date: '2008-03-13 10:09:00'
layout: post
slug: day-five-without-windows
status: publish
ref: http://twitter.com/eob/statuses/770649492
title: Day Five Without Windows
wordpress_id: '258'
categories: Futzing
Day 4 since Windows died on my dual-booted laptop. Can do almost everything on Linux. But no Outlook calendar or VPN, so need to reins ...
— Eamonn O'Brien-Strain 👨💻🔍🌁🇮🇪🇪🇺🇺🇲🇺🇳⚛️ (@eob) March 13, 2008
As I briefly mentioned in a recent twitter I got the dreaded Blue Screen of Death when booting up my laptop in Windows last weekend. Repeated attempts to reboot in various “safe” modes were to no avail and finally a CHKDSK revealed that there was disk corruption. I need to re-install Windows, and perhaps get a new hard drive.
Luckily my laptop is dual-boot, so I was able to boot up in Ubuntu Linux. There I could see all my Windows files, albeit in read-only mode, so that I could back them up easily onto a USB hard drive in preparation for the WIndows re-install.
Meanwhile I had a lot of other work to do, and it was interesting to see how much of my normal day-to-day work I could do on Linux. All of my software development work is done on Linux anyway, so that was not an issue, the question was how much of the other work could i do.
My company uses Outlook Exchange for e-mail, but it also allows access via IMAP, so I had no problem getting the Thunderbird e-mail client to connect both at work and at home. Microsoft Office documents are widely used in the company, but I could easily view and edit them using OpenOffice. I have not yet however tried sending an edited file back to someone using Microsoft Office to see if they could open it properly. Web browsing in Firefox on Linux was pretty much an identical experience to using Firefox on Windows. I did encounter a few videos I could not play, and our company has an internal IT support chat service that uses a Windows ActiveX component that I could not use to report my woes.
There were really only two shortcomings that are going to force me back to Windows. First is the support of Outlook Calendar, which is widely used in the company to schedule meetings — despite trying, I never found any solution on Linux that allowed me to access the Outlook calendar. The second is the VPNs that I use to connect to work from home and to the data center where our web application runs.
We had a big event in HP Labs today unveiling our new research strategy. My small part was helping to demo our Snapfish Lab web site. We also released a video about Snapfish Lab in which I make an appearance.
I'm not a U.S. citizen, but I live here and find the presidential race fascinating. So I took some of the online tests which claim to tell me which candidates are a closest match to my opinions.
What is interesting is that each of the three sites give three totally different orderings of the three viable Democratic candidates. I am surprised in particular at how poorly Obama does — perhaps I have been overly swayed by the glamour and symbolism of his candidacy and should instead pay closer attention to his positions.
For the last few months, I have been part of the team creating Snapfish Lab, a web site that allows users of the HP’s Snapfish photo site to try out some of the new technology coming out of HP Labs.
In its current form it is fairly modest — we have a few tools and let you play with them using your own Snapfish photos – but if we get sufficient interest we will be expanding it to show off all the cool new stuff we have waiting in the wings.
Feel free to go to the site and try using the tools with the sample photographs provided. We are still not fully open to the public, but I have some pre-release invitation codes available that I can give out to the first few people who add comments to this blog entry.
date: '2006-11-18 20:34:08'
layout: post
slug: plant-hardiness-zone-changes-more-evidence-of-global-warming
status: publish
ref: http://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm
title: Plant Hardiness Zone Changes — More Evidence of Global Warming?
wordpress_id: '138'
categories: Science
I happened to come across an Arbor Day Foundation page that shows how plant hardiness zones have migrated north between 1990 and 2004. This seems like another piece of evidence pointing towards the reality of global warming.
I started creating a spreadsheet of transit schedules between my home in San Francisco and my office in Palo Alto. It looks like there is no appealing options, but I will try it next week anyway.
date: '2006-10-14 11:29:11'
layout: post
slug: '116'
status: publish
title: Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows?
wordpress_id: '116'
categories: Programming
With Ubuntu it seems that Linux is getting closer to be a viable replacement for Windows. I am several days into my experiment of running Ubuntu as my operating system on my laptop. So far it is going fairly well, but I have hit the following problems:
I cannot get the Evolution connection to my companies Exchange server to work correctly. For mail this is not a problem, because I can use an IMAP connection, but I really need to be able to connect to the Exchange calendar.
Ubuntu does not deal with monitors well. It defaulted to a fairly low resolution and I had to do some arcane command-line magic and answer many questions about my LCD screen capabilities that I did not have readily to hand. Not very friendly for a non-technical user. Also it appears that if I want to be able to run with a second monitor attached to my laptop I have to do some pretty complex config file hacking. It sure would be nice if Linux had something as convenient as Windows display properties configuration GUI.
The usual VPN solution for my company only works on Windows. I will have to jump through some hoops to be able to work from home.
So I am glad I configured my laptop for dual boot. That way I can fire up Windows when I need it.
One nice feature I found is that I can hibernate both WIndows and Linux, so that when I reboot to switch I am switching into a saved state of the other operating system. However I did find some problem getting the wireless connection to work on Linux after waking up.