Peter's Blog

Since I got my Dell 2405FPW 24 inch Widescreen Monitor I have overall been happy with it apart from it's annoying tendency to show certain pixels pink. It looked as if certain colours were transposed to pink so a mountain for example may have pink stripes where it happened to be a certain shade and colour. On the whole it was distracting and sometimes it would degrade to the extent where the image looked like something the Predator would see.

My solution to the problem was to give the monitor a thump at a certain point on the back panel towards the left. This solution was reasonable and normally i would need to do it at least once per session although sometimes I would have a few pink-free days.

As time passed the problem got worse, thumping would reduce the amount of pink but not completely eliminate it. Sometimes I would thump the monitor and the screen would turn white or freeze which was most annoying when trying to play WoW.

By yesterday the problem was so bad that I was having to bang my desk with my knee as I played to avoid the freezing problem.

Time to have the back off.

The back of the monitor came off using the time honoured prising with a flat-blade screwdriver technique: there were four screws under the mounting point for the stand but the case was snapped on around the edge. Interestingly the circuit boards were all marked 'Benq'.

The fact that thumping would relieve the symptoms made me suspect a loose connector so I checked all I could see. No problems apparent so I plugged it into the computer with the back off to try banging it in various places to locate the problem. Unfortunately the screen was now dead. This was disturbing but I decided the only course was to further dismantle it and look for more connectors. I managed to get the LCD panel out quite easily. It was surprisingly light, most of the weight of the monitor was in the metal chassis. This panel had a circuit board on it with two flat ribbon cables, the kind where a flat flexible circuit plugs into a connector. The one to the right came out of the connector too easily, as if it had been loose. The cable itself was stuck down with transparent tape and it looked as if whoever assembled it had left no slack at all.

I put it all together and was relieved when it showed it's normal start up screen with no pink pixels.

I'm happy, the picture is now perfect.

Moral: be brave, get the screwdrivers out, rip it apart, what can go wrong? Oh, and warrantys are for wimps.

I had some work done on the TV aerial in my house, moving it from inside the loft to outside. I didn't do it myself due to extreme vertigo. The digital TV signal is now much stronger, no more artifacts and stuttering on BBC channels. This was a good excuse to dig out my old Slingbox which has been sitting on a shelf since I moved last september.

I have set it up with it's internal DVB TV tuner which allows me to watch something vaguely interesting on the pc while my daughter watches 'In the Midnight Garden' on the main TV in the computer room. This TV is connected to my Humax PVR which is very good for recording kids tv to repeat ad-infinitum. She's been watching the same episodes of Balamory since christmas, they sing christmas songs between the episodes.

The picture is very good on the whole. If I maximise it on my 24" widescreen monitor it is pretty pixellated and nasty but I watch it in a little box, maybe 4", in the corner of the screen and there is still plenty of space to work. Alternatively I can watch TV wirelessly at the bottom of the garden on the laptop. I did a proof of principal at the weekend but not for long as watching TV in the bright sunshine in the garden just seems wrong.

During my slinging haitus Slingmedia seem to have started selling the Pocket PC version of the player software in the UK. It's £20. I dug out my old Dell Axim v51 as it is in the compatibility list, I charged it up and all the programs are still there, stored in flash but it had lost the current time. I haven't installed the sling player software on it, I'll see how riveting TV has become during my nine months of televisual apathy.

Another option to investigate is the BBC's new streaming video service, only available to UK licence payers (ya boo). This has the advantage of being PVR like, being able to choose when to watch something. This is the main limitation of the slingbox, it cannot record or timeshift unless you connect it to a PVR. Channel 4 have a similar service and more interesting programs (none of those endless talent shows with judges, one of them a baddy), must investigate that too.

Now I have a strong TV signal and a powerful pc I may investigate the options for recording, timeshifting and streaming on the PC. Hopefully the technology has moved on from the awful state it was in last time I tried a few years back now.

UPDATE: fate succombed to the temptation and the signal was too weak when I got home to watch anything but BBC. OK next morning. Slingbox's aerial feed is chained after the Humax PVR which was working fine. An inline booster may fix the problem but that's more power consumption and cables.

No, not WoW, something techy for a change, how to migrate a Dell Precision 390 to Raid.

My Dell Precision 390 came with a SAS Raid controller and a pair of 143G disks. However it had been configured with one disk as a plain drive C and the other unconfigured. I had the following options:

• format the spare drive and use it as drive G: or mount it as a folder under the C drive. I didn't want to do this as it involves having to manage two drives which I don't want to worry about which disk a file will be stored on.
• reconfigure the system for Raid 0. Raid 0 would give me in effect a fast single 270G drive but it would have half the reliability of the single drive: if either drive dies I lose all my data.
• reconfigure the system for Raid 1. Raid 1 would store everything on both drives, giving me two copies of everything. If one drive dies, the data is already on the other drive. They call this mirroring, it is not exactly like a real-time backup as if you accidently delete a file, both copies on both disks are instantly deleted. Raid 1 only saves you from drive failures, not OS level errors.

