My son plays LOTRO — The Lord of the Rings Online. By virtue of this
fact, I, too, play some LOTRO. There’s something inherently geeky about
meeting up with your 12-year-old son to “hunt some orc” online. He’s
loved The Lord of the Rings since seeing the Fellowship of the Ring at
the ripe age of 4 1/2. Yes, I know, I’m going to hél. Since then, he
devours anything LOTR related, books, games, name it. So, when the Mines
of Moria expansion came out, it was a foregone conclusion that he would
want to have this installed as soon as possible. Well, I run a linux
system — in case you couldn’t tell from the rest of the blog entries on
here — and, so, my getting things set up, on my system, to do test
installations so I don’t hose anything up on his Win7 laptop,
well…it’s trickier.

First off, let’s get this out of the way — LOTRO is a large pain in the
rear to get running *well* on a linux system if you don’t know what
you’re doing. I do, for the most part, so it’s only a small-ish pain in
the rear. There are things to minimize the rear-pain out there and I’d
used one of them to get the standard installation of LOTRO up and
running on my machine. In wanting to set up the Mines of Moria
expansion, I thought I would set it up in a different “bottle” or
$WINEPREFIX, as it were. This, as it turns out is a good idea, however,
the way I set about doing it was not. I chose the “easy way.” Oops.

The easy way is to use CodeWeavers’ CrossOffice/Games proggie and simply
install the game into its own little bottle (compartment, really…).
This, as it turns out, was dumb. I don’t really know *why* it was dumb,
from a “how the heck did THAT happen?” standpoint, but I know *why*
inasmuch as “because it was.” Now, I’ve used CrossOffice in the past
over the years and have run Office2000, Office2003 and so on with it
with great success. Having shaken the shackles of MSOffice in favor of
more open source apps, I have had little use for CrossOffice since what
I do run through Wine does so quite nicely, even LOTRO. So what on earth
possessed me to color outside the lines and add another layer of “what
could go wrong?” to this equation? Foolish hope that it would, indeed,
simplify a fairly complicated installation procedure.

So, I installed CrossGames. I then created a new bottle and installed
LOTRO:Mines of Moria. It never worked. It would freak out when going
through the server checks in the native client and blow up in with a
partial black screen and an obscured error message that told of doom and
asked if I had changed my resolution. Not good. The exact error for all
the search engine hits is “err:xrandr:X11DRV_XRandR_SetCurrentMode
Resolution change not successful — perhaps display has changed?” The
answer to this, of course, is no. However, there’s an underlying error
message hidden behind the quartered off screen, and that’s “Could not
initialize Direct3D. Must have DirectX 9.0 or higher [105].”

Sadly, this isn’t going to tell you how to fix those two errors,
*really,* though what I did works, mostly. I know — such
definitiveness. Here’s what I *did.* I removed CrossGames, completely. I
removed Wine completely. I deleted both .wine and .wine-lotro
directories (after backing up some things, of course). I reinstalled the
most recent stable version of Wine and Winetricks. I also installed
PyLotro — which is nice…when it works. For the record, PyLotro worked
PERFECTLY until this whole CrossGames fiasco. Also, for the record, I’ve
*never* had to go *this* scorched earth with any linux installation
prior and that includes some pretty festive go-rounds with DB2, Oracle8i
and, well, just about any IDE prior to 2004 that would lead one on a
trail of dependencies. I digress…

I also did something *smart* this time around. After looking for roughly
5 days on all the forums from Turbine to WineHQ to just about every
MMO-related board out there, I came “back to my roots.” I came back to
the script that made it work, the last time. Why had I not looked into
this, before? Um…because I forgot? That’s about the only real excuse I
have. So — what magic has made LOTRO work again? Go here:

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=14566&iTestingId=46193

Follow the How-To. Really. It errors out at the end but, as far as I can
tell, everything’s working AND inexplicably I’m running with high detail
with very little slowdown…something even my previous, working,
installation couldn’t boast. The downside? PyLotro still blows up with
the Direct3D error. However, the command line script (lotrolauncher.sh)
works beautifully and, as I’m not averse to command lines in the least,
I’m up and running again.

So, why the title, “The Lord of the Direct3D?” Well, it’s simple, it’s
still the force of evil out there that makes you go insane after a bit.
Additionally, once you get it working, simply imagine curling up around
the proper files for DX9 and mumbling, “my own…my precious…” Trust
me, it could happen.

With that in mind, it was with a large amount of trepidation that I installed Ubuntu linux on my XP box, Frankenstein.  For reference, Frank has been a rock-solid XP Pro box for close to 6 years.  It garnered the name Frankenstein because it hasn’t had a case for close to, well, 6 years because it has 4 hard drives a dvd-rw drive, 2 external card readers, 2 4-port USB hubs to which are attached a printer, scanner, three external HDs, my iPod cable, my RP350 effects processor and, occasionally, a TI calculator, which usually supplants the iPod.  With close to 600GB of storage, 3GB RAM and a still quasi-zippy 2GHz AMD processor, it was solid, reliable, and my main development machine for all things software development related.  Then, one morning, it wouldn’t boot.  It couldn’t find the NTLDR.  That’s bad, for reference.  I tried several repair methods, and I mean several…5?
Since I started this writing, Franky has died. A power supply upchuck and a toasted motherboard really made the OS moot. So, Arkham has replaced it, and after a wiggy power supply on IT, Arkham II is plugging along perfectly happily running Linux Mint 10 and never having to worry about dual booting…all the Windows I need live in very compartmentalized virtual machines and that’s how it’s going to stay.
I’ve been running Linux Mint for close to 18 months, now, and as the sole OS for close to a year. There’s no going back to Microsoft land…there just isn’t.

I set out with the single, laughable, purpose of getting my drives to mount consistently at chosen mount points. Certain programs — Rhythmbox, Amarok, VirtualBox, and so on… — get crabby about drives showing up at different mount points each time. More precisely, I get crabby about drives showing up at different mount points, especially when they’re the ultra helpful variety: both 250G drives mounted with the label “250GB External Filesystem.” “Duh.” Since they were NTFS, it was more than a simple pain to change the label on them even with ntfsutils.

