system.reflecti0n.net

I bought the cheapie home edition of Office 2007 last spring and with it the option to load up OneNote. I figured it was worth a look.

Frankly, I did what probably everybody else did when they opened OneNote… I yawned. Nothing special to see there. I closed it and forgot all about it for months.

Then a couple days ago I was sifting through a really long blog posting about programming and found a piece of it that I wanted to remember. The blog being so long though meant if I was going to post is to delicious.com would mean I'd probably lose track of what peice I wanted to re-read later.

Then I noticed the little "N" in my system tray and the light-bulb went on…. I copied the text of the piece I wanted to reference, double clicked on the "N" and pasted in my clipping. Even better, I included a hyperlinked footnote to the original blog-- and I clipped it from a Firefox window so I was duly impressed by this. That is, I get to keep my little nugget of info AND track where it came from. Sweet.

So now I get it. OneNote is better than a complicated version of Word. I've got a handy little tool for gathering small pieces of info into one place. I recall it said something like that on the box-- shame they can't really show you how handy it is on the back of the box.

It's early days yet, this may only be a little fad for me. But I'll keep trying. Now I'm already wondering if I can get his installed at work and organize clippings of useful code in the same way. If OneNote could actually do code colourization I'd really be impressed… I'll leave that for another day, but soon.

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Ok, just a couple of small issues I want on the record…

Twitter has stopped posting my SMS updates. I think after sending a couple while I was overseas in Ireland and the UK they decided to cut me off. Could they must have been dinged for receiving out-of-country SMS messages from me? Really, I’d prefer them to tell me.

On the upside, I resorted to ping.fm for my posting updates. They don’t do SMS, but they do post a custom email for you to send stuff to. They even clipped the “This message was sent from my BlackBerry” footer from the posting. So I lost SMS, gained email and since unlimited email is included in my plan I actually come out ahead.

I still would like to have been told I was going to lose SMS. I think I’ll ask Twitter customer service about it and see what they come back with.

The other issue is slightly more frustrating. Each time I post from Windows’ Live Writer I get a double-post. I looked around and this is not an uncommon issue. Funny thing is, I think this only happens when I post on my laptop. That is, I remember making posts from my desktop ‘puter and not noticing a double-post. This posting is on my desktop now, so it’s part of a grand experiment… I’m suspicious it’s either a bad plugin, somehow I’ve got doubled settings in my laptop or drafts I save to an offline folder are breaking things somehow. Stay tuned for more riveting developments.

So there you are. Blogging is hell—when the tools don’t work. The Twitter issue balanced out to a net-zero in the end, but  I’ll have a tough time giving up on Live Writer if I can’t get around this double-post thing.

Update: There it is. Plain as the nose on your face, TWO postings of the same article. Even the permalink IDs are the same. Now my suspicion moves me to believe this is a BlogEngine.net issue... I wonder if it's because I posted to two categories. Instead of littering the blog with test posts, I'm going to try a posting tomorrow. At least theissue isn't a laptop-vs-desktop installation thing, both posting locations suck the same, so I can look elesewhere for a solution!

 Update 2: A solution, kind of. It seems this is a BlogEngine bug. To cut it short, there seems to be two instances of the same post in memory. There is actually only one post recorded so it's not worth it to delete the extra post. The trcik to erasing the double post is to reset your web app-- the easiest way is to edit your Web.Config file... add/remove a carriage return from the endo of the file and save it. This forces a reload and poof, the double post is gone. I bet they're caching the post and the trigger is firing twice... why is an issue for another day.

Tags: blogging, blogengine.net, web.config, double-posts

Like many of you, I’m getting more and more frustrated with the failure of Adobe to produce a Flash plugin that actually works well inside of Firefox. The two biggest complaints, as ever, are Flash ads that choke the browser and some Flash videos are unwatchable because the video stops every 3 seconds or so.

Through the grapevine I heard the patch-up solution is to download the beta of Flash 10. This stops random videos from freezing every few seconds. But as one problem goes away, a new one takes its place. Those stupid “pop-out” Flash ads that you encounter on just about every mass-media site rely on transparency to hide itself when your mouse isn’t hovering over the add. But transparency isn’t working on the beta 10 edition of Flash yet. So instead of a mostly-invisible pop-out advertisement, the content I really want to read is blocked off with a big white rectangle. Total Flash FAIL.

