Slightly less Random Ramblings

I recently installed Windows 7 beta on a Dell Latitude D630 and could not get Sprint Smartview to properly install. I finally found a solution which, while a bit kludgy, does work: using the BB over bluetooth as a dial-up-modem. I found the instructions on BlackBerryForums.com, from user “camattin.”

1. Go to your network connections
2. click create a new connection
3. select ‘Connect to the Internet’
4. ‘Set up my connection manually’
5. <next>
6. ‘Connect using a dialup modem’
7. <next>
8. check only the box for the ‘Standard Modem’
9. <next>
10. give the ISP box some value.. i.e. "SprintPCS"
11. <next>
12. enter ‘#777’ for the phone number
13. <next>
14. can opt for anyone’s use or my use only
15. <next>
16. leave the username & password fields blank
17. unless your situation warrants it, unselect both checkboxes (use this account when anyone connects to the internet, make this the default internet connection)
18. <next>
19. <finish>

This finally allows me to use my laptop when I am away from wifi. Smartview is the only important application I have not gotten working under Windows 7, which has been amazingly stable for me.

Libertarian Papers is now online! The welcome text below is taken from the site.

Welcome to Libertarian Papers!

To Authors, Readers, and Potential Libertarians:

A new libertarian journal—a new type of libertarian journal—is born today. Libertarian Papers is an exclusively online peer-reviewed journal. Its home is this elegant, fast, easy-to-use website. Please feel free to browse around.

Brutus weighs in on the state vs. blacks:

I recently install Ubuntu Studio 8.10 64 bit on a Dell Latitude D630. The wireless would not work, even after installing the restricted drives. The Network Manager icon did not appear in the gnome panel. After a bit of Googling, I found that ¨nm-applet” might not appear if the /etc/network/interfaces file has definitions for anything other than the lo interface. So, edit that file and remove the stanzas which refer to eth0, eth1, wlan0, ath0, etc. Now I see the normal network manager icon in the panel.

I bought a couple of 10/100/1000 Ethernet cards from Fry’s. Unpacking them, I discovered they had the Realtek 8169 chipset. My prior experiences with Realtek have been excellent. They make good, low cost 10/100 Ethernet cards. They work well, if unspectacularly. The 8169 is a horse of a different color, however. I run Linux pretty much everywhere except on my laptops, which are either for work or shared with my wife. Generally, I don’t have hardware compatibility issues with Linux, and I don’t think there is a compatibility issue here. I think the 8169 just stinks on ice. The actual throughput for this dog is far less than a gigabit speed rating would have you believe. I never saw more than about 75Mb/s. “Well, I thought, I didn’t pay any premium, so I still have a perfectly useful 100Mb Ethernet adapter, right?” Wrong. When I put the NIC on a busy system, like a firewall, it crawls. It slows down to less than 1Mb/s of useable throughput. This happens for both cards, so I can’t blame a buggy unit. I advise people to stay away from this card. It would be better to stick with the 8139 10/100 card, which works wonderfully. Broadcom makes good gigabit nics, but Realtek really needs to go back to the drawing board.

Dune: The Battle of Corrin is the third book of the Butlerian Jihad trilogy by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. The book attempts to build upon the proud legacy of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune series. Unfortunately, it suffers from some terrible, fatal flaws. The characters are totally unconvincing. They simply do not recognizably react like humans. On the one hand, military people have little compunction about exterminating entire planets, but then are afraid to attack the Omnius when the thinking machines threaten to kill hostages. It is a bizarre thing to make a major plot point. I do not know if this is a weakness inherent in the notes left behind by the original creator, or an oversight by the new writers, but it completely ruins the ending of the story.

As are all Dune stories, this story is a dystopian nightmare, but the Herbert/Anderson collaborations are even worse. Earlier in the story, things were already looking bad: Rather than simply go their separate ways and divide a tribe, two people decide to have a battle to determine who gets the right to rule. And these are people who are allegedly disgusted by slavery. But there they are, deciding who will have the right to enslave, when there was a very simple solution in front of them.

I find it bizarre that no one seemed to think that it might be worth trying, as a military strategy, to attack Omnius with the Holtzmann satellite generators. They had a blanket perimeter on the planet, through which no thinking machine could pass. Why not just advance the blanket toward the planet and eradicate thinking machines as you go? You can keep building more satellites to back up those with which you are attacking. It’s just a stupid oversight. Also, they exterminated planets with nuclear weapons to destroy the Omnius Everminds on those worlds, but occasionally humans survived, but Omnius did not? Why wouldn’t Omnius, a machine, embed himself very deep under the crust of the planets?

At the end, Omnius plans to beam himself as a big data packet into space? Hoping for a receiver? What possible reason would there be to think that such a transmission would bring about any useable thing on the other end.

These are only a few highlights of my problems with this book. I found it to be, quite frankly, one of the worst science fiction books I have ever bothered to finish.

I love cheap uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). For the home user, they make a lot of sense. Replacing the batteries in a UPS often costs more than getting a new one on sale, so I just get a cheap one for each of my computers every year. I look for the $20-$40 deals they have at Fry’s on a regular basis. My home has fairly dependable power. The outages I normally encounter are short, usually a second or two. That flash of power can be murder on my hard drives over the course of the year, however. For that reason, I go for the cheap, low capacity UPS devices. They work fine for these short bursts. If I needed the sorts of things which could keep me up and running for several minutes, and automatically shut down my machines, I’d go for something more costly, but a $20 UPS per year can save you a $100 hard drive, so I find it an investment well worth making.