Mark Stosberg tag:mark.stosberg.com,2008-11-25:/blog/2 2010-01-20T01:51:22Z balancing simplicity and technology in Richmond, Indiana Movable Type 4.33-en The cost of saving sent e-mail tag:mark.stosberg.com,2010:/blog//2.317 2010-01-20T01:17:21Z 2010-01-20T01:51:22Z I don’t tap my own phone. I don’t xerox postcards before I mail them back from vacation. I don’t take a voice recorder when I go out with friends. And I don’t have a copy machine at home to... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/
box biking at 10F

I don’t tap my own phone. I don’t xerox postcards before I mail them back from vacation. I don’t take a voice recorder when I go out with friends. And I don’t have a copy machine at home to duplicate hand written notes I may send.

But if I send a message of equal importance by e-mail, then my e-mail program will automatically save a copy of every one of these messages.

E-mails I don’t need waste my time. They increase the time it takes to search and browse through old email. They increase the time it takes for my email to “sync” when I want to go offline. To continue to save every e-mail I send perpetuates the unsustainable myth that as long as our actions are online they are “green”.

]]> First the small action of saving a e-mail is amplified by the 1.5 billion people using e-mail globally. More saved e-mail means more disks to store the e-mail, larger backup systems to handle the volume, and faster processors so that all the archived messaged can be searched through efficiently. Since sent mail accumulates over time, an increasing amount of resources are needed to handle the saved mail. In five years there will be more people on the planet. It’s likely a greater percentage will be sending e-mail, and likely the e-mail volume will be even higher than it as now. What is the energy cost, now and in the future, of storing so much e-mail?

While we can debate the magnitude of the impact, more data storage equals more resource consumption. In the United States, data centers already draw more power than our TV usage [1], and data centers are only part of the energy consumed by our increasingly networked life. In turn, about 40% of our water supply is devoted to generating power. Water is used in part to provide cooling massive data centers. (Only 15% of the water supply is actually used by the public). [2]

If you’re with me on this one, here’s one tip that could make big reduction in the size of your “Sent Mail” folder, while still retaining the memory the correspondence:

Consider not saving a copy of attachments you send in your Sent Mail folder. Attachments are often 10 to a 1000 times larger than a typical e-mail, and you already have a copy of the document on your hard drive. Plus, your recipient is about to receive a copy and she may then also download a copy from her e-mail to her hard drive. Saving the attachment in your Sent folder could mean keeping a forth copy of the document. If it’s important to have a record that the attachment was sent, you could send one message with the correspondence that references the attachment, and save that a message. Then, send the attachment in it’s own message, and don’t save the attachment in the Sent folder.

Another idea: While some places have data retention rules (or laws!), these typically do not apply to personal e-mail accounts. Consider turning off the option to save e-mails by default, and conciously choose which e-mails you think are important enough to save. Note that Google’s Gmail service (146 million users) does not have an option to turn off automatically saving the messages you send. Yahoo is another web-based e-mail provider that does provide this option. Check your e-mail program for details.

It is powerful to ask “what is the impact of this?”, whether you consider e-mail storage, the toxic batteries in our cell phones, or the impact of broadcasting wifi radio waves through our homes 24/7. A daily choice such as a not saving an sent e-mail can be a mindful practice to connect our abstract online lives with the real world.

For details about calculating the carbon footprint of e-mail storage, read on.

Calculating the carbon footprint of e-mail storage

Research about the carbon footprint of e-mail storage turned up little in the way of existing estimates. emailfootprint.org estimated that it would take 1 kilowatt hour to store 1 Gigabyte of data for a year, but they didn’t explain how they came up with that number, and the site is now offline, but accessible through the google cache

TreeHugger referenced a report that said that it would take 1 lb of coal to store 20 megabytes of data for a year, according to the US Department of Energy. But the report they linked to is no longer available. [3]

I decided to see if I could piece together my own estimate of the impact of storing sent e-mail, based on my own usage.

I have about 40 megabytes of mail saved from messages I sent in 2007. This perhaps already represents removing some messages which contained large attachments. For the sake of the example, let’s assume this is an average amount. ( To personalize the example, check the size of your own Sent Mail folders!). Let’s multiply this by an approximate 1.5 billion e-mailers and you get about 56 petabytes of data (about 58 million gigabytes). To picture that: imagine all the data was crammed on to reasonable large hard drives: 500 gigabytes each. It would take about 117,000 hard drives to store that data, assuming it was stored relatively efficiently and no extra space was required to store the operating system on this drives! The actual number is would be higher because much data can be expected to be on older hard drives, manufactured before the very large drives were an option. Further, it’s an industry best practice to use always duplicate data using “RAID”, so the same data would be written to at least two hard drives. Large providers such as Google may further be duplicating data in at least two data centers, for extra redundancy.

Using a number from here, I’ll estimate that it takes 446 MegaJoules of energy to produce a hard drive, which I’ll convert to 124 kilowatt hours. So, it would take about 14.5 million kilowatt hours of energy just to produce 117,000 hard drives, without getting into the energy required to keep them turned on.

Using data from US Department of Energy, it looks like we can expect about 2 lbs of CO2 to be generated to produce each kilowatt hour of energy.

So that puts us at an estimated 29 million lbs of C02 generated to produce enough hard drives to efficiently store all the sent e-mail in the world. (Using my own amount as an average).

To visualize that number, let’s equate it the number of miles you’d have to drive in average car to generate the same amount of CO2. According to Streetsblog the average car generates 1.2 pounds of CO2 per mile, equating to about 24 million miles.

In perspective: 24 million miles is a very large absolute number, but it pales in comparison to the estimated 5 billion miles that American’s drive each day. [4]. The real danger to address is the way of thinking that a digital paperless life is automatically green one.

This post is a follow-up to one entitled Stewardship and Sustainability of our Online Lives.

See Also

References:

  1. an EPA study stating that the data center industry devours 61 billion kWh of energy annually compared to ...about 275 million TVs currently in use in the U.S., consuming over 50 billion kWh of energy each year
  2. Quenching the Thirst of Power-Hungry Data Centers, citing primary data from the US government.
  3. The Footprint of Gmail: How Much Energy Would Deleting Email Save?
  4. Americans drive 5 billion miles per day
]]> Modifying PDFs so they open full screen tag:mark.stosberg.com,2009:/blog//2.313 2009-11-30T02:49:01Z 2009-11-30T03:31:36Z The PDF spec includes an option to cause PDFs to open full screen when users open them. I’m a fan of the feature because it maximizes screen real estate and creates a simple, focused, experience for the PDF readers.... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/
retired radiators
The PDF spec includes an option to cause PDFs to open full screen when users open them. I’m a fan of the feature because it maximizes screen real estate and creates a simple, focused, experience for the PDF readers. Using this option is one of my two essential tips for creating an impactful newsletter targeted at being read online. The other tip is to use a “portrait” format document, to match the shape of most screens.

