Total Conversion

SOPA and Content owners having a blackout

2012-01-19T12:55:00.000-08:00

Due to the surprisingly impactful anti SOPA blackout on 18 Jan 2012, I was interested to read a proponent of this legislation talking about the impact of content producers & owners having a blackout being more of an impact than removing Wikipedia, Facebook or Google.

This got me to thinking. What would happen if there was no access to popular music, tv & film to the average person. It got me to thinking about living in the dark when there is a power failure.

In our family we got together and had some fantastic family time. Played games, bonded and amused ourselves to such a point that when the power came on, we didn't bother switching on the tv. If I was forced to listen to independent bands or go and watch acts perform in a pub, I'd be fine with it.

Media owners need to watch out as they become more and more irrelevant. The only way they can compete in this age is to make their media available cheaply and legally. No region locking, rights management, serial numbers, activations, certification encryption or usage limitations.

They need to restructure their business around there 2 biggest assets.
1) the consumer (who they should worship and strive to keep engaged and interested)
2) the artist (who give them a reason to exist and a source of product)

They can and still will make money. We are all prepared to reward the artists who entertain us. We are not prepared to subsidise an industry intent on criminalising its customer base.

Fortunately, despite the actions of these crazy lawmakers hell-bent in distorting the internet to serve the interests of the few (1%?), I believe their outdated business models are doomed.

2012

2012-01-19T12:42:00.000-08:00

Well another year has come and gone and I see that I totally skipped blogging in December. My bad. I will try and share my thoughts and tips more frequently. I know I keep saying that.

We've put out a new version of WinFF. Version 1.4 is out and getting some feedback. I suspect version 1.41 and 1.42 will follow shortly, each one addressing user issues and making the program better and more useful. Gratifying to see it still in use.

Processing Exchange 2010 Message Tracking Log files with Python

2011-11-22T10:57:00.001-08:00

So my day job includes doing some work on MS Exchange 2010. I'm a stats guy and like digging in the log files to get details on the systems I work with.

I was asked to pull some stats out of Exchange and went straight into the Message Tracking logs.

By the unwritten laws of loggiles you will get a ton of information, some of which you don't need. I identified the fields important to me and wrote this python script to parse a folder full of log files into a summarised set of .csv files that you can process further.

In my test case, I copy the log files from 4 production servers into a dev box and then run the script there. This way there is a minimal performance / disk impact to the production users.

I am *NOT* a python programmer so make fun of the code if you wish, I won't be offended. This script is basically a product of much googling and reading of docs.python.org.

# parse Exchange 2010 MessageTracker Log Files

# (c) Ian Stoffberg

# 0) make folders source and output in the same folder as the script

# 1) put all the exchange logs you want to strip down into the source folder

# 2) delete the output filename output\output.csv

# 3) run script (i use cygwin)

# 4) import output.csv into excel

import os

import string

# sourcefolder

logdir = ".\source"

# outputfile contains the message events

outputfile = ".\output\output.csv"

# outputfile2 contains the expanded list of recipients and the domain per message

outputfile2 = ".\output\messages.csv"

writer = open(outputfile,"a")

messagewriter = open(outputfile2,"a")

# wanted is the list of columns you want to keep

wanted = [1,3,5,9,10,14,15,18,19,20,22]

logs = os.listdir(logdir)

messagewriter.write('emaildate,messageid,recipientemail,domain\n')

for log in logs:

logfiles = open("%s%s%s" % (logdir, os.sep, log)).readlines()

for line in logfiles:

try:

# next line discards commented lines

if line[1] != '#':

myinputrow = line.split(',')

eventid = myinputrow[8]

# I am discard other event types ( you might want to see those )

if eventid == 'SEND' or eventid == 'RECEIVE':

myoutputline = ''

for item in wanted:

myoutputline = myoutputline + myinputrow[item-1] + ','

writer.write(myoutputline + '\n')

recips = myinputrow[11].split(';')

i = 0

while recips[i] != '' :

emaildate = myinputrow[0].split('T')

emaildate = emaildate[0]

domain = recips[i].split('@')

domain = domain[1]

messagewriter.write(emaildate + ',' + myinputrow[9] + ',' + recips[i] + ',' + domain + '\n')

i = i + 1

except:

print ''

writer.close

--------------------

This is the basic version I first wrote. I have since tweaked it for my needs, but i figure any scripting guy could adapt this to their needs.

Once you have this info, the sky's the limit.

I imported the data into SQL, created some views based on it and linked to other system data.

I then created reports in Reporting Services which will be available for Managers/Administrators to query.

Why I prefer python to other scripting tools in this instance. The code executes fairly quickly. Its very readable and logical to follow). Its easy to move the python interpreter between machines.

There is a big bug which I will fix and post later. If subject field has comma's in, the script might get confused. need to test.

Final note: If you're not too familiar with python, some words of advice. WHITE SPACE MATTERS. Every indent is there for a reason. if , while, for statements have indents to indicate program structure. It affects logic and is not there to make the code readable, but affect its function. Mix spaces & tabs at your peril.

I hope this is of use to admins out there and can easily be adapted for any type of .csv log.

Tested on Exchange 2010 SP1. Log formats may differ in other systems.
----
edit: version 2 on the way. substantially improved. fixed the subject comma bug, etc.

Moon over Bourbon Street - Opening that Message in a Bottle

2011-11-15T10:53:00.001-08:00

Long winded titles aside, it was quite a humbling and interesting little moment from my day that lead to this post. I am not sure if I need to engage the tag at this point, but I've decided to blog this without getting all my thoughts in order. A little brainstorm is in order as I really don't think I should spend any more time thinking about this without committing some of my thoughts to the web.

Probably about 23 years ago, by my reckoning, Sting released his second solo album "Nothing like the Sun". An evolution of his previous "Dream of the Blue Turtles" and an album I thoroughly enjoyed listening to many times over. Some of the songs had really interesting lyrics and easily had me reading them over and over trying to "get" the message behind them. Songs about Pinochet & Noah & human emotion were easily decoded and understood while some you just appreciated them because you enjoyed listening and singing along. I mean really. Can't you just listen to a song and not worry about the meaning?

At some point Sting's music got more and more polished and crafted and I stopped listening and caring. I don't know when it really happened, but at some point I just didn't care to buy or listen to dvd's or new cd's. When the Police toured again, I got excited and every now and then I would here a Sting song in a movie soundtrack and fondly remember owning the cd. Eventually bought a greatest hits cd and dvd which I played occasionally.

Today at work, with my trusty Poweramp app on my Cyanogen modded HTC Desire, I decided to play the greatest hits compilation after MANY years. As the songs played, I skipped some and listened to others until I got to "Moon over Bourbon Street" (and the point of this long winded post with a rambling intro).

I am 43 years old now. How the hell did I not realise that the song is about a vampire? I'm not that stupid. I read a lot, especially back then. I'm into fantasy / scifi / mythology, etc. How could I blindly hum/ sing along with this song and NOT make the connection. Its not hidden or subtle. Its blatantly obvious. I'm absolutely baffled at my incomprehension.

I spoke to a long time friend who also enjoyed the cd back in the day and he remembers the song well. I mentioned the vampire thing and he just stared at me blankly and disbelievingly. I quoted a few lines and he just burst out laughing. We laughed uncontrollably at each other's stupidity and we just couldn't figure it out. He is an experienced Oracle DBA so brain cells are alive, well and plentiful, yet he too, didn't make the connection.

My only explanation, or my prevailing theory, is that 23 years ago, I didn't have the maturity to appreciate the song in its entirety. Maybe I enjoyed the sounds, and sang the words blindly whereas today I appreciate the lyrics more? Is that really experience vs innocence? I shudder to think of hidden meanings in Rick Astley songs that I didn't notice, but thankfully, I'm not tempted to go back and listen to them again.

So yep. I'm owning up to my stupidity and hoping to learn a vague lesson about listening & understanding when people talk or when I'm reading. Its another reminding that you should never think you know enough. There's always an opportunity for learning and improving one's self. I'm sure I spelled that wrong. Oneself?Another thing to learn. *sigh*

Lastly. Massive Kudo's to the Amarok, FooBar & Songbird plugin developers for providing excellent lyrics plugins to allow our music collections to be rediscovered and re-appreciated. Boo's to the idiots at Gracenote for issuing lyrics takedown notices. Institutions like you have no place in the new collaborative society that we demand and will build without your help.

Powerpoint Prank

2011-09-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

So this girl at work says my blog is boring and geeky. I guess I'll take half of that as a compliment. I'm taking tomorrow off work, but, since I work in an open plan, I thought I'd leave them something to comfort them while I'm away.

I made up an auto-running powerpoint slideshow with 24 slides. Each one has a recording of myself saying something inane or screaming at one of them. I have set the slides to loop repeatedly. Each slide has a duration of 35 minutes, so at various intervals tomorrow, my voice will ring out unexpectedly in the office.

I unplugged keyboard, mouse and switched off monitor. As I sit here typing this blog post, that looping presentation is running. Any security guards walking by might be tempted to unlock the office and look in, but I doubt they will know what the hell is going on.

The possibility of playing creaking horror sound efforts to freak out colleagues just came to mind. Save that for later.

Will post any funny feedback should I get any.

Adventures with Plex, Mediatomb, Ubuntu Server & Honeycomb

2011-09-15T07:59:00.000-07:00

So a lazy friend of mind decided to rebuild his media server and didn't want to do it alone. Foolishly, I agreed to help. I've been down this road before and could have predicted the outcome.

The plan was he wanted to install Ubuntu Server to be a streaming media platform for his family and also to his new Asus eeePad Transformer Honeycomb Tablet. All good and well. A good enough reason to blow an evening, I thought. I had been planning to upgrade an old Fedora 12 box, so I told him I would do the same install with him and we could share the learning experience together. I always figured I could reinstall Fedora or CentOS again a few days later, if I didn't want to stick with the Ubuntu Server. Considering that it would be running in headless, GUI-less mode, I figured the Ubuntu box wouldn't get on my nerves too much.

Naturally, R chickened out at the end and I ended up doing the install on my lonesome. Thankfully, I had anticipated this so by the time I got the call to cancel, my box was already rebuilt and back under the table in headless mode, purring away.

Here follows some things I learned along the way.

1) I backed up my old /etc folder from the server I was about to wipe

2) I unplugged my data drives before doing the installation. The installer keeps wanting to RAID those drives and I just want them left alone. I took no chances and unplugged the power before running through the install.

3) I only selected openssh during the install process, so the install took about 7 minutes and applying updates another 3 minutes. After 10 minutes the box rebooted and it was up. At this point I downed it again, plugged in the drives and made sure they came up during boot.

4) I did apt-get install aptitude mc lynx samba-client samba-server mediatomb

5) I plugged back the relevant bits of smb.conf and fstab into their respective locations and everything was hunky dory on the samba sharing front.

6) created directory structure:
/mnt/local/drive1
/mnt/local/drive2
/mnt/local/drive3
/mnt/remote/share1

/mnt/remote/share2

/mnt/remote/share3

/mnt/remote/share4
and mounted remote shares over smb, I could have used nfs, but they are shared on the second Fedora server via SMB for Windows & Mac, so no need to use nfs as well. I did this so that Plex on the Ubuntu Server can serve files stored on the Fedora Server.

7) I installed the Lucid Repo for Plex and install plexmediaserver

8) I edited the mediatomb conf to enable the gui

9) added Plex user & myself to mediatomb group and gave that relevant +x and +r rights to the mounted drives

10) after starting both plex & mediaserver, both their web interface were up!

11) oh year, forgot I had to add back the old samba user that the other machines used to see the shares!

12) Lastly, I had to make the remote shares automount using the fstab.

13) I failed to mention Webmin. Particularly useful for step 9. I had to reset the Webmin root password with a perl script. Link below.

All my XBMC frontends on Windows, OSX & Linux could see the shares unchanged on the frontend which was a huge bonus.

Finally, I have tested streaming various types of content over Wifi to my tablet and its working beautifully.

UPNPlay in combination with whatever Media Player you choose works like a charm. I tested Plex on the iPad and it works too. After this blog post, I'll be buying the Plex Android App and streaming / transcoding HD Movies to my eeePad !

Anybody have any questions about the setup, drop me a line via the comments and I'll do my best to help.

Some pages I used during this process:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently
http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/26727-how-to-plex-media-server-on-ubuntu/
http://www.plexapp.com/linux/linux-pms-download.php
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/webmin-installation-and-configuration-in-ubuntu-linux.html

UPDATE:
Responding to question in comments.

I installed Plex for sharing with my wife's iPad and iPhone. I typically use a combination of cifsmount + rockplayer on my HTC Desire and Asus Transformer to access this content. I also use Plex to access HD content (via transcoding) on the Transformer. The DLNA client (Mediatomb) is mainly used for things like the PS3 and my Samsung TV for browsing and accessing Music, although most of the videos play fine through DLNA (transcoding) as well.

