Category: Life, the universe, and everything…

Some blog entries are easy to write. Not this one.

Meebles is no more. In the end, it was peaceful, but his last days must have been hell. At least he had chicken (and lots of it) last night.

I first met Meebles in early 1998 when I was looking for a companion to Greebo. I went to the Lost Dog’s Home, and picked the most feisty cat there. After 14 years, I know now why his original slaves put him up for adoption again, but I didn’t mind the random attacks, the aloof distance he preferred, and his general bat craziness. It was part of his charm, and it’s the reason I picked him. He had 3 days to go before what I had to do today would have been done to a six month young cat back then.

All in all, I got the best of the bargain for all 14 years. He was steadfast in his loyalty. You had to earn that loyalty, something dog owners will never and don’t understand, but once you had it, he was a part of your life.

 

I miss him already. Catchya round buddy.

Much earlier this year, the Minister of War and Finance’s (hi Tanya!) old Dell augured in and bought the farm. First, Tanya spilt Milo (granulated malt) grains on the keyboard and this got under the key caps, causing the keys to stick. I tried cleaning it a couple of times, but many keys were never very good after even a solid cleaning. Then I spilt soup into the keyboard. In trying to take it apart and wash off the soup, I managed to break the little ribbon connector holder to the trackpad, and the keyboard didn’t appreciate being taken apart again, and I couldn’t get about six or so keys back on. Despite this, the laptop “worked” with an external keyboard for months. Finally, Mackenzie stomped all over our bed and the laptop, breaking the power cord connector near the screen. This last one did it – couldn’t get any more charge into it.

So I gave Tanya my maxxed out late 2006 17″ MacBook Pro. We were free of the evil, monstrous Windows beast and I was happy even though I was down a computer. Unfortunately, Tanya doesn’t like MacOS, not even after six months. Color me shocked, but there you go.

So for Christmas, I bought her a new Asus K52DR-EX143V from MSY. This unit has a 4 core AMD processor, 4 GB of RAM, 1 GB of dedicated VRAM and ATI HD5470M display chipset, 500 GB of disk, and BluRay / DVD-RW combo drive. Sounds sweet.

Opening the packaging wasn’t too bad (there are videos all over YouTube if you’re an unboxing freak), but then the stark differences between Mac and PC packaging starts to set in.

• There’s quite a lot of papers and odds and ends in the box. With the Mac, you get a simple, small Getting Started booklet and a sticker.
• The Asus power brick is fairly large, but the cables are pretty short – about 1 m in total length. The end is a traditional plug that is of similar design that caused the demise of the previous Dell. You may need to take an extension cord with you on site if you travel with this model as the cable is pretty short. The Mac has a small power brick with integrated cable organizer, with long cords (about 2 m total) with a MagSafe connector. There’s no doubt in my mind that Tanya’s Dell would have survived if it had a Magsafe connector.
• However, there’s no recovery DVD (urgh) or installation media. With the Mac, you get a single MacOS X DVD that allows you unlimited re-installs.
• Stickers randomly cover about 45% of the Asus palm rest. Luckily, they came off fairly easily in about five minutes and a sharp knife. There was some residual stickiness from one of the stickers which I’m still yet to get completely off. There’s no stickers on a Mac.
• There are a lot of shipping protective stickers on the Asus, such as around the bezel, on the web cam,and so on. Some of it is actually quite hard to remove such as on the hinges. There’s only a small piece of soft foam between the keyboard and the keyboard in the last two Macs I had.

Turning on the Asus requires installing the battery, and plugging the power cord in. Immediately, differences between Windows 7 OEM and MacOS X start to stand out. For a start, the Asus is by any standards a fast computer, but it took over a minute to get to the first registration screen asking for personalization and registration details. I was working and online in two minutes out of the box on my Macbook Pro 13″ in 2009.

Windows 7 starts in about a minute, but there’s so much circusware and trial software installed that I spent the next fourteen hours:

• Decoding and removing all unnecessary crap off the machine. This is still not complete, but I’m much happier now. The Asus now boots in about 45 seconds
• Removing the stupid “data” disk partition – for some reason there’s a 116 GB system partition (far too big), and a 329 GB data partition (far too small). Removing the data partition solves both issues. To fix it on yours, assuming there’s no data on the data partition, start the disk partitioner (diskpart.exe):

select disk 0
list partition
select partition 3 < -- see note below 
delete
select partition 2
extend
exit

* the data partition was 3 on my system - YMMV and do not delete your system partition!