I decided on (drum roll) Raid 0. Raid 0 and Raid 1 will give some speed improvements (maybe 10-20%) but I wanted the advantages of 270G of linear disk space. This is my home PC and apart from family photos there is not much 'critical' data on it: I won't lose my job if it went pear shaped.

How to reconfigure it? The OS is on one of the disks that will go into the Raid array which makes things interesting. Here are the steps:

• Download the trial version of True Image 10
• Use it to create a recovery CD
• Make sure you can boot from the recovery CD. Since my system was SAS (serial SCSI) I used the 'full' recovery program, not the simple DOS one.
• Reboot to windows
• Use True Image to backup the windows partition to a USB hard disk. This took about an hour, 46G of data used 35.6G of disk space.
• Reboot PC into Dell SAS bios and set up your disks in a Raid array (0 or 1). When it warns about you losing all your data laugh in it's face.
• Reboot from Windows XP installation disk. Go through the part of the setup that creates an NTFS partition. After this, when windows starts copying files, kill the setup. This step is necessary because the trial edition of True Image cannot create NTFS partitions.
• Reboot from the True Image recovery CD.
• Use the Restore option to restore the backup of the partition to your new NTFS partition. This took less than two hours.
• Reboot into Windows Installation CD. This time go into the recovery console.
• Run the following commands:

  fixmbr
  fixboot
  bootscan /rebuild
  

  Bootscan will prompt you for a name for the partition and boot parameters. Give it a name that shows suitable contempt for Windows and leave the options blank. My Dell came with two partitions, one containing Dell Diagnostics and one containing Windows. When I restored I had zapped the Dell Diagnostics partition as all that stuff is on a CD anyway. However it meant that my restored Windows system didn't boot because the boot.ini file was telling the boot loader that it was on the second partition rather than the first. Hence I needed the bootscan /rebuild to get the restored partition added to the boot.ini. True Image will restore the MBR itself, I just did all this to make sure (it takes ages to boot the recovery console so I did everything I could there to get things working).
• Reboot into Windows. You may be prompted which partition to boot from, choose the one you added with bootscan.
• Clean up boot.ini. The following should be ok:

  [boot loader]
  timeout=30
  default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
  [operating systems]
  multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
  

For some idea of speed, Firefox nows boots in three seconds. Open Office Write boots in four seconds. It's quick.

I was very impressed with True Image and could be tempted to buy it ($50):

• It can be used for daily incremental backups that are easily capable of restoring the system and not just to the original hard drive but to any other drive if necessary.
• It handles USB and SCSI without blinking.
• It can resize partitions as it restores them.
• It will 'clone' disks (copy contents of one to another). This is the first time I've used a tool like this that has actually worked.
• You can restore individual files from the backup

For $50 I could have True Image handling daily backups to my USB disk and still be able to sleep nights with my unreliable Raid 0 array.

Here is a recipe for happiness:

Ingredients

• World of Warcraft up and running after three days
• The beast, my bargain powerhouse pc
• Dell 24 inch widescreen monitor

Directions

• Start up computer
• Log on to World of Warcraft
• Up display settings to 1920x1200 widescreen
• Enjoy

I found myself admiring the scenery: rolling snow covered hills, pine forests, sun filled skies. Because I had been offline for three days resting in an inn the game decided to boost my experience and I was soon on level 8 (not sure of the logic of doing nothing increasing experience). Bought a big hammer and can now dispatch level 8 monsters with ease.

And it's friday!!!

Life is good.

When I decided to get the Beast I decided to treat myself to a BIG monitor. I felt the 30inch Dell monitor was too big, even after seeing 30 inch monitors in the apple shop. They also have pretty demanding video card requirements. After a while I decided on a Dell 24 inch, mainly because although it is widescreen, vertically it is still taller than the 19 inch CRTs I am used to. I cherish height more than width and 19 inch widescreen monitors I've seen look too small. Europc were selling the Dell 24 inch cheap (relatively).

It came today and it is pretty breathtaking:

• I set the video resolution to 1920x1200 and there is so much screen space, I have to turn my head to pan from corner to corner.
• It has a built in four port USB hub.
• It has a built in flash card reader (compact, SD etc).
• It does picture in picture: I could have a TV picture in the corner via the svideo input if I so desired (and there would be plenty of screen left).
• I downloaded some 1920x1200 wallpapers and these look amazing. Loaded up picasa and looked at my photo album and whee.
• Height and tilt adjustable
• Screen rotates 90 degrees, should I want about 20 inches vertical height.

May have to start using my glasses at home.

My new battery has come and the battery meter is predicting seven hours of operation. That's fine for surfing, I very rarely get anywhere near that much spare time for a good surf. The old battery was down to 50 minutes from a full charge.

Running wow it remains to be seen how long it will last. It will be a lot less than seven hours but an hour or so will make me happy.

According to this very blog, I have had my Dell D410 laptop since 17th Oct 2005, just over a year (seems longer). I was playing World of Warcraft on it when suddenly it went into standby after only about 20 minutes from a fresh charge.

Looks like the battery is on it's way to battery heaven. After a full charge, when doing nothing the laptop is reporting 50 minutes estimated running time.

