intel/amd Hardware virtualization CPU capability

I've often wondered if a computer I'm using (a laptop, or my work desktop) has hardware virtualization support. There are quite a few sites that say "cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags and look to see if there are vmx or svm flags in there", e.g.

http://www.linuxtopia.org/HowToGuides/fedora_core_6_xen_quickstart/fedora_core_6_xen_virtualization_how_to_005.html

and

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/linux-tip-how-to-tell-if-your-processor-supports-vt/

Now I've done that and it's a pain because there are so many flags and they're not in an order that makes it easy to spot the relevant flags. So I did some sed:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags | sed "s/ /\\n/g" | egrep "(vmx|svm)"

which is more useful since it replaces spaces in the flags with newlines, so that we can then search for just the flags we need and not be confused by the pollution from all the other flags on the line.

Without the trailing egrep I get:

flags :
fpu
vme
de
pse
tsc
msr
pae
mce
cx8
apic
sep
mtrr
pge
mca
cmov
pat
clflush
dts
acpi
mmx
fxsr
sse
sse2
ss
ht
tm
pbe
nx
constant_tsc
arch_perfmon
bts
pni
monitor
vmx
est
tm2
xtpr
flags :
fpu
vme
de
pse
tsc
msr
pae
mce
cx8
apic
sep
mtrr
pge
mca
cmov
pat
clflush
dts
acpi
mmx
fxsr
sse
sse2
ss
ht
tm
pbe
nx
constant_tsc
arch_perfmon
bts
pni
monitor
vmx
est
tm2
xtpr

As it happens, although I *do* have vmx in there, I doubt if it's actually usable. I've got two laptops with vmx enabled, but I expect that the hardware virtualization is disabled in the BIOS, and there's no toggle in the CMOS settings to turn it on. But I'll try to install Xen anyway, and see if it can use the CPU hardware virtualization support :-).

It's too bad that those are my two slower laptops (2.2Ghz and 1.6Ghz). My fastest laptop (3.3Ghz) is the oldest and it definitely doesn't have vmx support in there at all. Ah well, maybe I'll just play with Xen and hardware virtualization on my AMD64 desktop at work.

vlc on intrepid, no video

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) on laptops at home. I also installed vlc (well, on one computer vlc was already installed on Hardy and I just dist-upgraded). I would see no video but could hear sound. Some googling a week or so ago didn't help.

Today though I found this:

cannot play any video (SOLVED) on the videolan forums.

That solved the problem perfectly. The solution being, at the command line, to run:

vlc --reset-plugins-cache --reset-config

Linked to here so that its google karma will rise (not that it needs it, since it's already the first result :-).

xchat and DSL router woes

I've had some problems with xchat when working at home. This is on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid).

I lurk on irc.freenode.net's #erlang channel (sometimes I ask embarrassingly newbie questions).

The first issue (backwards from the title) is that my home DSL router (provided by my ISP) is crap (but I don't replace it because it's free). The DSL-604T has some sort of issue with some ip_conntrack settings being too low, so that when it receives too many incoming connections at the same time or within a short amount of time (e.g., when running a peer-to-peer client, or when in the #erlang channel, apparently, although I don't understand why that is) then the router hangs and I need to power-cycle it.

There are firmware upgrades for this model, but I can't upgrade the firmware since it might then stop working with my ISP (the ISP has custom firmware in there).

This isn't even about running peer-to-peer, it's about an IRC channel about a programming language!

So I solved that by setting up screen to open an ssh session (at screen #9) to do an auto-port-forward to my work computer. ssh -L 8001:irc.freenode.net:8001 my_work_computer. Then I just have xchat connect to localhost:8001. It's simpler than figuring out how to NAT requests to port 8001 through my work computer and cheaper on bandwidth than running xchat in vnc at work (my ISPs bandwidth caps have increased by a factor of 3 since i first whined about the caps, but I still hit the limit before the end of the month).

