‘Til All Are One

I recently bought myself a Huawei e169 3G modem as part of a service with Exetel (based on the Optus network). There are a few guides online on how to get it to work with GNU/Linux, but either they didn’t work as advertised or I wasn’t happy with the approach they took. Ubuntu 8.10 is due in three weeks, but since I usually wait at least a month for a new release to settle, I was after a solution that would tide me over for at minimum the next couple of months. It had to be simple and not too messy.

Here’s the approach I took:

1. Install NetworkManager 0.7 from the PPA. You might need to reboot afterwards.
   
2. Install usb_modeswitch. I got lazy and installed a DEB from here. Can someone confirm that this is included by default in Ubuntu 8.10?
3. Right-click the NetworkManager panel applet and select Edit Connections.
4. Select the Mobile Broadband tab and click Add.
5. Follow the wizard/druid: select your country and upstream provider (I chose Optus 3G).
6. Once the druid is complete, return to the Mobile Broadband tab, select your newly-created connection, and click Edit.
7. The only setting I had to enter was my APN (exetel1). You may also wish to change the Type to Prefer 3G (3 customers can save $$$ by selecting 3G — thanks Telstra! :p ).

Now when you plug in your 3G modem, two things will happen (after a few seconds). Firstly, the ISO9660 filesystem on the USB stick will be automatically mounted and displayed by Nautilus (you might want to turn this off in the Nautilus preferences if it gets too annoying). Secondly, you should see an option to use your modem when you click on the NetworkManger panel applet. Once connected, you can disconnect in the same way.

There we go! Now all I need to do is plug in my modem and connect/disconnect from the NetworkManager panel applet. My Eee PC 901 is truly mobile now

LotD: A Sysadmin’s Unixersal Translator (ROSETTA STONE)

Microsoft claim that their UAC security prompts in Vista are designed to annoy you. I’m trying hard to take them seriously and to not laugh them off… but did they really think it’d work? OEMs and users have been disabling it in droves. Other users have probably taught their muscle memory to automatically click the Continue/Allow button without the slightest acknowledgement or thought. I think Microsoft need to get their act together when it comes to UIs. Some of their recent efforts have been frustratingly inconsistent.

A major reason given by Microsoft in their UAC scandal was to encourage developers to avoid privilege elevations as much as possible. A noble cause, especially in the security-inexperienced world of Windows development, albeit poorly executed. It reminds me of Apple’s perpetual opposition to the multi-button mouse. One stated reason is to enforce more ‘sane’, ‘usable’ and consistent UI design, and overall I think they’ve done well. They don’t ban multi-button mice (‘XY-PIDSes’?), but given the simple one-button default there’s less need for them. I might prefer using a conventional 3-button scroll mouse, or even Apple’s own Mighty Mouse (a cleverly-disguised multi-button mouse), but I don’t lose any functionality by not using them.

It goes to show how much the graphical interface can be influenced by its physical input, something a lot of us don’t acknowledge in today’s world of >100-key QWERTY keyboards, multi-button mice and multi-finger touchpads. The real innovation in that space seems to be happening in the mobile and embedded sector, the iPhone being a good example. Players of games on both desktop computers and games consoles might notice the difference in ‘look and feel’ between games designed for keyboard/mouse versus control pad. Particularly for action and strategy games, ports from desktop to console (or vice versa) often aren’t successful. The software was designed with the assumption of particular input devices, and anything that deviates from this will also alter the feel of the game.

LotD: Your Windows licence fees paid to make this

Stuart Corner at iTWire succumbs to our old nemesis, corporate marketing.

Intel have for years pushed the line that megahertz (MHz) equals speed. Apple used to call this the ‘Megahertz Myth’. Intel competitors AMD and Cyrix were for many years forced to resort to using a ‘Performance Rating’ system in order to compete. The fact is that computing performance is far more complicated than raw clock speed.

As the marketing droids at Intel gained political superiority within the company in the late 1990s, its architectures devolved into marketectures. The Pentium 4’s NetBurst is a classic example. Unleashed in 2000, in the wake of Intel’s loss to AMD in the race to release the first 1GHz chip, it was widely panned for being slower than similarly-clocked Pentium 3s in some tests. While less efficient clock-for-clock, it was designed to ramp-up in MHz to beat AMD in sheer marketing power.

In recent years, Intel have been hitting the limits of their own fallacy. Higher clock frequencies generate more heat and consume more power, and start pushing the physical limits of the media. You may have noticed the shift in Intel marketing from megahertz to composite metrics like ‘performance per watt’. What they are trying to indicate is that they are innovating in all parts of the CPU — not just the clock speed — to deliver greater overall performance. Through greater efficiencies, they are able to improve performance per clock cycle, whilst also addressing heat and power usage (which is especially important in portable devices and datacentres).