Many PDF viewers respond to PDFs that are set to open full screen, but a number of PDF generation tools don’t provide you option to set this preference when creating PDFs. I ran into this with Xournal which is a nice application for Linux-based tablets, but offers no PDF export options.

So I found a way to update a pre-existing PDF to set the preference to have it open full screen by default. The key here is that PDF is a text-based format, so preferences in it can be updated manually by opening and editing the file according to the PDF spec, or the same effect can be accomplished with automated tools. In this case, I found that I needed to update a line that started like this:

<< /Type /Catalog

After /Catalog, this is all that needed to be added:

/PageMode /FullScreen

I automated this with a simple script that I named make-pdf-full-screen.sh. It works for the simple case when no “PageMode” has been declared, as in the Xournal case. I don’t expect it would update the PageMode properly if it was already declared. For a safer solution consider opening the PDF in a text editor to manually set “/PageMode /Fullscreen” on the initial /Catalog line. Alternatively, you could use a formal solution like PDF::API3::Compat::API2 which appears to have the features needed to solve this with Perl.

Here’s the contents of my little script to automate the update:

#!/bin/sh
# usage: make-pdf-full-screen.sh file.pdf
#   The file will be modified in place so that it opens full screen.
#   The current approach is naive... it assumes no Initial View has been defined.
# by Mark Stosberg
perl -pi -e 's?<< /Type /Catalog?<< /Type /Catalog /PageMode /FullScreen?' $1
]]> Stewardship and Sustainability of our online lives tag:mark.stosberg.com,2009:/blog//2.312 2009-11-26T05:04:09Z 2009-12-05T23:37:01Z A few weeks ago I had my laptop stolen. Earlier that morning I had been reflecting and writing on the laptop about the intersection of our spiritual lives with our digital lives. And then, as if by divine intervention,... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ Kent and Kurt on the Whitewater Gorge Trail

A few weeks ago I had my laptop stolen. Earlier that morning I had been reflecting and writing on the laptop about the intersection of our spiritual lives with our digital lives. And then, as if by divine intervention, my laptop disappeared— during church service no less— and I was given an even greater opportunity to answer the question: When we spent more time browsing the web, what is that we are doing less of? When we spend more checking e-mail, what are we doing less of? And when we spend more time on Facebook, what are we spending less time doing? Apparently, the answer in my case is cleaning is my desk and organizing the garage. Those are the things I did more when I could do the the internet less. I joke about this, but I do envision my home as a place of rest and rejuvenation, yet I let clutter accumulate while I spent more time on my computer doing “productive” things.

There are many implications of shifting our increasingly precious free time online. Today I’d like to delve into the carbon footprint of our online lives.

You can use the audio player here to listen to a 15 minute version of the message delivered at my church, (or you can also download the audio file.)

The message continues below the jump.

]]> Fall box bike commute

As individuals and organizations, many of us profess to hold up the value of stewardship, of caring for the earth’s resources. But as some of us move more of our lives online, how much do really know about the real-world impact of our actions and data online lives?

When Google’s Gmail service launched, it advertised “never delete an email again”. Instead, you can archive the e-mail with a single click, and it will always be there in case you might like to find it later.

As part of the launch, Google was offering about 100 times more e-mail storage than their competitors. This was enough, they claimed, to never delete another e-mail in your life. This was a decisive moment that changed web-based e-mail forever. Competitors scrambled to dramatically increase their storage options so they could compete.

Something there bothered me. In the physical world, this is a way of thinking that no environmentalist would stand for— NEVER THROW ANYTHING ANYWAY AGAIN? The circle of life is broken, replaced with a one way trip from creation to permanent storage.

Are the rules for sustainability online really that different?

There’s been a belief that when we move activities online, we are being green. We laud “Going paperless”, and celebrate e-everything.

There of course some truth in the efficiencies of digital living. It’s certainly intuitive that’s less resource intensive to send an e-mail instead of a physical letter, or teleconference instead of flying somewhere for a meeting.

But along with some of these efficient uses of the internet, we’ve moved some of our unsustainable practices online without deeply questioning the impact of this.

While it may be efficient to send an e-mail instead of a letter, many of us now send and receive far more e-mails than we wrote letters. Our use of the internet has gone far beyond replacing physical tasks with efficient digital alternatives.

I’ll share what I know about the carbon footprint of our online lives now.

To talk about the carbon footprint of our online lives, let’s start with the the physical existence of the Internet. Websites and e-mail are served for computers all over the world. Many websites are now clustered in a relatively small number of large data centers.

Picture a data center as a dimly lit, windowless warehouse. On the concrete floor sits aisle after aisle of floor-to-ceiling stacks of computer, neatly set on identical racks, with a blinking lights on the front and neatly organized cable on the back. There is an incessant hum from thousands of spinning disk drives and fans to cool the systems. The temperature is comfortable, thanks to dedicated cooling systems for the computers. The aisles are even emptier of workers than it is at Lowe’s. A small number of people may be onsite to tend to the rare physical needs of the machines, but most people who use the systems could be anywhere. Like you or me, they could even be sitting at home in their underwear.

Already, the data centers that host major Internet sites are drawing more electrical power in the United States than our TV use. [1] Let me say that again: the electricity American’s consume to power to their Internet habit has surpassed the amount of electricity used to power to TV habit. And while we keep our TVs just a few hours a day, we expect websites to be available 24 hours a day, every day.

Data centers tend to be powered by traditional power sources, with a few exception who choose to use wind or solar to power their operations. Google has expressed sincere interest in greening their operations, but so far continues to focus on building out their infrastructure as fast as they can, with a plan to throw money at the sustainability problem, hoping for a solution later.

