Something That Makes Me Sad, But Probably Shouldn't

Saturday was a good and incredibly geeky day for me. I went to the Indy Quantified Self Meetup, held in one coworking space, spent much of the afternoon in Fry's, where I met someone and talked about a startup idea (planned meeting, not happenstance), then went to Indy Hackers' Holiday Social, held in another coworking space. I listened to tech podcasts all of the way down and most of the way back. There's geeky things I didn't do (converse with my good geek friend Patrick) and otherly-geeky things that aren't for this blog (went to two guitar stores).

It was a good day, but there's one thing that wasn't so good. Maybe.

Above is the entire technical book stock at Fry's Indy. The entire shelf. There's lots and lots of shelves, and once, they were filled with all sorts of technical books. It fills my heart with joy to see a wall of O'Reillys. For the longest time, my first-pass rule for judging a technical project or tool was "Is there an O'Reilly book for it?" The books for learning Perl are Learning Perl and Programming Perl, and I judged Python harshly because the book a Python person would suggest is not Learning Python.

These days, though, your first pass for a technical question is asking Shub-Internet and ending up with a discussion thread, IRC log, or hopefully a Stack Overflow answer. I have editions 1 through 4 of Programming Perl, and they are decreasingly dogeared and beverage-stained as time goes on. I haven't really dug into Programming Perl, Fourth Edition, in part because I know how to write Perl, but in part because, even when I don't know what I'm doing, dead trees are not my go-to.

And, even from the perspective of the writer, writing tech books is a losing game. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror writes about it when pushing a book, ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology, that he contributed to. xkcd did a comic (which I can't find) which compares the staying power of different book types, grouping math and physics texts as books that can stay without revision for decades, sometimes centuries, while a book on a language or protocol will be out of date very soon, sometimes before publication.

So, it would make sense to have Knuth's Art of Computer Programming on your shelf, but less so Perl, much less Perl 5.18.1. So, it would make sense to publish Art of Computer Programming on paper, but to generate and regenerate language documentation into electronic form.

And really, at places like Fry's, you want as much floor space devoted to things that can only be atoms, like motherboards, cases, LEDs, cables, trackpads and MacBook Pros, and things that can be bits should be bits. Plus, of course, the fact that you can put a whole lot of bits into your tablets and newsreader.

So, I can rationalize it at length, but it still saddens me to know that the world I used to live in, where there were places where a wall of amazement and possibility was available to me. I guess it outs me as a geezery geezer who geezes.

The Internet of Things? The Semantic Web?

I have a dream.

I dream of a lamp. A lamp using LEDs. A lamp that changes color, depending on the ambient temperature outdoors. If the weather outside is frightful, the lamp indoors is blue-to-purple. If Summer's here and the time is right, the light is yellow, orange or even red.

This dream is in part inspired by my workplace in the subbasement of my building. I can very easily forget the season, even, when I'm head-down into my work, so any reminder of the conditions outisde would be good.

This is an example of what was called Ubiquitous Computing or Pervasive Computing, depending on who generated the buzzword. In essence, the data is everywhere around you, not just on your PC.

The thing that's really keeping me from realizing this dream is a lack of electronics skill.

But that's a smaller thing today.

There's a thing called an Arduino, which is an Open Source bit of hardware that begins to open up the world of programming small things. I'm fairly sure I could, given an Arduino and a breadboard, begin to dummy this up.

This kinda gets me to categorization issues. Does this concept, an internet-aware fixture that determines the shade by the weather report fall under the Semantic Web? Or is it more tightly connected to the Internet of Things concept? Or is it a bit of both, like a Reese's cup?

Something Now Sucks Like A Vax

vax11 is a friend of mine. Well, acquaintance. I'm not sure that we shared words in the last three years. We used to be part of the local Linux Users Group together. I used to call his apartment the Museum for Retro-Computation. He thought the room we used for install-fests looked like NASA Mission Control circa Apollo, especially with all the monitors up, so he wore white short-sleeve shirts and skinny ties so he looked he belonged in NASA Mission Control circa Apollo. You can tell he's old-school by the fact his handle is vax11.

