We went to LapLand to see some snow, but there’s not much of it … only a few inches deep. Plus it was only -1 whereas its normally -12 this time of year … global warming scary! We did all the Lappish stuff like snow biking, huskies, and reindeer as well as the Ice Hotel …. brrrr… too cold! Lappish food isnt really to my taste, most generic meat in some consolidated form, so I was really glad to find that the kids section (with fries, nuggets and frankfurters) was unguarded every day. If you go, don’t stay too long and make sure you have things to do there organised before you go.
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Double dropping was a term I was unfamiliar with before this week. I never wish to hear or experince it again! Double dropping is where the airline discover they have inbalanced their passenger manifests and decide to stop at another airport after you have taken off on your direct ‘non-stop’ flight. We took off from Gatwick and ‘dropped’ in to Manchester where we had to change seats whilst a few more people got on. What is most inconventient about the whole process isnt the landing and passenger embarkation (which was very quick just 10 mins), its the extra 75 minutes they made us wait on the ground doing nothing. Fortunately on the way out we were on a brand new 737-800 from Excel which was spacious and very nice. On the way back we were on an original 737-200 belonging to European which looked like it had done a tour of duty in Vietnam 30 years ago. Anyway, if your operator says you are non-stop complain loudly if they double drop you, its no fun.
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I couldn’t help myself … I installed Longhorn Server 6001 in a VM to see what’s new. One of the cool things for Vista and Longhorn server is that you don’t have to enter a valid key any more and it will keep working for 30 days, which is coincidentally my normal rebuild schedule. Anyway the WIM in this build includes Enterprise and Enterprise Core SKU’s and I installed the full fat Enterprise version.
Install was quick, about 20 minutes and it seems to have inherited some UI tidy up and icons from Vista. At rest memory usage is ~345MB.
More to follow soon …
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MS just posted a new Longhorn Server update, build 6001-16406-061208-1900. Hopefully this will be in sync with the Vista updates. Longhorn Server release should coincide with the availability of Vista SP1, keeping the kernels in sync. Won’t have a chance to look at this until after xmas now …
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The excellent ‘worst’ saga recomenced on BBc1 tonight, with two further episodes coming on Thursday and Friday this week. This is one of the funniest occasional series on TV and you should watch it if you can, where everything that can go wrong or be misinterpreted is, the humour is obvious and somehow its funnier for it. In my world I refer to these type of events as the ‘Twilight Zone’ where things that are impossible happen in front of my eyes, you know, unknown and never to be seen again error messages emerge from the OS you are working on, and bog standard actions that normally work first time, every time suddenly no longer work …
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and the flaw is that the battery cover just slides off whilst the phone is in my pocket. Most annoying finding the phone in bits when I want to use it. There is not enough tension when the backplate is in place to hold it on. Bah!
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There’s a useful whitepaper on how Windows Aero works and certainly highlighted a couple of things to me that I had been unaware of. One thing is that there is an Aero state that looks like Vista Basic but is in fact fully compositioned and is using the DWM. Its called Opaque, and the reason it looks confusing is it has the properties of Aero Glass but the borders are not transparent. As the author points out, a sure fire way to check if Aero is running is to hit Win+Tab keys and see if you get the 3D window stack displayed known as ‘Flip 3D’. Anyway, if your job requires you to support Vista this is a worthwhile read and quite interesting, although somewhat superficial.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/aero_rules.mspx
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This is just a really cool idea. I heard about this a while ago, but only started to look at it recently after my drive caught fire and then kindly destroyed my whole PC. MultiLane uses the infiniband cable standard to join 4 SATA drives contained in an external box directly to a PC using two special backplates and one single, robust infiniband cable. All the remaining internal cabling is standard SATA. So you get the full 3GBps per channel and the infiniband just has all four SATA cores bundled in one thick cable. The PC backplanes cost about £10, the infiniband cable is about £35 and a 4 drive cabinet with interface is about £70.
