News from Great Castle Wilson

  • Upgrading the BIOS on a T30

    So, I finally got Deb to give me her old T30 to play with [Thanks, Love], and the first thing I did was to wipe Windows XP off of it, and replace it with Ubuntu.

    I have to say, as desktop OSes go, Ubuntu is pretty nice. I honestly don’t know why the average user would need anything else — web, mail, IM, office suite, you name it. And it performs well on the T30, unlike XP. I could even turn on XGL and get the amazing wobbly windows! 🙂

    Of course, with any linux install the issue is whether or not it will find/configure all of your hardware properly. In this case, because of the ubiquitousness of ThinkPads I would guess, the support for Ubuntu on them has been well tuned, and I had no problems getting everything installed… or so I thought.

    It turns out there were two issues, one a minor annoyance, and one quite serious:

    1. If you put it to sleep, when it wakes up the sound is disabled
    2. As far as I can tell, attempting to connect to a wireless network, “hangs” the machine. That is, if I try to connect to my home network, it silently does nothing, and leaves me in a state where I can no longer start any gui processes.

    According to Google, the solution to the former problem is to upgrade your BIOS, and given that the BIOS on this machine is still the original 1.0 version, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that upgrading would fix the wireless problem too.

    The link to download the bios (and many other T30 updates) is here:

    Lenovo Support & downloads – Drivers and software – ThinkPad T30

    Well, no it’s not, of course, and I don’t think it’s worth looking for an updated link at this point.

    According to that page, I actually need to upgrade two different things: the BIOS and the “Embedded Controller Program”. This is where things start to get scary. Apparently, if you need to update both, then you have to update the BIOS first, but if you read the description of the BIOS, it claims that it won’t run without the updated ECP. Um…

    What I hope is true, is that you can update the BIOS and it will still run well enough to let you update the ECP, even though it’s running on the wrong version. Of course, it seems like the best way to do that would be to use the minimal set of hardware/software capabilities to do the updates [can you imagine attempting this from within Ubuntu?], so time to build some boot floppies.

    Erk! No floppy drive.

    So now what do I do? Has anyone gone through this process? Anybody in Ottawa with a spare TP floppy drive? Anybody want to hold my hand while I do the lobotomy?

  • Holy SPAM, Batman.

    Ok, so I’m not the most popular site on the web (although googling for “Great Castle Wilson” does find me first :-)). So why, when I checked my spam logs for this morning, did I find that my anti-spam software has killed >30,000 spam comments?

    Words fail me. If I’m getting this much attention, imagine how much real websites get!

  • Genetic hardware design

    It’s been a while since we’ve had a link of the day, but this is a good one. Check it out:

    creatures from primordial silicon

    Warning: there’s a problem with the certificate for that site, but it does still seem to be up if you click through the warnings to get to it.

    It’s not clear that this generalizes in the way the researcher hopes, but it’s still pretty amazing. What do you think?

  • OLPC as e-book reader.

    So why would I buy a Sony reader when I could get this:

    I’m not too happy about the position of the forward and back buttons, but for $175 I could live with it. Compare the functionality of that versus the Sony Reader.

  • The Treo keyboard works, but…

    …but I wouldn’t want to write a novel with it.

    How do people type with two fingers on these things? When I try it, the thing flops around in my hands to the point where I can actually go faster by holding it with one hand and typing with the index finger of the other hand.

  • What’s on my phone.

    I have added a new page that describes the apps I use on my Treo 680:

    What’s on my phone.

    Well, I guess I took that page down at some point. I don’t think the content is particularly relevant any more anyway, but it might have been nice to have it for historical reasons.

  • Happy Birthday, Elsie.

    Grandma turned 75 today, so we all got together at Mama Grazzi’s for a celebration.

    Best wishes for many more!

  • Opera Mini on the Treo 680

    No luck on first install, but a bit o’ googling got me these instructions…

    1. Go to Prefs
    2. Go to IBM Java VM
    3. Choose “Opera Mini” from the drop-down box at the top of the page
    4. Check the box: “Use Double Buffering”
    5. Check the box: “Use High Resolution Coordinates”
    6. Set Memory Maximum at 4mb
    7. Set Maximum Java Thread Stack Size at 32kb

    … that did the trick. (Thanks, “freakout”.) Seems to work fine now.

  • Canada + Cell Data Plans == nightmare

    Getting a cellular data plan in Canada is senseless. Here are the best deals I could find by wandering around the vendor websites:

    Bell$100 = 250Mb/month + $3/Mb after
    Rogers$100 = 100Mb/month + ?/Mb after
    Fido$100 = 200Mb/month + $5/Mb after
    Telus$100 = 250Mb/month + $3/Mb after

    For comparison purposes, in the US, unlimited internet access on your smartphone is 20 dollars!. Don’t believe, me? Here’s a chart snipped from the cingular website:

    It looks like it costs more if you want to use the phone as a modem for your laptop, but even then it seems that you can get an unlimited plan for $60. Wow! Only $60 for per month for unlimited internet access! Hey, Rogers: I will personally guarantee that if you offer that pricing plan in Canada, I will sign up for at least one full year. I bet I know several other people who would go for it as well.

    The Canadian vendors really have to realize that their pricing just doesn’t make sense any more. Think about the iPhone. At one point there was a rumour that Rogers was going to carry it. Would it make sense to own an iPhone connected to a Rogers network? No. The iPhone has a real web browser on it. Using that, in the way it was intended, could blow your entire monthly allotment in a single session. Heck, just doing the research for this article cost me 5Meg or so of data. Bah!

    Not that it will do any good, but if you feel like venting your frustration about this, there’s an online petition you can sign — well, there was at one point, but the site is gone now. I signed it.

  • Do you think if I asked nicely…

    … the idiots trying to ssh crack my system would give up? My log files are filled with Mbytes of this…

    Apr 10 19:03:07 xxxx sshd[7934]: Invalid user cstrike from 194.105.148.80
    Apr 10 19:03:07 xxxx com.apple.SecurityServer: authinternal failed to 
    authenticate user cstrike.
    /usr/sbin/sshd.
    ...

    Bah! Why does the internet always have to be such a wretched hive of scum and villainy?

    (In case you are wondering, yes, it’s disabled again. *sigh*)