WinFF New Developments

2011-09-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

None of this is cast in stone. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that this will change before the next release. I have been implementing some changes to WinFF that I felt would get me into the swing of developing. I am learning a lot of lessons during this process, but feel excited enough about it that I wanted to share.

Current Released Version

This is a screen from the current development version. It needs much more testing and quality control before release and the list contains a ton more info that the average user needs to see regarding file info, but its useful to have on during the development cycle.

The key new features I am excited about is the enhanced queue display in the file list with all the extra detail and the ability for each queue item to have different conversion settings. This has bugged me for a while and in the spirit of "fixing it yourself" I spent the last few evenings on this.

I hope the many users of WinFF enjoy the new functionality when its released. This program works so well and has so many loyal fans, I'd hate to rock the boat too much.

Asus Transformer Sixaxis Controller

2011-08-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

Another visitor. Stay awhile, stay forever!

I couldn't resist.

I had to try hooking up the Playstation 3 Controller to my Asus eee Pad Transformer Tablet. The Asus is running the latest Honeycomb 3.2 via the Prime Custom Rom.

Without much fuss, I now have various emulators running on my 32" TV using a Bluetooth Sixaxis controller to play. I tested a few roms using Gensoid and Snesoid, but my fave's are currently the Amiga Emulator UAE4Droid and Frodo, the Commodore 64 emulator.

The latter is the clue to the opening line of this blog post. +1 to you if you get the reference.

It all works relatively painlessly once its setup, but keybindings per emulator can get tricky. I have DOSBox as well, but I guess the fastest way to have all this stuff setup is using a keyboard dock to help you debug it and then you should be fine. Its a bit fiddly using the onscreen keyboards and toggling various modes, but its not impossible. It might be daunting for a newbie though, I concede.

However, its still a ton of fun and cool as hell to see!

Versions in OSX Lion

2011-08-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

I can't believe we haven't had this before. One of the things you can do very easily on a Linux box is to integrate your documents or config folders into a Version Control System. For the uninitiated, a VCS is typically used by programmers to track changes to programs and allow snapshots or releases / versions to be made. Its not really designed for document folders, but it has the side effect of tracking changes over time to your documents. It can be done seamlessly on a scheduled basis without much intervention on your part. At any point you can revert back in time to previous versions of a file in order to recover changes you might have lost. Its a very handy technique which requires quite a bit of skill to get working seamlessly. Once you use it, you realise how powerful and convenient this can be.

In OSX Lion, Apple has wrapped this functionality in a fantastic GUI for your documents. I was working on a document that went through many layout and artwork changes over a week. At the end of the week, I wanted to see some of the original text and art and was able to use the Versions feature to turn back the time with a slider to find the info I needed. A little slider appears and as you drag it further back in time, you see the document morph through the versions. Its incredibly intuitive and useful and very sexy to use. I hope more and more apps support this feature and I would dearly like to see this functionality duplicated on Linux or even Windows. I expect we'll have a clunky version in Linux within a short time which will mature over time. On Windows, I expect we'll get an over-engineered mess which works in theory, but is broken in some fundamental way. The closest thing we have to this is the version control bundled into Google Docs,

I haven't seen if this functionality extends to applications like Photoshop or non-native apps like The Gimp. I would love if this magic is happening at the OS Level without the application having to be aware, but I guess that's wishful thinking. I will test this next time I boot into OSX. I'd rather spend the next few days getting my Fedora 14 installation upgraded to 15 instead, so I'll leave that question for another day.

At this point, I expect some angry Linux fan criticisms but honestly, this is good stuff! It was $29 well spent to experience this feature alone.

OSX Lion

2011-08-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

Just upgraded to Lion today. Not bad for $29 that I can use on multiple computers. Installation is easy and brings some more tablet style functionality to the desktop. Not sure if I will change my workflow to use these new features.

So far so good. Had to upgrade my NX Client to connect to my Fedora machines & just started upgrading Virtualbox now.

Oh, 1 minor thing. My Gimp stopped working. Causes X11 to crash in a loop.

Might have to boot a Linux VM just to do some graphics work.

So I bought an android tablet

2011-07-03T00:34:00.000-07:00

What can I say? Father's day tradition of annoying the wife and spending continued for one more year.

I picked up an ASUS eeePad Transformer 32GB Wireless model and I'm loving it. It shipped with Android 3.0 Honeycomb as standard, but after switching it on and connecting to WIFI, it detected an update which it proceeded to download in the background without any prompting.

While this was happening I decided to research how to Root the thing and naturally turned to XDA Developers. I found that the rooting required a (micro) sd card to perform which went relatively smoothly. I then installed the Prime Custom ROM also from XDA Developers.

The Prime ROM has all the ASUS OEM Apps installed and appears to be largely identical, but of course has additional capabilities due to it being rooted. My main reason for rooting any android device is to run the CIFS filesystem in the kernel, which allows me to mount Windows (or Linux / OSX) shares on the sdcard. What that means is that I have access to my network shares as folders on the device. I've been doing this for years on my various Android phones and it works the same way on the tablet.

So effectively my tablet has all my music, videos & photos without using any disk space. Everything is in my (local) cloud. This is just so convenient I can't even begin to explain what a killer feature this is. This feature forms the foundation of how I use the device to access movies, ebooks, music, comics, documents, downloads, etc. So many other activities depend on this feature working. It's a massive time saver as I don't have to copy files over wifi to the device. Currently, I am using this one way, in that I don't sync data back to the pc, but as of now, I don't really need to do that.

At any rate, I've installed a batch of games & apps and over the coming weeks, will post some more info about specific use cases.

Bottom line. Its similarly priced to an equivalent ipad 2 here and for some people, I would recommend the Apple unit over the ASUS one. However, for my needs, I decided against the iPad2. One of my use cases for the devices is obviously to consume ebooks of all kinds. I have tested reading comics on the iPad and find that the screen resolution is too low to read the comics in full screen. I have to zoom into the page and scroll around to read comfortably. I am aware that this is also due to my own eye-sight capabilities, but thats the reality. The Transformer's screen res of 1280x720 allows me to read comics at the default full page view. I have read about 10 comics so far without any major squinting required. I am using an app called Perfect Viewer which is the model of subtle interface. The screen is divided into zones and touching those zones activate a function. No menu's or overlays, just clean next / prev page, next / prev book, etc.

I plan to download digital versions of the comics I own to read them this way. My watchmen comic is a bit hard on my eyes and I am hoping the digital version will be an easier read.

More posts to follow.

I would rate this tablet an 8/10 overall. For interests sake, I would probably rate the iPad 2 the same or even 8.5. There really is very little wrong with the ipad 2 technically. Its just not for me. The eeePad is my first Android tablet and hopefully not the last!

I wish my camera took better photos

2011-06-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

I just took delivery of some new stuff from Amazon.co.uk

Depeche Mode - Live in Barcelona BluRay
Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus Remixes
Depeche Mode - Remixes 2 80-11 (3 CD)

Delivered amazingly quickly from the UK.

I have left the cd's sealed and downloaded them from the Net instead. Want to keep them in good condition. Does this make me a criminal? I'm never going to sell them or redistribute.

So far I'm loving the newer mixes. I have heard most of the older ones before and for some of the songs, I have other mixes I prefer so its a mixed result. The Personal Jesus ones are all new and suitably Epic. Can't believe it can still sound so good after all this time.

All in all, a must have for fans and a nice compilation (the 3 cd's) if you want to remind yourself about a band that continues to evolve and improve.

Suggest www.depechemode.com for more info.

Portal 2

2011-05-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

So, in what must be one of the slowest playthroughs of a game ever, I finished Portal 2. No spoilers. Great game. EPIC ending song just like in original Portal.

There is nothing else like these 2 games...

Its an experience worth having just because it isn't like every other game you've ever played.

I love the fact that my boxed retail copy activates a Steam copy for OSX as well. Well done Valve.

9/10

Oh, and one last thing.

Doesn't Wheatley sound awfully like Chris Martin?

iPad 2 vs Samsung 10" Tablet

2011-05-02T12:30:00.000-07:00

So I broke down and bought my wife the iPad 2 upon its launch here in South Africa. I bought it for a couple of reasons.

1) She loves her existing Apple kit. Macbook / iPhone and iTunes make a comfortable environment she has mastered to the point that I am not needed for most of her work & play.

2) I didn't like the hardware spec of the original iPad, mainly due to the lack of camera's for skype. It just seemed a wasted opportunity.

3) The price *IS* right. It's way cheaper than the nearest competitor which is the 7" Samsung Galaxy Tab over here. In fact, the entry level iPad is about 40% cheaper. That's a huge difference.

From what I've heard, the 10" Samsung hasn't been priced, but I ended up playing with it for a few hours. I'm not sure if it was running the final software build, but it was running Honeycomb. Compared to the 7" tab, it didn't have the Samsung specific software and bundled apps, but I had market access and was able to load some of my favourite apps.

However, this blog post is more focussed on differences between the 2 products rather than exhaustive reviews.

With regard to the iPad 2, first impressions are good. It appears to be quite nippy and responsive and relatively bug free. Everything worked as advertised and the setting it up with my work email & home wifi setups was painless. While driving I was able to access the internet over wifi tethered to my android phone which worked well, if a bit slow. Could just be a network related issue, but the actual setup was painless.

Sync'ing with iTunes is brilliant and crap at the same time. Brilliant in the way it allows you to configure the screens with your apps & the seamless way your backups are handled. Crap, in fact, awful, in that you have to be physically connected over USB to get anything done. What's worse, is that while you are syncing, you cannot do anything else with the tablet.

Coming from the Linux world, I'm using to browsing the internet during an O/S install and I've been multitasking since my first Amiga in the 1980's. Its absolutely mindblowing to think of such an advanced product forcing you to twiddle your thumbs while you are copying data to it. It defies belief that users of IOS products put up with this. I swear, I'd be heading for Cydia if this was mine, but it belongs to my wife so....

It bears mentioning at this point that the average Android phone or tablet has multiple solutions for syncing wirelessly and you CAN sync data while using the device.

Onto the app store. In South Africa, being a new store, its severely limited. I was able to access the US store to compare and while there was much more content available, accessing it was incredibly frustrating. It just doesn't seem like the navigation options encourage browsing or discovery of apps. I found myself looking for lists of top apps on the web and then manually searching them using the search tools in iTunes and on the device itself. At least you can install / purchase apps from the iPad without the need to be connected to iTunes. The actual process of acquiring and updating apps seems seamless, although swapping between the US/ZA apps stores requires a password login each time. This is annoying, but understandable.

With regard to the Samsung tab, the Honeycomb market seemed to have fewer apps than on my Froyo phone. I couldn't find a couple of the apps I regularly use which seemed strange, but I guess this will change over time. I did find a few of my favourites which was awesome, but some of them seemed quite unstable. For some reason, rotating the tab caused a number of apps to Force-Close everytime. The core OS apps did not do this so I guess some of the 3rd party apps need some Honeycomb fixes. In fact, since I played with the tab, a number of them have been updated with changelogs reflecting Honeycomb support.

There are still many more FREE apps in the Android store. Finding quality free apps on the iPad is not as common and clearly the developers on Android have realised the market difference compared to the Apple user base. On Android Ad-supported free apps are in abundance and there is adequate choice of apps for most purposes.

On the iPad I forgot that you have no real choice when it comes to the core app functionality, something I wouldn't mind. On my Android phone, I have samba support which allows me to browse my media server and sync my podcasts or watch divx files. On the iPad, I am limited to using very flaky DLNA implementations with now file-system browse support. I guess its a different approach to the same problem, but I know which I prefer.

I realise that on both platforms, rooting is the way to go in order to maximise them. On the iPad, that will enable the use of XBMC as a media player and once that happens, it will kick Honeycomb's ass comprehensively in that department. XBMC supports DLNA as well as most common network protocols natively. I am literally dying to have this in a tablet device.

In conclusion though, what can I say. The iPad 2 is a combination of very good hardware with a brilliantly functional & stable O/S with an aweful ecosystem filled with lock-in and DRM. Its enough to drive you crazy and delight you from moment to moment. To make the device more usable for me would require some kind of Jailbreak. This should enable wireless syncing, alternate media codec support (flac / ac3 / etc) and wireless media streaming. For the price it would make even the Samsung 10" Android 3 based tablet struggle to compete.

One last nod to the Samsung. The camera's, screen, peripheral support & expandability are so far superior to the iPad 2, that they don't bear comparison. Its a better hardware device in most respects. However, the software support and the relatively new O/S needs some work to be spouse-friendly in this household.

Oh, before I forget. Screen rotation. On iPad its a joke. Some apps don't rotate properly forcing you to use the portrait mode in one one side only. Flipping it 180 degrees makes no difference. This can be annoying if you have the charging cable in. Also it means the home button moves from left to right or top to bottom depending on how you hold it. On Honeycomb, the buttons are virtual and follow the screen orientation, always at the bottom left. Its strange when you first see it, but it works like a charm.

Which would I buy for myself? Well, I guess it comes down to price. I'd be willing to pay a premium to get and Android device. However, I can honestly say, XBMC is just so damn good, that I might still be tempted to get a jailbroken iPad instead.