Why bother ? well I can now externalise my SATA drives and have none inside the PC itself whilst still using them to boot my PC. This reduces power and heat inside the PC case, and makes the drives transportable to any other PC with the £10 backplane installed. Obviously the external drive array is ‘dumb’ and has no inherent abilities like RAID which still have to be provided form the host PC, but this is ok, after all its just a bunch of disks (JBOD) not a server…
There is some good background info here http://www.satacables.com/html/sata_multilane-solutions.html
Picture courtesy of http://www.satacables.com
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I’m always asked why my WindowsMobile device of choice is a Smartphone, and not a PocketPC. Simply put, for me there is no advantage in a PocketPC, in fact the opposite is true. I really dislike the form factor and particularly the touch screen as it makes my life more difficult through 2-handed usage. I understand some people need the PocketPC form factor for LOB applications, but I don’t have one of those, and my primary usage requirement is as a phone.
Two PocketPC devices have almost turned me, and both for the same reason. The HTC Convertible (i-Mate JasJar) and the HP iPaq 4300 both had clear 640×480 screens which were very attractive. But reality soon homed in and forced me back to the Smartphone form factor. For me Smartphones like the HTC-620, Samsung i320 and Blackjack are the way to go for my day to day usage.
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The AKU on the HTC S620 includes Direct Push technology for Exchange server. Trouble is even if you are not using it or connected to Exchange, it still brings up GPRS. So if you aren’t using it then go to Connection Manager and turn off Direct Push and GPRS won’t keep coming up.
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These are the two hottest shipping Microsoft smartphones, so which one is best ? unfortunately its just not that simple. Size wise the Samsung is very slightly smaller and thinner (just), but the S620 has a nice big display. In the hand the i320 feels better but its non-standard connectors is just an oversight too far. I find both keyboards usable although the S620’s is bigger. The S620 has the most recent WM5 AKU.
Both are really well screwed together but, overall whilst the Samsung feels nicest in my hand, but the S620’s bigger display and standard connectors win me over.
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I’m forbidden by NDA from talking about upcoming info I know about WindowsMobile, but every now and then something slips into the public domain and that I can comment on. Today, I noticed that MS Mobiles have a spread about WindowsMobile 6.0 with loads of pictures of some ‘Crossbow’ flashed devices (http://msmobiles.com/news.php/5846.html).
I think the most interesting thing, though probably the most impractical, is Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the Smartphone. Unfortunately, the resolution really doesn’t work here, and scrolling round a spreadsheet where you can only see 2-3 columns and 9-15 rows is very confusing!
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I just found out that my PRS-500 has a Linux OS … its actually Hard Hat Linux from montavista (http://www.mvista.com/). I know montavista as the OS providers for some of the Motorola Linux phones I have seen.
I found the sources for the PRS-500 hidden deep on Sony’s site (http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/PRS-500U.html). Here’s whats available …
- EBOOK_1_2_0_P4.2_20051008_Linux_src.tgz
- USBTG_EBOOK4_20060801.tgz
- hhl-target-bash-2.05a-mvl3.0.0.1.src.rpm
- hhl-target-fileutils-4.1-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
- hhl-target-findutils-4.1.7-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
- hhl-target-gcc-3.2.1-mvl3.0.0.5.20.src.rpm
- hhl-target-glib-1.2.10-mvl3.0.0.7.src.rpm
- hhl-target-glibc-2.2.5-mvl3.0.0.15.14.src.rpm
- hhl-target-grep-2.4.2-mvl3.0.0.1.src.rpm
- hhl-target-hardhatutils-1.14-mvl3.0.0.10.src.rpm
- hhl-target-hostname-2.09-mvl3.0.0.1.src.rpm
- hhl-target-mkcramfs-2.4.16-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
- hhl-target-mtd-utils-2.4.16_1.16-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
- hhl-target-ncurses-5.2-mvl3.0.0.5.src.rpm
- hhl-target-openssl-0.9.7b-mvl3.0.0.1.097.src.rpm
- hhl-target-pam-0.72-mvl3.0.0.4.src.rpm
- hhl-target-procps-2.0.7-mvl3.0.0.3.src.rpm
- hhl-target-psmisc-20.1-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
- hhl-target-sed-3.02-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
- hhl-target-shellutils-2.0.11-mvl3.0.0.3.src.rpm
- hhl-target-sysvinit-2.78-mvl3.0.0.11.src.rpm
- hhl-target-tar-1.13.19-mvl3.0.0.3.src.rpm
- hhl-target-textutils-2.0-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
- hhl-target-time-1.7-mvl3.0.0.1.src.rpm
- hhl-target-util-linux-2.11h-mvl3.0.0.4.src.rpm
- mtools-3.9.8.tgz
- src_librofb_060414.tgz
- src_libroi2s_060713.tgz
The question is, what can I do with this information ? Although Sony provide the source, theres no build environment, no flashing tools, no documentation. I don’t really want to buy a montavista Linux Pro Dev environment, so I guess I’ll never know!
