it’s a tomato

Well, having had enough of the dd-wrt firmware for the linksys router. It was annoying, slow and irritating and every time we enabled QOS it lost the connection to the WAN I upgraded to the tomato firmware. So far it works. It successfully QOSes the p2p stuff down to the lowest category. It has pretty graphs! Whoopee!

The keyboard on my little baby laptop isn’t good

Someone is bound to rat me out for this one. I’ve resorted to using a sun type 6 USB keyboard when typing on the small laptop. For those times when I couldn’t be bothered dragging the XPS out of the backpack I just need to reach over to the keyboard and plug it in. Dayamm, but it makes a huge difference. The response is just right. The laptop’s keys are just that little bit too wussy.

AMT is handy….

It’s just a shame that you can’t use it easily on Linux due to the lack of a driver to communicate directly with the hardware. It’s the replacement for IPMI. Complete remote management of your servers (and desktops and laptops) through an always-on network connection (that is as long as you have power going to the box). All it needs is to be configured (not for the faint hearted) and then you need a machine to talk to it. Unless you’re using a half decent windows server box (something that can at least pretend to be a provisioning server), you’re screwed as you’ll only be able to use it in small bunnies mode (business :). You can make a local ISO image on your computer act like it’s in the CD drivce of the remote machine, you can PXE boot it from the command line (easy installs; easy cleanup!). It cooks, it cleans and it even sends out SNMP traps when something goes wrong (except of course for when the power goes out). It supports a watchdog (but it’s not as easy to program for as the linux watchdog). Unfortunately you have to talk to the damned thing over SOAP. I mean really, wot are you like? It’s like using a butcher’s knife to perform and appendectomy.

Nice toy, just too expensive

mbw-100.jpg
Well, it only works with Sony-Ericsson phones (and the newer ones at that), and it has a steep price tag (€300). but it is a really nifty toy. It’s just a shame that I got another watch for Christmas. Rveview at Mobile Review.

Sony get a thumbs up for the little gift I received in the post

I was looking for a case for the UMDs for the PSP. Could not find one anywhere unless I bought a complete hard-shell case for the box. I got back to the house and there was a small present from Sony – a case for holding 5 UMD’s. What a nice Christmas present, it put a smile on my face (and another on my case as I don’t have to carry around all those UMD boxes.

Anyone else seen this happen to their laptop?



Isn’t youtube great. It’s a Dell XPS laptop, the display does this wierd tearing thing like it can’t determine the refresh rate of the display. It happens occasionally on Windows, normally in a game when switching display modes. It happens with annoying regularity on Linux under XGL/Compiz, which leads me to the belief that it’s a driver problem.

I’m sorry, I just prefer a mouse with more than one button

It reeks of some form of elitism, and lets be honest using X for so long made a three button mouse mandatory, what with the middle button paste thing, which I love and try to recreate on the PC when using cygwin/X applications. Every time I look at a mac, I get this chill just thinking about the higher price tag along with the crippled bar of a mouse button. It’s effing stupid. We still have double click for the primary select, and if you want a context menu you need to use one of the extended keys (honestly, I can’t remember which) to get it to pop up. It’s a really fricking broken model when you have only one button.
Send in the pie menus, my friends, send in the pie menus.

Space/time tradeoff for disk access

It’s significantly slower to access a disk than it is to access memory. When given a choice between using a bit more processor power to decompress the information once it’s been read into memory or pulling more information from the drive then you really should make the smart choice.
Even if disk space is cheap/free, it doesn’t make sense to spend the time reading the information whan you could be using it. The problem is of course, using a sensible and fast compression/decompression algorighm, and also realizing that it really screws with the whole ease of write on the disk. You end up with some change one byte means completely altering the on-disk image so you need to write a lot more information. This is probably why we use transparent compression on files that don’t change that much.
Whee, ain’t science fun.

Xps 1710

Xps 1710

Xps 1710,
originally uploaded by petesh.

This is my new laptop. It is extremely nifty. Linux details – Networking is perfect (wired and wireless). The latest NVIDIA driver makes the graphics 3d accelerated, but I lose the console. Solaris wired networking was easy – I added the PCI identifier to the bge entries (14e4,1600) and it just worked (mind you I’m getting spurious SSH failures – could be networking related). The graphics don’t work – the NV driver doesn’t support the card (too new/too old Solaris Express). I’ve downloaded the latest drivers from the nvidia site and am just seeing how things work.
It’s a really fast computer – scarily so. I can play all my games at full panel native resolution (1920×1200) and it simply rocks. The dual core means that broken programs don’t take me down (they tend to be badly written single threaded applications). I think it may be time for an evil laugh!