Neverness

I own a laptop that came bundled with Windows Vista. I installed Linux as fast as possible, but left Windows as a dual-boot option mainly to check that things behave nicely in Internet Explorer.

And a good thing too, because they usually don’t.

I also keep it because I own some junk hardware that also doesn’t play nicely with Linux.

I boot into it about once a month – the last time was mid-December. I always enter with trepidation, knowing I’m about to install countless Gigs of security and anti-virus updates.

This evening I booted into Windows at 22h02, and immediately kicked off the Windows, Windows Defender and AVG updates. The updates finished around 00h30, and I’ve probably blown February’s bandwidth.

Shortly after finishing, I was alerted to another update. It seems they arrive faster than I can download them.

About an hour into downloading the patch for the latest gaping hole, a dialer popped up, so a hole was probably exploited in the interim.

I’m now scanning the entire system – who knows how long that will take. Perhaps I was a bit ambitious in hoping to get back to what I was doing by, say, 22h05.

For the average user, who perhaps doesn’t appreciate Freedom, or ever run into the frustrations of not having complete control of their system, there are still two huge advantages to running Linux.

One is having access to tonnes of fantastic software in one place – the default repositories. No need to trawl the internet for dodgy freeware, or head off to Incredibly Expensive software shop to buy something that’s freely available.

The other, of course, is that the obligatory anti-virus software takes up a rather large proportion of the system’s resources, and uses up a nice chunk of your bandwidth too.

And unless you use the machine regularly (and therefore update regularly), the chances of exploitation, even if you immediately install the updates when you do log on, are high.

The scan’s still running. Perhaps I should get this blog post up before my Windows partition is formatted…

Related posts:

• From Hardy to Helena
• A little too Intrepid for me
• Running Kubuntu 6.10 on my laptop

The second in Don Kurtz’s excellent series of lectures focused on the plain, ordinary old sun. Now reaching middle-aged, 4.6 billion years old with about another 5 and a half to go, the sun is wondrously active and mysterious. Unlike the earth, which rotates at the same speed at the equator and the poles, because of the sun’s gaseous form it rotates faster at the equator (26 days) than at the poles (35 days). This leads to a highly complex magnetic structure, with the sunspots in essence being where the magnetic loops bulge out of the surface of the sun, forming an area of lower temperature.

Much of the lecture consisted of phenomonal pictures from SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a satellite constantly aimed at the sun, and the source of much new recent knowledge about our nearest star. Pictures and videos are available online.

Sunspot activity goes in an approximately 11-year cycle. At the beginning of the cycle, sunspots form in bands around 30 degrees from the equator. As the cycle progresses, new sunspots form closer and closer to the poles. The cycle is actually 22 years, as the sun’s polarity flips every 22 years, but this seems to have little effect as far as the earth is concerned.

In his lecture, Don Kurtz summarised the connection between the sunspot cycle and global warming by saying that although the sun does have an impact on global temperature (he mentioned a figure of 0.2 degrees), there’s a far stronger correlation between the level of greenhouse gases (0.6 degrees).

Being a short lecture of 1 hour only, he couldn’t go into it in much more detail, but there’s quite a lot of complexity, and it’s often this complexity that those trying to reach a particular conclusion latch onto when claiming that humans have little or no impact on global warming, or, more ridiculously, that global warming isn’t happening. There’re the Milankovitch cycles, variations of the earth’s orbit, there’s volcanic activity (and, more recently, pollution), which has a cooling effect by reflecting heat away from the earth. There are longer, and as yet relatively speculative, solar cycles.

Much of the complexity comes from looking at what we know, and trying to model what we imperfectly know, or would like to test, and seeing how everything fits. We have fairly accurate temperatature records going back historically. We have fairly accurate carbon dioxide records. But when it comes to the sun, the records are much less accurate.

Sunspot records go back to the 17th century, and the 11-year cycle is clear over this entire period, but there’s information missing in the older records. Sunspots are cooler areas (due to the magnetic effect), but there’s a converse effect – solar faculae, which are the bright spots. These are hotter than normal, but have only been recorded more recently. There’s a correlation between the two cycles, but it’s not perfect, so the records can’t accurately be extrapolated back to the 17th century.