A scientist researched the energy consumed by a Google search and determined that executing just two Google searches would use enough energy to boil a kettle of water [2] Google refuted this claim, saying that this estimate was far too high. Google performed it’s own carbon footprint calculation of a Google search. According Google’s own estimate, it would take a 1,000 Google searches to equal the impact of driving an average automobile a kilometer, or 6/10ths of a mile [3]. Sending a search to Google isn’t just asking a question to a single computer. Clusters of super computers are used to calculate a response. The footprint of a search is small, but the number being executed every day is staggering. I’m sure Google was trying to present their environmental impact in the best possible light. It’s no wonder then that they didn’t cross reference these statistics with the number of searches that are currently performed each day. It’s estimated that about 300 million Google searches are performed each day.[7]

This means that according to Google’s own estimate, the daily impact of Google searches adds up to the equivalent of driving about 180,000 miles each day. Calculating this number was of my deciding points in preparing this message. It’s such a big number. Imagine if there were 180,000 less miles driven each day!

With some further research I was able to put this number in perspective. (I think it took less a thousand additional Google searches). The United States Postal Service logs an estimated 2.6 million miles each day, or about 15 times more. [6] Americans in total drive about 5 BILLION miles a day. [4] The impact of Google searches is statistically insignificant compared to this. To try to put this into perspective: If American’s were to drive one mile less per year, it would have more a thousand times more impact than if the entire world abstained from searching Google for a single day.

I don’t mean to diminish the original number: The daily impact of Google searches equating to 180,000 miles of driving in terms the carbon footprint. It’s still a big number and it would great to reduce it further. Comparing the impact of different activities we perform helps us to put things in perspective and prioritize what lifestyle changes could most effective. And we don’t always have to chose making one improvement at the expense of another.

The Google search statistic was an example of taking an action online. Life online involves more than just Google searches though.

Our online lives are also composed of data we generate or that is collected about us, sitting up there in the “cloud”, at these data centers. There are e-mail folders of archived messages. There are archived posts to mailing lists and forums, and photos of old summer vacations posted on photo sharing websites.

Our data has a cost to exist as well. Data that seems to be inactive is likely to be regularly accessed for maintenance like virus scans, causing an energy draw proportional to the amount of data involved. Any data stored online is likely backed up every day. Even inactive data is copied repeatedly to back-up tapes, causing additional power consumption.

What is this impact of this storage in context? I don’t know, but it’s clear that the more data is out there, the greater the cost to store it.

There’s so much data being stored about us, often not because we care about it, but because it benefits the corporations who are collecting it. The more data Google, Facebook and others collect, the more content they have for pages to serve ads on, and the more relevant ads they are able to display based on the data we give them.

So Google strongly encourages us to archive e-mail, not delete it, which would reclaim resources. Likewise, Facebook and many other sites have few or no limits on the amount of content you can post. Instead, they focus on infinite data structures, like Flickr’s “photostream”, Facebook “walls”, and the endless river of status updates on Twitter.

The design of these sites is not to encourage us to review all of someone’s content, or even someone’s best content. The design pattern we see over and over online now is to encourage an infinite streams of data, and have us focus only the most recent entries of the infinite streams, while meanwhile the old data is encouraged not to be removed and recycled, but to stay online forever for reference and profit.

It’s a hard problem to design tools that find the most relevant information regardless of whether it’s the newest or not. Google search tries to solve just that problem. The problem could be somewhat voluntary addressed if people took greater care to update the information that was posted online, or delete content we controlled that knew was obsolete.

As stewards of our online lives, we should apply the same kind of thinking we do about physical world sustainability to our online lives.

Re-consider allowing so much of your data to make a one way trip to permanent archiving. Cultivate your data like a garden. Something with finite boundries. Review the things you’ve planted online periodically. Throw away content that has rotted or expired over time. Prune out the typos. Trim and rewrite your best pieces so they can flourish.

Use your data gardening time to reflect on your past. You may ask yourself “Whatever planted the seed for that article in my head?” But you may also find some heirloom crops, still bright with flavor today.

Now let’s zoom out some. How can we profess to be good stewards of the earth, when we engage in activity where we don’t really know the impact?

Religious history has seen groups split over such questions. Should we use automobiles? Electricity? The Internet? The Amish stand out for choosing the simpler life, while other demoninations attempt to live “in the world but not of it.”

Communicating through the internet is just one example of lifestyle choices which create a more abstract existence, where the affects of simple daily activities touch back to data centers in California and factories in China.

To embrace this complexity while still prioritizing stewardship means taking on the responsibility of understanding the impact of our abstracted actions, from using the internet, to driving cars, to buying foreign-made products.

When it comes being a good steward of our online lives there are many ways to address the complexities and reduce our carbon footprint. Here are three specific practices that I use. The impact of each action may be small, but like a vote, the cumulative effect of small actions can add up to something big. The benefits of such practices go beyond simply reducing carbon footprints. Each one is a practice in mindfulness, that reminds us that our abstracted actions have real world impacts.

  1. The first tip: I put our home cable modem and wireless router on a power strip. We turn the strip off at night and on in the morning. Not only does this save electricity, it also improves security by completely preventing outside access. It also reduces the amount of radio waves being broadcast through the house.
  2. A second tip: When sending an e-mail that is primarily an attachment, I consider using the option to not save the message in your sent-mail folder. These messages are much larger than normal e-mails, and I already have a copy of the document on your hard drive, plus the recipients will also have a second copy in their Inbox, and likely a third that is saved to their own hard drive.
  3. Finally, here’s a tip that could vastly reduce the number of Google searches, while at the same time finding what you are looking even faster. Top Google searches include queries for “YouTube” and “Facebook”. Instead of going directly to a site like “YouTube.com”, many people first type “YouTube” into Google and click on the first result. Using a bookmark for popular sites would save a small but repetitive amount of time and energy by going directly to the sites. A bookmark is not only efficient here, it makes that Google is not tracking your search and mediating your experience as pass through Google. You are saving yourself from seeing one more ad that day, which would otherwise be displayed in the right sidebar of Google as you click through.

Ultimately I think the wisdom of “less is more” that applies to being stewards of our online lives. You have the option to just not post something. Or Don’t sign up for some website. Or just unplug and go outside. Visit someone in person. Stewardship the old fashioned way has a beautiful simplicity to it.

How have you found satisfaction and success in being a steward of your online life? If you don’t use the Internet, or have even just avoided Facebook, what has it meant for you to chose this decision while so many others embrace it? What do you find at the intersection of our spiritual and digital lives?

