the brook

I recently came across the Greenpeace Apple mock site. Greenpeace claims that Apple is lagging behind the rest of the industry in terms of green policies – specifically, toxic elements in products and the lack of worldwide takeback programs for hardware. They have a series of requests for Apple and a set of actions that consumers can take to help. Definitely worth checking out.

The larger question that comes to mind, though, is this – do consumers know enough about this? Not just Apple consumers of course, but anyone who uses a computer, or indeed any electronic device. Computer parts aren’t really all that different, and I cannot imagine anything inside a computer (and I’ve looked inside one dozens of times) that is even remotely environmentally friendly. We’ve been given enough gyaan about vehicle emissions, plastic bags and the like, but what about the millions of computers, cellphones, and music players sold (and dumped) every year? Imagine a mountain of the things lying in a pile, and suddenly the once-beautiful gadgets don’t seem so pretty anymore. If you can’t imagine it, just go to the backlanes around Serangoon Road and you’ll see them in plenty.

So I read up a bit on electronic waste. It turns out most of the developed nations handle this in their usual way – by throwing money at it and sending off the garbage to far-off places like – you guessed it – India and China. Where, of course, the materials are usually either dumped into landfills or burned – both of which can have serious environmental consequences. Not that the majority of tech-savvy users care, judging by an article (and the comments on it) on arstechnica that reported on this.

I suddenly feel quite happy about the fact that I’ve never thrown away a computer, but always sold it off or given it to someone who’ll use it. Though, of course, my motive was far from saving the planet. On occasions, however, I have thrown away old computer parts – and suggested that others do so.

At the risk of sounding preachy, I’ll list a few things off the top of my head that a consumer could do. I guess the most important thing is to ensure long-term use of electronic equipment. If you buy new, buy good so that it lasts. Sell off your old but working electronics, or donate them to someone rather than dumping. You could also consider buying second-hand computers (I’ve bought three, and not regretted it!). If one takes the life of a standard PC as 4 years (and I know from experience it can be much more), and they’re dumped after an average of two years of life, thats twice the amount of e-waste generated than is necessary. I’m assuming the planet has some limited capacity of recycling or safely disposing off e-waste, and uselessly increasing the load on this won’t help. It’s also important to keep track of recycling initiatives by companies – until I read the Greenpeace Apple site, I had no idea that companies like Dell and HP actually have recycling programs.

Sadly, longer computer use is not in the interests of the corporate world who sell us our computers. Hopefully, this will be an incentive for them to use cleaner components and have beter recycling programs.

Bloodlines is, by far, the worst Star Wars book I have ever read.

The book is part of a new 9-book series called Legacy of the Force, only two of which have been released so far. It’s set in the future when Han Solo and Leia’s kids have grown up. The New Republic is being accused of high-handedness similar to that of the Empire and resistances to it have sprung up, notably from Han Solo’s home planet of Corellia.

The major problem: the author has the character development all screwed up.

We are familiar with Boba Fett, the bad-ass bounty hunter. What you get is Boba Fett, dying man and mushy grandfather. Who realizes after some fifty years that he has been unkind to his former wife and two year old daughter; and then adopts his granddaughter to finally feel a sense of family.

We know and love Han Solo, who flies into asteroid fields with the odds stacked against him at three thousand seven hundred twenty to one. We are a bit surprised to meet Han Solo, running for his life from a rumoured death mark, under cover and thinking of growing a beard to disguise himself.

We were inspired by Princess Leia, beautiful yet strong enough to inspire the entire Rebel Alliance and be a leader of significant impact in the New Republic. And presto, she’s converted into a rather resigned wife who tries to tell her partly-senile husband that he shouldn’t meddle in the relationship affairs of his thirty-one year old daughter.

We are familiar with Luke Skywalker, sincere, calm and powerful Jedi Master who has great insights into the Force and leads the Jedi Council. We find a Jedi council that is totally irrelevant to government besides simply being sitting and frowning upon the war which the government is starting. “Grand Master” Luke Skywalker, as he is introduced in the Dramatis Personae, spends most of the book arguing with his wife about whether their son is under a bad influence and whether their nephew is going through a bad relationship or has turned to the dark side.

