February 2009 Archives

With the recent redesign/reconfiguration of the Los Angeles Daily News, my weekly Tech Talk column has moved along with the Saturday Business page to the A section of the paper. Find it today on Page A12.

In the Saturday, Feb. 27 Tech Talk column, I overcome a false start and finally fix my ailing Maytag gas clothes dryer.

While Authorized Appliance of Reseda, Calif., was once again instrumental in helping me figure out how to complete the repair, I did find a new appliance-repair Web site, Fixitnow.com - Samurai Appliance Repair Man, that is better than anything I've seen up to now.

Aside from being a most excellent resource on how to fix your broken major appliances, Fixitnow.com is a great example of how to fully use WordPress as both a blogging platform AND general Web site using the Pages function. I'm very much interested in doing this. It's a great way to break out of the blog post, blog post, blog post mold and showcase some more "timeless" content on your site. Like I did here.

Image at right: This image comes from the very same kind of Maytag dryer that I have. (Thanks the Ask Me Help Desk for the image — and a very helpful forum.) The two white plugs with wires protruding from them are plugged into the dryer's two coils, which control the gas valve (the thing they're bolted onto). I replaced the coils (remove both plugs, unscrew bracket, lift coils, replace with new ones, replace bracket, replace plugs) and the dryer now works great.

I tried quite a few OpenBSD ports during my last run on the Sparcstation 20. None of them would build (Firefox, Seamonkey, Geany).

Curiously, when I ran NetBSD on the Sparc, the Firefox PACKAGE wouldn't install. Not a port that needed to be compiled, but a precompiled package built for the 32-bit Sparc architecture. That didn't give me a whole lot of hope for pkgsrc, which theoretically can be used to bring NetBSD packages into OpenBSD and other OSes. (DragonFlyBSD uses NetBSD packages, and that's a great way for the FreeBSD-derived DragonFly to have a huge package repository, and it makes me want to try it on my i386 hardware).

I spent the past few days installing Solaris 9 on the Sparc 20. (I got the OS super-cheap — $1 plus shipping — from eBay, unopened in the box).

Solaris is quite a bit different from OpenBSD and Linux. I'm still getting the hang of it. A lot of the trouble I'm having is due to my near-total unfamiliarity with it. I do have "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Solaris 9," which I found remaindered at Fry's for a few bucks, and it's a good resource. It's somewhat short — not "complete," but for the "complete idiot," which I am in this regard. There are quite a few other Solaris 9 books out there, including a "Dummies" book by Dave Taylor, who wrote a general Unix book I quite liked (here's everything Amazon has that he wrote).

Back to the Sparcstation 20 after the Solaris 9 installation: With 50 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM, it's far from ideal. GNOME &mddash; which ships with Solaris 9 — is almost unusable, but the CDE desktop is pretty responsive. It reminds me quite a bit of Fvwm in OpenBSD.

StarOffice 6 is included among the many discs in the Solaris box. When I installed it as root, only root could run it, so I started over again in my user account. The answer to this mystery is probably somewhere in my "Complete Idiots" book.

I found a Firefox 2.0.0.20 package built for Solaris 8 at the great SunFreeware site. Again, installing as root meant only root could use it. Even after installing it through the user account with su didn't work all the way. I can still run Firefox as root, but I get errors relating to patches that I need to do when I try to run it as my user. I'll have to read up on Solaris admin and eventually find and install all the Solaris patches.

But I did get Firefox to run, and it's WAY faster than Netscape 4.7, which shipped with Solaris. Yes, I did just type the words "Netscape 4.7."

I could very well keep Solaris on the box, but one idea is to run OpenBSD and then try to use the Solaris binary packages for Firefox and OpenOffice (since none of the OpenBSD ports of Firefox or Seamonkey will install on the Sparc 20).

Running Solaris binaries in OpenBSD is supposed to work. And yes, OpenBSD is a better, faster OS, for my use anyway, than Solaris on this platform.

Sun Sparcstation 5 image from the OSIAH: Online Sun Information ArcHive.

It's not that I can't afford to have our major appliances professionally repaired (OK ... I really can't, but the fact that most clothes washers and dryers, dishwashers and stoves are so relatively easy to fix when compared to things like cars means that I mostly do this work myself.

Here's my record:

I've fixed our Maytag portable dishwasher (1980s vintage) three times: Broken drive belt, loose door hinge, worn-out water coupler.

I've fixed the Maytag clothes washer once: broken timer (that's an expensive repair, between $100 and $150 for the part).

And while I don't consider plumbing a "major appliance," since it isn't, I do quite a bit of plumbing work inside and out, unclogging drains, rebuilding leaky fixtures and replacing those fixtures.

Now our Maytag clothes dryer (can you tell that we like Maytag?), a gas-heating model, starts heating up but then stops heating after 10 minutes.

