It suddenly occured to me that printers are rubbish. Or rather, the software used to interface with them is. An example: my printer is a HP PSC-1410 (the PSC stands for Printer-Scanner-Copier; original name, eh?). I rarely use it; in fact, mostly what happens is one of my housemates needs something printed (or scanned, or copied…). Now, I’m perfectly happy to do this for them.

However, the software to use it is so complex to set up that I am rarely able to do so in a short enough period of time to be of use to anyone, and so large and bloated that I’d really rather not have it on my system when it’s not vital. It appears to require not one, but two dæmons: CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System (AKA Complete and Utter Piece of Shit), and another, HP-specific one.

Ideally, printing would be a case of converting a file to PostScript, then piping it to a program that would connect to the printer. There’d be no dæmon running; if the printer was busy (i.e., already printing) then it’d sleep for a few seconds before trying again. In fact, a few lines of shell script wrapping around cat $1 > /dev/printer would be ideal.

Network printing would be not much harder: a dæmon to listen on a port and pipe postscript data to the printer, in the same way; it may need to be a little more complex, as queues are generally a Good Thing for network printers. The client would be identical to the previous one, but using netcat instead.

Instead, what we have are marketing-driven pieces of rubbish, that can tell the computer they’re attached to all about themselves but make it far too hard to actually print.

Even lpr is better than CUPS, but with my HP lpr is very slow, and FreeBSD’s lpr doesn’t seem to work at all.

The situation is even worse under Windows, at least with this printer, since at least it’s supported by software provided by Debian; on Windows you need to install 400MB(!) of drivers and assorted crap.

Last night I upgraded bolan from Debian/arm to Debian/armel. The result: it’s somewhat faster at floating-point stuff (apparently, encoding an mp3 is about ten times faster).

Unfortunately, there’s no Haskell compiler for it yet, so no darcs (according to buildd.net, ghc6 is currently being built, so with luck it should be ready soon).

I used joeyh’s debian-installer build from 25th July, and it worked perfectly (once I remembered that the installer doesn’t support the Slug’s internal network card, and used an external one). I’m constantly impressed by the range of systems and installation methods supported by d-i: most people only ever see the CD install, but it can netboot, boot from USB, install in a chroot from another Debian (or sufficiently similar) system, or—in the case of the slug—be flashed to the internal memory, then overwrite itself with a normal bootloader and whatnot once it’s done.

I’ve just been browsing various websites looking at motherboards and processors, in anticipation of actually having money to repair/upgrade ?daltrey. I was interested to see that the marketing copy for the AMD X2 processors on misco.co.uk explains that Dual-Core processors mean that one core can run my virus scanner, firewall, spyware/adware blockers, etc., while the other is left spare for normal usage.

I’m using Debian and I neither have nor want or need any of those things. Does that mean I can use both cores for real work?

It also mentions that “…now you can simultaneously burn a CD, check e-mail, edit a digital photo, and run your virus protection - all without slowing down your computer”. Of course, I’m yet to meet anybody who can do all those things at once; maybe the chip comes with a complimentary second pair of arms.

Windows hardware support is just plain bad.

-dons flameproof suit and wields Skippy-poking stick.-

I’m not saying that there are not hundreds of hardware vendors who provide Windows drivers for their product. That would be stupid, and plainly incorrect. But Windows itself has only fairly basic support for hardware; if you reinstall Windows (on a machine that was preinstalled with it), and aren’t lucky enough to have a driver disk supplied by the vendor, you’re in for hours of searching for drivers.

One machine I own (?pogue, whose sole purpose is to run Baldur’s Gate games) has no working USB, sound, or (apparently) network, since I’ve been unable to locate drivers for it. Another, a Dell box old enough to have come with Win98SE, I ran into problems with when I tried installing Win2K: the drivers for the integrated sound card (an Intel chipset, I forget which) provided by Windows did not work properly: they played everything about 50% faster (and therefore higher pitched) than normal.

Both of these machines are supported out of the box by Debian.

64-bit processors were supported by Linux years before there was an officially-released version of Windows that supported them . Many of the problems usually brought up with regard to 64-bit CPUs are a direct result of Windows’ poor support: free software supported them fine, proprietary software didn’t because Windows didn’t.

The same goes for SMP, compounded by the fact that Windows’ licencing model requires you to pay extra for the privilege (if I remember correctly, they don’t charge extra for multiple cores, though). I suspect the same goes for SATA, and any other slightly obscure technology (either too old or too new).

So, the Playstation 3’s “Cell” processors are, basically, 64-bit PowerPC chips, similar to the ones in Apple Macs before 2006. What this, apparently, means is that it’s quite easy to port a new operating system to it. In fact, someone’s already done it.

Unlike with the Xbox, it appears to be a case of just writing a new bootloader to the hard drive; Sony provide an option in the menu to do just that.

Of course, it’s probably not worth £400+; it’s apparently a 3.2GHz chip, which is pretty impressive (it probably works out at rather faster than a 3.2GHz Intel or AMD processor, for a start), but I’d rather spend my money on hardware that I could rely upon conforming to some kind of standard. Maybe when they’re going on eBay for £40…

Random browsing led me to this page, showing the first computer I ever used, an Amstrad PPC640 belonging to my dad, when I was about 4-6. It had a fantastic card game on it involving dinosaurs; you had to pair them up by species. This is as good as high-tech entertainment gets when you are four.

Actually, that may not have been the first; I vaguely recall there being an Acorn of some description in one of the reception classes at school, which may have been slightly earlier.

Anyone else got more interesting early computing memories?

If you’re looking for a pair of pretty good, nice-looking speakers (I hesitate to call them “PC speakers” since that reminds me too much of old DOS games that beep constantly) take a look at the “Altec-Lansing XT1”. They’re USB (power and signal) with additional analogue input, and they have a suprisingly good bass for their size. They’re not brilliant, but they’re good enough for my needs, and much better than my old ones.

I’ve just ordered two NSLU2 network-attached storage doodads from Linksys, one for Gem and one for myself. These are dinky little ARM boxen that, with a little tweaking, will run Debian. I’m planning to turn mine into a router (we desperately need a decent one) and network-attached storage; it’s basically silent and uses so little power you can modify it to run off batteries.

Probably going to name it axl, since Axl Rose is a famous musical shortarse.

Update: I ended up calling it ?bolan

Okay, this is really bugging me. The NVidia driver is apparently so buggy that it’s not possible to suspend while the module is loaded, which basically means it’s not possible to suspend when X is running. And if I have to stop X to suspend, I may as well shut down anyway. And if I’m going to shut down, I don’t need to worry about the NVidia driver.

The only real reason for suspending is so that I can keep my X session running. Which I can’t, if I want to play most games. Maybe there’s an easy way of starting a second X session that uses the NVidia drivers, and use that just for games (and maybe movies, if I can use the OpenGL display drivers for MPlayer).

Apple’s ‘“I’m a PC.” “I’m a Mac.”’ adverts are really getting on my nerves now. The Mac is a personal computer, so when you’re describing Windows boxen as being designed for the office while Apples are designed for the home, you can’t really claim that it’s not a PC. And nobody but Apple is perpetuating the myth that “PCs” are what IBM makes; for a start, the term “IBM-compatible” had almost gone out of fashion when I started using computers more than ten years ago, and IBM don’t even make PCs nowadays - they sold their personal computing division to Lenovo.

Apple Macs are personal computers. And they are better than Windows-based PCs, but with the switch to Intel processors last year, the differences are few and far between (a Mac has a pretty case and a decent BIOS). But advertising them as being “better than a PC” is just perpetuating ignorance.