On one hot January night while I was trying to write a statement about some art project that I was working on, I just fell asleep on the lounge. I was trying to type this statement up on my trusty little HP Mini Note 2133 that was runing Ubuntu 8.10. Due to extreme tiredness and heat, I just felt that I could not go on typing or even thinking so I closed the laptop expecting it to spin down and hibernate while I just headed straight to bed.

When I woke up in the morning, the notebook was in an extremely hot state, it was more than the normal warmth you get from running a notebook for a few hours. When I tried to switch it on, it was not responding as normal. There was no HP logo at startup even though all the normal lights were on. The notebook was pretty much dead and did not respond to anything.

After leaving it alone for about a week (actually I just forgot all about it for a few days), I decided to contact HP since the notebook was still under warranty. After the usual menu selections I spoke to an operator who suggested that I plugged the notebook to the power (already done), to see which lights were on (already done) and then to plug it into an external monitor (already tried that too). He suggested that it might need a mainboard replacement (thought so).

The operator then rang me back and suggested that he could guide me over the phone to try to reseat the RAM module (unfortunately, already tried and I even tried another module of the same specification–1GB DDR2 667Mhz). He then said that I would get a phone call from an engineer who would visit me with a new mainboard.

Three days later, the engineer showed up and replaced the motherboard in all under 20 minutes. I was very impressed with the service and wish all notebook manufacturers provided the same level of service. Good work HP!  Shame on you Toshiba! Shame on you Apple!

2133 · hardware · hp · Linux · motherboard · notebook · replacement · service · warranty

Season’s greetings to everyone. There will be some disruptions during this holiday, due to a pending server upgrade. Let’s keep our heads up during these tough times. In the meanwhile, here’s a picture from my recent road trip.

2008 · 2009 · greetings · landscape · Photography

After two years of using the I-mate Jamin smartphone, I finally decided that it was time to upgrade to something with better feature set and a more open connectivity options. This time around, data was becoming more of a priority, since I don’t seem to use voice calls terribly much. I needed a phone that I could get on a contract that has a cheaper monthly payment than what I was paying before. While I was with Vodafone with the Jamin, the best I could get was $50 plan and $20 repayment for the handset. It offered GPRS EDGE connectivity with no included monthly data allowance which was charged at a rate that would give anyone a heartburn . With the least addictional cost, the best Vodafone could offer was an extra $10 on top of the already quite expensive plan to give me a mere 5MB of data per month. It definitely hurt.

Soon after i Acquired the I-mate Jamin, to make the experience even worse, I ended up buying a MacBook. The first thing I wanted to do was install Thunderbird (my favorite email client on all platform) on it and to my disappointment, I discovered that I could not do a sync between Mac and Windows Mobile without either using Parallels and Windows (and then only with that beast called Outlook) or buying some third party software. It seems that neither Apple or Microsoft wanted to know about people in my situation who did not want to subscribe to either one of the platforms (aka platform agnostic) for everything. The only thing that came close to being a solution was to use a Funambol Server installed on one of my servers, which was not only clumsy to use, but also difficult to manage. In the end I settled with using Schedule World so I could do sync between my Windows XP, Linux and OS X notebooks and my Windows Mobile 5.0 phone. This approach, while it works, is not really ideal since I have to rely on an external server to manage the synchronisation and the data.

The I-mate Jamin was a reasonably good phone, but its shortcomings were mainly caused by the Windows Mobile platform it was built on. While it works almost seamlessly in a Windows world, when you start venturing outside that walled garden the problems become unbearable. The minute you don’t want to use Outlook anymore (did I mention that an early version of Microsoft anti-virus product ate my entire Outlook database because of a single infected email?) you start seeing the ugly brick walls and quickly hitting your head against it. This gets a lot worse when you decide to try working on another platform such as Mac OS X. While there is Microsoft Office for Mac, there is no activesync for Mac. Entourage which was supposed to resemble Outlook on the Mac does not have support for syncing with Windows Mobile.

