joe ferrare's blog

Posts have been nonexistent for a while. Spent part of last week getting ready to go TDY (business trip) to Heidelberg, then the rest of the week there. Got back 11 p.m. last night, tired, still a big sick and glad to be home. Unfortunately, the girl was sick. Sue slept in her room all night. Boy it was a good idea to buy that recliner. Alexandra had a fever, threw up several times and was just lying there panting a good part of the night.

So I’m shot today, even though I got more sleep than either of them.

Now it appears I’m going to Stuttgart Monday, so no rest for the wicked.

Heidelberg was actually a so-so trip. I went up there to help judge a military writing contest. Can’t talk about how the contest went until the results are announced, but it sure was nice to be with writers and editors again. I’m doing mostly the PA side of things in my current job. It’s all fairly easy, but it also means a lot of staff work and so on, and that’s not fun. I’m going to look seriously at getting back into the writing – editing side of things when I leave here.

Another so-so part of the trip was that I wasn’t in the fun part of town. Heidelbert is a great town if you’re near old town, but I was in a little hotel near the Army compound. I was walking and a little sick, so I just went back and forth from the office to the room. Not thrilling, even in the best of towns.

Anyway, not every trip can be a holiday.

Man, does NetBSD have the most swag — or as they call it, devotionalia — I’ve ever seen: throw pillows, messenger bags, dog shirts and the thong underwear shown at right. It’s funny, too, because they have just about the simplest logo I’ve ever seen, and that’s all they offer: the NetBSD logo on different stuff. They even have two different pages with different pricing. On the second one things cost more and the difference apparently goes to the NetBSD Foundation.

I went to the NetBSD site because I think I’m going to write a review of NetBSD 3.0. I was reading Distrowatch Weekly and somebody noted they’d like to see a review, and the author said that , as far as he knew, there was no such animal out there. That seemed odd, as version 3.0 has been out a good month. But then, I gather not that many ordinary users actually use NetBSD. The code is supposedly super clean, it runs on pretty much everything with a processor (even if you put one in a toaster), and it probably runs lots of servers. But I think the reviews tend to be written either by fanboys or people with news sites who want to draw hits. I get the feeling the real pros don’t spend a lot of time writing reviews, so unless a distro gathers a lot of fans with time, it doesn’t get reviewed much. That probably explains why Ubuntu has almost as many reviews as users, and why Slackware gets more desktop reviews than server reviews, even though I don’t think there’s a shortage of servers running Slackware.
I went to the swag site to see if there was anything I thought was worth buying. I once sent NetBSD a small donation when they were looking for cold, hard cash. I don’t use it (though I tried it out after donating), but I understand they contribute a lot of code the other BSDs and Linux end up using. So it all goes for the good of the Free and Open Source Software community.

Anyway, I’ve downloaded the install disk and I’ll give it a spin on my spare hard drive some time in the next week or so.
Oh, and it downloaded like lightning. The speed stayed around 500k per second. I guess upgrading from DSL 1000 to DSL 6000 is paying off (though Deutsche Telkom hit me with an 86 euro [more than $100] upgrade fee they didn’t mention beforehand).

After a long search I finally picked out my Christmas present. It’s not really a Christmas present to myself, though it might as well be. Being full-grown adults with specific wants and needs, Sue and I tend to buy each other little things, then pick out our big present ourselves (though we do let the giver click on the “submit order” button on the web page. Call us traditionalists).

This year I wanted — shocker — computer equipment. I’m going to build a new computer during the coming year, and I figured I could pick up something for it for Christmas and thus soften the sticker shock when it came time to put the thing together. I decided to get speakers, as my current speakers, while they sound great, are big, bulky and have cable a problem that requires fiddling with from time to time. So I did my research and settled on Swan multimedia speakers. The problem was the only place that sells them and ships them to APOs (post offices for military and government workers overseas) was out of stock. I waited a while, but they dropped off the web page entirely.