References:

  1. an EPA study stating that the data center industry devours 61 billion kWh of energy annually compared to ...about 275 million TVs currently in use in the U.S., consuming over 50 billion kWh of energy each year
  2. Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.
  3. the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.
  4. Americans drive 5 billion miles per day
  5. The Dept. of Transportation estimates that Americans drive an average of 29 miles per day
  6. The Postal Service operates a fleet of 219,000 vehicles, including 146,000 delivery vehicles…The average LLV is driven about 18 miles a day. (146,000*18 = ~ 2.6 million miles per day )
  7. …299.83 million Google searches per day in May 2009
  8. The book Planet Google was also a useful reference.
]]> fgdb: Free software to manage community hardware recycling tag:mark.stosberg.com,2009:/blog//2.271 2009-04-03T23:50:44Z 2009-04-04T00:11:23Z Hardware recycling in Richmond took a leap forward last weekend. A small group of Richmond volunteers toured Free Geek Columbus. We learned much from visit. One valuable detail I’ll focus on today is that they run their organization on... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ pandarama #1 Hardware recycling in Richmond took a leap forward last weekend. A small group of Richmond volunteers toured Free Geek Columbus. We learned much from visit. One valuable detail I’ll focus on today is that they run their organization on web-based, database-driven software system called “fgdb.rb”. The software is available on their intranet, allowing several volunteers to use and access the system at the same time.

fgdb.rb tracks hardware donations, volunteer time, recycling trips, and hardware distribution. fgdb.rb work with a neat tool called “printme” that takes an automatic snapshot of the all of computer system’s details, and uploads it to the database. This automates tedious data entry and creates a great reference.

I was pleased to find that “fgdb.rb” was available for free as open source software, and is designed to runon Linux. However, the documentation was lacking on details on how to get the system up and running on Ubuntu Hardy Linux, which is what we use on our server at our hardware co-op, and also on my laptop.

Free Geek Portland developed fgdb.rb for their own use and had tested installing the software primarily on Debian Lenny Linux. Now I have managed to install it on Ubuntu Hardy Linux, and have submitted a patch back to the authors to update the documentation to help others do this as well. You can see my current version of the installation instructions, but my changes should be merged into the main fgdb.rb git repository soon, and I recommend checking there for the current version.

I’ve also published a few photos from the Free Geek Columbus field trip.

]]> Richmond, Indiana hardware recycling growing tag:mark.stosberg.com,2009:/blog//2.259 2009-01-11T21:46:11Z 2009-01-11T21:51:46Z Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ Free Geek Richmond?
panorama of our hardware coop, January, 2009

The Richmond Church of the Brethren provides free space for me and some other volunteers to operate this "Hardware Coop". We take in computer hardware that people are ready to get rid of. As our resources permit, we test it, spec it, label and inventory it, install Linux and provide "hardware grants" to those who need cheap or free hardware. What we can't re-use, we recycle.

We also learn a lot in the process. Jonathan Ulrich helped us put DD-WRT on a wireless router so it would function as a repeater, providing internet access to the room.

I built a four-seat thin-client computer lab with good performance using LTSP and Edubuntu. The thin client approach allowed us to bring 366Mhz/64Mb systems back to life by connecting them a reasonably powerful server. (Which was just an XP desktop that had been slow for lack of a memory upgrade). When the lab setup is stable again, perhaps we'll be able to grant the entire 4-seat lab to a non-profit.

With our new reliable internet access, we are able to be much more productive with our troubleshooting, research and general organization.

Soon I hope to be organized enough to take on more volunteers to share the fun and satisfaction of hardware recycling. (Not to mention preferred access to the latest hardware donations!). Also, our current resources prevent us from accepting donations from the general public. So far, the congregation and our friends have provided enough e-waste to keep us busy!

We could use help getting the valuable parts of our inventory into a spreadsheet, so we can publish what we have give out as hardware grants.

Soon I hope to organize a field trip to Free Geek Columbus. They are a model of what our future could be. I expect the visit could be inspirational
as well as educational.

]]> More review notes from testing a ZN5 camera phone tag:mark.stosberg.com,2009:/blog//2.258 2009-01-06T02:57:12Z 2009-01-06T03:03:34Z Here some more notes from testing my zn5 phone. Photos I’ve taken with it are sprinkled throughout. The built-in e-mail client appears not to be open source, although much of the phone is. One disappointment with the mail client is... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ Here some more notes from testing my zn5 phone. Photos I’ve taken with it are sprinkled throughout.

indiana bakfiets longtail panorama

  • The built-in e-mail client appears not to be open source, although much of the phone is. One disappointment with the mail client is that it appears that “POP before SMTP authentication” is not implemented. Strangely, it seems to identify itself as “Moto-A760” as part of making SMTP connections.

  • longtail Christmas tree recyclingMujmail is a decent, fully open source mail client that runs on the phone. It includes the basic usability touch of having keyboard shortcuts for key functions. But as a Java application, Mujmail is sandboxed, meaning it’s prevented from accessing files that it did not create, like reading or writing e-mail addresses directly back into the central address book that the phone uses. Also, because there is no way to make it the “default mail client” on the phone, the “Simple Sharing” feature to easily email a photo can’t be integrated with it. This is the java mess again.

  • There reports that 8 GB microSD cards work with it, although it officially supports a max of 4 GB. Amimu’s review of the ZN5 echos the 8 GB claim, and includes many screenshots.

  • I got the ability to telnet into the ZN5 working. That’s documented now on the OpenEZX wiki.

  • With telnet access, in theory manually fixing the Java permissions is not particularly hard, bit I keep getting out of memory errors.

  • The MidpSSH client doesn’t support ssh tunneling, but it shouldn’t be too hard to add. Any takers?

  • jmIRC is tested to work as IRC client.

  • I’ve now used it combination with the generic “ES-388” Bluetooth USB adapter, as a way to transfer files to a laptop running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron). It was easy enough to send or receive a single file, but I’m not yet able to browse the phone as if it was shared folder.

Farlow Road

]]> Java problems and solutions on the Motorola ZN5 camera phone tag:mark.stosberg.com,2008:/blog//2.256 2008-12-28T00:16:27Z 2008-12-28T03:01:58Z When trying to install some signed applications like Opera Mini on the ZN5 I get "root certificate missing", and the application fails to install. This message refers a certificate that is used to confirm that the application is from... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ new phone, ZN5 When trying to install some signed applications like Opera Mini on the ZN5
I get "root certificate missing", and the application fails to install.

