the gookins dot net

This is probably one of those things that’s already been around the blogosphere and I’m just late to the game in finding it, but it’s cool nonetheless.

Bohemian Rhapsody played on old-school computer equipment:

I placed an order for a Christmas present through RedOrbit. Yesterday I got an email from them.

Christine,

Unfortunately, the item your ordered is no longer available through our distributor. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Your order has been canceled and the release of authorization from your credit card has been issued.
Have a great day.

Thanks,
Joel
RedOrbit - E-Commerce

Fuckers.

Their website said (and I quote):

Quantity 98 item(s) available

So if you’re considering ordering from them, beware. They may not have what you want and apparently can’t figure out how to have their website reflect an out of stock product. Mine still shows up as “available” today.

So, Joel, if you’re reading this, take the damn item off your website, because if they continue their crappy service, you’ll be out of a job. And have a great fucking day. Thanks for ruining mine.

Okay, not to brag on myself - okay, I’m bragging - but I just reassembled my laptop with the repair part. And most importantly, it still works. This is the third time I’ve taken it apart though so I should be getting good at it. I couldn’t have done it without disassembly instructions from here.

Also, if you need to order parts for your laptop, I would try Blue Raven. I got a great price on a new power jack harness, $17 as opposed to $35+ for a used one with no warranty or returns. That price included next day air, too.

And for my next trick, I’ll be fixing the drivers for my CD/DVD drive. I would assume that I had done something to cause this by my repeated removal of parts, but it just so happens that the disk drives for the basement computer has the exact same problem, so we must have picked up a virus of some sort that corrupted the drivers. If not, at least I know a good place to order parts.

The Bee Gee’s song “Stayin’ Alive” can now be taken literally. The American Heart Association says the song has a great tempo to perform CPR to. Bonus: The linked article has a video of the song, too.

A 1953 experiment on abiogenesis by Stanley Miller simulated conditions on early Earth and tested to see if a chemical reaction could produce life. His results showed the production of two amino acids - the building blocks of living cells. His simulated environment later turned out to be different that what early Earth was probably like, so the results can’t be said to be a model of the origins of life. Miller’s apparatus and original samples were recently found and the samples were re-analyzed using technology that wasn’t available 55 years ago.The new results found 22 amino acids. His experiment was more successful than he thought, and the new findings may pave the way for further research.

Because the GOP knows that John McCain is about to get his ass handed to him by Barack Obama, they are starting to play the “it’s not fair” card. Over the next few weeks, they will be talking a lot about vote fraud, and will be citing the investigation into ACORN as their evidence. The problem? Aside from the fact that ACORN reported the problem in the first place, and despite what the Republican Party will insinuate, there is a difference between registration fraud and vote fraud.

NASA: Space smells like steak. If God is out there somewhere, he must be grilling something up.

I’m looking for a new wireless card for my laptop. The one installed by the manufacturer doesn’t have Linux-compatible drivers (and I’ve tried the alternate madwifi drivers and NDISwrapper to no avail). I can’t seem to find an easy way to find out for sure what other cards would be compatible. The Toshiba website is no good - their official parts supplier doesn’t list any replacement cards - and their documentation only gives specs for the card that I already have.

So I thought I would just go to some laptop parts sites and search by model, but I can’t find a single site that will give you a model-specific list of parts. Have you ever bought auto parts online at Autozone or Oreilly? You go to the site, put in your car’s year, make, and model, and the site saves your car info. Then every term you search on or category you select only shows results pertinent to your car. Shouldn’t a site selling computer parts work like that? I can’t find one. All I get are lists of every damn wireless card in their inventory, or you already have to know the part number or manufacturer to find anything specific. If anybody knows somewhere where I can buy a damn wi-fi card and be sure it’s compatible with my computer, please let me know.

My stupid, crappy, you-get-less-than-you-pay-for webhost, 1and1.com is really frickin’ annoying me. All I want to do is upload a tiny little Wordpress plugin and I cannot connect with my server via FTP or through their control panel. I’ve tried FTP through my FTP client and through the address bar of three different browsers, and it won’t connect. I’ve gone to the control panel with three different browsers and it tells me to upgrade my browser even though I’m using the most up-to-date version of each. And I’ve triple-checked my username and password. In other words, I’m not doing anything wrong, it’s their complete piece of crap server. (Yes, it’s hosted on a Linux box, but they apparently don’t know how to run it.) RRRRRRR.