Because I’ve worked with linux in one form or another since 1995 (dual-booting between WFW3.11 and Slackware 2.3…on 850,000 3.5″ floppies…), I thought I’d be OK editing my fstab in Webmin — with which I’ve worked since 1998 or so, with little to no problems — and, for whatever reason, boy was I wrong. Going in through the Filesystems module, I happily added mount points to each of the filesystem entries, as I’d done before, granted a bit of time before…I remember, fondly, finally moving to a 1.x version… At any rate, I think something got buggered up along the way because when I hopped into a shell and mounted -a, everything went to hell. Nothing mounted, properly, and the root was in read-only which caused the fascinating problem of exactly NO application or system function having privs to run. I could not even shut down. How sad is that?!

For starters, I simply wanted the two 250GB external drives to show up at consistent mount points. At the time, they were SDE1 and SDF1 (insert Robotech joke here…), so I thought I was safe in creating two happy directories in the /media directory — Dagon and Azathoth, respectively — and then having them mount there via the fstab. I was wrong. They merely mounted under their respective hardware IDs to the directories disk and disk_1. At this point, I figured, eh…fine. So, I went into the programs that needed to know where data was and felt safe, then, in pointing them to the drives. Apparently, that was a bad idea. The next time I needed to reboot, they mounted precisely opposite…not bloody useful.

It was at this point, I was sick of dealing with Kate or GEdit, so decided to go in through Webmin, and select precisely the mount points I wanted. This would be where the trouble hit. Something went bing, as detailed above.

Paring down fstab to its single / /dev/sda1 line, I set about to remedy this thing once and for all. However, I didn’t know how complicated it would be. No…it’s not that hard and the actually “taking care of it” was done in short order. It was the decision making process up to that point that was more than a little drawn out. The biggest question facing me was which filesystem to use. I was sick of the NTFS-to-linux latency and wanting everything happily native. That said, when it comes to native filesystems, there isn’t a shortage. I could have chosen EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, JFS, XFS and if I had put more effort into it, ZFS-Fuse.

I, intially, decided to format one drive to EXT4 and go from there. First, it should be noted that the throughput on the two external drives via USB2.0 when both were NTFS was at a paltry 3.5MB/s. Let’s just say it took a while to copy all 117GB from on to the other. Once everything was copied over, GParted was kind enough to get the drive where I wanted in a matter of a few minutes, including setting the label to ‘Azathoth’ so as to give Gnome, at least, a reference for consistent mount locales. This will become important in a minute…

One thing that struck me, though, was how much ruddy space EXT4 thinks it needs to chew up just by virtue of formatting. A completely blank drive, it formatted under NTFS to 232GB. In EXT4, I ended up with ~220GB free. In looking in GParted’s display, it shows that it’s formatted to 232.88GB. Cool, right? It also shows that 161.94GB are unused with 70.94GB. For those of us who have to use a calculator, that brings us to 232.88GB. Again, cool, right?

Well, one would think…look at a little discrepancy below… Yeah…Free space: 150.3GB as opposed to 161.94GB unused space. I guess my question is where did the other 11.64GB go?

So, then, it was necessary to think long and hard about the filesystem choice. I figured for Azathoth, we were going to be happy with EXT4 long enough to copy over all the data from Dagon in order to format Dagon to a native format…but which one?! I looked at the veritable merits, numerous blogs, several technical articles, a bunch of forum posts and the obligatory flame-war or two to see which one seemed to have fewer flaws. I finally settled on XFS for Dagon’s new format, and thus set about getting it ready to be formatted and be happy. The throughput from NTFS to EXT4 was consistently around 11.0MB/s, which was a dramatic improvement over the NTFS-to-NTFS transfer rate (3.5MB/s, if you recall). So, once everything was copied over, I hopped into GParted and converted the ol’ fish god to a faster, native filesystem.

In a stunning display of “what it says you’re going to get is what you actually get,” the XFS format seems to be consistent with the data… It formatted to 232.88GB, as it should, and when you do that maths, end up with 232.89GB, reflecting 84.69GB unused. When loaded in Nautilus, it shows that Dagon has, indeed, 84.7GB free. That’s more like what I expected to see. There was only mild disappointment in the throughput speeds when I copied the files back to Dagon from Azathoth, averaging right around 9.5MB/s. It could have been a lot worse — it could have been the NTFS transfer speed. Of course, it didn’t help that I was copying over close to 950K files, a large contingent of which were smaller files which are not XFS’s strong suit. Of course, this can be tweaked through mount options and, really, it’s not that big of a speed hit and I get the full reported size of the disk. That’s all I could ask for.

So, the upshot is, to me, we’ll see how the performance is, overall between the two drives, as that may determine who becomes what, should I feel the need to wipe drives, again. While I am currently enjoying the idea of having access to all the precious GB that XFS seems to offer that EXT4 seems to cordon off for who knows what, I am also all about discerning, really, which of the two is better for what I need. Virtual machines and so on will help me along with that decision…I’ll keep you posted.

Why?

1. Trial Runs at Little Cost

I would be lying if I didn’t say that the idea of not having a huge cost
of ownership for the basest level of your system, the OS, wasn’t really,
really, appealing. I don’t like the idea of shelling out close to $400
on an OS and hoping that everything goes well because of point #2 –
support — and how much pain will be involved in getting it up and
running. I like the idea of downloading an ISO image, burning it and –
*gasp* — trying it out, first. Being very careful not to utterly blitz
important data, it’s very nice to just blow away a drive and run a clean
installation to see if it is what you need and, if not, be able to put
either another “flavor” on the system, or going back to whatever the OS
of origin was. Now, I know, with the new trend…well, not so new, but
bear with me… of having the LiveCD/DVD ISOs with which to run the OS
from the CD/DVD and be able to test drive from there is very nice. I
still, however, seem to be one of the luddites inasmuch as I like to see
how it will work with my actual system and not just the live environment
that has been tailored to see how it runs. That said, such
experimentation is either FREE or very low cost.

Can you imagine doing the above scenario with Windows? If you wanted to
run tests of XP, Vista (ack) or Win7, that would require all three, and
none of them are free…well, unless you’re doing something you
shouldn’t really do, but how are you supposed to test something to see
if you like it if you have no access to it and no money? Good question,
MS…

2. Support

OK, so Windows users love the fact that they have a giant coproation
behind them. I get that and, even up to a certain point, sympathize with
it. However, I’ve lived in the real world where support calls can be a
pain in the rump even with expedited “preferred” status due to company
subscriptions. You’d think that when you sign up for a $20K support
contract with MS, you’d do better than 5 or 6 45-minute phone calls to
fix something that, after having gone home and been able to look up on
the internet, should have been fixable in about 20 minutes with both
eyes closed. I can’t tell you what it is for a couple of reasons — the
company in question probably wouldn’t appreciate it and really, it’s
been long enough that the details are fuzzy…I just remember getting
off with MS the last time and not quite screaming about why things had
to be so difficult. So, this was the first shattering disillusionment I
had with MS.

