In the interest of being green, I have been looking at the idea of building a lightweight machine with a reasonably low power consumption to do simple tasks computing tasks, like updating a blog, writing documents and simple editing of multimedia projects and occasionally running software for art exhibitions. When I first looked around the market, the obvious choice was a computer built around Intel’s Atom processor. It has all the right lows, such as low price and low wattage, but unfortunately it also has a low in performance as well. There are also solutions available from vendors such as VIA, but having owned an HP 2133 that was built around the Via Nanobook platform, I am not convinced that it will be one that can easily run multiple operating systems without a major effort to find drivers, etc.

For the sake of simplicity, I decided to just build around a motherboard from Foxconn with an Intel Atom processor 330 (dual core) built-in, or rather soldered onto the board. The model number for the board is 45CSX and it has 1 slot for DDR2 RAM with a 2GB ceiling. To house the board I also bought a Foxconn RS-338 case which comes with a 150W PSU and enough space for a 3.5″ HDD and a DVDRW drive. Since RAM is so cheap these days, I bought the maximum 2GB size for $40. All up, the rig cost a little under $300 and I decided to mate it to a 24″ widescreen 1920×1080  LCD from ViewSonic.

After installing Windows XP SP3 (yes, I know I should have installed Linux, but I wanted to test the performance of the CS3 suite on this rig), I installed the Adobe CS3 suite to test the machine and see how it performs. Upon running Photoshop CS3 and even together with AfterEffects CS3, I came to the conclusion that this machine is not as bad as it’s been cracked up to be. Photoshop launch seems to be quite snappy and AfterEffects seems to run just fine (takes just as long to launch on my MacBook).

Everything seems to work fine and yes, there was a performance difference compared to my MacBook with a C2D 2.16Ghz processor, but for something that costs a little over a quarter the price I think it is a quite acceptable trade off. So unless you work with Photoshop and AfterEffects in a heavy-duty production, I can recommend this setup as a secondary machine.

In case you are interested, I tested Photoshop on this machine with a file that has 134 layers, each with a mask of its own. AfterEffects was tested with a six layer 1:30:00 length animation.

330 · Atom · computing · dual core · Linux · MacBook · windows · xp

Having been stuck on Nokia’s Web (the default browser on the E71), I have always been on the lookout for an alternative to this often used piece of software on my phone. It’s not that Web is particularly painful to use, but sometimes it can be a little annoying. While it has some good features like the RSS reader and the ability to automatically resize web content (looks like it’s done with a custom CSS) and a few other nice touches, I often find it a little short in places where it counts.

One of the things that irks me about Web is when the screen goes blank after I click on a link. It first shows a text-only view of the web page, then it goes blank until the whole page and the majority of the graphics have loaded. This little habit of Web’s is quite annoying on its own. It might be fine if I am looking at the mobile version pages of the large internet sites like flickr and facebook and so on, but some sites do not have any mobile version and they regularly exceed 1MB in size, so on my E71, that means quite a few seconds (with a very good network connection) sitting idle waiting for something to load, staring at a blank screen. This is compounded by the fact that even when the same graphics are involved (eg the second page of a website with the exact same graphical elements), Web still makes you wait a few seconds (while it reads the local cache? How slow!). This is also true when you hit the back button to view a previously loaded page.

Having put up with Nokia’s little  browser for a year, I have decided that I have to find an alternative. I first looked at Opera Mobile, but it is only available for platforms such as Windows Mobile.  However, inspired by the good experience I had with Opera Mobile on my HTC phone (imate Jamin), I wanted to see if Opera made a browser for the Symbian platform. After looking around the Opera website, it turns out that they make Opera Mini, which is available for the Symbian phone, including my Nokia E71.

Download and installation was a snap and using the browser is such a joy. Pages load up so quickly and the zooming function works really well. Opera’s technology for the mobile browser has really created a nice user experience. Hitting the back button to view previous pages loads them in such a snappy fashion that I feel so compelled to write about it here. It seems that the use of server-side compression has really paid off for Opera in the mobile space.