So then I remembered that xchat on ubuntu sucks because there's no graphical way to turn off join and parts messages. And on a channel with a lot of lurkers (like #erlang), there are a lot of those.

A quick google search shows that the thing to do is

/set irc_conf_mode 1

And I can have that done automatically by:
Xchat|Network List|Select Network|Edit

and setting the Connect command to "/set irc_conf_mode 1".
It'd be nice if it were settable in the graphical interface, but
since it isn't, this is a neat workaround.

Toshiba Satellite A75-S231 bios password clearing

I've had a heck of a time trying to get a Toshiba Satellite A75-S231 working well with Linux. I first received this laptop (secondhand) around 2006, I think. I couldn't use it productively in Ubuntu (I think I might have checked some other distros, certainly I checked Knoppix too) back then. Whenever I would do something compute intensive it would shut down. It seems the kernel wasn't controlling the fans and it was overheating and the BIOS would turn it off.

I could sort of limp along and use it if I set the cpu scaling to its lowest speed. But that was still 1.8Ghz (no 800Mhz speeds on this CPU). And even at 1.8Ghz, if I did anything challenging that would use 100% cpu for a few minutes, it would shut down.

So I gave up. For a while I lent the laptop to someone who used XP on it, and after that it was stored in its laptop case for a year or so.

Well this year we moved to New Zealand, and since my sister-in-law was coming over, and I'd forgotten what the myriad issues with the laptop had been, I asked her to bring it with her.

I tried to install Solaris 10 on the ubuntu partition. That didn't end well. I'll try it again, but it looks like Solaris 10 probably doesn't know how to run the fans either. I then installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid). That installed and it didn't hang. It looks like linux got the fan working sometime between Feisty (I think) and Intrepid.

I had another problem with the laptop. I had received it with the bios security password set and my brother, who gave me the laptop, didn't remember what the password was. Back when the laptop was shutting down due to power, I'd thought that if I could get into the CMOS setup, I could find a setting so that the fan would always run if it was on AC power. But first I had to get into the BIOS.

Well, this year, with Intrepid working on it, the urgency of getting into the BIOS receded. I still wanted to clear the passwords though. After a lot of searching, I finally found:

Toshiba Laptop password deletion

On page 8 that shows the jumper to short to clear the BIOS password. So finally I can get into the CMOS setup. As it happens, there's no "keep-the-fan-on-all-the-time" setting. As with many (all?) laptop BIOSes, it's pretty minimal. I can't even set how much RAM is shared by the video subsystem. It's good to finally be able to see what's in there though (and set the boot order of the drives, fortunately, previously the boot order had CD-DVD-Rom first, which allowed me to install Linux in the first place).

This laptop still has other problems. I've never liked how insensitive the Alps glidepoint touchpad is, and the keyboard is pretty weak (there's no right Ctrl key, and I always use right Ctrl instead of Left Ctrl, the ~` key is beside the space bar, which is stupid). But that's the case with all laptop keyboards anyway, compromises are made and they all suck. I can deal with the keyboard though, mostly. And if I can't stand it anymore, I've got a cheap external keyboard I can use with it. I still hate the touchpad, but some tweaking of gnome mouse settings has the mouse being tolerable. I'll probably still buy an external mouse and use that though. The laptop is big enough (and I'm switching to it because I like the widescreen) that it's really a desktop replacement. For travelling, we'll bring sol's much lighter (and still widescreen) HP Pavilion.

As long as I'm going to use an external keyboard/mouse, I'd love to have this Adesso keyboard with built-in touchpad (well, assuming the touchpad is any good, but it probably is, most touchpads are, the -one in the Satellite A75-S231 I've got is just bad, not sure if it's bad for all instances of that model, or if I've just got a dud). I can't find that keyboard in New Zealand though, and frankly, I won't spend that much for a keyboard+mouse. I'll just grab a cheap external mouse.