Enter linux, where the opinion at large seems to be a complete lack of
support system for users when, in fact, the exact opposite is true –
it’s ALL user support. If you type your question into Google, odds are
very good there will be around 1.0503 million pages returned where
someone has run into the problem, or something similar. What’s better is
that most of these links are to forums that are bursting at the seams
with knowledgeable and helpful users who’ve been there and done that and
are more than willing to share the experiences and advice. What this
means that, unless you are having one of the most obscure problems in
the history of linux, someone will have run into it and, more
importantly, will have an answer or at least a suggestion to try within
a few hours.

I have, in my experience, only run into two problems that weren’t able
to fixed by searching the net and finding a previously answered
question. The two that remained I posted, one solved within 15 minutes
of posting. The other, for whatever reason, is in the realm of the
unknowable, and so I’ve moved on because it wasn’t something that was a
make-or-break error.

So, the bottom line for me, here, is that while there also seems to be a
solid windows user-based-support system, now, that wasn’t always the
case and the assistance I’ve received from the linux community over the
years has really endeared them to me. Not once have I been told I was an
idiot or newbie when asking a question — something that DID happen a
few years ago in a Windows forum, which, after having a been in a system
administrator position in a couple of places, irked me, a bit.

3. Update Love

I love MintUpdate and it’s varying relatives in the linux world. It
tells me, in an unobtrusive manner, that there are updates available for
varying items in my system. It then gives me the option to go in and
either update everything or select certain updates to apply while
ignoring others. It then downloads and installs everything in a slick,
unobtrusive, manner. Have I mentioned ‘unobtrusive?’ That’s important to
me…

I know, I know — WindowsUpdate exists for this purpose but brings with
it a number of *obtrusive* “features” that drive me absolutely nuts. The
main thing is that, by default, it downloads everything before telling
you that it’s available. This can be changed, but why have it that way
by default? Still, it’s just annoying to me — and that may just be
personal perception and/or preference at work, but the bottom line is
that the person having to use this system is…me.

The other thing that linux has over Windows in the form of updates
and/or additional software is the collection of repositories from which
to download new and/or improved software. I love jumping into a terminal
and, when I know exactly what I want or need, simply type sudo apt-get
install <thing I want> and away it goes, doing what it needs to satisfy
dependencies and install the software. If I’m feeling cheeky, I can use
Synaptic and it will do the same thing but with a nice happy list with
categories and life is good, as you can mark for installation, update
and removal all from one interface. Windows doesn’t have a good
equivalent that I have found and installing new software always seems to
run a risk to breaking something else. It’s nice to have something go
through and check dependencies to make sure I’m not going to do
something stupid…

I don’t know. This may be a push, in some peoples’ eyes, but I’m not so
sure. I’ve never had my system rendered useless after a batch of updates
from mintUpdate. I have, however, witnessed a laptop no longer able to
boot into anything but safe mode once ServicePack3 was installed for
WindowsXP. Not cool…

Conclusion

There are more reasons, and I may touch on those in later missives. For
now, I’m tired and not feeling very inspired. That’s a bad combination.
Of course, it doesn’t help with the frustration level stemming from one
of linux’s shortcomings — no REALLY solid blog client. Ah, well. I’ll
take stable and able to do just about everything else without
aggravation over a blogging client.

Clarification

Misconception: “Linux users switch to linux because they’re cheap and don’t want to pay for the software they use.”

Correlary: “…and are willing to accept an inferior product just because they’re cheapskates.”

Clarification: Over the years, I have paid for 8 distros, the most recent (and expensive) having been OpenSuse 8.2 at $64.95 when it was actually sold at BestBuy. I purchased Slackware 1.1 (came with a $50 book on Linux system management, which is good since it was a 50-disk download…), RedHat 4.3 ($5 from CheapBytes.com) and 7.1 ($2.99/CheapBytes.com), Debian 1.3 ($5/CheapBytes.com), StormLinux2000 ($2.99/CheapBytes.com), Mandrake4.5 and then 5.2 (both $5/CheapBytes.com), Caldera 1.3 ($10/CheapBytes.com) and the aforementioned OpenSuse 8.2. So, while some of those CD purchases through CheapBytes.com — which still operates today with great prices for CD/DVD-based installations of various distributions for, basically, the cost of materials and shipping — seem a little paltry compared to the $132 price attached to the Windows7 Pro retail package, some weren’t and, most importantly, it wasn’t about shelling out for the OS that was important, really.

Here’s where we get to the “Why?” and “Why Not.” sections of this entry. Please remember that, for the most part, these are purely subjective reasons and what’s good for me might not be good for you or anyone else. Disclaimer issued…now what?

Why Not.

1. Driver this, driver that.

I think my biggest pet peeve with the entire Windows, hell, Microsoft period, experience has been the drivers. Yes, you may snicker at a linux user griping about drivers. Trust me, I’ve modprobed my little heart out, too…that said…

Since the days of having to squeeze xyz drivers for certain peripherals into highmem and praying you still had enough free RAM to load whatever it was you needed in good ol’ DOS, be it 3.2 on up into Windows95 (DOS with a WM…). With Win95 and moving forward, we had what was/is affectionately known as “plug-and-pray” technology which, when paired with manufacturer supplied drivers, was supposed to make any peripheral you plug into your system automagically function properly. Usually, this was the case — after seven reboots and a few calls to the manufacturer to figure out why your faxmodem just blitzed the MBR on your hard drive. By the way — that’s a true story. What’s worse is that when I called Gateway to figure it out, I got, “Oh, yeah…that.” meaning that the problem had occurred before. Nice.

At any rate, enter WinNT4. I LOVE NT4. Given a choice between NT4 and Win7, if it weren’t for PNP and hardware drivers never working quite right, I’d choose NT4, every time. Why? Well, now, mainly because it would ROCKET on the current hardware specs. At any rate, NT4 was a nightmare. My second choice for Windows OSs to use would be Win2000. I love (not LOVE, but love…) Windows2000. It was rock-solid stable and did what it needed to do with minimal fuss. When I installed it on a laptop this past summer, it flew. I had no sound and limited touchpad support, so I ditched the idea, but it was a very nice system. Drivers, however, were still a problem. I remember when XP came out, there were still huge problems with drivers for the hardware we were using and the drivers released from the manufacturer would say lovely things like, “[product x] for Windows95, Windows98, WindowsNT4.0 and WindowsXP. No Windows2000 support.” Ugh.