Next I decided to get a computer case. I did a bunch of research (there are a ton of computer hardware sites on the net) and settled on the Antec 180. Their sales pitch is “a case without compromise,” and a bunch of reviews seemed to back it up. It has a separate chamber for the power supply and up to three hard drives, so the heat from those doesn’t add to the heat from the motherboard, processor and video card. It has big, slower fans, which are quieter than the little fast ones, and the panels are made from three layers to cut down on vibrations. It’s also a fairly nice looking case, pretty understated as PC cases go.

I wavered for a couple of days, because I thought it was such an obvious non-Christmas gift — especially because I don’t plan to build the computer until April or May. So I thought I’d get a ring. I’m into Celtic themes and designs these days, and I thought I’d get a Celtic ring. They were nice, so I picked out a place and told Sue to buy me one. But she needed my size, which I don’t know (because of a neck problem I didn’t wear rings for about 20 years. When I finally got my neck fixed and started wearing rings I only had my size given to me twice, and once it was too tight). I kept meaning to stop somewhere and get my size (we have a lot of jewelry stores right around the house, as we live downtown). But I never seemed to remember or find the time.

Finally I admitted the obvious: I wanted something for the computer. So I told her, she said fine and I ordered the case. It was $125 plus shipping, and that’s without a power supply. A little crazy, I know. But that’s the beauty: it won’t figure in the cost of the whole computer when I build it in four or five months. It was a present…

Now the question is, can I wait four or five months?

I want to, because AMD is changing their processors some time in the the Spring (or so the rumors say), and I’d like to either get one of the new ones or pick up one of the current ones cheaper. I want to build a very fast box with the latest hardware. Not because I need it right away, or because I’m a gamer or something, but I want to future-proof this computer for a while. I’d like to have it last for a year after I got back to the states. Right now I’m supposed to go back at the end of 2007, but if I can get extended it might be the end of 2009. With dual core processors, the latest video card technology, the latest in fast hard drives and a boat-load of memory, I should be good for a while. And I went with a regular-sized case because the small form factor style I use now — while really cool — makes upgrading hard. If I do this correctly, I should be able to replace one or two pieces at a time and generally keep up for a good 5 years.

Well that’s enough obsessiveness for now. I’m sure I’ll do more later.

Somewhere between my hosting company and WordPress my posts have been getting eaten all weekend. Have to see if this takes or not. If so, I’ll be back to blogging regularly Tuesday.

Slashdot has a brief about SiteAdvisor, which is a blog by some people who have decided to download pretty much every free program online and see what it does to your computer. The current article is about the worst examples they’ve come across. They seem to be mostly screensavers, but to get them you have to download and install six or eight or 10 programs. And most of them are adware, spyware and so forth. They run on your computer, leeching on your processor and memory, redirecting your web searches and so on. That’s why so many people running Windows get to watch their computers get slower and slower, why their home page gets switched and they can’t get it back and why so many of them end up having their computers taken over by bad guys who use them to send out spam, attack networks and so forth.

The answer is easy, of course: don’t download crap off the web. These guys have downloaded an incredible 140,000 programs and checked them out. They have virtual PC installed, so they can install the programs on a copy of Windows that’s not really running their PC. It’s an operating system inside their operating system, so if it gets hosed, it’s not fatal.

But as these guys document so well, you don’t know what you’re geting when you download this stuff. Even when people bother to read the user agreement, they usually don’t understand what it says (and the agreements are no doubt written that way on purpose), or really understand what it’s going to do to their systems. So the only thing to do is download nothing, which makes the web a giant candy store where you dare not eat anything. That pretty much sucks.

My answer — of course — is to run Linux (or the Mac, though there are more things targetting the Mac than Linux). The first thing it does is makes the whole 140,000 programs not enticing: they won’t run on Linux, so you’re not tempted to get them. Sounds just as sucky as ever, until you realize there are tons of free programs out there for Linux. Pretty much all the programs the average user would want to run on Linux are free. There are screensavers, games, etc. They’re good, they’re free and they don’t try to take over your computer. If you pick the right version of Linux (and it’s not hard) your computer will be faster, prettier and pretty much bulletproof when you’re surfing the net. And a nice side benefit is that you don’t have to feel bad because you’re using an illegal copy of a program.

This makes me think about writing a “how to choose a Linux distro” article. There are a lot out there, but I’ve never seen one I think is just right.

