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 Having successfully persuaded one of my friends to buy an Ezy SlimTop, which is an Intel Atom based computer that runs with Linux, I recommended it to another friend. When she tried to buy one they were out of stock. This was less than a week after the product was launched so we can safely assume that it has been selling like hot cakes. A couple of days later my friend did get hold of one.
 After successfully copying her old files the first thing she tried was to start Thunderbird to check mail. Where the heck is Thunderbird on this thing? Well it's not there. Ezy Slim Top ships with a customized version of Ubuntu. I have never been a fan of Ubuntu but surely the Thunderbird package is included in the Ubuntu DVD? why couldn't those Moron's install it? I told my friend all she needed to do was to download the tarball, expand it, look for a file called thunderbird or mozilla-thunderbird or something similar and just click on it, it will run. No dice. She says nothing happens! She was adamant that she did everything right. I was getting rather irritated with her but finally asked her to send it over for me to have a look. What happens when I click on the thunderbird binary? nothing!
 Thunderbired fails silently but when your run it from the command line a set of errors about missing stdc++ libraries show up. The obvious thing to do is to install Thunderbird with apt-get. That will result in all the dependencies being installed. But for that you need the root password. Or do you? Well on Ubuntu you can do without the root password. They encourage using sudo instead of a root login. Sudo will prompt you for a password but what you need to enter is your own password. Right so what is the default user's password? no one knows! 
 This Slim Top is configured to login automatically with the default user account (named ezy) and that default user's password is not included anywhere you cannot look it up from the website cause they don't have a website. The day the product was launched, their site just said 'coming soon...' and that's all you can still find on the it more than a month later.
 Any password can be reset by booting up in single user mode. When I tried it, I was sent a weird recovery console with an even weirder keyboard mapping. So rebooted giving bash as the init script (of course you can use any other shell too (append init=/bin/bash in the grub bootup line)). I reset the password for both the accounts and rebooted. Yet, no matter how I try, it refuses to accept the passwords that I just chose!
 I rebooted again and reset the passwords again, still sudo and su both refuse my password. I tried for a third time, This time, I checked the /etc/shadow file before and after the reset to make sure that the changes have taken place. They haven't, the hash is exactly the same. It was then that it occurred to me that the file system might be mounted in read only mode. It is. So I remounted in R/W mode and reset the passwords one more time. This time it worked but why didn't the passwd program produce an error when the file system was mounted in read only mode? All this hassle could have been avoided if they had included the password in the booklet (well handbill more likely) that comes with the computer.
 The next day, I returned the computer to the owner but only to receive another complaint; the printer doesn't work. Shouldn't they be complaining to the vendor? well the vendor doesn't have a clue. Wearily I asked her to send it back (by this time, I had forgotten the password so had to go through the reset process one more time). The printer is an HP 1020, it has a driver for linux (name <a href="http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/">foo2zjs</a>). On their site, they say in bold letters: "DON'T USE the foo2zjs package from: Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandrake/Manrivia, Debian, RedHat, ...". Now if easy Slim Top ships with a customized version of Ubuntu, why can't they replace the bad driver from the install DVD and replace it with the direct download from the site?
 These are two issues that any ordinary user will not be able to solve on their own. Others encountering these sort of problems probably format the machine and install XP or Vista on it. Vista would crawl and XP wouldn't be much better and it would most likely be a pirate copy of windows as well. So by this half baked approach to linux, Browns is harming both linux and themselves.
 
 

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How not to sell computers running linux (part 2).

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 About a month ago, a friend of mine, a first time computer buyer bought a budget computer with an Intel Atom chip and Linux on my recommendation. I haven't heard from him since, either he doesn't have any complaints and is deliriously happy or he is not talking to me anymore.
 Recently, one of Sri Lanka's best established companies (Browns PLC) started selling Intel Atom based PCs powered by Linux. The very first day they started operations, a friend of mine from one of the most remote and backward parts of Sri Lanka (yes I do have such friends) bought one of those machines (the Ezy Slim Top). The other alternatives were to buy a branded box with a dual core chip or to get one from Unity Plaza. Most of the vendors in Unity Plaza are not to be trusted (sure there are a few good ones but it's darned hard to tell the difference). To make matters to make a warranty claim you need to bring your computer to Colombo (not very easy when you are living in the middle of no where and don't have your own car) and argue with them till the cows come home. What convinced him was seeing a girl who was about 12 years old, lugging her computer into one of the shops to get it repaired.
 The other option is just pay a lot of extra money for a powerful CPU which you will never utilize to the full (just check now how much of your processor you are using, bet it's less than 10%). The second problem is that most of the branded machines ship with Vista or XP, I simply cannot understand why people pay so much money for garbage. Since money was at a premium it wasn't hard to convince him on this point either.
 Having read so far, you might wonder what all this has to do with the topic of the post ; 'how not to sell computers running linux', well the trouble started the second time I recommended this same computer to a friend. This time it's someone who's been using one for years to do word processing. I can see you roll your eyes in your head but I got such friends too. But this is enough today, check back tomorrow for the next episode
 

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How not to sell computers running linux.