That brings us to the current “engine” of Windows — XP/Vista/7. You’ll notice I carefully sidestepped ME and Bob. This was on purpose. XP was my OS of choice, even though it still had issues with older hardware, up until this spring. I was an early adopter of Windows7 after being one of the most vehement detractors of Windows Vista. To me, Vista was a beta test shipped out as a commercially viable product with a $259 price tag. With that kind of price tag, I expect anything — software, hardware, car… — to work as advertised. Vista hated me, and I hated it right back, going through tumultuous fits of driver hell with older printers, scanners, digital cameras, and video cards…not to mention sound drivers. Ugh. So, I went back to XP with which I had suffered fewer indignities. I figured Win7 might make up for this, since during my beta testing I had encountered very few problems with drivers not working or working … differently … than they should have. I was right, for the most part, but — enter point #2.

2. Neverending Malware.

To be clear, I am a firm believer in antivirus software. While I believe Norton to be a virus in its own right, AVG and AntiVir have been staples on my Windows machines since they were viable alternatives to the McAffee and Norton products. Still, the rule always was if you had a Windows PC, you had to have an antivirus package running at all times. This would be fine if a) the antivirus software didn’t routinely suck up 50%+ of the CPU time and 60%+ of available RAM or b) it caught everything. Now, I know there’s no catching everything. I’ve studied virus design. It’s freaking fascinating if you’ve never taken the time to look at polymorphic code in old 8086 assembler that crammed the ability to display a message, attach itself to executable code, shift its signature and blow stuff up all in 4K. If I sound a little starstruck, as a programmer by trade, that kind of efficiency is something that we all could aspire to achieve. See point #3.

Still, my decision to shift over to linux from Windows7, which I was *really* enjoying at the time, for the record, revolved almost solely over a virus. It was probably, ultimately, my fault. That said, I had AntiVir running active realtime scanning and AVG running every hour or so scanning core files and had them both, at different times during the week, running full scans. I had a good system going and nothing had gotten through that system since I put it into place back on my old XP machines. I also had SpyBot Search and Destroy running with all its TeaTiming real-time protecting glory. Additionally, I had Microsoft’s own Malware Destructor running its little scan once a week in case there was something SpyBot missed. It was with utter dismay that I got hit with something that rendered the OS unusable. Not command.com, regedit.exe, explorer.exe or anything else system related would function. This, to me, was unacceptable. Even with a firewall, 2 each of the antivirus and spyware removal packages, something got through. Something BAD got through. I refuse to think that it was some new morph of something that made it past the heuristics, so I had to make a choice: reinstall an OS with enough security problems for this to happen, or go back to what I knew I could lock down with no worries — linux.

3. Software obesity.

In a startling statistic, one in six Americans is obese. Not to be outdone, every release of every WinXX-based software package, be it operating system or new whiz-bang app, gains on the order of 1/4 of it’s original size with every release. The system requirements for Windows 1.0 were an 8088 with 640K and roughly 5MB of space on a “fixed disk.” Not horrible. My AmigaDOS 2.04 installation was ~800K and occupied ~55K of FastRAM, but who’s quibbling? When Windows 2.0 shipped, it needed 512MB RAM (which makes me wonder if the original specs for 1.0 were “mis-remembered” by someone along the lines…), DOS 3.0 and a graphics adapter card. When Windows3.0 came along, it added the requirement of DOS 3.1, 640K conventional and 256K extended memory to the game. Not too bad, right? Windows3.1 required DOS 3.1 running on an 80286 processor, 640K conventional RAM, 256K extended, with recommendations of 1MB extended for 286 and 2MB extended for 80386. A fixed disk with 6MB free was now required, with 10MB free being the recommended allotment. The obligatory video card requirements and, of course, a mouse. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 required at least a 386SX (no math coprocessor), DOS 5.0 or later, EGA graphics (sorry HGA users…) and around 15MB hard space.

So far, we have a 20% space requirment increase from Windows 1.0 to 2.0. From Windows 2.0 to Win3.1, we see a 66% increase in hard drive real estate required. From Windows 3.1 to WFW3.11, the footprint increases another 50%. So, in the span of 3.11 releases (major), we’ve actually increased the OS footprint by 200%. Yikes. It gets better.

Windows95 arrived and required a 386DX or 486 processor, 4MB memory, between 40 – 55MB depending if it’s an upgrade or a clean installation (the clean installation takes more…), VGA graphics capable of 256 colors and one 3.5″ HD floppy drive, though I would recommend installing from CD. Really. So, now we’re looking at a footprint increase of between 167% and 233%, depending on the installation. You also need double your RAM *if* you were already running 2MB RAM on your system previously. Windows98 required a minimum of a 80486DX/66 processor with 16MB RAM and depending on your installation (upgrade versus clean) and filesystem (FAT16 versus FAT32), it required between 120MB and 355MB and, finally, VGA graphics. Personally, I long for the days when any OS took “only” 355MB. Still, that is between a 200% and 545% increase in space consumption by just the OS. From the original 1.0 version, that’s a 6,100% increase overall OS HD footprint. Ouch.

I refuse to acknowledge WindowsME as an operating system — we called it “Mangled Edition” for a reason, so I’ll just move on to WindowsNT4.0, since it’s more the precursor to our current incarnations of Windows than the previous releases. It required a Pentium with at least 16MB RAM and roughly 110MB of hard disk space. That’s not so bad, really, compared to Win98, clocking in from an upgrade on Win95, for example, of only a 100% size increase, which, to be fair — NT4.0 was so much more solid than Win95, that’s kind of to be expected. From here, we upgraded to Windows2000. Win2K required a 133MHz Pentium with at least 32MB RAM — up 100% from NT4 — and a 2GB hard drive with 650MB free. For those counting, that’s almost 491% more footprint than NT4.

From Windows2000 we moved to WindowsXP, which needed, for the Professional Edition, a 233MHz Pentium running at least 64MB RAM, though it would prefer 128MB. Along with sundries of CD/DVD-ROM, keyboard, mouse, etc., it required *at least* 1.5GB of hard drive space. That’s a 131% increase over Win2K. It doesn’t stop, here, however. There are the *service packs* that clock in at 1.8GB for SP2 and 800MB for SP3. So, yeah, it required 2.6GB of *fixes* after its release, bringing the total footprint to 4.4GB. That takes the almost reasonable 131% and turns it into 777% more than Win2K. At this point, HDs were cheaper than they were, but still…if you look at those requirements versus what it needed back in 1985, it’s a little staggering, and we haven’t even hit either Vista or Win7.

