Walk Alone

Had a peaceful weekend, leaving aside the brief exchange on the previous post. I’ve written about the washing machine syndrome sometime ago. Yesterday, I witnessed another use (or diabolic misuse, from my point of view) for the machine.

My sister got herself a Nokia 7610 (no, not an envy-rant). It plays songs and can be connected to the PC via USB. So far, so good. So she hooks up the cell to the PC. And does she back up her phone’s contents? Transfer images shot with the camera? Synchronize schedules and to-do lists? No way! She logs in to coolgoose.com and apniisp.com and downloads songs in bulk. Using the Nokia PC Suite, these find their way onto her phone.

Piracy apart, I hate seeing my machine reduced to a glorified pipeline. The phone’s loaded. It has GPRS connectivity. So why not use it? Why waste nearly four hours of machine time every week to transfer songs? I say if you download music like a vaccum cleaner (like a lot of my friends), do it only if you are going to listen to it from your PC. Why the double standard, you ask? Because I spend more than four hours every week doing ad-ware and AV scans, updates and defrag runs to make sure Windows doesn’t hang up on the user. After all this, using the machine as a transporter (highly efficient but replaceable and redundant nonetheless) is simply not fair. I wouldn’t mind if she buys CDs from the market, rips them and transfers the files to her phone - thats where a PC would be essential but as a pipeline? No way!

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My plans to persuade my parents to switch ISPs has run into a wall - tariff. With effect from November, MTNL has doubled its rates for the “Telephone for Internet” scheme. Don’t know why. Maybe they are trying to push customers to TriBand. But TriBand has serious billing issues. People using its Night Usage plan, where traffic between 12 AM to 8 AM was supposed to be unmetered, have received bills amounting to thousands of rupees. And MTNL’s policy is “Pay up first to continue on to redressal of your complaint”. Also it has serious authentication issues. It seems the username and password are stored in the DSL modem. So you can effectively use it as “roaming DSL” wherever you have a DSL-subscribed telephone line, since such lines would have the necessary splitter that seperates telephony and data signals. Convenience? Or a potential for misuse?

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I talked with Amey through Skype for fifteen minutes yesterday. He came away impressed with its quality. I wasn’t in a position to judge becuase I don’t voice-chat that often. But the few times I’ve done… Skype is better.

Seems like this will be the state of affairs for some time now.

The community of Bloggers in my class has reached a critical density - a grand number of 9. And I’ve not considered others who may be publishing on Blogger unknown to me or on LiveJournal or using Wordpress or MT. To keep us together, sort of like adding a sustaining element to a chemical process, I have started a team blog. So far, two of the eight guys have come onboard. The slack may be becuase I’ve timed it right on the first day of Ganeshotsav. But never mind if it sinks. This will be… lets see, my third community site (one team blog on Blogger during Nov-Dec 2004 and a Yabb-driven hosted forum were the first two) which will sink.

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My poor machine suffered the fate of being used by my sister, an administrator-level user suffering from the toaster syndrome. Or worse, a washing machine syndrome. Check this - 2 presses on button 1, 3 on button 2, flick the load switch and you are done. Now, on a PC, 1 click here, 2 there, 1 right click, select an Option, hit Enter, you are done. Sounds similar?

First, she bit my head off - “The Net is not working. You must have screwed it deliberately”. Ahh, sibling rivalry. “The Net” means all the componets from the NIC on my PC to the CAT-5 cable to the area switch (see my previous post) to Pacenet servers to their fibre-optic link to the Internet backbone. Hmm. But this “error” was “Ethernet Controller Detected” and the OS showed no clue of any NIC being present in the hardware. It was as if something had knocked off a module from the OS and the OS was now claiming a new hardware. Oh well. Two rounds of the New Hardware Found Wizard (once with the OS installation disc and then with the NIC drivers disc) didn’t rectify the problem. Then, I simply took out the NIC, did a startup-shutdown cycle and put in the NIC back. Everything was back to normal. Only Gates and God knew what happened.

Then she went ahead and installed something called Hotbar for smileys, wallpapers, customisable toolbars and a local weather conditions indicator! Hell of a choice for an admin-guy, I must say. The thing sat in my sys-tray and whenever I opened an explorer window, it would fire up a net-based setup. Even the un-install required an active net connection. Damn. This lady works in Orange, somewhere in their Customer Care department. Her job usually involves some highly customised software used for call centres. If this is what her computer IQ is, I wonder what Orange must be paying its system/network administrators.

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My site is due for an overhaul. The Matlab thingy fell through. Mainly, because I envisioned a bigger document than I could possibly handle. It was also becoming redundant and I was focussing more and more on how to make it different than Matlab’s own Help, which started dragging it down. This time, the idea is to simply point the reader to specific nodes in Matlab’s Help - it should be better than the reader going through the huge documentation on his own.

I realized the utility of “Look before you leap”.

Having procured a 64 MB flash drive, I was looking around to putting it to a better use than just carrying files. And I found a good one - as a bootable Linux USB key. At last count, there three good quality distros for less than 64 MB -Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux and spblinux. Plus I believe that using SYSLINUX, it could be possible to make a bootable USB key from just any distro’s ISO image which fits on your flash drive, even Knoppix, if you got a 1 GB key!!

I went about downloading the manuals, how-tos and the 50 MB ISO files. After an entire day spent downloading, I thought of checking my BIOS - and it was not able to boot from a USB device… The entire project was summarily abandoned.

Before that, I tried to get a BIOS update. Again, I was ready with a flashing utility but without a proper bin file for the update…

Guess if I do manage to get the USB on my list of bootable devices, it make a great project. Any ideas on making my BIOS boot from USB welcome.

Its past twelve in the night as I’m writing this. The incompatibility between different partitioning softwares and the unavailaibility of a good (read: lazy-enabled) partitioning software in Linux has caused me much grief. Due to some events, I had to remove Linux from my machine - the necessity of moving partitions being one of them. Because if I altered any Linux partition, it was as good as wiping it off. That said, yesterday (on March 19), I tried to install Linux. FC3, for some reason, consistently refused to show the first boot configuration. Ubuntu installed smoothly, but I don’t prefer it at all. So it was back to FC3 in another partition. This entailed resizing some other partition… at some point of time , Partition Magic gave an error - that my disk had been touched up using a program that read my disk as having a 16 head 32 sector geometry!!! Immediate action - forbear playing around and backup. But I pushed ahead and guess what ? Lost my swap partiton, my data partition and all my documents, downloaded setups and ebooks and everything. Its a hard lesson.

So I’m downloading stuff and going through my CDs. One good thing is I get to install the latest versions now, by force as it may be. Another is now, perhaps my documents folder will get to be be uncluttered. But I lost my cpp files. Thats going to be a tough catch up job.