Haha! I help increase blog overpopulation!

I have now created a third blog. One has to separate one's interests you know. Anyway, old entries have been imported and published, will soon be gone from the old mixed blog. This one is my more public and global part of the "Speaker's corner", the others will return to being more personal. Oh and in swedish mostly... This one is english-only.

Tata for now!

My Windows vs Linux desktop fight

I really try to work with Linux, and for the most part it works ok. However I have issues with things not being stable and being difficult to get to work in a simple way.
With Windows everything almost always "just works". In addition, things are relatively stable, and when things do crash I may not know what caused the crash but it rarely happens again because I can avoid the condition for causing the crash. With Linux (ok, I don't use any of the directly end user centric distros (Arch, with KDE4.3) so I have myself to blame, but still) I can often cause crashes with subtly different effects just using the system as intended. And I still don't know what caused it!
One example is KDE and multiple desktop sessions with different users. It *should* work very simply, but every time it has caused window manager problems that forced me to at least log out and back in. Also, strange window manager behaviour in the second session.
So, you say, report the bugs! Sure I may do that - if I ever find the time to produce valuable bug reports. In this forum I can bitch and moan about problems in a slightly unstructured way, but it would be worthless as a bug report. I would like to help but it's difficult to find the time. I mean, I shouldn't even be writing this, I should be working!
Oh, and Adobe's flash plugin. Unfortunately they have basically monopolized dynamic content and media on the web so the closed-source plugin is completely mandatory on a desktop system. However, the Linux version crashes a lot - once it took down KDE, and once it *completely* locked up the whole machine. Comparing to the Windows Vista and XP computers I use my Arch Linux desktop crashes noticeably more frequently.
I'll continue to plug away at this, but it'll be quite some time before I can let me dear wife use it daily.
(You may wonder why I don't use Mint or Ubuntu or something similar? Well, I just got stuck on Arch since I could easily get a home server running with it, and Arch is so easy to manage. Desktop support is a bit trickier to get right it seems - but apart from the crashes it was easy to get up and running the way I wanted it to)

"BT spokesperson" suggesting tiered internet

This may or may not be news but I just saw it and I really became angry that this sort of misconception continues to be propagated. A BT spokesman (no name oddly enough) allegedly said the following:

Traffic is growing. The idea that ISPs will continue to pick up the bill is unsustainable. We want to work this out with the BBC and other content owners to come to some real-world compromise.

This person doesn't seem to understand that his industry is there to transport bits from point A to point B. It annoys me since the way it roughly works is this:

• Content provider pays for bandwidth from an ISP that charges based on usage (amounts of traffic up and down)
  
• Individuals/households pay ISP for internet access (based on certain speeds, sometimes with bandwidth caps)
  
• ISPs make arrangements to transport bits between each other so that if one ISP is sending much more data across another ISPs network it will end up paying for the used bandwidth

This means that usually ISPs share the cost of transporting data and end users (that is both content providers and consumers!) do pay for their activities. I assume that I may be quite wrong as there are likely lots of different deals between ISPs but I do think this is the generic model.

The "funny" thing that I guess this spokesperson does not realize is that both BBC and YouTube for instance are already paying, albeit not directly to BT in this case. In return, BBC gets to send data from its customers out to other ISPs without paying "extra". Now, if the costs are getting too high I suggest either increasing corporate efficiency or charging more for internet access. It's that simple. I just cannot understand how the spokesperson otherwise imagines things would work! Each individual ISP having to have agreements in place with each individual content provider that crosses some sort of arbitrary threshold in terms of the amount of traffic it causes in the network? Jeez, managing and negotiating that sort of dynamic scenario will cost more than increasing your bandwidth to just deal with it, I'm sure.

However I guess what they don't want is the increasingly symmetric internet, where the previous consumers are now producing content and will consume valuable uplink capacity since the ISP pays for that. Actually I suspect that they really are just afraid of the speed of change and want to slow that down to stay in control and maintain some sort of illusion of being in charge of their "products".

I have no problem paying more for internet access. As long as I know it is unlimited, I do not want to be limited in any way as to what sites I can or cannot visit, or about speed caps, or bandwidth caps. That is just silly and arbitrary censorship in my opinion. I will pay what it costs (within reasonable limits...), just don't come to me and say that "Yeah... you know, in order to access these sites that you seem to like so much we will need to charge an extra ten pounds... Yeah, sorry about that, but they're so popular, you know... Oh, and yes, we do charge them a pound each per individual user too of course. Mmm, yeah... that's in addition to what they already pay... Yeah..."

