EEE PC - Screen Real Estate

The screen on the eee PC is pretty damned impressive. The tiny screen on my old 3-Com Audrey was just about the same physical size as my 4G Surf, but it packed in about half the pixels. These days you get an easy 800 pixels across in such tight space that my old eyes simply can't count the dots.

Of course, you are still taxed with a 'short' display. It's not a problem in Terminal or in your web browser, because you can scroll. But sometimes you get a window that's too big and you can't get to the close or okay buttons. The fix for that by the way, is to hold Alt while clicking and dragging the window around.

Looking for more space in Firefox? - Open up Firefox. Right-click the toolbar somewhere such as over-top the Stop button. If you don't use the Bookmarks bar (I never do) you should uncheck that. Also notice how big the buttons are in Firefox? You can downsize them. Right-click the toolbar again and choose 'Customize'. In the window that pops up, look to the bottom for an option to 'Use Small icons' and check that box. You have just increased your browsing real estate. You may even decide to part with your status bar (but I like mine too much). To remove it, click View and uncheck Status Bar.

Want more space in your taskbar? - Taskbars are always over-crowded but the eee PC has a little less horizontal space than you may be used to. How about getting rid of the word 'Applications' on the Application button? An eeeuser.com forum poster, Red Penguin found this remarkably easy method. Simply right-click the Applications button, and click Properties. Now just uncheck the option 'Show title in button'.

Another space eater is the Desktop Switcher. It looks like four big boxes in the right hand corner. This is handy if you spread your windows across separate spaces (one desktop for work, and one for games?). I have never really made good use of this feature and you don't need the switcher panel to switch desktops anyway (you can press Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Key and get the same effect. To get rid of the desktop switcher panel (it's actually called the "Pager") right-cick it and Remove it.

I am still collecting space saving tips myself - so I my add to this topic in the future. In the meantime here is what my tight-on-space desktop looks like.

EEE PC Network Manager Replacement; wicd

It was a really busy day at the office. But thankfully a third of my work today was waiting for software installations to finish. In this minimal off-time I was able to try out an alternative Network Manager for eeeXubuntu called 'wicd'.

The default network manager is "not bad", and it looks a little something like this ...



I have a few complaints.

1) It seems to lie about the signal strength, and sometimes it really drags when connecting me to a network or obtaining the IP address.
2) It doesn't give you a lot of options or additional information about the networks it finds. It's almost too simple.
3) It's connected to the Keyring application. That means it saves all of your WEP/WPA passwords safely - but every time you log in you are prompted for your master password. I made mine really long too. Woops.

With that, I went off in search of an alernative network manager. I found one mentioned in the eeeuser.com forums called 'wicd' which seemed to be well liked. The installation instructions were not very clear - so allow me to elaborate.

1) Open terminal and do a ' sudo mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list'. Then scroll to the very bottom and add these lines (the first is for your reference only) ...
# WICD.longren.org
deb http://wicd.longren.org gutsy all
2) In terminal, do a 'sudo apt-get update'. This may take a few moments.
3) Next, do a 'sudo apt-get install wicd'. Note that you cannot have *two* network managers, so you are going to lose network-manager and network-manager-gnome in the process. If you have stored away WEP/WPA passwords ... they will be saved in case you want to go back to the old manager. They will not however, be 'ported' to the new application.
4) When you say 'Y' to continue - the NetworkManager will *crash* and generate error messages. Because it is being removed. Don't panic. It's no big deal.
5) You may need to reboot. But try clicking Applications > Network > Wicd and launch the interface. If it's blank - reboot. Otherwise it will look a little like this ...



One thing was obviously missing, and that is the 'tray icon' down in the bottom right corner. Surely it has one, right? Of course it does, but you will need to add that to your 'Autostarted Applications' list.

6) Click Applications > Settings > Autostarted Applications. Then the 'Add' button. The name and decription can be whatever you like, but the Command box must read '/opt/wicd/tray.py'. Refer to this screenshot ...



