The Linux Extremist

Given that politics is the subject du jour for the blog, this Armstrong and Miller offering seems appropriate:

I believe him.

It’s a sign of impending middle age, but I enjoy watching television programmes about property: Relocation, Relocation, Property Ladder, Grand Designs, you name it, when I land on a channel that’s featuring something involving renovating a house or moving to a new location, I find it compelling. It may be the tinkerer in me: the idea of turning, say, a crap 1960’s council house into a luxury development is similar to what Linux does to old PCs.

My lady likes these shows as well; she’s the kind of person who looks in various house and home magazines, looking for ideas on how to stick an additional toilet into a ridiculously small place, among other things.

So, we were watching Property Ladder last night; the programme featured a rather irritatingly nice family that were developing and selling houses for a profit. Think of Disney Does Real Estate and you have a fair idea of what it was like. Sarah Beeny, the presenter, said “they’ve cleared a £58,000 profit…before tax.”

My lady seized upon that. “That’s the first time she’s said the phrase ‘before tax’ - if it’s a second home, it’s subject to capital gains.”

As I regard property development for profit as being a more complicated way to commit suicide than taking arsenic, I hadn’t really thought about it before. Loads of people have bought houses and then redeveloped them under the assumption that at most, they’d have to pay 10% to the government on their gains. For those in other countries, you may not have heard that Gordon Brown recently raised this tax to 18%.

Hitherto, I thought that Gordon Brown just might win the next general election, whenever that may be. Yes, his government is full of corrupt wankers who have all the morality of a lobotomised weasel on meth. For goodness sake, any decent human being realises that taking money from a businessman who wants to donate anonymously has at least the air of dodginess about it, and given that they’re supposed to be in public service (cough, cough), they shouldn’t do it. We could live with that if it was accompanied by an air of competence and self-criticism. We’ve seen neither.

First take self-criticism. Speaking for myself, whenever the presenter on Sky News or BBC News says they have someone from the government on to defend some indefensible mistake, I get a sense of a dread. Few inspire more loathing in me than Hazel Blears: she has a smile that is as plastered on as that of the Joker from Batman. She tries to appear like she’s one of the “ordinary working folk” from her constituency of Salford, but you know that she’s got Sancerre in her fridge and if she ate a doner kebab, her head would explode. Furthermore she’s wound up so tight that you’d like to see her handed over to a crew of Liberian sailors who had been at sea without female companionship for 6 months, possibly the only way that would shake loose what’s been bunged up in her.

In precise tones, she always carries on, says that the government is competent and knows what it is doing even when the banking system is near collapse, the economy is plumbing depths that the passengers of the Titanic would recognise, and youth crime is such that a television presenter like Jeremy Clarkson can’t shake one of the little scrotes that’s bothering him by the scruff the neck, without thinking, “Oh crap, am I going to get done for this?”

Perhaps the most disgusting element of all is that Labour seems to think it is entitled to stay in power forever. Funny, I thought we lived in a democracy. Sort of, anyway. Part of the idea is that power should change hands from time to time. As much as I was cynical about New Labour in 1997, it was clear that the Tories were showing signs of wear and tear after 17 years; it wasn’t good for democracy that they were in power forever. At least the Tories went more gently into that good night. Labour thinks it can replace a charismatic leader with one who has to duct tape his smile into place and magically make it so they stay in office till the end of time.

Fortunately, they have made the fatal mistake of jacking up capital gains tax. So much of our economy is based on madness with housing; they just shot at all the little developers like the nice but irritating family. They shot at the small business owner. They shot at the people working in finance and all those who depend on them. And they’re not showing any signs of remorse, they’re just trotting out Hazel Blears.

Labour is done. Yes, yes, the pundits say they can come back from this. Pundits generally speaking live in London and hang out at dinner parties with people who discuss this very seriously no doubt. The view out here in the provinces is a bit different: they are dead, dog meat, and should lie down and accept the inevitable. Gordo plotted and schemed to become Prime Minister to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if sacrificing the lukewarm blood of babies to Satan was involved. In the end it was futile; the sell by date has expired, all that remains is the long walk to the graveyard.

