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Hardware Problems

My laptop turned one-year old last Monday. What could be called remarkable for this gadget anniversary is the fact that I had legitimate cause to claim warranty in the allotted one-year period. It’s not a show-stopper defect that required servicing. It’s something minor though it’s one of those minor things that tend to be really annoying.

One day, the down arrow-key button just stopped working (or started over working depending on how you view the symptoms).

That day I noticed that Windows 8 automagically loaded even if I missed the 10-second period where GRUB asks you for a confirmation on the OS you want to load. I did not fuss too much about it since I was about to play Skyrim, and was going to boot into Windows 8 anyway. However, later that day, when I wanted to code and so had to boot into Linux, I noticed the automagic and started wondering.

In Linux, I noticed that the browser randomly scrolls down and scrolling up with anything (mouse wheel, scroll bar drag, page-up, up arrow key) had no effect as it just drags back down. Then I started switching workspaces via the Ctrl+Alt+Down key combo which just didn’t work.

This is where I started experimenting, starting with GRUB. With no further delay, I present you, the symptoms:

  • At GRUB, I noticed that the selection cursor automatically goes down to Windows 8 (the bottom-most option). From there, while in the 10-second grace period, you can still go up (by pressing `up`) but not down.
  • Inside Linux, I noticed that Ctrl+Alt+Left does not work as well.
  • Inside Windows, while in Notepad, the down button really does not work. All the other direction keys seem to be fine though.
  • Inside a terminal session in Linux, pressing `down` does not make your terminal command history go forward.

As I said, not really a show stopper. At vim, my text editor of choice, I’ve grown accustomed to using the h, j, k, l keys to navigate around my document; for everything else, I have a mouse with a scroll wheel. At bash, I seldom go through my command history via the up and down buttons anyway; I mostly use Ctrl+R (reverse search). As for workspace switching, I can still get to any workspace as long as up and right are still working and wrap-around behavior is enabled. But this defect just bugs my workflow, not to mention the annoying scroll down browser behavior told earlier.

As when this happened, the machine is still under warranty, I thought it prudent to claim it. Everything’s fine, save that I went to this year’s GDG Philippines DevFest without a laptop. I had to leave it with Acer for three weeks as they ordered a new keyboard. Those three weeks, I managed to sleep on time and devote time to my other hobbies.

I wonder what could’ve caused it though.

Now, I’m having another problem, still minor but perhaps less annoying. For some reason, USB mice are working very erratically with my laptop. At first I thought that the one I’m using just failed. I’ve been using it for less than over a year and it’s not any recognizable brand but one that has sentimental value; I wouldn’t want to let it go too easily.  But I just bought an A4 D530FX, saw that it works well with my computer at work but not with my laptop. I’m not sure if I should feel happy or sad that I seem to have established that my no-namer, sentimentally-important mouse is still fine1 but my laptop may be in for another maintenance check.

(In retrospect, I could’ve saved myself a few hundred pesos by plugging my sentimentally-important mouse to another computer—like the laptop my sister is using, or the old Windows XP desktop which we only keep for printing, or the beast I use at work—and check if its working fine there. Oh well, back-ups can still be considered an investment no?)

It’s not a big problem as the touchpad is still working fine. What suffers is my Skyrim. Damn. :(

With that all said, I’m still pretty pleased with my laptop. Though I, as part of being a “wise consumer”, do check out reviews of products before buying them (especially when I buy uber-new products, like what I did with my XPeria Z), I do not place that much value in them. It seems to me that most reviews today come from people who have just used the product concerned for a test drive, just in time to write a blog post about it (and get their paycheck). Well, I’m buying things not to use them for a test drive but for a pretty long time. I’d actually like to see my purchases as investments.

After a year, I think I’m in a position to make a short review of my laptop no? Quoting from this blog’s “About” page as of this writing:

Unit Model: Acer Aspire V3
Processor: Intel Core i5 (2.5GHz) with Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz.
RAM: 4GB DDR3
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M with 2GB dedicated VRAM
Operating Systems: Linux Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) and Windows 8

So well, the pros: I think it looks really sleek. It’s no MacBook, but I find the design really aesthetically pleasing. It is not as light as I would’ve wanted (when I bought this, it was due to an emergency; it was still quite out of spending schedule) but I’ve no issues with weight since, unlike when I was in undergrad, my laptop mostly sits on my desk at home now. Plus points for having the order of the Ctrl, Fn, and Super2 keys in the same order as my previous one.

The specs may not be top-notch but it is sufficient for games (Skyrim, Civ V, KingsRoad, anyone?) and the side projects I’m doing. I find that Windows 8 really plays nice with it, though it is not a touchscreen model. Though I think it must be said that I’m way more pleased with Windows 8 than your average Lifehacker commenter.