Looked up to see whether the battery was subject to the Dell exploding battery recall but it wasn't on the list so I don't get a free one

Found a new battery on ebay, looks like someone selling the 9 cell extended battery (80Wh vs 55Wh) for the same price as the going ebay rate for the standard battery. The extended one is a bit bigger, it will stick out the front a bit, but it will be able to run WoW longer.

Waiting for it to arrive. Must look again into options for extending lifespan of lithium ion batterys (no deep discharging etc). I haven't been that brutal with it, I leave it charging in the docking station every night.

Ripped Stadium Arcadium with the Beast and iTunes (CD Sainsburys £9, iTunes store £15). It ripped it at 20x where the old celeron 2G managed about 6x. It only took a couple of minutes, I was impressed. Ripping definitely still cpu limited or it would manage 52x (like the CD drive) but I'm happy.

Should I keep using the term 'ripped'? Should I be saying 'imported into iTunes for my own private use'?

Beast only has a DVD-ROM. I have a DVD writer to fit but unfortunately it is beige and would spoil the Dell Black colour scheme. Must get some black paint.

UPDATE: Stadium Arcadium: very good. Great bass riffs. Can't understand the lyrics, either the enunciation or the semantics.

The Beast continues to amaze.

I've never really thought about it before but here is cpu utilisation while playing 'Freak on a Leash' by Korn in iTunes:

This is the windows task manager. Points to note:

• two cpu cores so two cpus displayed
• neither is working very hard: 0%. The little spikes are where the track started. While running it normally shows 0% with the occasional 1% glitch.

I've never tried this on a lesser pc. Thinking about it now, a pair of 2.4Ghz cpu's should have no trouble generating a pair of 44kHz audio signals: simplistically, that's 54545 clock cycles for each 44kHz cycle. Decoding mp4 files is probably more challenging than shifting the contents of a wav file to a dac but 54545 clock cycles seems like plenty to play with.

The Beast arrived five days early. Only an hour or so to play with it what with life and all. First impressions:

• Heavy. Solidly built case. Nice quality, nicest desktop case I've ever laid hands on.
• Side panel comes off really easily. Disk drives unclip, can tell I have a pair of Maxtor Atlas 140G 10,000rpm drives.
• Microphone and Heaphone jacks on the front: very thoughtful. Also a couple of USB holes. No sign of a reset button! Big dropoff for a Windows box.
• Takes 30 seconds to boot, most of this seems to be the serial scsi controller looking for the drives.
• Fairly quiet, not silent it does make a low hum. There's a huge fan inside with vents about 6 inches square. Big fan = slower rotation = quieter. Could live with it running all the time.
• When it booted it was infected with McAfee Security stuff. Had to spend a few minutes figuring out how to disable it enough for the uninstall to work.
• It is fast: it installed firefox virtually instantly. Silly things that shouldn't have ever been slow like the control panel pop up immediately.
• The programs menu includes the 'Dell SAS Raid Storage Manager' which asks for a username and password. Beast came with no manuals so I'm going to have to google for those at some point. Doesn't seem to be configured for Raid, have to think about that one. Do I care?
• Came with keyboard and mouse and a couple of Install CD's but no mains cable or manual. Keyboard is a black Dell one with a useless windows button but I'm keeping the Cherry one I was using as it has a nicer feel.

Happy thus far. Using it to type this. Can you tell the difference?

Have to find something taxing for it to do.

New Dell X51v PDA has come. Have to say it again, but I got £80 off a brand new one through ebay: gotta love it.

Impressions of X51v wrt rx1950:

• bigger, fatter and heavier. Not as comfortable to hold in the hand. Slightly more plasticky. If I got a magnesium case for it then volume it takes in my pocket would be about same as rx1950 in it's original case. Walking around with wallet, pocketpc and mobile spread around pockets does tend to spoil the line of my outfits
• much nicer to use, very noticably faster. Apps that were sluggish or painful on rx1950 (pocket mindmap, especially Daynotez) are now quite usable. Internet Explorer is noticably better.
• no memory/random termination problems so far: with five or so apps loaded, still have two blobs out of five free (a blob is a unit of memory measured by vbar) where rx1950 might have one and a half with one or two apps running (and in this state one of the apps is likely to be terminated whenever the O/S feels like it: make sure those files are saved!).
• VGA (640x480) vs QVGA (320x240: I guess the Q stands for quarter) screen much nicer. Internet Explorer can show smaller fonts clearly, giving more on a screenful. The cleartype in Pocket Mindmap makes the characters look blurry, turning it off makes them look pixelated. Other apps are fine.
• Wireless seems to connect faster, less of a thumb twiddling exercise. Useful button on left to toggle wifi on and off.
• Still needs that reset button but then again it is still running Windows.
• Haven't tried the 3d accelerated games yet but rx1950 doesn't have 3d acceleration so that must be better. By an odd coincidence the DS Lite is out today.

Conclusion: rx1950 is better than nothing but more annoying than useful. Go on, buy an X51v, you know you want one.

