The Indigestible

To borrow from a lamentable final chapter in a movie trilogy,¹ every time I get out, they pull me right back in again.

They being, in this case, general nerdish tendencies.

Followers of this blog will know by now that I've restarted my usage of Linux, in Ubuntu form. I can't begin to describe what a vast improvement Linux has enjoyed since the last time I used it, back in the Red Hat days. Prior to that, as I've mentioned, was Slackware — and for those of you familiar with JR "Bob" Dobbs, you'll know what I mean when I say that ’ware gave everything except slack.

But this is about Mac, not Linux, and specifically making the Mac Mini work with non-Apple wireless networks. I'm posting it because I've seen, firsthand, the kinds of questions that come up in a lot of user forums, and I'm hoping it might help others who are Googling around for answers about getting their Minis — or their Macs in general — working with certain Belkin wireless networking products, especially their USB wireless transceivers. Typical questions are "Why won't my Mac Mini work with wireless?" and "Mac and Belkin USB wireless — how?" and "Belkin wireless USB drivers for Mac?"

Okay. Many years ago, I bought an AirPort wireless modem/base station — the Graphite model, immediately prior to Apple's release of Extreme.² It's actually still working just fine, but it's 802.11B, which in non-nerd terms means pretty damn slow, all other things being equal, about 2 MB/second maximum transfer rate. Since my net connection is capable of up to 5 MB/sec download, well, it was choking.

My Intel dual-core 2 GHz Mini can handle G series, which is much faster, and between that and the periodic connect problems I was having with the AirPort — plus the fact that AirPort Graphite hasn't been supported by Apple (surprise!) since about 2005 — I thought maybe I'd be better off with a new wireless router.

I skipped over the AirPort idea, though. I'm sure it's just a matter of time — probably 3 to 6 months, knowing my general luck in these matters — before Apple releases something even better than an N-compliant unit; and besides, third parties make N-speed routers that cost much less than an AirPort Extreme, to the tune of $100 less. Faster and cheaper.

So I scooped up a Belkin, which has a Mac OS installation CD, and while the setup appeared to work fine — I got my Linux netbook and WinMo 6.1 smartphone talking to it without a hitch, though I had to use the Web interface rather than their install wizard for arcane reasons that few others will probably ever encounter — I had no connectivity at all from my Mini.

Well, that's not totally accurate; I did get some connection, sometimes, but it was extremely sporadic and tended to fail a lot more often than not.³ Those of you who have Minis and have experienced this probably already know what's coming, so you can skip ahead a little if you want.
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It almost sneaked by, but Indigestible turned three years old this month. On the sixteenth, to be precise.

Came upon a page via another Twitterer today (@blogofinnocence) that made me go a little cross-eyed. Here's the site quoted in full:

0.999… is the same as 1. Not just very close, but precisely identical:

a = 0.999…
10a = 9.999…
10a – a = 9.999… – 0.999…
9a = 9
a = 1

There's no trick here. It's just a mathematical fact that most people find deeply counterintuitive.

No, there's no trick, but there is a failure to parse.
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The rest of you will merely find it baffling.

Yes, that is Ubuntu Jaunty running in emulation via VirtualBox on my Mac Mini.

Why?

Because I could, that's why.

Welp, that was an interesting exercise in holy crap. After installing Ubuntu 9.04 (netbook remix) on my Acer Aspire One netbook, things looked great; I switched the system over to the full Gnome desktop UI — the remix has a simple launcher as its default — and everything just ran slick and stable … until I rebooted, and the system menu bars were gone.

That's a bit of a problem, since pretty much everything you need to load and run the Gnome GUI resides in those panels.

Oops.
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The Ubuntu install was damn near painless compared to XP, or even OSX. And by contrast to the insanely recalcitrant Slackware I began with more than ten years ago, well, hell, there's just no contest.

This is actually an Ubuntu remix optimized to work on netbooks. It runs well, significantly faster than XP did on the "Designed for Windows XP" Acer Aspire One I have. (8 GB SSHD!) No noticeable system hangs, unlike its predecessor; loading a browser was an exercise in frustration, and even starting up a link in a new tab locked the machine for 15 seconds or so while the HTML rendered. Well, not any more.

Currently I have five virtual desktops; here's a screenshot of the system load with Firefox, TweetDeck, Tomboy and Evolution running:

You wouldn't know the netbook has a (more or less) dual core processor, not the way it ran with XP. But Ubuntu's barely even touched its VM. And you have to admit the GUI eye-candy isn't bad.

Probably the hardest thing I had to do was get and install synce to sync my smartphone (I still haven't found a GUI tool that seems to work in a way I can comprehend); the second hardest was setting it up to talk to my EVDO cellular modem.*
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It's because, unlike Bush, Obama hasn't set up "free speech zones" to corral protesters miles away from where the events are actually taking place.

There's a lot this administration could be doing better, but only the most hardline Kool-Aid swilling Birthtard would disagree that this single change is, on balance, an improvement.

Well, okay, it wasn't just him; Douglas Adams had more than a little to do with it too, but that's another story.

It was 1982, and I was a freshman in high school. It was typically tough, as those years often are; but it was perhaps a little harder on me — not because I was a burgeoning pubescent, but because I was a weird kid, a bisexual kid, growing up in a town that was anathema to weird kids and queers, and I was more or less bereft of good close friends right then.

In eighth grade, just the year before, I had watched in horror as my best friend humiliated me in front of a lot of guys. Sitting at the cafeteria table at lunch one day, we'd got onto the topic of PE and how I hated to be naked with the other boys. (I know; it's ironic today. But I was thirteen then and very, very body-shy. When you're still hairless and growing on pudgy, it's amazing how intimidating it can be to be surrounded by guys who have developed, who have all the growth and expansion and enlargement and everything else that happens more or less always, but always unequally, to boys between the ages of eleven to fourteen.)

Anyway. We were on the subject, and I don't remember why he did it, but I remember what he did. He took out a pen and paper and said, "This is what Warren's penis looks like," and drew a sad, deflated little squiggle on the page. There was much laughter, and I looked at him. How could you? He didn't seem to care.

Adults sometimes say, "Kids can be cruel." I think they've chosen to forget these kinds of moments, or maybe they never had them; in any case, cruel doesn't begin to cover it.

It's stunning to realize, in just a few moments, that the kid you'd spent many happy summer days playing with was not your friend at all any more. It's stunning how quickly trust can be murdered.
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These people are why I have this.

I would like to think this represents the nadir of spoiled-brat behavior from the twentysomething crowd, but I fear it's closer to being an iceberg's tip.

A recent college graduate is suing her alma mater for $72,000 — the full cost of her tuition and then some — because she cannot find a job.

In other news, dead people* are filing a class action suit against the goddamned horrible unfairness of life.

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* Actually, their attorneys. Death of a client doesn't necessarily put a lawyer off the track, you know.

Issues with the internet connection have kept me from my Friday update. Ideally they'll be resolved today. Meanwhile, here's a lovely cartoon from Cagle's pad. Bill Day got it on the nose.