The Hacker Factor Blog

The last few weeks have been a serious rush. I think I can summarize it simply: newer isn't always better.

Spinning Down

A few months ago I lost "yet another" hard drive. Fortunately, it was part of a RAID, so I didn't lose any data. (A lesson I learned from my first hard drive failure -- always use a RAID.) I seem to be getting 2-3 years out of newer hard drives, and it does not matter which manufacturer created the drive.

I have a few old computers collecting dust in the back room. Recently I had a need for some software that I wrote back in the 1990's. I couldn't find a copy on my newer systems, but I knew it was on the old, dusty box. I plugged it in, powered it on... and it came up without a problem. Now, to put things into perspective: the hard drive is a 120 MB (yes, megabyte) Conner drive. I acquired it around 1990. This drive ran continuous duty for over 15 years before being powered down and archived for five years. And... it powered back up without a problem.

When it comes to hard drives, I plan for new ones to fail -- because they will fail. But old hard drives? I think my Conner could easily do another ten years continuous duty. (Too bad it is only 120 MB!)

Broken Windows

The newer X-Windows server (since about 2008) is much more automated. In Ubuntu's Karmic Koala (9.10), it does not even include an Xorg.conf file -- the entire configuration is automatically detected.

The good news is, the X-Server will likely configure itself correctly and start up without a problem. The bad news is, if it has problems, then many of the debugging tools that you will need are broken. Making matters worse, they have been broken for years.

A good example is the xvidtune program. If you have a flat screen monitor, or even a newer tube monitor, then it will likely auto adjust the frequency and center the image on the screen. But if you have an older monitor, then you may need to manually align the desktop's position on the display. Depending on the video card, monitor, and auto-detected X-Windows settings, the desktop may need more shifting than the monitor's manual controls allow. The real solutions is xvidtune, which allows you to adjust the position on the display by tweaking the horizontal and vertical frequencies.

Unfortunately, xvidtune has been broken for years -- since X-Server version 1.4 (2007). And while plenty of people have reported the problem, it has remained broken for at least three years.

HTML Doc

I've been doing a lot of technical documentation lately. I'm writing it in HTML and using htmldoc to convert it to PDF. The problem is, my older Ubuntu Dapper Drake system could generate the docs but all of my newer systems could not. It turns out, my HTML includes arrows for menus (–› created using –›). On the newer systems, they just print blank spaces.

I eventually traced the problem to the version of htmldoc. Version 1.8.24 works fine, but the newer versions (1.8.27 through 1.9) seem to have problems with ampersand codes.

Et Tu, JPEG?

For my image analysis stuff, I rely on the FreeImage library for loading most image formats and saving all formats. (FreeImage has a few quirks with corrupted files, so I wrote my own libraries for loading some file formats.)

I recently upgraded from FreeImage 3.11.0 to 3.13.1... and immediately noticed some problems. The Error Level Analysis and color space algorithms were giving different results for some of my regression tests. I even tried 3.12.0 and 3.13.0 -- and found the cutoff: 3.12.0 renders JPEGs correctly, 3.13.0 does not.

FreeImage actually uses the library provided by the Independent JPEG Group (IJG). FreeImage 3.12.0 uses jpeglib v.6b, while 3.13.0 upgraded to jpeglib v.8. Somewhere between 6b and 8, IJG did a significant rewrite to their library for applying chrominance. The net result: JPEGs rendered by IJG's jpeglib v.8 no longer look like JPEGs rendered with other libraries (IJG and non-IJG).

Don't get me wrong: The pictures still look like pictures, the differences are subtle, and the changes really only impact extreme corner-cases. However, if the library does not render colors in those corner cases exactly like other libraries, then I cannot use it. Good thing I could easily regress to 3.12.0.

Blast From The Past

Not everything old is better than their newer counterparts. My iPod is a much better MP3 player than my old no-name brand player. My USB LED mouse is far superior to the old serial mouse (if for no other reason than the wheels don't get gummed up). And my netbook is a huge improvement over my old Dell laptop.

But in the last few weeks I have been repeatedly reminded that newer is not always better. (And don't get me started on the Toyota recall. Good thing my car is old...)