I'm giving it up and moving to Wordpress. The blogging ceases here and resumes here.

I'm going to be in Beijing for the next six weeks, and I will be writing about it in a new blog:

• As Yet Untitled Beijing blog
• RSS

The blog runs on a written-from-scratch engine that is not nearly as good as WordPress, but at least it's mine. Anyway, I gotta pack.

(link: http://i28.tinypic.com/1zxmj53.gif. Supposedly created by a Jazz fan.)

If you don't love this game, you don't love life.

• "You are not your bookcase" by Megan Hustad, on how one's consumption has become one's identity. Not nearly comprehensive, but important.
• "La Vida Robot" by my favorite Wired contributor Joshua Davis, on a group of high school kids who can't afford college because they are undocumented and poor, but who anyway beat MIT in a robot competition. This is old but no less awesome. Suck it, private school!
• Gabe Pramuk's trail journal. GP was my roommate during the fall quarter and is now hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, which goes from the US/Mexico border to the US/Canada border.
• BS Report in which Simmons talks to Paul Shirley, low-tier NBA-caliber basketball player, sometime in the spring of 2007.

This is an overview of my current Linux/Windows dual-boot setup on my new laptop.

1. Introduction
2. Hardware
3. Step 1: Get a Windows Vista install disc
4. Step 2: Backup recovery media
5. Step 3: Delete pre-existing partitions
6. Step 4: Decide on a partition scheme
7. Step 5: Install and update Windows
8. Step 6: Install Linux
9. Step 7: Setup applications for shared use
   • The share partition
   • Firefox
   • Pidgin (GAIM)
   • SVN working copies
10. ThinkPad minutiae
    • CPU whine
    • No firewire port
    • To do

Introduction

I've had certain pretensions of becoming a Linux user since 1997, but the desktop environments and hardware support have been flaky enough over the years that I could never quite convince myself to switch over from Windows. But with the Linux desktop (especially Ubuntu) roughly reaching par with XP in terms of usability and stability, and with Vista introducing various functional annoyances and its weird visual rubberiness, I think I'm about ready to drink the Linux-flavored kool-aid.

I'm hoping to move over to non-proprietary software entirely within the next year or two, which is not a terribly ambituous thing to do given the current maturity of free and open-source apps. At this point, I can only think a few categories where the Linux desktop doesn't keep up with Windows: music production software (abundant and full-featured in Windows, cute and larval in Linux), games (not too many free options), and platform-specific software development tools (proprietary SDKs and toolchains, and plus I want to learn to write Win32 and DirectX apps). If it weren't for these things, I'd pretty much be ready to ditch the for-profit software industrial complex entirely.

What follows is a brief HOWTO-style schematic of my mostly pain-free experience getting a new-ish mainstream laptop to work under these operating systems:

• Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Release Candidate
• Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium

Hardware

My machine is a 14.1" non-widescreen ThinkPad T61p. Some sundry specs:

• T8300 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo processor
• 1gb RAM, supplemented by a 2gb DIMM from New Egg
• 160gb 7200rpm Hitachi SATA HDD
• 1gb Turbo Memory
• Bluetooth support
• Lenovo 802.11 a/b/g wifi adapter
• NVIDIA Quadro 570M graphics card, 128mb
• Windows Vista Home Premium, pre-installed on a single partition spanning the entire hard drive

There are some hardware- and vendor-specific issues that make the dual-boot setup something less than effortless, but I'll deal with those as they become relevant.

Step 1: Get a Windows Vista install disc

Lenovo typically doesn't ship any install media with their laptops, but as of the writing of this guide, DVD ISO images of the Windows Vista SP1 RTM [?] are easily available on BitTorrent, and you can use these to make complete, bootable install discs. This works for any version of Windows Vista, from Home Basic to Ultimate, although the image comes in two different flavors, one for 32-bit and one for 64-bit. The Vista product key stuck to the bottom of each laptop determines which Vista functionality gets installed.