The nephew in question is Jacen Solo, a Jedi Knight (under the apprenticeship of a Sith) so powerful and wise that he can hide and show his Force-presence and travel backward and forwards in time. Yet he is pathetic enough to believe in completely ridiculous arguments for killing innocents. And this, if it may be referred to as such, is the “plot” of the book. Jacen has his ideas – Sith-like ideas of how to control order in the new government, whereas everyone else seems to disagree with him.

The plot moves ever so slowly – with nine books in the series, not hard to imagine why. Less pressure on the creativity, but more money into the authors’ coffers. And virtually no action at all. Not one lightsaber fight, only a second’s worth of space combat, some SWAT-like teams arresting civilians and one anti-climactic assasination. This is what Star Wars has come to?

If you’re looking for a galactic soap opera, with loads of self-pity, broken hearts and impotent characters, by all means go and pick up this book.

As a fan, I can’t help but cringe at what this has done to the Star Wars universe. Until now, although there was a fair variation in Star Wars extended fiction, there was at least a minimal level of quality. And usually the lower-quality literature focused on side issues like cloned soldiers, or unknown Jedi and so on. This book has taken a wonderful story with it’s strong characters and basically ripped it apart. My respect for the likes of Kevin Anderson and Timothy Zahn has doubled – sounds like its not easy to write quality Star Wars, and they did a brilliant job.

Rating: 1/5

Freakonomics is about how social and economic factors powerfully influence decisions that people make, and how data can throw light on a phenomenon that is otherwise inexplicable or misinterpreted.

The authors go through a few case studies, among them – economic incentives for teachers to cheat on their students’ exams, the rise and fall of violent crime in the US, manipulation of clients by “experts” like real-estate agents, rise and fall of the Klu Klux Klan etc.

It was quite a decent read though it didn’t quite live up to the hype of “prepare to be dazzled”. What I liked most was the analysis of crime and the drug mafia. A number of the studies are unconventional, and I couldn’t quite agree with them entirely – especially the analysis of the main reason for the fall of the Klu Klux Klan. Won’t spoil it for you here, it’s an interesting story, but not much more (to me).

The book, self-admittedly, has no central theme and is a series of short case-studies, some more interesting than the others. But because of it and the fact that it’s reasonably small – just over 200 pages – makes it an easy and fun read.

Rating 3/5

So this is how liberty dies. Overnight.

I’ve really come to love checkgmail, a perl-based tray application that allows you to monitor and manipulate your gmail account. The killer feature is that the notification window gives you options to delete a message, mark it as read or report it as spam. Very, very useful and fast for messages that you don’t want to waste time opening a browser window for.

Anyway, it has a number of dependencies and since it’s not made into the fedora repos yet (I hope it will, soon!) here’s the easy way to install it.

1. yum install perl-Crypt-Blowfish perl-FreezeThaw perl-Crypt-SSLeay perl-XML-Simple perl-Gtk2 perl-Gtk2-TrayIcon (these are obtainable from the preinstalled Fedora repos – core, updates and extras)
2. yum update perl glib* perl-Glib (Older versions of glib give problems)
3. If you have the dries repository added to yum, just do yum install perl-Crypt-Simple. If not, get the rpm from here. Install it using rpm -ivh perl-Crypt-Simple*
4. Get the checkgmail fedora rpm and install: rpm -ivh checkgmail*

[ Update for Fedora Core 6 ] Step 2 is not needed. In step 3, download the perl-Crypt-Simple fc6 rpm. The rest is the same.

So, I decided to install Linux on my Powerbook G4 12″. Why? (Feel free to skip to the real install notes while I rant!)

Recently, I’ve become slightly bored, slightly bugged with OS X. Nothing much wrong with OS X, just that I tend to do most of my work on Linux, and switching context back to the Mac takes brain cycles. Even though nearly everything works the same, there are minor, but painful differences. How you copy and paste text to and from Terminal / iTerm, gVim behavior, virtual desktop switching – minor things but very irritating and distracting at times. There are three main computers I use – my desktops at home and lab and my Powerbook and finally, all three run Fedora.

I’ve got the linux-ppc urge for quite some while now, I guess the last straw was the Apple battery recall fiasco, my Powerbook, after nearly a month of turning in the battery is still battery-less and therefore nearly use-less. So I didn’t have much to lose by experimenting. And I came across this post after which I decided to take the plunge.

PPC is not x86

Just in case you’re planning to try this out on your G4/G5 based Mac – these computers have a different architecture called powerpc or ppc, and aren’t as well-supported for Linux as the x86 architectures of AMD or Intel processors.