This message refers a certificate that is used to confirm that the application is from a legitimate author. Based on confirmation of a legimate author, the
signed application then has the possibility of being allowed to some more
security-sensitive operations, such as reading and reading files that the
application did not correct.

For background on this issue, I recommend this post on Midlet signing on the Javia blog, and the post How MIDlet Signing is Killing J2ME.

]]> The related "Java Root Certificates" involved on the ZN5 are accessible to view
at Settings: Security: Certificates: Java Root Certificates  There I found
that Motorola had added the certificate named "GeoTrust CA for UTI". I believe
this is the same as the "Java Certified" certificate referenced above.

Opera Mini fails to install because it signed with certificates from Thawte and
Verisign but not GeoTrust. As the posts above explain, the "Java Verified /
GeoTrust" certificate could cost Opera something like $30,000 per bug fix to
use that certificate, so it's no wonder that they haven't used it.

Unfortunately, Motorola has not provided the Thawte or VeriSign certificates on
the ZN5, nor have they have provided a way for users to add their own
additional root certificates. (It appears that the needed certificates are
easily available for free).

In the case of Opera Mini, I already trust the downloads from opera.com, so I'm
not so concerned about the legitimate author feature of the signed java
midlets.  I'm interested in the extra permissions that a signed application
could take advantage of.

I recommend that Motorola release an update to the phones software that
adds additional root certificates and/or allows users to add their own.

In the meantime, there is a theoritical way in which a ZN5 owner can start
with an unsigned Java application, and then manually grant it the permissions
usually reserved only for signed applications. For Opera Mini, I believe this would enable the "Save Page" feature as well as possibly enabling file upload fields.

As I understand, the permissions are stored in simple text files on the phone.
By gaining access to the phone by telnet or FTP, these files can modified and
the permissions changed. If you Google for how to unlock java apps on the ZN5,
I'm sure you can find at least one way to do this yourself using a series of
hacks, which are reported to work on T-mobile's ZN5 software as well as an
unbranded ZN5.

I have not attempted that process yet myself. I would prefer a cleaner
solution, such as one Motorola or T-mobile could provide.

Both Motorola and T-mobile are hurting because the popularity of the iPhone.
Part of the iPhone's success is the App Store, which seems to avoid this mess of certificate problems that Java  applications for mobile phones have. For its part, Motorola could
make some simple changes to increase the value of their phone by including more
root certificates or letting people add their own.

T-Mobile has apparently further reduced the utility and value of this phone by
crippling network access for many Java applications. Perhaps T-mobile has
concerns about users racking up accidental data charges. With the explicit
prompting that applications provide when accessing the network, I think this
would be hard to do.  Giving Java applications full access to wifi doesn't
concern T-mobiles network and further help the ZN5 compete with the iPhone.
At least, T-Mobile could more clear in their marketing of the ZN5 that they
have added significant restrictions to the device.

I hope these notes help to give some people leads after they run into the "root certificate missing" problem on the Motorola ZN5.

You may also be interested in my general review notes or my ZN5 bookmarks.

]]> Review notes for an unbranded Motorola ZN5 camera phone tag:mark.stosberg.com,2008:/blog//2.255 2008-12-27T20:00:19Z 2009-03-22T13:10:14Z These notes concern the unbranded Motorola ZN5 camera phone. The unbranded phone includes the software that Motorola distributes with the phone, rather than the software that T-Mobile puts on the phone when it is branded for T-mobile. The phone... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ new phone, ZN5 These notes concern the unbranded Motorola ZN5 camera phone. The unbranded phone includes the software that Motorola distributes with the phone, rather than the software that T-Mobile puts on the phone when it is branded for T-mobile.

The phone is available with the original software directly from Motorola. I found mine on on eBay. On eBay, you have to be careful to insure that you are getting an unbranded phone, and not just an unlocked T-mobile branded phone.

For more ZN5 details, you may follow my ZN5 bookmarks as I create them.

]]> Differences between branded and unbranded ZN5

From other reviews online, particularly tnkgrl’s, there are a key differences with the T-mobile branded edition of the phone.

  • On the unbranded phone, the phone is fully operable without a SIM card (except for calls, of course). The T-mobile software reportedly requires a SIM card to be operable access wifi. Without a SIM card, the unbranded ZN5 is comparable to an iPod Touch with a camera.

  • On the unbranded phone, wifi access is unrestricted. On the T-mobile software, wifi is reportedly restricted to the web browsing and the Kodak Gallery software.

  • On the unbranded phone, network access for Java programs is not crippled. On the T-mobile software, there is reportedly no network access for downloaded Java programs.

  • On the unbranded phone, one or more POP or IMAP email accounts can be setup with any provider. On the branded phone, options are reportedly limited to select e-mail services, including AOL, Comcast, CompuServe, EarthLink, Gmail, HotPOP, Juno, Mac, NetZero, SBC Yahoo, Verizon, and Yahoo Mail ( reference )

  • On the unbranded phone, you an use the e-mail client to send photos (and videos and voice notes). On the T-mobile software, reportedly you can’t use the e-mail program to send photos.

  • On the unbranded phone, the APN settings can be easily changed. Reportedly on the T-mobile software, the APN settings cannot be changed.

  • Finally, tnkgrl reported that the T-mobile software did not do multi-tasking except for music. The unbranded phone does allow some kinds of multi-tasking. Any Java program can be set to run in the background while another task is performed. Attempting to open the application will instantly restore it. You can also do things like read your e-mail, follow a link to a website, and then close the browser and return back to your e-mail.

  • If you buy an unbranded ZN5 and start as a T-mobile customer, the $35 activation fee is waived, and you can get on a month to month to plan, since it’s the subsidization of the phone that they usually trade for a 1 or 2 year contract. I called T-mobile to confirm this myself. If you acquire your own phone, it’s currently required to travel to a physical T-Mobile location to have the phone activated with a SIM card.

What works on the phone

  • Yes, the unbranded ZN5 works without a data plan. It’s simple to set up a networking profile called “Wifi only”, which will only try to use the wifi connection. The ZN5 prompts you every time an application connects to the network, so it would be very difficult to accidentally connect to T-Mobile’s pay-to-play network.

  • The unsigned Opera Mini java application installed easily and offers a great user experience for a web browser on a small screen. However, it’s not clear how to register Opera Mini to also handle downloads and uploads, as I explain more below.