And yes, there are cons: one of my very first issues with it is that it doesn’t have any indicator if I’ve my Caps Lock on. It may not be a big issue for most users but it does bug me: imagine getting your web passwords wrong only to find out that you’ve accidentally hit Caps Lock on. There’s also this weird bug it has on Google Chrome where GC suddenly hangs for no apparent reason. It happens for both Windows and Linux but Linux does not seem to be able to recover. I’ve checked the logs, reported, and Googled about this bug but I don’t find much. I guess it’s an architecture-level issue, then? I’ve switched to Chromium in an attempt to isolate the problem further but to no avail.

 

So, hey, a keep-alive. Between me not being able to keep my New Year’s Resolution (at least the part that tells me to write about my experiments here) and some other problems, personal and/or technical, I’ve been going through lately it feels refreshing to be actually writing in casual English instead of code.

See you around! ~Chad

  1. Though you may say that this needs further testing, I noticed that it works quite well in Linux but really annoyingly erratic in Windows. So yes, sentimental value and all it must be still fine. [↩]
  2. The one with a Windows logo printed on it. [↩]

Hanged

There. Google has done it, again. That is, rolling out over-drastic changes to a product I’m already very familiar with to the point that it is alienating. And this time, they even changed the whole product, not bothering to stack the updates with an old brand.

In an effort to push Google+ to more of it’s users, Google has rendered Google Talk obsolete in favor of Hangouts—Google+’s video chat feature. I’m not allergic to change but it seems to me that Google has been pushing “social” to their users too much that they dropped the non-social use-cases.

My review for the Hangouts Android client says it all1:

I understand that Google made a lot of improvements for hangouts but they forgot their basics. From Talk to hangouts they removed status messages/indicators and the quick list of people who are “online”. Inconvenient as we use Talk in the workplace. Moreover, they now list your contacts based on your most recent conversations. Hardly useful if I just want to leave a message to someone not-very-recent. And that piles up fast since I use Talk a lot.

At work, when I switched my provided workstation from Windows to Linux, I had problems choosing a client for GTalk, since Google does not support a Linux Talk client. Sure the web interface that comes with GMail is OS-agnostic but it also comes with the inconvenience that my chats are all in a single tab and I can’t drag them around my workspaces. I would’ve tried Gwibber, the one that comes by default with Ubuntu, but I was too lazy to hurdle the set-up.

In the end, I settled for the official Google Talk Chrome plug-in. It did not fit all my needs but it does what the web client does without having to be in a single tab and I can lug it around my workspaces. In fact, if only I did not have to open Chrome just to sign-in/sign-out to it, it would’ve felt like a native desktop app.

That is, until Google decided to force feed Hangouts to everyone. I first encountered how Google does Hangouts via the Chrome plug-in. And I found it plagued with the same problems I later found in Android. Being that I cannot see a list of all my contacts via the plug-in, I now always have a GMail tab running at the far-left of my Google Chrome window for starting conversations2.

For a long time, I managed to resist Android’s nags of updating the Google Talk app in my phone to Hangouts. I even set the Talk app not to auto-update. And then came the most recent Android update from Sony. I should say that I’ve been loving Android updates ever since my XPeria Z first prompted me for one3. But this most recent update had the audacity to replace Talk with Hangouts. Argh. Google wins.

I’m now looking for another GTalk (as I will persistently call it) client in Android. I’ve tried Trillian, the first IM client I used, from way back when class presentations where planned via Yahoo Messenger conferences and not Facebook Groups. Unfortunately, Google won’t let me log-in with it; apparently the Trillian app does not hit the Google log-in servers directly but, rather, some “gateway” server which does the actual log-in for you. Google sees the IP of these gateway servers and labels them as suspicious sign-in attempts. Right now, still looking for another one.

The Google Score

Google, Google, I still think you are among those who tackle the most interesting problems and research topics but I think you’re pushing social too much into the face of your users.

Google products I still love:

  • Google Chrome
  • GMail
  • Android
  • Google Docs
  • Google Maps

Google products which I think has gone astray:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Reader (or, rather, what they did with it; it was fine until they sent it the way of dinosaurs)
  • Google Talk Clients: Chrome and Android

And with the talks of Google’s famous 20% time perk dying going rounds, it really feels like Google has changed. A lot.