Ubuntu vs. Fedora

There are a number of resources online for installing Ubuntu on ppc architectures, but relatively few for Fedora. I was initially tempted to go for Ubuntu because of this but I really prefer Fedora. No harm in trying (we Linux folks are supposed to do that aren’t we?) and I could always reinstall Ubuntu if Fedora didn’t work out. Like I said, my Powerbook without a battery was just a toy to play with.

Partitions

My original configuration was a single partition containing my entire Mac OS X partition. I wanted to make a dual-boot system (didn’t know how well Linux would work out and OS X is useful for PowerPoint). There are a number of paid utilities and some free/shareware ones to resize an existing hard drive but I didn’t find anything that I could trust. I figured after more than 18 months my Powerbook could use a OS X reinstall anyway, and so I backed up my data and reinstalled Mac OS X, leaving about 15 GB in free space on my disk for Linux.

Installation

I burned myself a FC5 ppc DVD and set to work. To boot from CD, you need to restart your mac and hold the ‘C’ key while starting up. First hitch: touchpad didn’t work in the graphical installer for some reason (it started working just fine after installation – on it’s own). I plugged in a USB mouse which worked fine. For partitioning, I chose to manually partition. The first thing you need to create for a Powerbook is an Apple bootstrap partition, of size exactly 1 MB (any larger and the installer will complain). Following this, you can create the usual partitions – I created swap, root and home partitions. The rest of the partition went smoothly. I foolishly unchecked the eth0 wired-LAN connection that FC5 detected (don’t do this). On my Powerbook, the system clock is set to UTC and timezone is offset, so I checked that.

Wired Networking

Wired LAN is detected in Fedora by default. I had mistakenly unchecked the device during install, I got it back running the neat command. Then, I plugged in an ethernet cable and did an ifup eth0 to breathe the fresh air of the Net.

Wireless

The good news is – Airport Extreme does work – relatively painlessly. What you need to do:

1. Update your kernel to 2.6.17 or later: yum update kernel
2. Do yum install bcm43xx-fwcutter (firmware cutter – does some stuff to the wireless card firmware)
3. Download firmware: wget http://drinus.net/airport/wl_apsta.o
4. Run: bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o
5. Run: modprobe bcm43xx
6. Run: cp /usr/share/doc/bcm43xx-fw-cutter-004/modprobe.bcm43xx /etc/modprobe.d/
7. Run: system-config-network, click on add device, and choose the Broadcom Wireless LAN device and your desired settings, and activate.

And wireless works!

Sound

Fedora detected the sound card. To get it working though I had to load the snd-powermac module by running: modprobe snd-powermac every startup. And somehow, putting this in modprobe.conf etc. did not work. Finally what worked was adding /sbin/modprobe snd_powermac to the file /etc/sysconfig/modules/udev-stw.modules. Note the underscore in the latter addition as opposed to the hyphen that I was using earlier. I don’t really understand this, and for another guy I spoke to at #fedora-ppc the hyphen was what worked. Anyway, this got the sound module auto-loaded at startup.

One more thing – sound is muted by default. I needed to run alsamixer at the prompt and “mute” a volume bar called “auto-mute” (don’t ask me) before sound would work. Also, the volume control is strange, it needs to be set to at least 75% for me to hear anything.

Touchpad

The touchpad, while not detected during the installer, works fine once you reboot after installation. However, the standard touchpad leaves a lot to be desired, especially since the Powerbook has only one click button. Fortunately, the synaptics driver can be used to give good touchpad functionality quite easily. The synaptics driver was included with my FC5 install, if not you can get it by yum install synaptics. Now edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Insert the following in the “ServerLayout” section:

Section "ServerLayout"
...
InputDevice "TouchPad"
...
EndSection

And then add the following lines somewhere in the file:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "TouchPad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "LeftEdge" "0"
Option "RightEdge" "850"
Option "TopEdge" "0"
Option "BottomEdge" "645"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.4"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1.5"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.05"
Option "FingerLow" "55"
Option "FingerHigh" "60"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "30"
Option "UseShm" "true"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