That's an image of his VT125 terminal, connecting to the VAX emulator on his HTC EVO phone, hanging from his VT125. Now, I'm a big geek — 6'4", 250lbs+, Plus all the coder, reads O'Reilly books for fun, read LoTR, saw Star Wars for his eighth birthday, owns a 20ft scarf stuff, has the Daredevil comic where Bullseye kills Elektra, blogs about frustration with electronic esoterica, etc — but this is way next level. Isn't it so cool?

Gone Google Docs

Yeah, I've gone Google. This is a spreadsheet that I'm maintaining, showing my fuel efficiency. When I get gas, I take webcam photos of the dash and the pump, then transfer the odometer and gas pump data to this spreadsheet. I started using Google Docs for this because my netbook has a 10GB SSD in it and just XP and the few apps on it take up most of that. If I keep it all on Google Docs, then I don't have to have either Office or OpenOffice (and thus Java) on my dinky netbook.

Columns A-F are straight reporting. G is subtraction, and then miles/gallon and miles/day are simple division. I think I can get more interesting and better data out of this when I learn a cooler set of Excel-like spreadsheet commands.

I kinda wish I could do this from my phone. I can't, though. My smartphone isn't smart enough. Anyone know if GoogleDocs works under the iPhone?

Charting the Descent into Madness

A friend is getting XMPP to work on a private network, mixing XP, Linux and Solaris. So private, only he's on it. Madness after the cut.

New Gear Day

There's one thing I find about being a geek, which is that when people who aren't geeks give up on trying to make a thing work, it gets passed on to me. Sometimes I can pass it on — a while ago, a rack-mount UPS got passed on to me, and today that UPS, that danged-heavy lead-filled monster, protects some servers that serve, among other things, the Purdue Perl Mongers site. Yayness.

The newest thing to land on my lap is, well, swank. An HP Pavilion Slimline. 320 GB SATA. 3GB memory. Dual-core processor. It's running Vista, which yeah, could be a blessing, could be a curse. We'll see. I have the technology to upgrade it to XP at will, and of course I can jump to Ubuntu. It's a tight little case, so not much room to upgrade. Seeing that it's far faster and better than anything sitting around the house, that should be no problem.

The problem it had in Mom's hands was that it couldn't keep connected to AOL. That will NOT become a problem with me.

I think I want to stick with Vista, though. At least at the moment. I am a big fan and user of Open Source software, but my user experience as a Unix guy has not really been strongly changed since I first started working with Unix in the mid-1990s. Unix, a shell (then tcsh, now bash), X, terms, and browsers. Vista is wildly different, and I think coming to terms with the differences, with what Vista has to offer. Similarly, I'd keep MacOSX around if it landed on my lap. This, more or less, is why I bought BeOS back in the day, to get another view on things.

So, we'll see. Thanks Ma!

Configuration: The Devil is in the Details

I work in a lab. The simple fact is that, in the 21st Century, all science is computer science, and that's especially true here. We have several computers whose entire purpose is to control scientific instruments and handle the data that comes from them. But we don't want the data to be on the instrument machine. We want it to be on the server.

This is where FTP, and especially the Perl module Net::FTP, come in. We try to keep it locked down, configured at the firewall so that only the server can FTP into the instrument and even then can only move instrument->server, not the other way around.

One specific machine was set up with Windows 2000 and the FileZilla FTP server. The software, we were told, wanted 2K, and so we ran with that. FileZilla was about the first Google result I hit when I searched on "windows ftp server", and I cannot say there was ever a point where I regretted using FileZilla for all my FTP needs.