7) Log out, and log back in. Now you should have a tray icon, and you can go to work.

I was not all that impressed with wicd, and at the end of the day - I went back to my default network manager. Here are my dislikes for wicd.

1) It's slower than the default manager, and it takes forever to scan the network and show you the results.
2) When it strikes an error or a problem joining a network - you are put on endless hold. There is a cancel button which *does* cancel the connection - and that is a plus.
3) It does not consolidate wireless networks. This was a dealbreaker for me. If I have 6 access points in range, all with the same 'SSID', it shows all 6 of them to me. I don't want to see all those, and it takes time to query and report on all of them!
4) This also lies about signal strength which tells me the driver is the root of that problem.

If you want to go back to the default manager:
1) Open a terminal and do a 'sudo apt-get install network-manager network-manager-gnome'. It will automatically remove 'wicd' for you, as you can't have both.
2) Remember to go into Autostart Applications and remove the wicd tray applet.
3) Perhaps reboot, although it may not be necessary as your old tray icon is probably back and functional again.

A note of caution - if you return to wicd a second time you may have issues. I found myself removing wicd, deleting the entire /opt/wicd directory, and reinstalling it again just to create some screenshots for this blog entry.

EEE PC Day 2 - Wardriving Attempts

After some late night last minute attempts to make Kismet work last night, I was actually graced with some a bit of minor success. Kismet loaded, and displayed some accurate capture information.



Now if only I could get my "production network tool" to play nicely. It seems to only want to connect to my home network, and disregards everything else it sees. When I search for other networks it finds them by name - but shows a very weak signal for them and won't seem to commit when I tell it to connect. It's a tad annoying, because I can pull out Audrey II (the Mac) and jump onto any one of these networks without a problem.



I am assuming the problem is:
1) The way the driver was written.
2) The utility demands a certain level before it will connect.
3) Power limitations to the card keep it running weaker, but longer on battery.
4) The card just simply is not that good.

It could be a number of those factors run together. I spent some time tonight searching for an option in the driver or with a wireless tool like iwpriv which would allow me to step up the power consumption to get a better wireless reach. I came up empty there. I guess my next step is to see if I can't find a replacement for this native wireless network manager. I hope to have these training wheels off soon. I am anxious to get back to wardriving.

The EEE PC Day 1

I was walktzing down the hall today at the hospital past the supply man with a cart of stuff, and he had something for me. My EEE PC had arrived a full four days ahead of schedule. As busy as this day was I still managed to find some time to play with my new toy.

Out of the box, I was pretty impressed with this little device. I have the 4G Surf model which has the smallest screen and keyboard of the bunch, but with 4GB of SSD flash versus 2GB. The default Operating System was "not bad", but it had all the makingd of kids computer. If Webkinz made an OS it would probably look a little like that. There were great big buttons spread amongst four tabs or so for launching applications. These ranged from Instant Messaging and multimedia stuff to limited "work" applications like Abiword. If this was the OS you were stuck with, these little machines would have never taken off.

Within 10 minutes or so I had decided that I was ready for a real operating system. With that, I got a copy of eeeXubuntu and ran through an installation. It was a bit cumbersome because I was unable to boot to my external CD-ROM drive as I had hoped. Instead, I had to use a thumbdrive to install from. This involved getting everything off my thumbdrive and creating a backup with 'dd'. Then I booted up to the eeeXubuntu live disc using a PC on my desk. Next I repartitioned and formatted my thumbdrive as a FAT16 drive - and ran a script from the CD-ROM to create a bootable and installable thumbdrive. From there - the install to my EEE PC was cake.

While the installation took the better part of an hour, once it was complete I was quite impressed with the speed. Booting seemed to take less than 30 seconds or so, and running applications was pretty pleasing. I've never spent much time using the default window manager 'xfce' but I will probably hold onto it a while. It's very thin, and there's not much eye candy. But the speed that you get is amazing.

