Ben's Bits

Friends who have seen my electronics warehouse, err.. basement, know that I'm an avid collector of "antique" electronics. From the 8-Track recorder, yes you heard that right not just an 8-Track player, but a recorder, to my collection of cell phones and landline phones my interest in history seems to manifest itself in collecting bits of history.

As an information technology professional I think it's both important and useful to realize how I got to where I am. For me this means both the people like "Mr. C" my elementary school computer teacher who showed me the inside of an Apple //e and taught me the fundamentals of computing as well as those early machines I worked with. This means that it has been one of my personal goals to collect some of those influential machines from my early years. A fun side benefit is the ability to play the games and software I remember from my youth on real hardware instead of an emulator.

This means that I also have quite a collection of computers in my basement, primarily Motorola 68k Macs and a few Commodores. I've even gone so far as to have similar minded geek friends over for a LAN party consisting of these early Macs in a LocalTalk environment. Nothing like a good game of Wagon Train 1848 (multiplayer Oregon Trail) to get things going!

Because of these interests I try to stay on top of what's going on in vintage computing circles, subscribe to several mailing lists and visit quite a few websites devoted to the topic. There's something to be said for experimenting with computers just to see what can be done even though it may not be practical (LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge for Internet access from a 512K Mac anyone?) though it seems to be something that occurs less frequently these days.

I recently ran across 1000BiT, a website devoted to vintage computing which I had not seen before. 1000BiT is a great website for finding everything you can related to a specific vintage computer in one place. From system specs to original advertising, brochures and manuals they've got it covered. It's a great stroll through personal computing history and an easy place to get lost in for hours as you pour over the specs and adverts which built an empire.

Databases are a wonderful tool for organizing all those bits of information in your life. While open source technology took database backend technology by storm (MySQL anyone?) there remains a gap in desktop database technology. Let's say you wanted to create a database for your address book. You could certainly do it in MySQL and write a PHP front end for it and make it web based but this really seems like overkill for a personal address book, it also seems like a lot of work.

You could also do it in a spreadsheet program but you give up a lot of advantages of a database (especially a relational database) when you do so. In an effort to fill this void between the massive SQL database with frontend application and the spreadsheet Microsoft offers Microsoft Access. This is both a banckend database engine and a frontend design package in one which allows you to generate forms for updating data as well as reports. As a bonus if your database is too big for it's engine you can connect via ODBC to a bigger backend such as SQL.

Unfortunately, this segment of database tools has been largely overlooked by open source software, especially in the Windows environment. This is probably not without reason as middle-level database tools like this, even Microsoft Access, are often too complicated for most end users and too limiting for most developers. In fact, if you asked many Microsoft Office users what the "Access" program does they probably wouldn't be able to tell you. Still, if you need a quick database form for entering data it's tough to beat this type of application. Perhaps the most widely known open source office suite, OpenOffice, has has made an attempt at an Access alternative in their "Base" tool but, frankly, it leaves a lot to be desired.

A better choice is the KOffice program, Kexi. Like Microsoft Access, Kexi can serve as a combination backend/frontend or as a frontend to a remote backend database. Kexi provides scripting through the python and ruby languauges in addition to the basic tables, forms and reports. In fact, the only real problem with Kexi is that it is not available in an open source version for Windows.

Because KOffice relies on the Qt graphics toolkit it was not made available in an open source version on the Win32 platform. Recognizing the interest in an Access alternative Kexi was ported to Windows and a commercial version is available for $72. The winds of change are in the air though. Trolltech which makes the Qt toolkit has released the Windows version of their toolkit under the GPL meaning Qt based apps can now be made available in Windows under an open source license.

Based on this development the KDE developers have started porting applications, including KOffice and Kexi, over to Windows. Because of the large codebase and complex nature of KOffice it's going to take a while to get things stable on Windows (they're currently at Alpha 10) but someday in the not too distant future there will be a good open source alternative to Microsoft Access on Windows. You can see the progress being made and check out the alpha on the KDE for Windows site. In the meantime KOffice/Kexi is available for use on Linux and Mac.

For reasons I can only speculate about two of my most popular articles to date remain "The Next Big Thing In Blogging Software" and "a year later: an overview of multiblog software options". The first was written over four years ago and the second just under three years ago. In the online world that is eons.

