Luci Sandor’s blog

We do a lot of user switching these days. We’re two on a single PC, you
know. And when you do Fast User Switching, you can see pretty soon who
is the idiot around here. E.g., Panda Antivirus has the bad habit of
drawing two icons in system tray whenever you log back to an account
already open, while real-time software such as the one used by the TV
tuners don’t hang for a second.

The HP drivers are a collection of 6 programs (including 2 services).
It’s a hard job to keep a disconnected printer only to admire in tray a
fancy blinking icon: Guess what? Your printer is disconnected,
that’s why they use 6 EXE’s. And when you log back in after a Fast User
Switching, some of those EXE’s crash, pretending that HP COM objects
were disturbed. I’m sorry, I thought that, as long as the driver
supports only Windows XP and 2000, the HP coders had an idea about
multi-user environments.

Yesterday I’ve been prompted about a survey HP is conducting. I thought
that here’s the chance to let Fiorina know her drivers are written by
monkeys and that’s why I shut down and/or disconnect the HP printers
ASAP at any PC I’m using. The HP printer that triggered the survey is
registered to me, but not on the system was using (you know, it’s
boring to register a printer each time you reinstall Windows, like
there’s a Microsoft activation and an HP activation). Once again, I
took a step to protect my privacy - I thought that the survey sucks and
I don’t want to be contacted again. I’ve unchecked a box and felt
better, eased.

It’s 4 AM and HP strikes back. We
want to upload some stuff about your printer usage, like how many
sheets you printed, how many pics of you mother-in-law are placed in
“My Pictures” etc. The screen was overwhelmed with such
questions, they were about 50. The good part was that I didn’t have to
fill a form. They already knew, but, politely, asked me about my
opinions. I’ve fired a session of network packet recording with Packetyzer
- a nice GUI for Ethereal - and I was glad to see they didn’t send it
through plain text and HTTP on port 80. Anyway, I didn’t have
administrative rights, I couldn’t read this kind of data and I
shouldn’t be allowed to send this kind of information to Fiorella (or
was it Fiorina?). And, anyway, my information was not protected by the
firewall that integrates in Windows’ Security Center, it just went away.

I admit. I am curious about the data in the report. I’ve always wanted
to precisely count the sheets printed with my printer. Maybe I’ll ask
Fiorina.

I admit, I am way behind reading this huge blogroll you can see on the right column of the blog. Usually I just scroll fast through the pile of useless wonders posted by Scoble, feeling eased by the sudden decrease of unread posts, from 2000 to 1900, in only one minute.

On the other hand, I take the expression "A-class bloggers" literally. When my PC is busy with OCR or TV recording, I use my last cycles for Bloglines. After 1-2 minutes, more than enough for the Romanian blogs, I take the challenge of the "Techies" blogroll. I take it from the beginning, with the appeased Aaron Skonnard, the provocative GoogleWeblog of Aaron Schwarz, the noisy Adam Barr. For me, these are the A-bloggers. Although I do wonder what Tim Bray had said lately, I get to his blog only once in 2-3 months. That’s because, for me, these guys have pretty equal importance.

And that’s because there’s not a Techie that slept into long stories about movies, politics, wives, religion and moral values without being removed from my blogroll. I also don’t give a damn about blog revolution, year of blogging, blogging software (What, people, can’t write something, you have to write about how you write? Then, please, stop writing!). I care about my unread posts as I care about spam. Raise the signal / noise ratio. Stop wasting my time. Teach me something.

Of course I care about learning the news. We already have stuff written by guys like Thurrot, which is usually meaningless , uninteresting or unprofessional (yes, that kind that really doesn’t look better). A enormous trail of blurbs since Mac unveiled MiniMac reached me even through Yahoo! Messenger. I couldn’t care less about Six Apart doing dirty things with LiveJournal (A Perl template buying a PHP template and then failing to provide CPU and/or bandwidth? Wouldn’t it be better for Mena if she goes back to her English teaching or if she buys a pub and hires her husband as waiter?).

I prefer the news in the language of Dan Appleman, a man, not a boy, and a guy who surely know about he’s writing.

I always hoped that reading Alan Meckler gems about search engines I would find the magic recipe for PageRank 10. Turned out he didn’t knew it or he still kept it secret. But today he made me waste 10 minutes. He posted a link to a SF short movie which describes the world in 2014 as conquered by "alternative journalism". News would be offered by an alliance Google-Amazon, selected by their algorithms from Blogger posts. Algorithms would create new stories from disparate posts and people would read those fictions rather than NYT real news. For a while, Microsoft keeps the same pace with glorious moves, such as buying Friendster (wtf is Friendster and what is the importance of this new generation, post-IRC addiction, on the world market anyway?). Anyway, Microsoft lost the competition (perhaps Office became obsolete) and AOL or eBay didn’t qualified for the race that starts in 2005.

How many times did anyone managed to replace news agencies with blogs? How many times did Google News posted Reuters news before Reuters posted them?

Resolution: do yourself a favor and stop reading the "gems" of Alan Meckler, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompsons. Stop believing that blogs count and that peripheral phenomena like giving invitations for bloggers at the parties national conventions in USA or Bloggercon will replace (or, for that matter, will reach the magnitude order of) the influence of BBC, CNN or Murdoch’s empire. Think about the most blogged US nominee, Dean, and his influence at this moment. Think about who’s ruling at the AOL-Time Warner HQ.

