News from Great Castle Wilson

Category: Tech

Anything technology related that isn’t covered by one of the sub categories.

  • Eee!

    Ok, you knew it had to happen. I picked up an EeePC 8g from the guys down at PC Cyber. So far, I have to say, I think it’s very cool. I was looking for a sub-notebook to carry around in my MEC bag, and this fits it perfectly.

    But wait, you say, what about the OLPC XO? Wasn’t that going to be your sub-notebook?

    Well, yes, that was the plan. But after several months of using the XO, too many of its limitations became irksome, and the things that make it great (i.e. the educational software, the mesh networking, the kid friendly case) just weren’t useful to me.

    So here I am with the Eee. It’s still got limited storage (but more than the XO — 8Gig + 4 on an SDHC), a really small (not outdoor readable) screen, and it runs a funky front end onto xandros (not Ubuntu, although that’s pretty easy to get going) but despite that it seems to be a much better fit for me. It comes with all of the software that I would use on a day to day basis, like OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgin, Skype, Lightening, Java, FBReader… you name it.

    Plus, I managed to get it to

    • sync calendar entries with the rest of my Macs
    • hold (but not sync) all my address book entries
    • mount my iPod (and my 120Gig USB laptop drive)
    • run eReader under Wine (so that I can read my DRM’ed eBooks)
    • …

    Heck, I even got it to run Eclipse, and you know, it actually runs well enough to be usable, although it takes some careful tweaking to get enough screen real estate to run Eclipse on a 480×800 display. (Hint: “Toggle Toolbar Visibility” is your friend.)

    [Latest find: a site that explains how to connect to LEAP/PEAP networks. I’ll have to try that at some point.]

    The only real negatives I’ve found so far are the battery life which is somewhere between 2 and 3 hours, and the fact that it has a fan. The fan doesn’t run all the time, but when it does start up, man is it loud. At full speed it sounds like a hairdryer.

    Btw, the small keyboard is not a negative. In addition to being a lot larger than the one on the XO, it’s actually large enough for me to touch type on without difficulty, now that I’ve gotten used to it.

    Anyway, this is the proverbial first post from the Eee. I guess, if nothing else, the length of it indicates that the keyboard really is usable. I’ll let you know how well it works out once I’ve had it for a few weeks.

  • What do you mean mysql can’t find my wp database?

    Well, that was more excitement than I was expecting.

    Tonight, Deb wandered into my downstairs office and said, “Are you playing with the server? I can’t get to my blog”. I naturally assumed it was the normal problem of my dynamic dns address changing and the associated delay before mikew.ca catches up. So I tried connecting to my blog and what did I see: “WordPress can’t find your database”. What!!! That would be bad; very very bad.

    Well, after about an hour of messing around, I realized it wasn’t quite that bad. MySQL and all my data really were still there, but it turns out they had been masked by some misguided hacking I had been doing with MacPorts.

    Whew!

    Well, in honour of the near miss, I promptly did a full backup of my entire website (as apposed to the incremental nightlies) and the mysql database, and then upgraded to WordPress 2.5.

    So far, everything looks good. The upgrade went painlessly, as it has for me since I started using WP. Man, I wish all software was that easy to deal with.

  • GUI Bloopers: Paste Special

    So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, it offers the user a dialog with a range of available formats, something like this:

    The typical behavior, in this case, is to open the dialog with the format that would have been chosen if the user had simply picked “Paste” already selected. I guess this is done so that, if the user hits return when the dialog opens, they will get the same behavior as Paste provides. The thing is though, no one who opens that dialog ever wants that behavior. The only reason why a user would go through the extra pain of the dialog is because they want to paste in some way that is not the default, so in point of fact, picking any other choice would be better than picking the one that does what Paste would do.

    The question is then, what should the dialog have as the default selection?

    In 99.9% of the times Paste Special is used, the intent is to remove any rich formatting from the content in the paste buffer, so that it can pick up the surrounding formatting of its destination. Given that, when there are multiple possible formats, always pick the “plainest” one. So, for example, in the above dialog, it should have “Unformatted text” selected by default.

    Of course, as usual, the Apple guys have understood the underlying problem better. Instead of a Paste Special command, in Pages I get this…

    … which does what you (almost always) actually want, without putting up a dialog at all.

  • Sometimes it’s the little things

    It’s been a while since I’ve done a link-of-the-day, but this one made me think. (Specifically, “Are my UI designs getting this right?”):

    Thanks, Windows. If I had a cookie, I’d give it to you.

    Well… That’s disappointing. Not only is the original post gone now, but it’s been so long that I can’t even remember what they were on about. Oh well.

  • I read books.

    Steve Jobs can be such an a**hole sometimes.