• Upgrading Adobe Reader 9 to X
• Upgrading Flash to be as secure as it'll ever be (which is not very)
• Installing the 78 patches for Windows, requiring just over a gigabyte of bandwidth, several attempts and reboots
• Installing decent firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware - not needed on a Mac (yet)
• Installing Microsoft Office 2010. There's a trial copy of Office 2010 Starter edition already installed, but that also has all the installation bits for all editions. So I bought the Product Key Card of Home and Business edition and chose "Activate key" to turn Starter edition into Home and Business. However, it failed to install the first time, so I tried again after a reboot and that worked. On the Mac, you just drag MS Office from the install DVD to your Applications folder. The Mac install is far faster and just works. Of course, once installed, there were Office 2010 patches to install.
• There's no installation media or recovery DVDs, so I broke out my DVD-R supply, and after 2.5 hours (seriously!) it burnt five recovery DVDs with hilarious Chinglish prompts such as "Predictably, burning will take five DVDs to create a recovery DVD". You can't make that crap up. Of course, using the recovery DVDs will blow away all Tanya's data and return the circus ware, but ... it had to be done. The Mac has a full OS DVD and thus doesn't lose any user data, and in many cases keeps your applications and settings working too.
• I'm currently installing iTunes and migrating data across. This would take time no matter if it's a PC or a Mac, so I'm going to give it a free pass at the moment.
• I'm still trying to set up Outlook 2010 and her Windows Mobile 6.1 phone. This should be a no brainer, but ... Windows 7 doesn't seem to like Windows Mobile 6.1.
• I still don't have a Time Machine work-a-like that can back up Tanya's data. This is a serious issue as hers is the most likely computer to die. Suggestions welcome.

Using the laptop

As it's only the second day of having the laptop, I've not done any real work on it yet. PCs are unproductive like that. I'm still yet to find out if it can run videos in iTunes full screen on our TVs, which the Macs do in their sleep. Tanya's previous Dell used to have serious lag time between video and sound and the fans were on full time, requiring extra volume. I'm hoping that this computer is at least as able as a four year old Macbook Pro.

Problems so far

I don't know if this is just me, or known problems with Asus laptops, but I've found that connecting the VGA adapter to a 24" screen at 1920x1080 @ 32 bpp produces a wobbily and shimmering display that flickers a great deal. I would get eye strain after a few minutes if I had to use this as my primary display. So I tried a HDMI cable, but that produced a pink / purple display centered in the middle of the screen. I don't know if this means I have a broken laptop yet, or if this is how crappy all PCs are. I hope it's not broken, as I've invested so much time in getting to where I am at the moment.

Conclusion

In short, the machine is very fast at some things. Except for booting and running Office seems a bit tardy. The external display connectors don't seem to be working properly. At least, it found my Bluetooth mouse and used it without any additional issues.

As a Mac user, I cannot understand why PC manufacturers don't take that little bit of extra time and make sure their product works out of the box with minimal fussing. The circusware was very annoying. That should go, as should the sticker vandalism. The patching was annoying but necessary. It shouldn't require multiple reboots. Someone should test the installation of Office 2010 with a product key card before creating the image. A slightly longer power cable would really help and is not that expensive. And supply a real copy of Windows 7 installation media, so you can clean install the OS easily instead of wasting hours and hours and hours getting rid of the circusware. Asking folks to sit there for 2.5 hours to create 45 cents worth of DVDs is morally repugnant and evil.

Although in terms of raw speed, the equivalent Mac is about twice as expensive as what I've spent on the Asus, the reality is that my two year old Mac boots up faster, starts Office 2010 faster in emulation than this thing, and has a better screen and a longer battery life. The price of a Mac with my Mac's performance is $1499, only a few hundred more. If the display ports are broken, I'll have to do all of this again with a replacement unit next week. Argh!

Score so far: 2/5. Do not recommend. PCs are only cheaper if your time is worthless. I just don't get it.