Since my old Dell Inspiron 500m suffered a nasty accident the batteries don't work and it loses it's bios settings whenever it is switched off. What to do with it? Well my plan is to turn it into a media centre to record tv, play music, whatever. For this it should be well suited because:

• It is very quiet
• There is space under the TV for it, especially if I pension off the video recorder.
• It has USB 2.0 ports for my Hauppauge TV Tuner (which has a remote control) and a big fast external USB hard disk.
• Shouldn't take too much power: it can go into standby if the remote and the scheduler can wake it up
• It has an s-video output.

Main disadvantage: DVD tray will be hard to access: not a problem if I use another computer and copy the files over the network.

The one flaw in this plan so far is that I cannot get the s-video output to work. I plug it into the computer and TV and nothing happens: no new options appear on the laptop to enable the TV output.

After extensive research I have discovered that the video circuitry in the laptop it looking for 75 ohm terminating resistors inside the TV when the cable is plugged in. I poked some 100 ohm resistors (nearest I had) into the s-video socket of the computer and hey presto, the TV output options appeared in control panel/display (a plug-and-play kind of thing, complete with bing-bong when you plug it, doesn't appear to need a reboot).

Next I cut the last 4 inches off an s-video cable and soldered in the resistors. I plugged it into the TV and, after some fiddling with the TV settings I had a picture. In black and white. Somehow, somewhere the chrominance signal is getting lost.

In Black and White it looks like it will give a pretty good desktop, it should be quite usable if I can get the colour working. I have played with the PAL/NTSC settings but that makes no difference.

If all else fails I will try this trick to make an s-video to composite adapter: the signal won't be as nice as pure s-video but it might be in colour.

Dell sell a s-video cable for the 500m for about £25, I could simply buy one of those but I'm too mean, I'll try to reverse engineer it.

Watch this space.

I found a neat trick to make a media server: install apache, expose your media directories and let apache's directory browser and http do all the magic. Nicer than messing with Windows Networking.

Update: I joined the two signals with a 500pf capacitor and joined the two grounds and it is now working. It seems that my 7 year old Toshiba 37 inch tv (so old it uses a crt) is expecting composite video on the s-video port instead of the conventional luminance and chrominance signals.

When I have time (i.e. not valentine's day) I will make up an s-video->rca phono adapter so I can plug it in round the back of the TV (the only s-video connector is behind a flap on the front of the TV). Then it's the small matter of running an aerial cable down from the roof so I can use the TV tuner. Meanwhile I can also record upstairs and stream the recordings.

The picture is not wonderful, there is noise which may be cpu or disk drive related. Hopefully a less bodgy cable will fix that.

What with it being the Christmas holidays I found a spare couple of hours to set up the Docking Station for my Dell D410 Laptop. I set it up thusly:

• 17" CRT monitor
• Packard bell keyboard
• Packard bell wireless mouse
• USB 2 Hub
• External USB hard Drive
• Wired network so I can play with wake-on-lan and access it from the internet

I need to buy a long audio cable so I can plug it into the hifi.

It makes a nice system, the Dell is faster than the desktop. I still use the desktop system for the following:

• Canon USB Scanner
• Nightly backup of remote server

I could do my scanning on the laptop and I could set it up to do the nightly server backup as well. Since I set the desktop machine up for nightly backup I haven't got around to getting it to shut down automatically so one of my bedtime tchores is to turn it off. Once that is done I don't need the desktop...

I would like to set the laptop up for a nightly backup to the external hard disk: turn itself on at 3am, backup, then switch itself off. I'd like to figure out the most efficient way to do that: weekly full, and daily incremental maybe. This could be combined with the remote server backup.

The only disadvantage of a laptop over a desktop for me is that it has no PCI slots: the only PCI slot I could use is my TV card and I only need that to capture my wedding video (2 years, 3 months, still haven't got around to doing that). I'm not into games now (did I mention I'm married?) so I'm not inclined to upgrade the graphics: I'd buy an XBox 360 for that.

With my old Dell Inspiron 500m the wireless connection (using the Intel microcard that came with it) was not 100% reliable: I would get randomly disconnected and have to repair the connection maybe once a day. It was annoying and I blamed it on the Dlink Di624 router. It was never annoying enough to justify buying a new wireless router but I was tempted.

Since getting my Dell Inspiron D410 and using it for a couple of months I have realised that this problem does not seem to be happening. It is possible that it was the Dell 500m's wireless that was the problem. I am probably tempting fate and am going to be hit again or it may be that I repair connections automatically without thinking and don't remember doing it but I'm pretty sure I haven't done it for a while. The last time I did have a problem I remember seeing a neighbours unprotected SUID in the list of available networks so it could have been related to that.

Conclusion: apologies to dlink. I still wish I'd bought a linksys WRT54g though, one of the ones that runs linux.