This gives you the ability to scroll vertically using the right side of the touchpad, middle click by tapping two fingers on the touchpad, and right click by tapping three fingers on the touchpad. The values for MinSpeed, MaxSpeed and AccelFactor are what I am comfortable with, and you may want to experiment. I made a couple of modifications to this – the Apple touchpad single-click is too sensitive for me and I end up inadvertently clicking a lot of times, so I disabled the single click tap (single click is only by pressing the button below the touchpad). Also, I find it more convenient to right click using two fingers. These modifications can be made by inserting the following lines into the code above:

Option "TapButton2" "3"
Option "TapButton3" "2"
Option "MaxTapMove" "0"

Java

Sun doesn’t have a release of Java for PPC. gij (gcc-java) is hopeless for GUIs. Fortunately, IBM has released a Java 5 SDK for PPC here. You want the 32-bit iSeries/pSeries file. Once you have it, simply unpack it and put it somewhere appropriate, like /usr/java. To install the Java plugin for Firefox, simply go to /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.x.x (depending on your firefox version) and make a symbolic link: ln -s /usr/java/jre/bin/libjavaplugin_oji.so

So far this version of Java has been quite stable, running fine on my internet banking site and running applications such as JabRef.

Suspend

After doing yum install apmud closing the lid suspends to RAM. However, this doesn’t work in KDE for me (yet).

Mounting the OS X partition

Just make sure you have hfsutils installed and it’s as simple as mount -t hfsplus /dev/hda3 /mnt/macosx

Flash doth not work

The ways around this are obscure and IMHO not worth exploring. You can run the normal flash player in some emulation environment called qemu, though apparently only Gentoo users have been able to do this. You can try OSS implementations of flash like gnash. Let me know how you fare :)

Yet to try

External monitor support, remapping F1-F5 keys, hibernate. I’ll update this post if I try out any of these. If you’ve had experience with these, do leave a comment.

The bottom line is that I’m quite impressed. I expected to face a lot more problems getting a workable system on linux-ppc. I have a system now that I can fully work on (except for MATLAB, which doesn’t support linux-ppc platform).

Tagged via antrix.

1. Book that changed my life – Conversations with God (Part 1), by Neale Donald Walsch. I read this book in my early undergraduate years… and nothing has influenced more strongly than this my model of the world.
2. Book you’ve read more than once – Nearly every book I’ve really liked. One of my reasons for loving the books I do is that the more you read them, the more you discover. To name one, One by Richard Bach :) To name another, The Tamuli series by David Eddings.
3. Book you’d take to a desert island – Simple. The Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover. Never come across anything more re-readable.
4. Book that made you laugh – Nearly all written by the master of humour – P. G. Wodehouse. To name but a few, The Code of the Woosters, Joy in the morning, Uncle Fred in the springtime and Psmith Journalist.
5. Book that made you cry – I can’t recall one. The one that came the closest was The curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon.
6. Book you wish you had written – Universe through a droid’s sensors. Thought long and hard about it, wrote a bit, and then left it. Maybe I’ll pick it up again someday.
7. Book you wish had never been written – The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. If it hadn’t been written it wouldn’t have been forced upon my unsuspecting and innocent brain at the tender age of 15.
8. Book you’re currently reading – Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Look out for the review sometime next week.
9. Book you’ve been meaning to read – The list is endless. The one on top of my mind though is The C++ programming Language (3rd ed) by Bjarne Stroustrup.

Tag passes to: AC, Avyakt, Ravi and Shashwat. Wake up, sleepies! We must blog, yesss…

Is it sadistic to be amused as two developers fight?

Today, you’ve thrilled the world.

You’ve added battery life, capacity, movies and games to the iPod. So the teeming fans can waste their time in ever-more productive ways.

You’ve made the iPod nano go pink, and anyone with the remotest inkling of taste go pale. The girls will sigh, and the boys will cry.

You’ve made the iPod shuffle so tiny and cheap at $79… with a magnifying lens locator at an extra $99.

I sense a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of credit cards cried out in joy – and were suddenly charged.

Thou art indeed a great, great company.

I have just one small, tiny request. Could I please, please, please, PLEASE have my promised Powerbook battery back from your service center?

Apple has announced upgrades to iMacs and Mac minis. There’s now a 24″ iMac which is just awesome.

Something that not many people have noticed – the iMacs have NVidia cards now, unlike the previous generation of Intel iMacs which had ATI cards. I wonder if this is the result of the AMD/ATI merger. Any thoughts? I see no other reason, except possibly price, for the switch.

Anyway, this makes the iMac a much more interesting prospect to me, since running Linux on it becomes much easier.