I'll keep my other laptop (a Durabook) for a spare. Or probably for Solaris (not that I need Solaris, but I might as well play with it and get familiar with it, I'm sure I'll use it since the big client my department does software development and management for is big on enterprise everything).

Photobucket bulk uploader applet now works in Ubuntu

It's probably been close to a year, or a bit more than that, since I gave up on the Photobucket java bulk uploader. Back then, the applet worked in Windows but photobucket didn't care enough to make it work on Linux (there were forum posts about how it didn't work on non-Windows boxes).

I did upload some files from either my wife's windows partition (which we keep for legacy devices that work only in Windows, e.g., a Sony NW-HD1 that was given to us and that doesn't seem to have any linux support at all). I remember using windows under vmware to test the bulk uploader too.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) and I'm glad to report that the bulk uploader now works with the Sun Java 1.6 JVM. I don't have 1.5 installed just now, so I don't know if it'll work with that. But I'm glad that I've finally got a working setup.

svn:externals and git

A previous post has a comment from Jakub Narebski pointing me at git submodules. A quick google points me at: Andy Parkins' post on git submodules and svn:externals on kerneltrap.

That's cool. And if the anyone on my subversion using team ever uses svn:externals I'll be glad of the workaround. I hope, though, that git-svn support for svn:externals will mature before then :-).

I'm very happy with how flexible and powerful git is, and how I'm able to work on our svn repository while taking advantage of git capabilities that aren't in svn or are very painful to use. But I'm drowning quite well in java and erlang just now, and I'm not going to be able to spend time figuring out git nuances. Much better to sit around minding my own business while the product matures :-).

git-log --name-status

I've been using git for the past month (I just realized that today was my first whole month at work) and I'm very happy with it. I'm used to svn (and before that, CVS) and I'd gotten around the ugly (so much so that I never used the version discussed in the subversion book for versions below 1.5) merging in svn by using svnmerge (which, while not making merging painless, did make it sufficiently less painful that it was actually usable).

For a long time I looked at git but never actually dived in head first since casual acquaintance with git made me feel dumb. Now that I've been using it for a month though (well, with git-svn, since my current project uses svn), I'm getting used to it, I've got the basic workflow down and I'm slowly learning more advanced workflows.

For a long time too I didn't like git because I thought it didn't have an equivalent to "svn log -v", that is, show the revision number, author, message, and the affected files. git-log showed the first three, but not the last. I was probably looking at an early version of git though, this would have been in 2006 or so. Sometime in revision 1.4, git-log got --name-status, but I didn't notice. Anyway, it required -r if you wanted to see recursive changes. 1.5 has better behavior now. --name-status shows filenames and what was done to them (deleted, added, modified, etc), and the -r is implied.

There are still some things I'm not clear on (e.g., how to do the equivalent of svn:externals, which is probably a SMORTD, a simple matter of reading the documentation). But given that the main VCS at work is SVN, how to work with svn:externals with git and git-svn :-).

I'll get there though. Although it may take a while since, in fact, we don't use svn:externals or similar in our current projects (in fact, the reason I decided to use git and git-svn was because we don't have the regular trunk and branches structure either, and being the new guy, I didn't want to be creating a test branch for myself at the root of the svn tree :-).

In any case, git-reset and friends (i haven't tried the --interactive options to git-commit or git-rebase and friends yet, but I will, one of these days) are great helps and because of their (admittedly, simple) enhancements to my workflow, I'm not going to be switching back to pure svn.

Our project isn't so large that the git vs svn speed difference is a factor, but I have (at a previous job) worked with sufficiently large trees and branches that the speed of git would have been a huge help. On the other hand, as smart as my co-workers were, at that job, I think that pushing git into the organization would have been too big a challenge in the time I had. svn was certainly the better choice there (since svnmerge was available, before I learned svnmerge, I spent far too much time hand-merging between branches).