You should also notice Intel’s sudden emphasis in recent years on model numbers (e.g. ‘Core 2 Duo T7200’) rather than just MHz (e.g. ‘Pentium 4 3.0 GHz’). They are trying to shift the market away from the myth that they so effectively perpetuated over a series of decades. My laptop’s Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.0 GHz) is clearly faster than my Pentium 4 desktop running at the same clock speed. Reasons for this include (but are not limited to) the presence of two cores (each running at 2GHz), faster RAM and a much larger cache.

It is interesting to note that the design of the current Core line of CPUs (and its Pentium M predecessor) owes far more to the Pentium 3 than to the marketing-driven Pentium 4.

Now, Stuart makes the mistake of presuming that Intel’s CPUs are not getting any faster since they have not increased in megahertz. Instead of berating Intel for finally being honest, why can’t we praise them? Addressing real performance (not some ‘MHz’ deception), including the previously-ignored factors of power consumption and heat generation, is of benefit to us all.

If there is anyone to criticise, it is the hardware vendors. They have successfully countered Intel’s message by continuing to market their systems using MHz as a key selling point. The general public (and evidently most of the press) are left to believe that computers aren’t getting any faster. Given the convenience of a single number as an indicator of performance, who can blame them?

When end-user experience is taken into account, software developers fall under the microscope. Windows Vista is the obvious posterchild — I’ve seen dual-core 2GB systems that once flew with GNU/Linux and (even) Windows XP, now crippled to the speed of contintental drift after being subjected to the Vista torture.

Update: The article’s content seems to have been edited to remove any criticism of Intel, but the sceptical title (‘Intel’s new chips extend Moore’s Law, or do they?’) remains.

Update 2: Now that I have explained that megahertz on its own is only of minor consequence to CPU performance (leave alone overall system performance), we can see that it is often not even a conclusive way to compare different CPUs. A Pentium 4 can be slower than a similarly clocked Pentium 3. This inability to compare becomes even more stark when scrutinising completely different processor families. Apple had a point when they trumpeted the “Megahertz Myth’ back when they were using PPC CPUs. Clock-for-clock, a PPC CPU of that era was faster than the corresponding (by MHz) Intel chip, often by a considerable margin. Apple countered Intel with benchmarks demonstrating the speed of their CPU versus Intel’s. Benchmark quality aside, their intent was to show that a seemingly ‘slower’ PPC chip could outperform its Intel competition. It is a shame that the promotion didn’t convince more of the general populace.

LotD: Real Amber vs Photoshopped Amber

There was enough at LCA to be excited about to give you heart palpitations. If I was forced to single out one thing, it would have to be the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC).

One of my primary interests has been the interactions between people and technology, and I have long felt that there has been scant attention payed to how this operates in developing countries. Sustainable development is a vital goal, and an important part of this ongoing process is the use of appropriate technology. This can range from bare hands and rudimentary tools to complex computational and engineering infrastructure. The key is to select what is most applicable in a given situation.

So-called ‘developed’ regions of the world might be able to accommodate expensive, disposable and inefficient technologies and methodologies. This has guided policy, R&D, production, distribution and use within this part of the world. The playing field is entirely different in developing regions, and so solutions need to be crafted with their needs in mind.

You can’t expect to successfully shoehorn a solution designed for Sydney onto Mogadishu, or even onto Maningrida. To date, however, most approaches try to do just that. This only works to an extent, if at all. In many cases it would be better to rethink things from the ground-up to come up with something more appropriate. This doesn’t mean that you’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Successful designs often base themselves upon existing policies, technologies and ideas, and then proceed to modify or redesign parts to fit their goals. The OLPC is a prime example of such an endeavour.

Whether it is successful or not is another matter. That remains up to the governments which purchase and distribute them, and the communities which accept them. The greatest challenge of the OLPC isn’t technical, it’s socio-political.

This is one of those fables with the moral "don’t be greedy".

A couple of weeks ago at college I spied a trolley loaded with books with the label "Take me!" The library was giving away old books to make space for new ones. There were plenty of interesting titles, ranging from basic PC repair to *NIX to programming. I collected a massive pile of books (If I could place them all on top of each other I think they would reach my waist).

I travel by public transport (I don’t own a car), so there was no way in hell I could take them all home at once. What’s more, I was working that evening and I had to take a bus to get there. I decided to take about half of them and I made arrangements with the instructors to leave the rest so I could take them the next day. It was a pain carting those books to work and back (especially since I normally return home around 10:30pm), but I managed it. The next day I took the rest directly home (thankfully I wasn’t working that day). No dramas.

Then on Monday I saw something else at college: free computers! They weren’t very good (AMD K6200 with 32MB RAM), but hey, they were free! There were only five of them and I didn’t want to miss out, so I decided to take two home at once. These were chunky: old-style AT desktop cases made from thick steel. Carrying them home was a nightmare. I had to take frequent breaks so that my arms could recover. I also had a heavy backpack.