Since I changed the base hardware configuration slightly by adding more RAM, I was concerned that there might be issues with activating a Vista install that did not originate from factory-provided media. But while I did end up having to activate Vista using Microsoft's automated phone service, I had no real problems with the activation process. Apparently, it is technically possible to extend the OS activation period indefinitely, although this shouldn't be an issue unless you are using a product key that has been disqualified on Microsoft's end.

Step 2: Backup recovery media

One consequence of having no factory-provided OS or driver media is that all recovery operations are conducted through a special pre-installed partition that is invisible to Windows operating systems. This occupies about 6gb of space and an entire primary partition slot, both of which you're probably better off using for your own purposes.

Purely in the interest of good citizenship, I used Lenovo's pre-installed "Make Rescue/Recovery Media" utility to create a backup of the recovery partition. The rescue disc consists of one bootable CD, while the recovery media has one bootable disc (I used a DVD) and two more DVDs' worth of data.

Step 3: Delete pre-existing partitions

At this point, you are ready to bask in the momentary destructive glee of removing all traces of vendor-provided software from your hard drive.

Since the recovery partition is designed to be invisible to Windows (and this includes the partition editor that runs in the Vista installer), you will have to run your favorite third-party partition editor to delete both the ThinkPad recovery partition and the pre-installed Vista partition. I just used the gparted utility, which you can access by booting off an Ubuntu install or live disc.

Step 4: Decide on a partition scheme

There's no need to pre-partition your hard drive prior to installing the respective operating systems, but it might be worthwhile to have an idea of how you want to organize your hard drive space.

Here's how I ended up partitioning my hard drive:

• 30gb primary parition, Windows C: (NTFS)
• 30gb primary partition, Linux root (ext3)
• 4.5gb primary partition for Linux swap. You'll hear different things from different people, but the swap partition size heuristic is usually to allocate a swap space equivalent to 150-200% of your available physical memory.
• An extended partition with:
  • 20gb partition, to be used as a primary data share between Windows and Linux. Ubuntu 8.04 comes with a fairly mature NTFS-3G driver, so you can use NTFS as your share partition and feel safe writing to it from Linux. Of course, FAT32 still works okay.
  • ~70gb partition for music, video, and application installers (NTFS)

Step 5: Install and update Windows

For all of its flaws and idiosyncracies, Vista actually has a much more straight-forward install process than XP and other earlier versions of Windows. You pretty much just create an install partition, pick your timezone, type in your license key, and you are good to go. I sort of suspect this simplicity comes at the automatic cost of installing every last driver and utility that Microsoft bundles with the install disc.

Prior to Vista SP1, if you had an SATA hard drive and AHCI enabled in your BIOS, you had to load Intel's third-party Matrix Storage Manager via USB during the Vista install, or else you would subsequently encounter a highly entertaining and insurmountable series of BSODs during Vista's startup cycle. I know this from experiencing just such a series myself. Nevertheless, if you are using an SP1 RTM install disc, then you have nothing to worry about.

Wifi access for my ThinkPad worked after the initial Vista install, so I was able to get on the Internet immediately to grab hotfixes and drivers. After three or four rounds of visiting Windows Update and rebooting, I had nearly every necessary hardware driver, including an up-to-date NVIDIA graphics driver. The only driver I had to install manually was for Turbo Memory, which for some reason is not included in the Windows Update database, despite the fact that it's essentially Vista-specific hardware (ahem).

I didn't bother installing Lenovo's system utilities, so there's no visual response when I change speaker volume or adjust screen brightness.

Step 6: Install Linux

Depending on which distribution you're using, Linux installations are generally way more involved and way more shall-we-say educational than Windows installs, although Ubuntu 8.04's install is basically painless, so long as you know how you want to organize and mount the various partitions on your hard drive.