Vista’s introduction gave us a look into indulgent, almost decadent programming with no real restraint involved as it seemed to be almost entirely bells and whistles with very little “operating system” improvements over, well…AmigaDOS 1.0…. (That would be hyperbole…but when the disk subsystem takes 25 minutes to copy a 25MB file across two USB drives, it felt a lot like dealing with floppies all over again. While it says the minimum requirements were an 800MHz processor with 512MB and 32MB graphics memory, you’d be silly to install it on such a beast. It would be painful. However, the HD free space required by Vista clocks in at 15GB. Yes, that’s GB…when compared to WFW3.11 at 15MB… So, to upgrade from XP to Vista presents an increase of 241%, if we go from SP3. If you go from base installations, alone, it’s a 1100% increase. I think a “holy moly!” would be appropriate, here.

Windows 7 is a vastly superior product in so many ways and actually comes with a lighter hardware requirements footprint than it’s unwieldy predecessor. While I won’t touch on the 64-bit version, as I haven’t used 64-B anything, OS-wise, it should be noted that requirements are roughly double that of the 32-B version. The processor and RAM requirements are more than Vista — 1GHz 32Bit proc running 1GB RAM (though I have a cobbled version running on 512MB, it’s not pretty…) — the HD requirements are what make me happy about this. It requires, according to spec, literally 1GB more space than Vista. That’s right — 16GB versus 15GB, meaning an increase of roughly 6.7%. That’s more like it. Now, just fix all the blasted security holes and I might consider a return. Might not, too, but without it, the deal’s off.

So, what we’ve seen, kiddies, is that in 25 years, HD space requirements have increased 319,900%. Yes, you read that correctly — three hundred-nineteen thousand nine-hundred percent. Follow the math: 16GB = 16,000MB – 5MB = 15,995MB / 5MB = 3199 * 100 = 319900. That’s a freakishly large increase in anything. It makes you wonder what the lines of code increase is, doesn’t it?

Now, I know – there’s the whole equal time thing and the whole issue that linux’s footprint size has also increased. I can’t argue that. My first linux partition lived, comfortably, in a 20MB partition leaving me with roughly 15MB free after installation. So, we start, in 1995/6 with a 5MB installation. Factor in that the most recent installation (the one I’m using, now) after OS installation and application installation (a LOT of stuff – OpenOffice; MySQL and Apache servers with data associated; several browsers; 2 ERP packages; Mono, C++; Gnome2 Xfce, WMii and all associated icon packs; Evolution, and so on…) and it weighs in at just over 11.7GB. The base installation, itself, was somewhere around 8GB. That’s still not *terrific* from someone who views anything over 1GB excessive (I sometimes live in the past…), but it’s a far sight better than twice that with 1/2 the performance. Did I mention the system I have has 2GB RAM a 3GHz proc and a built-in video card that doesn’t support OpenGL or Direct3D? Win7 had to be scaled back considerably to get it to run smoothly. My current linux installation runs almost perfectly and I still have breathing room on my system to install a considerable chunk of anything I want, even on a “tiny” 40GB drive.

4. Memory shrinkage.

This may fall under “bang for your buck,” but when I think of it that way, I feel bad for Windows, really, I do. What I really mean by “memory shrinkage” requires an example. Take Frankenstein, hereafter known as “Frankie.” Frankie’s a cobbled together system I built over the course of 3 or so years between 2003 and 2006, comprised of parts from here and there, hence the Frankenstein’s monster reference. It’s running an Athlon2800 which means somewhere in the 2.2GHz range and, at one point had 3GB RAM, but through a series of catastrophic RAM failures (the “newest” RAM being circa 2005, I believe…), it has been reduced to 512MB, which is roughly where it started back in 2003. This being the case, it started with Windows2000Pro. It ran very well with 512MB and life was generally good. Then came WindowsXP and after a a year of seeing how it played in the real world, I upgraded the system to XP from W2K and the first thing I noticed was that there was considerably less headroom and apps just weren’t quite as happy, running slowly or, occasionally, trying to address memory that wouldn’t be there, demonstrating the BSOD-ability of the newest OS.

This would be why I ran out and upgraded the memory. Here’s the thing, upon installing Windows7, we were generally happy. When the RAM died and I had to do some creative replacement (try explaining ECC polarity issues to an 11-year-old…and not sounding like a loon…) and ended up the Win7 with 512MB RAM, once again. Unlike W2K or XP, Windows7 is by and large useless with that amount of RAM. Loading programs is like the old C64 days where you’d enter LOAD “*”,8,1 and then go get some coffee — although, I was 11, so coffee wasn’t really my bag…maybe…just sit and be grumpy for 5 minutes…

What’s any of this have to do with “memory shrinkage?” Well, we know the size isn’t really shrinking — 512MB is still really 512MB. That said, it’s what you can do with it, which is decreasing by the iteration of operating systems, regardless of origin, be it MS Windows, linux, bsd, OSX, what-have-you. I’m picking on Windows because it seems to have the worst time of it. For reference, I loaded the LinuxMint live CD onto Frankie for giggles and, well, it flew. Yeah, that’s right — flew. The only lag in loading anything was reading from the CD, which is to be expected since it’s a live CD. So, my determination, in that regard, was that the $0.19 CDR with the name “minty” scrawled across it gave me much better bang for my buck than did the $219 priced Windows7 upgrade. For more expounding on “bang for buckness,” see the next point…

5. Quality, not price.

Windows 1.0 sold for $100. Windows 2.0, when it was released, was priced at $100, as well. Windows 3.0, upon release, sold for $149.95 with an upgrade price of $79.85. Windows 3.1 sold for $149.95 for the full installation while it sold for $79.95 for an upgrade. Thankfully, it looks like a price-point has been set, at least, for now. WFW3.11 seems to clock in at ~$139 according to PC Magazine circa 1994, which means, it probably started higher and that’s just what it was retailing for at that point. Likewise, it had Windows NT listed at $309. That was the “nice” pricing. When WindowsNT4 was released, it listed at $1,129. That’s a load of bread. Windows95, on the other hand, for it’s release, was $109. There were many specials at CompUSA and the like, retailing for $89, if I remember correctly, but I think my first experience with it was actually from a promotional copy sent to our office. I liked it enough to buy my own. Funny — 3 months later, I was dual-booting with Slackware… At any rate, Next came Windows98 which initially retailed for $209 but allowed for more inexpensive upgrades — $109 from Win3.1/WFW3.11/Win95 and $19.95 from Win98 first edition.