Steam error on OSX - Steam must be online

2011-03-05T02:17:00.000-08:00

For the longest time, I have been getting an error when trying to run Steam on OSX. As soon as I launched Steam, it would attempt to download patches and then fail miserably.

I have followed many guides and attempted many fixes and this problem just wouldn't go away. So, being a "read the manual if all else fails", I decided to check the support site at www.steampowered.com

The solution to the problem was trivially easy. Firstly, the error message was grossly inaccurate. Steam complained that I needed to be online in order to update. I clearly WAS online, but the actual problem was that the folder Steam was trying to update was write protected.

Turns out that I was executing the read only copy of the file in the mounted STEAM.DMG file. Aaaargh. How could I be so stupid. Well, i was launching steam using Spotlight. So I would hit Command-Space and then type in S,T,E and and it was defaulting the installation folder instead of the Applications folder. I just never noticed. Arrrghh.

Anyway, problem is solved. Yes, I was stupid. Yes, I should read the screen properly.

iPad 2 Launch Video - Almost caught up with Android

2011-03-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

Congrats are due to Apple for the launch of the iPad 2. Finally a device to tempt me away from Android.

Unfortunately, it's let down by a shockingly "last generation" screen and average hardware. I was most impressed by the software and grudgingly concede that they are WAY ahead on the software front with the Apple created software like iWork, iMovie & Garageband.

I think ultimately that's the only thing that would make me want to try it out. Fantastic software. I've spent a lot of time with a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7" and an iPad 1. If I had to choose only 1 device on the proverbial desert island, it would have to be the Android 1. Compared to the iPad 2, I would probably plonk for the Apple.

However, its still Q1 of 2011 and I expect that within 3 months we'll have an even larger choice of devices with equal or better hardware. I find it hilarious that people can watch the iPad 2 video and thing its a major advance.

I think they missed a genuine opportunity by leaving out an IPS based screen like the iPhone 4.

When the highlight of your presentation is the cover and Garageband, I have to wonder. I admit if I was to recommend a tablet to a clueless user, I would probably recommend the iPad 2, so in that respect, perhaps they have improved slightly.

Confession. Will probably buy one for the wife and see if I can get a working XBMC on it. That would make it useful.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (NES remake)

2010-11-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

iTunes 10.01 and Fedora 12 (specifically AmahiTunes mt-daapd)

2010-09-29T04:28:00.000-07:00

So I had upgraded to iTunes 10 and immediately downgraded back to 9. Reason being, iTunes stopped seeing my Fedora 12 servers DAAP shared music library. My server is running Amahi 5.5 (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) and stores all my ripped mp3's, oggs and flacs. I was quite content using iTunes to play it as its one of the few decent players on the mac. Compared to linux, there are very few decent players that support daap. My player of choice, songbird, as well as amarok & banshee don't support daap on OSX, but work perfectly in any recent linux. Hell, even my android phone works over wifi, so I am very happy with the server side setup.

So Apple introduces iTunes 10 and totally breaks daap for me. I expected that Apple would just leave it and expect all the various NAS / streaming server manufacturers to work around iTunes, but amazingly, Apple recently introduced iTunes 10.01, which fixes the issue.

It required a restart of the service on the fedora box, which was a quick "/etc/init.d/mt-daapd restart" to fix. Naturally my mac needed a reboot, whereas the Fedora box remained up throughout.

Oh & even better news, I just read that I can enable transcoding on the Fedora side so I can stream FLAC & hopefully DTS .wavs to my network devices. I hope it works!

Problems Compiling Lazarus IDE to GTK2 on Fedora 12 and 13 ( and the solution )

2010-08-13T01:11:00.000-07:00

Had some issues following some of the posted guides online when trying to convert the Lazarus IDE to GTK2.

The first portion worked, whereby you compile the LCL to GTK2 first, but the second step, which was to compile the IDE itself kept failing.

I eventually got it working by compiling it from the command line.

I did a:
make clean all
make LCL_PLATFORM=gtk2

and it worked.

Please note to do all of he above as superuser / root.

Vaio VPCEB17FG E Series - no sound - problems fixed - Ubuntu / Linux Mint

2010-07-13T02:52:00.001-07:00

After trying various solutions, I settled on the following one.

http://monespaceperso.org/blog-en/2010/05/02/upgrade-alsa-1-0-23-on-ubuntu-lucid-lynx-10-04/

I am currently running Linux Mint 9 and the above worked perfectly for me.

Hope this solves your problems...

Vaio VPCEB17FG E Series - disable touchpad - linux

2010-07-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

from Ubuntuforums, where much credit is due!

gksudo rmmod psmouse to disable
gksudo modprobe psmouse to enable

of course, you can script it, make an icon, etc.

Tested and working on LinuxMint 9.

Original thread / discussion which covers all kinds of info about this laptop here.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1449001

Father's day memory stick lost

2010-06-27T23:15:00.000-07:00

This year, on Father's day, my wife bought me a stunningly small usb memory stick. 32gb of space crammed into a tiny space. I knew it was a recipe for disaster, and on Friday, my fears were realised. I couldn't find it when I got home. I must have left it at work. It bugged me the entire weekend and so this morning I came in extra early to look for it.

Oh no, an empty desk. Have the cleaners been here? What now? Desperately, I move in closer...

Is there something between the desk units? It looks like something next to the telephone wire...Could it be??

It looks shiny, this is good. What are the chances? Could just be a coin or something??

Oh yeah! Thank you thank you thank you....My nuts remain intact!

So problem over, for now. This bloody thing is so small I have to take extra care. It had just slipped between the cracks WHILE I was packing up. It was there and then suddenly it had disappeared. I'm just glad there's a happy ending though.

Another Xcellent Android Site

2010-06-10T12:53:00.001-07:00

http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=594

This one is specifically for the HTC Desire, but navigate up a folder to access other Android devices like the HTC Legend, Nexus One, Motorola Droid, etc.

In each sub-forum you will find like minded owners and their app recommendations and even downloads / links.

AppBrain for Android

2010-06-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

Found a cool site to browse and install apps. Its an alternative to using the Market app on the phone.

http://www.appbrain.com

You create an account and install the appbrain app. From that point on, you can browse top apps, recommended apps in more detailed categories than on the normal Android Market on the phone. Being a desktop app, its more comfortable to browse and read the images & reviews.

You get urls to click to install the apps you want and they sync wirelessly to the phone itself.

Pretty sweet. I found apndroid and 3g watchdog here and installed them. pretty cool site.

HTC Desire Goodness

2010-06-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago my HTC Hero was stolen. Woe is me. However, I had used it enough to become an Android fan. I knew that my replacement phone would be another Sense based Android. I had a contract upgrade due as well and plumped for a HTC Desire.

As Pat (from TLLTS) has been saying, the snapdragon processor is amazing. The phone is fast and responsive and makes the Hero seem pedestrian in comparison. Its quite a huge improvement in terms of usability.

Android 2.1 is awesome and 2.2 looks set to shake things up when it launches on HTC. I can't wait. Some of the things I have installed include C64, Sega Genesis and Amiga Emulators, C64 Sidtune players and the amazing Tower Raiders game. Of course mundane things like RSS, MAPS, Video and Audio are totally catered for. I believe there is a divx player working as well, but haven't seen it on the Android Marketplace yet.

The screen resolution is lovely and the camera seems unchanged in hardware from the Hero, but the 2.1 software offers more control over the camera settings which is nice. This phone also has an FM radio which is one of the main things I miss from my N95. Another thing is the frontfacing camera which is used for Video Chat. I am amused to think that Apple's new Ipod will probably have a front facing camera and many people will hail it as revolutionary. What a joke. The phone supports 7.2mb/s 3G connections which I have not really done much testing on. The local phone provider has 21mb/s network speeds using HSPA+, but I think the max speed supported on the Desire is HSUPA at 7.2mb/s. I think the upload max is 1.8mb/s which is pretty awesome too.

I have been using DoubleTwist to sync music to it from OSX, but am planning on switching my main desktop to Fedora in the coming weeks, unless I hit a stumbling block.

I can highly recommend Android to anybody looking for a new phone. Oh and by the way, the insurance finally agreed to replace my Hero and so I now also have a brand new HTC Legend in my possession. Will probably swap it out for another phone if I can.

Nerd Score

2010-04-21T02:07:00.001-07:00

MythBox on Amahi

2010-04-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

I've been running AMAHI as my principal server for a few months now. It Fedora 12 based and shares media wonderfully. Recently I picked up a Hauppauge PVR 150 and decided to get MythTV working.

If you don't know what Myth is and what it can do, I suggest Youtubing it. I have always thought of Myth as a sort of exam or qualification. Once you reach a certain level of skill, you can get it working. It tests your patience and your skills, especially if you have non-standard hardware or live outside the US!

Anyway, finally got it working *ON* the Amahi server. It was a real achievement for me in that I didn't have to do a fresh install of a clean Myth installation. I layered it on top of the existing Fedora 12 and Apache installation.

Feeling pretty chuffed. Next job interview, if asked about my linux qualifications, would like to reply. I have a working MythTV backend with multiple frontends on Linux and OSX, but I'm sure that the interviewer would glaze over at that.

Oh well...

Fedora 13 disable gdm and enable kdm cannot login

2010-04-20T13:02:00.000-07:00

After disabling GDM and using KDM instead, I could no longer log in as my normal user, only as root.

It seemed like a permissions error. Seemed like KDM could not read my home folder.

I ended up using the following command...

restorecon -R -v /home

to restore KDM. I restarted X and it worked again.

Thanks to the original poster at
http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora-list@redhat.com/msg23145.html

VAIO E-Series on Windows 7

2010-04-19T22:46:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that my Windows 7 installation feels slow and sluggish. Having used Linux on the same box for almost a month now, I was curious enough to check out the slow windows performance this morning.

Firstly, I was shocked that the 130gb partition was almost full. I just had 1 VM on it (XP ironically). This was about 40 gb. Nearly everything else was original Vaio supplied software.

I was shocked at the amount of OEM software on this machine. I was going to blog that I have uninstalled 40 apps already, but its actually more. I have uninstalled about 30 apps already and there's still > 10 left in the control panel add / remove applet. What is truly scary is that this is only software with the word VAIO in the title. This excludes the Mcafee/Symantec/Adobe software which I am also going to remove. With names like "VAIO Content Monitoring Service", I am only too happy to remove these bits of bloat.

I wonder if this software is being provide for my benefit or some nameless content provider.

I wondered why this machine took so long to boot up on Windows compared to Linux. Also it should explain why VM's ran so slowly. Its like taking a thoroughbred horse and making it pull a carraige filled with rocks in a race.

Hopefully once I have done the first batch of my estimate 60 uninstallshield processes, this machine will still boot up!

Current Setup

2010-04-16T05:42:00.001-07:00

Haven't really taken stock yet, but thought I'd list the current IP connected devices in the house.

Desktop PC - OSX Snow Leopard
Server - Fedora 12 + Amahi
Laptop 1 - Ubuntu 10.04 / Win 7 Dualboot
Laptop 2 - Ubuntu 10.04
Laptop 3 - Ubuntu 10.04
Laptop 4 - OSX Snow Leopard
AppleTV 1 - OSX (Tiger?)
AppleTV 2 - OSX (Ditto?)
PS3
XBOX 360
Wii
PSP 1
PSP 2
Nintendo DS 1
Nintendo DS 2
iPhone
HTC Hero - Android 2.1

Damn! Never realised it was that many. I guess that's why my WiFI is so slow...
Speaking of which..

Siemens Wireless N Router
Linksys WRT 54G Router
Marconi DSL Modem

My 2 LCD TV's probably run embedded linux, but they're not technically ethernet capable so don't have to include them, but I wanted to push my device count > 20 and my linux device count > 10 ;)

Does this mean I'm a geek???

VAIO E-Series on Linux

2010-04-16T05:36:00.000-07:00

Still having fun. Got sound working thanks to the amazing folks on UbuntuForums. If you are having similar problems, google solutions using "hda-verb" to get the latest. Its a changing topic with improving fixes all the time so better to get the latest tips yourself to get it working. The one I used was taken from

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=509542#c5

Which was linked on the Ubuntu Forums.

Still having ATI 5650 problems. Apparently it works in Ubuntu 9.10, but since I'm running 10.04 beta, the problem is still evolving. Some people have it working on a fresh install, but I upgraded a 9.10 installation to 10.04 alpha and have been doing the daily updates. I might have some residual configs I need to delete before it works.

Its a Friday afternoon now. Setting myself the goal of having it working by Monday.

Marvel 88E8059 on Linux

2010-03-24T06:11:00.000-07:00

Had issues with 2.6.32 kernel, card not detected, etc.

Installed 2.6.33 using info on this page

http://www.ramoonus.nl/2010/02/25/linux-kernel-2-6-33-installation-guide-for-ubuntu-linux/

and it worked for me on Ubuntu Lucid Beta.