This is not to say things will get much better with anyone else. Generally speaking, decisive governments tend to anger people. For example, President Sarkozy in France just told the unions to bog off, and there’s a lot of unhappiness with him. Bush was decisive in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, now the entire world is angry at him to the point that they forget how the porky guy (who used to have chemical weapons) gassed the Kurds. Given this, most politicians try to just muddle on and not do anything courageous. So the recession will not be called off, and we will get just as fed up with the new lot as we did with the old one. But given that we are imperfect people, we should expect governments to be just as frail, ignorant and ridiculous as the rest of us. All of it springs to mind what Churchill once reportedly said - democracy was the worst form of government….except compared to all the others.

The weather in Britain has been damn awful as of late. Thus the following sketch from the geniuses Armstrong and Miller appeals to me greatly:

If only.

My parents, now retired, like to keep computing simple. To their credit, when faced with a choice between a PC and a Mac, they chose the latter. However, my father tried out the Linux PC I built in 2006, and was highly impressed by its speed. So, for Christmas, I’ve offered to replace their ageing iMac with a homemade 64 bit Ubuntu Linux machine. I’ve yet to hear if they’re going to take me up on the offer.

The build is complicated somewhat by the fact that they’ve moved to America for their retirement, so the usual haunts I’d use for parts don’t apply. No matter, there is www.newegg.com to the rescue. From this, I’ve managed to put together the following list of parts:

I’m starting with a Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 processor. It’s not the fastes that Intel make, but it is 64 bit and it has a nice balance of cost for performance. It also comes with the necessary cooling equipment.

Sticking with Intel for the moment, I’ve selected their Intel BOXDP965LTCK LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Motherboard. If I need to change the processor to something with more oomph later, the board gives me some room for this.

I’ve proposed getting two sets of Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel memory. The memory comes highly rated, and again, appears to be a nice balance of price and performance.

Linux support for Nvidia is still better than ATI in my view. At the same time, my parents are not likely to be playing graphics intensive games. So for graphics I’ve selected a ASUS EN8400GS/HTP/256M GeForce 8400GS 256MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready card.

The sound on the motherboard doesn’t look particularly convincing. Hence, I’m proposing that I bolster that with a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE SB0570LPVP 5.1 Channels PCI Interface Low-Profile card.

SATA drives offer better performance than their IDE predecessors. I don’t want to skimp here, but at the same time, my parents aren’t going to load loads of music and photos on it. For the hard drive, I’ve picked a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500AAKS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s drive. For a DVD-R drive, I’ve picked a SAMSUNG 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S203B.

As for the casing and power, I’ve gone with a GIGABYTE Triton 180 Black 0.7mm SECC Steel ATX Mid Tower and Thermaltake Purepower W0100RU ATX 12V 2.0 500W Power Supply.

With these parts, plus a 22in Samsung monitor, a slimline Kensington USB keyboard, and a Microsoft mouse, the sum total comes to less than $1070. In contrast, to replace their iMac, the entry level model would cost $1199 - this has a smaller screen (20in), much less memory (only 1 GB), and a slower processor (2.0 Ghz). Of course, the Mac does have a lovely casing.

That said, the user experience need not be radically different; The Mac4Lin Project is an example of how the usability of a Mac can be brought to a Linux machine. Furthermore, there are benefits the Ubuntu machine will have: for example, it will be able to run Swiftweasel, and connected to an American cable modem, it should be blazingly fast.

If my parents allow me to execute on this project, I will write an update as to how the project proceeds.

Merry Christmas to all, nonetheless!

There are only a few television shows produced today that are truly funny, in my opinion - the best of the lot is the show done on Friday nights by Ben Miller and Alexander Armstrong - their RAF “chav” sketches are utterly hilarious. Here’s an example:

And another:

I read an item in the newspaper yesterday which made me raise an eyebrow. Apparently, Al Gore is on his way to Oslo, Norway to accept his Nobel Prize for his work in “raising awareness” about climate change. From there, he will be going on to Bali for the present international conference on protecting the environment.

I really hope I’m not the only one who has spotted some disturbing things: air travel is supposed to be bad. It is supposedly a major contributor to the carbon emissions problem. Yet Al Gore and all the Bali delegates aren’t canoeing to their destination.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. These international conferences tend not to happen in crap, nasty places; rather, they meet in Bali, which is supposed to be beautiful, warm and have sandy beaches, and Rio which is beautiful, warm and has sandy beaches, and…you get the idea. Neither conference location is close or convenient for most of the delegates from countries that are supposedly the root of the problem, namely Europe and North America. In fact, Bali and Rio aren’t particularly close for the “new era polluters” like India and China. Indeed, if one wanted to pick places on the map that would require the most carbon burned in order to reach them, only the Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica would have been better.