With a good functional OS I tempted fate and installed all available updates. I did not do the 'dist-upgrade' as I have heard that certain things will be broken if you move up to the hardy release (current eeeXubunt runs gutsy 7.10). My updates finished at 5:00PM and I was out the door.

Since then, it's been a battle getting kismet installed. I am anxious to get back to wardriving but a wifi scanning app is essential. There are all sorts of issues with Kismet, madwifi, and the eee PC in general. From what I have read, people have got it working by mising new and old libraries and deb packages. I'm not sure I like that idea, so I have stuck to attempts. I got the latest Kismet source and built it pretty easily. It runs, detects my card, and gives no complaints ... but then it doesn't display anything. Of course, it also cripples the wireless driver which is rather typical for putting a device into monitor mode. Doing some more reading I found someone had posted a command to put things back in order and save a reboot ... 'wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode sta'.

And now, as I get ready for bed I thought "why not break this thing in and Blog a bit". The keyboard is definitely awkward being so small ... but the first keyboard I ever used was a lot like this (TRS-80 Color Computer). I think the 3-Com Audrey keyboard was also about this size. I'm probably chucking out typos a-plenty - but fuck spell checking. There also seems to be some running joke about finding punctuation marks on this thing, but since it's marked so well - it shouldn't take you any more than 10 minutes to become acustomed to the layout.

I look forward to the adventures I will have with this little toy.

*EDIT* It's tough to go to bed with a job unfinsihed. After reading a few entries to the Kismet mailing list, I found that my madwifi driver needed an option to be passed to it at the time it is loaded for Kismet to run properly. I will spare you the bloody details. If you are interested however, you can read this post from the eeeuser.com forums.

Tomorrow - we wardrive.

Blog Upkeeping

I was digging through a drawer a few days ago and I came across a "web server backup" that I had made in late 2005. At that time, I was still administering a web server from work which I used to host Gloop.net. The domain name, and the server, have both long since been dead and forgotten. With them went a lot of pictures that I had put in my blog over the years. I have always been a little sad that my older blog posts are now photo-less and plagued with dead link boxes.

Vowing to fix the image problem, I slowly began to work my way through old blog posts identifying the images that are now dead, and fixing them by uploading them to Blogger (which actually uses Picassa to store them). Hopefully Blogger.com will outlive me, and I never have to worry about repairing dead links again.

I was only halfway through the year 2003 when I realised that my Blog has some other problems. Namely that my commenting feature has always been hosted by Haloscan.com. At the time I started my blog, the Blogger service did not have a commenting feature. This of course predates when Google bought them ... and it was before Wordpress ever came into existence. In it's hayday, Haloscan served me well. These days, their servers are slow as hell and add what seems like a 45 second delay to my page loadings.

I have spent a good two to three hours copying those Halsoscan comments and pasting them into my Blogger entries. So if you are rolling back in time and reading old Blog entries they will appear in the post as "Historic Comments". Future comments will now be hosted by Blogger! I could have just switched to Blogger comments, and dumped the old ones. But I love reading those old comments from my friends. :-)

I also dropped a new theme overtop of the old one, which I have probably had for at least 3 years .... maybe longer. It's not what I want - but I will work on that later. Now, I need to cook dinner. I'm making Strombolli!

The Audrey Legacy

Long ago my wife and I each took $100 to buy ourselves something. She bought herself ... shit I forget. But I went right onto eBay and bought myself a 3-COM Audrey. I had a lot of fun with that damned thing. I would sit up in bed with it with the kick-stand down, and the tiny little keyboard on my belly chatting with a Jabber client that I had compiled to run on it, and irc-ii. Good times. I called it "Audrey".

After a while I got bored with my little network appliance, and I needed a meaner toy. I was in the market for something that had wireless capability so that I could explore this phenomenon known as "war-driving". I bought myself a Mac off of eBay. It was a toilet-seat iBook model. In fact, it was the original iBook. I drug it *EVERYWHERE* and I still use it every other day or so to check e-mail or surf the web from bed. It became my new best friend, and I nick-named it "Audrey II" (a play on the broadway show and film, Little Shop of Horrors).