This might be due to the fact that I'm installing a days-old version of Ubuntu on what's probably at least year-old hardware, but this was the first time I've ever installed Linux without encountering some kind of catastrophic mid-install failure, or a desktop environment that drops windows and dialogs sporadically, or misconfigured/non-functioning network or sound drivers. In fact, pretty much everything on this T61p worked on the first boot--I only had to grab the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver, which isn't packaged with the distribution, presumably for legal reasons.

Ubuntu even has its own set of built-in laptop function widgets, including popup displays that respond to changes in speaker volume and screen brightness. The only thing that doesn't seem to work out of the box is the trackpoint's middle-click vertical scroll.

Installing Ubuntu after Vista ensures that you get a friendly GRUB boot menu that allows you to choose between your installed operating systems. If you re-install Windows, you'll most likely have to restore GRUB to access your non-Windows OSes.

Step 7: Setup applications for shared use

Although I plan to use Ubuntu most of the time, it'd still be nice to have a fully-functioning Windows environment. The prospect of manually synchronizing the generic apps (e.g. web browsing, email, and chat) between both OS platforms is none too enticing, but one can get around this by 1) moving to online thin clients (who uses desktop mail UAs these days, except for corporate types who have to use Outlook?), or 2) using software that's smart enough to have environment-independent config data.

This last point is where it's useful to have a share partition between Linux and Windows. The following is how I have things setup, along with some caveats.

The share partition

My share partition uses NTFS, so Vista performs read/write operations on it natively and without any explicit configuration. There are various ways of getting read/write access to the partition in Linux, although the easiest might just be to edit /etc/fstab to have Linux mount the NTFS share at boot with read/write permissions.

If you want to grant write access to all users, use the following mount options:

rw,user,users,auto,umask=0000

Personally, I limit write access to a single user account, and so these mount options apply:

rw,user,users,auto,uid=MY_USER_ID

In either case, with a recent Linux distribution equipped with the NTFS-3G driver, you can mount the partition as ntfs-3g.

If you're using FAT32 to format your share, mount as vfat instead. There's a slight caveat for the mount options if you're using Subversion on the share partition in FAT32, which I'll get to in a second.

Firefox

It's probably worth pointing out that Ubuntu 8.04 comes with Firefox 3 Beta 5. This is somewhat idiosyncratic, and so you'll want to make sure your Windows version of Firefox conforms to this. I just used Synaptic to remove Firefox 3 and grab the firefox-2 package. The latter doesn't seem to create a generic /usr/bin/firefox executable, so I just created my own with a symlink to /usr/bin/firefox-2. This will ensure that your launchers still work properly after you've removed Firefox 3.

At any rate, there are various guides across the Web on how to use a shared Firefox profile in a dual-boot scenario, although the basic pattern is as follows:

1. Place your profile folder in a location that's readable and writeable for both Windows and Linux.
2. Using your method of choice, point Firefox in each respective OS to the location of your shared profile. I prefer simply to edit profiles.ini that comes with Firefox, although apparently there are GUI wizards that help you do this.

Mozilla Thunderbird has a very similar profile structure, and can be shared in basically the same fashion.

But note: one dual-boot gotcha that I discovered is that Firefox's profile data contains some platform-specific file paths that are totally illegible in the OSes that don't support them, e.g. Windows has no idea what to do with /home/jeff, much in the same way Linux has no idea what to do with a path such as C:\temp. What's more is that this can actually break some non-trivial functionality in Firefox.

One instance of this is the default directory into which Firefox stores downloads. My profile was imported from a Windows environment and had MS-style file paths for various download config values. As a result, I couldn't use Firefox's "Save Page As" and "Save Image As" functions from Ubuntu--the options were there in the menus, but no dialog would appear after selecting them.

The way around this is a) not to specify a download directory (which might be an annoyance for you, although I find I actually prefer this), and b) manually clearing all download-related config variables from your profile.

Pigdin (GAIM)

You can share your Pidgin profile (i.e., setup, connection information, and chat logs) in virtually the same way you share Firefox profiles above. Move your profile to a location that's readable/writeable to both platforms, and then replace the .purple directory in each respective Pidgin install with a shortcut (Vista) or symlink (Linux) to the profile share.