Recovering, not so gracefully

My laptop's DVD-RW drive stopped working a month or two ago. I didn't mind much since it's not essential. I can always use my wife's laptop when we have DVDs for our son to watch. I ordered Ubuntu Hardy desktop and server CDs via shipit and I got those a few weeks ago. I did want to install Hardy, but it wasn't a big deal, so I waited until I could figure out how safely.

The only thing I really *needed* the DVD drive for was for booting rescue DVDs. I didn't want to try to do an online Hardy upgrade if I couldn't go into a rescue DVD if something broke and the laptop couldn't reboot (that's happened to me once or twice, on doing an online update).

I downloaded the RIPLinux iso and installed it to my USB flash drive. I thought I could use that for rescue. Unfortunately, when I tried to do some grub surgery on my laptop, I made it unbootable. Mainly, because I'm not intimately familiar with grub (I'm a lilo man, myself, and the only thing I really dislike about Ubuntu is that it's inherently grub-centric), but also because it thought my hard drive was at /dev/hdc but Ubuntu sees it at /dev/sda. I couldn't fix that either since RIPLinux would boot and assign the flash drive it was booting from to /dev/sda.

Fortunately, when I went to Pendrive Linux and saw a tutorial on how to install Hardy onto a USB drive FROM the ISO. The recipe there worked flawlessly and I've now got a flash drive that is an Ubuntu Hardy installer as well as a live Linux. If I go to an internet cafe, or someone else's computer, I can use it and not worry about the viruses they've got running around in their Windows installation.

So I've got Hardy installed now. I'll bring the laptop to work tomorrow, update, and install all the development packages I need that aren't on the default Desktop install. I work at Catalyst IT Limited. Online updates and apt-get are very fast at work since Catalyst hosts the New Zealand mirrors for Ubuntu and Debian (and a bunch of other distributions).

Next, I need to figure out how to install OpenSolaris from some device other than the install CD :-).

Java and Erlang

I just got through my first week at work. It's a great environment, lots of geeks around. My primary project is in java, and I'm taking some time to re-acclimate. I'd avoided java in the last 5-7 years or so because I thought it had gotten over-complex. I have now just jumped into the deep end :-). I'll survive, of course, and maybe even learn something. As to whether what I'll learn is going to be worth the trouble, I'm not sure. It probably will be. Although it's going to be painful for a few months.

My secondary project is to be the backup (or go-to, I'm not very clear on that yet) guy on a project that was done in erlang. I've been interested in learning erlang, so I'm certainly interested in doing the project. On the other hand, the guy who implemented it (and who has since left the company for a job in Paris) gave me an introduction to the system and it was overwhelming.

I've just jumped into the deep end twice. I'm going to be gasping for air for a while.

Tom Lane pics

I've always wondered what Tom Lane looks like. He's a great presence on the postgresql mailing lists, always informative, always polite and knows incredible amounts of postgresql implementation details.

Now there are pics of Tom Lane from PGCon2

Ehem, apparently a Mac user :-). I'm not going to be swayed to switch to Mac just because Tom uses one. Well, maybe a little. But not enough to buy one :-).

Java

I just got an offer of employment at New Zealand's largest open source oriented company. I'm looking forward to working with 80+ geeks. I'm going to be working in Java though, with some PHP. I've worked with java a lot in the past, but I'm not up-to-date on the latest developments. As it happens, I've been told that most of the code is still 1.4. That's a mixed blessing. Some things in 1.5 and later are nice, but a lot else is horrible. Still, I'm going to miss autoboxing.

I've got a week to learn some basic things. I'm going to see how much of Java, Tomcat and Spring I can learn in 9 days or so :-)

Nontechnical, but must-post

OK, there have been a whole slew of articles about recent discoveries regarding platypus genes. I didn't post about them because it was enough that I read about them (frankly, I only read one of those links, I only searched for the other links so that I could have a whole slew of links here :-).