Joel from Joel on Software just announced the public beta of Stack Overflow, a new programming Q&A site that sounds like it has the potential to be incredibly useful:

You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I’m talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back:

• A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
• A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
• An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore,
• And something in Japanese.

If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.

Well, technology has gotten better since those discussion forums were set up. I thought that the programming community could do better by combining the idea of a Q&A site with voting and editing.

I’ve spent hours searching through forums to find answers to programming questions and what Joel describes is 100% accurate. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried using advice or code snippets from a forum and after maybe a dozen different attempts still come up with nothing that works. Stack Overflow will work by letting users vote voting on the best answers and even editing them, so you can find a good answer quickly. I can’t wait to try it out.

After playing around with Google’s new browser for a few days, there are a couple things that bug me.

First, there is no “home” button on the menu bar. If I want to go to my home page, I should just be able to click a button. I guess this might be kind of a silly complaint, since I could just make it a bookmark and click that, but I’m used to having a home button.

Second and more importantly, Chrome has some issues with the stock charts on Google Finance. When mousing over a chart, the page will occasionally freeze up and the cursor will disappear. After a few seconds it will snap out of it, but then after awhile it will happen again. Since this is happening on Google’s own site, I would think that this would be something they would want to fix (whether it would fixing the browser or the code to display the chart).

If you haven’t heard about this, then you must not be as big a geek as me. Google released their own web browser, called Chrome, today.

News of the new browser hit the internet yesterday when someone at Google supposedly accidentally leaked the announcement (in comic book form) a day early.

Normally I use Firefox, which is far superior to Internet Explorer, which I gave up on several years ago. (Except I have to use IE at work because they don’t let us install anything that isn’t officially blessed by the IT gods, who really don’t know crap about the internet because they’re all old Cobol programmers who started working there back in the days when IT was known as DP.)

So I downloaded Chrome tonight and took it for a spin. The download and install were both fast and painless. It allows you to automatically import your bookmarks, settings, and saved passwords from your default browser. I surfed a few pages that I go to frequently and they all seemed to load very fast. I didn’t see any problems with rendering css or html so I would assume it is standards-compliant (though I haven’t checked to be sure).

It has a very nice look and feel. Clean and uncluttered. And each tab has it’s own address bar and controls (back, forward, refresh). Chrome will also keep track of your most visited sites and when you open a new empty tab, give a list of them along with your bookmarks. You can also search from the address bar. I always hated searching from the address bar in IE and Firefox because the way they try to autocomplete your text is annoying. Google actually makes this work well in Chrome by dropping the suggested terms to a separate box below the text-entry box. There is also a feature for private browsing called an “incognito window” (Click the “Control the current page” button -> New Incognito Window). This lets you browse without saving any history or cookies on your computer. This is only for anonymous browsing though; it won’t protect you from malware.

One of the underlying differences from other browsers is that Chrome has separate processes running for each tab. So say you have multiple tabs open and you are opening a large .pdf file in one tab, and it crashes. With other browsers, you’d have to quit the entire program and the relaunch it (when this happens, Firefox asks you if you want to restore your tabs). In Chrome, the crash will only take down the tab you were loading the offending file to, and the other tabs will continue unaffected. I tried to test this out, but I couldn’t seem to get any tabs to crash.

Also, because each tab has it’s own processes running, there is a Windows-style task manager built in (Control the current page -> Developer -> Task Manager). This allows you to see a summary of each page that’s open with CPU and Memory usage for each. You can click on any page and then hit the “end process” button to quit that page. In the task manager, there is a link at the bottom that reads “Stats for nerds”. Clicking that will open a tab that shows the memory stats for each page open. If you have more than one browser open, it will show you the memory usage for all of them. I opened Firefox and IE and loaded the same pages in all three browsers. Consistently, IE used the most memory, with Chrome next, and Firefox using the least.

The other major feature is that Chrome comes with Google Gears included. Gears lets you use certain web services (such as Google Documents) offline. This allows you to work seamlessly with documents and spreadsheets from Google Docs and save them offline. Whenever you go to Google Docs online, it will synch the version stored on your computer to the one stored online. This enables you to use Google Docs for your office software even when you don’t have internet access. And Gears will work with other Gears-enabled websites too (like any site using Wordpress 2.6 or above). This is clearly part of Google’s attempt to gain market share from completely bludgeon Microsoft. Microsoft’s bread and butter has always been Windows and Office. The combination of Google Chrome and Google Documents allow you to have virtually the same functionality for free, with near-seamless integration between what you do online and offline.