SVN working copies

You can keep Subversion working directories in your share partition that work with both Windows and Linux SVN clients, provided that they use FSFS (i.e., they have little .svn folders in every directory...I believe this is default behavior for most clients, anyway) rather than BerkeleyDB.

One somewhat esoteric caveat, mentioned above, is that if you are using FAT32 on your share partition, you need to mount it with the uid option rather than the umask option, for reasons that are partially explained elsewhere. I say only partially, because I've tested the umask mount with an NTFS share partition and it worked fine, and it's not quite clear from the aforementioned link why FAT32 should be any different.

ThinkPad minutiae

CPU whine

One of the bugbears of laptop acquisition of the last many months has been a longstanding and mostly unresolved issue involving non-trivial, high-pitched noises emitted from laptop-based Core 2 Duo CPUs or associated motherboard components, known colloquially as the "CPU whine" or "fan whine". This problem seems to affect C2D-based laptops of all makes and models, some more consistently than others. I did notice this on my T61p, and it's consistent and distracting enough to be a potential reason for returning the laptop (no joke: certain disgruntled and mercenary elements have broached the idea of pursuing a class-action lawsuit over this issue). Happily, I eliminated the sound almost entirely by changing my BIOS settings so that the CPU runs at maximum performance while on AC power. This is a minimally-intrusive and instantaneous fix. I've decided simply to put up with the noise in the infrequent occasions that I'm running on battery power.

Interestingly (or depressingly), I get a different kind of pained, high-pitched, wheezy noise when I run the preview of Ubuntu's (or GNOME's) Colorfire screensaver. I have decided not to think about it.

No firewire port

14.1" T61p laptops do not have 4-pin Firewire ports. The Lenovo catalog claims that Firewire is available on "certain select models", but then fails to specify which models these might be.

To do

I just found a list of T61-specific issues that arise for Ubuntu 8.04 installs, mostly things that I never would have caught on my own. In most cases, the issue is minor, and fixes are available on the internet. Anyway, this helps me round off a list of things that still need some attention, although most are insignificant enough that I don't need to be in too much of a hurry:

• Trackpoint middle-click vertical scroll doesn't work
• Linux wifi driver and/or GNOME Network Manager doesn't locate hidden SSIDs
• System wifi light doesn't work (I wonder if there's the same issue with the Bluetooth light?)
• Installing utils that grant more precise control over fan and CPU

As rare as my blog posts come these days, I'm going to waste this one on the much-dreaded reflection on why I don't blog anymore. In this circumstance it almost comes closer to an obituary than an apology.

After last spring's messy series of entries on being a roadie for a band, I claimed to be on blogging hiatus until I got to Shanghai. At first this was exusable by certain professional obligations I'd had at the time, but by the time I hit Asia, and surely by the time I got back and started school, I really couldn't complain of a lack of time to write, or a lack of material. In fact I can still provide an inventory of at least the following notable things I'd considered writing about:

• Working on a successful and popular video game, which at the time I'd been perfectly willing to casually violate my non-disclosure agreement to talk about
• Visiting three Chinese or pseudo-Chinese territories and/or nations
• One incredibly atrocious haircut
• Attending graduate school, and the lifestyle and protocols thereof
• Writing lots of music in the month of February
• The demise, rehabilitation, re-demise, and tenuous detente of operability of my crappy 1995 Nissan Altima

To be honest, though, I was relieved when I stopped blogging. For one thing, there's an odd kind of tension that comes around when you're trying to base your creative work on the events of your daily existence. I'm sure everyone who blogs--really, everyone who writes--has had this moment of grotesque self-consciousness where you realize you might not so much experience life as collect it, in order to craft some hilarious tale packaged for the consumption of your peers.

