I've been discovering a lot about what influences my productivity when writing things.

The right combination seems to be something like

• Make sure that I'm actually doing writing stuff by 9.30am. Starting later, particularly in the afternoon, is a good way to get nothing done.
  • This can be hard to do when working at home.
  • You actually need to get up in order to do this.
  • Sleep helps with the getting up part.
• If tired, V helps
• Get rid of distractions
  • Make web browser refuse to visit certain sites. This only works if you can persuade yourself not to work around the restrictions you've imposed, but if you habitually visit certain sites (like AlterSlash) during lulls in work, having an error pop up is usually enough of a reminder that you were supposed to be doing something else.
  • Staying home or going to VUW doesn't seem to make much difference; each has different distractions available. And there's more V at VUW.
  • Ignore IRC
• Write! Once this is started (and the morning stuff, V and less distractions help), keeping going doesn't seem so hard.

If only I'd worked this out earlier.

Update: This only works intermittently. Alas.

When you're sick of reading David P Farrar's blog, it's nice to know that there's now an alternative: the blog of David B Farrah. I predict his blog will be more widely read than my own.

A-ha! (sorry, been watching I'm Alan Partridge)

Now working on my laptop, under Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger:

• ACPI
• Sleep
• Sound
• Wireless
• ... everything!

Shiny! And all I had to do was simplify someone else's patches to comment out a panic(), turn on sleep in /etc/default/acpi-support, remove my wireless card's drivers from the kernel and install the latest out-of-tree versions, install a modified DSDT, install ifplugd, and several other things I've forgotten.

And they say Linux isn't ready for the desktop!

So. Linux on laptop. This should be easy, right?

Oh, you say the system won't boot with ACPI on? Okay. But WiFi works. And odd patches (commenting out a panic() in io_apic.c) to make ACPI, and therefore sound work? Okay. And some wierd DSDT file to make the battery status appear? I can cope with that.

However, doing all this and having the WiFi stop working somewhere is less fun. And Ubuntu (which I thought I'd try) seems to have a bunch of patches applied to a kernel, and they're only available for 2.6.12, so upgrading to 2.6.14.${latest} will be a PITA. A newer kernel may not fix the problem, anyway.

Aaaargh! I want my Mac back. Just lighter, with three mouse buttons, and a slightly larger screen. And faster. And with Linux-supported WiFi. Pity they don't make that sort.

I saw an ad on a noticeboard at the supermarket today.

It appeared to be written by someone who thinks that the purpose of an apostrophe is to warn the reader that they're about to see an "s".

I crossed out the incorrect apostrophes.

Does this make me a pedant?

Ha.

A few days ago, I said:

I want an entirely new set of problems. So I’m buying an Acer.

The out-of-box experience is just as bad as with the iBook. Eager readers of my mind may remember me returning the iBook for repairs a few hours after receiving it. Same problem with the Acer, except that their 0800 number seems to be staffed by Australians who tried to make me call Australia before realising that I was in another country. While I was logging into a shiny new Ubuntu install, the trackpad stopped working. It wouldn't work with Knoppix anymore, or Windows. The restore CDs don't blow away grub, so after running them the system wouldn't boot anyway.

Apparently, Acer have a 3-hour service thingy in some major centres. But this only seems to apply if they have one or more notebooks of the model you have in stock. Of course, they have no 3002WTCis. So I have to wait 3-4 days. Suck. But so far, on a par with my Apple experience.

So I've had an iBook for about 18 months.

At first, it was really neat. It had lots of shiny, and everything antialiased, and power management worked. A few hiccups, but nothing that the warranty doesn't fix.

Then it remained the same. It began to feel slower -- I don't know how much of this I can blame on upgrading to OS X 10.4. Java never ran at a reasonable speed, making Eclipse unusable. The Dreaded Beachball&tm; was everywhere. I'm sick of Firefox being unstable, and I don't like Safari.

Running Linux wasn't an answer -- the Airport Extreme (the silly name Apple brands IEEE802.11g with) card has an evil Broadcom chipset, for which there is no Linux support on PPC. There's only one mouse button, which makes X unusable if you like running software like Emacs.

So it's easy to use. But I want to do wierd stuff. I want to tunnel IP over DNS. And I can't.

I could buy a new iBook -- the 1.2GHz 12" ones are sufficiently cheap. But that won't make enough of a speed difference. I want an entirely new set of problems. So I'm buying an Acer. And I'm going to run Linux on it.

TCL seem to have deigned us worthy of new cable internet plans. Unfortunately, they seem to have tried to emulate Telecom, badly. The only advantage of cable now is higher upstream speeds, and that's going to increase congestion. The new plans require that you buy a phone line from them, so they've lost that advantage over DSL -- we have no phone line at present. They charge the same for all network traffic -- no more national split. The prices including phone line don't compete with DSL, especially the overage of (at minimum) $5/GB, compared to $10/10GB from Orcon. If the Telecom local loop gets unbundled, or UBS upstream improves, cable is dead.

So, any more Karori-ites interested in sticking antennae on their houses?

SWANS is built around tunneling ethernet over UDP via vtun, which sits in userspace shoveling packets between the network and a tun device. This works, but it's a little slow; so much so that when I set up a new shell box for Interface, I connected it to SWANS via WDS instead. Which was still only a few hundred Kbytes/s, but didn't need to use fragmented UDP packets.

Today, I was thinking about this, and realised that maybe a kernel-based approach might be slightly better -- especially as I wanted the APs that were providing the wireless link to my office back. So I tried a GRE tunnel instead, which is handled by Linux in kernelspace. The result was impressive.

Bearing in mind that the SWANS router was only a PII 233, I wasn't expecting amazing results. But IPv4 over GRE gave me about ten times the performance of ethernet frames over vtun -- peaking at about 6Mbytes/s (not too shabby, considering the unencapsulated, NATted packets share the same link). True, there's no crypto, but I didn't want any to begin with.

Xen doesn't seem to be compatible with as many Linux drivers as I'd like. Over the last couple of weeks, I've discovered that

• RTL8169 Gigabit Ethernet cards don't work.
• vifs don't support jumbo frames.
• ATA over Ethernet doesn't work (lots of fun kernel panics and I/O breakage)

This is a pity.