Many years have passed, and I have not since had an electronic gadget great enough to carry the Audrey nickname. But that is about to change.

Today my boss called me from her office, which she does often. It's a little strange, because she sits about 10 feet away from me. But she doesn't like people bothering her, so she often locks herself into her office to get work done. When she calls one of us, we all hear both sides of the conversation. This is humorous, but not relevant to this story. My boss says "I need to order two laptops, but I have no Windows XP option ... so I may have to get them with Vista". I said "that's fine, but get me one too would ya?". She laughed and hung up.

Then I drafted an e-mail to her. I told her that I desperately needed a highly portable laptop which I could take on runs with me around the hospital. It would have to have a decent battery life, a small display, and if possible a non-mechanical hard drive. I chose the Asus EEE PC with a 4GB flash drive. I sent her a link with all the purchasing information she would need to buy it for me. I have sent her requests like these before and she usually just deletes them. But today - she called me into her office. Then she called my cohort into the office and had him look at it. She asked my cohort, "does he need this?". He took a look and replied, "oh yeah ... absolutely ... that would be perfect for what he needs". And with that, she processed the quote and ordered me one.

I really need a small laptop for making small network changes, and for remotely connecting to servers while standing inside wiring closets. But I also need a new toy which I can take on war-driving expeditions.

Don't tell my boss, but she may have just bought me Audrey III.

Ray might be back in the game. Stand by for details.

Historic Comments
We had someone bring one of these over to the office a month or two ago and it was a lot of fun. The display is a little crowded by the flash memory is fast. Just be careful when traveling with one because the TSA get nervous when they cannot hear the hard drives!
Rich | 05.29.08 - 11:11 am | #

I don't think anything could make the TSA more nervous than Audrey II.

http://www.oddree.com/rayhaque/a...que/ audrey1.jpg

I just got word today that my unit was ordered, and it should arrive by *next* Friday.
Ray Dios Haque | 05.29.08 - 4:37 pm | #

Victories in Life (yet, not in death)

Getting to sleep has been really tough lately. The tossing and turning is mostly attributed to tasks unfinished. And perhaps a wave of hypertension and manic depression which I sometimes just cannot vanquish despite my best efforts. I have taken on a few projects at work which have unobtainable outcomes. Such as correcting issues with an Exchange server which were created during a migration which took place almost four years ago.

The Exchange Issue
It took recreating my server environment with a host of VirtualBox servers, beating them to death, rewinding them, and starting them over again before I started to make any progress. For days I tore through forums, newsgroups, "knowledge bases" and the like. I found an old book on Exchange 2003 server, and read three fourths of it. I stayed up until 3:00AM a few nights working on the server while nobody was around to complain about it being off line. Using a few oddball development tools with huge disclaimers I came across some interesting clues. It seems that the migration was a "bust". When Public Folders were migrated, half of their contents went right out the window in the form of database errors. Permissions were tangled up and handed away to non-existent users. Most importantly, the Free/Busy was duplicated, renamed, and completely crippled until I stumbled upon the problem years later.

Having devised my own plan, I carefully backed up all the permissions for the folders - carefully removing the permissions for the system folders so that the problem wouldn't reoccur. Then I simply dumped the Public Folders into a PST file using Outlook, so as to avoid a recovery disaster with Veritas which would rely on "SIDS" of System Folders which I wanted to recreate. Then - I blew it all away, forced Exchange to give me a new set, and I put all the permissions back. It was ... glorious. My boss was pleased (but not overjoyed, because she really didn't understand why I was so dedicated to solving it).