Notes on Dell Latitude D410:

• Been surfing for about three hours and battery meter says battery is still 50% full (not empty). It says I have only 2:16 left so I had better type this quick. I think this is pretty good. I would do the test to see how long the battery lasted but then I wouldn't be able to use it (without mains) so I am going to recharge it now.
• Fiddling with trackpoint settings, discovered I can do a middle click by tapping the corner. This is nicer than middle-clicking by pressing two buttons together: the two buttons below the trackpoint click rather loudly. The two buttons above (for the nipple thing) are quite but not so convenient. I have been middle clicking in Firefox to open pages in new tabs so middle clicking is pretty important to me.
• Hibernates/dehibernates faster than 500m despite having to copy 1G of ram to disk.
• Default power settings put it in standby after 10 minutes or so unattended. Not sure why I disabled this on the 500m, it only takes a second to come back.

Conclusion: happy.

I fixed all the problems I had with my new Dell D410 Laptop. The trackpad is perfect, video fast, hibernates and restarts in about eight seconds. All I had to do was install Windows XP on it with all the Dell drivers.

It's only now I can see how fast it is: with ubuntu I felt it was somehow constrained, I was compromising and I would only see it's potential using XP. Ubuntu was doing weird things, the trackpad was unreliable and frustrating and sometimes when it was busy it wouldn't task switch, almost as if it had hung.

From the device manager I have confirmed that it has a 5400rpm hard disk which is good for a laptop and noticably faster than the 4200rpm disk in my old Inspiron 500m. 1G of memory makes a difference. Rebooting FireFox is instant, it just appears.

The screen resolution was immediately better, smaller text, more on screen. Then I was looking for the tweakui powertoy on the microsoft site and found the cleartype power toy which makes the text on LCD screens less pixellated: it really works, makes a big difference.

The battery meter tells me I have over four hours of battery life. I am unlikely to get four hours to test it in today but I will be happy if it manages that. The Dell can disable the wired network card when running from battery to save life. When I put the laptop in the docking station for a recharge then I can still use the wired network from that. Theory: does the extra power drain of 1G memory make up from the power loss of swapping to the hard disk?

I think I have reaffirmed my opinion that Linux is a fine server operating system and Windows is a fine desktop operating system. I have both available and I am happy.

Another theory: this laptop and all the peripherals in it were designed with windows in mind. The manufacturers of the various parts wrote windows drivers for them and did a good job because they knew the components intimately. Some linux drivers may be written by manufacturers, some from data sheets and some reverse engineered (educated guesswork). Which approach will give the best results? If some windows drivers are written badly and never peer reviewed will Dell use them in their PC's? My dedicated server runs debian, I am happy that it can control a hard disk and a network card. My desktop O/S has to be compatible with many more things.

Dell D410 whinges:

• It has just one speaker and it is pathetic, very tinny.
• It normally runs cool but if it is doing something CPU intensive it really chucks the heat out of a vent on the left hand side. The estimated battery life drops from three hours to one but comes back once things slow down.
• All Dell drivers are nicely organised in the 'Dell Resource CD' but you have to install them one by one (chipset, wifi, video etc) which is a bit tedious.

Got new laptop: Dell Latitude D410.

Specs:

• Pentium Centrino Mobile 1.86GHz
• 1G memory
• 40G hard disk
• 12" screen
• weights < 4lbs

I wanted something light, not a portable desktop but a true laptop.

I bought it from Europc as 'refurbished' which seems to mean factory return or < 6 months old. It was close to £400 off the Dell price. After I ordered it I started wondering what could be wrong with it as other similar systems from the same place were north of £850. The next day they rang me and asked me if I realised that it had no operating system. No Redmond tax: that explains it. I thought about it for about 2 seconds and said I don't care, I'll take it.

They weren't strictly accurate, it did come with a copy of Freedos...

I installed ubuntu on it, taking the plunge of going totally linux on my main personal computer. Can I live without Windows on it? If I can't I can always get a copy but let's see how it goes.

Various Notes:

• Looks like new, transparent film like new pc's have, not dusty or faded.
• Installed ubuntu with no problems, mostly it Just Worked.
• Had to downgrade wireless network to WEP as it does not support WSA out-of-the-box. I had to fiddle for some time to get the keys in agreement. Seems to work very well, maybe better than the 500m. I always thought that the di624 was the weak spot UPDATE: it is, see comment.
• Battery life is over three hours, more than twice the Dell Inspiron 500m and enough to last an evening. UPDATE: should mention (as I wondered this before I bought it but couldn't find mention in any reviews) that this was with Wifi running all the time. I set the screen to minimum brightness.
• Suspend to disk doesn't work. Had to install linux source code to figure out how it was supposed to be used and it didn't work anyway. I could go through kernel patching to get suspend2 running or I can live with a long initial boot and lots of suspending-to-ram (which seems to work fine).
• It has both a trackpad and a nipple thing: I hate the nipple things, I'm used to the trackpad from my 500m. Unfortunately the default drivers lack the support for scrolling, tap-to-click, tap and drag and various other neat shortcurs. I think I could get it working, either by patching the kernel or by installing a different version of X windows. I'm not in a big hurry to do either. UPDATE: trackpad working.
• Some reviews say the keyboard is cramped but to me typing on it now it is gorgeous: apart from the page-down key which is hyper-sensitive: I'm hoping the previous owner rejected it because of this and nothing else is wrong with it.
• Living with kubuntu: installed ubuntu and upgraded to it as the kubuntu servers were unresponsive. I got warty warthog which was released only days before I got the laptop.
• The 12" screen is a bit tighter than I had hoped. It is 1024x768 but seems like less. I've made the fonts small and I can get into the habit of running firefox full screen by banging F11. The display quality is good, crisp and good contrast.
• It's fast: nothing seems to take very long. Gimp boots in about five seconds, compared to maybe 15 on the 500m (under windows). UPDATE: not sure I've ever seen the top command show a process using more than 2% cpu time. Must find something intensive for it to do.
• It came with a media dock that holds the DVD-rom (no DVD-RW ). This can also act as a charging station and has sockets for VGA, wired network etc. It supports Wake-on-lan so I am tempted to set it up so I can wake it remotely from my hosting pc and do cool things like program the sky+ box from the irda port. I email the hosting pc from my mobile and coolness ensues.
• Better build quality than the inspiron. Lattitudes are the business models and are targeted higher. It doesn't creak much when squeezed. Not a 10/10, maybe 8 for creakiness, where 500m was a 5.

