Geek Drivel

“Seriously, though, wouldn’t you have killed for this when you were 14?” I certainly would have. Sometimes I regret the inevitability of growing up (or at least older ).

(Via LifeHacker’s “Remains of the Day” feature)

The title might seem rather yawn-inspiring to anyone who knows about the issue, but I’m not talking metaphorically. They are literally numbered: there was an estimated 625 days of them left on January 7th, representing 10.2% of the possible numbers. Just twelve days later, on the 19th, a second report said that was down to less than 10%.

What does this mean? Well, the Internet isn’t going to immediately stop working once the IPv4 addresses are gone. My take on it is that it will become harder (i.e. more expensive) for ISPs and hosting companies to obtain them, which means fewer new ISPs and hosting companies, which inevitably translates to higher prices (from all providers) for consumers.

Should you care about it? Probably. Is there a solution? Yes, the IPv6 standard (with, I’ve heard, enough address space to cover every square foot of the Earth with several of them) has been around for years. Can you do anything about it? Not much, other than demanding that consumer electronics manufacturers provide IPv6-enabled machines, and that ISPs offer IPv6 service. Any OS that has been updated in the last few years already does, it’s just the hardware (and the ISP willingness to buy and install it) that’s missing at this point.

It appears that, despite the hype, laptops have not fully taken over yet. Good, that means I won’t be obliged to feel embarrassed if I ever decide I need to fix my old desktop machine, which I’m pretty sure just needs a new power supply.

Strangely enough, I’ve been considering doing just that recently. It takes a long time to compile Project Badger on this MacBook Pro… a quad-core desktop machine could cut that in half, easily. But that would mean a new motherboard, CPU, memory, and at least one new hard drive, as well as the new power supply… nah, it’s just not worth it.

Yet.

As a programmer, I’ve always found that the more monitor space you’ve got, the more productive you can be. And multiple monitors are even better than a single huge monitor, in a lot of ways. When you’re referring to online documentation while you’re programming, for example, it’s a lot easier to just glance from one monitor to another than it is to switch between windows, or try to somehow fit all of both windows on a single screen at once.

I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup for years, but earlier this week I ran into a situation where even two monitors simply weren’t enough: coding in a Windows VM while having a Linux VM running a proxy and web browser, and needing to simultaneously monitor a program under Mac OS X. I managed to get by, but it was extremely irritating. And that was only the first part of that project, I’m going to have to revisit it for at least one more extended period in the near future.

I had an extra monitor lying around unused (an early-tech 4:3 17″ LCD one with an annoying flicker problem), but no way to connect it — this MacBook Pro only has one external monitor port in addition to the built-in monitor panel, and it’s already in use. And being a notebook computer, there was no way to add another video card. I’d seen USB video adapters before, but I’d never been able to use them because none of the manufacturers seemed to support Linux. But I suddenly realized a couple days ago that I was running a far more mainstream system now, and that the USB video adapter manufacturers who ignored Linux would almost certainly support Mac OS X.

Sure enough, that was the case. I found a fairly cheap representative of the species at our local Best Buy (for the curious, a Diamond BVU195 “USB Display Adapter Pro”), which claimed that OS X was supported. It turns out that it was, but I had to track down a hard-to-find page on their website to get the drivers; they weren’t included on the driver disk in the box, and whoever wrote the skimpy little manual had apparently never heard of an Apple computer. But they installed with no further hassle… and I had a three-monitor system.

It’s really a beautiful thing.

The third monitor isn’t quite as snappy as the first two — there’s a small but noticeable delay when you try to scroll a window on it, for example — but I expected that. I had some trouble getting it on my desk as well; even though I’d cleaned the desk off recently, and had kept it meticulously neat since, there simply wasn’t any place where it wouldn’t block something I didn’t want to give up. I finally plunked it down on the left side of the desk, in front of the window… it’ll do for now. It still has that annoying flicker too, but as it’s off to the side and I don’t have to stare at it continuously for long periods, I should be able to ignore that.

All in all, I’m happy with the setup. It should make further development work a lot easier. Now if the 8GB memory expansion that I need for this system would just drop to an affordable level, so my virtual machines could run simultaneously without a lot of really slow disk-swapping, I’d be all set.

Very timely, since GoddessJ and I helped her mother set up her new printer over the weekend. She replaced a semi-expensive Canon inkjet printer from around the turn of the century, which never worked particularly well and was extremely slow on top of that, with a really cheap (less than $150) Brother black-and-white laser printer/scanner/copier.

Now, I’d heard bad things about Brother printers, so I wasn’t too keen on it when she asked GoddessJ and I about it. But after looking at comments from customers on the ‘net, the worst thing we could find about it was a complaint that the toner cartridge was saying it was low after only about 500 pages, rather than the 1000 that the manufacturer claimed. If that was the worst thing anyone could legitimately say about it, I figured it was a lot better than I’d expected.

On the minus side, as the comic says, it didn’t include a printer cable — not a problem if you’re updating from a previous USB printer, but her old printer predated USB connectors, it was so old that it used a Centronics parallel interface instead (remember those?). I thought I recalled that she had the right kind of USB cable somewhere, and it turns out she did. It had come with the battery backup she’d bought last year to deal with the power problems that were causing her system to lock up regularly, and was still in the plastic wrapper with the battery backup manual.

And the drivers… don’t talk to me about the drivers. The ones that it came with for Windows were a breeze to set up, but her system is dual-boot Windows and Linux, and the Linux side was a massive pain in the tail to get running. You didn’t have to compile them yourself, but that’s about the only break you got… I guess Brother figures that anyone running Linux is enough of a geek that they don’t need simple installers. Oh well, at least they do offer some support for Linux, unlike Canon.

On the plus side, once it was set up, she was delighted that the new one was so ridiculously much faster than her old one, and produced such beautifully crisp text. Inkjet printers may be “just as crappy and unreliable as they were in 1995,” as the comic claims (and my personal experience backs up), but laser printers are far better than that, and have dropped in price by a huge amount in the last decade.

If you only need black-and-white printing, I’d highly recommend going with a cheap laser printer these days. Even if you do need color printing, it’s probably worth looking at a color laser printer, like the Xerox Phaser 6110MFP I picked up a few years ago. In the long run, it’s a lot cheaper than paying for ink, despite the up-front costs.