These were, really, the last of the DOS-based Windows OSs, so let’s move to the next generation. When Windows2000 arrived in Feb 2000, it retailed, for the professional edition, for $309 with the upgrade price being $219 from Win95/98 and $149 (after rebate) from WinNT3.51/NT4. To me, that’s pricey for an operating system. From Windows2000, we get some intermediate server editions that don’t apply to the average user, so let’s move to WindowsXP. The Professional Edition retailed for $299 with an upgrade price of $199. If you wanted the Home Edition, subtract $100 from each price.

From WindowsXP, we were saddled with Windows Vista. I have very little good to say about Vista, so I’ll stick to the facts — for the Home Basic version, it retailed for $199 with a $100 upgrade price. For the Home Premium, it ran $239 with an upgrade cost of $159. The Professional Version was renamed to “Vista Business” and retailed for $299 with an upgrade of, you guessed it, $199. The version that every seemed to want was the Ultimate release, and it retailed for $399, $259 for the upgrade. Once the first Service Pack was released, those prices dropped to $319 and $219, respectively. Yeah…

Finally, Windows7 was released to the world in the Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate editions, costing $199 ($119 upgrade), $299 ($199) and $319 ($219), respectively.

Now, what does the above have to do with anything? Well — from where I’m sitting, if you’re going to pay for software of the size and complexity of an operating system, especially the prices we’re talking, they should work well right out of the box. They should also be relatively easy to “fix” with updates and such, but, really…for $319, shouldn’t I be paying for some *extensive* beta testing in there? I know that for Win7, there was a LOT of beta testing…I was a beta tester, myself. That said, I also know that there are some things (issue #2) that aren’t covered, really, in beta testing and fall squarely in the lap of the manufacturer’s either inability or unwillingness to plug the security holes that allow bad things such as virii to infiltrate and render the entire OS useless. Remember, that’s $319. It’s not $109, nor is it $59, nor is it $2.99 to cover shipping. It’s with that in mind, that I choose quality over price. It’s not that “it’s free and that’s cheap and that’s why I’m going to use it!” It’s “my system ate itself and I paid *how much?*” and that’s where Linux comes in. Not only is the price right, but it doesn’t routinely go down in a situation as best described by Roy (IT Crowd, Series 4, Episode 5), “if it were a person, I’d shoot it in the face.”

Finally, in the “quality over price” debate is this — when I installed Windows7, what did I get? A fairly polished operating system that came with with MediaPlayer so I could listen to my MP3s and Internet Explorer so I could search the web for things I needed to raise my productivity levels above simply listening to my MP3s.

When I installed LinuxMint, what did I get? I got an OS that was lighter weight and faster. I also got OpenOffice (no need to shell out for Office) , GiMP (not quite PhotoShop, yet, but more than adequate), RhythmBox (no need to download iTunes with the dreaded Bonjour service/virus), VCD (so I wouldn’t miss MediaPlayer and all the licensing weirdness), FireFox (for web traversal), Gwibber (should I feel like tweeting) and a slew of other utilities — right “out of the box” that precluded the need to scour the web for things to get me going.

So, the quality argument is, as follows, “why should I pay $319 and not get what I need when I can download, legally, an OS that includes what I need?” You know the answer.

In Conclusion

This ran a little longer than I intended. I guess I start to obsess over stuff. This is why my hockey articles would take longer and longer to write, as well… At any rate, this is the “why not Windows” aspect of why I’ve turned back to a friend who treats me well, most of the time, and laughs at my jokes: linux. I can’t say that these reasons are your reasons and I can’t say that anyone else has taken the same path to get here that I have, nor can I say that linux is for everybody just as I can’t say Windows is for everyone. Although, really, I guess I could say why not? For me, linux’s pretty GUI (either Gnome2 or KDE4.5 are flashy enough to compete with the “gee whiz” factor of Aero) belies the stability and power under the hood. That’s my decision and I’m sticking with it.

It’s been a right long time since I’ve written anything.  There are reasons for that, but they’re by and large irrelevant for our purposes, here.  I’ve been here and there and everywhere and what has finally happened is that I’m trying to get back into the IT world doing what I’ve done for the past 15 or so years, writing code.  The catch?  I’m an old goat in this world: no one REALLY wants a Visual Basic 6.0 programmer.  Really.  If they do, they want you inasmuch as you know VB6.0 in order to convert apps over to .NET, be it VB.Net, ASP.Net or C#.Net.  I will admit — I hadn’t really worked in C# in a capacity that I would call “professional,” or even “mildly amateurish” at the time I started looking.  That said, the learning curve — which felt daunting when using VisualStudio 2002, 2003 and 2005 — was almost nonexistent using VS2008.   It just made sense.

Send in the Clones

I started looking at resumes, looking at source code of other folks and started trying to figure out how to ramp my skill up to what most companies would want — and fast!  You know what I found?  Imitation is irritating and just trying to mimic what’s out there will do nothing for you, especially if you’re like me and see programming as creating, an outlet by which to bend the computer to your will in order to produce something beautiful.  Well, OK, sometimes it doesn’t come out beautiful, but you know what I mean.  Order from disorder.  Taking what the corporate world seems to call SDLC and making it a birthing process.

Head First

So, I knew I needed to learn C#, immediately, and get as experienced as possible in as short a time as possible.  It sounds a lot like drinking your tea before it can steep, doesn’t it?  Well, I decided to create.  I have two projects that I am currently working on, now, that have pushed my brain a LOT and I’ve been getting VERY familiar with the ins and outs of C# and the .Net framework.  They’re both niche programs, but in their nichiness offered the ability to deal with things that I hadn’t often had crop up in the “real” world in exactly the same way, so it is experience and it’s head first.