The Solution: Firefox Add-Ons To The Rescue

Originally I thought Remove It Permanently was all I’d ever need to get these Flash ads off of my screen, but the easiest way to use RIP was with the context menu and clicking on Flash doesn’t show you Firefox’s context menu. This is where Flash Killer comes in real handy. With one click you shut off all the Flash and its obstructions are over! It does leave the original area that Flash occupied with a really fugly rectangle, but that’s OK. Right-click on the fugly and you’ve got the real Firefox context menu to nuke the annoying flash.

The Force Is Strong, But Use It Wisely…

I like to think I play fair with this. I won’t remove Flash ads that aren’t pop-outs because I don’t need to, they don’t get in my way so there’s no need to waste my time with a zero-value-add operation. Hopefully to a website this means I’m leaving most media outlets the opportunity to serve up less obtrusive ads and still make some money.

Now, if only I can work out a good method to block all those 3rd-party usage tracking scripts that never ever finish loading.

Tags: flash, firefox, plugins, adblocking

I used to have a problem when I booted into Windows Vista. Even waiting a few moments before I logged-in, my network connection wouldn’t be ready. No IP address was available, even if I set one manually the NIC just would not serve up anything network-related. Rebooting the NIC by disabling-enabling it from the Manage Network Connections would never fail.

It seems to me that the order my hardware is booting it probably at issue here. While the NIC is trying to go online, some resource required to initialize it is in use by something else. Sifting through Event Viewer did not turn up any clues either. But by the time I’m logged in that resource is free again, by the process that initializes the NIC has given up trying by that time.

So this got me to wondering why there couldn’t be a background process that’s surveying all your services and hardware to determine what’s running and what’s not running? You know:

1. RAID-array: check
2. Video-display: check
3. NIC: check
4. Database-server: check
5. Web-server: check
6. …ad nauseum…

…Then if one of those services was to fail, the background process that’s noting these problems would check to see if it had a history of failing, note its dependencies and determine a better order for booting. For example, a web-server booting before the NIC would be a problem in most cases, so the algorithm that determines the boot order would push that service down the ordered-list of services to boot up.

Furthermore, if this boot-up analysis saw things were all booting up fine, but detected some services could boot in parallel because they had mutually-exclusive dependencies then the ordered-boot up list could be optimized by reordering and re-synchronizing the boot order again.

This would be advantageous to a Windows or Linux based PC because the hardware and services of all the machines out there covers a very wide spectrum of configurations and duties. Today, boot order optimization is a manual task that is probably overlooked by all but the uber-geek administrator types. This automated approach is well within our grasp already and we only need to write an application that will do the dirty work for us.

Tags: optimization, windows, linux

You know, for something that looks as cheap as this, the eeepc actually works really really well.

By really well I mean that all the advertised features work as advertised. Event the wireless networking runs surprisingly fast.

By cheap, I mean this looks like one of those cheesy toy laptops you'd get at Zellers for your 8-year-old nephew. You know, it would have an equally cheesy brand name like Panthertronics or some atrocity towards compound words.

The New eeepc - First Impressions

Back to the point, at first try, you wonder what you've plonked your $300 over... apps like Firefox and OpenOffice seem to take an age to show a splash-screen, let alone load. But once you get past those seemingly long app loads, the apps themselves seem to run nice and smoothly. I don't have the booklet with me, but the 512 Mb of RAM is probably DDR. I think the bottleneck must be the solid-state drive. I'll gladly accept the slow SSD since it probably makes it possible to run this gadget on a battery no bigger than three “C”-cells.

I'm glad to be using it now, but I got off to a bumpy start. After poking around with the default OS (based on Xandros, once upon a time the basis for the Corel Linux OS) I noticed ASUS included a booklet on how to install Windows XP Sp2 on the device. 2Gb of storage be dammed, here I have written proof that ASUS wants me to install other operating systems on their hardware. This was too good to pass up!

Installing Windows Xp on a 2Gb eeepc

Unfortunately for me, the only valid installation I had for XP was an old Sp1 install disk. Nevertheless I plodded on using my external DVD drive. In about 50-60 minutes the install was over, but my hunch was the included drivers were never going to work without Sp2 installed, especially the wireless support, which changed so much from Sp1 to Sp2. So I found my network install of Sp2, copied it to a USB key and got down to work.

Installing Xp Sp2 on a 2Gb eeepc

This is where things started going downhill. First, I get the message like Sp2 cannot install because there is not enough disk space. No surprise there, I had partitioned the SSD in two, 1.5 and .5 gigs. I plugged the USB into another laptop and manually extracted the files onto yet another USB key. Now I could install Sp2 directly from the USB key using the Update.exe command (look inside the subfolders of the i386 folder extracted). Again, another 30 minutes or so to get the service pack installed and you're off to the races.