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Oh this is just too true! A friend of mine just sent it to me. No idea who created it but its spot on.
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My PC recently burst into flames destroying almost everything except the graphics card. I was actually using it at the time! The seat if the fire was a small ASIC on a Maxtor drive which then seemed to cause damage via the SATA cable to the motherboard which then started smoking with the accompanying acrid smell of of components frying themselves. Bizarely this also killed the second drive in some way as it wont power up anymore.
So I consigned myself to the annual upgrade exchanging the AMD x64 X2 4400 for an Intel Quad QX6700, 2GB for 4GB, a nVidia 7900CTX for a nVidia 8800. I enjoy building PC’s so putting it all together is a treat, but not without its woes ….
I bought the bits from a combination of ebuyer.co.uk and overclockers.co.uk to get the bits I wanted. ebuyer were a cool £100 cheaper than anyone else for the Intel QX6700 cpu, and the picture below probably shows why ….
It came packed loose in a small unmarked box, looking like it had been swept up by the cleaners the night before…but, despite my skepticism it worked! There was no fan but I had already selected a separate Freezer 7 Pro so I was ok.
For the motherboard I picked the ASUS P5W64 WS Pro which I hadn’t given much thought to apart from it supported the QX6700. The main deficiency for me with this otherwise excellent motherboard is that it only has 2 PCI slots and 4 PCI-E slots for 4 graphics cards. One of the interesting improvements about this mobo is that you can put a ROM upgrade onto a USB key or disk and it will recognise the device from the BIOS and load the file … cool!
For the case I was using my ever trusted option, the Antec Sonatta II which is close to silent with its 450 watt PSU. However, with all this extra power requirement I went to the local PCWorld and purchased a Jeantec 700W Silent PSU which has a natty wattage indicator on it. However it went straight back and from the moment it was switched on it was like standing in a wind tunnel …. xtreme noise! I did like its modular cabling system though, where the internal cables are supplied separately and you only use the ones you need. What I did notice though was that at standstill, the Jeantec was only reporting 200W usage … so I swapped back to the antec which I’m very happy with.
Finally its all working, and its quick and quiet.
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After much discussion yesterday, we’ve narrowed our top 3 to :
- Marks & Spencer - Shirley Bassey ‘lets get this party started’
- Debenhams - Eartha Kitt ‘Santa Baby’
- Boots - ‘Epoca’ by Gotan Project
I think its safe to say, Shirley Bassey can make any song sound like a Bond theme.
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Well I tried it, and it doesn’t meet the hype, well for me anyway. For more than 10 years I’ve been waiting for a usable ebook, and this isnt it. The basic problem is that the DPI setting for the 6″ 800×600 screen just isnt good enough to match print. Its also expensive, but feels cheap, and has the aesthetics of a childrens leap pad. The PC reader software is clumsy and ugly and doesnt work on Vista. Page turning is painfully slow and you have to plan for it to happen. Its as if it goes away and renders the next page only when you press the advance the page button, and displays it 2 seconds later, not really acceptable. Its also nearly a year late after appearing at CES 2006.
The iRex Iliad looks like it might have a slight edge on display as it uses a bigger 8.1″ 1024×768 display, although I think page turning is as lethargic as the Sony.
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