Second Breakfast

Although I have worked in the IT field for nigh upon 17 years (there’s a point in your life when you start measuring things in rather long stretches of time…its disturbing), I actually had actually never purchased a computer with my own money.

My first computer was a Mac IIsi that my great-aunts paid for.  In theory I wanted/needed the computer to do electronic music, as I was all fired up after my freshman year to enter the School of Music at U-M and study electronic music, composition, or something along those lines.

My time at the School of Music was a rather unhappy one in my life, and in lots of ways I wasn’t prepared to be a music student at U-M, which sees itself more as a conservatory school than a public institution.  There was lots of drama on my part, and I was never actually admitted to the School of Music.

But I still had the Mac IIsi, and along the way got a job at the University doing all sorts of computing-related support:  helpdesk support, mainframe stuff (I was a semi-competent tapes consultant for the Michigan Terminal System at one point if you can believe it), all sorts of Unix-y stuff.  Heck, I even convened the rather short-lived but useful WWWSIG (special interest group) at U-M in the early days when the Web meant “Mosaic”.  My trusty Mac IIsi was there, if not by my side, at least on my desk, and having a computer allowed me to work half-time, be a full-time student, and still find time to write papers.

Actually I’m not the guy you want to pick the upcoming Next Big Thing.  I remember, after having downloaded and compiled an early version of NCSA Mosciac (I knew how to type “make” back then), saying something like “well, this isn’t really that interesting since there isn’t anything to look at, and who is going to get a browser if there isn’t anything to look at on this thing?”.  We call that problem “network externalities” now but I obviously didn’t get it.

After the Mac IIsi, which eventually I gave to my now-husband as a second computer for a while and we eventually got rid of, I had a series of laptop computers provided by my various employers.  There have been a long series of IBM ThinkPads, which in general I have liked a great deal, and my Mac/Unix skills have withered somewhat as the realities of jobs, layoffs, and paychecks turned me into a corporate “MIS” guy (for now).

The most recent ThinkPad, a T42, was entering its fifth year of service when its fan died.  And we had been talking for a while about buying me a new computer.  But the notion of spending $2500-$3000 on myself just seemed silly, and so I’ve been putting it off.  So finally, for my birthday this year I took the plunge and ordered myself a MacBook Pro.

Its awesome.

First of all the hardware package is great: very light, durable, thin as heck, with a beautiful, glossy backlit LCD display.  Turn the brightness down a bit and you’ve got a good 4hours of battery time (or 8 since I bought a second battery).  Plenty of ports, an integrated optical drive, and the magnetic power connector is brilliant.  Power management works very well, and doesn’t require the constant management of hibernation vs. sleep that my ThinkPad required.  My only complaint is that it runs rather hot on the bottom.

MacOS is also a great operating system.  It is a Unix-based OS, so all of the command-line goodness is there if you need it.  The UI components are derived from NeXTStep/OpenStep (I used to have a color NeXT computer on my desk at U-M, which was really fabulous) with real vector graphics everywhere.  It just looks beautiful and everything works together very smoothly.  I don’t spent a lot of time having to work around the obstacles the OS puts in my way.  I love Spaces and Expose, and the multitouch features on the trackpad are addictive (I’ve always eschewed the trackpad in favor of the ThinkPad little pointing stick, but I guess that’s because the trackpads I’ve used sucked).  I just find myself working very efficiently and enjoying the “flow” that the system creates.  TIme Machine works perfectly, and gave me the perfect name for this system: Gallifrey.  Yeah, my backup drive is called, you guessed it, Tardis.  I am a geek by trade you know.

I’m really not an Apple maven like my husband is.  I tend to hate all computers equally (a problem given my current chosen profession), and there’s lots to hate in every computing environment I’ve encountered.  But I hate MacOS a little less than everything else I’ve used.

I still have Windows-platform tools to deal with, so I bought a copy of VMWare Fusion (although with 4GB RAM to be able to run XP and MacOS side by side).  It works quite well, and my only complaint is that I wish it would restore the guest OS to a running state when I come out of sleep mode instead of requiring me to click on it every time.  But that’s not a major hassle.

And I have MS Office 2008.  Lots of little complaints there.  It doesn’t understand Spaces, so I wind up with the Word formatting pallette orphaned on a different desktop from the one where my document is.

So count me back among the Apple fold.  They’re expensive machines, but well worth it if you’re someone who works with your laptop constantly, and tends to be demanding in terms of quality and ease of use.

The past few months have been rather consumed with many work projects, church commitments, projects for More Light Presbyterians, travel, training, and just plain busy-ness.  So I’ve had little time or energy to engage here, and my several (one, two?) readers have gone without.  Alas.

I think I’m on the other side of things now.  Unfortunately my laptop’s fan decided it was “time to die” finally (it has been spinning more or less happily for four years now, so I forgive its new reluctance to keep it up), so I am sans computer.  Well, not entirely true given the Dell laptop at work (which never leaves the dock), and the Compaq Evo at home which is mostly a terminal to access the Internets and e-mail.

