Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

I have been resisting the move to a laptop for years. My vision is pretty bad, so I’ve doggedly stuck to using a desktop system with a big screen, and that’s served me well.

But recently I bought a laptop, expecting mostly to use it as a portable desktop: hook up the big screen and the real keyboard, but able to pick it up and take it away with me if needed.

Over the last week, though, we’ve had a sick dog in the house who needs to be watched and who has trouble with the stairs. As the computers are usually kept upstairs, it became necessary to shift our stuff downstairs so we wouldn’t have to deal with Mr Stoned Lab treating the stairs as a perilous slippery-dip.

So I’ve been getting used to using the laptop in broadly the way it is meant to be used: sitting on the kitchen table, using the builtin screen and keyboard. I’ve had to bump the fonts up in PuTTY (now using 16pt Lucida Console, rather than my usual 14pt), and some things are a bit squinty to read, but mostly it’s OK.

Not really liking the keyboard much, but I’m used to having that sloped and without the big chunky bit in front, and the trackpad is of course bloody awful, but a regular old USB mouse does just fine.

The machine is running Vista SP1, and that’s been perfectly adequate. I’m not trying to hook up to a corporate network though, so there are all sorts of nasties I’m not dealing with there.

My one Vista observation is that the Sidebar has got a lot less dreadful since I last tried to use it. It is no longer gobbling up all the CPU on a regular basis, and on a widescreen display there’s quite enough room to have that little strip of gadgets down the side. I’m running with third party clock, iTunes controller, ISP download meter, CPU monitor, and a neat little tool that shows the top 3 CPU-using processes. sidebar.exe has only rarely made its way onto that list, and never with more than 2-3% CPU.

This experience has convinced me that it’s probably worth my while to buy a 24″ widescreen display for upstairs. With only one working eye it seemed kind of pointless, but the sidebar thing really is genuinely useful.

My one small Vista complaint is that I’d like to have window borders be completely solid the way they are on maximised windows, but all the time. I don’t care for the translucent effect (which can be disabled), nor do I care for the frosted look. But I do like the compositing window manager a lot.

Unfortunately most (all?) WindowBlinds themes suck. They are usually completely unable to cope with larger fonts. You can tweak that in the WB configuration interface but it usually just makes it look like amateur hour.

Oh, other Vista complaint: Magnifier isn’t terribly good, and ZoomText is (a) terribly expensive and (b) crap on Vista anyway. Guys, Apple and the Linux weenies can both do an adequate screen zoom as a builtin, it may be time for you to do it too. Sometimes copying features is good.

All this said, I’m still doing some things on XP and Linux. The old desktop machine has been repurposed and is now running Ubuntu Server LTS plus VMWare Server. This gives me a Linux environment when I need it — and boy has VNC gotten better over the last few years! — plus a stable unchanging always-on XP system for video transcodes and handling the Topfield stuff.

Please, nobody start carrying on about how Linux can do video, it all still sucks asteroids through garden hose compared to DVD Decrypter and AutoGK on Windows. Really. And for subtitle work there is simply nothing (free) better than SubRip and Subtitle Workshop, also both Windows-only. I laugh at your puny gocr wrappers!

Anyway. It’s nice to have the freedom to work downstairs when needed, so all up the laptop experience has been pretty decent.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Tags: Tech by matt
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Looking around for information on getting the VMware Server 2.0 beta running on Ubuntu Server 8.04 — I find it best to look online to see if people are having trouble before I waste time trying to make something work — I saw a fair few complaints about performance not being very good.

Well, I’m not quite sure what those people were talking about. I’ve set it up with a Windows XP VM on a machine that had previously been running Windows XP and as a test I hit it with my usual DVD-to-AppleTV process: rip to disk with DVD Decrypter, convert to XviD with AutoGK, convert subtitles using SubRip.

It’s been a little bit slower than the same stuff running natively, but not significantly so. I don’t have numbers — I forgot to collect stats before nuking the native XP install — but it’s doing the DVD->XviD at ~real-time, which isn’t a whole lot slower than when there was no VMware in the middle.

I’m happy enough with this, particularly given that this is batch processing — fire off a whole heap and forget about it — and that this is a beta with debug code.

Incidentally, I did try using dvd::rip from the Ubuntu packages, but the cluster support is failing — the final “put all the bits together” step barfs claiming there’s no video stream — and while I can indeed do transcodes one-at-a-time without using the cluster stuff, there’s no batch support without it. So while that would probably be faster, life is too short.

Popularity: 49% [?]

Tags: Tech, Ubuntu, Video, appletv by matt
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The new laptop arrived on Tuesday. Life events (sick dog) rather took the shine off the new-toy-lust, but that’s OK.

To recap, this is a Dell XPS M1530, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, GF8600MGT video. Essentially a 15″ desktop-replacement type system, about as grunty a GPU as you’re going to get in a laptop without paying crazy money for an Alienware machine.

So far so good. It’s running Vista Ultimate (I’d have been happy with Home Premium, but I opted for the red one, and that comes with Ultimate) with the VMware Server beta handling a Ubuntu VM for work-stuff.

