also, I like Facebook. It's getting some maturity, Buzz just seems like a toy version of the real thing and the possible security and privacy leaks are a concern.
MySpace? What's that?

[Update 17th Feb] Told you so.

Upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala

I just upgraded my home server from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, Karmic Koala.
No problems. Looks better. Windows 7 domain works fine. All good.

Climategate

I sure hope we're not overly reliant on the models or data from CRU for our picture of global warming. Because it seems they are both complete crap. See here, here.

[update Dec 2]  While this looks very very bad, it's possible the science coming out of CRU isn't all crap, but there should definitely be some sort of review of their results.
Also there are other sources of good science on this, so lets not lose the plot on climate change altogether.

Sun C++ compiler precompiled headers implementation sucks.

I'm using the Sun C++ compiler (Sun C 5.9 SunOS_sparc Patch 124867-01 2007/07/12) on Solaris (5.10 Generic_141444-09 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220) for work.

I noticed that the compiler supports precompiled header files recently, and thought, great, this is going to speed up compiling enormously. For a given C++ package, compiling on Windows under VC9, the time taken decreases from 55 seconds to 22 seconds when precompiled headers is enabled. That is a significant difference, and well worth the effort of setting it up to work for you.
On Solaris, without precompiled headers, this same package takes 2:30s to compile. OK, it's an older machine, but when precompiled headers is turned on (-xpch=autofirst), the time taken, incredibly, increases slightly to 2:40s. I mean, seriously, WTF!?
With some more digging, I work out that the Sun compiler's implementation of pchs is infantile. They just collect up the postprocessed code from the headers and lob into one large file. There is nothing precompiled about Sun's precompiled headers, If anything, it's preprocessed headers. And it has to be implemented badly to take longer! Sheesh! Even the link above shows a minimal improvement for a really simple case.
Get it together Sun! Oh, right, Oracle is buying, and they probably care less.

Karmic Koala upgrade problems

I think maybe I'll wait a while before upgrading my Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). If only 10% of upgraders are getting a good experience, I'm just not going there for at least a month. OK, the Windows 7 upgrade took 12 hours to complete, and that was the fourth attempt, but I'd rather multiple attempts with flawless rollback than being stuck with an OS release with graphics drivers issues.

Windows 7 Upgrade Finally Completes

You may know I had some initial difficulties upgrading to Windows 7. As it turns out, mostly, I just wasn't patient enough. Apparently 5 hours just isn't enough time, and it doesn't matter if the PC appears to be doing nothing, you need to be patient!
I went camping on the weekend, and decided to give the upgrade another try and let it take its own time while I was away. It had 48 hours, and that has to be patient enough, right?
The bad news is that the upgrade was still going when I got back on Sunday. Seriously! But ok, the good news is that it had stopped at a very well known point with a documented hang. The old 62% point. The log showed that it had taken around 11 hours to reach this point, even with my recent hardware upgrade!
I think the 62% metric is really just a Microsoft stab in the dark, because I followed the KB article fix, restarted the upgrade and forgot about it for another 12 hours or so.
And this time, it worked. I'm writing this from Windows 7. Yay.
No other serious issues encountered. I needed to upgrade VMWare Workstation to the latest version. No big deal. Everything else just worked - Ubuntu domain login included.

Upgrading to Windows 7 Hangs.

So I finally decided to go ahead and upgrade my main Vista 64 installation to Windows 7. I would have done it earlier, only I was waiting in hope for A.L Tech to release a firmware upgrade for the media player to see Windows 7 shared drives. That's clearly not going to happen.
Anyway, so I punched in the upgrade, and it went really smoothly right up until it slides gently into a kind of hanging situation. The screen is happily updating alternating between "Please wait..." and "Updating your drivers ...", the drive light flickers occasionally, you can move the mouse cursor, but after four hours of this, you just know it isn't going to go anywhere. So I hit the reset button. Click-click.
Magically, and happily, it automatically recovers and reverted to my Vista install. Whew.
I've tried this twice now, and I see some signs of this happening all across the blogosphere.
That is, unless of course, it really does want to take 11 hours to complete...
It looks like I'll have to do a clean install. And it all worked perfectly in my various VM tests.
Fisking Super.
[Update - it worked after 12 hours!]

VHS to DivX

It's a tedious process. I just finished converting some old VHS tapes to DivX. Physical media must die, but digital media will move from one disk to the next. Hopefully.
For each tape, I had to :

1. Hook up the old MiniDV video camera to the VHS player, and record from VHS to MiniDV.
2. Hook up the video camera to the PC via firewire, and rip using the very good and free WinDV.
3. Use the also very good and free VirtualDub to encode to DivX and MP3, doing gross editing as well.
4. Lob the final file where the media player can see it!

Tapes converted include the wedding video, engagement video and some important yoga video.

Getting Windows 7 to join Ubuntu Domain

[see updates at end for Ubuntu 9.10 info]
I finally managed to get the release of Windows 7 to join my Ubuntu domain controller at home. First I had to upgrade Ubuntu from 8.04 to 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). This was pretty easy, since Ubuntu has a single button for upgrade, although I had to upgrade in two steps with 8.10 on the way.
The next step is to install Samba 3.3.4. The required version of Samba running is very specific since Windows 7 will only join a Samba domain of this exact version. Previous versions of Windows don't care. So the default 3.3.2 of Ubuntu 9.04, nor later versions of 3.3.7 etc will work at all.
I found a posting here that helped my do the manual Samba upgrade. Quite a long and tedious process, but I got it to work in the end.
Finally, I had to tweak some Windows 7 registry settings to let it use some lower security options for dealing with the old style NT domains. All the details are found here. You'll notice I posted a question here when I was having problems, and the poster Greg was really helpful with getting me on track. Thanks Greg!
My problem was the upgrade of Samba/Ubuntu left my smb.conf with an invalid -n option in the "add machine script" line, which caused an error when attempting to add a machine to the domain.
All sorted now, which means I'm one step closer to upgrading my main workstation OS from Vista x64 to Windows 7 x64. I just need to verify VMWare Workstation and a couple of other critical apps are going to work. Joy.

[Update 28/8/09]
Upgrading a Vista machine that is already connected to a Samba 3.3.4 domain to Windows 7 RTM also works fine. I notice the only reg entry it changed of the four above was the "RequireStrongKey" one.

[Update 16/11/09]
It seems Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, does support Windows 7 clients in a samba domain (fix released), however I'm waiting to upgrade my server for a while.

[Update 6/2/10]
Upgraded. Seems fine.

[Update 26/5/10]
Now I've noticed that one of my accounts couldn't log into the domain. I had to change these reg settings:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Netlogon\Parameters]
“RequireSignOnSeal”=dword:00000000
“RequireStrongKey”=dword:00000001

In smb.conf, I also added to
[netlogon]

write list = root


Not sure which is important, but the account now logs in.