I expect 2.6.33 on Fedora/openSUSE should sort the problem on those too.

Hope this helps somebody out there!

Adventures with my new Vaio

2010-03-24T05:33:00.000-07:00

So I bought a new laptop. Sony Vaio E Series Model VPCEB17FG.

Its a gorgeous machine and I am hoping to get 2-3 years quality life out of the thing. It comes with Windows7 and I decided to at least give Win7 a fair go. Unfortunately even with 4gb ram, this feels slower than my wife's nearly 2 year old Macbook with half the ram. What the hell?

Now, Win7 fans, everybody tells me its not that bad, but how come my XP VM runs so slowly compared to the same thing on the Macbook? On the Macbook, the XP VM had 1.2gb ram, but because I have more memory now, I have allocated 2.5gb to it.

Now, applications seem unresponsive and database access seems much more sluggish. I am running some mysql databases on the vm and application access to the database seems markedly slower. Not 10 or 20%, but 5 or 10 times slower. Again, what the hell??

My current theory is that the Windows XP VM on Windows 7 is to blame because effectively I am running 2 antiviruses, 2 anti spyware / malware and ultimately a bunch of services that I don't need all competing for disk access. I think that disk activity under win7 is more pronounced than with OSX. I could be wrong, but until I hear a better theory, that's my story and I am sticking with it.

I have setup dual-boot with Ubuntu Lucid Beta as I try and test the alternative. Once I find a working setup I'll reload another linux like opensuse, mandriva or fedora to run my vm on. Its just a lot easier to set ubuntu up with multiple kernels at this point. My Vaio has a Marvell ethernet card which currently has flaky support in kernel 2.6.32.

So I got me a Linux based phone. Farewell, dear N95

2010-02-24T07:20:00.000-08:00

Some history...

I *love* gadgets. I am insanely fussy about which phones I have. Before my contracts are ready for upgrade, I research and plan and drool about my next phone. My history of phones goes back to 1995 when I got my Ericsson 388. Lovely tiny phone. Followed over the hears with an Sony Ericsson T610, P910 and eventually got my first Nokia, the N95.

Often when phones are released, they ship with one or two features missing. Either a lower spec camera or no FM Radio or something to make you want more. For the first time, with the N95, I got the perfect phone.

When my two years were up (September 2009) 6 months ago, I couldn't find a single phone that could do all the things it could. Finally 6 months later, I realised that it was a once off event. I would not be so lucky again. I'd have to compromise when I bought my replacement. The fact that it took 6 months before I did shows you how much I love that phone.

This blog post is supposed to be about my new HTC Hero, but I think I'm going to dedicate a post or two to the Nokia. My adventures with the Hero will follow in a later post.

In this post, let me just mention how the Nokia N95 still is better than the Hero in some respects. This is not to slight the HTC phone, but merely to illustrate what an absolutely epic phone the N95 *is*.

1) FM Radio - Well implemented, fairly good reception and well integrated. Shuts up and resumes as you receive calls, able to multitask and run in the background, manual or automatic tuning. In some regions (not South Africa) they have additional features which are network related. They call it Visual Radio, but never seen it working. I used the radio primarily to listen to live sports for which I could not get streaming online. Also working in corporate environments mean that listening to streaming radio is normally blocked anyway.

2) Camera. 5MP, just like the Hero, but optics seem superior. Not sure if its quality of lenses but its markedly better. It has a basic flash as well. The video camera is awesome 640x480 @ 30 frames as opposed to the basic low-res one on the Hero. Video quality is leaps and bounds ahead and suitable for casual use. The Hero cam seems to be more for novelty uses. N95 also had a sliding lens cover to protect the innards of the lens. Opening the cover automatically launched the camera app. Nice.

3) Media Controls - Dedicated slide out buttons for Play/Rewind/Stop/Forward, etc. Also a dedicated button for taking photos. Easier to take photos than on Hero which requires the use of the trackball to take photos. This is much more unconfortable.

4) TV Out - I LOVED THIS FEATURE! Especially used when I travelled and stayed in hotels. Played videos and games on the hotel tv. Later on I was able to hook up the WiiMote to it and play games wirelessly from my hotel bed. When the phone was hacked and emulators ran on it, that was particularly fancy.

Of course, now, the biggest problem wih it is the lack of speed and the clunkiness of the aging symbian interfaces. The lower resolution screen makes web surfing and rss reading a pain and in general the interface feels archaic in the modern age. I was very envious of the app store on my wife's iphone, but am finding the Android store interesting enough as an alternative.

In short the faster speed, large screen & modern interface of the Hero as won me over. The android store, sense ui and linux platform sealed the deal. Unless something changes majorly in the coming months, my next phone will be Android based too.

Anyway, I haven't given my N95 away, it sits on my desk tempting me back, but I think its going to get packed away soon.

I was seriously disappointed to find that the N96 and N97 phones have not lived up to the N95's reputation. Pity that. Nokia gave the N95 frequent software updates including adding additional functionality like auto rotate based on accelerometer, etc, which other phones had. Good job Nokia.

Lastly, a huge thank you to the many phone hackers and modders who opened up the N95 to hacking and added even more functionality.

Trim .AVI files on OSX without reencoding

2010-01-19T00:33:00.001-08:00

So I wanted to burn some video clips to disk, but the resultant disk image was too big to fit on a dvd. I could have removed one file and it would fit, but the issue was that it was only a few megabytes too much. It seemed like I needed to lose 1 or 2 minutes of video to make it fit.

I immediately reached for my usual answer to the problem ffmpeg. FFMpeg, as everybody should know, is the video editing command line tool of choice. It was a simple matter of setting start and end times and clipping the file.

However, it normally requires a bit of work getting the parameters right and converting times to seconds, etc. I wasn't in the mood. Secondly, I'm using OSX. There's supposed to be a GUI way to do this. So a few searches later, I had my answer.

http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

Enter Streamclip.

OpenFile.
Seek to the Point you wish to clip. Don't drag a selection, just select the frame you wish to use as the trim point. Now, in the edit menu, select "Select In" to select all frames up to that frame or "Select Out" to select frames after that point. Now, select "Trim" in the edit menu. Lastly, SaveAs to create your new file without re-encoding.

Test your file and you're done.

I used it to trim a file which I had recorded which had extra adverts at the end. Removing it, saved my enough space to make my compilation fit on a dvd.

Awesome.

2010 Admission of Guilt

2010-01-08T04:27:00.000-08:00

So.

One of my biggest complaints with Linux has been the Audio popping I've been getting which I blamed on PulseAudio.

I had gotten used to using my computer with the sound turned low, so didn't notice that the same problem existing using it on OSX.

I finally realised it was a speaker problem when I tried to use the speakers without the computer to provide music at a pool party. Lo and behold. Clicking and popping like crazy.

So all the time I blamed it on Kubuntu, or PulseAudio, or whatever, it was just the bloody broken speakers...

2 More Weeks of Snow

2009-12-19T23:41:00.000-08:00

Part of me thought I would have left Snow Leopard and gone back to Linux for my desktop use, but so far, nope. I'm very happy and think that for most of my needs, OSX is as good or better than using Linux.

I miss using KWIN + Plasma as my desktop, but with a little adjustment, most of my workflows have been replaced with suitable alternatives. I guess because I use mostly cross platform apps (Songbird, Picasa, Virtualbox, XBMC, etc), my daily routine remains largely unaffected.

In addition my Hauppage USB card works better in Mac along with my printer (Canon), Scanner (Epson), and Keyboard (Logitech G15).

This isn't a bash linux post. On the contrary, I miss the lack of boundaries that working on linux gives. I miss the freedom to change things, install from source, etc. Most of all, I miss being able to go into /etc/*.conf and fine tune things!

I still use my openSUSE VM and now and then run an XP VM for work related tasks. All in all, a very comfortable setup.

Krusader + KDE 4.3 on Snow Leopard

2009-12-07T09:08:00.000-08:00

There's just no substitute for good quality apps on your desktop.

I missed using Krusader, Marble and even Dolphin!

To get KDE 4.3 working, I followed the guide at :

http://n0tablog.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/installing-krusader-orthodox-file-manager-on-mac-os-x/

This got me 99% of the way there. For the last %, I needed to edit a plist file as per the following post.

http://old.nabble.com/Re%3A-dbus-%401.2.12_5-apparent-regression%2C-can%27t-%22launchctl-load%22-p23700119.html

The first post is quite lengthy and the bits that worked for me are in the comments. I am posting it here, but do visit the original post for more info. All credit and thanks to the respective authors and commenters, they are the real heroes.

once off.
sudo chown -R ~/Library/Preferences/KDE
launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist

once per login
open /Applications/MacPorts/KDE4/kdeinit4.app

2 Weeks of Snow

2009-12-07T09:06:00.001-08:00

I've been running Snow Leopard for 2 weeks.

Its been remarkably dull. Everything works as expected. No major hassles thus far.

Have installed macports and kde4 to have some apps I can't live without.

Everything from nano to krusader ;)

Linux Thoughts

2009-11-27T13:16:00.000-08:00

For most of what I need to do in Linux, the current releases of openSUSE 11.2 meets my needs. I have a number of hardware issues related to poor driver support from the manufacturers which makes my current setup 99% of what I want it to be. More specifically, my Canon Pixma ip5200 printer whose support is okay for normal printing, but for cd label printing, which is my primary need, its pretty poor.

In the last 2 weeks, I also read some posts from linux users who are considering moving to OSX and was amazed (although not surprised) at the hostile reaction there posts caused. So much for a community spirit.

When a linux user criticises linux, its not always about bashing developers and their hard work. Its about recognising where we need to improve and to suggest ways forward. Its crazy to think that Linux is ready for everyone and all use cases, because quite simply, it isn't. If you have a relative that's hooked on Sims 3, Windows (or OSX) are better platforms for that use case. End of story. No debate necessary. If WOW is your thing, its probably still better to use a platform other that linux + wine due to the add on utils and supplementary software that most WOW users use WHILE playing the game. However, most linux users will tell you how much better WOW is on Wine.

This negativity got me looking at installing Snow Leopard on my test box and what do you know? Its working.

I've bought a retail box of iLife, iWork and Snow and have installed them all. I am planning to migrate data from ext4 to something usable on mac and use it like this for a while.

Distro Hopping

2009-11-08T02:15:00.000-08:00

Seeing as I have my configs pretty much split between O/S and Data, I am evaluating different Linuxes as there are a number of new versions floating around.

In the last month I have looked at

openSUSE 11.2 RC1
openSUSE 11.2 RC2
Kubuntu 9.10
Mandriva 2010 KDE Edition

Currently running Mandriva.

Despite previous expectations being high, Kubuntu is a distant 3rd to the other 2 in my opinion.

Waiting for new version of Linux Mint. but might get brave and attempt Arch Linux next. Still feeling a bit chicken though...

Kubuntu 9.10 - A short review

2009-10-30T07:29:00.000-07:00

I installed it, works well.
I missed openSUSE.
Reinstalled.

Reinstalling Linux vs Reinstalling Windows

2009-10-30T07:14:00.001-07:00

One of the unexpected side effects of running Linux is that you have the opportunity to grown and learn in areas you may not have expected. For example, I have learned so much of the intricacies of my operating system and read so many articles that my understanding of computers has expanded to levels I wasn't expecting. In contrast with Windows, sad to say, I felt I had been stagnating. When I speak to qualified, certified, experienced Microsoft engineers, when faced with a O/S issue, their response is to upgrade the ram, cpu or reinstall O/S. In fact, reinstall O/S is the most common bit of advice I hear from Microsoft People. Next to reboot, of course.

The side effect of this is that you tend to interuupt your working Windows setup and you have to download a ton of apps and reinstall them. Antivirus, Web Browser, CD Writer, Chat Clients, Email, etc. Often you forget to backup shortcuts, documents, notes, etc, and they are lost forever. Its possible avoid this by storing data away from the O/S, but it seems you lose some integration by doing it that way. 10 years later, people still have the same issues with reinstalls that they had now. I tended to run a Windows install about 2 years between reinstalls and my biggest problem was finding forgotten driver cd's.

On to linux. One of the first tips you learn is to seperate your O/S partition from your home partition. Its a simple task you do at install time and from that point forward, you life gets *VERY* easy. It means you can reinstall your O/S, login to your desktop and have all your familiar folders, shortcuts & icons as you had before the reinstall. What a joy. It becomes even better. You can *CHANGE* linux distributions and test them this way. In the last 24 hours, I have gone from openSUSE 11.2 RC1 to Kubuntu 9.10 and now back to openSUSE 11.2 RC2. All my documents & settings remain intact and my music library & documents are where I left them.

I can't put a price on what value this is to me in terms of convenience and time saved. To any linux users out there who took this for granted, another reason to be glad you left Windows behind.

Lastly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Its trivial to backup the O/S settings and patches before reinstalling, saving even more time setting up services, databases, applications or system updates.

Logitech G15 Keyboard openSUSE 11.2 - follow up

2009-10-28T06:01:00.000-07:00

Just a note to say its working beautifully.

g15daemon has been automatically added to the startup services during boot. I didn't have to do that manually. It brings up a nice clock + date screen as default.