Overall it’s been nice and stable, performing about as expected. I’m a bit leery of running it with the lid closed — it’s hooked up to a 19″ LCD most of the time — as it gets a bit toasty, but having reorganised the computer room a bit it isn’t really a problem to leave it open at the back of the desk.

Also rather enjoying the new version of Opera. This plus Privoxy has become my “default” web browsing environment, with Firefox and IE available where necessary. An Opera addon to load the current page in IE or Firefox — rather like the equivalent for Firefox — would be nice, though.

Despite concern that working with this as a mobile machine wouldn’t really be viable with my crappy vision, it’s been OK so far. I’ve got fonts turned up a bit in Vista, and typically run PuTTY, eReader, and Opera with monster fonts as well. Since that covers most of my non-gaming use it’s been OK.

Overall, pretty happy with the purchase. It’s no Macbook Pro, style-wise, and the disk is a little loud, but it does appear to Just Work and it’s not what I’d call bad looking.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Tags: Tech by matt
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When they say “webrick is crap, use mongrel” they really do mean it. Webrick is enough to do a little basic testing to satisfy yourself that this tool might be useful to you, but once you’ve got even 50 machines talking to it, it starts failing all over the place.

Takes extra work to set up mongrel, but TFM is pretty much spot-on in this respect.

Also: don’t bother running puppetd as a daemon. Run it from cron with “–onetime –splay” instead. Hell, have it set up its own crontab entry:

        cron {puppetd:
                command => "puppetd --onetime --splay",
                user => root,
                minute => [ 15, 45]
        }

Use modules. Use them from the very start. They really do make life easier, and if you use them from the start then you don’t have that awkward period when you’ve got 50+ machines using an old un-modular configuration and now you have to very carefully migrate them all.

(i.e., don’t be an idiot, do what I say, not what I did!)

Popularity: 23% [?]

Tags: Tech by matt
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I grabbed this combo Firewire/USB2 enclosure earlier in the week, and am quite happy to recommend it.

Complete doddle to fit the “old” 300GB Maxtor drive I had sitting around, keeps it reasonably cool when running, not especially noisy, and when hooked up to a G5 iMac via Firewire it “felt” faster than the internal disk.

Of course now it’s mostly full and I’m going to have to do a bit of a shuffle when the laptop arrives, as it really should be formatted as NTFS but the iMac doesn’t speak that natively. Thus it’s FAT32 for now.

At least the laptop also has Firewire, so it ought to be pretty speedy. 7200RPM disk attached via FW400, probably faster than the 5400RPM SATA disk fitted internally, so really a good thing to be able to have 2GB+ files on.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Tags: Tech by matt
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Dell have already shipped clifford. Estimated delivery date is still the 18th, but I wouldn’t be completely surprised to have it sooner than that.

(clifford is an XPS M1530 in red, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, 320GB disk, 256MB GF8600M GT GPU. Pretty much a desktop replacement system.)

I’ve ordered an external enclosure for the 300GB PATA disk in the old gaspode (the house server we barely use any more). With that hooked up to clifford via Firewire it may well be faster than the interal disk (7200rpm Firewire vs 5400rpm SATA), will do very nicely for storing all our video/etc, much of which is synced down to the AppleTV anyway.

If I can get mt-daapd playing nice on the AppleTV (and by all accounts it’s a doddle) then the only thing left here that requires an “always-on” computer is the overnight EPG/favourites upload on the Topfield. Which will be moot in a few months when we get TiVo.

This leads to the very-appealing prospect of my only needing one computer for my own stuff, plus one for my partner. This will be replacing three machines (G5 iMac, Core2Duo desktop, Athlon psuedo-server) with one little laptop that’ll sleep at nights unless I’ve got video jobs to run.

I expect this will lead to a fairly significant electricity saving. Which makes me a happy bunny.

The only change I might think about is getting one of those consumer-grade NAS units. The D-Link DNS323 looks like a reasonable choice at AU$300 plus disks. That’d stay on 24×7, but it’d be the only thing that did.

Backups? We use Jungle Disk for our documents/photos/etc — the stuff we’d be really unhappy to lose — and music is synced down to the AppleTV so we’ve automatically got two copies of everything there. Video, well, if I ever fill that 300GB disk (possible, but meh) then we’ll have more than we can copy to the AppleTV, so there’s some exposure there, but really, who cares? Most of it we’ll only ever watch once anyway, this is more about simply having a library of stuff available when we want it, none of it is irreplacable.

I’ve been working for a few days now using Mandriva under VirtualBox on WindowsXP as a “paid work” environment. This lets me use things like iTunes while also being able to have a UNIXy work environment. So far so good, and I think that’ll work out nicely in the longer term. Best of both worlds, effectively, with no great compromise required on either side.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Tags: Linux, Tech by matt
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3G iPhone at a reasonable price, nice I suppose, might consider it in 18 months when the current contract is up, but otherwise quite happy with my Sony-Ericsson phone. At least the price is now sensible. It’ll be interesting to see what (if any) data bundles the Australian telcos come up with.