Right now I love it. The small screen may get annoying and I'll miss suspend-to-disk (unless I go kernel building, which I cannot be bothered with).

Dell Inspiron 500m is tethered to a mains socket so now I have it running 24/7. One advantage of this is that I can use iTunes for podcast downloading. Using the Apple podcast directory I found The Week In Technology (TWIT) which the laptop downloads at it's leisure. Come rowing time, I fire up the desktop pc in the rowing room and use the iTunes sharing thing to play the podcast back. And it works! Before I could not be bothered to find any podcast other than the Daily Source Code and now I am spoilt for choice thanks to the iTunes podcast directory. Ok, I'm not a great fan of iTunes but Microsoft built an empire on seductive ease of use.

Following from the tragic accident here is the progress on the fate of the Dell Inspiron 500m laptop that had coffee poured over it.

• After a day or so of drying out I took off the covers of the memory and wifi card bays and drained out the coffee which was still liquid.
• After a day or two more the laptop would actually boot but the keyboard did not work.
• Laptop would run on battery but not mains.
• Left more time for it to dry out.
• Laptop would only run from mains if battery was pulled out: can run on battery alone but cannot charge it, even with the laptop switched off. The mains adapter appears to crowbar: the green led on it fads out.
• Took laptop to bits. Keyboard very dead. Stripped it down to it's membrane, no visible coffee staining but it would not work. Probing keyboard plug with a bit of wire I established that the circuitry was ok, the membrane was dead.
• Cleaned up what I could with nail varnish remover, which appears to be acetone and water so should be safe.
• Ordered new keyboard from ebay for £45. The keyboard is type 1M723.
• Fitted new keyboard, works fine.
• Examined circuit board to try to resolve battery problems. Heavy corrosion around the battery circuitry. Cleaned it up to no avail.

Conclusion: laptop is working fine, I'm using it to type this, but I can only run it from the mains. If I unplug it from the mains then I lose my BIOS settings when I plug it back in. From a portable computer I have gone to one that cannot even be moved without typing the date in.

It's sad.

The worst of it is that now I'm tempted to get a 12" Apple iBook.

Pros:

• Smaller
• the battery lasts longer
• a totally new non-ms environment to explore.

Cons:

• Apple are going intel next year. How long would PowerPC support linger?
• Linux will support intel indefinitely. In 5 years time when this box is only useful as a server, will I be able to get any contemporary software to run on it?
• Apple appear to be corporate bully boys like microsoft. They aren't the cool guys.
• I have to find Macintosh versions of my favourite apps: Firefox, Vim, Putty.
• Paying for it
• I have to grow a pony tail.

Warning: the Dell inspiron 500m laptop reacts badly to having coffee poured over it. Must be some kind of design fault, aren't computer users coffee drinkers by definition?

Moral: don't let baby near coffee.

dell is a big computer company.

Updated this blog to Drupal. Went smoothly enough, tried using the democratica theme as it is one of the few drupal themes that resizes horizontally to fit screen width but it had some problems:

• if main content was not long enough, there was an error whereby the background to the right side panel was not long enough and did not meet the footer.
• viewing in IE6 on my Dell inspiron 500m, the background to the page loaded horribly slowly and I had to edit the css to make it plan grey
• it's css is vastly complicated and spread over a number of css files. Does not strike me as a clean or efficient design.

so I went back to my theme although I am a little sick of it.

I have wanted to categorise my blog entries using tags for a while now but there is still no official drupal module to do it (an api for developers but no user level module). I had a google and found awTags which is exactly what I want. You can now see the nice tags block on my site.