I added g15stats to the startup apps manually and it has a number of screens related to memory / cpu / network usage etc.

Will post photos soon.

openSUSE 11.2 RC and NVidia Drivers - follow up

2009-10-28T05:54:00.000-07:00

Part of my problems on KDE4 were related to a bug in the Nvidia driver. This was fixed yesterday and a new version was released which fixes the bug.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_190.42.html

That's the link to the new version's release page.

It fixes the bug I was having that made KDE4 unusable. Have been running it stable since installing this fix and I am very happy to be back on KDE4.

I have been a long time Gnome user, but I absolutely admire the KDE guys who decided to re-architect a stable release and make it *WORK* more efficiently under the hood. Your hard work is paying off now as each release gets significantly better.

On a related note, was glad to see the default choice for my openSUSE install *WAS* KDE. Thanks for listening guys.

openSUSE 11.2 RC and NVidia Drivers

2009-10-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

Downloaded the Nvidia linux driver for my Nvidia 8800GT.

Can only install it without X loaded so did a:

init 3

when running the NVidia***.sh file, it complains that it can't compile a kernel so did the following

cd /usr/src/linux
make cloneconfig
make prepare
zypper in linux-kernel-headers kernel-syms module-init-tools make gcc
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.36-pkg1.run -q

Followed the prompts until it completed.

Lastly did a:
sax2 -r m 0=nvidia
init 5

All of the above commands were run as root!

For some reason, desktop effects in kwin under KDE4 are not working yet. Gnome + Compiz is accelerated, wobbly and pretty as all hell! Need to fix the kde4 kwin bling as I prefer Kde4 to Gnome current versions.

Logitech G15 Keyboard openSUSE 11.2

2009-10-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

Got the LCD display on my logitech keyboard working well. As their is no built-in support for the keyboard in openSUSE 11.2 RC, I googled and found the site www.g15tools.com

On their forum, I found packages for openSUSE in a user repository.

I added the repo with the following (correct as of 24/10/2009).

sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dgege:/g15tools/openSUSE_Factory/home:dgege:g15tools.repo

then followed by

sudo zypper -r install g15daemon g15stats

nextup

sudo /usr/sbin/g15daemon

lastly

g15stats --interface eth0 --daemon

Will post a follow-up once I make this autostart every bootup.

So far works very well.

I get 5 screens on the keyboard lcd from memory / swap stats to clock to eth0 stats, etc. All nice and readable. There are plugins for Songbird and other apps which I need to checkout.

Haven't figured out how to attach Macro's to the extra function keys, as I haven't started to research that.

Windows 7 Thoughts

2009-10-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

Its better than XP.
Its better than Vista.

I don't think it stacks up to OSX or Linux when it comes to speed or general responsiveness though.

Didn't have much in the way of crashes although frequently encountered pauses / non-responsive apps which would appear dead, but then resume after a few seconds.

Much simplified and usable configuration options compared to Vista. I found working with Vista like playing a really hard puzzle game. Nothing seemed to work in a logical way and there were too many screens to configure something as simple as a network. It was frustrating to work with compared to OSX or Linux and even XP.

It still *IS* XP under the gloss though. The network domain reboots and frequent reboots after installing apps or patches make it unusable for me.

I didn't use much of the Microsoft supplied apps, relying on open source equivalents for web browsing, downloading, music, podcasts,etc. During this time I also checked out Google Chrome. In the same way that the app store makes the iphone useful, Firefox addons make it indispensable. I have no plans to use Chromium on Linux until they have a similar lineup of extensions to match the ones I use daily in Firefox.

Would I recommend Windows 7 to anybody? Yes. Unless I feel they are ready to UPGRADE to Linux or OSX. I think its a decent O/S and in a corporate environment, it makes sense compared to Vista.

Its not as fast as Microsoft is claiming though. I have it on my wife's netbook and the delays & pauses are even more noticeable there.

For the record, my wife's netbook has 2GB ram and my workstation 4gb.

Upgrade from Windows 7 to OpenSUSE 11.2

2009-10-23T03:02:00.000-07:00

I like the title of this post, because it certainly feels this way.

I popped another drive into my machine and installed openSUSE 11.2

I was thinking about waiting for Ubuntu, but a beta openSUSE is just as stable as a release Ubuntu in my opinion so why wait?

Its been a while since installing linux as my main o/s and it just gets easier. In comparison, my Windows 7 install seemed to take close to an hour with all the reboots and downloads of patches. openSUSE 11.2 took about 20 minutes and I don't remember seeing a reboot. There seems to be a point when it wants to reboot, but it seems to unload everything and then restart booting without a physical reboot. Pretty impressive.

As usual all my hardware is detected correctly and I'm up and running with a minimum of fuss. To bring closure to my Windows 7 experience, I will make a final post about life with Win7. Overall it wasn't bad as I was expecting.

Windows 7 First Impressions

2009-10-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

Not good initially. I deleted my boot hackintosh partitions, leaving one HPFS+ partition intact with all my data on. I booted the Windows install dvd and installed Windows 7 on the primary partition.

Install progressed smoothly if a little slowly. After about an hour everything appeared to be running smoothly. On closer inspection, I found that the pc was crashing randomly within half an hour of bootup.

"To hell with this..." said I and proceeded to wipe the installation and try openSUSE 11.2 RC1. Much to my dismay, openSUSE couldn't read the partition table to reformat the drives without erasing my data partition (HPFS) which I wanted to keep.

So, reluctantly, back to the crashing W7. I got desperate and checked Intel's website to see what Bios updates were out that could help. Amazed to find that the board had numerous updates in 2009 fixing several stability issues. Mine was about 5 or 6 versions out of date. Considering that the Bios was only about 14 months old, I was amazed at the amount of updates done to it. What bugged me is that this board had previously worked fine on Ubuntu 9.04, openSUSE 11.2, Windows XP and OSX. Why did W7 have such problems?

At any rate, I did the bios update and believe it or not, the crashing has stopped. I can't believe it was such a simple fix, but it was. So, I have since started installing apps, Chrome, Pidgin, Songbird, etc. All seems well.

My general feeling about it is that it feels like XP+. The usability is just as poor with the taskbar / dock-like bar being cumbersome and the system tray is same old same old. Control panel is confusing as hell to after 6 months of the Mac's Preferences view and even Gnome Control Center is better, YAST on openSUSE, even more so.

I do prefer the integrated control panel a la YAST or Mandriva's Utility, etc, to the Ubuntu style, but that's just me.

I'm most enthusiastic about the future of KDE4 and I reckon it's evolving into my dream desktop with the best combination of ease of use and power.

I'll be running Windows for a while I hope. Once I migrate the HPFS partition to EXT3 or NTFS, I *WILL* be installing openSUSE 11.2 final or Kubuntu 9.10.

Bottom line.

I prefer Win7 to XP. This will be a good one for MS. It was such a frustrating experience to work on a Vista machine, but I am finding W7 to be a decent improvement. Don't get me wrong, its easy to see the XP or earlier underpinnings.

What blows me away is that you still have to reboot after joining a workgroup. I guess one day MS will fix this and everybody will rave about how wonderful it is. I can't stand all the reboots due to installing a cd burner, antivirus or doing updates.

Are we really having do to this in 2009? Come on...

I loved my Hackintosh

2009-10-16T10:36:00.000-07:00

So my wife has a Macbook and I bought some software for her which gave me a chance to see what the Mac is all about.

After 6 months, I have reluctantly decided to go back to free software. Not that any of the experience was bad. On the contrary. Running OSX has been the best OS I have run in years! Better than Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mint and other desktop friendly linuxes for me and certainly faster than Vista and seemingly more capably.

I was constantly surprised by how well it performed and of the ease of use. I know many people who swear and curse Mac users, but frankly, the criticism is not justifiable. I think its an awesome platform and I can see why there is so many users converting from Windows to Mac. Its not as hard as switching to Linux as its a very attractive and easy to use system for windows people. You will have more trouble adapting to the keyboard and mouse changes than to using most of the software.

One of my favourite things about the system was the consistent way apps behave and look. It seems to be the direction that KDE is heading and I wish we were a little further bit. Whatever we think of Cocoa/ Carbon or DirectX, the lack of single dominant framework for Linux is not making it easy to compete head on. I know I am in the minority for believing this, but in the past few months I had to develop some software on all 3 platforms.

Linux was certainly the hardest with having to choose GTK1, GTK2, QT, etc, for widget sets, each with slightly different levels of completion and with peculiarities of each.

The main reason I am leaving the Mac world behind is that for 95% of the time, I was running applications such as firefox, songbird, lazarus, jdownloader, etc, on it. These apps are all cross platform, so I figured I might as well run them on Linux or even OpenSolaris.

Lasting impression of Mac. Pound for pound, I think its a much better O/S to use than Linux, but the lock-in of apps such as iTunes and iPhoto mean that I can't commit to it.

OSX Update

2009-10-16T10:32:00.000-07:00

So, its been about 6 months that I have been using OSX as my principal O/S. I have finally decided to change. Not because of anything bad, mind you. Just, I realised that I can't run a Hackintosh forever. I have had a guilty feeling that I have been neglecting Linux for too long and so with Ubuntu 9.10 and OpenSUSE 11.2 around the corner, I decided to try Windows 7 before going back to Linux.

After much hassles getting all my Mac data backed up, I have installed Windows 7. Its been about 24 hours since I started this little experiment and it was rocky at first. 1 day later and everything looks rosy for the time being.

Its the final version and on my desktop pc its performing a lot better than on the Netbook.

Before I go on to post too much about Windows, I want to spend a post or 2 on OSX.

Windows 7 on a HP MiniNote 2133

2009-05-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

I have a HP Mininote 2133 with 2gb + 120gb disk. Its a decent netbook and came with Vista Business pre-installed.

I quickly installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid and was quite happy with it. Some friends of mine told me to try Windows 7 on it because it was more efficient than Vista on it and so I have it a try.

As the machine does not have a dvd drive, I copied the Windows 7 RC image onto a flash drive and installed it that way.

It was certainly better than Vista and impressed me with its ease of use and excellent hardware detection. Linux is still better at it, but for the hardware that Windows knows, it handles it very well. It even redirected me to the appropriate Hauppage support page to download the drivers and I got most of the system working perfectly much faster than I would with XP or Vista.

After a day or 2, the things that bug me still are the speed hit you take once you install the appropriate antivirus / security software and the fact that you get regular updates which require a reboot.

As this machine won't be used for gaming, I don't see a good reason to use Windows on it. I installed XBMC on it and it was quite flaky. It seemed it took a big performance hit running it.

In general the machine felt sluggish. I don't see it lasting a week on this netbook. I see myself going back to Linux very quickly. I will probably try Puppy Linux, Mepis and then Ubuntu Intrepid. Jaunty has issues with video drivers on it.

Last comment on Windows 7. On normal desktop hardware, at this point, I would choose it over Vista. I might even choose it over XP as you have to patch XP so much to get it into a usable state. However, this choice would only be made if I was in a work situation and I was not allowed to run Linux.

For now, my default choice for a work machine would be Linux, OSX and then Windows. For home, its a tossup between Linux and Mac. If video editing, photo management, etc is the prime consideration, I would probably choose mac first.

OSX - the Revenge of the Apple

2009-05-26T12:27:00.001-07:00

If you look at the 3 platforms that I've used, namely Windows, Mac and Linux, I have the least experience with Macs. With the advent of the Intel mac's and especially with the adoption of a Unix subsystem for OSX, Apple has really impressed me.

I am extremely frustrated by the closed nature of the systems and the way you get locked into their applications and hardware, but if you choose to run normal Open Source software on it, the Mac makes a decent platform. The hardware driver support for my printers, network hardware, tv cards, etc, has been awesome and the day to day reliability has been legendary.

On linux, I tend to have the odd hardware issue as I run close to the bleeding edge distros most of the time, so I've grown accustomed to the odd crashing application due to the unstable nature of the repo's I used, but on the mac, that's not an option. You are forced to use the software in a "stable" mode and guess what, its actually not that big a deal.

I am slowly finding alternative apps for the ones Apple defaults so on my taskbar, you'll find Thunderbird, Songbird, Firefox, Banshee, MuCommander, VLC and Skype.

Since this Mac came with iLife and iWork, they are still there and I will use them for the odd project. They're actually all fairly decent. They compare favourably with any app I've used on the Linux side and better than most. For the price, I think they're worth the money. I haven't bought software in years, but if I was faced with the choice, I could honestly say, I would be tempted.

OSX part deux

2009-05-26T12:21:00.000-07:00

I managed to get my own mac on an extended loan and I decided to give it a look from a techie perspective. I had recently gone through a 2 week trial of Vista and hated it and wanted to give the OSX thing a fair review before going back to Linux.

Well. Its been about 2 weeks and I'm *VERY* happy to use the mac. I have a similarly specced Ubuntu machine running Jaunty and the Mac seems to kick its ass on so many fronts its scary.