First, however, I’ve got to write about running Linux on my laptop for TuxMobile.org. I had one up on my old blog on joe.ferrare.net, but when I killed that whole site I forgot to save it.

It’s not a big deal, though, because I needed to rewrite it anyway. I wrote it when I was running Ubuntu, and I’ve since installed Zenwalk, which is quite a bit different — at least to install.

Well, I’ve missed a few days in a row here. No biggie, I guess, but I’d hoped to be more regular.

I thought I was just going to post some little nothings just to have a blog, but I’ve actually been thinking about writing and leadership. I don’t know that I’ve got the resume to actually write a book about leadership and get it published, but I think I could write a pretty good leadership book. Not your typical military leadership book, but a book for technically oriented people who suddenly find themselves in leadership positions.

That’s what happened to me. I came back in the Army to be a journalist, mainly because I wanted to be a writer. My plan was to get my degree, learn to write along the way and then get out and be a journalist. As it happened, I was just smart enough — and only just — to keep both sides of my career going — the writing and the military side. As luck would have it, I got promoted early (it was early back then, I’d be a laggard today). I decided to stay in the Army until retirement, because I was already halfway there. But having gotten promoted (to sergeant first class) meant I started getting non-writing jobs, which is when I looked around and realized people expected me to be a leader.

I made it pretty far, as least in the big fish in a small pond way, but I never felt like a leader. I felt like a writer who kept getting promoted, who got great jobs mainly because of timing, luck and occasionally the lack of competition. But it put me in leadership positions, and I got to be around a lot of good leaders and see what was what. I think I saw a little more clearly because I retained my sense of being a journalist and a bit of an outsider, while at the same time having establishment leadership jobs. I don’t think my perspective is unique in any way, but I think I might be one of the few guys who was in that position and is a good enough writer to write about it well.

Maybe I should blog it. Hell, maybe I should blog anything regularly.

E-week has a story about another “study” Microsoft has done. I understand the PR theory behind why they do these things — you have to reassure the people who agree with you and challenge those who disagree with you while trying to convince the undecided (think political campaigns). But the journalist in me wonders why they bother. They’re so transparent.

I mean, I’m going to do a study (or pay for a study to be done, usually without telling anyone it’s on my dime) and — I’m shocked, shocked I say — that my product comes out on top. Or in this case equal to.

The story is about how Linux isn’t any better than Windows XP on older hardware. So how do they check? They install several Linux distros on a machine and see what happens. Seems fair. Except their choices determine the outcome. Except for Slackware, none of their choices is known for speed. So they pick the distros that compete with XP on capabilities and ignore the distros that are done specifically to run on older hardware. So instead of Kanotix Lite or Mepis Lite, or Vector they use Suse and Linspire. Heck, they must know it’s very easy to get a good low-resource installation of Slackware. It’s just not the standard KDE desktop installation.

I’m sure the desktop environment was KDE, too. As I’ve said before, KDE is great, and so is Gnome. But they’re resource-intensive. IceWM or XFCE would be the way to go on those machines — nice task bar, familiar menus, a fraction of the resources. The standard install of Slackware gives you Apache, development tools, databases, etc. With a little thought you could pick out the desktop apps you need and have the system you need. If you do the standard install you could run a huge web site, an office server, etc. That’s Slackware’s market. But the choices are there.

And instead of using Abiword, which any idiot would do on a machine from 1997 or 1998, they use OpenOffice. Hey, it’s a nice program, but again, it’s one that aims to compete with Microsoft’s current offerings. Abiword aims to be light and give you everything you need in a word processor. Big difference, as any Word user knows.

They make it seem to be a reasonable (which is the key) study by picking Linux distros and programs that compete with XP and doing a standard install of everything. They ignore Linux’s strength — choice and targetted distributions — because they’d get their asses handed to them if they did. They say people trying to use these older computers generally don’t have the IT staff to configure these operating systems to the nth degree, so they would just do a normal install. Here’s the thing: with an hour of googling, you could find out everything you need to know to install the right distro on those kinds of machines.

But it’s better for MS to assume ignorance. And hey: the idea of choice doesn’t come naturally to them, does it?