Certificate Issues
One day I got a call from a user who couldn't access the hospital e-mail. It's a common call, and it's usually because the user is incapable of following simple instructions. But just to make sure that there really isn't a problem, I always remote to my home PC and try to log in myself. Alas - there really *was* a problem. I had no idea how deep it ran. This became another case of something that hadn't been set up correctly to begin with, but had waited nine months or so before becoming a real problem.

A day and a half later, I had resolved the issue. Not only had I fixed it, but I had documented the whole procedure. I was careful to document the details because the certificate would be expiring soon and we would have to repeat this whole process. My boss, who doesn't speak tremendously good English, had come to agreement that I was "her pappy". She wasn't quite sure what that meant exactly, but after shouting "who's your pappy?" repeatedly from my desk - she emerged from her office with the answer.

It's hard to describe that feeling. When you have spent endless days working on an issue, and you resolve it, there is a moment of peace. But it doesn't last, and I am quick to jump onto something else to bring my brain silence.

Math Problems
Aside from the array of problem solving at work, I have had several weeks of torturous math problems at school. I had enjoyed my last class. The reading was quite a lot of work, and writing the end report took a lot of energy. But in the end, I got an 'A' in that class. I've asked around with some of the other folks that took the class with me. They got 'B's. Math class seemed a lot harder. It was supposed to be an introductory class to other bigger mathematical concepts. What it ended up being was a hodge-podge of everything crammed into a six week course. Each week there were four new chapters to read (and therefore four new concepts). Homework usually ran about 10 to 12 pages, and took upwards of 15 hours. Spending all weekend studying and trying to learn math from a course book was frustrating.

The professor had a few issues too. He often derailed discussions, demonstrating his 'old Jedi math' on a chalkboard while we all looked on dumbfounded. Running short on time the past four weeks of the course, he resorted to dropping on quiz all together, and changing the last two so that they wouldn't cover concepts that we hadn't learned in class. I was really dreading the final. I had done well on the mid-term (I aced it). But by the time the final had come on the last night of class, I was very unprepared. The instructor allowed us to have a cheat sheet, and I thought I had made a pretty good one. He even gave us a few hints about what we could expect. And then ... he delivered something wholly other. The first question asked for a demonstration of Egyptian multiplication through addition. This was a concept we had seen and used only once during the course. Most other questions related to complicated scenarios involving odds. A concept which still does not compute with me.

I spent the entire amount of time allotted taking the final exam. I ended up being one of the last two students out of the room. "Where was that geometry?", I asked him. He says, "I didn't want to put a lot of that on there". I indicated that I would have liked more geometry and less odds theory. He said I must be a visual person. I agreed. I left feeling pretty defeated. I had really given that exam my best, and by my own calculations I probably scored a 60 percent at best.

But just today, my grade for the course finally appeared. I have been checking the web site every hour or so for the past week and a half waiting to see what I got. And then ... an 'A' showed up. Relief. I think I know how it happened. 10 minutes into the final exam, a few folks had all ready finished. I know that even working feverishly at 100 percent brain utilization, you could not have completed that exam and have shown your work in that amount of time. I think most of them had simply given up on the class at that point. I'm wondering if he didn't have to curve the class scores to get a few 'A's. I know at one point, I was got one of the five 'A's on a quiz for a class of 30 (there were few B's and C's in that group). I don't think I even care what I got on that final exam. I passed ... with an 'A'.

I can sleep.

Death
There are a few things in life, which remain unconquered. It is the impassible which haunt me most. As I watch my wife take long drives to the city to see her ailing grandfather, I know that each trip might be her last. I cringe every time the phone rings, as we're all expecting bad news. I watch her constant state of unrest. She sometimes tosses in bed at night and grabs for my hand without ever really waking up. We both wait for an influx of imminent pain and depression that will follow the death of her grandparents. But the pain arrives slowly, in carefully prescribed doses. Waiting for bad news is a sure fire way to lose sleep.

Busy hands find no comfort.

I can't sleep.

Historic Comments
Math hates me as well.
Hello | 05.15.08 - 9:52 pm | #