I’m very sorry to do this – again – but I’m going to declare e-mail bankruptcy on Dec 31, 2010. I have failed miserably in keeping my personal inbox clear and replying to e-mails this year. That has to change as it lets a lot of good folks down.

If you have sent mail to me and I have not replied, please wait until Jan 1 and send it to me again. I will deal with it as soon as I get it.

My only new year’s resolution is to do the Inbox Zero thing properly this time around.

Like many technical writers, I am constantly looking for ways to improve my writing skills. I don’t think there will ever be a time when I think “Okay, that’s good enough” and stop criticizing my own work.

I am constantly in awe of other authors, particularly those that have published great works. I seek out author interviews on scholarly websites, and places like Galley Cat, in an effort to glean small insights into the life of an author.

I started out by reading author interviews for any morsels on how they organized their day and their writing space. This accelerated once I started working from home. This is a futile project – each author, if they mention it at all, has a completely different day structure and writing space than the author before. Some write early in the morning (impractical for me), some write late in the night (I’d love to, but I have a 2.5 year old who says “close eyes” and means it); some write in glorious writing palaces redolent in over stuffed furniture and old books others write in long hand at the local coffee shop or library. No two are the same. Sigh.

The one common theme is that they write every day. Iain Banks, one of my favorite authors, writes for only part of the year and takes the rest off, but still manages a punishing schedule and daily word count to pump out beautiful works of art.

Another common theme is supportive family and friends. I can attest to that – my cats led a lonely life whilst I was tapping away at the OWASP Guide 2.0 for several months. I don’t think I could ever do that again – not least for family reasons.

Technical writing for web application security is far different from any form of fiction. It’s different from most non-fiction – and it’s dramatically different from sports writing. We’re expected to dumb down (“communicate”) with our peers in a way that nearly no other technical field would allow. In my field, respect is paid to those who can communicate highly technical, very advanced concepts in a way that could be understood if they were on the back of a “Fantale” wrapper.

I am not disparaging my field, for I love it, but I do object that our terms of art – our short hand – is so easily sacrificed. I need to learn how to write dumber, become one with my inner dumb writer, and make sense even when it makes no sense to write for the average tabloid reader. I think we underestimate our reader’s intelligence and insult them terribly every time we pump out a report in basic English (that is – using only the 500 most common words).

Viva la revolucione! Whoops, that wasn’t basic English. My bad. As for more author interviews – it’s like reading a good autobiography – hard to put down. I think I will continue to seek out author interviews, even though I think they will in the end not shape my writing style nor my work space to any great degree.

It’s been a slow haul working on converting all the database access to PDO. There’s just so MUCH crap in there.

So to keep things moving, I’m going to move www.gaiabb.com to run on the donated OLPCs at my home.

More details here.

It’s Inbox Zero time again. Every year, I do the Inbox Zero thing and archive all my mail (read and unread) on January 1 from the year just gone. I also tell myself it’s time to start following the IZ rules, but … they somehow always fall to the wayside.

I get a lot more personally addressed e-mail than most folks do, and I don’t have a chance to action every item that needs it. I know I have missed replying to at least 20% of my mail – my bad. To make amends, I will work on replying to the last three months of outstanding mail by the end of the year. But I bet there will be mail that still needs actioning that will be archived.

Action Required: If you e-mailed me, and not had a reply from me by January 1, please re-send your mail to me after January 1, and mark it REPLY NEEDED in the subject. I have an e-mail rule that flags such messages and I will reply to you.

Well, that’s been a rotten few days…

• My friend TJ, 43, passed away from diabetic related complications and worse than third world access to basic health care in a first world country – the USA.
• My USA credit card expired.
• This domain expired and failed to auto-renew using my USA credit card.
• Tanya had to go to hospital twice after a fall in the back room… on my birthday.

Some of these things are important, others not so much. So apologies all who might have tried to mail me and for this site to be down for more than 24 hours, but I had other things on my mind. Please re-mail anything if you haven’t heard back from me.

TJ – rest in peace mang. I just wished you could have migrated to any other first world nation and gotten the basic meds and help you needed instead of dying so, so young from completely and utterly preventable and manageable diseases. I’ll miss you and remember you.