  • YouTube for mobile videos play on the phone, and load quickly and stream well over wifi. There is a full screen mode and sound comes out through the speaker phone. YouTube videos are clear and stream well on the ZN5. Clicking on a YouTube video in Opera Mini will launch the built-in Symphony browser to play the video, and then return you back to Opera Mini when the video is done. In cases like this, it’s simpler to use th built-in web browser, which is also decent. Symphony is based on WebKit, the same browser technology that the iPhone and iPod Touch use on the backend. Several other mobile sites were successfully tested instead, including those for eBay, Flickr, delicious.com, Hiveminder, and Google Calendar. And thankfully, even the bicycle comics at Yehuda Moon are readily viewable in Opera Mini 4.2

  • As other reviewers have said, the camera does take quite good photos. You can see some samples on Flickr and other ZN5 reviews.

  • Google Maps for Mobile installs. Despite the lack of GPS in the phone, Google Maps automatically centered the map on the town I was in. Streetview works. Once you search for and find a business, it offers a link to start a call to the business.

  • the Mobile Gmail client installs and runs OK.

  • the Nimbuzz chat client installs and runs OK. It connects with Yahoo, Facebooke, Google Talk, AIM, MySpace, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, Jabber, Skype and more.

  • For geeks, the MidpSSH client installs fine, and was successfully tested.

  • Uploading to Flickr can done by e-mailing photos to Flickr.

  • Contacts can be directly imported from another bluetooth phone, using Bluetooth.

  • The phones memory and USB card are both recognized as USB hard drives with Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 (after standard maintenance updates are applied)

What doesn’t work yet

  • scanr did not install, but can be used by e-mail. It may have the same “root certificate” issue that the signed version of Opera Mini does.

  • gcalsync and primoSync, both tools for Google Calendar sync’ing, failed to install. In theory, http://www.kontact.org/kitchensync/index.php can be used to sync the phone with Google Calendar, using a Ubuntu computer in the middle. All the pieces are there for it to work, but I was not able to make it work successfully on my initial tries.

Annoyances

  • panning and zooming photos is not available in the media browser integrated with the camera features, you have to go through the “File Manager”

  • Text templates are not offered for use with e-mails, but they are available for MMS messages, which can be sent to e-mail addresses.

  • Sometimes I have had difficulty connecting to open wifi networks with strong signal strength, while other time this works automatically.

  • Once the phone actually crashed, while I was deleting a photo. The screen froze in a garbled state, and the phone needed to be rebooted to recover.

Conclusion

It’s too soon to tell if the new distractions the phone provides will outweigh potential productivity benefits it could bring. Overall I’m satisfied with the quality and features it provides. It’s still a relatively new phone at this point, and I expect solutions will appear to address the few weaknesses and annoyances I’ve found with the software so far.

Updated March 7th, 2008: The phone now works as a USB hard drive in Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10

]]> Darcs 2: A major update tag:mark.stosberg.com,2008:/blog//2.238 2008-10-24T00:55:53Z 2008-10-25T12:38:53Z To review darcs 2, I reviewed hundreds of bugs entries in the darcs bug tracker, checking to see whether the bugs were fixed are still present. Through this process I became as intimate as the developers with what had... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ Darcs logo To review darcs 2, I reviewed hundreds of bugs entries in the darcs bug tracker, checking to see whether the bugs were fixed are still present. Through this process I became as intimate as the developers with what had been improved in darcs and what remained to address.

What I found was that darcs 2 closed over half the bugs in the bug tracker, literally hundreds of bugs. This was possible because it addressed not just specific bugs, but whole categories of bugs were closed by major architecture and design improvements.

]]>

Major bug fixes

  • Darcs 1 was unfortunately famous for "hanging" at times as it calculated the resolution of complex patch conflict cases. This was a tough issue to solve, but is largely solved with darcs 2.
  • Darcs 2 no longer considers identical patches or patch "hunks" a conflict.
  • Darcs 2 has important safety improvements. With new repo formats available to use, darcs 2 is more resistent to repository corruption caused by third parties, like a stray recursive find-and-replace function that gets into the repo directory. It will also create backup files in cases where it did not before.
  • Darcs 2 replaces the concept of "partial" repositories with "lazy" ones. There has always been a desire to allow "lightweight" checkouts that don't include the complete repo history. The darcs 1 solution to this was "partial" repositories that only checked out history up to a point. This approach worked to some extent, but didn't play with well with darcs commands that expected the whole history to be present. The new "lazy" concept offers similar benefits, and will pull down older remote patches on demand if some command needs them. Lazy repositories are a great comprise between features and performance.
  • Darcs 2 fixes some broken darcs 1 repositories. In some cases a darcs 1 repo could get a bad state so some commands didn't work. Often these repos could be converted into the darcs 2 format, and would be "fixed" when used with darcs 2.

While darcs 1 was and is a useful tool, darcs 2 fixes some significant bugs that restricted some kinds of uses in the past.

New Features

To summarize the feature improvements: darcs 2 provides a more polished user experience. Here are highlights of the new features:

  • Better progress reporting. In places where the user may need to wait more than a second or two for a response (Say, pulling over HTTP or SSH), darcs 2 is able to give live progress updates. There's often an option to turn up the detail level with '--debug' and '--verbose' flags.
  • Performance improvements. Darcs 2 has an option to use a new "global cache" system which speeds up some kinds of operations. Performance when operating over SSH is improved as well. There does remain room for improvement here. Very large projects may not be satisfied with the performance, and "darcs whatsnew --look-for-adds" remains noticeably slow when compared to competing tools.
  • Better error messages. Users who run into exceptional cases are more likely to discover error messages that make it clear what to next, without consulting a reference or mailing list.
  • Better integration with external tools. Darcs has improved the "post commit hook", allowing better automation for tools would operate on every patch that is pushed to a central repo. The darcs project made direct use of this feature, allowing it to close a bug tracking ticket simply by including the right phrasing in the name of a patch.
  • Better handling of binary files. With darcs 2, you can make all the files in particular directory as being binary, rather than just using pattern matching on the file names.

Under the hood

There a few important details to know about what's under the hood of darcs 2.

First, backwards compatibility is in there. There is a strong set of automated tests that insure that darcs 2 works as well as possible with repos in darcs 1 format. You can upgrade to darcs 2 now even if some of the repos you need to access will remain in the darcs 1 format.