About the only thing that the Linux box has going for it is choice / variety of software, but for the rest, I'm enjoying using the mac a lot more. I spend most of my time on the mac and remote the windows or ubuntu boxes over ssh or rdp if I need to do something on them.

For the moment, the mac has become my principle machine. This is such an unexpected thing that I am slightly embarrassed. I was also so pro-Linux and anti-Windows & and anti-MAC that I didn't know how to handle this at first.

I had to be honest that my dislike of Vista came from actual experience and frustration, but my dislike of Mac was more due to my pre-conceived notions of Mac users and Apple as a company.

That said, on a purely technical level, I like what they've done.

OSX is actually not that bad after all.

2009-05-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

After another extended blogging absence, I am back again with a spurt of posts. By my reckoning, its my first post of 2009 and it certainly goes against the spirit of everything I've been using for the last 5 years.

It started about a year ago when I bought a Macbook for my wife. She just was not enjoying either Windows or Linux and after a short while, she seemed to really *get* the OSX thing. Couldn't explain it. She just enjoyed using the Mac a lot. I set up a dual boot with Windows because she was familiar with it, but at this point, I feel like wiping it off and reclaiming the disk space as she rarely uses it.

I've looked at the Mac on and off in the last year and its been okay, if a little frustrating to use. I find the mental approach to using it is very different to the one I've been used to in Linux.

However, things change...

XBMC - Xbox Media Center with Aeon Skin

2008-11-16T10:55:00.001-08:00

Not the best video I could find, but it gives you an idea.

XBMC

2008-11-16T10:42:00.000-08:00

So I mentioned the second pc I bought.

It currently runs a stripped down version of MythBuntu which is a version of Ubuntu tailored for Media Center use. It boots into a program called XBMC which is just the most awesome frontend to multimedia that I have ever seen and believe me, I've seen a few.

It runs on XBOX (original), Mac, Linux and even Windows!

The website is http://xbmc.org/

And there some awesome videos on youtube. Give it a look.

Will see if I can post a video in the blog.

Distro hopping

2008-11-16T10:28:00.000-08:00

So I've been made to feel guilty for running openSUSE 11. Its the distro of the devil. Patent deals with MS, and all kinds of hatred towards Mono thrown into the mix.

What can I say? Its an extremely well thought out and reliable distro. I have had awesome use out of version 11 which is the first version I honestly will say I prefer to Ubuntu. I have used Ubuntu primarily now for 3 years and have found the need to change.

I won't criticise too much, but I will say that my experiences with Mandriva 2008, OpenSUSE 11 and Mint 5 have all been *very* positive and certainly more productive than with Ubuntu.

Recent conversations about release cycles leave me leaning away from distros with a 6 month release cycle. I think we've reached the point where the amount of functionality going in is so great that the testing cycle is getting short changed. That is definitely an opinion that I subscribe to and I have taken a bit of flak for that. Some people seem to like the quicker refresh of these distros and who am I to blame them.

If I had to rate the distros on various criteria, I favour reliability above all and openSUSE 11 has been the model for me. I am not a die-hard Slackware / Arch user and probably never will be. My choice of distro is largely due to the fact that I need South African mirrors for the update servers for any distro I use, which sort of limits which ones I try.

Making amends

2008-11-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

Some notes.

Confession time. Despite my deepest efforts to get over it. I still miss Total Commander. I think its just the most awesome file manager on the planet. I have spent a lot of time getting Krusader to suit my needs, but I just keep hankering after that windows app.

What makes matters worse is that it works perfectly under wine. I'm thinking of buying the bloody thing. I just wish the author could port it to linux.

I have tried numerous linux clones, but they are just not suitable for me. I consider myself a power user of Total Commander so I have some very specific requirements. I have described it before, but suffice to say, using anything else is just not the same.

Guilty as charged

2008-11-16T10:20:00.001-08:00

In the past I have been guilty of not updating blogs of mine on a regular basis...

...it seems, in the present, this remains the case.

Sad to say I have not been disciplined enough to keep the blog updated. Its pathetic, I know, but I will make a conscientious effort to keep it updated from now on. Mark my words.

Let them come back and haunt me later...

2008-08-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

Life with openSUSE

After about 6 weeks of using openSUSE 11, I must say I am pleasantly surprised. I would have thought by now that I would have given up and gone back to Ubuntu, but so far, my laptop and work machine remains firmly in the SUSE camp. I do think part of it is that Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron appears to be a bit of a dog. Many people have had minor issues with it on their machines after installing / upgrading from previous versions of Ubuntu. I thought it was just me. I guess that they should not have used technologies like PulseAudio in a LTS release, but who am I to judge.

In some other news, I picked up another pc second hand which had XP media center edition installed. I installed mythbuntu on it as the machine had a Hauppage tv card installed, but apparently the card is not well supported under linux so it went back to being a Windows machine. It was weird installing Windows for the first time in a long while and the irritation of finding and installing patches and antivirus reminded me why I've left it behind. That said, the one and only Macbook in the family running MacOSX Leopard is developing a loyal and devoted fanbase with the rest of the family. I've given it a try and it seems solid, if a little limited compared to a linux desktop. Possibly I need to see how to add a repository for some OSS and see if that makes it more interesting. For now, I prefer my SUSE boxes, but I can see the attraction. It is fairly easy to use and the applications / gui's are neat, functional and more consistent than any linux distro I've used.

openSUSE update

2008-07-08T04:44:00.001-07:00

After 2 years of running Ubuntu, I am actually enjoying using my new openSUSE desktop. YAST is still slow and yes, I do miss installing via apt-get, but the new command line version of zypper is much improved. The system is rock solid stable and I have had no issues with any of my hardware on 2 different machines.

I am running XP in a VirtualBox session on my laptop and that's been absolutely a joy to use. I did have some challanges getiing the XP host to print to my network printer at work, but it seems to be fine now.

Freshly installed OpenSUSE 11

2008-06-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

I must say I was impressed with the OpenSUSE install. Smooth, slick and hassle free. Only issue is my display drivers are not included with the distro due to license restrictions from the vendor, so I have to download the driver from their repository to enable the full performance of the card.

Will document little things as they occur post install.

Confession Time

2008-06-20T13:19:00.000-07:00

This blog is poorly named.

I am about to install OpenSUSE 11 this evening. I expect I will have some teething issues having being an ubuntu user for a while, but I am starting to get a little frustrated by Ubuntu. Its hard to explain, but I think its time to give OpenSUSE another look. The main issues I didn't like about it have been addressed and I think that I am starting to get lazy and need to experiment and try something different.

I have a fairly comfortable Ubuntu Hardy setup with streaming to ps3 and all kinds of goodness working, so it will be a good experiment to see how long it takes to get back to the same level of comfort with a smoking hot new distro.

Remember kids:
When you're changing / reinstalling distro's, remember to use a separate partition for your home folder!

2008-06-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Quick update

More myth messing and experimenting.

Learning more and more about getting this environment working. Quite refreshing working on myth this time around. Had lots of teething hassles in the past but things are much smoother these days.

2008-06-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

MythTV Remote Frontend Cannot Connect!

That was pretty much the biggest problem encountered this week. It reminded me of the old days when I got started with Suse Linux and couldn't find my way around forums and help pages to solve problems.

My approach to these sorts of technical challenges has also gotten rusty over the years as things have worked very consistently for the most part.

I had set myself the mission of getting mythtv working with a windows, mac, ps3, psp and linux frontend accessing the same content. The Mac and psp don't have native myth clients so they used a combination of upnp and samba for accessing. All of the connections work fine over wireless although I reckon I can't have too many of them streaming at the same time.

At any rate, my biggest challenge was getting any kind of remote access working. Most of the help texts pointed out quite correctly that I had to enable access to the mythtv mysql user from all hosts on the local subnet, but few of them reminded me to ensure that the mysqld listener was binding on the local ip address and not on 127.0.0.1, which was the case.

Once this was sorted out, it became a matter of sharing the appropriate paths over either NFS or SAMBA and ensuring that the frontends had symbolic links to ensure that the remote shares appeared to be local to the frontends. Its been pretty cool to have this content shared all over the place on multiple devices.

Out of town blues

2008-06-01T01:23:00.000-07:00

I've been away from home for a week and had no access to my desktop pc, of course. I've been forced to use XP this week to integrate with work colleagues and this week's experienced has motivated me to get my work dualboot XP partition converted to a Virtual Machine asap. I guess this process will also give me some more content for the blog.

In the meantime, I've found an application called Double Commander which is a cross platform Total Commander - inspired file manager. Its still in its infancy, but the coolest part is that its written in Lazarus, which I am at least partly familiar with. I am going to investigate if I can actually contribute code to the app. It would really be cool to have participated in an OSS project. I am investigating it as we speak :)

I did the unthinkable

2008-05-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

Not only have I neglected this blog for a week, but I have done something terrible. Actually 2 things.

Firstly, my internet access has been *very* patchy this past week to the point that I didn't get much done and so I have very little updates to the site. Its not a big trainsmash as my usability testing continues. My initial enthusiasm for Krusader has dipped as I am missing some key functionality that I need to duplicate via the customisation features within the app. I'll document these as I sort them out one by one. BIGGEST problem is the lack of queuing for multiple copy / move operations. If I don't get satisfaction, I see myself buying total commander and running it under wine.

Second thing is I installed Virtualbox and installed Windows XP into it. I have been meaning to live without XP, but I need it for iTunes.

Now, the 2 things above are not the bad things I refer to. Over the weekend, I bought an iPod Touch and a Macbook. The iPod does not work on Linux very well (or at all) and the MacBook is as proprietary as they come. That said, both devices impressed me tremendously win terms of their interface and usability. The main differences between the Mac OSX and Linux for me initially is as follows.

Linux == More Functionality
OSX == More Polish

Depending on your personality, I guess that's what impresses / frustrates you about each. The laptop is actually going to be used by my daughter for school things and I couldn't bring myself to buy her a Vista laptop. It's the lesser of 2 evils.

I *am* intending to put either Ubuntu or XP on as a secondary O/S, although currently I am leaning towards XP as I have an old Encarta cd I want to install. I don't expect it will work in wine.

The iPod is pretty neat too. iTunes refuses to see it under Virtualbox so I am still working on that aspect.

More updates to follow as I investigate further.

MVIX 760HD Linux

2008-05-11T23:59:00.001-07:00

Good news.

Read/Write Access over FTP works! Very pleased to report that the firmware did the trick. What I have lost though is the ability to mount the drive as a folder and work with it as if its a local drive. Perhaps I can use some kind of FUSE solution to do this. In the past, what I would do is move files into a folder on the remote drive and then sort them into the correct folders later. Using ftp, there is no obvious way of moving files around on a target system other than to upload them to the correct folders from the start. I don't mind doing this, but some kind of mount option is preferable.

I can of course, install the proprietary NAS driver and use that to mount the drive locally, but that's not ideal.

Overall though, I consider this one pretty much done and dusted. I will follow up with move info if I decide to pursue the locally mounted option.

I found the firmware on the www.mvixcommunity.com website and the "Olav's" firmware is available on the forums. A big thank you to the guys there for providing all the needed info.

2008-05-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

HD Media Player and Linux

My next challenge was to get direct read/write connectivity to my MVIX 760 multimedia box over ethernet.

The windows solution requires setting up a proprietary secure connection between windows and the device. Its a clunky setup which involves the setup of unsecured shares on the windows machine to make this work. I never liked the solution as it included a client side install on the pc to make it work. Each pc that needed access needed this software.

Instead of duplicating this solution, I have chosen to improve on it. What I did was install a custom firmware on the device which allows ftp/ http and telnet access. This firmware also allows for the read/write of drives connected to the device via the 2 builtin usb ports which were previously inaccessible over a remote connection

The only other concern is that the firmware does not allow write access to NTFS drives so I had to reformat the drive as ext3. Considering that the 300 gb drive was full, Saturday was spent backing up this data and reformatting the drive. Sunday morning was spent copying the data back.

In order to make the blog a little bit more active, I am splitting this post over 2 posts. I am about to test the above functionality.

I hope it works!

2008-05-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

Krusader Update

I am really enjoying working with Krusader. Its a feature filled app and I have been able to do most of my filemanagement tasks with it. I think this one's definately the closest to what I need.

I do have one huge pain. I am finding that I miss the functionality of the queue-copy function in Total Commander. I have only used it for the short while before I formatted XP and it revolutionised the way I batch copied files between machines at home.

I'm going to have to find an alternative somehow, but so far no solution to this problem comes to mind.

2008-05-07T11:33:00.000-07:00

Oops UP - Remix

Some musings...

Although I am comparing certain Linux apps to more famous proprietary alternatives, I am not making a very important point. While I am focussing on very niche functions which few other people consider important, I have to do this as its to replace a workflow / operation that I am used to performing in windows. Old habits die hard so I want very focussed things to still work. I bitch and moan when it doesn't and tend to harp on that a lot. What I have failed to do so far is highlight the following.