I managed to get home with myself and the computers in one (or rather three) piece(s). My arms were almost numb. If I tried to raise my left hand to my face it would involuntarily shake. I could not straighten my left arm until two days ago. I can still feel a bit of muscle stretching when I do.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do with those computers. I don’t have any keyboards with AT connectors (I only have PS/2). I’ll have to give it some thought.

It’s funny what some people chuck out. A few months ago my mum found a perfectly working 63cm television set. Yesterday I was at my cousin’s house and I saw a computer monitor sitting on the side of the road. It was an old HP Pavilion 15in screen, and it was slightly damp since it had rained earlier in the day. I didn’t expect it to work, but I decided to pick it up anyway. Not knowing the frequencies of it, I decided to hook it up and boot with the PCLinuxOS Preview 8 liveCD and hope that it would be automatically be configured. Lo and behold, it was! KDE looked great running at 800x600 on it. I’ve been wanting to set my mum (who is essentially computer-illiterate) with a computer, but I didn’t have a monitor. This one will do fine.

I love Grease, don’t you? There’s some logic in the title. It is summer here in Australia, and as many may know Australian summers are typically very hot and dry. A lot has happened over the past few weeks and I’ve been too lazy to type it out here. I’ll split things into several entries for the sake of readability.

Back in July, I bought myself a nice new Athlon 2100+ system. This machine is lightyears ahead of my old Pentium II 350, and now I can do many things that wern’t practical on the old system. When I got the machine, I put it through a rigorous barrage of tests, including memtest86, heavy compiling and cpuburn. It passed with flying colours.

However, in the past couple of months, I’ve been having problems with heat. When I ran the tests, it was the middle of winter. Now it is summer, and room temperatures can easily hit 35 degrees or more. Using lm_sensors, I found that my CPU was about 70 degrees or more on a hot day - and that’s just at idle. If I tried compiling something or playing a game like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, it would easily go past 85 degrees. This triggers the overheat protection system on my ASUS A7V333 motherboard to shut the computer down (an Athlon can only take 90 degrees before frying itself). I’ve been saved many times by that - had my motherboard not had that feature (most boards don’t) I would’ve lost my CPU.

I had to use my system very carefully to prevent shutdown. This is obviously unacceptable, but I had to wait until mid-December before I could do anything about it (I was busy with other things). The heatsink on my CPU was standard AMD-issue - nothing special. I decided to purchase something better, finally settling on the Thermaltake Volcano 9. I made an order on an online shopping site and much to my surprise it was delivered only three hours later! The owner of the store lives only a block or two away from me, and he decided to deliver it himself on his way home. Now that’s what I call service!

I don’t trust myself with expensive equipment (I’ll mess around with older/cheaper stuff, though), so I decided to get the heatsink installed by the guy I bought my computer from. He’s a nice guy, and I’ve been dealing with him for a number of years, so I know he’s good. I opened the heatsink box for the first time. This thing is a monster! It was so big that we couldn’t install it without taking the motherboard out. It sounds like a helicopter, but over time I’ve gotten used to the noise. What’s important is that I can use my system at full throttle without fear of burning it out.

I haven’t posted any articles on PCLinuxOnline over the past three weeks because I b0rked my Gentoo system. I upgraded from glibc 2.2.5 to 2.3.1 and since then I haven’t been able to run certain apps without wrecking everything else. I’ve detailed my problem here and here. If anyone can help I’d much appreciate it.

At the moment I can run most apps, but things screw up when I load any part of KDE (including Konqueror) or Evolution. GTK+ (1 and 2) apps (apart from Evolution) work fine.

Update [2003-03-07]: The problem is with my Nvidia drivers:

Hi! I’m the guy who started this thread. I finally managed to fix things by turning off Grsecurity in my kernel. However, a very similar (but different) problem emerged a few months later. It occurred around the time I upgraded glibc to 2.3.1, so I initially thought glibc was to blame. After lots of experimenting with kernel configs, I discovered that I could have a stable system using Nvidia drivers if I turned highmem off, sacrificing just over 100MB of RAM (I have 1GB total).

I then came across cigaraficionado’s bug report and updated nvidia-kernel ebuild. I compiled a new kernel, this time turning highmem back on, and installed the new ebuild. The updated ebuild had no effect — using the Nvidia driver made my system unstable like before.

My hardware seems fine. Memtest86 detects no errors in my RAM (2x Corsair XMS 512MB DDR333 SDRAM). My GeForce 3 Ti200 card works perfectly in Windows and it worked perfectly in Gentoo until December, around the time I upgraded to glibc 2.3.1. I can’t figure out where the true problem is, but I strongly suspect it lies with nvidia-kernel.

That’s what you get for relying on binary-only kernel modules