Well I call it fun.
If I had no computer technology to complain about, my otherwise pleasant nature could turn ugly. At least it gives me an outlet for any built-up negative energy. Better to unleash it at the maroons in Redmond or even my own incompetence than onto those near and dear to me.
First of all, typing has become more and more frustrating for me if not downright difficult since my last two surgeries. I’ve begun a quest for free open source speech recognition software. So far the best results I’ve had consist of several projects that require you to compile code on your own. You need to be ready to solve your own problems—as well as contribute your solutions to the project(s)—if you want open source speech recognition now. You need to be able do a lot of typing just to get the code running. And I won’t tweak code to run within Ubuntu, which is based upon testing and unstable releases of Debian. It would be better to do this in Debian Etch if possible. Right now I’m running Debian Etch only virtually within MS Virtual PC. That’s not a good way to test and tweak hardware dependent software. Debian Etch should be installed onto it’s own hard drive or partition so it can run natively if I want to do this. Most likely I’ll wait for the folks at Carnegie Mellon’s Sphinx project (funded through DARPA), the Simon Project on SourceForge.net, and the Open Mind Speech project, another SourceForge.net hosted project, to come closer to their respective goals. With all these motivated and resourceful groups working towards the same end, the fruit of their efforts should be realized soon. I hope to contribute to the Open Mind Speech project, which plans to release their product under the GPL. I’ll try to keep up with all these projects and report what’s going with them here.
Secondly, I’ve been very busy just trying to stabilize my systems while considering that the release of Windows XP’s Service Pack 3 may have been pushed forward to roughly coincide with the release of Ubuntu’s latest incarnation. At any rate, between the two of them, the dust has finally settled. Now I have XP SP 3 settled in and operating smoothly on one box, while the AMD64 version of Ubuntu 8.04 is running great on another computer here. Both upgrades were somewhat problematic for me, either due to my aforesaid technological incompetence, imminent hardware failure, or problems within the packages themselves. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that nothing is bug-free.
When Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) was released on April 21st, the servers got hammered, so I waited until the following Saturday morning, April 26th, to start the upgrade. Update Manager downloaded 1,380 packages for my system. I had lots of software installed, including Ubuntu Studio’s real-time kernel, midi sequencing and music notation. I have a 3 mbps connection, but it averaged only about 80K per second as opposed to a “normal” full-speed (approximately) 360k/sec. It took a while, but it finished.
Even with known hardware problems (bad DIMM slot, flaky AGP interface, and, as it turns out, a soon-to-fail hard drive), the update worked fine. In fact, I was impressed at the manner in which an error was handled, much better than the way the same problem was handled when updating to Gutsy, which eventually turned out to be the soon-to-fail eIDE hard drive. Even though I had Hardy running well, I replaced the motherboard and started a fresh OS install the next weekend. In the meantime I decided it was time to run Microsoft Update on my XP Pro installation and was informed that Service Pack 3—now at version 2—was available.
What a can of worms that turned out to be. Actually, it was two cans of worms opened nearly simultaneously. First of all, the newly upgraded XP SP 3 system wouldn’t re-boot. Fortunately the data was intact. In the mean time I determined that the hard drive on my Linux box would imminently fail. Hardy Heron installed with the newly replaced motherboard but failed to boot even though Debian Etch installed and ran subsequently. But the Debian install was faulty as well, getting errors when concatenating large downloaded files. The XP system, having an ATSC TV tuner and Beyond TV from SnapStream, needed a new—and bigger—SATA hard disk since I needed to do a fresh install anyway. That way I could use the older and smaller (250gb) SATA hard drive to replace the bad 160gb eIDE drive on my Linux system. So began the odyssey of the past 6 weeks. There’s been several ups and downs I need not go into here besides moving a sizable quantity of data. And there’s no need to go into detail about my not always astute silicon mining excursions at our local computer recycling center, The Surplus Exchange.
Now I understand why Service Pack 3 was held back from Automatic Updates. While an improvement over all, certainly some things will break, especially if there are flaws in your current XP SP2 installation. Even though getting everything working again was a little bit of a pain, it’s been worth it. There are improvements in XP SP3 that should make most XP users happy. I know I am. It looks much better and seems faster. The only drawback I’ve found is that some low-priority applications that were previously well behaved, specifically Beyond TV’s ShowSqueeze routine, now hogs CPU cycles, making it virtually impossible to run anything else concurrently, and difficult to halt by bringing up the Task Manger, even using the preemptive ctrl-shift-escape key combination. (BTW, I use that combination exclusively rather than ctrl-alt-delete. That way I don’t inadvertently restart Windows.) Just be sure to schedule such tasks when you know you won’t be trying to use the system for anything else.
Ubuntu 8.04 (AMD64) is now running great on a nearly identical hardware setup—except for CPU speed and hard drive size—as the XP box. It does all I ask of it. Install nsplugin wrapper to use 32-bit plug-ins with your 64-bit web browser. Flash 9 and other plug-ins now work in a 64-bit environment. One other thing I now have working that I didn’t before is the Macintosh emulator Basilisk II. I have access to a bunch of my old System 7.x.x Mac files I haven’t seen for years. Hidden in there were some projects, graphics files, word processing files and financial data worth keeping. Now I can port them to my Linux system. Basilisk II runs on Windows and OSX too. Take a look at this new screenshot of all this stuff loaded at once.
I have another procedure scheduled for tomorrow, June 9th. Hopefully I will make another post soon.
But whatever you do, make it fun!
Posted by d.j. 