In most cases, the Linux App FAR exceeds the alternative in terms of other functionality. Example. Most linux file managers support browsing of shares via SMB or using FTP, like the alternative but also include fish, scp, ssh, etc. Considering that these technologies are more unix/linux specific doesn't matter as we live in a multiplatform world. Don't get me started on Amarok or Banshee vs iTunes. The best music management app I've seen on Windows anyway by a long shot would have to be MediaMonkey anyway.

Another thing. I don't hate Windows or OSX. In fact I am at the point of buying a laptop for my daughter and am seriously contemplating getting a Windows machine PURELY so that I can get Encarta and the Sims 2 working on it. My wife has a windows laptop that she uses to do her email and manage her cellphone and ipod. I'd love to get her to convert, but unless I can find her seamless replacements that enable her to do the above, I won't bother.

Regarding iTunes, for managing iPods, its hard to beat. If you buy music on the online store (not me), its your only option and frankly, there are far worse players out there. iTunes is free and does what it does relatively efficiently.

Whenever I want to bash Windows I always think of a project I ran in 2003. We deployed a clustered Windows 2k3 solution for about 2000 users. This system is still in production 5 years later and has had close to zero downtime. I still inquire about the system and last I heard the servers were out of warranty and out of support and were being replaced.

SO while this blog is pro linux, I am trying to be balanced about it and realistic. What I will say about proprietary software is that I am tired of being forced to pay for the same software on each machine I have and then having stupid restrictions on what I can do with my media on my home network.

Hope that clarifies things a bit.

2008-05-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

Oops upside my head

I totally ignored Midnight Commander in my previous post.

MC will always be on any machine I have. It may not be perfect, but I have come to depend on it and have one copy permanently open. In recent times, with the advent of compiz, I have been annoyed that compiz is stealing some of the MC hotkeys (F9, F10, etc). I could fix it, but I haven't yet. In a way, Krusader & Gnome-Commander are also competing to replace MC as my default file-manager.

Speaking of MC, I was surprised to see that it was started by Miguel de Icaza. Miguel is often credited for his work starting more important projects like Gnome (!) or Mono, but in terms of what I use the most, MC ranks up there as just as important :)

2008-05-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

Today's challenge. Total Commander linux replacement

First things first. I think that this is just an awesome program. I first used it many years ago when it was still called Windows Commander. I remember buying 5 licenses at the company I worked for and after leaving them I have been lost without it. I have tried all the various free alternatives and nothing else comes close.

It hasn't been an major issue as I have been primarily a linux user for the last 3 years, but I still miss it. I recently took a look at the latest version and its even better than I remembered.

For those of you who have never seen Norton Commander style fiilemanagers, they work on a 2 pane system where one pane is the source and one is the target. You perform operations on files using this manner instead of the Explorer / Nautilus convention of a tree view + icon / list view.

Some of the features that blew me away include:

the addition of tabs to the panes

background copy

multi rename tool

queuing copy operations

sensible keyboard shortcuts / easy to use without a mouse

There's tons of other functionality under the hood that one takes for granted in a file manager which I won't bother mentioning, but the above are the things that standout.

On the linux side. we have a number of choices including

bsc

gnome-commander

krusader

konqueror (configure 2 pane view)

As usual they all have similar functionality in terms of overall "commander" filemanagers and many share the same function key shortcuts. In terms of feature completeness, the best one appears to Krusader. Again, its a KDE app on my gnome-desktop so time will tell if I will stick with it. Having used TotalCommander recently for the first time in a long while, I would like to see as good a linux client. From my research it seems that TotalCommander works quite well under Linux using Wine.

Regarding the feature list above, the only one that I can't seem to find an equivalent for is "queued copy"

A simple example of where this is useful is if you are doing file operations on a usb drive. Lets say the drive has a file transfer speed of 10000 kb / sec. When you do the first file copy, it will copy at close to the max speed. When you do a second copy at the same time, the 2 copies will probably each slow down to the point that the joint speed of the 2 file copies are slower than the max speed. doing 3 copy operations or a delete operation complicates this further. This is magnified even more with dvd / cd file copy operations. The obvious sign of this is disk thrashing. With file queuing, it allows you to sequentially do these operations ensuring that they happen at max speed. I don' t know how windows users can use explorer to do file copies for precisely this reason. Of course, nobody should use explorer for file operations anyway as its broken by design.

In terms of the task of replacing total commander, I guess I can't conclude it in one evening. I have to live with gnome-commander, bsc and krusader for all my file operations and pick a winner when I've thoroughly gotten used to them and tweaked them thoroughly. Currently on first inspection, Krusader is in a comfortable lead position. Interesting question looms now is should I be using KDE vs Gnome? That's another debate for another day.

2008-05-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

Podcast / mediaplayer update

As predicted, Banshee has already got the ipod support in the new codebase and apparently podcast support is imminent.

http://banshee-project.org/

2008-05-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

To do list

As a kind of reminder list for myself and possibly to see if others are interested, I thought I'd compile a list of topics that I have been playing with covering.

1) Bluetooth Support

2) Connection to my MVIX 760 Media Player - from windows uses encrypted NDAS connection. Want to have seamless read/write support from Linux over ethernet.

3) Replacement for Total Commander - the ULTIMATE filemanager.

4) Replacement for AltBinz - nntp reader for nzb files

More to follow as I think of them. I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I don't believe there is anything that comes close to Total Commander under windows. The only one that I am expecting to come close of the various Norton Commander clones is Krusader. I am hoping that the functionality I Krave is Kustomisable pr Konfigurable in Krusader.

2008-05-07T09:41:00.000-07:00

CD Label printing addendum

I never credited the post that ultimately got me going.

http://www.crn.com/white-box/188100839?pgno=4

I did some printer model specific searches which is not really of general use to everyone, but the above post was most useful.

I am currently using OpenOffice Draw to do the labels, although Kover, KoverArtist and Glabels are also available.

2008-05-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

Printing DVD Labels Linux Success

I'm claiming success on this one even though its not as seamless as on windows. The main problem I am having is that I just can't get the full disk to print perfectly without any white borders.

I can spend a while adjusting image offsets in pixel increments until I get it perfect, but I don't have the blank disks to waste on this exercise.

In windows, to save ink, I tended to use a white background with black / coloured text boxes describing the disk contents. This also meant that you never had the problem with dark backgrounds not printing to the edge of a cd and leaving the white unprinted edges on the disk visible.

I have made a template in OpenOffice Draw which gives me the same functionality and I have just started using it to print on dvd's and its working beautifully.

I have a Canon pixma ip5200 and the Linux printer driver support in Ubuntu has worked quite well since Gutsy. It printed okay in OpenSUSE 10.3, but the direct cd printing didn't work as I couldn't select the cd tray as an output tray for the printer.

Again, let me reiterate that I don't have total perfect printing for full page labels as I had in Windows, but I think its more a case of me blaming the software rather than admitting I ran out of talent (and patience) while attempting a tedious / repetitive task.

As a general comment, the real reason this works in windows is that Microsoft doesn't bother to get involved with solving the problem. Canon has to write the driver, supply the software and certify that it works. In Linux, they have not elected to do the same and so you can't blame Linux or cups. It would be nice to see more commitment from the hardware vendors in a case like this. When you consider that the drivers exist and the application software stack is suitable, why can't companies like Canon just provide templates for applications like the Gimp, GLabel, Kover or even OpenOffice.

2008-05-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

Linux printing directly on printable cd / dvd

Okay, for my next challenge, I am trying to replace the windows software I used to make cd labels with a linux equivalent. I've tried before with mixed levels of success and failure and always went back to using Windows to do this.

Since my windows partition is history and doing this in a virtual machine will be admitting failure, I am going to give this a serious try.

My initial stabs are showing me a number of potential problems.

1) Selecting the correct settings for the cd tray.

2) Creating a template that can be reused for different types of cover.

3) Finding the appropriate application to do the printing.

It feels like I've got a frustrating session ahead of me.

Streaming Ubuntu to PSP

2008-05-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's actually working via the PS3 as an intermediary, but it works seamlessly without any changes to the config below. All I did was sync my PSP to my PS3 using wireless remoteplay and was then able to play the content on my psp without touching the pc config. Works like a charm.

So currently I can wireless access my media (video/audio) stored on my network via Ubuntu & my PS3. It's pretty sweet.

What's next? Sleep!!!

2008-05-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

Streaming to PS3

Okay, I confess. Was going to do this tomorrow, but was so energised I decided to give it a go. Got it up and running using Mediatomb. Able to stream videos from folder on Linux machine to ps3 via upnp. Works like a charm. Had a challenge getting the correct configs for ps3 as opposed to the default, but its well documented on the web. Main issue was setting mimetypes in the default mediatomb config.xml file to handle avi's, etc.

I got the solution from this thread on ubuntuforums http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=648582

The post from the user IMOC did the trick for me.

Only thing missing is .mkv support, but I'll save that for tomorrow. Probably not too difficult, just need to add the filetype for mkv.

Of course, mediatomb can stream to a host of other devices as well, so give the project a look. They're doing an excellent job.

What's next on the todo list?

Probably streaming the same content from pc- > ps3 -> psp

2008-05-05T13:14:00.000-07:00

Amarok and Video playback

Due to the extensive library of scripts available for Amarok, I was able to get video playback of the podcasts inside the amarok window. The script is called Autoplay Videos and can be installed through Amarok's built in scripting gallery and browser tool. No need for fancy command line tom-foolery. Still haven't figured out a way to play my .sid files, but I reckon I can modify the video playback one to make it work if I really want to! Its not necessary though as a player like xsidplay does a better job of managing .sid files which are not like normal music files anyway.

I pretty much consider this whole experiment a success and will be moving onto my next challenge which is streaming / transcoding video to my ps3 from a media daemon under linux. I am expecting to try my luck with mediatomb, fuppes & mythtv, in that order.

2008-05-05T12:33:00.000-07:00

Amarok Video Podcasts

Amarok keeps impressing the hell out of me.

I had a few video podcasts already sync'ed from iTunes to the iPod. I right-clicked one of them and Amarok subscribed to the same feed.

I was able to download video podcasts into amarok and sync them in the same way as audio. I could not play the video directly although the audio of the video podcast played perfectly. By right-clicking on the video podcast, I could redirect playback into smplayer which worked a treat. I could not make this behaviour be the default for some reason. Will work on that.

I am really nitpicking now as Amarok has exceeded my expectations and then some. Amarok has always been an awesome mp3 manager for large collections and for at least a year now, maybe longer, the stability has been phenomenal. Based on an interview I heard with the developers on the Linux Link Tech Show, the don't plan on making video a priority, but I hope this changes. I know the app can do it easily enough and possibly this is something that will come with the final kde4 release. From what I have seen, the Kde3.59 version is probably the most feature complete media app for my needs and I hope to use it for all my obscure needs.

I wonder if there is a plugin to play Commodore 64 .sid files? I guess that is just me being unreasonable!

To finish this post off, I disconnected the iPod and was able to watch the video podcast on the ipod exactly as if it had been sync'ed with iTunes. One more nail in that coffin, it would seem. As I've mentioned before, I am only reviewing the precise features I need. This is a tiny fraction of what Amarok is capable of doing. Don't get me started on the coverart handling, wikipedia, lyrics, scripting, magnatune and much more functionality it offers.

2008-05-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

Catching up with the post installation status

It would be remiss of me not to mention some of the apps I have installed after the base installation happened

apt-get install

liferea - rss reader (feed reader)

banshee - media player (mainly for audio)

smplayer - media player (mainly for video)

for the purposes of my itunes experimentation also downloaded

gtkpod - ipod manager

amarok - audio player

exaile - audio player

miro - video player

songbird - audio player

mediatomb - upnp server / streamer / transcoder (for my ps3 / psp / xbox)

lazarus - free pascal IDE and gui development tool

mc - console file manager

gnome-commander - gui file manager

Also downloaded compiz-fusion-icon for controlling compiz.

I apologise for the rudimentary descriptions for the above programs. I am just listing them for the sake of documenting the process I've followed post install to record the sequence of events. The apps all do far more than the simple description says and I don't mean to belittle them in any way. Right click and google any one of them app names for more info.

2008-05-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

iTunes podcast alternative for linux ?

So far, my first impressions are what I expected with a silver lining at the end.

Without exception, all of the applications reviewed are extremely capable and will serve you well for media playing needs. The evolution of these apps from just a year ago to their current status is nothing short of amazing. New features seem to be sprouting out of the woodwork at a phenomenal rate and I have no doubt that very soon, we will be spoilt for choice for this type of functionality.

Considering the relative youth of the project, I am astounded by the progress made by Banshee in particular. The leap from the 0.1x codebase to the current 0.9x codebase has been remarkable and welcome. I still miss the podcast/ ipod functionality which is critical for me at this point, but I can see that they have literally resculpted it to the new codebase and I reckon its a matter of days before the missing functionality is seemless grafted back in. I reckon that its the project which I am currently expecting to be my long term choice. Its lack of a navigation hierarchy in the 0.1x codebase has been totally sorted out in the current version. The rest is probably in the .svn version already, I am sure.