Then there was a necessary upgrade that needed Windows XP. The machine had 2 HDs in it, so I installed XP on disc 2 and made it dual boot. And, since it was XP Pro, I had IIS already. I may have had it on the 2K, I never thought to check. Anyway, the machine now spends most of the time under XP. I have had to change the upload-and-munge script to handle the new, and I'm not sure how much is IIS-vs-FileZilla and how much is Instrument-Software 1.3 vs Instrument-Software 2.0.

Where the story threatens to become interesting is this: The person who runs on that instrument, she makes a CSV config. Normally, she copys it, changes it, and seemingly, as long as the Excel file was open, it wouldn't upload. This was the 2K and FZ behavior.

Windows XP and IIS, it seems, FTP anyway, no matter if the Excel file is still open. And I had to clean up after it because of it. Not a problem, to be sure, but something to be aware of.

Gizmo + GoogleVoice = Frustration

I'm a big fan of the idea of GoogleVoice, but I don't have a cell phone at the moment and work in a sub-basement anyway, so I want to use it with a computer phone. But I've been on this before.

What I have changed is Auto-Answer. I clicked that and tried again. I hear the voice, but I can't input the numbers. Go to about 8:35 on the YouTube video above and you'll see exactly won't come up.

Skype won't uninstall, so I'm reinstalling to deinstall. I hope that will help.

People share the gift of gab between themselves

I am a Google Voice user, and I have been since it's been GrandCentral. I use it because voice mail connecting to email is an obviously good thing, transcribing your voice mail is a really good thing and the dial-in voice mail interface is an obvious dog. Also, I work in a sub-basement where cell phone signals do not reach. If I want to know that people are trying to get ahold of me, I had better have a voicemail service that uses email.

But that just means that I can hear the voice mail. What if I want to answer?

Lifehacker has a post on using Gizmo to do just that. They make it sound so simple. Set up Gizmo. Tell Google Voice you have a Gizmo Phone. Have Google Voice confirm your Gizmo number. Then you're golden.

Unless you're not.

Here is my entirely unhelpful order of events.

• Tell Google Voice I want to verify my Gizmo phone.
• My computer rings.
• Time passes.
• Google Voice gives up.
• Gizmo's soft phone pops up to tell me I have a missed call.

I have tried Skype and it has ... kinda worked. The problem is, nobody I know uses Skype. On second thought, the problems are and they are nobody uses Skype, and if I'm being cheap (and I am) I'm not going to pay for SkypeIn.

It might be something simple and stupid. My current cannot-be-checked-at-work theory about my wife's laptop is that it's a permissions error. I'll work it out and see.

Setting your GTalk Status with Perl

When confronted with a problem, I used to go to Google and type perl problem-domain , but I stopped that, because that, at best, sent me to a module page on CPAN, which, unfortunately, doesn't always tell you how to use the module.

I have started to use perl problem-domain site:blogspot.com instead, as it is likely that someone hit the same problem and found a solution. When I started looking into the problem of changing the status for Google Talk, I did this, and found this page, ending with the line "Worked? Or Crap?" I could not help responding "Worked AND Crap."

"Worked" is nothing to sneeze at. The IETF motto is "rough consensus and running code", and when you have code that does what you ask it to, what more do you want? But when you use the same variable name three times for three different things, you have to wonder if you could do a better job with it.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# http://digitalpbk.blogspot.com/2009/02/perl-change-google-talk-status.html
#usage : perl stat.pl 

use Modern::Perl ;
use Net::XMPP ;
use subs qw{ get_status set_status } ;

my $status = get_status ;
if ( defined $status && length $status > 1 ) {
   set_status $status ;
   }
exit ;

sub get_credentials {
   #this is the point where my setup sucks
    my %creds ;
    $creds{ username } = 'NO' ;
    $creds{ password } = 'A Thousand Times NO' ;
    return %creds ;
    }

