Computer Repair on the Mid-Peninsula

This is my primary business so I figured it was worth a blog post. When did I start? In 2003, I saw a post on Slashdot talking about how many people need help with their computers and if you're responsible and personable, you can do well solving people's computer problems.

Since I started doing this late in 2003, I've done all kinds of things for customers including setting up database applications, websites, backup and removing viruses. It's a joy solving problems and setting up new systems for my customers and I'm amazed at how many great people I've met in this line of business. If you'd like to learn more I'll be waiting for you at SterryIT.com.

I serve the following cities: San Mateo, Hillsborough, Millbrae, South San Francisco, Daly City, San Carlos, Belmont, Redwood Shores, Foster City, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Atherton, Woodside, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Half Moon Bay and Mountain View. I'll also cover surrounding areas for an additional travel charge.

Automatic Login and Email

There's this website I have to login to and check on a regular basis. It happens to be for Nexicore, a company that contracts out computer service and extended hardware warranty contracts. Nobody likes to login and check a site every day when updates to it should really be push.

So I wrote a script that logs into the website using my username and password, checks to see if I have any new work orders and emails me if a new one is found. I run it automatically once per day. Simple and effective. Now I just have to check the site when I get an email.

This service would be useful to all Nexicore contractors at a minimum and as a more general case, anyone who has to regularly login to a website just to see if something changed. Furthermore, there's no other service like this at least when I searched on it a few days ago.

If you want to get an email when something on your private website changes or if you are a Nexicore contractor, I can run this for you as a service. Just email me at davesterry at gmail . com. I would probably just charge $10 to $20 a year depending on the difficulty of parsing the website.

Ubuntu on Gateway MX8711

I am outlining here my attempt to run Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft on a brand new Gateway mx8711 laptop. The conclusion of my trials was a failure at starting X11. I'm posting my notes here so the next guy(maybe you?) doesn't have to repeat my work or can maybe get some ideas on whatever problem they're actually working on.

I'm using Edgy Eft as a live cd only, I didn't install it on the local hard drive.

First boot: X would not start and I got the error "Failed to start the xserver..." By looking at the detailed error info and scrolling down(which isn't apparent when the scroll bars are all this random screwed up looking character) I saw somethinng like "screens found but none have a useable configuration."

Second boot: This time I hit F4 at the boot options to try the 1024x768x32 video mode. Same result.

Third boot: Used boot option vga=771. This made the bootup sequence look a little different but I got the same result as above.

Fourth boot: At this point, I decided to try Dapper Drake or 6.06 LTS. It still didn't work but I was able to get to a command line with the live cd so more work is possible(as always).

And that's about all the time I had to try out thelivecd on this laptop. If you're in the same boat, I wish you better luck. Let me know if it works for you!

Improving on Ubuntu

I think Ubuntu's great. Version 6.06 LTS was the first version of Linux that I could actually get comfortable with and want to use more than Windows. While it's good, there are still a few things about it I would improve from the getgo. I'm going to focus here on some of the default applications that are packaged with Ubuntu(Edgy and Dapper) and what I like to use instead.

Email

Ubuntu comes with Ximian Evolution out of the box. It tries to be an Outlook replacement but for me it's slow and clunky. I'm used to Mozilla Thunderbird in Windows so I prefer to use Thunderbird in Linux. I've even noticed that it's faster at downloading in Linux. Also, there are all those extensions to try out. Enigmail is one I'm fond of since I can use it to encrypt and sign my emails via OpenPGP when the need arises.

Instant Messenging and IRC

Sometimes I like to be on one or more instant messenging and chat networks. The fact that Xchat was configured to go straight to the #ubuntu room, made me feel at home in Ubuntu in a way that I've never felt with any program, let alone operating system. The defaults on install are Xchat and Gaim. I have no qualms with Xchat. It does what an IRC client should. Gaim, on the other hand, is a bit vanilla and there's no way I can use a webcam with it(at least with the version that ships with 6.06LTS). At the recommendation of an sflug member, I tried Kopete and was pleasantly surpised both with the glossy interface and the fact that I webcam over Yahoo!'s network.

Web browsing

Here's an area where Ubuntu comes with just what I want. Firefox. Unfortunately, if I click a link in Kopete or Xchat, anything but Firefox comes up, currently Quanta Plus since I just removed Epiphany. I'm sure there's some setting I can fix but I've not found it yet. If you've got any ideas, I'd love to hear your comments!

Web editing

Ubuntu comes with Nvu. While Nvu is capable, this guy is coming from Dreamweaver and wants something a little more full-featured. I've found Quanta Plus fits the bill nicely. It handles publishing files to the server easily, does syntax highlighting, and seems highly scriptable. If you need to do web editing, development, and design on Ubuntu, get Quanta Plus.

Conclusion

Even though it doesn't come with these apps by default, Ubuntu still trucks right. Just fire up Synaptic, select these packages, click Apply to get out on the Big Slab in your Ubuntu Bulldog.

What's new in Vista?

I purchased a new laptop on the day of Microsoft Windows Vista's consumer release. I never ran the beta of Vista but I did read about it as the stories came down the wire. Here I present some of my impressions.