Off to the Races... or the Glue Factory

Now it was finally time to unwrap the ASUS-provided driver CD. In it goes and directly offers to install the ACPI drivers-- not even a reboot is asked for, that's not so bad. Now on to install all the other drivers... whoa, eight more drivers huh... and four reboots, well it's nice of them to let me know. I start flipping through the Saturday afternoon sports offerings on TV, keeping one eye on the eeepc, as each reboot required me to login again as I didn't leave the administrator password on 'blank'.

This ASUS drivers CD worked as advertised though, after about an hour of waiting and watching all the drivers for video, audio, wireless and networking were all installed, with no effort on my part except to login after each of the four reboots. I really want to hand it to ASUS, they did everything possible to make this device work for their customers. I don't always have such a smooth ride installing that many drivers at once.

Windows Update - to the Gates of Hell

Up until this point I was pretty stoked that I was going to get to use the eeepc with all my favorite software, especially AbiWord and Windows Live Writer (the possibility of having a handy little 1.2-lb. wordprocessor in my backpack was the driving issue for me). Though I may be a fool, I am never foolish, so my next stop had to be Windows Update to finish off the job of patching up my new teensy (tEEEnsy?) pc.

And this is where using Windows XP Sp2 on a 2Gb eeepc comes apart at the seams. There are simply too many updates on to a fresh Sp2 system to install them all on a 1.5 Gb partition (i would later try using a full 2Gb partition, no dice either).

About ¼ of the way through the 89 patches pumped in to the system by Windows Update and i started getting repeated warnings about running out of drive space. This happens around the 100Mb-free point. Eventually all the updates fail as there is no room left to finish the installation, let alone download all the necessary install files.

The forensic evidence turned up a folder at C:\Windows\SoftwareDownload which is where the BITS service downloads all the update files that will get installed on your computer. Note, if you TURN OFF Automatic Updates after starting Widows Update, the BITS service will continue to download updates into the SoftwareDownload folder until all the files are completely downloaded. in other words, if you start deleting files in this folder to make room, more files will turn up in there place! Maddening, to be sure.

A leafing through the booklet at this point, to see if there was a warning about installing on 2Gb systems turned up nothing, but ASUS did recommend compressing the drive. Since I corrupted the SoftwareDownload service by deleting all the downloaded files, I chose to start from scratch again, meaning installing XP Sp1, Sp2 and drivers all over again, then do a drive compression and see how far I'd get. I did this only because I love to use Live Writer so much.

Hard drive compression did the trick, I was able to finish all of the Windows Updates. But upon reboot that useless appendage called “Windows Genuine Advantage” crashed. I tried to ignore this, but it seemed to be preventing me from installing Windows Live Writer as well.

A search through Google turned up a KB article indicating that the licensing database used by WGA can become unusable if the system drive is heavily fragmented. Lo and behold, this was true, Disk Defragmenter displayed more red than all the fans at a Montreal Canadiens home game. Repeated attempts to defragment the drive made little to no improvement (seriously, i tried about 20 times). This was probably a side effect of so little leftover space (about 200Mb even after compression) and the system drive compression itself.

Without Windows Live Writer, there really is no point to using Windows (even though reboots were complete in under 10 seconds) and I can get AbiWord for Linux just about anywhere.

Back to the Beginning: Xandros Linux for eeepc

So that's what brought me here. Along the way I tried “eeedora” the Linux distro based on Redhat's Fedora distro, but I never did get the wireless adapter working, in spite of numerous forum posts about the same.

The re-install of Xandros wasn't straightforward either. it seems results may vary when restoring by external CD/DVD. ASUS recommends getting a 2Gb USB still and performing the factory restore by booting from the USD key instead of external CD. Luckily, the instructions on their support forum were excellent and worked as advertised.

So here I am. Contentedly typing up this blog post and several others in OpenOffice 2.0 (I would be happily typing away if only I could get AbiWord to install, but maybe that's another blog posting) when I realized that this thing does work every bit as well as you'd need it to. Given it's small size, it demonstrates ASUS's sage engineers as the least bit of frustration would send this tEEEnsy device hurtling across any large open space. (Yeah, that last part probably only makes sense in my mind, but I keeping it in there, it's my blog and I don't have to make complete sense...)

Conslusion

Really, skip getting that next-gen iPod. An eeepc is going to be far more useful if you have any inclination to blog, or write for pleasure at any time in any place. Seriously, you'll love having the compactness of a paper-and-pen notebook combined with the word-processing options of a mouse-and-keyboard notebook.

Update: AbiWord is now installed... I repeat, AbiWord is loaded and running... one step closer to perfection!

Tags: eeepc, winxp