So I had a nice tagging system and over 700 articles with no tags. asTags provides an admin page to add tags to nodes with selected existing tags but no more. Looking through the code it had a nice clean api and I was able to hack to to do a search on the database for a search term and add a tag to matching nodes. I used the mysql REGEXP operator so that I could match whole words:

   1  function awTagsAPI_AddToExistingTagSearch($search, $addTag) {
   2    $addTid = awTagsAPI_GetTagID($addTag);
   3  
   4    if ($addTid == FALSE)
   5      $addTid = awTagsAPI_AddTag($addTag);
   6  
   7      $strSearch = str_replace( "'", "''", $search);
   8    $result = db_query("SELECT nid FROM {node} WHERE body REGEXP " +
   9                       "'[[:<:]]%s[[:>:]]' OR title REGEXP '[[:<:]]%s[[:>:]]'", $strSearch, $strSearch);
  10    $nCount = 0;
  11    while ($nid = db_fetch_object($result)) {
  12      awTagsAPI_AddTagToNode($nid->nid, $addTid, TRUE);
  13      $nCount = $nCount + 1;
  14    }
  15  
  16    return $nCount; // return count to display in summary
  17  }
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In an ideal world I would have used drupals own search facility but the api for that is horribly mixed up with user interface code so I searched the database directly. The above allows an amount of regexp syntax to be used, e.g. search for (outlook|thunderbird|exchange|gmail) and tag with 'email'. However, the above does not search comments, only node title and body.

Still, it worked good enough for me and I've added lots of tags.

Tempted by Dell Axim X50, a PocketPC, which Dell are selling for £234 which seems like good deal for something with:

• Wifi (only b but that will do)
• Bluetooth
• 64M ram
• 128M flash
• Compactflash and SD slots: can share compactflash with my camera and they do a 1G card for £41.36 which is a good deal
• Free TV Tuner (!). Just have to walk around carrying a UHF aerial.
• Powerful IR emitter, useable as remote control.
• It works with Skype which means free phone calls from starbucks.

I haven't been using my Tungsten T2 recently. Reasons:

• My digitiser is flaky and I have to be pixel perfect clicking on things. The handwriting recognition is pretty poor, have to write ultra-big block capitals all the time which always seems like hard work.
• No Wifi Bluetooth is no comparison.
• Palm OS is pretty noddy compared to windows: it does have 'files' as such just databases which makes it hard to port anything to it.
• Appears to be a dying platform: Palm are being sluggish with their Wifi and this could be a fatal error.
• Sony are already pulling the plug on their Palm PDA's to focus on phones.

I've been giving iPodder a try. It's an application for automatically downloading podcasts for later listening with iTunes: the podcasts appear in iTunes playlists.

I've been considering using my laptop for dowdloading podcasts instead of having a server running 24/7 and launching my downloading script once a day. The dell Inspiron 500m laptop can be turned on at certain times through it's Bios and after that it can sit in standby mode until the windows scheduler tells it to download podcasts. The laptop is effectively silent so it's not a pain like the server. I don't even know if it has a fan in it.

I gave iPodder a try as a more refined way of podcasting than the script. A potted review:

• it installs as a taskbar app
• it's user interface is little more than a set of property pages
• when it is idle, waiting to download podcasts once a day, it has about 20M of memory allocated to it. Ok, so most of this is probably swapped to disk all the time but even so, HOW MUCH?

• as it is a taskbar app, someone has to be logged into windows to run it. It is not a service and the windows scheduler can log in automatically to launch a task.
• it works but it is unremarkable.

I'll probably stick with my script if I can get it to run on windows, which should not be a problem. During the 23 hours and 50 minutes of the day it is doing nothing it will consume negligible resources. Downsides are that I do have to edit the script to add new feeds and it won't integrate with iTunes.

In England at least a lemon is something that is something of a liability. It is also iPodder's icon.

Been working on a new theme for my sites, something with round corners and shadows, xhtml and css. It's a really hard process of trial and error, testing it out in available browsers:

• Firefox
• IE5
• IE6
• Mozilla 1.6
• Lynx

I've just spent a few hours on a weird problem in IE6 showing round corner bitmaps: the images were all slightly corrupted, as if they were not being displayed in the right place by a few pixels or were being partially overwritten:

I spent hours fiddling with this, making sure my gif's didn't have transparent bits, googling for IE6 bugs etc but no joy. On a hunch I checked out the Drupal site and saw that the rounded corners there were corrupted as well.

I tried my new site with IE6 on my desktop pc and it was perfect.

Problem must be something strange about the graphics drivers on my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop.

New theme coming soon: it's already XHTML validated and has earnt a little badge: unlike Drupals bluebeach

For the first time ever I had to send a personal FAX so I had to think about how to go about it.

I had a form to print, sign and Fax off to 123-Reg. I can print, sign and scan the form back in using my Canon CanoScan Lide 20 Scanner so that was not a problem. I had a large graphic file to send.

I'd decommisioned my fax/modem when I went broadband and I didn't want to fiddle around setting it up again. I looked around the internet for faxing services but these seem to be mainly commercial or email < - > Fax gateways, no services for one off graphic Faxing.

Then I realised that my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop has a built in modem. I searched the internet for fax software then, on a hunch, looked to see if Windows XP itself supports it and it does.

These are the steps to install it:

• Go into Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs
• Click on 'Add or Remove Windows Components'
• Click on 'Fax Services' and 'Next'.
• Go into Control Panel/Printers and Faxes
• Add a new Fax. This will take you through a Wizard where you put in your name, address etc.

