There it was. Useful. Versatile. Almost Spartan in utilitarian beauty, and just what I'd been looking for. A USB to IDE and SATA adapter. No housing, as I said it was kinda Spartan, but it had an external connector that jumbled SATA and IDE (inc. floppy) all onto one multi-headed device. Perfect for file backups and troubleshooting on the run.
Only one catch... The brand was Ritmo. Now, call this a product review if you will. It is not intended to be slanderous in any way, just honest. I normally have a 'Don't buy Ritmo' rule, for no other reason but that I have never had a Ritmo product last much longer than the time it takes me to lose the receipt (not long). Anyway, I bought it. It's called the R-driver. It lasted for maybe 3 uses, then the power supply died. Just when I needed it... Another memorable Ritmo disaster was the KVM box I bought for my Dad. From the colour output on the monitor, you'd think they'd changed colour for Autumn. That was embarrassing. I like to give my parents my best. They gave me theirs!
In conclusion, there are many cheap Asian brands out there for electronics. Some are great. I love the Wise router my Dad and myself use for example. Some stuff is really rotten though and Ritmo is a brand I'll be staying clear of.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
The True Nature of Sin
It seems that God has challenged me lately about sin. One sin in particular that I had let stay, but sin in general also. The challenge goes something like this...
Jesus said, that those who love Him will obey His commandments. There would seem to be the logical conclusion there that we will obey what we love. Therefore, if we obey a desire or urge or call which is contrary to what Jesus has commanded us, then we love that thing more than we love Jesus and as Leonard Ravenhill would say, "Anything you love more than Jesus is an idol".
When we exalt our own desires and directions over God's will, we crown ourselves and our will an idol before God. When we follow the desires of our flesh, we crown our bodies an idol before Him and when we chase material things, regardless of what they may be, instead of sacrificing our desire of these things to Him and giving it all into His possession and rule, we make images of money, cars or houses that we bow down to instead of to Him.
God, help us to love you always, not just as a friend and a saviour, but the Lord of every second, every desire and every breath that we hold.
Amen.
Jesus said, that those who love Him will obey His commandments. There would seem to be the logical conclusion there that we will obey what we love. Therefore, if we obey a desire or urge or call which is contrary to what Jesus has commanded us, then we love that thing more than we love Jesus and as Leonard Ravenhill would say, "Anything you love more than Jesus is an idol".
When we exalt our own desires and directions over God's will, we crown ourselves and our will an idol before God. When we follow the desires of our flesh, we crown our bodies an idol before Him and when we chase material things, regardless of what they may be, instead of sacrificing our desire of these things to Him and giving it all into His possession and rule, we make images of money, cars or houses that we bow down to instead of to Him.
God, help us to love you always, not just as a friend and a saviour, but the Lord of every second, every desire and every breath that we hold.
Amen.
Getting the Whole Story
My attention was drawn by a friend yesterday back to the book of Romans. He was shocked by a mis-reading of his in ch 4. He had thought that vs 15 said that law brings death, but blanched a bit when he realized that is says that the law brings wrath! On considering this a moment, I was suddenly confronted by the idea that my friend, being a good pentecostal boy and raised in a pentecostal church, might have no idea what the law actually means. So often do we, as pentecostals, throw away the Old Testament, not realizing that our understanding of the New Testament, the Covenant we hold on to by faith which is sealed with Jesus Christ's own blood, is greatly diminished as a consequence.
Myself, raised a traditional Lutheran with Sola Scriptura ringing soundly in my ears am a little better off, but it was not until entering Bible College that I grew to understand the Law and Grace more fully.
I love the book of Romans. This epistle of Paul's, along with Galatians, is the deepest and most detailed laying out of the Gospel that we have. Not only does it go into salvation and the maintenance of salvation, but the amazing Grace of our God who not only forgives us of our sin, but changes us and strengthens those who walk in His Spirit to live a holy life overcoming our sin! Seriously I love it, but would not comprehend it if I had not studied the Old Testament and the Law also. My challenge to any readers that may happen to come along is this. When we read the Word, do we read the whole of the Word that the Lord has supplied us with? Do we think that we are so far out of the jungle, so to speak, that we do not need to study the whole of God's specific revelation of Himself and His ways that He has preserved in the Bibles we so casually peruse?
Myself, raised a traditional Lutheran with Sola Scriptura ringing soundly in my ears am a little better off, but it was not until entering Bible College that I grew to understand the Law and Grace more fully.
I love the book of Romans. This epistle of Paul's, along with Galatians, is the deepest and most detailed laying out of the Gospel that we have. Not only does it go into salvation and the maintenance of salvation, but the amazing Grace of our God who not only forgives us of our sin, but changes us and strengthens those who walk in His Spirit to live a holy life overcoming our sin! Seriously I love it, but would not comprehend it if I had not studied the Old Testament and the Law also. My challenge to any readers that may happen to come along is this. When we read the Word, do we read the whole of the Word that the Lord has supplied us with? Do we think that we are so far out of the jungle, so to speak, that we do not need to study the whole of God's specific revelation of Himself and His ways that He has preserved in the Bibles we so casually peruse?