Meanwhile, these same politicians and “experts” are drawing up a blueprint to tell the rest of us how to live. I can imagine Al Gore, puffed up with pride and pomposity, sitting down to a lobster dinner with these people, basking in the glow of their mutual self-righteousness. To someone who has to stand in a queue on a cold December day in West Sussex in order fill up their car with increasingly expensive fuel, this is an irritation. If they continue to fail to lead by example, these officials are bound to provoke a backlash.

I don’t think they get it. For someone who goes to Tesco on Saturday mornings and watches every penny, picking store own brand when possible and feeling like getting “Tesco Finest” is something of an indulgence, being told that one’s life has to change is fairly ridiculous. I’m not poor, Britain is not a poor country (clue: poverty doesn’t generally involve owning satellite dishes), but the grand assumption that I and others can afford more green taxes is ridiculous.

Forget the punishment element of it too. Public transport in this country is expensive and its coverage is too poor to get me to my work directly. At least in Britain I have some idea of the relationship of these costs to what I pay to drive myself; driving is cheaper. This cost in Continental Europe is masked through paying higher taxes. Meanwhile the governments of the world are expecting people like myself, and the Pierres, Hanses and Luigis to keep the economy going through spending and borrowing.

My father once told me, “it’s easy to be socialist when you’re rich”. The same applies to Green; these officials think about people like myself as an abstraction, part of a faceless mass that has to take on their prescriptions of less consumption, more taxation, and greater inconvenience. This elite feels they have done their duty by “raising awareness”; their lifestyles which span across the globe do not change.

They should be warned: the other day, I did give up my car because I was tired from spending hours on the road, due to the fact that planning for roads was simply inadequate for the demand. I had to take a cab from a train station to cover the deficiency in public transport. En route, the driver told me that he was sick of the taxes on fuel, sick of how the local authority had rejigged the traffic lights in favour of buses, and anyway, those buses were due to disappear given their subsidy had been cut off, and said that “no one trusts this government”. Unless the same people who tell us that our lives have to change, show some sign they can change their lives too (I know for a fact they could meet online rather than go cavorting with Balinese bikini girls), they will be met with this skepticism, and rightly so.

Just to show I’m not totally an old grouch, here’s a video of what is arguably the best theme song to the holiday season:

And here is a video of the absolute worst:

The Bank of England cut its base rates yesterday from 5.75 to 5.5 percent. Stock markets rose. The “alleluia” chorus in the newspapers was near universal. Additionally, President Bush just announced a deal by which mortgage lenders would “voluntarily” keep rates down for subprime borrowers. Those panicky, nervous herd animals we call investors moved in a positive direction.

I, however, am not overjoyed. This is not just because I’m a professional curmudgeon, who sees a dark cloud in every silver lining. Working in technology does give one a dim view of humanity, and one of the things I’ve discovered is that it’s very bad to let stupidity go unpunished.

The subprime crisis is stupid. Stupid is a harsh word, not one to be bandied about lightly; it doesn’t just indicate a lack of intelligence, there is a hint of willful lack of understanding too: “I’m going to do what I want to do even when the facts are against me”. But the subprime crisis is a product of just that: banks loaned money to people who hadn’t a hope in hell of paying it back. Now they’re screaming because, ta-da, they woke up and found out that they were never going to be repaid. They spread the poison through the financial system by selling it bundled with other assets; now there is a lot of pain in trying to figure out who is going to pay the cheque.

In steps the Bank of England and Uncle Sam - don’t worry, you fools, we will cut interest rates and thus ease the hurt and make it more likely that you will get something. The bankers heave a sigh of relief, they won’t have to forego all of their bonuses this year, all they have to do is buy a Ferrari instead of an Aston Martin, and get a suit off the rack at Gieves and Hawkes rather than have one custom made. All is well.

Until the next time; as someone in the internet industry, I remember when a mistake at this level of idiocy was last committed, namely at the time of the dot com boom.