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 Tried to load a page with an applet in FF for the first time since upgrading from Tiger to Snow Leopard and this dialog pops up.
 <img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/applet-cache.png" alt="converting cached applets">

 I don't quite see the need to convert the applets in the applet cache in this manner. What the heck is the conversion anyway? any applet compiled with java.4+ will run on Java 6 (though the reverse is not true).

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Apple Tries To Turn People Off Java?

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 The other day, I upgraded from to OS X Snow Leopard and I wasn't entirely pleased with Apple. However having used it for a while I have become less resentful. One of the reasons is that Snow Leopard is fast much much faster than Tiger. This is probably due to the new version being a real 64 bit operating system. The second reason is that I now have a fresh install (I couldn't upgrade because the installer didn't like my partition table) so there isn't any blubber lying around. Last but not least I now have a hard drive that is three times as big as the drive that originally shipped on this mac. <a href="../../linux/drive-speed.php">Larger hard drives generally tend to be faster</a> than smaller ones.
 Once I rsynced the bakups into the home folders, most of the newly re-installed applications continued from where they left off as if nothing had happened (well, they are running a little bit faster). Right so the Snow Leopard is speedy but what else? hmmm, well there's 'stacks' but even though this is trumpeted as a great feature this doesn't look at all like a novelty for a linux user. It is widely believed Windows is heavily influenced by OS X but what many people don't know is that OS X is heavily influenced by X Window. There is something similar to the stacks feature in linux desktops that places all open windows of a given application together in the task bar as a stack. As for spaces, it's been available on X Window systems for at least 15 years!
 Other new features includes Safari 4 (if you could call it a new feature, much of what is new in Snow Leopard is actually refinements of what shipped with Leopard.) but who uses Safari? And then there is support for Microsoft Exchange so what? who cares about exchange? A worse piece of software has never been written.
 Other than the speed the only thing I have found useful is a new feature they are not even shouting about: More reliable disk eject! In tiger, when I pressed the eject button to remove a CD or DVD from the drive, the eject mechanism would continue to try to eject the disk long after it has been ejected. That's right, every few seconds you will hear the familiar sound the drive makes when it ejects a disk but there is no disk in the drive!
 I was in fact contemplating getting a replacement drive. There are no OEM drives in Colombo that would fit, so I would have had to ask a friend or relative abroad to buy it or get it from the local agents and pay through the nose (and wait three weeks for delivery). Upgrading to Snow Leopard seems to have sorted out this disk eject problem so the money hasn't been wasted after all.
 

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Thawing out the Snow Leopard

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 Apple's much hyped OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard is here. I didn't bother to update from Tiger to Leopard and there was a pre release discount available, so I thought of grabbing it and started off on a long and tedious process that left me feeling like a fool. Apple's online store in the US ships only to addresses with in the US. Similarly the store in the UK ships only to UK addresses and the one in Singapore only ships within Singapore.

 Sri Lanka supposedly has three authorized agents for Apple products but I seriously doubt if Apple Inc is even aware of their existence. Come to think of it, Steve Jobs and other blokes at Apple might be vaguely aware of a place call Mexico and another called Canada but they are blissfully unaware of the world outside (still trying to figure out how macs ended up being manufactured in China). So it's no surprise that we don't have an official apple store for Sri Lanka. I ordered from the US one giving the address of a friend in New York. That was on the 26th of August. My friend re posted it when he got his hands on it and it arrived in Colombo yesterday. Today I tried to upgrade my system and now I am beginning to regret it.

 After backing up, changing the boot device and going through the first few steps of the installer, I was presented with this very annoying message:
 <img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/mac-install.jpg" alt="Install Error">

 That's right, the installer doesn't like the partition system. Less than a month ago, <a href="macbook-hard-drive-toasted.html">the drive on my macbook pulled a hamstring </a> when I replaced it, I created three partitions, intending to restore the existing tiger installation on one of them, I planned to put Fedora on the second (but didn't because the Fedora DVD wouldn't boot on the macbook (more on that later)) and third was kept aside to install Leopard or Snow Leopard. Apparently the partition table type cannot now be changed without losing all the data on the drive. Very annoying but I decided to go ahead with it cause I have bakups.