Google is releasing Chrome as an open-source project too. So developers out there can add on to it as they see fit, or even use the code base to build their own custom browser.

Overall, I’d have to say I like it every bit as much as Firefox. I’m not sure I’ll switch over permanently though since Firefox is sort of the little guy in the browser wars and they’ve done so well thus far that I feel kind of loyal to them. I will keep trying Chrome for awhile though, to see if my first impressions are accurate.

Well, I never could get my wireless networking to work in Ubuntu. I’m sure it was because my Atheros network card only has Windows drivers. I tried substituting the MadWifi drivers, but that didn’t work. I also tried using the Windows drivers with NDISWrapper, but that didn’t work either. So after a week of tweaking settings, searching forums, and pasting in a bunch of command-line stuff that I didn’t understand, I uninstalled Ubuntu and installed Mepis instead. So far, so good. I’m online now with a wired connection. It’s almost 12:30am though, so I don’t want to try going wireless tonight, cuz if it doesn’t work, I won’t get any sleep.

Well I finally got Ubuntu installed. Last night I downloaded the current version (8.04) and burned it to a fresh CD. Tonight I installed it and it went off without a hitch. Although I’ve used it before, it has been a couple years and I’m still refamiliarizing myself with it.

The only problem so far is getting on the internet. The network manager finds our wireless network, but when I enter the WEP key it doesn’t connect. I tried configuring it manually, which didn’t seem to work either. I went back to roaming mode and found another nearby network that was unencrypted and connected to it, but I couldn’t access the internet. Went back to our network and tried the WEP key in all CAPS (even though I’m pretty sure I didn’t use all caps when setting up the modem/router); this seemed to work at first because it said I was connected to the network, but I still couldn’t access the internet. At this point, I’m not sure if it’s a problem with how I have things configured in Linux vs. a hardware issue like my wireless card drivers vs. my network configuration. I think I’ll need to do a little research to get this figured out, but it’s getting late, so it will have to wait.

O’l Georgey didn’t waste any time getting his Get Out of Jail Free card signed into law. One possible bright spot is that the ACLU has already filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law in regard to the surveillance powers it gives the president, and the EFF is planning to challenge the retroactive telecom immunity portion. One interesting possibility is that the federal court judges, or possibly even Supreme Court Justices who will hear these cases, may end up being appointees of the new president. You would expect Obama appointees to be more liberal than McCain appointees, but than again, Obama has been full of surprises lately.

If you’re like me, you probably don’t trust that the government will refrain from spying on you regardless of what the law says. Well, there’s some promising news on that front too. The guys behind the Pirate Bay have plans to encrypt the internet. The idea is to use encryption at a network level rather than at an application level. If this were to be used by enough people/webhosts/ISPs, virtually all of your internet traffic would be encrypted. Where do I sign up?

All my devices are revolting against me.

My continuing saga of trying to install Ubuntu on my laptop:
Last night I did a final clean up of my hard drive, uninstalling a few more things and defragging a couple times. I’d done some research on getting Windows disc management to allow the partition to be shrunk more. It can be done but you have to uninstall/delete/move a bunch of system files, then defrag again and shrink the partition and then restore all the files you deleted. It sounded like a risky pain in the butt, so I decided just to install Ubuntu on the 17GB that Windows was graciously letting me have.

So I shrunk the Windows partition, popped in the Ubuntu CD (version 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon) which I’d burned like 6 months ago, and rebooted. Except the laptop booted into Windows. Every computer I’ve ever owned has defaulted to booting from the CD before the hard disc, but not this on one. So I had to reboot again so I could enter BIOS. But then I apparently didn’t hit the F2 key quick enough, so the laptop booted to Windows again. In frustration, I pressed the power button before Windows had started completely, and the computer went to sleep. When I pressed it again, it started back up but my screen stayed dark and I had no mouse or keyboard control. Press power button again. Nothing. Close the lid; wait; open again and Windows is back. Reboot one more time. Press the friggin’ F2 key and get into BIOS (half an hour after starting). Change boot preferences so it will boot from a CD. Exit BIOS and the Ubuntu disc boots. Yea!