One might ask that if these have proven to be such popular articles why not update them more frequently. To be honest about it this blog is as much for me to remember and track my interests and solutions to technical problems as it is to share knowledge and information with you the reader. Given the significant amount of time which was invested in installing, testing and reviewing the blog software choices and the return on investment it simply doesn't make sense to spend the time to do an annual or even semi-annual update. This is primarily because I have been extremely happy with my chosen solution, b2evolution and despite the continued prevalence of Wordpress in the blogosphere I see no compelling reason to change and one good reason to stay with b2evolution, multiblogging. Despite the continued development of WordpressMU it remains a sort of kludge which may or may not work in your specific instance. b2evolution, on the other hand, was built from the ground up to support multiple users and blogs so support exists throughout the product. This is reason enough for me to stick with b2evolution, the blogging software that I still believe is undervalued and an excellent choice for the vast majority of independent blogging sites.

For those that have forgotten once upon a time the independent blogging software market was ruled by Greymatter and after it's discontinuation by Movable Type. There were no other serious contenders. All was good in the land of the blogger, then the sky fell. As I wrote four years ago...

On May 13, 2004 Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, announced the long-awaited version 3.0. With this blog entry they also single handedly managed to start the demise of the Movable Type monopoly and changed the face of blogging software forever.

What they did was try to commercialize what had been free software while maintaining a crippled free version to placate complainers. As it turned out this was perhaps the biggest mistake Six Apart ever made. As bloggers such as myself became vocal about these changes and provided developing alternatives which were improving on a daily basis the vast majority of independent bloggers abandoned Movable Type for other platforms such as Wordpress and b2evolution. I have an unsubstantiated hunch that my prediction of the demise of Six Apart became a haunting reality for the company who saw customers fleeing by the thousands. Although they retained some market share, particularly among the commercial bloggers it would never be the same for Movable Type, once the king of the bloggers.

Despite attempts to rectify the situation and improve the pricing structure it seems that eventually the stubborn Six Apart came to realize the gravity of their mistake. In December 2007, more than three years after that infamous day, Six Apart made what I believe to be one last ditch effort to regain the market share they once had. It was then that Six Apart announced "as of today, and forever forward" Movable Type would be open source. Finally a victory for those who complained so mightily about that initial pricing structure.

How does this change things? It doesn't really. Movable Type will never again see the market penetration it once had. The decision to go open source is far too late to have that kind of transformational effect. The market has become far too diluted and there is no single competitor (Wordpress would be closest) to try and overtake. If it would have been made shortly after the original backlash we would probably all still be running Movable Type for out blogging needs as many of the other contenders would never have seen the development influx they did in the weeks and months after the MT 3.0 announcement. Certainly there is now a possibility that over time Movable Type will innovate and become a serious contender but for the time being it will remain a Wordpress (and b2evolution) world. I applaud the move made by Six Apart and it probably will keep the Movable Type software alive and viable for the time being but it's too bad this lesson was such a hard one for Six Apart. Better late than never. At lest the sentiment is right.

About a year ago I built several 1.2TB fileservers for a number of my consulting clients which utilized RAID5 arrays for redundancy with LVM running on top for expandability. One of my cleints which does some media work has exhausted the storage space and called a few weeks ago about expanding the storage space on the server.

The four hard drives in the server now were already utilizing all the onboard SATA-II ports. I certainly could have replaced the drives with larger ones (which I did do for another client) but that would have entailed some careful shuffling of data and wouldn't provide for much future expandability. For another client who uses space much more slowly I could have added a two port SATA expansion card and added two drives in RAID1 but here I expect to need to continue adding space and so I proposed an external storage tower with a multiport SATA link. I was looking for a PCI Express controller which would support eight drives on a single card and would be supported in Debian Linux. I ended up selecting a Highpoint RocketRAID 2322 which seemed to fit the bill.

As it turns out packaged driver support for Linux is only available for Fedora, Red Hat and SuSE. Luckily I found great instructions at this University of Northern Iowa site for building the drivers from source provided by Highpoint. Although there is some grumbling in the open source community about these drivers being non-free licensed (hence no package from Debian) just about everything else is great. The kernel module built without any problems and without a huge number of dependencies and I was able to get the drives up and running without too much work.

Unfortunately, I did not get the module into the initramfs as I had intended and so on reboot it all came crashing down. This entailed a trip to the customer and several hours to fix because the entire system including the root filesystem is LVM on RAID. Luckily, I was able to boot off an Ubuntu CD and build the RocketRAID kernel module again then start the RAID and then the LVM which finally allowed me to mount the filesystem. After doing this a few times I was finally able to get the initramfs straightened out and things working again. Needless to say it was a long night, but a successful one nonetheless.

I've written before suggesting the use of Linux for open source drive imaging and it seems there has been some movement in this direction. About a year after my initial posting the folks at PackRatStudios posted this article with a list of free and open source alternatives to the Symantec Ghost software. A quick look at the utilities they reviewed indicates that there is still much work to be done on using Linux as a disk imaging platform, particularly when it comes to ease of use and filesystem (NTFS in particular) support. On the other hand we're much further along than we were and progress is clearly being made.