Let’s put into context how asinine that was. Boo.com was a leading example; those who have read the book (”Boo Hoo”) written by its sublimely ridiculous founder Ernst Malmsten, will recall how they met with investors and were asked, “What does your market research say?” Malmsten thought that was a daft question, because market research was something one did when one “wanted to market a new brand of toothpaste”. The internet, in his view, relied more on “instinct”. Giving this man money was the financial equivalent of having a vasectomy performed by a lunatic with hedge clippers, but he got $130 million to waste.

I was part of a lesser failure. I worked for a dot com in the Netherlands and was promised $1 million in share options. Unfortunately, the company had a burn rate of $250,000 per month. The directors lived like oriental satraps with lovely offices on the top floor. They had secretaries obviously hired from the finest modelling agencies in Amsterdam. However, the product that was produced was simply not viable. Funding dried up, and the company died.

The Bank of England and the Federal Reserve cut interest rates around 2001 to stave off some of this pain; fortunately, however, it was not an injury they could eliminate altogether. Venture capital for this nonsense disappeared. The foolish companies that had business plans based on hot air have largely been consumed. Internet based businesses are increasingly subject to the same rigours and disciplines as bricks and mortar ones. Stupidity was punished, and we were all better off for it.

The invoice for subprime lending has come due. The chickens have come home to roost, cackle and excrete all over the yard. The worst message that could be sent to the lenders is that they will always have a sugar daddy to count on.

The sugar daddy may indeed do more harm than good; after the stock market crash of 1929, Herbert Hoover was advised to let the pain cycle through, because market forces, and the creative destruction they entail, would ensure that the economy would be more efficient as a result. Hoover chose to intervene and stop the pain; the result, broadly speaking, was the Great Depression.

President Bush and the Bank of England will hopefully take heed . As Herbert Spencer said, “The consequence of shielding men from the results of their folly is to create a world full of fools.” With wisdom can come much grief, and with much grief can come wisdom. Hopefully the inevitable pain can be front loaded, the necessary lessons will be learned, and we can all carry on.

Note: It’s been a while since I published a blog entry - however, I’ve updated the software and now it’s fully up and running again.

I’ll re-open this blog with my experiences with a new laptop.

My HP laptop was - at long last - about to die. All hardware manufacturers put in a lifespan on their equipment, mine was no exception. I replaced the battery and the hard drive, but the computer was taking longer to boot, hard drive failures were starting to crop up, and even the power on button was starting to not respond as it used to: it took enough pressure to crush a golf ball just to switch on the thing.

So for my sins, I got a new Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop - with Windows Vista Ultimate.

I experimented with Vista for a couple of weeks; while it was pretty, it annoyed me nearly instantly. This is a new laptop with a dual core processor and 2 GB of RAM. Why was it taking a solid 10 minutes to boot? Granted, some of the blame lies with Lenovo insisting on stuffing the laptop full of their own bloatware, but even with that removed, its boot time was considerably slower than the laptop that I just left behind.

The experiment was further compounded by purchasing Office 2007. This too was slow to boot on a machine of this power; much has been made about its revamped navigation, but the icon and menus motif leaves much to be desired. Furthermore, it nearly choked on the novel I’m writing.

I waited for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to be released; its arrival was a godsend. As soon as it came out, I turned the Lenovo into a dual boot machine.

The performance differential is huge. What once was a slow clunker turned into a graceful, fast and elegant machine. I asked someone to time me while I booted the same machine up using Ubuntu as opposed to Vista - Ubuntu was eight minutes faster.

This is not to say that Ubuntu didn’t need tweaking; unfortunately there were two problems to be addressed at the outset - the audio didn’t work, and there was an annoying screen flicker associated with the Nvidia driver.

The screen flicker issue has a simple resolution:

1. Goto: System>Preferences>Advanced desktop settings (The compiz config settings manager)
2. Click on General options>display settings
3. Untick Detect Output
4. Manually input your screen’s resolution (1680×1050+0+0 for this model)

Fixing the sound was more complicated, however, I found some useful instructions here.

Thanks to using the Moomex themes for both Compiz and Gnome, I haven’t lost any eye candy either; its appearance is just as high tech and elegant as that of Vista. The other new installation I’ve made was to put on the Swiftweasel Browser. This has proven to be incredibly fast - far outstripping Firefox on Vista.

So why don’t I get rid of Vista entirely? Were it not for Rome: Total War, I probably would. But having to dip into the Windows world every so often is a cogent reminder of why one is a Linux person: greater speed, efficiency, performance, and apart from the gaming aspect, a lot more fun.