The Morning After
Hmmm. Maybe I was a bit rash in installing Intrepid so soon... I only have two major complaints. One really. The problem is this. None of the things I actually installed Intrepid for seem to work properly anymore, or in some cases at all, except for the tabs in Nautilus. As I'm not doing any coding at the moment, I'm not really needing them that much anyway.
Suspend and Hibernate are still no-go. The package in my bug report has been changed to acpi-support, but no progress that I know of yet. No comments etc except for my own. Network Manager is also playing up a fair bit. I don't have to kill the process anymore to get it working again, but it won't store a WEP key in the Password Manager, with the result that the key needs to be supplied every time you log in and sometimes several times again after that! Sometimes it will duplicate the wifi profile as well and then refuse to log in at all, no matter how many times you supply the key. The solution I came upon for the duplication issue is to delete all copies of the wifi profile. One correct profile will then 'appear' with the old settings intact. Alas, no WEP key. Afer reading the bug reports, I still can't seem to make out whether it's a Network Manager issue or Password Manager fouling things up.
Suspend and Hibernate are still no-go. The package in my bug report has been changed to acpi-support, but no progress that I know of yet. No comments etc except for my own. Network Manager is also playing up a fair bit. I don't have to kill the process anymore to get it working again, but it won't store a WEP key in the Password Manager, with the result that the key needs to be supplied every time you log in and sometimes several times again after that! Sometimes it will duplicate the wifi profile as well and then refuse to log in at all, no matter how many times you supply the key. The solution I came upon for the duplication issue is to delete all copies of the wifi profile. One correct profile will then 'appear' with the old settings intact. Alas, no WEP key. Afer reading the bug reports, I still can't seem to make out whether it's a Network Manager issue or Password Manager fouling things up.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Installed Intrepid Ibex Alpha 6 on my Inspiron 1501
Just installed Intrepid on my dell. Started out as just a test install in an extra partition, but I liked it so much, I replaced Hardy with it.
The main points in Intrepid's favour were: suspend and hibernate worked great (please note past tense), the improvements in the Network Manager which mean I can now use it for wifi without crashing things and tabs in Nautilus.
The system is still a little bit of a jumble, as you'd expect from an Alpha, but seems steady enough to use as my main OS.
Suspend and hibernate were working on the initial installation using kernel 2.6.27-3, but is no longer working due to a suspected regression in 2.6.27-4. There also seems to be a driver issue of some sort. See my bug report on launchpad.
Network manager is advancing at a great rate. Mark Shuttleworth's ambition or having constant internet wherever and whenever is looking like becoming a reality. This is also the first time that I have been able to use Network Manager to connect to wifi without crashing things. No more wifi-radar! One issue with the wifi on the 1501 was that the drivers would not install through apt or the Hardware Drivers manager. I installed the windows driver using ndiswrapper and the guide here.
Finally to tabs in Nautilus. Gotta love it. I had a long convo with the Nautilus developers in Aug 2007 about tab support and was told pretty much that it would happen when hell freezes over, that I could write my own code if I wanted, but I wouldn't get any help and it wouldn't be implemented anyway. Great. I used pcmanfm instead. Well, I don't see any ice creeping up from the deeps and I'm using tabs in Nautilus. Seriously though, a big well-done to the Nautilus developers. They put in a lot of work and it's a great feature.
That's all for now. Back to the essay I'm supposed to be doing...
The main points in Intrepid's favour were: suspend and hibernate worked great (please note past tense), the improvements in the Network Manager which mean I can now use it for wifi without crashing things and tabs in Nautilus.
The system is still a little bit of a jumble, as you'd expect from an Alpha, but seems steady enough to use as my main OS.
Suspend and hibernate were working on the initial installation using kernel 2.6.27-3, but is no longer working due to a suspected regression in 2.6.27-4. There also seems to be a driver issue of some sort. See my bug report on launchpad.
Network manager is advancing at a great rate. Mark Shuttleworth's ambition or having constant internet wherever and whenever is looking like becoming a reality. This is also the first time that I have been able to use Network Manager to connect to wifi without crashing things. No more wifi-radar! One issue with the wifi on the 1501 was that the drivers would not install through apt or the Hardware Drivers manager. I installed the windows driver using ndiswrapper and the guide here.
Finally to tabs in Nautilus. Gotta love it. I had a long convo with the Nautilus developers in Aug 2007 about tab support and was told pretty much that it would happen when hell freezes over, that I could write my own code if I wanted, but I wouldn't get any help and it wouldn't be implemented anyway. Great. I used pcmanfm instead. Well, I don't see any ice creeping up from the deeps and I'm using tabs in Nautilus. Seriously though, a big well-done to the Nautilus developers. They put in a lot of work and it's a great feature.
That's all for now. Back to the essay I'm supposed to be doing...
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