MobileMe might be interesting, it depends whether/how they implement things like calendar/contacts sharing. If they get that right — no indication at all in the currently-available documentation, such as it is — then it could be quite a decent option for small businesses/nonprofits who need that sort of functionality but simply cannot justify a full hosted Exchange service.

But it does rather feel like something where they should be bundling a year of service with an iPhone purchase.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Tags: Tech by matt
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The Australian dollar is nearing parity with the US dollar.

You wouldn’t think it to look at Apple’s prices, which are even more out of whack than usual. Take a look at the middle-of-the-range Macbook Pro (15″ display, 512MB VRAM, 2.5GHz CPU):

US price: US$2499
AU price: AU$3399

That’s ~$900 more to buy locally, or a 36% markup. I’m not entirely sure that it’s worth $900 to buy from a local dealer.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Tags: Mac, Rant by matt
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I have a need for a laptop, but also have fairly poor vision. So while I mostly don’t need a screen magnifier on my desktop machine I almost certainly will on a laptop, and colour-remapping — swapping light for dark and dark for light — is also helpful.

There are two basic hardware options: an AU$1500-2000 15″ generic laptop from Dell, Asus, Lenovo, or whoever, or a AU$2500 Macbook Pro. The cheaper generic machine could reasonably run Windows or Linux.

I already have an old Mac desktop machine so I’ve been fiddling with the screen zoom and “white on black” display mode for a while. Both work quite well. The magnifier is controlled using control+scrollwheel, inverse mode by hitting control-option-command-8, which is a bit inconvenient but not completely impractical.

ZoomText — which easily adds US$400 to the price of that cheap laptop, by the way! — has what feels like a slightly nicer zoom in terms of image quality, and the inverse-mode hotkey is rather more convenient. The “jump to focus” stuff feels more effective, too. It does a fair bit more than the built-in OS X tools do and is much more customisable, but on the other hand it “supports” Vista by completely turning off the compositing window manager.

Linux, ah.

Compiz has a pretty decent magnifier, but for the life of me I can’t get it to activate using just the touchpad and keyboard on the test laptop. And while it has some colour-filter options none of them seem to do quite what OS X or ZoomText can. On the surface one might think that all that needs doing is to select the “high contrast” white-on-blue Gnome theme and maybe make the fonts a bit bigger, but of course that isn’t really the whole story. A proper screen-inverse feature gets everything, so for example those annoying bright white web pages are suddenly a lot easier on the eyes, and it also fixes the “we have ten thousand different GUI toolsets — many of which don’t honour your Gtk+ settings — and we’re not afraid to use them” problem.

You can work around this by fiddling with Firefox plugins like Stylish to apply custom stylesheets to specific (or all) websites, or using the high-contrast stylesheet that ships with Opera, but those will break some websites. Simply switching the colours around at the display level is a whole lot easier, requires almost no configuration work on the user’s part, and can be toggled on and off at will.

So it looks like it’s coming down to cheaper hardware+much more expensive software or more expensive hardware with the required features bundled. The former is probably still cheaper by one or two hundred dollars but the overall experience is still going to be less productive for a Mac-weenie like me.

But at least I’ve come out of this exercise with a newfound respect for ZoomText, if not for the obscene price the vendor asks for it. It’s quite in line with what other AT costs, but is completely still unreasonable.

Popularity: 51% [?]

Tags: Linux, Mac, adaptive tech by matt
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I’ve been using GNU screen for a long time. Probably something like 15 years. But I’ve pretty much always used it in a fairly naive way, no custom configuration, and when working remotely I’ll typically log in to the “gateway” machine, run screen there, and wind up with 20-30 sessions sitting in it and eventually go nuts trying to figure out what exactly any given session actually is.

Which has motivated me to learn a bit more about what’s going on, and, admittedly, to cargo-cult a bit too.

So here’s my .screenrc as it stands now:

hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= BW}[%H] %{= BW}%-Lw%{= RW}%50> %n%f* %t%{= BW}%+Lw%< %{= BW}% -=%c%{-}'
defscrollback 1000
vbell off
term xterm

The nifty bit is that “hardstatus string” line. What it does is give me a line at the bottom of the terminal which looks a bit like this:

[prod01au] 0* bash 1 sqsh 2 log 15:39

Except generally with a lot more “screens”.

In addition to this I have a few aliases of the form:

alias sqsh=screen -t sqsh sqsh -Usa -S`hostname`

to make it easy to fire off what I need with the right labels. Of course that ’sqsh’ example is grossly simplified, and for sqsh itself I actually use a wrapper script because the database names are not always the same as the hostnames, but anyway…

So now I make a point of running screen directly on each system I touch, which means that:

• I can see at the bottom-left exactly which host it is, whatever crappy prompt settings might be in place;
• I can see which “screens” are running what;
• I’ve always got a couple of useful things there, ready for next time, like a “tail -f” of the Sybase error log;
• I’m much more efficient.

All this is usually running in a tabbed terminal emulator (Apple’s Terminal.app at the moment, but in theory any will do), one tab per host. And it’s dead easy to pick these sessions up from anywhere, of course, which was the reason I was using screen in the first place.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Tags: Tech by matt
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