I really should have known better. Last summer I got caught up in the back to school sales and purchased a Toshiba Satellite A215-S5848 notebook. I was sick and tired of dealing with the WinBook I had purchased from Micro Center. Someone who used to work there had told me they thought the WinBook notebooks were private lable Toshiba, but they weren’t certain. After dealing with this p*ss complected puddle of puke, I know for certain that they are.

You should know right off the bat when the ad for the notebook claims it has a fax modem and you find out it has just a modem. How much did they really save by leaving fax capability out of the firmware? Where they hell did they find someone making a modem only chip in this day and age?

Then you get into the real issues. Nearly every piece of “ bootable” software you purchase on CD cannot boot on this machine. They all seem to use a Linux or other kernel which expects industry standard USB, A20, and APCIC. Toshiba couldn’t be bothered with that. Non-industry-standard was much cheaper, so that is what you got. Most other notebook vendors don’t bother with these non-industry-standard components because they cause oceans of compatibility issues.

Oh, they didn’t stop there. While the notebook included a card slot, it didn’t include a PCMCIA card slot so you could use your old faxmodem cards to get around the shafting you took on the fax-only hardware in the notebook…noooo…new style card slot only. You get to spend another $100+ dollars if you want to actually fax from your notebook. If you don’t want to do that, you scrounge around in your cast-offs bin to find an old external faxmodem, then pray to the chip gods you can get a USB-Serial adapter cable.

Injuries don’t stop here, however. They found a cheaper than cheap wireless chipset which can sometimes function with the pre-installed Windows Worsta Home Premium Edition. You had to wait a full year for someone else to get ticked off enough to write a Linux driver for it. The vendor never bothered. Had they used the industry standard chipsets it would have worked just fine. The chipset they included didn’t give you anymore than the low end industry standard sets, it was simply cheaper. Not like it had N capability.

Ah, but they saved the best for last. They used an ATI chipset for graphics, sound, and other functions. Oh the humanities! Oh the insanities! I realize my favorite CPU vendor now owns ATI, but they really need to stop production on the horrible chipsets which were designed prior to take over. These chipsets require the drivers to be linked into the kernel. Naturally the driver writers at ATI have very little kernel skill. Any time you get an automatic update from your OS vendor, it doesn’t include the ATI stuff. Your video display is trashed until you manually go get the updated kernel from the ATI sites.

Never, ever, again.

I might even stop buying stuff at Micro Center after receiving two shafts like this. They seem to be in bed pretty thick with Toshiba, so I doubt they will start carrying better notebooks.

Oh how I wish Pro-Star would go back to putting AMD CPUs in their notebooks. Their notebooks were solid!

I’ve been in the process of migrating from Ubuntu to OpenSuSE 11.1 this past week. While I really liked Ubuntu, they put out a 64-bit kernel update which was any direction but “up”. Problems were spread far and wide, yet they didn’t send out another update backing this update out. Given the company putting out Ubuntu wants to become the desktop of choice when corporations dump their legacy Windows desktops, this was not a smooth move. It alienated a lot of users at a time when most of the off-shore consulting companies have already begun abandoning Microsoft products. The first cut has been to get rid of Outlook and Exchange, replacing them with Gmail. The second step has been to remove MS Office and replace it with OpenOffice. Pretty much every corporation which will still be here in 3 years has moved to the Open Document Standard. Even IBM has now released a free Lotus Symphony word processor which runs on a lot of platforms and creates the Open Document format as its default output. (Not only that, but it can read Lotus WordPro and other IBM document file formats. There may very well be some quirks when reading complex documents, but so far this is your only “free” option.)

I dutifully did an image backup and even copied my home directory off to a USB drive. I nuked the Ubuntu partitions and performed the process of installing SuSE. Then I performed the process of installing all of that software you don’t have the option of choosing when installing from DVD. When I started configuring email, I learned of a real bug-a-boo with Evolution. You cannot simply copy the addressbook.db file from your backup copy to the correct place in the newly created folder. That trick works with the email tree, but it is a prescription for heartache when you try it with the addressbook.db file.

Needless to say, I’ve spent the better part of the last few days searching the Web and trying various things. The bottom line is that you are nearly pooched if you forget to use the “export” function in Evolution before moving to a new OS or even re-installing Evolution. Then I found this Web site: http://members.cox.net/mraswan/work/perl/AddressbookViewer.html

In case the site moves, I’m going to post the code here. It requires you have the BerkeleyDB package for perl installed, but you probably already do, if not, I haven’t found a distro that didn’t include it. You want to direct the output to a listing file because it is pretty ugly. A little time spent with a text editor and your new Evolution installation will allow you to salvage most of your data.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use 5.008;

use BerkeleyDB;

package addressbook;

{

sub new {

# Create new object

my $class = shift;

my $self = {};

bless $self, $class;

}

sub getBook {

# initialize variables

my $self = shift;

}

sub printBook {

my $self = shift;

use vars qw( %h $k $v ) ;

my $filename = “/media/USB_250/addressbook/local/1/addressbook.db” ;

tie %h, “BerkeleyDB::Hash”,

-Filename => $filename,

-Flags => BerkeleyDB::DB_RDONLY

or die “Cannot open file $filename: $! $BerkeleyDB::Error\n” ;

# print the contents of the file

while (($k, $v) = each %h) {

print “\n$k -> $v”;

}

untie %h ;

}

}

package main;

{

my $addressbook = new addressbook();

$addressbook->printBook();

print “\n”;

}

exit;

Today was one of those days where my mind wandered a lot. This happens on weekends when I’m writing. It happens to a lot of writers I’m told. You are “supposed” to be writing chapter X, but your mind decides to paint a really intriguing scene before its own set of eyes. The scene has absolutely no place in the chapter you are supposed to be writing, it may not even fit in the book you are writing, but you know it’s good.

Those who try to teach people to be professional writers tell them to write these things down in a notebook or in a new document file. There is a reason why those people tend to not be professional writers themselves. You need not only the scene, but the context which caused it to appear. A notebook or directory full of well written yet unconnected scenes is a cross between Chinese Water Torture and failure for a writer.

WordPro had one feature no other word processor has bothered to implement. If there was a good way to get the Lotus SmartSuite running under Ubuntu I would still be using it today instead of OpenOffice. WordPro had tabbed document divisions. Not only did you make each chapter a tabbed division in your file, you added tabs for these wonderful scenes right there, when they happened. A simply glance down the right margin told you the chapters which gave you the most inspiration and the chapters which captivated your attention. Most importantly, everything was kept in the same file. At the end of your process, you could then choose to collect or discard the tabs which didn’t make it into the final document. Each division which made it in made it because you had a frame of reference as to “why” you wrote it.

I used WordPro for a lot of technical documentation writing over the years. Novel, short story, system user manual and developer’s guide all benefited because a word processor worked like a writer’s mind worked. Today, the industry is awash with word processors that all have the same boring and nearly unusable interface. One of the real reasons so few books and movies fail to inspire us today is that writers don’t have a word processor that helps their mind put the story together.