The first project is RuneSong.  It’s probably what you think, if you think it’s a program that allows the user to do single, 3, 5, 9 and 24-rune castings.   Sounds simple, right?  Bunches of random numbers and displaying them to the user, right?  Not exactly.  I tell you what — everything was pretty simple until I had to generate random numbers between 1 and 24 and have 24 unique numbers.  My first attempt was inelegant, at best, and horrific, at worst.  When it would get to runes 23 and 24 it would basically generate a random number until it found one that wasn’t already in the list.  Yes, it probably would have gone forever if I had let it.  No, this isn’t very useful.  After a few of hours racking my brain and ALMOST having it — using linked lists, I nailed it, EXCEPT that the 24th number was always 1.  D’oh.  While I can’t give out any trade secrets, I will say that a self-reducing array did the trick.

The second project is the one getting most of the attention, right now, and that is the application I’m writing for Moonshadow Gardens daylily farm.  The app will allow for adding/removing/updating daylilies in both the main “inventory” and also the catalog.  There are some other business related modules involved and, finally, a quick and easy way to update the website from the app.  It’s pretty ambitious, but I’ve learned a LOT about C# and how it works with things I used to take for granted in VB6, like control arrays, and that’s cool — the things that were daunting are becoming almost second nature.  I’ve also learned how it interacts with not only the SQLServer2005 that ships with VS2008, but also MySQL and am making the app so that it can use either of those two and, also, Oracle, should there be a desire to do so.

MySQL?

During a technical interview, I was asked why I chose to use MySQL for the application rather that the bundled SQLServer.  I’ll tell you what I told them…  Original development took place on a PIII/730 with 512MB RAM.  Let me put it this way — when it comes to low overhead speed, MySQL ran circles around SQLServer for what I was doing.  Now, working on a 3GHz P4 with 2GB RAM, it’s a push, which is why I’m putting the additional modifications to utilize SQLServer and even Oracle, for the intrepid.  I drew the line at SyBase and Informix simply because I was running out of HD space for all these monster dbs and the overhead of 5 RDBMS was more than a little daunting.

Cross-stitch…

OK, in learning C#, I also learned that VS2008 was a bit of a bloated beast and on the original development PC wouldn’t load if anything else was loaded (like a browser…).  This is bad.  It was at this point that I discovered two alternatives to VS2008:  MonoDevelop and #Develop.  I would use MonoDevelop for everything as it supports cross-platform compilation which allows for Win32 and Linux binaries to be generated from the same code.  Like I said, I would, were it not for the GUI creation tool; it’s not where I need it to be for true rapid application development, since it’s not what I would call intuitive and #Develop and VS2008 handle it much better.

So, I use #Develop (SharpDevelop, if you prefer…I don’t…) almost exclusively, jumping into VS2008 every so often to uncheck some flag that got set during initial creation that isn’t given an option to even select in either of the other two.  I load the source into MonoDevelop to churn out linux binaries, but that’s about the only time I work in it.  I like the look, feel and behavior of #Develop much better than the other two — and it’s a) free and b) open source.  The only drawback that I’ve found, thus far, is that it doesn’t like the Oracle .Net components…then again, neither does VS2008…

In conclusion — it’s been gratifying getting my skill level to where my VB skills were after 15 years.  At some point, the programs may even be fit for mass consumption…of course, as much of a perfectionist as I am, they’ll probably be ready long before I’m ready to let them go…

“’You’re my alarm clock,’ the boy said. It will uncramp though, he thought. Surely it will uncramp to help my right hand. There are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands. It must uncramp. It is unworthy of it to be cramped. The fish had slowed again and was going at his usual pace. I can do nothing with him and he can do nothing with me, he thought. Not as long as he keeps this up. ‘No. I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?’

‘But you went turtle-ing for years off the Mosquito Coast and your eyes are good.’”

Rule #1: Never Intimidate the Client
Written by Philip M. Ware

vol. I, article 2 [originally written Fall 1998/Winter 1999]

There are times where being trendy and cool aren’t always the best recourse. This is especially true when your intended viewing audience is comprised mainly of retired Air Force officers and, basically, people over 60. Why? 1) No sense of humor when it comes to things that will cost them money. 2) If they hold the purse strings, it’s unwise to honk them off.

So why the etiquette lesson? Well, it’s not so much a lesson in manners as much as a page in my history book that I am perversely proud of, but would have benefited from just following the straight path.

There was a product. It was called something that for copyright issues (and the fact that I worked on the product, there’s some wacky legal binding on what I can discuss, also) I can’t tell you, but I can tell you that it was a large-scale application that was very ambitious. It was a monumental task, and as such, required a monumental-sized effort for the task I was given: an animation to impress the board of directors, who were going to be in town the next week. So, I was to impress the men with the power. “OK, no problem,” I thought.

I sat down with the LightWave modeler and, first, created the names of each of the components within the application to be shown off. The beveled text was adequate and titanic in size. The text was also given the material of a nice, shiny color, a differing shade for each component. I wanted the lights to be the color for these, at first, but then, the rich colors and flat texturing captured my interest. I pursued this and, following the success of my previous text animations for this company, proceeded in that direction. In the layout, I had them whirling in from points unknown, swiveling in from the side, all sorts of boring text animation things. Of the compiled video, the coolest part was when the previously displayed object shattered into about 1,400 polygons when the next text slammed into it. There was something about the whole animation that I didn’t like, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I had, however, used close to 3 days on the modeling, layout, animation(which took the majority of time, even on the P6-200/128MB) and video editing. That, and we were worried that Yanni would come after us with a stick since I used one of his cooler intros as a click-track.

So, it was Thursday, and the brass were going to be in on Monday. Well…isn’t that interesting. I decided that I could still use the objects I had already created, but I went in and changed all of the materials to a fairly shine-free chrome. I also created an additional object that was the name of the application itself, and it was to be the final image these men saw. It would be titanic, colossal, immense! It would also have to happen quickly.

Now, I was monkeying with camera tracks and motion paths and such in the previous one, and after finally watching the tape of Millennium from the previous Friday, I had an idea. I started a new project in layout and the first thing I did was import all of the objects in there. So, with a polygon count reaching the number of lies told in congress in a year, I didn’t have much room for frills if I wanted this to render in under a decade. Soooo…if I wanted to give it some panache, I would have to do something with the environment – something I hadn’t messed with before. So the second thing I did was place a spotlight on every object. When they were all turned on, it was a real mess and extremely over-exposed. So, what is an animator to do? Dig into the manuals, that’s what!