The only way you could access the files on your Windows Mobile was to use the Acitvesync software which was not a good thing when Activesync decides to play up. In the end I basically had had enough of the “closed” way in which Windows Mobile was working, so this time around I decided to look around for a phone built on a platform which supports open standards.

My first choice would have been the iphone from Apple. It is a beautifully-designed piece of technology with a very nice and intuitive interface, based on a platform which originated from a Unix world. I was quite sure about getting the iphone, until I discovered that despite its appeal, it does not really support open standards that well and I just could not understand why they would limit the bluetooth profile to headset-only. So the iphone is out.

The next on my list was the Nokia E71. Ever since my partner acquired the E65 phone from Nokia I was always a little partial to the Symbian platform, so when the Nokia E71 was released I was itching to get my hands on one to try it out. However, when I read more about the specs it soon looked like a very good candidate for my next phone. It supports 3G HSDPA, most of the common bluetooth profiles, SyncML synchronisation standard, Wifi, Assisted GPS, Flash Lite 3.0, push email  and the list goes on. It even has IRDA support.

The day I went to a Three shop in Sydney, I just wanted to check it out and hold it in my hands. The phone feels very nice to hold. Its thin and wide frame sits well in my hand and having a qwerty keyboard definitely makes things a lot easier when it comes to hammering an email or a text message. The screen looks nice and smooth and the phone is suprisingly large. It definitely amazes me what Nokia engineers manage to fit into such a thin and small device.

I liked the device so much that I decided to sign up for a plan right away. What I ended up getting was the E71 on a $29 cap plus $10 handset repayment a month on a 24-month contract. This was cheaper than getting the E71 on a $69 cap plan with no repayment. To quench my thirst for mobile data, I added $20 X-series (1GB/month) to the plan which brought the total to $59 per month including 1GB of data. This is definitely in my ball park and having 1GB of mobile data to play with means I will not hesitate to use the phone as a modem with either my Nokia N800 tablet or a notebook when needed.

3 · Australia · data · E71 · HSDPA · mobile · mobile data · Nokia · phone · Three

I recently acquired the HP mini-note 2133 netbook and I have been using it almost constantly for the last few days. It is a very nice little machine to use on a day to day basis, although in terms of raw power and speed it is no match for my Dell Inspiron and my MacBook. A lot of people seem to forget the fact that this machine was built to a price to occupy the same market segment as the Asus Eeepc. In my view, this machine is superior to the Eeepc in many ways and it is working very well in what it was designed to do: lightweight ultra-mobile computing.

For a while I was really comparing this machine to the Eeepc and the clincher for me was the storage capacity (120GB) as opposed to the various flavours of Eeepc which come in anything from 4-20GB, which means that this machine could also function as a mobile storage unit for photographs and other files when on the go. The other factor was the size of the keyboard. While it may be difficult to type quickly and accurately on the Eeepc’s cramped keyboard, it is, by comparison, quite effortless on this machine, which means that for typing documents and code the HP wins hands down.

The few gripes that I have with this machine are: no booting from the SD card slot, Windows Vista pre-installed (only the vista version is available here in Australia), it only comes with a 3-cell battery and (because of Vista) a long boot time and wake up time (from hibernation).
The specs:

• 1.6Ghz Via C7 processor
• Via Chrome graphics adapter
• 1GB of RAM
• 120GB HDD
• a/b/g Wifi
• Bluetooth
• VGA Webcam
• SD card slot
• 3-cell battery (expandable to 6)
• Express Card 54 slot
• 1280×768 8.9 inch screen

Pros:

• Relatively light, therefore easy to carry
• Large 8.9 inch screen
• Nice 92% size keyboard
• Spacious storage

Cons:

• Battery could be larger
• Awkward power switch
• Only comes with Windows Vista Home Basic
• Webcam utility (modelled on Apple Photo Booth) does not work properly

All in all, this notebook makes a great companion when you are out and about and not wanting to carry a 3kg+ load on your shoulders.

hp · mini-note · netbook · notebook · review · sp2 · sp3 · Technology · vista · xp

Recently while I was upgrading a hard drive on one of my servers, I found a webcam that I purchased around 18 months ago. It was one of those cheap webcams that I bought,installed for a test then I just promptly forgot about. Somehow I must have stored it on the top of the server case (under a desk) and then I somehow must have pushed it to the back of the case and guess what happened next? It fell off to the back of the server.

