Peter's Blog

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.

I use a Dell Inspiron 500m notebook. 1.5G Centrino thing, light, portable, I use it a lot more than my desktop pc.

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  }

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.

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!!