sub get_status {
    return join ' ', @ARGV ;
    }

sub set_status {
    my $status         = shift ;
    my %cred           = get_credentials ;
    my $username       = $cred{ username } ;
    my $password       = $cred{ password } ;
    my $hostname       = 'talk.google.com' ;
    my $port           = 5222 ;
    my $componentname  = 'gmail.com' ;
    my $connectiontype = 'tcpip' ;
    my $tls            = 1 ;
    my $Con            = new Net::XMPP::Client( debuglevel => 0 ) ;
    my $con_status = $Con->Connect( hostname       => $hostname,
                                    port           => $port,
                                    componentname  => $componentname,
                                    connectiontype => $connectiontype,
                                    tls            => $tls,
                                    timeout        => 10 ) ;

    if ( !( defined( $con_status ) ) ) {
        exit( 0 ) ;
        }
    my $sid = $Con->{ SESSION }->{ id } ;
    $Con->{ STREAM }->{ SIDS }->{ $sid }->{ hostname } = $componentname ;
    my @result = $Con->AuthSend( username => $username,
                                 password => $password,
                                 resource => "neuron" ) ;
    $Con->Send(
        "<iq type='get' to='gmail.com'>"
        ) ;
    $Con->Process() ;
    my $iq = $Con->SendAndReceiveWithID(
        "<iq type='get' to='$username\@gmail.com'>"
        ) ;
    my ( $cur_status, $statuslist, $show ) = ( "", "", "" ) ;
    $cur_status = $1 if ( $iq->GetXML() =~ m/(.*?)<\/status>/ ) ;
    $statuslist = $1
      if ( $iq->GetXML() =~ m/(<status-list(.*)<\/status-list>)/ ) ;
    $show = $1 if ( $iq->GetXML() =~ m/<show>(.*?)<\/show>/ ) ;
    ##Change status
    $Con->Send(
        "<iq type='set' to='$username\@gmail.com'>
            <query xmlns='google:shared-status'>
               <status>$status
               <show>$show
               </query></iq>" ) ;
    $Con->Process() ;
    $Con->Disconnect() ;
    return $status ;
    }

I'll admit that set_status is fairly cargo-cult. But I think it is a little less crap that it was before. Thanks to digitalpbk for the code.

Taking a Great Notion ...

I have a Blackberry. That makes me cool.

It has two mapping programs. Google Maps and Blackberry Map. And I can tell which one uses which.

According to the article in Wired, which I read last night in the library, there are three main geolocating technologies. There's WiFi, which my phone doesn't do. There's GPS, which works from satellites and is slow and sometimes has problems with buildings. Then there's Cell Tower Triangulation. Which doesn't really do triangulation, but rather uno-angulation. There's a cell tower. You connect to that tower. Therefore, you must be really really close to that cell tower.

I assure you that I have not jumped in the Wabash with my Blackberry. Nor am I on the edge of I65 when I'm home.

Which is a big downfall for Google Latitude. Which, considering how potentially orwellian it could be, might be a good thing.

Talking At Me...

As I'm embedding this, I haven't watched this. This is, more or less, a note to self to watch this. But this should be good. Not because TED talks are good. By and large, they are. But because Clifford Stoll is always interesting to listen to. He can be spastic to watch, to be sure, but interesting to listen to.

I used to have his Silicon Snake Oil on the bookshelf next to Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, being that they're so anti-each-other that being in such close contact should make them explode.

Contemplating My Desktop...

Not on the computer. Under the computers.

I have an L-shaped desk with a hutch at home. The hutch has a monitor-shaped spot that's actually too small for either of my two monitors. I have two tower machines connected via KVM and a laptop that's busted. I also have two monitors, both of which are huge CRTs that monopolize the space. Currently, my #1 machine has sat in the hutch with the flatbed scanner, but with the arrival of my new gear, it has become my #2 machine, and the 1/8"-to-RCA cable connected to my stereo can't reach my #1. So, there has to be a change.