Not remembering what I had done with the camera box and the driver disc, I tried to search for a driver online. Since there was hardly any marking on the camera itself, except the word “kinstone” on the front of the clip that forms the base of the camera. Well, lo and behold, I found a website called kinstone.net. I quickly found the download section and before I knew it I had downloaded a driver to my desktop.

After decompressing the file, I found a folder called kinstone_xxx_xxx on my desktop. I opened the folder and found a sub folder called “setup”. After I double-clicked the installer file (setup.exe) it installed all the files and created shortcuts. However, using this method, the camera was not recognised and therefore was not working. I attempted to install the driver through the “found new hardware” wizard and it was still no go.

When I tried to find the instaleld files in “Program Files” directory I found a folder called “vimicro” which the installer had created. So when multiple attempts to get windows to install the driver for the camera failed, I put vimicro into Google and then voila! I found out that vimicro was a company that made the chipset for the kinstone webcams. So I downloaded a driver from their website and there was even a tool which will tell you which driver to download (can identify the chipset of the camera). The driver downloaded from vimicro works flawlessly.

So if you have a Kinstone USB webcam it might be best to head straight to the vimicro website.

driver · kinstone · vimicro · webcam · windows

There have been numerous and relentless attacks on the comment section of the agit8.org website, so for now, all comments have been turned off by default. This may leave me more focused on thinking about the content and less on deleting comments in the moderation queue. I am not sure what can be achieved by bombarding sites with comments about cialis, viagra, loans, etc when all external links get automatically tagged with

rel=”nofollow”

attribute, which should render them useless in the eyes of Googlebot.

I suspect some people may have been misled to purchase software that directly target wordpress comment forms in the hopes it will artificially increase their pagerank . Well, the bad news is that it will not work on this site any longer, so Goodbye Search Engine Marketing People (GSEMP)! Well there has to be an acronym in here somewhere.

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After nearly two weeks of chaos on the agit8.org server, things are finally back to normal. Two weeks ago, due to network disruptions, the agit8.org server had to be physically relocated to another connection, which is a little more stable and less prone to disputes. Having left the server alone for the best part of two years, I could not remember exactly how things were configured or where things were on the filesystem. This had me stumped for a while as Apache just refused to serve the other virtual hosts in its configuration.

It did not help that the server, at the new premises, had to be put behind a router and firewall, which meant more configurations had to be changed. Previously, the server was sitting as the network gateway. I took this opportunity to also reconfigure and update a few things on the server, such as openSSL, etc to the latest versions.

Thank you all for your patience, everything is now back to normal (and running).

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Of late, there have been problems with the server and a fix is on the way soon. It began with a severed connection to the internet which precipitated the relocation of the server to another connection which promises easier administration. So far everything is working as they should, except for the site hosting side of things. This situation is far from satisfactory and will be rectified as soon as possible.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

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Having had to live with comment spams for the last few months to the tune of more than just a few a week, I finally found an interesting tool called Bad Behavior which seems to have dramatically slowed the tide. It works by identifying the “bots” used by spammers and blocking them, while allowing other “bots” and browsers to come through. This set of scripts is easily attached to any php-based website by simply adding an “include” line at the beginning of the php file. In WordPress, this is even simpler with the tool able to work as a plug-in module. (more…)

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On Sunday 1 May, around midday local time, the server at agit8.org was having a hardware problem and had to be shut down. It seemed that there was excess heat generated inside the case and this was caused by a worn out and malfunctioning fan which has since been replaced. Apologies to those who could not access the agit8.org website and the still frames website.

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