After making my latest Amazon order (no, not the boy’s shoes they recommended because I rated a Microsoft mouse, or even the Bourne Ultimatum DVD they recommended because I bought a book on Tokyo (although, to be fair, I did see that movie dubbed into Japanese…)), an HP ad popped up that included a statement that seemed surprisingly honest:

Ink-cartridge technology must be pretty bad when you’re proud that only one in a hundred are no good.

This is the Asus EEE PC slogan localized for Japan: “manabu hataraku asobu”, which copies half of the English slogan, leaving out the whole “easy” part. Then again, it ships with Windows XP instead of a dumbed-down Xandros derivative, which might make it less approachable for a complete novice, but definitely more familiar to the Windows-centric Japanese audience.

Now that there’s a working Fedora 8 distribution for the EEE (thanks to the new official kernel support and Philip Pemberton’s RPMs), I can really start using mine. The supplied Xandros-derivative was amusing, but much too limited. Among other things, WPA2 Enterprise wireless was messy to set up, the Juniper VPN software simply didn’t work, and I really, really like chkconfig.

The most important software I’ll use on it? Claws Mail, Perl, emacs, minicom, Firefox, and StarDict. StarDict isn’t as useful a Japanese dictionary as Jedict for the Mac, but at least it uses the same source data. I’d prefer the “Green Goddess” dictionary that’s being included in some of the recent handhelds, but the EEE is small enough for most occasions, and I’ve already got a WordTank and a DS Lite running Kanji sonomama.

Why on Earth are you shipping a brand-new, business-class laptop with a 14-inch 1024x768 display?!?!?

Your DigitalMedia SE software is installed on one of our Windows laptops (Sony ships the damn thing, in fact). It’s supposed to help users burn DVDs. When I pushed the little button to burn a disc containing 3+ GB of data scattered across several thousand files, a little dialog box popped up complaining that 6 of the files couldn’t be written.

This was in a fixed-width window, and the files were listed with their full pathnames, cut off at the end of a non-resizable column. I have no idea which 6 files can’t be burned to the DVD, and your software refuses to tell me. Obviously no one at your company has ever actually used your product.

Yesterday, a user’s VAIO BX640 dropped dead in the middle of a meeting. It didn’t come back, and by that I mean “nothing happens when you press the power button”. After swapping in different battery and power supply, I called for service.

This afternoon, another user reported that he wasn’t getting sound out of his BX640, and the headphone jack just made ticking noises. It doesn’t even make the magical VAIO noise when you power it on. I swapped parts around, reset the BIOS, etc. No luck. This isn’t a critical issue, so I’ll wait until Monday to ship it off for service, but it’s disturbing, because they’re both motherboard problems. And so was the only other one of my (more than a dozen) BX640s to fail so far, several months ago…

I’m playing with my old Sony XG-19 again. As reported earlier, OpenBSD 4.1 worked but never played DVDs, Fedora 7 blew chunks during the install, and Debian 4.0 worked fine, requiring only a few xorg.conf tweaks and a copy of libdvdcss2.

But it sucked for Japanese, so it had to go. There are all sorts of input managers and applications available, but they don’t all play nice with each other, and the system setup assumes that anyone who wants to type in Japanese wants a completely localized system. You can work around this, eventually, but I lost patience.

So I tried CentOS 5. The graphical install worked fine, the xorg.conf file only needed a one-line change to shut off double-tapping on the trackpad, and once you find DAG, it’s easy to get DVDs playing with VLC (Totem steadfastly refuses to admit which of its plugins are missing, and nothing I install seems to placate it, but who cares?).

The Japanese support in CentOS is much more mature, and offers a user experience reasonably close to Mac OS X or Windows. The default keybindings are naturally different from anything you’ve ever used before, but one has to make some concessions when dealing with Open Source, and it has a “behave like Windows” option.

Now to build the current version of Claws Mail…

[Update: got Claws 2.10 built and running, and unlike my Debian install, it plays nice with the Japanese input method.]

My friends keep whining about certain behaviors in Apple’s Mail.app. Specifically, the inept way it wraps URLs in allegedly plaintext email, which simply don’t work in most other mailers. I can’t really defend its behavior, because I think that Mail.app’s concept of “plain text” is pure shit and violently anti-WYSIWYG, obviously only tested against itself. [note: don’t bother complaining to Apple, the bug will be closed with “working as intended”]

Claws Mail seems to be much more sensible, and at this point I’d cheerfully send some cash to support a native port to Mac OS X. The X11 port works, but it’s a bit clumsy to use (especially for Japanese; Apple’s X11 server doesn’t support their own Kotoeri input method, so you have to use an external editor), and like virtually all Open Source applications, it’s in desperate need of user interface design. I need to poke around some more and see how it handles some of the features I rely on in Mail.app (particularly SpamSieve), but the initial experience is pretty good, and it sends honest-to-gosh plain text.

There’s a native Windows port available, but it hasn’t been updated in quite a while (2.4, current is 2.10).

[Update: Tip for the day: don’t open an IMAP folder containing 17,167 messages. Claws locks up until it finishes downloading and processing all of their headers, and then (at least on Mac OS X) the X server locks up for a few minutes when you try to scroll through the massive message list too quickly.

Mind you, until today I didn’t know that I had an IMAP folder with 17,167 messages in it (it was a trash folder full of spam, on a server I’d only been reading via POP), so I really can’t blame Claws Mail for being a bit overwhelmed. And to its credit, it recovered perfectly when the X server came back, and the memory footprint was still nice and lean.

It doesn’t look like the Mac port includes any plugins right now, so I need to keep something else around to handle spam. The account I most want to get mail from is of course the one with the most spam, so I need to continue processing it through SpamSieve for now. Most likely, what I’ll do is leave Mail.app running with SpamSieve on one of my machines, but turn off all of the other filtering rules and port those to Claws.]

Recently I picked up a new battery on Amazon for my ancient Sony VAIO XG-19. I used to use it to VPN into Microsoft to work from home, but that meant running XP Pro, which is not terribly pleasant with 256MB of RAM. So, I could either use the original restore CDs to put Windows 98 back on, or I could free it from the chains of Microsoft (and complete hardware compatibility, but who needs all those ports and drivers anyway…).

First up was OpenBSD 4.1, which I’m quite fond of for firewalls and hostile-universe-facing servers. I didn’t expect much, and certainly the manual package retrieval and dependency tracking is a pain in the ass when configuring it as a desktop, but it worked, and I only had to tweak one line in the supplied xorg.conf to get it running. VLC wasn’t terribly happy about my limited video memory and pathetic CPU, but I wasn’t really expecting a multimedia powerhouse. There’s only so much you can do with a 650MHz Pentium III.

Fedora 7 blew chunks.

It actually made it all the way through if I forced it to install in text mode, but the same DVD I installed the OS from couldn’t be mounted after the install finished (to add Emacs, of all things, which was inexplicably missing from the selected packages), and the first reboot after the install locked up good and hard after loading the Sony JogDial driver.

I have no desire to ever look at Ubuntu again, so I suppose I’ll give the latest Debian a try before going back to a BSD variant.

[Update: Debian 4.0 installed just fine, and after tracking down the magic to get the synaptics driver to stop accepting taps as double-clicks (blech), setting the right options for the neomagic video driver, and locating the libdvdcss2 package, it’s running fairly well. DVDs actually look pretty good, and the drive is old enough not to require a region-unlocking firmware update. The downside: modern Linux distributions install more crapware than Sony does. Oh, and I still needed to install Emacs myself…]