I hate it when that happens…

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Late Tuesday night, I was playing an old game on my Dell laptop, and the machine froze up — nothing worked. It was the first time that had happened since the motherboard was replaced more than a year ago. Rebooting it led to strange errors, so I shut it down and went to bed.

Wednesday morning, I got up and booted it up again, and it worked fine — for a while. Then it froze up again, and got strange errors on reboot. That’s pretty conclusively a heat problem. I checked, and my three-year warranty ran out a month ago (of course), so I was on my own. No problem, I’m a trained electronics technician! The last heat problem that I had on that machine was due to a huge dust clog covering the inside of the output fan, so I shut it down, disconnected the power cord and battery, and opened it up.

Hm, no dust clog this time.

I put it back together, being very careful to get everything just the way it was.

It wouldn’t boot at all.

-(

Nothing I could do would bring it back to life. After several hours of fruitless attempts at revival, I finally had to face the fact that it was dead. Well, it had a good run. But my programming work requires a computer, and none of [the other working ones that I have][1] are powerful enough to get anything done on (ever try to run Windows XP through VMware 6 on a medium-powered laptop computer circa 2003? I don’t recommend it, you’ll die of old age before the virtual machine finishes booting), so it was time to go shopping.

Perusing the local Best Buy’s computer section, I found a machine that was comparable to the dearly-departed Dell (and a lot cheaper today than the Dell was three years ago, let me tell you!). But as I was going to pay for it, I asked the clerk who was helping me if they had an Internet-connected system so I could make sure that the latest version of Ubuntu Linux supported all its hardware. To my shock and amazement, he knew exactly what I was talking about, and even knew that everything would work out of the box except the sound, which would require manually compiling a new version of the ALSA driver. I’d long ago given up hope of ever finding a computer store clerk who knew anything about computers.

Then he explained that he ran Linux himself, and suggested a different machine, one I hadn’t even considered. After checking out its specs and thinking it over, I took his advice.

Ploni, you’re going to laugh… I bought a MacBook Pro. 4GB of memory, 13.3″ screen, aluminum unibody. Hardware revision “5,5” (which apparently means it’s the latest one, just released a couple months ago). I can’t tell what size hard drive it has, it seems larger than a 250GB but not as large as a 320GB… whatever, it should be sufficient.

I’ve never owned a Mac before. I haven’t even used one since the summer of 1986, when I borrowed one for a few days. I have to admit, I’m kind of impressed with the hardware… I’ve had a router that supports 802.11n and gigabit ethernet for over a year, but this is the first computer I’ve had with either, and they’re impressively fast. It has no problem with my wireless mouse (via USB dongle) or my Bluetooth keyboard. And it’s all but silent too, and quite thin compared to any of my previous notebook systems. And the expected battery life… seven hours! Sheesh! It even puts the five-hour extended battery on my Dell to shame, and that’s the best one I’ve ever seen before this!

The OS is frustrating, because just enough is where I expect it to be that the things that aren’t are very confusing. I’m sure I could get used to it with a few days’ effort, but that will have to wait, I have real work to do first. As soon as I figured out how to call up the web browser I looked up [the instructions for installing Ubuntu Linux on it][2].

The install wasn’t difficult. The only real problem was getting the sound system to work, which I did via the instructions on [this page][3]. After that, it was just a matter of reinstalling a few programs and getting the data from my latest backup. I can now boot into either Mac OS X or Ubuntu Linux with no problem (I decided against putting Windows on it too, for now — I can do almost everything I need Windows for through VMware). Some things seem noticeably slower (starting Firefox for the first time in a session, for instance), but overall it seems faster than the Dell… probably because, as I just discovered, it’s using a processor that’s 25% faster.

Apparently I picked up the wrong external monitor adapter, but as soon as I take that back and get the right one, I should be fully back in business. 🙂

“Virus arms race primes malware numbers surge”

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Computer security people have seen this coming for years. Signature-based detection of specific malware variants is less and less effective all the time; there’s no way antivirus programs can keep up anymore, and they’re just going to get further behind. Not to mention the ongoing problems with false positives.

(I don’t even bother running an antivirus program on most of my machines anymore. They’re usually more trouble than they’re worth, and I have several layers of other defenses, including keeping up on what malware authors are doing. But those layers aren’t easily available to most people.)

Heuristic analysis is the only real answer, but the bad guys can code around any readily-available fixed-heuristic analyzer — they can get the updates as easily as anyone else, and can test whether their creations are detected before releasing them. The only thing that’s going to put a real dent in malware, in the face of general purpose computers run by people who can be tricked into installing stuff, is a true artificial intelligence that can watch for odd behavior, such as data that’s being sent without the user explicitly doing so, and alert the user that something might be wrong. And unless there’s such a thing brewing that I haven’t heard about, that’s several years away at minimum.

“Self-Enforcing Protocols”

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Here’s something you’d probably never think of:

[…] a self-enforcing protocol for determining property tax: the homeowner decides the value of the property and calculates the resultant tax, and the government can either accept the tax or buy the home for that price. Sounds unrealistic, but the Greek government implemented exactly that system for the taxation of antiquities. It was the easiest way to motivate people to accurately report the value of antiquities.

It seems counterintuitive, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The (short) article can be found here; it’s worth a read.

“Boost Your Map Skills for When GPS Fails You”

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I find this quote shocking:

Sure, it sounds like a rant your grandfather can chime in on, but most of us probably aren’t as familiar with how our roads are laid out and how maps correspond to them.

Surely GPS systems aren’t so old that people have forgotten how to use paper maps?! I can only imagine that this fellow has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.