But it'd be lucky if the chief pain of blogging were just some kind of existential damper on one's ability to relax and enjoy the air. For me, at least, the real reason that blogging is painful is that I want it to be good, which it almost never is, and besides, writing something that is good is intrinsically stressful and hard. And so of course it is easy just not to do it.

Over the hiatus of the last year, I've gone over some of what I'd written in the past, and I find the vast majority of it cringeworthy. Not astoundingly bad, not totally incompetent, in some places even smeared thinly with interesting residue, but mostly run-of-the-mill shit. What's embarrassing isn't so much the mistakes as the all the pretension, which comes about when you have the ambition to make meaningful statements but lack the discipline to make those statments coherent. Mostly, I've been guilty of trying to have my cake and eat it too: if the writing gets too fancy, it's because I'm trying to make it more than just a retelling of what are really non-unique and mediocre experiences, and if the writing is sloppy and takes too many liberties with the reader, it's because I'm not trying to do anything "serious".

At any rate, it's still true that the blog has been the only somewhat consistent creative outlet I've had since I started it. I've always had the intention of coming back to it, but there's going to have to be some change in the way I go about the writing so that it doesn't feel pointless or lame. What I'm thinking at the moment is that in the interest of being neither here nor there about the blog, I will attempt to be both here and there. On the one hand, I think I ought to try writing more serious, focused essays, not as in humorless, but stuff that isn't merely rambling introspection ad absurdum. On the other hand, I'm severely tempted to get into far less substantial blogging that is essentially exhibitionist, informative, and trivial; that's to say non-introspective and most probably short.

The point would be to expand on both quality and quantity, but not at the same time.

These are the kinds of things I have been thinking about:

• Very soon: something purely technical on how I set up my new laptop.
• Some notes about the tricks I use to study Chinese vocabulary
• An essay on work and being happy
• Daily notes and longer pieces on my trip to the Olympics this summer
• Something political about creative work and whether we should pay for it
• An outline of how I like to format my C++ code

Hopefully you will hear from me again, and soon.

In case you have not yet heard, I have been working on an album with my old bandmates Mike and Jen, and we have 45 minutes of music out, available here.

In the past I think I would have been a lot more interested in going into very great detail about how the music came to be and what the recording process was like, but at the moment that seems to me not only a little self-indulgent but also no better than boring. We did all the composing and recording under some pretty novel circumstances, but I'd rather have the work just stand for itself.

I will say just this much: in the era of the Internet and cheap computers, it's very possible (and I'm not saying I've ever done it) to make music at a level that's indistinguishable from professional productions. People have been saying things like this for a while now, but I'm not sure if anyone really understands what this means in terms of the status of music as a creative act versus music as a vocation. If distribution and production are basically zero-cost, then the only thing that really justifies the existence of the music industry is its ability to convince many people to buy one particular recording instead of another. And the purpose of this, in turn, is primarily to make money for certain media interests, and then secondarily to support the lifestyles of people who want to live off of their creative work. The former is a truism; I don't point out in this instance as a kind of sophomoric, cynical statement, but merely so I don't ignore an obvious thing. The latter is what's more interesting, since I think the current trajectory of technology is making more and more clear how fundamentally untenable it is to sell things that you can digitize, i.e., intellectual property at large.

I guess, in a basic sense, I find it wrong to deny or allow access to the music you make on the basis of a person's ability to pay you. The ethics of it are complicated, and they depend on which point of view you adopt. It's easy to say that we can dispense with all of the excess and spectacle of stardom--which isn't to say that the music is bad, but to claim merely that the economics of it aren't necessary--but then there are lots of hard-working musicians who desire no more than a modest income to do what they love to do full-time. If musicians were able to support themselves only on the basis of selling their music, then I would say that nobody deserves to live off of their music, because it would necessitate all the retrograde contrivances that exist currently to treat music as property. Even if you aren't willing to discard the idea of intellectual property entirely, if e.g. you believe that it provides society with some sort of entrepreneurial incentive, I still think most of the counter-arguments are irrelevant in music, simply because creative work has absolutely no calculable contribution to society in any definition of "progress" you might prefer. In fact, I actually believe in something like the opposite of the incentives argument: commodification of music limits its creative potential, and it limits the scope of what we consider to be acceptable music, right down to the form (e.g. aren't albums and 3-5 minute songs kind of arbitrary?) in which we consume it.