According to my appliance bible, the out-of-print-but-available-used "All Thumbs Guide to Repairing Major Home Appliances" by Robert W. Wood, the likely cause is one of the dryer's two thermostats.

Yes, it has two. Some dryers have more, the book tells me. This one has a "high-limit" thermostat and a "cycling" thermostat. Testing them will be a pain, and the problem could very well be with another part, perhaps one of two gas-valve coils, another class of part that could be responsible for a dryer that doesn't dry all that well (but does get a little bit hot at times).

How do I know all of this? A major source of help for me is Partselect, a Web site with diagrams for just about every appliance ever made, plus a list of all parts (and the opportunity to buy them, of course) and, even better, user reports of how problems were diagnosed and fixed.

Aside from searching for your specific model number, a great place to start is PartSelect's Free Repair Guide.

Another great resource is http://www.acmehowto.com, which has a great tutorial called "How to Fix a Gas Dryer." Clicking on the section about coils tells me that they're solenoids, meaning there are moving parts in there that very likely have gone bad.

Here's a very helpful section:

The easiest way to diagnose a problem in the burner assembly is to observe the burner operation. Remove the small access panel at the bottom, front of the dryer, select a high temperature setting and start the appliance. Watch the burner assembly, shortly after starting the dryer the ignitor should begin to glow. Next you should hear the click of the gas valve coil and a flame should ignite. The flame should be mostly blue and it should remain on for a minute or more.

If the ignitor glows for several seconds (up to 15 seconds) and then goes out, the problem is probably the coils (solenoids). If the ignitor glows and stays on, then the problem is usually the flame sensor. If it ignites and then quickly goes out, it is most likely a problem with inadequate air flow.

Test the coil for resistance using a multitester. Set the multitester to the ohms setting X10. Place a probe on each terminal. The multitester should change from a reading of infinity to roughly 1300 ohms (+/- 150 ohms) when the probes touch the terminals. If the reading is infinity or substantially different from 1300 ohms, the solenoid should be replaced.

I'm going to investigate, but this could be a complicated problem to diagnose. And with an older appliance, replacing more than one part at a time could quickly become a case of throwing good money after bad, and it could be time to give up and either call in a pro, or shop for a new dryer.

Coincidentally, my local source for parts when I do the work myself, and perhaps for the first time in a long time to do the work for me if I can't figure this out, is Authorized Appliance Parts and Service, 18450 Vanowen St. in Reseda. Their phone number is (818) 342-2055. I've blogged before about my experiences with this excellent local business here and here.

Another great place to find appliance parts via the Web is Midwest Appliance Parts, which has a great price on Maytag dryer coils (and lots of other stuff, naturally), and which provided the image of those very dryer coils above.

In this week's Tech Talk column, I talk about the Linux operating system and how if you want to learn more about it, there's a Web full of information, books and, coming up Feb. 20-22, the SCALE7x show in Los Angeles.

I also mentioned the presentation I gave recently to the TUGNET user group in the San Fernando Valley. The title of the talk is "Evolutionary Computing," and it is about the journey every computer user can take along their own personal road from proprietary software toward varying degrees of free, open-source software, from single apps to full operating environments.

Here is the presentation, which includes many resources, including books and Web sites, that have helped me along the way:

• "Evolutionary Computing" (PDF)
• "Evolutionary Computing" (OpenOffice Impress presentation)
• "Evolutionary Computing" (MS PowerPoint presentation)

I decided to get deeper into Puppy 4.1.2 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

I'm always looking for platforms on which I can do all my Daily News-related work, which means I need the Java runtime and Flash video.

Well, there is a Java package for Puppy. I'm surprised Java isn't part of the base install, but it appears not. I installed the package, and I even brought in the Opera Web browser to augment Seamonkey.

Both browsers are performing well, but for some reason Flash doesn't work in either. I distinctly remember Flash working in all of the Puppy 2 and 3 releases I've used previously, and now I'm left wondering what happened.

Also, Java did NOT work in either browser, so easy use of the LogMeIn remote-desktop service is not something happening in Puppy. I'm getting to the point where I'll need to bit the proverbial bullet and install Java from source in OpenBSD on this laptop so I can get that functionality. I can live without Flash (and the Flash I do have in i386 OpenBSD via Opera is marginal at best; it works in YouTube but not in Brightcove). I can sort of live without Java.

But it's better for the work that I do to have both of these things working well.

Also, I was surprised to see not Pidgin or Gaim as the IM client in Puppy but something I'd never heard of. Pidgin is available as a package, so that's not such a problem.

The end result is that while Puppy 4.1.2. runs quite well at first blush, I need to look closer at why I was so unsuccessful at getting Flash and Java to work. It should be easier than this.

And while Flash remains somewhat of a problem in OpenBSD (I probably need to be running an up-to-date Linux such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, Zenwalk ... take your pick) I'll probably stick with it for the time being as my primary OS.