So if you are on a symbian phone, make sure you give Opera Mini a try!

browser · mobile · Nokia · Opera Mini · web

For about 3 months I have been having a problem with my Macbook running OS X Tiger with 3GB of RAM. The problem seems to only occur when I run a resource intensive application such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Final Cut or even Garage Band. What happens is normally when I close those applications then put the notebook to sleep (safe sleep aka hibernation), when I wake it up it goes through the process slowly (slower than normal wake up from hibernation) then it crashes. Because I very rarely shut the notebook down, this seems to happen at least two or three times a day.

Annoying? Well what do you think? The waking up process, which is supposed to be quicker than starting it cold, takes a lot longer and then you have to force the notebook to reboot. This is unacceptably inefficient and not to mention scary. I keep thinking that there is something wrong with the hardware, but it does not get worse, it just seems to happen with any resource-intensive application.

The solution is apparently very simple: just open terminal and type sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage, then enter your password and then if there is no error, you have just deleted the sleepimage file, which is where the content of your RAM gets dumped when the computer goes to sleep. When done, just reboot the machine and all should be fine. I even tried running Photoshop and then putting the Macbook to sleep and it wakes up fine.

So if your MacBook has a crash on wake up (that’s what happens to me in the mornings), then just delete that sleepimage file in /var/rm and it should be recreated afterwards and everything should be fine. It is particularly wise to do this after upgrading your RAM. I upgraded mine from 1GB to 3GB and did not know that I had to do this.

apple · crash · hardware · hibernate · hibernation · MacBook · OS X · safe sleep · sleep · upgrade

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 started the day with a quick dash to the bank to deposit a cheque that I have been waiting for in the last four weeks. Sometimes some jobs don’t pay immediately and that is just the reality today. Everybody wants everything to be finished yesterday, but when it comes to paying for it they can take weeks to get their hands to lift up a pen and write that cheque or print it out as is more the case these days. After the bank coffee was mandatory to get me started for the day and clear up the remaining morning cobwebs. (more…)

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Recently I have watched a few movies that contain non-simulated sex scenes. One was Romance . I also watched a few others including Ken Park and 9 Songs. I am by no means a movie buff, but I recently felt compelled to watch these movies as they seem to represent a new trend in movies that are appearing in film festivals around the world and are not likely to be released in Australia (except for Romance) which I have seen available on DVD.

For quite a while I was pondering the reason why these directors decided to make these movies and what was so significant about having a sex scene that is not simulated. I thought it could be a sign of a new interesting radical trend in film-making, but after watching them I am not so sure if that is the case.

What was interesting about these movies is that there seems to be a really strong emphasis on the sex scenes. The directors seem to be obsessed with making the sex scenes as “real” as possible but they are happy to leave other parts of the movie in the traditional realm of “simulation for the screen”. The question, then, is why? Why are these sex scenes so important to these directors? Is it to gain notoriety or is it an attempt to create something that cannot be emulated by the Holywood studios (an attempt at differentiation)? Well, in the case of the latter they have certainly emulated the San Fernando Valley crowd.

Another question that must be asked is why they tried to create real sex scenes when the medium of cinema itself is just a simulation of reality. Does this mean that we are not allowed to use our imagination anymore or are we supposed to believe that a real sex scene is more erotic than a simulated one?

In the case of 9 Songs, the sex scenes in the movie certainly appears to be gratuitous and superficial. There seems to be no passion in the actors even though they are having real sex and if Michael Winterbottom asked why real sex could not be in a movie then I guess we are very lucky that Larry Clark still believes in simulating the murder scene in Ken Park.

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On the second day of April I realised that yesterday was April Fool’s Day, but I just forgot to post anything as a joke. However, there is a joke going on with the television programming here these days. I wonder if there is something sinister behind all this, but anyone who has been watching TV a lot (I never watched much TV until recently) will notice how many different cop shows there are on TV every night. Is this supposed to prepare us for more police presence and intervention in our daily lives?

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It has been a while since my last post. I believe it is nearly three months ago that I last posted to this site. Well, the story is quite long, but as usual, it is to do with changing priorities. Since the change of the year things have been going quite hectic and there is hardly any time to do anything other than work. Sound familiar to you? Well, that is what I call dynamic priority reassignment or DPR for short (just kidding).

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