Quality Assurance tools have been been improved. While end users won't notice directly, they benefit from the improved quality assurance practices of the darcs project. The large automated test suite is now better organized and more portable. Further, a new "Buildbot" system automates builds of darcs on various platforms, allowing the team to catch portability issues faster.

Deep math? still in there. darcs has always excelled at cherry picking patches from a branch due the patch algebra originally implemented by physicist David Roundy. this unique foundation of the source control system remains and was updated for the new release to support the features described above.

In the community

Between Darcs 1 and Darcs 2, the community continued to release and update related tools that work with Darcs. Some darcs projects worth highlighting include:

Adopting Darcs 2

Darcs 2 is an easy upgrade decision for darcs 1 users. Darcs 2 deserves serious consideration for anyone evaluating source code control tools. Be careful reading comparisions of darcs to other options. Most published at the moment still measure against darcs 1, and some cite the now-fixed weaknesses of darcs 1 as reasons not to adopt it. The darcs project is now up front about it's significant limitation: It isn't recommended for very large projects.

The reality is that while some of the weaknesses of Darcs 1.0 were dealbreakers for some users, Darcs 2 is a solid, mature, usable release that deserves a second look.

Darcs 2 binaries for Ubuntu Linux are available on Iain Lane's PPA page. Binaries for many other platforms are available.

Thanks for reading! This post is discussed on reddit.

]]> The Widescreen Scam tag:mark.stosberg.com,2007:/blog//2.275 2007-11-19T02:19:24Z 2009-04-24T01:20:23Z Widescreen LCD monitors are laptops are all the rage now. Wikipedia cites lower associated manufacturing costs. Basic geometry and algebra explain why manufacturers are saving money and consumers may be deceived about what they are getting. Monitors are measured... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/

Widescreen LCD monitors are laptops are all the rage now. Wikipedia cites lower associated manufacturing costs.

Basic geometry and algebra explain why manufacturers are saving money and consumers may be deceived about what they are getting.

Monitors are measured along the diagonal. A 14" widescreen sounds like a '14" screen...only wider", but it is not. It a screen with a wide width-to-height ratio, such as 16-to-10, with a diagonal that that measures 14". The wider and flatter a rectangle gets for a given diagonal length, the smaller the area. That means a 14" widescreen LCD has less screen area than a standard screen with a 4:3 ratio. By my calculations, it's about 6% smaller, or the equivalent of removing about half an inch from the standard size 14" monitor.

That's why the manufacturers are saving money! But wait, the widescreen version of 1280x1024 is often given as 1440x900, as in this newegg.com article which makes widescreens sounds like they only have positives.

At first glance, the widescreen resolution looks like it might make sense-- it is in fact a little shorter than the standard version. But the areas don't add up. They are within about 1% of being the same, when the widescreen should be about 6% less. So what happened here? The pixel size on the widescreen was reduced about 3% in each direction.

So in summary, A 14" widescreen is not like the 14", but wider, it is shorter, smaller and likely has smaller pixels. That explains why they can be cheaper and a little lighter, too. If you watch a lot of widescreen DVDs or need to see lots of spreadsheet columns, maybe widescreen is right for you.

Otherwise, consider your monitor shape carefully.

The story sometimes bigger is smaller - widescreen monitors reports on the same topic.

]]> The virtues of a small hard drive tag:mark.stosberg.com,2007:/blog//2.223 2007-08-04T16:00:00Z 2008-09-18T02:11:04Z A small hard drive is a like a small house. Less to clean. Yesterday I got a visual alert that my drive was 99% full (Thanks for the hint, Ubuntu!). I responded immediately in two ways. First, I immediately... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ Thinkpad T23 inverter replacement A small hard drive is a like a small house. Less to clean. Yesterday I got a visual alert that my drive was 99% full (Thanks for the hint, Ubuntu!).

I responded immediately in two ways. First, I immediately searched Ebay for hard drives that were are least 60 GB in size. That would upgrade my current one by about 50 Gigs.

Second, I started looking for junk to get rid of.

A short time later I'd found 800 megs of stuff I was happy to be living without, and I canceled the E-bay search.

A bigger drive may allow me to store more, but it also allows me to make a larger mess, lose more in a crash, and anything that involves looking at the whole disk will take longer, like a search, backup, or restore procedure.

]]> Open Source Software: Presentation Talking Points tag:mark.stosberg.com,2006:/blog//2.306 2006-08-06T01:21:52Z 2009-07-02T01:28:51Z I recently gave a presentation about the culture and values of open source at a local church I roughly covered the following bullet points. I've linked to points to pages with further context. The Four Freedoms of Open Source... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/

I recently gave a presentation about the culture and values of open source at a local church

I roughly covered the following bullet points. I've linked to points to pages with further context.

Thanks to all who attended and helped out! ]]> My favorite browser: Firefox tag:mark.stosberg.com,2006:/blog//2.286 2006-04-25T16:00:00Z 2009-05-17T01:40:03Z My current favorite browser is Firefox. It's easy to use for novice web users, while housing advanced features that demanding folks will appreciate as well. Firefox launches quickly. This is a basic but important quality. The larger Mozilla suite... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ coming home from dinner

My current favorite browser is Firefox. It's easy to use for novice web users, while housing advanced features that demanding folks will appreciate as well.

Firefox launches quickly. This is a basic but important quality. The larger Mozilla suite that Firefox is descended from does not have this trait.

]]> Firefox runs on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. This consistency across platforms helps minimize frustrations when switching computers. For people considering trying out Linux, running open source software like Firefox and OpenOffice can ease the transition.

Tabbed browsing has become essential to me. Tabbed Browsing refers the ability to display multiple web pages in one browser windows, each in it's own tab. It's a much faster and more organized than holding each page in it's own window, which may be hidden behind another. This feature is also available in Safari, Konqueror and several other browsers, but IE 6 still doesn't have it.

Type-ahead find is a time saver. With Firefox, I just start typing a word, and an incremental search for that word on the page will begin. This is faster and easier to use than using "Control-F" to pop-up a search box, which obscures the page I'm searching.

Excellent Rendering. Another fundamental feature done well. Firefox does an excellent job of rendering the most complex websites and does well adhering to the many established standards to web page rendering.