 The bakup was created with rsync (yeah I am a linux man), in hindsight, it would have been much better to use <a href="http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html">superduper</a> instead cause at the 'migrate your old stuff' stage, the installer didn't detect the contents of the external drive on which the bakups were placed. I said never mind and skipped it. It was only after booting up that I realized what a fool I've been. iPhoto, one of the most usefull products on OS X is missing. Yeah right iPhoto, which is part of iLife is bundled with all new Macs but if you lose your copy you need to cough up another USD 79 for it.

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A Shivering Snow Leopard

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 <a href="https://jquery.com">Jquery</a> and it's plugins are so popular because they allow you to do in a couple of lines of code what might otherwise take days and days of effort.. The <a href="http://tablesorter.com/docs/">tablesorter</a> plugin is one that allows you to sort an HTML table by clicking on any of the column names in the table header. I am talking of a real HTML table not one that is made with UL and LI. Tabular data should be represented by TABLE, TR and TD tags but some people go overboard with LIs and use them even for tabular data.
 The table sorter plugin can sort both static and dynamic data inserted into the HTML through user interaction. It can also cope with data retrieved from remote sources (with an XHR). Here is an example straight out of the docs:
 
 <pre>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$(document).ready(function()&nbsp;{&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$("table").tablesorter();&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$("#ajax-append").click(function()&nbsp;{&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$.get("assets/ajax-content.html",&nbsp;function(html)&nbsp;{&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;//&nbsp;append&nbsp;the&nbsp;"ajax'd"&nbsp;data&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;table&nbsp;body&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$("table&nbsp;tbody").append(html);&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;//&nbsp;let&nbsp;the&nbsp;plugin&nbsp;know&nbsp;that&nbsp;we&nbsp;made&nbsp;a&nbsp;update&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$("table").trigger("update");&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;//&nbsp;set&nbsp;sorting&nbsp;column&nbsp;and&nbsp;direction,&nbsp;this&nbsp;will&nbsp;sort&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;first&nbsp;and&nbsp;third&nbsp;column&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;var&nbsp;sorting&nbsp;=&nbsp;[[2,1],[0,0]];&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;//&nbsp;sort&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;first&nbsp;column&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$("table").trigger("sorton",[sorting]);&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;});&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;return&nbsp;false;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;});});</pre>
 
 What if your webservice only produced XML and you had to rely on an XSL Tranformation to convert it to HTML? Well I found out the hard way that this otherwise excellent plugin has trouble with that. The data would be inserted into the table but the rows would not be sorted. Only the original content (the data that was statically included would be included). So I ran into a funny situation where only the top half of a table would have it's row order changed while the bottom half remained obstinately fixed! Here is the fragment of code that fetched the data, transformed it and appended it into the TBODY.
 
 <pre> $.get('report.xsl', function(tr){ xsl_pages = tr; xProcPrimary.importStylesheet(tr); $.get('report.php', function(data){ xmlMain = data; var fragment = xProcPrimary.transformToFragment(xmlMain, document); $("#msummary tbody").append(fragment); $("#msummary").trigger("update"); }); } );</pre>
 
 After a couple of hours of head scratching and the tedium; I figured out that the 
 <li>DocumentFragment</li> is being appended to the table in some weird way, fixing bugs in your own code is hard enough so I never entertained any thoughts of finding the cause of the problem in the tablesorter codebase. Instead, I came up with a work around: Add the DocumentFragment to a hidden HTML element, then call the jQuery.html() method on that element to generate the HTML source for it and append that HTML into the table. In other words, I cam up with a quick and painless way to convert a DocumentFragment into HTML source.
 
 <pre> $.get('report.xsl', function(tr){ xsl_pages = tr; xProcPrimary.importStylesheet(tr); $.get('report.php', function(data){ xmlMain = data; var fragment = xProcPrimary.transformToFragment(xmlMain, document); $("div.sortable").html(fragment); alert(fragment); $("#msummary tbody").append($("div.sortable").html()); $("div.sortable").html(); $("#msummary").trigger("update"); }); } );</pre>
 

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Monthly Archives for 2009 09

How not to sell computers running linux (part 2).

How not to sell computers running linux.

Apple Tries To Turn People Off Java?

Thawing out the Snow Leopard

A Shivering Snow Leopard

jQuery TableSorter and XSL Transformation