Now, luckily I don't live in the UK so BT is not a problem for me. However, any sign of such idiotic statements (well, I'll wait for them to actually implement it) from my ISP and I switch.

RANT: Man, I HATE Microsoft Word!!!

Oh my God how I hate MS Word. It is the spawn of the devil, a productivity vampire leech, the most vile and inconsequent piece of crap that has ever graced a computer with its idiocy.
And I am forced to use it at work because we're standardized on Word and the rest of MS Office of course.
At work I often write reports. They include simple things like headings, Table of Contents, headers, footers and pictures and tables with captions. Also, we often collaborate so we use change marks quite liberally, and also a versioning document storage system. There are internally developed macros that make it fairly easy to keep formatting consistent etc. However, picture handling is appalling. I become a nervous wreck every time I have to insert pictures because no matter how I try, the pictures float around willy-nilly, captions end up wherever in relation to the picture and settings for the picture get completely lost! If I set the text to wrap top and bottom and position it relative to line and margin it should stay that way, but nooooo, as soon as I resize or try do do any minor changes the settings are comlpetely forgotten and picture starts to play hide and seek again. I HATE IT!!!
I yearn for the simplicity of Framemaker (version 5 last I used it), where you tell the picture where it goes and it and its caption stay there until you change it. You can easily anchor it to the text and while the text may change and reflow, the picture (and its caption!) nicely follows along without destroying formatting.
We use Office 2003 and man do I hope that 2007 or 2010 are better because I have no doubt that no changes will be forthcoming regarding the approved office programs that my company uses.
Maybe I just need a course to learn how to work in Word again, but I think that Word 5 actually handled things allright, and ever since then the quality has been going down-hill.
By the way, I feel better now. Maybe I can actually go back and fight some more to get the pictures where I want them. Blogging is good for your heart ;-)

Adding LVM2 for flexible volume management on top of RAID

So as I mentioned a while back I also added LVM2 (Logical Volume Management) on top of my software RAID arrays (well, only one of them so far). This is really easy as LVM can use any existing partitions, be they actual regular partitions or RAID partitions. Here's what I did:
First tell lvm which existing partitions you want to use (pv stands for "physical volume"). In my case there are three RAID arrays

lvm pvcreate /dev/md0
lvm pvcreate /dev/md1
lvm pvcreate /dev/md2

You can probably leave out lvm, it seems to work anyway. The same goes for all commands below, I just included them for completeness.
Then you create an actual volume group out of each physical volume (I guess this adds data structures so that lvm can keep track of the logical volumes you create in the next step, and any changes later on). I only use one of the physical volumes due to the issue with hal that I mentioned in the previous post. data is my name for the volume group.

lvm vgcreate /dev/md0 data

I then add the logical volumes that I want. These are then used like ordinary partitions and must be formatted with a file system before use. You decide how large the logical volumes should be and their name. The final part of the command tells lvm which volume group should be used according to the name in the previous command.

lvm lvcreate --size 200G --name home data
lvm lvcreate --size 200G --name bkp data
lvm lvcreate --size 800G --name media data

These "partitions" will then show up in in /dev/mapper/home, /dev/mapper/bkp, /dev/mapper/media and can be formatted and mounted like any regular partition. Note that I did leave quite a bit of space unused, mainly this is for testing resizing later on. The nice thing with lvm is that you can eaily resize these things as disk space is added to the volume group, but of course the file system must be able to handle it.
Finally to get my Arch Linux system to recognize the volumes I modified the lvm line in /etc/rc.conf to read:

USELVM="yes"

And then I added a couple of hooks in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, one for RAID and one for LVM2, so that the volumes are recognized when the system boots: mdadm lvm2
Finally I rebuilt the kernel and initrd to include the hooks by just letting pacman reinstall with the new settings:

pacman -Sy kernel26

This is probably the easiest way although you can rebuild manually as well of course, if you have specific requirements.
And then it was a breeze to install Arch, telling it to use the logical volumes home, bkp, and media wherever I wanted them in the file system. home is obviously used for home directories (currently mainly used for "backing up" home directories on other computers), bkp is used for backup storage of family photos and videos (and probably other stuff too in the future), while media is used to store recorded TV (Mythtv recordings as well as old movies) and our audio library (including iTunes audio - only iTunes Plus so it is portable). The setup seems to work very well, but we'll see if any problems arise in case I have all four tuners recording at the same time... :D
Btw, you can actually boot from a RAID/LVM2 partition as well but I did not want to do this, I want the system to boot even if there's something wrong with this slightly complex setup.