• Robbie (new #1)
  • Ubuntu
  • Much disc
  • Much DVD for burn and rip
  • Much processor. Well, 2.26GHz, which is faster than everything else I have
  • Want: 2GB memory, dual-head video card, TV tuner card so I watch on that, not a separate TV, LCD monitors


• Tom Servo (new #2)
  • Ubuntu, for now
  • Not much disc
  • Much DVD but I think it's done burning
  • Soon to be my sacrificial, "I wonder how to install this..." machine
• Maria
  • XP
  • Much RAM
  • Much DVD for reading but I think it can only burn CDs
  • Broken monitor. Strongly considering using it only remotely, via Remote Desktop, or...
  • Going to be receiving SSH for Windows soon. I wonder of you can use SSHFS to copy files to it. FuseSMB seems to not be a heavy-use alternative.

Also, there's a TV. With the speaker broken the last time I looked inside to try to fix the built-in VCR.

There's more, of course, but not on my desk.

So, my plan is as follows: laptop and scanner into the hutch,

Birthday Gifts for K, Myself

K wanted and received the single most expensive gift again this year. This year it's an EeePC, which is a netbook. That's 1024x768 in a 9" diagonal screen. It's also 120GB for hard drive. It's the best machine in the house in a form factor smaller than Learning Perl.

I spent a part of the afternoon poking at it. It runs XP Home, which is her choice, not mine. I have installed, among other things

• Firefox 3
• OpenOffice
• The Virtual Deskop PowerToy, because virtual desktops are nice verywhere but crucial on such a small screen
• The Google Pack, including Google Talk, Google Desktop, Google Earth, Chrome, Picasa and a few more things
• AVG Antivirus

I was also getting a problem with it being able to find the Windows Network. It could ping Maria, my XP box, but it couldn't ID it via SMB. Through Shub-Internet, I found this link which explains a little on the magic incantation to convince your machine to talk to the Windows Network.

 Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters]
"NodeType"=-
"DhcpNodeType"=- 

I ran it on both machines, and now I have a full view of the network. Yay!

One tremendous benefit: It's kinda built for Skype. I don't have a phone for my desk, and in the sub-basement, we don't really get reception, so voice communications down there are cool.



I have also discovered the use of Remote Desktop. Well, no, I knew about it from working at Computers4Cars, but I never used it on my own machines. I found GnomeRDP, which is an implementation of the Remote Desktop client ... server ... the part that you sit at to run a machine that's far away. I'm writing this on my Windows box, but using the monitor, keyboard and screen of my Ubuntu box to type, which is best, as my laptop's keyboard is broken. I was using Synergy to multiplex my keyboard and mouse across two machines and two screens, but there is something to having your one machine in the window of another.

And, beyond the O'Reilly I gifted to myself, I did get something else that should be interesting to geeks. I got a DVD(plus/minus)R drive and a 500GHz hard drive for one of my machines. Big drives and burnable DVDs -> I live in the future. All IDE hardware -> I live in the past. But with a 500GB hard drive, I can do that little while longer. Yes, at some point I will kit out a new #1 machine and I'll put in multiple terabyte harddrives and I shall run FreeBSD or OpenSolaris so I will have all the benefits of ZFS. And I will gallop freely amongst the heards of unicorns. But in reality, I will upgrade my Robbie, my 2.26GHz Compaq, to be a relatively cool machine. The CDW Memory Finder says that I could get myself upto 2GB of memory for less than $100. I'll try to get that together by Spring Break.

I have some ideas for a program relating to Twitter, but I'll cover that later. It's 2am, people. Gotta sleep sometime.

Reconsidering a Point...

This is a callback on the post on "wireless monitors".

Consider a netbook with a current-generation SSD drive. 6-8 gigabytes. Sure, years ago that was positively massive, but today, that's next to nothing. But, something that small would be a great candidate for your remote desktop scheme of choice. One thing I've discovered about Remote Desktops in the Windows world, one clear benefit over X forwarding in Unix, is that you forward sound as well as graphics. (Mark your calendars, folks, because you won't get such a clear comment favoring Windows again any time soon.)