I finally broke down and posted about the discoveries though because, after all, who can resist a headline like this?

Platypus Genes Hint at Human Scrotum Origins

Of course, Pharyngula on this whole thing is better. The original study would be even better, but I am avoiding embarrassment by ignorance, and also sleep by boredom, so I'm not reading that :-).

GW Bush: Impeach, Prosecute, Convict, Execute

I've got "Impeach, Prosecute, Convict, Execute" in my email sig, in reference to that Abject and Miserable Failure, George W Bush.

I'm taking that part off temporarily though, since I'm sending out job applications. No need to ruffle the feathers of any strongly anti-death-sentence hiring managers out there :-).

I had also taken off URLs for this blog and my other me since someone pointed to a spamhaus post that indicated it might be used by yahoo.com (and related properties) as an indicator of spam. In fact, I added the impeach, prosecute, convict, execute text because I had removed the blog links and wanted something to take their place :-).

Well, when I stop emailing job applications, I'll put something back in the sig.

Finally, Debian on NSLU2

I won a linksys NSLU2 at a TradeMe auction last month.

I couldn't get it running immediately since the power supply that came with it wasn't the right one. The seller had bought it in Australia and I think he got a unit where the power supply had been switched (maybe it was a U.S. unit and the australian seller replaced the power supply since the outlet jacks are different). In any case, Phil (the seller from whom I was buying), didn't know the power supply didn't work since he never got around to turning it on.

It took a while to get in contact with him (yahoo was filtering my outgoing email to Phil, considering it spam for some reason, probably because of some text on my sig). After some back and forth we finally sorted it out and, he sent a replacement power supply, we had to have that replaced again because the jack was the wrogn size too, and we finally got the right power supply and I got it working today.

I immediately installed Debian on it. That does take a while to install since the CPU is pretty slow, so I guess unpacking, installing and generating cryptographic keys and such take a while. I'm going to de-underclock the NSLU2 one of these days. Apparently, the CPU in there is forced down to half its speed. I can remove a resistor and double the speed. On the other hand, I'll take my time since I have a history of breaking hardware :-). Best to take my time and do things right :-).

I had planned to have it boot from one of my 60GB external USB drives, but there was a problem with that. It thought the drive had bad sectors. It didn't though, I ran badblocks on it (well, actually, mkfs.ext3 -c -c) and there are no media errors. Maybe it's just the low quality drive enclosure making the drive seem marginal. I just installed debian on a flash drive and then (with some work with fdisk, mkfs, mkswap, etc) copied the flash data to the external hard drive. The Slug is now booting from the 60GB drive, after those gymnastics.

I've got a self-powered Maxtor hard drive enclosure with two full size (3.5") drives in there. I'll use that as my secondary drive for the NSLU2. I used a power meter to measure power draw by my laptop, by the NSLU2+USB laptop drive, and by the Maxtor drive, and the Maxtor drive takes so much power I don't want it to be on all day :-). The NSLU2 with one external laptop drive only draws between 7 and 11 watts. That's very nice. The Maxtor enclosure, by itself, draws 26 watts even when there's no activity. That's not so cool since my laptop draws less than that at low CPU speed, and only around 48 watts at high CPU speed with the CPU fully loaded.

I've got just a basic install on the SLUG for now (well, I installed build-essentials, although there's not much profit from building from source on a 133Mhz CPU :-). I'll build it up slowly, probably installing an openvpn server (I've got openvpn on my laptops now, and firewall rules on the router to let openvpn through) and possibly moving my postfix+dovecot+fetchmail+ypops+bogofilter+spamassassin setup to the SLUG.

My thanks to ian sison for pointing me at the NSLU2. He told me about it maybe a year ago, but my wife and I were in the midst of preparations to immigrate to New Zealand, so I didn't try to buy one then. I've had a few months at home, taking care of Timmy and after losing one or two trademe auctions on an NSLU2, I've got one now :-).