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/02/misreading_news.php

I booted Puppy 4.1.2 on This Old PC, a 12-year-old, 333 MHz Pentium II, 256 MB RAM white-box. The update from Puppy 2.13 to 4.1.2 went much more smoothly than a 3.01-to-4.1.2 I tried last week.

The verdict thus far: Puppy RULES.

This post began its life as a comment on the previous Sparcstation 20 entry, and true to the way I overwrite even a comment, it works well enough as a standalone entry.

And thus, here it is in that form:

I've discovered that NetBSD doesn't run so well on the Sparcstation 20 (50 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM). The install went fine, but the X configuration was less than optimal. Console messages continued to appear on the X screen, and I could tell that, among other things perhaps, the horizontal sync and/or vertical refresh might have been just a bit off. I imagine that if I take the xorg.conf information from OpenBSD and use it for NetBSD, all issues will be solved.

But when NetBSD's 32-bit Sparc packages for Firefox and Seamonkey (precompiled packages, NOT ports) wouldn't install, and then the Geany package did install but ran so slowly as to be unusable, I decided to go in a different direction.

Thus far, that direction is a reinstall of OpenBSD. I haven't tried any ports yet, but all the packages I have installed — a few GUI editors (nedit, which I quite like, and another I can't remember), plus the Dillo browser, which in all fairness ran great in NetBSD, too — did work.

Now that I'm running not the box's original, jet-plane-noisy 2 GB Seagate hard drive but a super-cheap-on-eBay 35 GB Hitachi SCSI drive that's pleasantly quiet, maybe the installation of an OpenBSD port of a "modern" Web browser will work. Maybe not. I'll also try to roll Abiword onto the box, as well as Geany (for comparison's sake, if anything else).

And there's always Solaris.

I know there are Solaris-compatible packages for just about everything, so if I can't manage to get Seamonkey or Firefox installed from OpenBSD's ports with the extra disk space, my next move will be installing Solaris 9 (I got an unopened box of the software for $1 — yep, that little, plus shipping — on eBay) and see how that OS runs on the box.

One thing: Sound on the 32-bit Sparc platform doesn't work in OpenBSD. It does in NetBSD. Of course it does in Solaris, since Sun's OS was written with the Sparc in mind.

It may be that Solaris is the best OS for desktop use on the Sparc 20. Probably the best thing to do is get a CPU module faster then the current 50 MHz processor I'm now running, and also upping the memory to the max of 512 MB (right now I have the 128 MB the box had when I got it).

But make no mistake, for sheer out-of-the-box configuration on a Sparcstation 20 (sound nothwithstanding), OpenBSD is way ahead of NetBSD.

My next line of attack is trying a few (or more) OpenBSD ports. Even if this experiment goes well, I'll have to roll Solaris 9 onto the Sparc 20 before I decide on any long-term OS for the box.

Before I finish this entry, it's worth pointing out that Debian Etch for Sparc boots but won't install. It hangs when trying to load the CD driver. I don't know if the Sparc port of Debian is broken for EVERY 32-bit Sparc model, but it sure doesn't work for the Sparcstation 20.

Image above right: This isn't my Sparc; it's a Sparcstation 5 from http://www.computermuseum.org.uk. They look exactly alike (and in many ways are).

This blog and my weekly print column don't cross paths much, but it's time to change that and help readers tap the resources I write about in the Saturday edition of the Daily News (Page 2 of the Faith section, where Business currently lives, as well as the aforementioned online home.)

The Saturday, Feb. 7 column is about self-publishing, ideally with no cost to you, both in traditional printed books as well as in electronic form on Amazon's Kindle e-reader.

Links mentioned in the column:

• "Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature," Time magazine, Jan. 21, 2009
• Self-publishing with Amazon.com
• CreateSpace — on-demand publishing (for free!!) through Amazon.com
• The definitely not-free BookSurge from Amazon
• Self-publishing company iUniverse
• Amazon's Kindle electronic reader

The fact that Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client has no built-in way to export the whole of a user's mail from one installation to another is as close to a fatal flaw as can be for a class of application — the stand-alone mail client — as can be.

Now that I've had a week or so since I started trying to move mail from one box to another, I've learned that there are a couple of plugins out there for Thunderbird that supposedly help you do this.

Even so, the consensus appears to be that you need to just pull the whole nested-directory mess over from one installation to the next. The problem for me is that I don't have access to the proper directory on my Windows box, so I'll have to do it with a Linux live CD).

Would it kill the developers to embed export functionality into Thunderbird? Would that be so terrible, allowing users to have a little control and freedom when it comes to how they access their own e-mail?

You can easily import messages into Thunderbird (Tools -- Import in the menu). For the sake of freedom and sanity, it should be just as easy to export out of the app.

Is there a reason Thunderbird doesn't include export? I'd sure like to know.