I turned off all the lights in the scene and set the background to black. I then turned the colors on all the lights to either a pale yellow or a dark orange. Next, I set the visibility of all the objects to zero. That’s right, invisible. Now, the magic – envelopes. It’s a simple concept, and, really, it made the rest of the animation setup a snap. I just got the camera set on a path, ran the wireframe preview and wrote down times. From there, I went in and set the visibility envelopes for the different text object and the envelopes for the intensity of each of the lights. What this did was set up a sort of pulsating roller coaster ride through the text objects. Now, the camera path had to be adjusted so that it was coming at each of the text objects head on. Cool, huh? Well, yes, because as the camera would approach each object, the space in front of the camera would begin to fade into the object, but would then disappear after about 2 seconds as the camera got close enough for the object to overfill the screen.

Well, now you know the mood that this type of display can create, and that’s creepy. I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but it was very close to being something that you could imagine being shown by FOX around 9pm on a Friday. At any rate, I had compiled the whole animation(only 4 scenes) and crunched them down to – get this – 480MB. Now, I know this isn’t much by today’s standards, but what’s impractical about this size is that it had to be played off of a laptop machine with 32MB RAM. Yeah… Now, I didn’t realize how creepy it was until I was in the unlit conference room watching this puppy play on an 8′ screen. My first thought was, “Wow. This is…uh…dark.”

Now, remember rule #1? Well, when the 54-second animation finished and the lights were raised, I’m not sure I saw a face in the room that wasn’t a scowl. I got compliments on how well the animation was done, but I also got a stern talking to about the mood it presented. Apparently, the monolithic logo at the end didn’t make up for eerie lighting, disturbing camera angles or cello-heavy music. I don’t know if was as a direct result, but the project received very little backing and I was not asked to do a production animation for the board of directors again.

So, there you go. Thank you for reading, and check back later for new insights/stories/misguided prose.

Yeah, so it’s sort of a vague title, and there’s no real topic that can be defined easily based on the vagueness of the title. That’s the point. This isn’t going to be a very specific article on a very specific topic relating to 3D rendering or animation or modeling. As the title of column suggests, this is an article written by an amateur, and it will mostly be stories about some experience I have had in the field, or relating to the field. That doesn’t mean that they won’t contain insight, or how-to information, but what it does mean is that I’m an amateur animator.

“OK, fine,” you say. “You’re an amateur. Who are you and why are you writing a column?” Good question, and fair enough. Well, as you could glean from the byline, my name’s Phil Ware and if you’ve never heard of me, that’s probably good, because if you had, I’d have to find out where and what back-royalties I was owed. Seriously, I’m an amateur animator that monkeys around on my PC at home, now, since I’m not at the job where I did most of my 3D work anymore. My experience there, however, was extensive for doing production stills and animations for a cost analysis house. I forged the path for multimedia, there, and since I have left, the path has grown over with weeds and brambles from disuse. That’s all good. While I was there, I used TrueSpace2.0, Lightwave5.0 and 3DStudioMax2.0. I also spent a lot of quality time in Premiere4.0 and PhotoShop3 and 4.0. Towards the end of my stint there, I also did a lot of production work in PageMaker, producing trifolds, brochures and programs for a local organization.

So what grand insights will I have for you? Probably nothing more than you would get out of a nice $60 book from Barnes and Noble, but they weigh 70 pounds and are usually a little more dry of a read. This being said, I will also give you some funny stories about mood and animation or a horror story of producing an animation for a client in under a day or something else that is amusing, painful for me but not for you, or just useful to think about if you’re in the business or even if you’re not.

I also want to say that I am nowhere near an expert in anything 3D related, but have had considerable experience and have toyed with many 3D products over the past 5 years.  With all this introductory stuff out of the way, why don’t we toss in a funny/serendipitous story before I go?

So, I’ve been working for weeks on this interactive brochure thing in Authorware, TrueSpace and Premiere. I was also using, at work, basically what I have at home, a Pentium 100MHz machine with 32MB RAM and a 2MB video card. In other words — things tended to crawl along when I was rendering the animations in TrueSpace or compiling the AVI files from Premiere. Authorware was a beast and GPF’d regularly because of memory issues. Now, we had been trying for a long while to get machine upgrades, but it just hadn’t happened and the CEO and VPs were coming down for a little pow-wow with our top folks. One of the things they wanted to see was a demo of this project they had been funding out of the overhead budget. No problem.

Well, my supervisor and I are sitting in my office with the VP sitting there watching my machine just crawl through my little demo of the creation process. We had already shown him the real product, but even it had been a little sluggish and there had been several cases where the computer just dropped frames to keep up with the 640x480x16MB anims compressed with your standard cinepak codecs for avi. About 2 minutes into one of the renderings, he looks over at me and says, “You need a faster computer. Put in a PO and I’ll sign off on it.” H’okay, this was novel. This from a company that wouldn’t get the applications developers(including me) faster machines for the development of things we actually had clients for… So, I put in for a Dell PentiumPro 200MHz monster with 64MB(at the time), an 8MB Number Nine #2e graphics card, 3GB of storage — the works for that time. It was around a $3,100 machine. The signed off on it. I put in the PO on the last day before the week off for the Christmas holidays and such, and when I got back on January 3rd, there was a LARGE box sitting on my floor. I couldn’t get into my office.

The following months saw several thousand dollars of application software arrive, and within several more months the project had been canned. I worked there another year and a half before deciding that greener pastures were anywhere but there.

That’s it for this installation of Amateur’s Anecdotes. Check back later to see if I have anything else to say. Thanks for reading!

First and foremost, we’ve moved.  Gone are the comfortable trappings of Dayton, Ohio replaced instead with the hustle, bustle and general business of Baltimore, Maryland.  It’s been quite an adjustment and I wouldn’t really say that anyone’s really adjusted, yet, though Lara’s been here since January, not in our new place.  So, that’s reason number one.

Number two, less significant in some regards, but not others, I’ve ditched the Windows platform in favor of linux.  The disruption, here, comes from the unfortunate dearth of blogging software like I was used to in the XP/Vista world.  The second part of this disruption stems from laziness.  I’ve not felt compelled to venture into the dashboards of each respective blogging account and hammer out a blog in one sitting — I just don’t do it that way, normally…

Another factor is having a general lack of time and motivation, meaning that when there’s time, there’s no motivation and when there’s motivation, generally speaking…there’s not time.  I’m hoping to move past this last road block and get back to routine posts.  I miss it.

Another thing I miss is being able to do things that I consider "blog-worthy."  I hope to start getting out and photographing, again, pretty soon.  So far, it’s just not happened, though.  We’ll see!  I’d say stay tuned, but I’d be just as happy with stopping by every so often to see if anything’s changed…