Early scientists were particularly cautious about reaching any conclusions, given how imperfect much of their knowledge was. Some actively tried to show that the sun was predominantly responsible for global warming, such as Sami Solanki, but, after 15 years of research, he was forced to conclude that the sun was not to blame. Now however, there’s little doubt that greenhouse gases have a causal effect on global warming.

After briefly tackling global warming, the highly enjoyable lecture raced onto the Van Allen belts, the bands of highly-charged particles kept from hitting the earth by the earth’s magentic field, and some stunning pictures of the Aurora Borealis, the polar lights. This lead of course to solar storms, with huge amounts of matter blasted from the sun. These happen regularly, but when they’re aimed at the earth, the equivalent of trillions of watts of power arrive in the earth’s atmosphere. The Aurora Borealis go berserk. And, if the storm is strong enough, satellite, radio transmissions, and power transmissions will be affected.

The most recent large storm was in 1989, and it knocked out Quebec’s power grid. Computers were also affected, with the storm frying Toronto’s stock market system.

A far, far bigger one happened in 1859 and, if such a storm is repeated, let’s just say you want be reading this online for a while.

Related posts:

• Of burst bladders and Tokamak stellerators
• Climate Change – am I a sheeple?
• Renewable energy fee in tariffs approved
• The nuclear tooth fairy
• Why is anybody still considering nuclear
• Localised green power
• Solar power breakthrough
• Ignorance

I’ve recently upgraded my Lenovo Y510 from Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy, which I’ve been running since around May 2008, to Linux Mint 8, Helena (which is based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10). I used to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu every 6 months, but it got a bit tiring keeping up on the upgrade treadmill, running around fixing things, especially things that worked before. I decided to stick to the Long-Term Support version (LTS), as the intermediate versions tend to have more regressions.

With Hardy, there were ongoing annoyances I’d learnt to live with. My screen brightness modifier worked the wrong way around (brighter was dimmer). Flash in the browser caused problems with sound (Flash 9 didn’t work well with PulseAudio), and I’d have to close the browser to get it working again. My webcam image was upside down. Firefox would eventually consume all available memory and need to be restarted. The system was unresponsive for a few seconds after booting up. When wireless was off, it would be on, and I’d need to flip the switch to on and then off again to really switch it off.

I’ve been meaning to try Linux Mint for a while, to see whether I could recommend it to complete beginners. Ubuntu was fine, but for beginners, especially if I just gave them the CD and they installed it themselves, installing all the extra codecs to get music and DVD’s playing properly was often problematic.

At first glance, Helena looked great. Based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10, it’s more polished, booted faster, and was more responsive. Little touches such as the volume control not taking up a huge chunk in the middle of the screen – rather appearing neatly in the corner, the consolidated menu bars freeing up a few extra pixels, or the improved menu, all add up to a noticeable improvement. Most of the little Hardy annoyances seemed to be taken care of (except for the webcam and the off-on-off wireless).

It didn’t last long though. Sound was a complete mess, breaking seemingly at random at some point in the session. Lennart Poettering, a lead developer of PulseAudio has been ranting about Ubuntu’s implementation of PulseAudio since they first implemented it in Hardy. He also blamed application developers, in particular Skype and Flash. He was equally displeased in the buildup to Karmic.

The blame-game goes back and forth, with criticism of PulseAudio equally vociferous, and all sorts of contrary advice floating around (much of it around uninstalling PulseAudio).

Next, the system, although starting off more responsively, degraded very quickly. Whereas beforehand I’d have Firefox open with 30 tabs for most of the day before running into trouble, things fell apart much quicker. Even worse, once the browser hung, I couldn’t just click “X” to close it, and have to manually kill it to close it down. The disease spread to other applications, all needing to be killed manually.

So, in short, lots of little improvements, but two rather large regressions.

Fixing these though proved trivial. For me, two little fixes seem to have helped – installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (over libsdl1.2debian-alsa), and instead o using the buggy version 2.0.x of Skype, which doesn’t work well with PulseAudio, rather installing the beta 2.1.x. Thankfully at least Flash 10 works with PulseAudio (Flash 9 didn’t, causing the sound problems mentioned above). Now, both the sound and the related memory problems have gone away.

So although I seem to have a stable system now, and am personally happy with Helena, it still took a bit of fiddling around, beyond what the average user would be comfortable doing. It’s getting closer though and, hopefully, with Lucid Lynx 10.04 being a LTS release, sound will finally be a painless experience for most people.