Simple, easy to use and customizable. Unlike the Mozilla suite, Firefox is just a web browser, without extra functions cluttering the interface. It's also easy to customize the toolbar. I like to remove all the buttons except for the forward and back buttons, and use keyboard shortcuts or menus for the rest.

Many extensions are available. There are many extensions and plug-ins available to extend Firefox in all kinds of ways. My favorite extension is the web developer extension. It adds an invaluable toolbar for debugging web page problems. My favorite feature is an option to display all the form tags directly as part of the page rendering. That's a time saver in the debugging process of my website development.

You may also be interested in my favorite text-based browsers for the unix console environment.

]]> First and second impressions of Kolab as a groupware server tag:mark.stosberg.com,2006:/blog//2.299 2006-01-17T17:00:00Z 2009-06-15T02:59:19Z I've helping a friend evaluate open source alternatives for small business desktops. His primary feature requirement is shared contacts and calendaring for a staff of seven professionals. Kolab looked attractive because it's a groupware solution made to integrate with... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ farm cats explore the bakfiets

I've helping a friend evaluate open source alternatives for small business desktops. His primary feature requirement is shared contacts and calendaring for a staff of seven professionals.

Kolab looked attractive because it's a groupware solution made to integrate with Kontact, the personal information management suite installed by default on Mandriva Linux.

Kolab is free and easy to install.(A kolab package is provided by Mandriva).

Kolab met and far exceeded the functionality I was looking for. It offered a turnkey solution including complete e-mail management and the ability to scale to hundreds of users across several domains.

]]> It is itself built from many standard open source technologies including Apache, PHP, Perl, IMAP and LDAP. The names may not be familiar but the value behind the design is sensible. By re-using standard compontents, kolab plays to the existings skill sets of those who manage it. This makes it easier to customize and extend if necessary.

On the desktop, it was easy to set up Kontact clients to integrate with the Kolab server. From the start screen of the program there was a link to follow which lead me to through a wizard to complete the process.

Yet, for these benefits, Kolab didn't feel like a good fit. While Kolab was easy to install, it actually installed 120(!) new packages to complete the process, and starting about eight new to run continuously. While building in everything that would be needed for a large deployment, it felt like too big a hammer for the simpler task at a hand.

For a specific example, Kolab accomplishes a shared calendar through a concept called a "shared folder". First I had to discover this, since I don't usually think of a calendar as a folder. This folder is actually an e-mail folder that the calendar program pays attention to, but the e-mail program basically ignores. That seems like an odd solution to me.

My first impression of contact sharing with equally cumbersome. I was looking for a solution which each member should share contacts freely with others. Kolab appeared to only share contacts that were managed through it's own interace. To add a new contact, it seems users would have to use Kolab's web-based interface rather than a standard desktop addressbook person. Again, I could see how this could work well for sharing a central corporate directory, but wasn't what I had in mind for a small business solution.

Other alternatives for small business calendar and contact sharing

At Summersault, we have a simple way related:to share digital calendars among a team of five, including Mac, Windows and Linux users.

Simply, we use different desktop software, but they share two features: First, they export the standard ICal format. Second, they allow subscribing to multiple remote calendars, so we can all subscribe to the other calendars without the need for a central server.

I plan to explore an option more along these lines for my next project.

I'm hoping to find an equally simple solution for contact sharing.

Two approaches seem promising to consider: Evolution is a desktop PIM suite that has the ability to allow users to share contacts be providing everyone write access to shared LDAP server.

Thunderbird is the mail program the team is already using, and it would be nice to keep using it if possible. If LDAP write access could be added to Thunderbird, it could be the ideal solution here.

Now a second look, a couple weeks later.

When I last looked at Kolab as a groupware server, I came away feeling it was not a good fit, in part because the storage model didn't make sense to me.

After further consideration, I've come around. Storing all the data in an IMAP server actually makes a lot of sense. I took the liberty of starting a page on the Kolab wiki detailing why.

Kolab can quite readily share all kinds of groupware resources, including calendars and contacts, through shared IMAP folders. It's not necessary to involve an LDAP server for this, nor is it even necessary for users to use this set of IMAP folders for their e-mail, if simple a sharing scheme is sufficient.

In summary, I discovered the Kolab can scale down as well as up, and it was easy to set up this way. It just took a little patience to read the documentation and understand the design.

In the process, I've also become very impressed with Kontact as a groupware client. Not only does it work well with Kolab, it appears to work well with several other groupware servers.

Several of these other groupware projects put a focus on providing a web-based interface to all the data. I already have favorable first impressions all the options that I looked at.

As a professional web-database programmer, exploring these options further appeals to me because it may mean I have a greater ability to understand and modify the systems myself if I chose to.

Apparently my adventure exploring groupware isn't over yet!

One thing has become clear: there are fewer and fewer reasons to chose Exchange and Outlook as a solution, as alternatives exist that are lower cost, have the features and compatibility and are based on open source and open standards.

]]> A great first experience with Linux scanning tag:mark.stosberg.com,2005:/blog//2.219 2005-02-15T17:00:00Z 2008-09-16T02:34:31Z Today I tried to scan something using Linux for the first time. Although must hardware I want Linux to talk to general works well, I still have a number of memories of finesses and fussing with things to get... Mark Stosberg http://mark.stosberg.com/ Morphine Explosion Today I tried to scan something using Linux for the first time. Although must hardware I want Linux to talk to general works well, I still have a number of memories of finesses and fussing with things to get them to work (moreso from the distant past than recently). This is what I expected out my first Linux scanning experience.

Instead, It was an very impressive experience. I plugged the scanner in and it was recognized. I easily found and installed a scanner package called Xsane using Mandrake's built-in Software Installer. (I just searched for software with 'scanner' in the description').

XSane needed no configuration to talk to my scanner. From my experience using Macs with various scanner, I recall that usually each scanner has it it's own specific drivers to install and software to use, often with mediocre features and inteface.

I needed to install no additional drivers in this case.

Although XSane was feature rich, it was easy to find just the details I needed to adjust the colors, rotate and crop the image, and save it in a file format of my choice.

I would say that XSane is the best scanner interface software I've used so far.

With Kprinter, it was easy to complete my task by turning the 7 PostScripts I had generated into a single PDF. I simply needed to open the files in Kprinter, and then choose the "Save to PDF" option.

It was a pleasant first experience to discover this Linux desktop software that was not just "good enough", but excellent.

I look forward to more "Just Works" experiences. ]]>