Next app which is close to being my one stop solution would be Songbird. I've got a thing for modular apps with tons of plugins ala Firefox and of course, Songbird comes from a Mozilla XUL background meaning that this design philosophy comes standard. Again, not all the functionality I require is built in, but it seems like a powerhouse app with a ton of functionality that will be totally sufficient for most users.

The 2 previous apps are gtk & xul based and as a gnome user, the quality of this next app is what makes me use it even though its QT based. Amarok has always been a total overkill app for me which did more than I needed and just seemed like a hog for me when all I wanted was a simple winamp replacement like xmms. At any rate, Amarok has grown and matured and my needs have evolved. To illustrate the power of this remarkable app, I configured my ipod in the device manager and amarok detected it and as well as the music and podcasts stored on it. By clicking on the podcasts, I was able to subscribe to them on my local pc as well. All of the above without typing in any url's. That's pretty cool. As i type this, some podcasts are downloading to my local amarok podcast library.

Okay, the podcasts have downloaded and been sync'ed to the iPod. I'm suitable impressed.

2008-05-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

Mission #1 - Replace iTunes

I have previously used iTunes to manage my podcasts. Don't do much downloading of songs as the iTunes store does not work in South Africa. iTunes main use for me is as a podcast/video podcast download mechanism and sync tool for my iPod. As such it does that one job fairly well.

My requirements for a linux tool are as follows.

1) Ability to maintain a list of podcast subscriptions and update them

2) Ability to painlessly sync the above to my iPod

3) If it can play music and tag it, as well, that's a bonus.

4) Import / Export .opml files for managing the podcasts feeds

The apps I intend checking out are in no particular order. Amarok, Banshee (old & new), Rhythmbox, Miro, Songbird, Exaile and gtkPod.

All of them are competent with their own individual strengths so I don't mean to praise one of them over another specifically. My choice will purely be as a reflection of my need to manage my podcasts, not my music.

I should consider looking at rss feed managers, but from what I've seen they don't specifically handle the ipods the way the media managers do. I'd of course, love to be proven wrong.

So that was fun

2008-05-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

So now I have to live with this decision.

I am definately going to have to get over not having the safety net of my favourite programs to catch me. Its make or break time now. Show some commitment to the cause, etc.

I am looking forward to each challenge as they occur and will post the results of my research as I tackle each one. Must just be sure to remember to credit all the forums and help posts I read.

2008-05-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

Coupla hours later

So I've started importing my mp3's and photos onto the ubuntu side from my windows backups.

Some notes, I have a fairly large mp3 library and have never ever cleaned up the tags / names. Programs like Banshee like structure to the data inside them and therefore I can see myself battling to bring order to the chaos in my collection.

On the photos front. Re-tagging photos in f-spot that were fairly well categorised in Picasa will be a pain. I'll see how long my impatience lasts as I do this boring chore.

On the whole things work as expected. Being a ubuntu user of about 2 years does help significantly.

Bottom line so far.

Despite the many improvements that have been made, I can still see some first time users having a bad experience with this distro. I have had easier out of box experiences with both Mandriva and OpenSUSE and despite what Ubuntu die-hards tell you, there are small stumbling points. Some good news is that some issues are ridiculously easy to fix compared with windows, but also have their quirks.

Example:

I switched on my usb printer and received a message telling me that the printer was identified and prompted me to install the driver. It correctly identified the model and offered me a choice of 2 drivers to install. I picked one and clicked ok. I was then prompted for my password. When I typed it in, nothing happened. I then realised that I was using an account that I had created after the installation had completed. It meant that the new user was not added to the printer admin group. I made the changed to the group membership and then my password was accepted. I know its quirky, but this would not happen with a normal install. Also, bear in mind that I didn't get prompted for disks or serial numbers or anything. So far its just been the single cd + automatic downloads off the internet. That includes installing Banshee & the mp3 codecs.

2008-05-04T06:48:00.000-07:00

Post install notes

After enabling the Nvidia driver and restarting, everything seemed hunky dory. There is some residual / old / obsolete gumf in my home directory which prevented 3d effects working, so I created a new user and tried again. It all worked smoothly after that. I guess it comes from switching distro's from suse to ubuntu and going through multiple beta's of hardy heron. Anyway, alls well now.

I installed a gnome blogging panel applet which makes blogging this entry a cinch. It automatically picked up my blog details from blogspot and making this post easy as pie. I will have no excuses for not blogging frequently in the future.

Installation Complete

2008-05-04T06:07:00.000-07:00

So the installation completed and I rebooted.

Grub error 17.

Not very friendly. No obvious way to fix this. I know why it happened. Ubuntu is installed on the second drive and the first drive is the NTFS windows drive. Still, I believe I should have either received a warning from the Ubuntu installer or have a safe option in the boot menu to repair things. Not a good start.

I booted off a knoppix livecd and reinstalled the grub menu. This did nothing and I had the same problem again. I then swapped the cables on my 2 sata drives to changed the drive order around so that my drive 0 was the ubuntu one and drive 1 was NTFS. This fixed the problem and I was able to boot in without incident. As I had kept my old home directory from my dual boot setup, I was up and running without incident. All my firefox settings (bookmarks, etc) were in place and my documents and files were all happy and in their familiar places. All in all, this was the highlight of the installation process. I must say, reinstall linux and having your settings intact is something I can't live without and Windows needs to copy this functionality pronto.

Last comment. Ubuntu correctly installed my display driver and set the resolution up to 1920x1200 as I expected, but it used the open source nvidia driver by default. I opened the hardware utility and it told me there was a proprietary driver available if I wanted more 3d capabilities, but that there was no source code available for the driver. I cheerfully ignored the implied rebuke for using the proprietary driver and clicked on the checkbutton to autoinstall it.

After this install, I was prompted to reboot.

Installation notes #2

2008-05-04T04:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, we're doing a lot better now.

I am creating this blog post while the installation is proceeding in the background. Its pretty sweet. It looks like my screen resolution has been correctly setup at 1920x1200 and the installation appears to be proceeding without a hitch.

This time, I unplugged the ipod and booted into the livecd environment. I then fired up the installer and went through the same procedure and started the installation. After telling the partitioner what to do, everything started to proceed as per normal. The pause at 15% was quick and then it continued smoothly. Its at 76% as I type this and I will blog again once its over. Holding thumbs as we speak for a smooth bootup.

Installation notes #1

2008-05-04T04:36:00.000-07:00

Okay.

First stab at installing failed miserably.

Backed up windows data, rebooted pc with Ubuntu 8.04 cd in drive and attempted installation.

Did not use the livecd option, decided to do normal install. Did the preliminary setup, deleted my main windows partition and allocated it to ubuntu's "/" partition and created a swap partition. I kept my previous dualboot "/home" partition to be reused and I left my NTFS data partition active. I want to migrate data from the ntfs to the ubuntu system afterwards and then I will reformat it. So at this point I have an NTFS partition and 3 linux partitions. Pretty standard stuff. Only complication is that my ipod is still plugged in via USB. The installer detects it as FAT32, no problem, and I exclude it from the install in the partition tool.

I proceed and the installer freezes *AFTER* deleting my windows partition but before recreating the new filesystems. The progress bar never gets past 15% (detecting filesystems) and I leave it be for about 20 minutes before pulling the plug.

The conversion begins

2008-05-04T03:31:00.000-07:00

I've just about had enough of windows and the associated baggage. As an experienced user, I don't have the problems most beginners have with spyware, viruses, etc. I'm able to maintain a working windows setup for 2 years between reinstalls so I can pretty much live with it. What's been getting me down the last few weeks has been the issues that I am starting to like about Linux.

1) No need for keygens / cracks. All my linux software is pretty much free / open source.
2) No need for restrictions on use / license agreements which affect my privacy.
3) No need to remove / reinstall applications between upgrades
4) Uninstall leaves stuff behind
5) Having to pay for software I already own because of upgrades that I am forced to do.
6) CONSTANTLY installing free applications then finding the functionality I need is in the "PRO" version of the app.

I will miss some of the gaming, but I guess I'll use a console for that.

Today, May 4, I am deleting my XP partition and replacing my dualboot with a dedicated Linux partition. If needed, I will install Xp in a virtual machine.

I will document my frustrations / successes as they occur.

Bioshock

2007-09-18T08:57:00.000-07:00

OMG!

This game is insane. I've been playing through the opening level and am being blown away. This is not your normal shooter. Its all about atmosphere and creepy sound and video. Not for the faint hearted.

Check the reviews.

http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/xbox360/bioshock

More demos downloaded

2007-09-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

Downloaded some more demo's

Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix, NBA 08, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2.

You would think my dsl would cap, but its still active for some reason.

While they were downloading, I continued playing Gears of War on the 360. Man, what an awesome game.

Funny thing is that coming up over the next month, we have a ton of good 360 games coming up. Bioshock, Project Gotham Racing 4, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4 are all coming out in the next 30 days. On the PS3 side its not as rosy with the good games coming nearer to November / December.

If I was to advise somebody on a console buy right now, my vote would be for the 360. Will let you know when that opinion changes.

Dowloaded FIFA08 Demo

2007-09-15T14:37:00.001-07:00

Neat demo. Might even be interested in buying a FIFA game after the last few years of playing Pro Evo instead.

360 Brilliant & Crappy

2007-09-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

Something really well executed by Microsoft is the XBOX Live Service. It's really a well designed portal to a ton of content for the 360.

Playable game demo's, Videos, Songs, Movie Trailers, Downloadable games, etc, it totally dwarfs Sony's offering. Of course, this is due to the headstart that Microsoft enjoys in the next-gen console market, but even so, it really is a huge positive. You can download and play most games on the shelves in stores today and evaluate them before buying the retail game. Considering that the game are averaging R500 a pop, its useful. Of course downloading 500 meg or 1 gig demo's in SA is just a not feasible with our capped & slow internet, so I took my xbox to a friends office where they have an uncapped Internet line which is unused over weekends. I hooked up the Xbox, got an Ip address and was stunned to find out that it did not support proxy servers. For this stupid lack of functionality to exist almost 2 years after the console launch is unforgivable. I can't believe that you can't do this. It made the whole exercise of carting my xbox around a waste of time and effort.

On the other hand, I am happy to report that the PS3 will HAPPILY work with a proxy server and even supports authentication over proxy. When you consider that the PS3 also ships with wireless support with several authentication and security protocols built-in, you realise that its not a bad system when it comes to networking.

The 360 Strikes Back

2007-09-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

Lately, my poor 360 has been neglected quite a bit and, I decided to give it some attention in the week. Of course the 3 games I played were Gears of War, Guitar Hero 2 and Colin McRae Dirt. All three of them are just plain awesome and tons of fun. Picking up the XBOX controller reminded me of the differences just in the feel / functionality of the 2 controllers.

Big differences are that that the 360 controller is much heavier. In practise, I actually like the PS3's lightness, but that lightness comes at a price. There is no rumble support, so when you fire a gun or crash a car, there is no shake or vibration. Of course rumble is a subtle effect, but when you go between systems it is noticeable. The 360 one is definately more bulky, I suppose to house the extra functionality & motors, but the extra weight is not a problem. Its going to sound wierd, but its like the difference between a small gun and a big gun. Sometimes, size does matter!

The PS3 has the tilt-sensitive control, but I reckon its more of a gimmick than useful. Time will tell. A couple of games seem to benefit from it, but the majority don't. My feeling is that I'd rather have rumble instead.

RemotePlay

2007-09-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

This is a neat feature on the PS3 which has no equivalant on the 360. Basically, you use the wireless capabilities of both devices to stream movies / pictures / sounds / games from the PS3 to the PSP. The PSP in effect becomes a remote screen of the PS3 and the PS3 will send screen output over wireless to the PSP.

Tonight I tested an mp4 video I downloaded from the Playstation Store streamed to the PSP. It played instantly with no buffering, etc. Considering that the video is Hidef, the scaling to the psp low resolution small screen was pretty good.

To take it to the next level (as one does), I fired up Nero MediaHome on my PC ensured that the PS3 detected the UPNP media streaming server on the network. I then started RemotePlay and the PSP was able to browse video's on my PC's hard disk and watch them. For those of you who don't get the significance I had the following setup:

PS3 connected to PC over Wired Ethernet
PSP connected to PS3 via Wireless
PS3 accessing UPNP MediaHome server on PC
PS3 accessing Video/Audio/Photos served via UPNP
PSP accessing PS3 accessing PC

Yes, there was an initial buffer period of about 5-10 seconds before the videos started playing, but I am not complaining. Its still pretty cool.

With the firmware on my PSP, I can also access the PS3 via the internet so I could, in effect:

Goto any Mugg and Bean, Airport or Wireless Hotspot, connect to my PS3 (if its on) via ADSL and browse the contents stored there or on my PC's hard disk. I am sure its not a feature I will use very often, but its nice to know that all this wireless connectivity works. Of course the possibilities for voice communication using the PSP as a smartphone are intriguing.