1. When you first unbox the computer and want to run it for the first time, it takes a while for it to boot up. I can't imagine what it's doing during this time. On this HP dv6226us laptop, it took about 10-15 minutes of a please wait message to get to any setup questions.

2. The disk manager is helpful in that it helps to shrink your main partition quickly without a 3rd party utility. This is helpful if you want to install linux on the same hard drive or if you just want to separate your data from your operating system and programs.

3. The default action if you hit the familiar shutdown icon is to sleep. Since I run multiple OS and sometimes need to switch, I prefer a normal shutdown or for it to ask me. I'm sure I can configure it but I've just not gotten into that yet. I've been to busy setting up Beryl on Ubuntu Edgy so I can rotate my cube of a desktop like a top.

4. It would be nice if the sidebar(OSX Dashboard clone) could be expanded...I have no idea why, I just want to.

5. There's this new concept called a Windows base score that attempts to redefine and distill performance to a single number. The different games on the system each have a minimum and recommended score to run them. I do wonder just how this is calculated and if this base score can be calculated outside of Vista.

6. The trial version of Norton that shipped with this laptop integrates surprisingly well with Vista but I am a bit puzzled. If Windows is supposed to be more secure, I wonder if I can risk running without antivirus for the reduced overhead. In some OS, I do not use any antivirus at all.

7. It looks like OSX in certain ways. Things look more glossy and shiny. This seems to be the fashion though as only relatively recently has hardware been able to render the kinds of high quality graphics that shiny things require. The other more obvious thing is that My Computer and My Documents are more tersely named Computer and Documents respectively and presented in a Mac OSX style. This is a good thing and I don't really care who came up with it first.

8. This erks me. They changed "Add/Remove Programs" to "Programs and Features". It was kinda nice that it used to be near the top in alphabetical order, but now it's further down. Guess I'll have to get used to an extra click or a little more visual scanning to get to what I want.

Well, that's all I got for now. I'm sure I'll find some more things Vista does differently as I have the opportunity of using it. Overall, it's appears to be an improvement on XP though I'm not sure it's as ground-breaking as it's been made out to be. Beryl on the other hand...OMFG.

Update: I've switched back to XP, Vista's dead! Long live XP.

Free Software and Freedom

Computer user! I've spotted you. You are using a computer. Don't be ashamed. Everyone does it. It just means you are using an operating system and some programs. That operating system may be Windows, OSX, Linux, or something else. Those programs may be Firefox, Internet Explorer, Word, or Quicken to name a few.

Since I've successfully called you out as a user of the computer kind, my next task is to edu-muh-cate you on something called free software, what it is and why should you should know about it.

First, how free is the software you are using? By the way you can comfortably sit on your wallet and the ease with which you agree to EULA's, I'm guessing it's not free enough. Right about now, much of our lives is spent using computers. We use them to balance our checkbooks, to organize our family photos, and to keep in contact with friends and relatives. We use computers to live our lives.

If we care about our personal freedom to balance our checkbook the way we want, to organize pictures the way we want, or to communicate with others the way we want, we should value freedom in the software we use.

Software freedom is not in a great state these days. Before I tell you why, I'd better tell you what it means for software to be free. Free to many of us is the ultimate of cheap. That is the price is zero. While price is important, it is not the ultimate concern for us as a society. The free I'm talking about is free as in freedom. You need the freedom to do what you want. This freedom includes changing software, copying it or even printing out the source code and throwing darts at it.

The Free Software Foundation has made this definition of freedom more explicit with their four kinds of freedom. With free software you have the freedom to:
* Run the software, for any purpose.
* Modify the program to suit your needs.
* Copy and distribute copies of the program.
* Distribute modified versions of the program.

If you want to remember this easily you can remember that you can run, modify, copy, and distribute modified copies of free software. For short that's RMCDMC. The stranger the acronym the easier to remember but let me help you anyway. I can remember that one because it reminds me of the 80's rap group Run DMC. They were so illin'. The point is, you should know these freedoms by heart and you should care that the software you use has them.

Just above, I wrote "software freedom is not in a great state". The point of that, aside from giving myself a chance to quote myself, is that people are use a lot of non-free software. Programs like Windows, Word and Quicken all qualify. You cannot run them without accepting end-user license agreements that restrict you from each of the aforementioned freedoms. You cannot change them legally and you cannot copy them or distribute any changes you would make if you could.

Since free software has been around a while, there's lots of good free software available. Firefox can replace Internet Explorer. Open Office can replace Microsoft Office. Thunderbird replaces Outlook Express and so on and so forth. That's not to say these are task-for-task, drop-in replacements but most tasks are covered just by investing a little time learning. Furthermore, just by using free software, you can help improve something that will always be free.

You should care about the freedom of the software you use. Freedom in software means the author or owner of the program cannot stop you from doing what you want with the program. In many cases, this means improving it or just fixing a bug. What a vendor does by being gatekeepers over software changes is to artificially limit how good their software can be.

It's fairly often I find a problem I'm sure somebody would fix if only they had the source code and the freedom to do so. Case in point: Windows OneCare installing itself over conflicting competitors willy-nilly. If it were free software, the problem stands a good chance of being fixed by someone like me who has suffered because of this missing feature.

Question: Out of the programs I mentioned at the beginning, only one is free software. Do you know which one?