So, for $300, you get your self an 8" monitor that you can take with you. I've been a Palm guy long enough, even with that time being past, to be soured on the concept of a device being a metaphorical prehensile tail to the desktop system.

Laptop sales have leaped above desktops in sales recently, and I see that trend going on. I'm not seeing why you'd keep a desktop if you had a sufficient laptop.

But there must be something to this idea, or else I'd let go of it.

Discuss Wireless Monitors ...

IdeaStorm, a Dell website, is talking about the wireless monitors.

I've seen them advertised, but as a gizmo that plugs into your VGA cable slot and another to the outbound cable from your monitor. Get a wireless monitor, wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, and you could be many yards from your main PC. Which sucks if you need to plug in your thumbdrive, it being across the room and all. Which, I guess, is a good reason to have Bluetooth.

Consider, instead, having a Citrix connection or Remote Desktop to a desktop machine from a laptop. Except, it's all the desktop and none the laptop. There, it almost sounds appealing.

Until you think about it.

The further you get from the desktop, the worse the performance gets. A wireless desktop (keyboard and mouse) comes in about $100, and a netbook comes in around $300. Having a machine that looks like a netbook, costs like a netbook but isn't a netbook and can't be ported like a netbook? That dog don't hunt.

A pass at coding for Twitter and, kinda, Blogspot

So, you write something in your blog, and you want to tell somebody, right?

Me, too. And here, I've automated the process. This script, blogspot2jabber.pl, reads your Atom feed, looks to see if the newest post is new, and then sends a tweet to your Twitter feed.

I use AnyDBM_File to save the most recent, even though I don't nearly tap the awesome power of it, because opening it as a hash is a lot easier than reading then writing a file.

XML::Atom was the tough one to install. CPAN never did finish it, so I used apt-get to install it instead. The laugh is that XML is anything like human-readable.

And Net::Twitter just could not be easier.

#!/usr/bin/perl 
# ========= ========= ========= ========= ========= =========
# blogspot2twitter.pl
#
# AUTHOR - Dave Jacoby 
#
# Copyright (c) 2008. David Jacoby.
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it
# and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
#
# See http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html
#
# ---------

use 5.010 ;
use strict ;
use warnings ;
use AnyDBM_File ;
use Carp ;
use Net::Twitter ;
use XML::Atom::Client ;
use XML::Atom::Entry ;
use XML::Atom::Feed ;
use subs qw( get_entry send_to_twitter ) ;

dbmopen my %dbm, '/path/to/.database.dbm', 0600 or croak $! ;
if ( !defined $dbm{ 'current' } ) { $dbm{ 'current' } = '' ; }
say 'C ' . $dbm{ 'current' } ;

my $url   = 'your_blogspot_Atom_ feed' ;
# I think that it'll autodetect if you just put the URL
my $entry = get_entry $url ;
my $text  = 'New post to my blog - ' . $entry ;

if ( $entry ne $dbm{ 'current' } ) {
    send_to_twitter $text ;
    $dbm{ 'current' } = $entry ;
    }

exit ;

# ===================================================================
sub get_entry {
    my $url = shift ;
    my $tweet_link ;
    my $client  = XML::Atom::Client->new ;
    my $feed    = $client->getFeed( $url ) ;
    my @entries = $feed->entries ;

    for my $link ( $entries[ 0 ]->link ) {
        if ( $link->type eq 'text/html' ) {
            $tweet_link = $link->href ;

            #we should be picking it up 2nd pass
            }
        }
    return $tweet_link ;
    }

# -------------------------------------------------------------------

# ===================================================================
sub send_to_twitter {
    my $user   = 'username' ;
    my $pass   = 'password' ;
    my $status = shift ;
    my $tweet = Net::Twitter->new( username => $user,
                                   password => $pass, ) ;
    if   ( $tweet->update( $status ) ) { say 'OK' ; }
    else                               { say 'FAIL' ; }
    }
# -------------------------------------------------------------------

I'd like to get the URL and subject in, but that can't be guaranteed to be under 140 characters.