  1. Incidentally, the first app review I ever gave, out of pure ire. [↩]
  2. Or hangouts, as Google would now want you to call them. [↩]
  3. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much to update with my old Samsung Galaxy Y, so not much fanfare there. [↩]

Ubuntu WiFi Problems

Ever since I got my new laptop and upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04, I noticed that my WiFi has been very unsteady to the point that for anything greater than 100MB, my most reliable download method would be via torrent, unless the server I’m downloading from supports resuming downloads, which is never. That’s a shame since not everything > 100MB can be found in P2P networks. I also noticed that Ubuntu 12.04 oftentimes took ages to connect to our WiFi network upon start-up. This isn’t the case with 10.04 and Windows 8. Unfortunately, the last time I felt this frustrated with WiFi connection upon start-up was with Windows Vista.

At first I thought it is an issue with our router which is around 3-4 years old—a suspicion I got pretty confident with upon checking my ping and traceroute logs. My pings averaged at around hundreds of milliseconds, sometimes even up to 800ms, while the normal was only at around 50ms to 60ms. Traceroute, on the other hand, times out intermittently and, noticeably, on the first hop towards our router (192.168.0.1).

I got a replacement for our router around a month ago and, to my disappointment, the problem persisted. My ping and traceroute returned to normal but the WiFi remained choppy while connected and initial connection upon start-up still took ages. I’ve been searching for a solution for this problem but every solution I come across seem to be very hardware specific (check those network cards, geeks) and involved building some low-level modules. For what it’s worth, it seems that this problem boils down to a conflict among the wireless drivers that come with 12.04.

Then somewhere, in my searches, I encountered a post in Ubuntu Forums which looked like a general solution to the problem I am having. This, as the command suggests, installs a backport of wireless drivers into your machine:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-cw-3.3-precise-generic

Now, my Ubuntu 12.04 instantly connects to our WiFi upon start-up, just like my old 10.04 installation.

The WiFi still cuts though, something which I’ve pinpointed to be a fault of the router (or, maybe, how I’m positioned with respect to the router): I noticed that my XPeria Z, stationed on the same desk, also gets disconnected. For what it’s worth, reestablishing connection is now faster since I backported my drivers.

Are We Worth Our Hype?

I was at AngelHack. Not as a competitor though; I was there for API support. Chikka (a.k.a., where I work right now) exposed its mobile charging API for the developers to use. The API somehow falls into my responsibilities so I was there.

But this post isn’t about the experience, nor about our API, nor about how we had to reconfigure our backend set-up just a few hours before the coders started hacking because of some “logistical oversights”. The point I want to make here is about something that is only remotely related to AngelHack. I want to point to this article from the thought-provoking Aeon Magazine which basically asks if we (developers) are worth the hype accorded to us. It makes for a nice post-AngelHack reading especially as AngelHack is basically the search for the possible next big thing for geeks.

As a footnote, I quote from this advice found from Learn Ruby the Hard Way1:

Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You’re much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.

Really makes you think. Interesting food for thought.

  1. No. I am not actually learning Ruby. [↩]

Some Random News

Okay. First off, I’m aware that I’ve lagged behind my New Year’s Resolution. But I’ve only lagged behind the blogging part: I’m still exploring new stuff monthly. Guess I’ll talk about them in brief for now and, maybe, expound some other time. ^_^

Just to clear some smoke, last time, I told you that I may be in for a volunteer project. Well, so I’ve been and yes, I did use Django pretty extensively with it. The project is for the up-and-coming Python Philippines. I’m the one behind the website and it’s running on Django CMS. Go visit it. We don’t have content yet but, well, you can look at the pretty theme. Hehe.

And just last Saturday, I talked about Django CMS at Python Philippines’ monthly meet-up, to encourage contributors. I feel that my talk went well and I hope to put up a transcript of it in here, to make up for my lack of blogging. Soon!

 

I’ve also been trying to learn some things from the ground up in Python. I’ve done sockets last time and this time around, I tried doing threads. Straight from the box, Python does not really support threads. You’d need libraries like gevent to actually get some concurrency done in peace. But still, unlike PHP, if you just want to switch among jobs, Python has something for you.

I’ve experimented with Python’s threading library. It’s a curious thing, coming from Java’s threads. I got so curious with it I’m even trying to learn statistics to validate my experiments. Because, you know, I did all my samples in powers/multiples of ten.

 

Lastly, as a form of humbrag1, I got myself an Xperia Z, for around a month now2. I must say, it’s damn gorgeous! I never got people who complain that Samsung uses cheap plastic to house impressive hardware but with the Xperia Z’s all-glass build, I get it now. It’s all about the user experience, people. User. Experience.

The hardware is damn powerful; Iron Man 3 plays very smoothly, save for occasional lags. The camera isn’t shabby either; for quick shots, it can do in place of my bulky SLR. Being water proof, dust proof, and shock proof sealed the deal for me.

At last, at last, I can play Temple Run 2 even when it’s raining.

  1. Okay, really bragging mostly [↩]
  2. Those who know the camera I am using can now scream “Fanboy!” [↩]