Subversion is a source code control system developed under an open license with the declared purpose to replace the standard open system used these days, CVS.

I decided to put it to the test as an extension to the Apache web server. The regular distribution of the svn server include the Apache plugin, which had to be copied in the Apache modules folder. The installation guide explains what configuration files have to be edited in order to have it loaded with Apache.

The first trouble was a forced mistake. I created a folder for source code repositories and then I tried to access it with the browser and with svn clients. After half an hour of failures I traced the HTTP/HTTPS requests in Apache’s log. The svn clients were asking for a "format" file in the root of the repository folder. This file had to be created, because Apache modules were unable to create it. It turned out that the initial structure inside the folder should be created from the beginning using the command line program included for administration purposes in the svn server. Unfortunately, the aforementioned installation guide didn’t set it clear. In fact, this initialization wasn’t even mentioned in Subversion Book.

(It is horrible to see a web-enabled application is administered only through a command line.)

The second error was a special one. After some weeks, whenever I tried to start Apache, it failed. The output, as caught in the application Event Log and as displayed by Apache -t command line, which tests the installation, was that in a line of the "httpd.conf" I had an error. That line was OK, it was a directive for Apache to load a module, "mod_dav_svn.so", part of the Subversion server. The module was in place, but it failed to load because, as I saw in Dependency Walker, it depended on a DLL file which was not found. It was a common mistake and googling a bit for this error message returned lots of people having this problem and none receiving a helpful reply. The cure: don’t forget to include the "bin" folder of your Subversion installation in the PATH environment variable, otherwise "mod_dav_svn.so" won’t be able to work, Apache won’t be able to load it and it will fail to start.

I’ve left about 30$ and I decided to replace the GForce2 borrowed video card with an Asus-ATI 9200SE brand new one. And here comes the pain.

I had no experience with ATI, but Marius, a friend that used to sell PC hardware, told me that Catalyst is a good replacement for Nvidia’s NView. I checked on ATI’s website and indeed Catalyst was on the "at-a-glance" features of the 9200-based video cards. There are even two links to download it.

Dana drop by the cheap Taurus store and brought the card about an hour ago.

I’ve admired the fact that Windows XP included drivers for it, as in the days when I used SiS 530. This was not the case with the previous card, Nvidia’s GForce2, when Windows XP used to bug me about an unidentifiable video device. (I hope Xboxes, TabletPCs and Media Center PCs using GForces don’t prompt for drivers).

I upgraded? downgraded? drivers with those from CD. I really had no idea what GART drivers do, but they were on the list of drivers, below the standard drivers, so installed them too. The right order was a bit confusing: while the installer featured them down the list, the ATI website tells me that GART driver goes first, even before booting, "before operating your system". Then I understood that those were for onboard video chips. The installer tried to trick me when it wrote something about "onboard chipsets" and it was easy to fall for it, because everyone has the chipset onboard and 9200 is a single chip AFAIK, not a chipset.

Some mandatory restarts and then on to Catalyst. Click on the links for it on the 9200 homepage. Select the software from an Nvidia-like menu and there you go. The instructions on the download page say I must have .NET Framework installed. That’s a bad sign, dude, I bet the proggy is slow as death. But there’s more. The latest Catalyst, 4.12, does not support 9200 chips. This is really not nice.

Download it anyway. Install it. No sign that it hates 9200. But there are evil signs: a DLL failed to register. Restart. Start the magic Catalyst. Ugly manga pics, unintuitive menus. Mandatory sign: "You should upgrade your video card!". But I just did it! Uninstall. First try failed.

Let’s move to the previous versions. Now, that’s crap, because this Catalyst comes packaged with the drivers or on standalone versions. If I have to use it I have to:

• run old bundled drivers, which means buggier drivers

or

• run newer drivers, possibly incompatible with older Catalysts.

Move on to driver archive. No hint whatsoever about supported hardware. Read the boring release notes. Version 4.11 doesn’t like 9200. Anyway don’t click on the links from the summary, they are pointing to 404 non-existing file. Go back. The archive is so long, it scares me that I might spend the evening reading release notes. Move to version 4.10. It supports 9200! That was easy. But what’s that on the title of the browser window? Version 4.9.

What am I going to install? 4.9 or 4.10? Nvidia?

Just in case you thought This product is a real beta (meaning it is still tested), I can tell you that this product has already been sold for a while and all that Microsoft is doing to it is making it slower. During the first start, its splashscreen was drawn for a while inside a window, although it ran on my 2.8 GHz Prescott. That reminded me of .Net framework.

Then I got two alerts which were really hard to understand for me. From the log, I’ve learned that a spyware alert was triggered by the fact that I had auto-logon activated. I think Joe Average User would really jump on the "Fix" button, getting on the next reboot a nice password prompt and, with a bit of luck, a really locked machine.

Then, I scanned the system and I learned that RealVNC and WinPCap are spyware carriers.

A quick visit to the program installation folder reveals a license for InfoZip. Gosh, they were in such a rush they forgot to switch to CAB compression.

I really have to uninstall this thing. Just stick to the free Ad-Aware.