Getting it going ....

When i worked at the other place, we used Synergy. Not the bad and byzantine source-control Synergy, but the software KVM tool.

I have a laptop that's unusable as a laptop, so it is my Windows machine. The screen is busted, so I have it connected to a big screen, and the keyboard is busted, so it's not all that much fun to use. So, I tried the power of Synergy, like I had been using at work.

And I failed.

Talking to Patrick, I figured out the issue. Synergy wants to talk names, not raw IP addresses. I had no local DNS. What few machines needed to talk to each other, I have their 192.168 addresses memorized. But Synergy wanted to work with names.

The solution?

/etc/hosts

Or c:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

(There's no legacy BSD code involved with XP. Nope.)

So, I made the wired NIC on the laptop static, named it, and set up Synergy again. And I'm writing on my XP machine via the keyboard on one of my Ubuntu machines' keyboard.

Honestly, I have that keyboard hooked to a KVM switch going between two Ubuntu machines, but that's another story.

Considering the Vast Array of Possibility...

At the end of work today, I had a fully-functional OpenSolaris machine running under VirtualBox.

I have tried, at various points in time, to keep a Solaris x86 machine around — "But, Mom! It followed me home! Honest!" — but in the end, I always wiped it. That is, if I ever got the installation finished. Solaris has not been an easy installation.

This wasn't real. This was virtual. A virtual ISO sat in a fake CD-ROM drive and filled a phony chunk of memory full of OpenSolaris. I clicked "GO", moved to another desktop and beat my head on Catalyst and MySQL for a little while. Then, I moved back to the desktop and clicked OK, and it was done. I had my first stab at Solaris package management trying to install the "Guest" packages.

First time I sat behind a Solaris box, I was using CDE. Ever use CDE? CDE is the reason people started looking in to window managers. So they could get away from it! OpenSolaris comes with Gnome, and it's nice. Nice like the Gnome that comes with Ubuntu. And they're both Live CDs.

If the OpenSolaris user experience is, within Δ, the Ubuntu user experience, why use OpenSolaris? You want to integrate into a huge Sun environment. You develop in Java or otherwise want to have your Sun-based development environment. You're used to Sun. Or you wish to prove your manhood by grappling with the OS that was the go-to Unix when Linus was in high school.

I almost have a use for the similar XP install on my desktop. I don't really have one for OpenSolaris yet. So, what do I use it for?

Reading the Documentation ....

My boss has a flatbed scanner he wants to work. An HP ScanJet 3670.

I tell you the model number so that you too can do what I have done, which is look up the XSane compatability list. You will find that the 3670 is explicitly listed as not working with XSane, which means ito be non-Linux-compliant.

So, my boss suggests I dual-boot the thing. And my other boss — Boss₁ can hire and fire me, but Boss₂ controls the hardware I deal with on a day-to-day basis — suggests I try VirtualBox, running XP in a virtual machine under Ubuntu. I'm happy to do this, as I would much rather have most of the user software running on Linux than Windows. That's the kind of guy I am.

This process is complicated by the Thanksgiving weekend, which means that all the people I need for getting XP install media (to run in the VirtualBox) are on vacation just when I need to do it. So, finally, I get my hands on install media, get everything running, and guess what!?!

VirtualBox OSE, the open source edition, has no USB support. None. None at all.

This makes me frown.

Want to know what made me smile?

The VirtualBox License.

You can use VirtualBox, the closed, feature-rich version, if you are

1. Using it just for yourself
2. Evaluating it for your company, or
3. Part of an academic institution

Like, for example, a research lab of a large land-grand university!

So, a little apt-get here and there and I have the real VirtualBox running.

Now I just have to convince the ScanJet to talk nice. I could still be setting up a dual-boot yet.

ETA: Adding this to your /etc/fstab and restarting helped a lot, too.

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=[GUID of vboxusers],devmode=0666 0 0

Assuming you add your users into that group. Thank you, noorez!