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.

I have a large stack of unencrypted (well, they are now…) DVDs. Each one contains several short video clips, correctly separated with chapter marks. I want a new DVD containing a subset of those clips, arranged in the order of my choosing, with a simple menu structure, and without re-encoding any of the videos. A mix disc, as it were, with no quality loss. So far, every Open Source or free tool I’ve tried has choked.

I’ve tried three different VOB-splitting tools. All of the available author-from-VOB tools choke on them, because they’re missing the embedded tags that make it a real DVD-compatible VOB (e.g. muxed with “mplex -f8”). Demuxing (either directly from the DVD or from split VOBs) produces an audio track that none of the tools can read, not even the same tool that just demuxed it; they all claim it’s unsupported. mplayer, ffmpeg, ffmpegX, mjpegtools, dvdauthor, transcode, etc, etc, all the same. mplayer cheerfully plays the DVDs (and the single-chapter VOBs), but it only successfully demuxes if the audio is AC3 or MP2; mine are all PCM.

[side note: ffmpegX and HandBrake both have a tendency to produce garbage in either audio or video when used to transcode and compress DVD video; there are options that work correctly with both, but many things that should work don’t.]

It seems the only realistic solution is to rip to DV and drop them into iDVD, accepting the quality loss from re-encoding. Everything else involves spending more money than the task is worth.

Current stats across all my email accounts: 115 spams/day, 30 of them caught by Mac Os X’s Junk filtering, 85 ended up in my Quarantine folder (people who aren’t in my address book or email history).

Best news: 0 false positives in the most recent ten days worth of email. By its nature, the Quarantine folder will occasionally contain real email from someone who’s trying to reach me for the first time, but I have a variety of other rules that do a pretty good job of detecting common cases. I also create custom addresses for every new vendor and site membership, and a monthly disposable address for this blog, and all of those get filtered into special folders.

I haven’t set up anything more sophisticated, largely because the problem is under control. About twice a month, something makes it into my real Inbox, and that’s not worth the effort.

[last update: the root cause of the Linux loopback device problem described below turns out to be simple: there’s no locking in the code that selects a free loop device. So it doesn’t matter whether you use mount or losetup, and it doesn’t matter how many loop devices you configure; if you try to allocate two at once, one of them will likely fail.]

Panel discussions at LinuxWorld (emphasis mine):

"We need to make compromises to do full multimedia capabilities like running on iPod so that non-technical users don’t dismiss us out of hand."

"We need to pay a lot more attention to the emerging markets; there’s an awful lot happening there."

But to truly popularize Linux, proponents will have to help push word of the operating system to users, panelists said.

... at least one proponent felt the Linux desktop movement needed more evangelism.

Jon “Maddog” Hall, executive director of Linux International, said each LinuxWorld attendee should make it a point to get at least two Windows users to the conference next year...

I’m sorry, but this is all bullshit. These guys are popping stiffies over an alleged opportunity to unseat Windows because of the delays in Vista, and not one of them seems to be interested in sitting down and making Linux work.

Not work if you have a friend help you install it, not work until the next release, not work with three applications and six games, not work because you can fix it yourself, not work if you can find the driver you need and it’s mostly stable, not work if you download the optional packages that allow it to play MP3s and DVDs, and definitely not work if you don’t need documentation. Just work.

[disclaimer: I get paid to run a farm of servers running a mix of RedHat 7.3 and Fedora Core 2/4/5. The machine hosting this blog runs on OpenBSD, but I’m toying with the idea of installing a minimal Ubuntu and a copy of VMware Server to virtualize the different domains I host. The only reason the base OS will be Linux is because that’s what VMware runs on. But that’s servers; my desktop is a Mac.]

Despite all the ways that Windows sucks, it works. Despite all the ways that Linux has improved over the years, and despite the very real ways that it’s better than Windows, it often doesn’t. Because, at the end of the day, somebody gets paid to make Windows work. Paid to write documentation. Paid to fill a room with random crappy hardware and spend thousands of hours installing, upgrading, using, breaking, and repairing Windows installations.

Open Source is the land of low-hanging fruit. Thousands of people are eager to do the easy stuff, for free or for fun. Very few are willing to write real documentation. Very few are willing to sit in a room and follow someone else’s documentation step-by-step, again and again, making sure that it’s clear, correct, and complete. Very few are interested in, or good at, ongoing maintenance. Or debugging thorny problems.

For instance, did you know that loopback mounts aren’t reliable? We have an automated process that creates EXT2 file system images, loopback-mounts them, fills them with data, and unmounts them. This happens approximately 24 times per day on each of 20 build machines, five days a week, every week. About twice a month it fails, with the following error: “ioctl: LOOP_SET_FD: Device or resource busy”.

Want to know why? Because mount -o loop is an unsupported method of setting up loop devices. It’s the only one you’ll ever see anyone use in their documentation, books, and shell scripts, but it doesn’t actually work. You’re supposed to do this:

LOOP=`losetup -f`
losetup $LOOP myimage
mount -t ext2 $LOOP /mnt
...
umount /mnt
losetup -d $LOOP

If you’re foolish enough to follow the documentation, eventually you’ll simply run out of free loop devices, no matter how many you have. When that happens, the mount point you tried to use will never work again with a loopback mount; you have to delete the directory and recreate it. Or reboot. Or sacrifice a chicken to the kernel gods.

Why support the mount interface if it isn’t reliable? Why not get rid of it, fix it, or at least document the problems somewhere other than, well, here?

[update: the root of our problem with letting the Linux mount command auto-allocate loopback devices may be that the umount command isn’t reliably freeing them without the -d option; it usually does so, but may be failing under load. I can’t test that right now, with everything covered in bubble-wrap in another state, but it’s worth a shot.]

[update: no, the -d option has nothing to do with it; I knocked together a quick test script, ran it in parallel N-1 times (where N was the total number of available loop devices), and about one run in three, I got the dreaded “ioctl: LOOP_SET_FD: Device or resource busy” error on the mount, even if losetup -a showed plenty of free loop devices.]