The Fax device now acts like a printer: I opened my scanned form in Paint Shop Pro and just printed it to the Fax device. This triggerred another wizard that took the Fax number and allowed me to set up a cover sheet. Then it sent the Fax. Easy.

Lets hope someone is working at 123-reg on a Saturday and will read it.

Got around to trying Skype today for some VOIP fun and games. The main problem for me to set this up was the poor sound quality on my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop. Using windows sound recorder with a plugin external microphone the recordings were distorted and pretty poor quality. I did some searching but I could find no fixes for this. Eventually I tried downloading new drivers for the SigmaTel C-Major Audio hardware from the Dell site. This fixed the problem.

I tried dialling my home phone but I could not get through because my home phone is set up to refuse calls from phones that withhold caller ID (to stop telesales) and Skype obviously has no caller ID to give.

Ringing wife's mobile I was able to amaze her and check Skype out simultaneously. It works. It's as good as using the phone and for ringing my mum in the evenings it works out cheaper than the landline. The rate to mobiles looks pretty steep, about 30p for a 30 second call.

I didn't need to fiddle with the DI624's firewall settings to get this working. For the record, I am on a 750k down/128k up broadband connection.

Now to ponder more about bluetooth headset.

pros:

• can make phone calls with hands free

cons:

• horrible pose factor makes it embarrassing to buy

Summary: Skype is cool.

Now I realise why Google has a plug for Google Desktop Search at the bottom of their results pages: MS and Yahoo have brought out their Me Too versions (both apparently bought in).

I uninstalled my various desktop search tools (google et al) when I realised I hadn't used them for a few months.

Update: Reading more on Microsoft MSN Desktop Search it seems that it integrates with windows explorer and the desktop as well as IE so it doesn't require you to use IE or even to drop into it just to search your desktop.

I've installed it and it is looking good: it can be used from Windows Explorer (to replace to lame built in search tool) and it can search python source code with no problems. This is my main need for a search tool, as a grep. The searching features in Vim are pretty crude (have to cd to directory and run thinly disguised command line grep).

Thoughts:

• It would be nice to see an actual list of file types that it indexes, reducing the capacity for subtle ommisions.
• Can choose which folders you want indexed.
• From the search results you can right click and do explorer-type things (open, edit etc). This is just what I want and my main objection to Google Desktop Search.
• Can restrict search to a particular folder by including part of the folder name in the search, e.g.:

  *.py AND play
  

  lists python source files in my 'play' directory and subdirectories. Nice, and without having to click around to find the play directory.
• It runs nicely on my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop. It would be more useful on my pc at work but that is far more gutless: it hasn't had a defrag for about 5 years.
• Save shortcuts:

  @regedit,=c:\windows\regedit.exe
  

  in the desktop bar and it creates a shotcut. Type in 'regedit' and enter and it runs regedit. Cool, saves me popping up the 'run' box. Doesn't seem to save desktop search terms which would be useful.

So, in conclusion:

• Microsoft are shafting everyone again by building a useful enough tool into the o/s
• This one seems good enough to me, a confirmed MS cynic. Google desktop search isn't good enough for me to use just to spite MS.

Update 2: It's better than that. Type file name you want in desktop toolbar and open it. Bypass explorer completely. All those wasted hours!!

Been trying out Puppy Linux, a 50M linux distribution that can boot from a USB flash drive.

I've put it on my Billionton USB Flash key. Here are the results so far:

• Boots on main work pc if I use a floppy disk to load the USB drivers (an old PC with a BIOS that cannot boot from a USB key).
• Boots on old work pc that has an addon PCI USB card, again using floppy.
• Doesn't boot on my Dell Inspiron 500m when using the BIOS setting to boot from USB, it just says 'MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM' and locks up. The Dell doesn't have a floppy drive so no way to try that out. Puppy can boot from CD and that works just fine. The problem is either the Dell BIOS or the key's 'boot sector' not playing ball. I set the key up using the script that runs on puppy itself, I am suspicious that this is the problem.

Once booted it is cool, it has enough utilities for a good play. I launched a console and did:

mkdir /mnt/c
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/c
ls /mnt/c

and I had access to my Windows 2000 C directory, no logging in, no fuss. It boots in a minute or two.

The two PC's it is working on won't boot from CD's, at least not CDR's, probably as they are >4 years old, so USB is the only option.

As puppy only uses 50M of my 512M USB key it will be a handy thing to carry around with me.

There is lots of helpful advice on the website.

Succumbed to temptation and bought a USB Flash Drive. It is a Billionton 512M, nice and small and was £50 in PC World (not always the cheapest place to buy things but very convenient). I find these drives really handy when Windows networking decides to play up: browsing the network for other computers decides to freeze explorer for a minute, access denied with no useful details to tell me why, system admin decides to alter the security policy and my account gets locked out, that kind of thing. 1.4M floppies are unreliable and too small, the future is Flash Drives.

The drive itself worked immediately in my Dell Inspiron 500m notebook, on Windows XP SP2 without even needing a reboot.

I may look into booting linux off it as that's such a cool trick. There's also Mandrake Move to investigate.