Here are the guts of my ThinkPad T42, which has been a very fine laptop despite its current challenges.  The heatsink fan (the copper-colored component) is quite a piece of engineering.  A bit of egg-carton-style packing foam makes a great screw holder.  Thanks to this site for notes on how to remove the palm rest.

I’ve been contemplating a new computer for a year or so, and thinking of taking the plunge back to Apple.  My first computer was a Mac IIsi, which my wonderful great-aunts funded despite its hefty price tag.  I loved that computer, and I wouldn’t be the big professional geek keeping my husband in the lifestyle he’d like to become accustomed to without that gift.  Apple is unlikely to rev the MacBook Pros anytime real soon, so now is probably as good of a time as ever.  And with Parallels I can have my MacOS goodness and my Windows XP work stuff all in one easy shiny package.  W00t!

I’ve been looking for a while now for a Content Management System (CMS) to help me maintain the various web sites that I produce for various folks. I’ve used Dreamweaver and Contribute in the past, but Contribute has the flaw in that 1) its not free, and has gotten expensive, and 2) you need the fat client in order to do the updates. I wanted something that was browser-based, simple to install and administer, and imposed relatively little overhead in terms of managing the site. The CMS should also be PHP-based (for ease of installation), and simple to install. And WYSIWYG editing would be nice (a la HTMLArea or something similar)

There are hundreds of CMS projects out there. Lots of them fall into the groupware category, which is not what I want. I’m not interested in blogging and photo gallerys and wikis. Those are all great, but the groupware systems tend to be really bloated, and get in the way of designing a clean web site that does a few things well. There are projects like Midgard which might do this well, but they’re difficult to install. The full release of Midgard is not possible to deploy in a hosted environment, and even the “lite” version is difficult to deal with and poorly-documented, and like many CMS tools tends to want to “eat” your site in a way that will be difficult to migrate out of. There are systems like Typo3, but it looks like it requires a lot of upfront work to get something useable out of it and it is really targeted at large sites with complex needs. Bricolage is a nice tool, but it has lots of dependencies as well, and a lot of overhead on the back end.

I’ve been trolling various directories and lists, downloading and installing stuff that might be a good candidate. I tried TikiWiki, as it seemed like it could be stripped down a bit. But TikiWiki doesn’t meet the “no bloat” requirement by a long shot. However someone in the support forum pointed me at Etomite. Its easy to install, completely PHP-based, simple to manage, and appears to impose only the necessary amount of overhead. It has a simple template language with only a few options (most of the extra work is tossed into Snippets, which are little executable bits of PHP you can supply to the system). Its a relatively fresh project, but appears to have interest.

I’m going to migrate 2 or 3 smaller sites into it and see what I think.

So I have a printer at home that I want to network. Being the smart guy that I am, I think “I’ll by a print server”. Having heard good things about Hawking Tech’s products (particularly in terms of price), I thought I’d pick up a USB print server from Hawking Tech. So I go over to Computer Alley on State St. and pick up a Hawking HPS1U USB Print server for $65.00.

I get it home, unpack it, look at the simple docs, cable it up, and try to set it up. I install the config utility, run it, and it can’t find the print server on the network. I power cycle it, try again. No dice. I swap out cables, same result. I look at the docs some more, and try some other stuff. I ping the broadcast address on my network and see what shows up in the ARP table. I see a new device, and try to connect to it. I can ping it, but I can’t connect to the HTTP server that is supposed to be running on the thing. I also try putting a static ARP entry in my system’s ARP table and connecting to it that way (which is what is suggested for non-Windows systems). Again, I can ping the thing, but I can’t actually access it in a useful way (ICMP conversations are rarely interesting — “Are you there?”, “Yes, I’m here.” — “Still there?”, “Yes, I’m here.” — And so on…)

After a bit of cursing, I conclude that the unit must be defective. I look for help on the Hawking Technology web site. There is none. There certainly isn’t a support number that I can find.

So I take the thing back to Computer Alley to get an exchange. They happily give me a new one, apologize for the problems, and take the old one back.

I bring the new one home. Unpack, cable it, etc. Same results. Troubleshoot. Same results. I look at the docs some more, and apparently the thing is also supposed to have a TFTP server on it. So I grab the TFTP client for my Fedora Core 2 box (surprisingly not installed by default), and try to TFTP to the thing to configure it. Again, no luck. The thing responds to ICMP packets, but no other packets. I even tried connecting via crossover cable to the thing just to make sure it wasn’t my LAN switch or something wacky like that. Still no dice. The damn thing just doesn’t work.

Now I can accept having a unit go out the door DOA. Sometimes it happens. But TWO units? Both were in unopened OEM packaging. The boxes were in good condition, and didn’t appear to have suffered in transit. But both simply don’t work.

Looking online, I see that folks have had mixed results. At least one other person reported the same thing I did — the unit just didn’t work out of the box.

I’m not at all impressed with Hawking. I think I’ll avoid their products in the future, and look for vendors like D-Link, Belkin, and LinkSys for stuff like this.