    According to Gizmodo, he said about the Amazon Kindle:

    “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

    Hey, Steve, ever think that your iPods are part of the reason why fewer people are reading? People used to read books on the bus, now they just listen. Why not show some societal responsibility and bring some of that trademark Apple coolness to something that drives intellectual development, so your next generation of customers will be able to get jobs that let them afford to buy iPods.

  • Some more OLPC XO notes

    Here are a few random notes about the XO, after a day of playing with it:

    • It’s heavier than I thought it was going to be. If I had to guess, I would say that combining the need to be robust enough for kids, with the need to be inexpensive, probably means that it was bound to be heavy. It would really be too heavy to be an eBook reader, if I wasn’t pudgy enough to have a “belly shelf” to put it on. 😉
       
    • The keyboard is too small to type on. It is, of course, too small for my adult hands, but it even seemed small when my 11 year-old nephew was playing with it. I understand that the size (and the lime-green color) were intended to make it less appealing to adult thieves. I guess will see. To me it’s no worse than learning the Treo or the iPod Touch keyboards. In this case, 2 fingers from each hand + the right thumb on the space bar is working for me.
       
    • There’s something odd about the trackpad. It seems to get in a mode where it causes the cursor to jump to one corner of the screen every time you lift your finger off the surface. Whatever it is, Jeff noticed the problem on his as well, so it’s not a hardware problem with mine.
       
    • FBReader works better than I thought it would. I installed it by finding an RPM that started with “fbreader” at http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/ and then getting it with a command like:

      rpm -ivh http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/fbreader...

      (Note: You probably have to be su’ed to do that.)

      To start it, you type “FBReader” at the shell prompt. To exit, you hit “ctrl-Q”. The default font, font sizes, margin spacing, and keybindings all need to be adjusted on first use, but the values are remembered so it’s not a big deal. It may just be personal taste, but I find the resulting experience to be more pleasing than using the built in PDF reader. In any case, it’s certainly faster.
       

    • The SD slot seems to work fine. The way I tested FBReader was by sticking in an old 256Meg SD card I had used with one of my previous Palms, which was full of eBooks. It mounted as “/media/SD256” (because the volume label was “SD256”), and when I told FBReader that “/media/SD256/palm/Books” was on the library path it found the 4 unencrypted DOC format books that were there.
       
    • Wireless is definitely an issue. After several hours of attempting to get it to connect via WEP to my Airport Extreme, including following the instructions of people who have gotten it to work, I have given up. The claim is that the XO can’t speak WPA yet, but there also seems to be a counter-example — broken links removed. I may switch over to WPA and try that, but for now I just stuck a Linksys “USB200M ver.2” USB-to-wired-ethernet adapter into one of the USB ports. This worked without problem, and at least seems to be faster than using wireless anyway.
       

  • An unexpected birthday present

    48 today (ugh!), but guess what was on my front step when I got home: My XO!

    More info once I’ve had a chance to play with it. Yes, I’m using it to send this.

  • MacBook Air

    So the Macworld keynote has come and gone, and I must say, there wasn’t really anything that thrilled me. A new NAS? I guess. But they’re awfully late to the table, and it’s not cheap. Movie rentals? Not in Canada. An upgrade to get mail on the Touch? Great! But wait, you want to charge for it, even though it’s going to be free on all new ones sold? Come on!

    And then there’s the MacBook Air. Am I the only person who thinks this is way too expensive? It’s got only an 80Gig HD, no optical drive, no wired ethernet, only one USB port, no Firewire and a significantly slower processor than the other Apple laptops. I guess it’s nice that it comes with 2Gig of memory, but you’ll notice that they had to put 2Gig in at the factory, since there’s no way to upgrade it.

    Compare it to a black MacBook… Same size screen and the same graphics chip. The MB is cheaper, but it has less memory, so let’s say we upgrade the memory to 2Gig and throw in the 250Gig HD — we still only come up to the price of the MBA. And the MB does have an optical drive, a firewire port, a second USB port and a 2.0GHz processor (vs. 1.6GHz on the MBA).

    I’m sorry, but making it thin around the edges and backlighting the keyboard is not enough compensation for those limitations. Essentially, no one should buy the MacBook Air.

    Update: OMFG, it doesn’t even have a user replaceable battery! WTF?

  • 10.5.1 broke my FW audio.

    Not sure whether the consensus in the community is that 10.5.1 is better than 10.5, but several of the problems that hit me personally were not fixed, and I developed a new one: Now, my firewire audio interface disappears at random intervals using the built-in drivers, and attempts to run the official Yamaha ones were unsuccessful. bah! (and again I say, bah!).

  • Well, I did it.