I'd love to upgrade the memory on this NSLU2 too, but I can't do it, so I'll need to see if I get to know anyone with the requisite soldering skills :-).

regionset is cool, thanks Cedric

I've moved to New Zealand with my family and after a few weeks getting all set up, I went to the library and got a library card. I then borrowed some children's DVDs for my son to watch occasionally.

I found, though, that I couldn't use them on my laptop. Fortunately, we left the original windows on my wife's laptop (but dual-booting to linux, which she uses almost exclusively). I found that I could play the DVDs there.

After two weeks of messing around with this I finally posted a question on the Philippine Linux Users Group mailing list and got exactly the answer I needed (this answer probably also helping dido sevilla, who had the exact same problem). It seems my DVD drive has a region setting hardcoded into it somewhere. If playing a DVD with a different region setting, it's necessary to change the hardcoded region. Unfortunately, there's a small number of changes available. Beyond that, I suppose it won't change anymore. Fortunately I didn't bring any US region DVDs with me, so I won't have to worry about having one laptop be for US DVDs and another laptop be for NZ DVDs :-).

sudo apt-get install regionset
sudo regionset

and then choose the region (4, for Australia, New Zealand).

For Phil Wynn

Hi Phil,

I've emailed you but I see no reply. Possibly an anti-spam filter is eating things, so I'll post the text of my reply to you here and send you an innocuous email with the link.

---- message follows ---
Re: Trade Me Auction: 148561162 -- Linksys NSLU2 Network Attached Storage (NAS)
From: Gerald Quimpo
To: "Phil Wynn"

Hi Phil,

On Monday 14 April 2008 13:16:36 you wrote:
> Just checking, did you receive the parcel?

Yes I did. I also emailed you, but possibly that got lost (or eaten by a spam
filter) or something.

here's what I said then:
>>>>
>>>>On Wednesday 09 April 2008 07:59:15 you wrote:
> If you dont receive the package within a couple of days, please let me
> know.

I received it the other day. Didn't get around to looking at it til
just now.

Did you get this working at all? Where did you buy it? I've been trying
to get the power jack in and it won't go in. It's not that it's too tight,
it doesn't even seem to be the right size (although it *looks* right,
it won't go in at all though, even when I exert some force).

Do you have the receipt from when you bought it? Might need to
have it repaired or the power pack replaced.
<<<<<

oh, and I signed it "tiger", which is my nickname, but possibly why you
might have ignored it :-).

by the way, i think i'm mistaken about the jack being the wrogn
size. instead, the inner part of the power conection (the part in the
NSLU2 seems not to be a regular cylinder. instead, most of it
is a cylinder but part of it seems to have some metal protruding
or welded on so that the power cable can't mate with it. but i'm
not really very sure about all this, weak eyes and i have no
magnifying glass available.

Gerald


---- message ends ----

Switching to Kmail

I've used Gnome Evolution for many years. I've looked at various email clients over the years (sylpheed, kmail, thunderbird, and very long ago, pine, mutt, elm and mail) and Evolution had the right mix of features that I needed.

Mainly, I stuck with Evolution because it has realtime-updated search folders. That is, it's possible to create a virtual "Folder" that is actually a search into other real folders, with logical criteria. It's like a view in SQL.

I used that for having an "Everything" folder, which was a view into all emails in all real folders (because I cut my email apart into many folders, for easier management, and so that I don't have a single large Inbox with 50,000+ emails in it). I also used it for showing unread email for some very voluminous mailing lists. In evolution, it's not convenient to find the next unread message (well, I never spent the time to find the keyboard shortcut for that, although there probably is one). So I just created search folders that showed only unread messages.

An upgrade to ubuntu gutsy's Evolution has left evolution slightly unstable though. Evolution would crash for no reason, or it would crash because, just after starting it, while it was fetching mail, I would click on the fetch mail icon and it would get confused. Evolution also feels like it's not being maintained. That's no big deal since it's already pretty complete, but I've been seeing it get unstable as crash bugs aren't fixed while some new features get in. So I decided I needed to switch to some other mailer.

