Various headaches with my Acer laptop planted a strange idea in my head: just install Ubuntu and everything will magically start working…

So I did. I spent a lot of time cleaning out my second partition and finally was ready to install.

I was surprised to find downloading Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 from bittorrent was ~6x faster than downloading from the mirrors.

On to the install. It was slow going until I got to the disk partition selection part, at which point time stopped. For some reason it was unbearably slow to do anything with the disk – read my paritions, respond to mouse clicks, etc.

In any case, I finally setup the partitions and installed away. The install itself was quite smooth and easy, and fairly fast. Only a single CD, which is nice.

The first thing I wanted to try was setting up dual monitors. I started digging around the administration tab, screen resolution tab, other tabs, finally onto the commandline, and concluded I have no idea how to do that.

Heck, I couldn’t even set the screen resolution to anything above 1024×768.

No problem, I thought, the Web is here to help.

But it turned out Web wasn’t working. Digging around eventually led me to a message in syslog that the driver for the WiFi card did not load; something about a resource.

Hmm. Onto the Network option under Administration, surely some utility there could help me.

The Network utility stubbornly refused to load, complaining that the supplied password was incorrect. Which I would empathize with, except I hadn’t entered any password for that program!

With no Web access and unreasonable responses from the Ubuntu utilities, my patience started to wear thin. I tried various useless things, rebooting several times along the way.

And that’s when I noticed: Ubuntu boot sequence takes significantly longer that Windows XP! This was simply unfathomable, unconscionable. I was looking for a lean, mean alternative, and I was getting a fat, confused alternative.

It only took 2 more hours to give up – perhaps I could live with XP’s warts after all. Sure beats tracking down kernel module load errors.

Now to get rid of Ubuntu.

This turned out to be much harder than I had expected. First I needed to get rid of GRUB (the boot loader). Unforunately I have neither a floppy drive for my laptop nor a Windows XP disk, meaning the easy options weren’t available.

Panic was starting to set in as option after option refused to work. All I needed was to rebuild the master boot record (MBR), but every program I tried refused to do it.

Meanwhile, the Acer program that offers to let you burn recovery CDs would go nuts each time I rebooted, requiring a harsh kill. On the 3rd kill I decided to dig around in the acer directory and by chance ran across a program called MBRwrWin.exe . Hmm, MBR. What’s the worst that could happen… I decided to run it. It flashed momentarily, and as far as I could tell nothing happened.

But on the next reboot I noticed GRUB was gone. I think MBRwrWin.exe was the magic, but I tried so many things it was hard to tell.

Now to get my partition back for Windows. I did a search for partition utitiles and downladed and tried 3 of them. All 3 were dos programs that didn’t get along well with Windows. I had an old copy of partition magic somewhere, but couldn’t find it. I was starting to give up…

There must be a way to create/delete partitions with plain old XP, I thought. And sure enough, there is: My Computer->Right Click->Manange->Storage/Disk Management. I deleted the Linux partitions, reformatted as NTFS, and am once again back in the world of Windows. Still with all the problems I started with, but somehow feeling better about not having to deal with Ubuntu…

I should mention, I’m running Ubuntu on my server for some time now and it works great. Ubuntu is a wonderful distribution. But I must’ve been out of my mind to think Linux on a laptop would have less setup/maintenace headaches than Windows…

I’m having a strange problem with my Acer laptop that renders use of a 2nd monitor impossible.

What I’d like to do is to use a 2nd monitor with the “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor”. With the acer apparently you have to use the SIS utiliy instead of using the normal Control Panel windows display path.

When I enable the 2nd monitor and extend my desktop to it, the system freezes for 2-3 seconds every 10-15 seconds. The mouse stops, the display is frozen, nothing works for just a few seconds, and then everything comes back.

Here’s someone else having the same problem from the Hexus forum.

I’ve updated the graphics drivers and the Bios to the latest versions. I’ve also increased the memory size for the graphics card to 128M from the Bios settings. Still no luck.

Any ideas?