And consider the technical reality I pointed out earlier: anyone can make music, and they can send it to anyone, and all of this occurs with very little investment beyond the time you decide to put into it. In this situation, there is no reason to feel that some musicians deserve to be paid for access to their work, while others don't. Really, I think it's kind of presumptuous to have that expectation in the first place. It's possible that you might resent such a view, because it seems to lead to the claim that we should not have professional artists at all. That's certainly one possible end to this logic, although I'd prefer to focus only on the music-as-commodity aspect. I don't know enough about the economics of it to really know for sure, but one can imagine alternatives: selling merchandise, selling artwork, selling music for advertisement purposes (although I'm not altogether convinced this is possible if what I said earlier about the viability of defending music as property applies in any context, to any extreme), and/or selling admission to live performance. Or if we felt, as a society, that there is a place for professional artists, we could just get together and establish a fund to support them. The point is that defending the professional artist by making creative work into a sellable thing is neither very ethical nor particularly sensible in light of technological advance.

There has been a lot of brouhaha over Radiohead allowing fans to pay whatever they want for their most recent album. I suspect they have no illusions that this kind of mass patronage is a sustainable business model for the long term, or for any band with less loyal a fanbase. About this I felt kind of the way I feel about philanthropy in general--of course we are all better off for it, but we have to see it as something less than true generosity. That Radiohead did it was on the one hand very cool, because nobody else at their level of commercial viability had done it, and on the other hand both very short of revolutionary, since it was kind of half-assed--they only released 128k MP3s, which I'll admit is "good enough", but their reluctance to release any higher-fidelity versions means even they themselves believe that those who pay full price should get something "better"--and still pretty defensive of the essentially conservative idea that people should pay for music in the first place.

I'm back in LA and I have this ambition of re-doing the entire blog, from the ground up, maybe on a different server with a different programming language even, while I'm still on break. There was some stuff I wanted to write as well, but it'll have to wait until I decide what I'm gonna do. Hang tight.

In spite of having had many weightier and more meaningful ideas and events to report since the start of my de-facto blogging hiatus of so many months, I have decided to briefly interrupt my silence with such an underwhelming announcement as the following: Contra 4, a game to which I have made various significant technical contributions, has been released. And though I a) have a developer's copy of the game, and b) I get a free official copy, I'm thinking this one might be worth a trip down to the local game store for a purchase.

Loath as I am to recycle other peoples' blog content (this for various slippery-slope-style concerns), I think there has been some consistently great stuff coming out of Gothamist's Shanghai spinoff, cleverly dubbed Shanghaist, especially when it comes to cringeworthy spectacle that is the cultural fodder of my generation.

Behold MC强强, resident of Jiangsu:

And some thousand miles away, inmates in Cebu are up to some interesting mayhem:

I might be missing the whole point here, but: critically the enjoyment of this kind of thing hinges on the fact that one can watch these videos and feel, simultaneously, this kind of smug superiority to their general lameness and also genuine appreciation for the moves on display. It's like the slow-motion train wreck you can't turn away from, only the train wreck is not only awful and offensively empathy-inspiring but also extremely neat to watch for its base technical merits. I.e. dude is a fantastic dancer, but then he has indoor slippers on and he is not actually wearing a shirt (this being one of many habits of male Chinese that seems really kind of practical but yet fundamentally unclassy), or his grandmother or whoever is constructing or mending a garment in the traditional manner right behind him. How does he avoid slamming into her? How can she not be watching this guy the whole time? And then I wonder if you could get 1000 cons in the US to recreate the "Thriller" video. I'd like to think the answer is yes.