I looked at Kmail and Thunderbird. Sylpheed-claws doesn't install cleanly as a package in Gutsy (or in my config, anyway), so I just ignored that.

Kmail has pretty much all the features I needed (and some I wanted):

1. Choice of maildir or mbox (I tested maildir last night on reiserfs and xfs,
I expected reiserfs to be much faster than xfs. Was very surprised to see
xfs (1.5 minutes) beat reiserfs (2.5 minutes) in a simple little "read many
little files and search for a string" benchmark). Fortunately, my /home is
already a luks encrypted xfs.

2. Strong mail filtering functionality. A nice surprise is the automatic
anti-spam support. It supports both bogofilter and spamassassin, and
it creates filters which will register an email as either spam or ham
using the bayesian classifier in either of those. The filters just
classify the email as spam or ham and then either move the email to the
spam directory or keep it in the current directory. I had scripts to
do that in Evolution. Didn't think to do it with Evolution's built-in
filters though.

3. Search/Virtual folders.

It's slow though. Slower than evolution at most things, and I can make it pause with some large tasks (evolution seems to be much more multi-threaded or multi-process or whatever, in any case, it's harder to make the UI pause). And the Search/Virtual folders have a stupid bug (or maybe it's a feature, I don't understand how that could be though). When the preview pane is displayed, clicking on a virtual folder makes all unread email in that folder automatically change their status to read. This is bogus. It might make sense if the email that is selected in that folder is marked read, but not ALL of them. There's a bug report on it. I don't know why it's a wishlist. I think I saw this bug already the last time I looked at Kmail and I backed off from switching then.

This time I switched anyway because Kmail has keyboard shortcuts to go to the first, next, prev,last unread emails. That's enough of a workaround that I can deal with switching. I'll be able to work with my large mailing list email folders. I won't be using Saved/Virtual folders for much else and I can wait for this bogosity to be resolved.

I looked at Thunderbird, but there are too many things missing. For one thing, I can't run a filter on a set of selected emails. As far as I can tell, one has to run a filter on a whole folder. Sometimes though, I need to do subset filtering (particularly when developing a new filter incrementally, on a very large folder, so that whole folder filtering is very slow). I can't run external commands in a filter (can't do that in the filter definition either in Kmail, but you *can* do it in the filter action. Thunderbird can't do it in the filter action either). And there's no maildir support. maildir support is important because if the mailer gets unstable, you lose just one or a very few (depending on number of working threads) messages. An unstable mailer that uses mbox can lose the entire mbox if it really loses its mind. In fact, the reason I decided to switch away from Evolution is because after a security upgrade (pilot error, I had it run the upgrade while evolution was still running, I should have stopped the client) it deleted all email in my inbox with dates after Dec 7, 2008 (approximately, I forget the exact last date).

I may look at Thunderbird again in a few months, particularly if Kmail doesn't fix that bogosity.

Loyalty is short-lived

While Telecom's customer service is outstanding, the actual internet service isn't that great. In particular, the bandwidth cap (in my case 3GB/month) is the sum of downloads and uploads. This isn't what I was told at the telecom sales office we subscribed at. I'm sure the telecom sales guy was just confused. He wasn't trying to lie to us, he just didn't know that the cap is the sum. He thought uploads weren't counted at all and that only downloads contributed to the cap.

As it is, this is going to put a cramp into my posting Timmy Videos to youtube. Or pushing pictures up to photobucket. With me, objective measures win over soft, touchy-feelie values. All things being equal, I'd stick with Telecom because their customer service has been great. But if some broadband provider were to suddenly provide internet access without caps, or with higher caps or no upload limit, then I'd switch immediately. Or maybe wait two to three months for telecom to catch up, and if they didn't come up with a competitive offering, then switch. Touchy-feelie good feelings are great. But bandwidth trumps touchy-feelie :-).