Here are the details for my setup:

Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (build 2600)

1.80 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64
64 kilobyte primary memory cache
128 kilobyte secondary memory cache

Board: Acer, Inc. Lugano M
Serial Number: LXA55051075160CF14EM00
Bus Clock: 400 megahertz
BIOS: Acer 3A27 08/24/05

704 Megabytes Installed Memory

SiS M760GX [Display adapter]
LGP 14.6 [Monitor] (14.6″vis)
Proview XF-9s [Monitor] (18.0″vis, s/n FEVL4B185655U, November 2004)

It seems I read about Hackday, coming up on the 29th at the Yahoo! campus, every 5 minutes on Chad Dickerson’s blog. It’s a cruel reminder of the fact that I can’t go.

As my brother-in-law would so eloquently say, sucks. I have an idea I’d like to try. It’s a great idea, if I do say so myself, fits into about 24 hours of hacking, and mashes up with user generated content from Yahoo! properties. And it incorporates AJAX. I kid you not, it’s so Web 2.0 it’s almost Web 2.5!

But I can’t go. It’s crunch time on my main project and there’s no way I can take the day to hack. I’ve contemplated pulling an all-nighter and doing it remotely, but I don’t think that’s gonna fly either…

Sucks, as they say. If you’re going, hack away in the name of those who didn’t make it to the party…

This is great. A feature on HP cameras that lets you slim down the person in the picture by just adjusting a slider.

Excellent. Now if they could just de-uglify the person… or maybe automatically substitute the picture of a more attractive person in…

A lot of people tell me I look like Brad Pitt.
Via Signal vs. Noise

I’m letting the recommendation engine from Yahoo Music Unlimited guide me around with good results, better than other services I’ve tried.

Yahoo Music Unlimited, btw, is a great service trapped in a not so good player and bundled with DRM headaches. However, I enjoyed the music I discovered on it enough to actually pay for the service out of my own pocket. Those who know me recognize this for the truly monumental event it is – the cheap bastard credo is broken.

Anyway, in my play list right now I have almost the entire Music From The OC mix. That’s amusing, embarrassing (much more so for the OC than for me), and true. I like most of this stuff.

(I’m the polar opposite of the target audience for The OC)

From Mark Dominus:

Patterns are signs of weakness in programming languages.

When we identify and document one, that should not be the end of the story. Rather, we should have the long-term goal of trying to understand how to improve the language so that the pattern becomes invisible or unnecessary.

Me, I’m a big fan of patterns.

Funny that the pattern advocates tend to be hardcore Java folks…

(Btw, for the record, I hated EJBs before it was hip to do so)

Check out Daily Lit. The tag line is: “Too busy for books? Read them by e-mail”. You get emailed a chunk of a book per day via email.

This is a great idea. I tried it with the first chapter of The Idiot on my sidekick this morning and it was quite readable. A nice bite of literacy early in the morning.

I wish they had a larger book selection though. Why not grab all of Project GutenBerg’s books? Why not partner with publishers to get new releases? I’d bet publishers would be willing to make at least a few chapters of their books available for free – what a great way to try out a book and see if you like it.

Via Caterina.

Check out this graph from the NY Times on inflation adjusted home prices since the 1890s. That sharp rise in the 2000s looks pretty scary to me…

Via Signal vs. Noise.

Check out Jon Udell’s screencast on IronPython. This is getting very interesting – Python with access to deep underlying windows facilities like Avalon and XAML. I’ve read that the performance is also quite good.

There’s a lot to this dynamic language on the .Net CLR / JVM thing. Tragetting multiple languages to the same runtime virtual machine tackles cross-language integration at a deep, natural level. Definitely goes on the list of things to try.

I find it interesting that Microsoft is taking the open approach to what can be hosted on CLR, versus the Sun, which has been very focused on Java as the language of choice. Yes, I realized Jython exists and is quite good, but my impression is that Microsoft is much more open to non C# things running on the .Net CLR than Sun is about non Java things running on the JVM. Heck, just look at the names – Java Virtual Machine vs. Common Language Runtime.

Update: Sun hires the JRuby developers:

Does this mean that Sun is still operating in a ”Java-only“ world? · No. We are actively interested in supporting non-Java technologies such as PHP, Perl, Python, and Rails on our system and OS platforms. And we are quite aware that many Solaris systems are running non-Java workloads. In particular, I’m concerned about the slow progress on the next-generation native Ruby engine and would like to help there too.

Doesn’t quite say Sun wants to support non-Java on the JVM, but it’s getting closer.