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…]

I ordered one of these (250GB laptop SATA drive) a few weeks ago, knowing that they weren’t in stock yet. Today, PC Connection says they’re in stock, shipping today, but mine is still marked “back-ordered”, and a call to customer service confirms that it won’t ship until around July 9th.

Why? Because it’s in stock in California, and she said that orders going to California have to ship from a warehouse in another state. So my shiny new drive has to be loaded onto a truck, driven a thousand miles or so, and then overnighted back to California.

And she’s not kidding. If I try to place a new order, it shows as “in stock, shipping today” right up to the moment I try to finish the transaction, at which point it switches to “2+ weeks”.

Feh.

[7/5 Update: we just got bit by this again, when we ordered a shiny new “in-stock” LED-backlit MacBook Pro for a new hire. It arrived two weeks after he did, shipped from Nashville. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting on my new drive…]

[7/10 Update: still hasn’t shipped, and customer service confirms that they still haven’t managed to ship any from their warehouse in California to their warehouse in Nashville. So, I ordered another one from Other World Computing, who’s had it in stock for weeks for $20 more, and who promises to have it on my desk by 10am tomorrow. I might leave the other order open and expense it at work; we’ve got several laptop users who’d love to have 250GB.]

Well, for corporate customers, at least.

It’s no secret that Vista sales have been sluggish, with many people (and most companies) preferring to stick with Windows XP for now. Retail sales are pretty much Vista-only, though, and online dealers have a strong preference for it as well.

At my company, application compatibility has been the main reason to avoid Vista (as opposed to Office 2007, where “user pain” tops our list). If all their apps and peripherals worked, I think most of our users would quickly adapt to Vista, and prefer it over XP.

Until that day comes, we’re sticking with the XP-based models in Sony’s SZ and BX series, which continue to deliver excellent performance and stability (one motherboard failure in 20+ machines, quickly repaired). I’ve been casually keeping an eye on Sony’s lineup, on the assumption that when the existing supply of XP-based VAIOs runs out, it will be Vista time.

Maybe not. Today’s press release from Sony Japan only has assorted versions of Vista on the A, F, and G series, but still offers XP on the brand-new widescreen BX’s. The BX series is still completely absent from sonystyle.com, but now that the new model has been announced in Japan and Europe, it should show up soon here.

Sadly, all recent models in the lightweight SZ series (beloved by our non-Mac-using executives) are Vista-only, but unless we hire a lot more execs soon, we’re in pretty good shape there.

Please stop embedding Reader in my browsers; it’s a horribly bloated application that renders PDF files a dozen times more slowly than Preview.app, and frequently manages to peg the CPU and lock up my browser while failing to render a document.

Slot-loading optical drives suck, especially when they refuse to eject a disc that shouldn’t be allowed into the hands of J Random Technician down at the Apple Store (or anywhere else, really).

For future reference, if you really, really need to crack open a MacBook Pro and peel the optical drive open, the nice folks at Other World Computing have you covered.

Be sure to pick up a Torx size 7 and a Philips size 000 before starting, and keep very careful track of which screws came from where. And don’t forget to plug the keyboard back in before you seal it back up.

Rory has ranted a bit about our recent laptop troubles. After giving up on those two companies, and not being able to fit ThinkPads into the budget, we looked for an alternative. These days, we’re also constrained by the desire to avoid becoming a mixed XP/Vista shop, so I went to the vendor who likes us the most, PC Connection, and sorted through their offerings.

The first “fix me now” user really, really wanted a lightweight machine, and had a strong affection for Bluetooth, so we bought him a Sony VAIO SZ340P and bumped the memory to 1.5GB. He loves it, and I was pretty pleased with the out-of-the-box experience as well (including their new packaging). There are only three real problems: it takes half an hour and three reboots to delete all of the crapware that’s preinstalled, you have to spend an hour burning recovery DVDs because they don’t ship media, and the default screensaver plays obnoxious music on a short loop.

The second user liked the SZ340P, but wanted something even lighter, so we bought her the SZ360P. It’s a quarter-pound lighter, uses the same docking station (which ships without its own power supply, but uses the same one as the laptop), and is also a really nice machine.

The downside of 4-pound laptops is they’re not as sturdy, so for the next four new-hires in line, I looked for something a little bigger, and ended up choosing the BX640P, with RAM bumped to 2GB. Different docking station (nicer, actually, with room for an optical drive and a spare battery to keep charged), different set of crapware, and not a widescreen display, but a better keyboard and a sturdier feel, and I’m equally pleased with its performance.

The only serious negative: it looks like the BX series will be discontinued, so when they run out and I need to start buying Vista machines, I’ll have to switch series. At the moment, I’m leaning a little toward the FE890 series, but PC Connection doesn’t stock the full range yet, so I can’t get the CPU/RAM/disk combination I want. With luck I can put that off for a few months, though.

With the previous brand, 2 of five had video and wireless problems. The five VAIOs I’ve set up so far have been rock-solid, and I expect the same from the other three that just arrived.

Sadly, while we’ll be able to put off the Vista migration for a little while (hopefully until Juniper gets their VPN client working…), Microsoft Office 2003 is a dead product, and starting Monday we’ll have users running 2007. On each user’s machine, I have to open up each Office application as that user, click the unobtrusive button that looks like a window decoration, click on the “{Word,Excel,PowerPoint} Options” button, select the Save tab, and set the “Save files in this format” option to use the Office 97-2003 format. Or else.

[Update: Actually, if you like ThinkPads and you’re willing to buy them right now, PC Connection has some nice clearance deals. If we were a bigger company, I might find the “buy 15, get one free” deal attractive…]

[4/17/2007 update: okay, one of the Sony BX laptops just lost its motherboard, after locking up at random intervals over a week or two. That still leaves 9/10 good ones, which is better than we got with Dell and Alienware.]

I always knew graphic designers were a little goofy, but come on:

COLORSTROLOGY™ Widget combines astrology and numerology with intuitive wisdom and the spiritual power of color to create a personal color for every day and month of the year. By blending the colors that are associated with the sun sign, ruling planet, and elements such as fire, earth, air or water, with the numerological vibration of each day, the colors for the COLORSTROLOGY calendar are selected, along with key words that best describe the personality traits associated with that color and day.

This is part of Pantone’s web site, and they even offer a Dashboard widget for offline shweng fui magic color selection. And there’s a book, and an official “colorstrology” web site, with a Flash intro that suggests it’s completely serious.

I cherish these people. From the wipe manpage:

I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.

Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands.

My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufacturers and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.

Don't trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.