Joe's Random Ramblings

It didn't take long for the disappointment over Apple's new product iPad to show up on YouTube.
No wonder, with a device that evokes memories of MS-DOS: no multitasking. The 80ies called: They want their single-user, single-program system back...
Add to that that there is no USB and no camera, it is likely to end up as a dud. Anybody remember Newton?

But the fanboys will of course continue to buy anything with the bitten apple on it.
For these people, Gizmodo has an appropriate (fake) ad.

I just came across this story about a TSA agent who planted a bag of white powder into a passenger's bag, and then pretended to have found it there.
This really leaves me speechless.
What idiots is the TSA hiring???
And all that happened to the guy is that he got fired???
Passengers get into lots of trouble when they make "bomb" jokes, and that guy gets off so lightly???
As far as I am concerned, that TSA guy fits the description of a terrorist, and he should be prosecuted as such.

Hat's off to The Register for the link.

When Barnes & Noble announced their eBook reader, the Nook, a couple of weeks back, I decided to pre-order it. I was in the market for an eBook already, anyway, and I had decided to not buy Amazon's Kindle because of their remote killswitch debacle.
B&N originally said they'd ship by November 30, but it was delayed a bit. It finally shipped on Dec. 8. They added free overnight shipping, so I got it yesterday, on Dec. 9.
I have played with it a bit, and my first impressions are that it is a good device. I know that there are some not-so-good reviews out there, but I didn't have any problems.
Boot-up is a bit slow, but not too bad. And I have so far mostly put it in sleep mode, which means I get right back to the spot where I was before. It comes out of sleep mode quickly. It also hasn't crashed on me.
The menu navigation works well. And the nice thing over the competition is the Wifi support. I was able without problems to connect to my home Wifi network, using WPA.

Recently, I made the mistake of buying a relatively expensive item (a Sonos Zoneplayer S5, ca. $400) at a local Best Buy store.
Unfortunately, the item was sold out pretty much everywhere else, with Amazon showing a delivery time of 1-2 months. Since I needed to have this before Christmas (I was traveling and wanted to take that item with me), ordering from Amazon was out of the question.
So, I am going to the local Best Buy store, with Best Buy being listed as authorized retailer for Sonos.
First problem: I couldn't find the item, or anything from that manufacturer anywhere. Neither could the sales guy I asked. Eventually, he found some colleague who told him where to find it, in a somewhat separate part of the store branded "Magnolia", which is where Best Buy sells high-end audio-video components. And sure enough, they had a display of all the Sonos components there. But nothing in stock (it took the sales guy even more time to figure that out.)
Being handed to another sales guy, one who handles the high-end stuff, I was informed that while they don't have it in stock in the local Best Buy, another Best Buy store has 3 items in stock. So, I order it, they ship it to the local store and I can pick it up a couple days later. I leave happy.

Fast forward to the day after Thanksgiving, when I wanted to pick it up...
I patiently wait at the store pickup counter, while the Best Buy employees try to locate the item.
Eventually, it turns out the item arrived at the store 2 days before, but was sold to somebody else! What the ?!? The mind boggles.
The only option they gave me was canceling my order, and then reordering it. So, that's what I did. They again ship it to the local store from the other store that now has 2 items in stock. And I can pick it up a week later or so.
That second shipment was, to a lesser extent, also weird. The store that has the S5 in stock is about an hour or so away from where I live. Yet, they apparently shipped the S5 to their main warehouse, and from there to the local store, with the end result that it took a week and a half to ship it. At that speed, I could have walked to the other store

If there ever has been a reason to prefer online stores over the brick-and-mortar ones, this is it. This experience ensures that I will never buy anything over $10 or so at Best Buy again.

Earlier this year, Yahoo changed the login protocol for the Yahoo Instant Messaging service.
This resulted in Kopete, the instant messenger tool for KDE, to no longer being able to log into the Yahoo IM service. The background is explained in detail here.
There was a quick fix for KDE 4.x available, but people like me who are using KDE 3.5 and don't think KDE 4 is ready for primetime yet (or who just don't want to change an otherwise perfectly running system), were left out, essentially forcing us to use another IM client, like Pidgin.
Eventually, though, somebody created a patch for KDE 3.5 for Ubuntu, which solves the login issue.
I am using Slackware, not Ubuntu, though, so I used the Slackware build system to create a kdenetwork package for Slackware 12.2 that contains the fixed Kopete.
I used the source code from the Slackware 12.2 DVD, just adding two files in the source/kde/kdenetwork directory: a shell script which applies the patch during the build process, and the patch itself.
The final Slackware 12.2 kdenetwork package is here (12MB.) It can be installed in two steps:

1. Remove the old kdenetwork package: removepkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2.tgz
2. Install the new kdenetwork package: installpkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2-yahoo-login.tgz


Update: The ICQ protocol also is broken in the latest kopete for KDE 3.5.
Using the patch from here, I have now created a new Slackware 12.2 kdenetwork package that re-enables both the Yahoo and the ICQ protocols. It is just another patch that gets applied to the normal source package. The resulting binary package, with both patches applied, is here. Similar to the instructions above, it can be installed this way:

1. Remove the old kdenetwork package: removepkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2.tgz
2. Install the new kdenetwork package: installpkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2-yahoo-icq-login.tgz


Update 2: Since sometime in October or November 2010, ICQ connections started to fail. As it turns out, this has nothing to do with the protocol. AOL recently sold ICQ, and as a result, the server URL has changed. In the Kopete configuration for ICQ, in the account preferences, the default server needs to be overridden and changed to login.icq.com. The port number stays the same.