Now I’m getting excited because the Ubuntu splash screen is up and the loading bar is running across my screen. Just waiting for the welcome screen to come up. And waiting…and waiting. OK, I know from when I tried to install Ubuntu on my old laptop that running an operating system from a CD can be slow, so I decide to play some Wii while I wait. I figure that whenever a new install screen comes up I’ll just pause the game and click the buttons and then go back to the game while it does its thing. So I start a game of golf and I play a couple holes, checking the laptop every now and then I notice that the loading bar on the splash screen has stopped moving. I figure it must be ready to load the welcome screen. I play a couple more holes of golf and it still hasn’t moved. I get down on the floor and put my ear to the computer. The CD is not spinning. I get no response from the keyboard or touch pad or power button. It is frozen. What to do now? Unplug the AC power and remove the battery. Manually remove CD. Put battery in and plug in power cord. Reboot AGAIN. Have spent an hour and accomplished nothing. Fling Ubuntu disc across room. Decide to try downloading the newer Ubuntu release and burning to a fresh CD. Start download. Should only take an hour and 20 minutes.

I’ll just play some more Wii while I wait. Grab Wiimote and turn back to the TV screen. Now the frickin’ Wii won’t do anything!!! Apparently the Wiimote rechargeable battery needs charged. The charger has been unplugged for like a month, so I plug it in and put the Wiimote on it. I could get out the other Wiimote, but I’d have to change the settings to make it work as player 1, and I don’t think I can deal with that right now. Turn off Wii. Write ridiculously long and boring post. Hope Wordpress doesn’t hose everything when I click “publish”.

I’m about to try to install Ubuntu Linux to my laptop. If everything goes well, I’ll have a dual-boot system with Windoze Vista so I can still use Fireworks and so Matt can still play Pirates Online. I used to have Ubuntu on our desktop, but it has such a small hard drive that there literally wasn’t room to store anything else with two OSs on it. Even though I’ve installed Ubuntu before, I’m a little nervous about having hardware issues. If I get done at a reasonable hour, I’ll post an update.

Update: Looks like I won’t get to the install tonight. Last night I freed up some disc space and defragged, so I had Windoze (and my files) using only about 20GB of the available 73GB on my hard drive. When I went to shrink the Windoze partition using the Disc Management thingy in the Control Panel, it was only going to let me take it down to like 52GB, which would only leave 21GB for Ubuntu and a FAT32 data partition to share. Yeah, right. So I tried to free up some more disc space and now I’m defragging again.

Update 2: That was weird. After defragging, I actually have less free space on the hard drive, and now Windoze disc management only wants to shrink the Windblows partition to 54GB. I wanted to give about 20GB each to Windoze and Ubuntu, and use the other 35-40 GB for shared storage. Is that asking too much?

We finally got our hands on a Wii. We’ve been looking for one for the past four months and everywhere is chronically sold out.

I’ve been making the rounds to Target, Wally World, and Best Buy weekly and also checking Toys R’ Us and Game Stop on occasion. Sometimes I’d ask the pimply-faced geek working there (there’s one in every electronics department) if he knew when they’d be getting more. He’d shake his head and then I’d hear him snickering as I walked away, probably muttering to himself about how he wouldn’t tell me anyway since he and his geek-friends buy them as soon as they arrive and then sell them on eBay and Craigslist for a nice profit. I was at the point where I was about ready to find one on Craigslist and pay the extra for it.

Then yesterday Christine and the kids happened on one at Target. The story, as pieced together from the various accounts, is that Christine pushed the little red button to get the pimply-faced geek to come and unlock the case, and then immediately took up a defensive position in front of the display to assure nobody else would try to claim it. At one point I guess an elderly lady started down the aisle and Christine yelled at her “What do YOU want, you old dustbag!” and the startled octogenarian nearly keeled over from fright in her haste to retreat. But we got the Wii, and that’s the important thing.

Once it arrived home, it was on nonstop from about 4:00pm to 10:30. I think they logged some more serious hours today, too. But it really is more fun than any other system I’ve tried. The wireless interface is just so much more interactive. I even worked up a good sweat playing boxing.

OK, gotta go now. Jessica just went to bed and the Wii is free…