"Lost" some email

In a glitch that I don't quite understand, I "lost" some email. It's not really lost. I keep a copy of everything on gmail. So it's still there. But it's very inconvenient to try to restore what was lost because gmail doesn't have a flexible way of saying, "reset the end of my already-downloaded list of emails to this particular email". Instead, I can either download everything again, give up on the "lost" email, or workaround somehow.

I'll probably give up. The email is on gmail, so I can always get back to it. I could workaround by forwarding all those emails to myself and then, on the receiving side, editing the From: and date sent of each email. But that's no fun. I certainly don't want to download everything again because I'm in New Zealand, and broadband here has a bandwidth cap. Mine is 3GB/month. When I go over, download speeds will drop to 64kbps or so. That's not too bad, but this isn't important enough for that.

I think that evolution got confused because evolution was running, and then I ran Ubuntu's automatic updater and evolution got updated. Possibly there was some confusion regarding evolution-data-server or similar. That'll teach me to keep programs running which are being updated. I think, though, that this is the first time I've been caught by updates updating running programs. Ah well, live and learn. Or maybe not. I'll probably forget and this'll happen to me again.

I've been putting off running postfix, fetchmail and an imapd daemon locally. I've done that in the past, it helps with reliability, automatic backup and spam classification with .procmailrc, etc.

I think I'll put it off some more though. Gmail has a copy of all my mail, and I can get a relatively recent copy of my Inbox (the only file affected) from my rdiff-backup backups. That'll bring my Inbox forward to sometime early this month. Then I'll just have about a week and a half of personal mail left on gmail. I would probably then forward those to myself since there'd be few enough of them.

Quality Service from Telecom

I've been busy with moving to New Zealand with my family. This process has been going on for close on two years now. We arrived a 5 weeks ago, my wife is now working at the foremost open source oriented software development company in New Zealand, we've moved into a new rental home, things are moving forward quickly.

As part of moving into our new home (it's not an apartment, although it is a rental, since it's a standalone house with a little garden and garage) we had the utilities registered in our name, and we subscribed to Telecom for our home phone. We also went ahead and subscribed to telecom's broadband plans. This was mainly for convenience. New Zealand has naked DSL, it's possible to get DSL without a landline phone service. We thought we'd just go the convenient way and get both, and then switch later as necessary.

We probably won't now though, because I've been very happy with Telecom's call center service. I rang the call center and ordered the broadband service. All of this was done over the phone. I then rang again because I wanted to get some dialup service for the week or so that it would take to receive the ADSL modem/router. First of all, on the broadband, I was told that they had a promotion for online subscriptions. Online subscribers would get free 2 months of service. But the call center operator said that we'd get the free 2 months of service anyway even though we weren't subscribing online, because she'd just enter the order and we'd get the promotional 2 months free. She also said that Telecom had a promo on the broadband hardware package. There was an NZ$100 discount on the package (ADSL modem/wifi router and a few ADSL filters) so it would only cost NZ$100. Good deal.

I later called Telecom because I wanted to subscribe to their dialup service for a month, just til the DSL was up and running. I was told that normally broadband subscribers were given free dialup accounts to use until DSL was up. Good deal.

The Telecom call center support person later called me because he said he'd reviewed my broadband application and there was something wrogn with the order for the broadband router. That's pretty good service, good initiative.

So finally I called the call center again, spoke with someone who sounded Filipino (I guess they don't hire just Kiwi accents) and she investigated the error, and fixed it by removing the old order and re-creating it. I had to do the third call since the second support center person (the one who discovered the problem) was in the dialup support section and couldn't help me with broadband.

Altogether, it was very good to see really good, pro-active, genuinely customer satisfaction oriented service in action. I may still jump ship to some other broadband suppliers, but the barrier to jumping ship is now higher than it used to be.