The US department recently seized up to 82 internet domains. The operators of which have been accused of selling counterfeit goods. While the websites are still operational, the manner with which this event unfolded is a definite concern for all website operators. If left unchallenged, this procedure can, in the near future, be applied to other “infringements”, such as linking to contents deemed unsuitable for public consumption, political differences, or even in the cases of blogs and forums where a user might post something that is not agreeable to the content industry. The ease with which the US Department of Justice can seize domains demonstrates the attempt by the department to shift the burden of proof to the domain owners. It is now the case that you are guilty until proven innocent.Link to the story that inspired this post

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I have found that using Jackalope on the HP 2133 Mini-note to be quite a good experience so far. Compared to installing Intrepid (8.10), the installation process was a complete breeze. There was no need to install using weird methods and there was no need for installing any drivers from VIA to get the display working in the correct setup.

The only issue that can be noted is with the wifi connection manager. It seems after a few hibernates that the connection is stuck at the “getting ip address…” stage. This can be quickly fixed with a reboot. Other than this issue, I have not found any major ones to mention. Sound works flawlessly, Bluetooth works normally and the webcam works with Cheese (I have not tested it to work with Skype or anything like that).

Recently, I also purchased the 6-cell battery for the Mini-note, which makes the notebook (or netbook, if you like) much more usable. Since I use this notebook mainly for writing text, coding and web browsing, I have found that having that extra amount of battery capacity makes the notebook a little easier to use. No longer staring at the battery icon every few minutes to see if I will have time to finish what I am doing. It puts the usability of this little notebook on par with my MacBook and my Dell Inspiron laptop. Using it with little power management and with wifi on seems to give around 3-3.5 hrs of uninterrupted use. What joy!

Had this notebook shipped with Jackalope instead of Windows Vista Basic (standard on all Mini-notes shipped in Australia), it would have been a winner from the start. A 6-cell battery, even though it adds a little to the price should have been standard on all models.

2009 · 2133 · computing · hardware · hp · Linux · mini-note · netbook · notebook · open source · ubuntu · vista

In my experimentation to build a question and answer system using adobe spry, I tried to create a view of the data set in which only one question is visible at at time. The code seems pretty straightforward, as the Adobe Spry 1.6.1 documentation outlines under the section dealing with Pagedview. However, when I tested it I get either “no data in the data set error (or something like that)” or a blank page. Try as I might, looking at all the different possibilities, looking at any possible oversight in my code, I could not figure out what was wrong.

The solution, however simple, took me about a day to find out. It seems that the SpryData.js that Dreamweaver CS3 shipped with is an older version, so while I was actually doing things correctly using the documentation of Spry 1.6.1 and the SpryPagedView.js from the 1.6.1 package, it was the SpryData.js that somehow broke it all. So if you are trying to create a paged view of a data set using Adobe Spry, make sure you update the SpryData.js to the one that comes with the 1.6.1 package from Adobe Labs. This way at least you will end up with more hair on your head.

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Having owned a Canon DSLR for more than two years now, I have become somewhat aware of some of the limitations of the DSLR format. Even though it is a beautiful piece of equipment with nice results, I often find it a little cumbersome to carry.

Everyday, I find myself lugging a laptop, either my MacBook, Dell or the HP Mini-note 2133, depending on what I need to do for the day. As I am both working and studying, this could mean a whole day out of the home, so that means I have to carry everything that I need for the day from the morning to at least two or three different locations.

While it would definitely be nice to lug around a DSLR with some nice lenses and a flash gun, I sometimes feel that for my day to day photography needs, the DSLR is definitely an overkill. Carrying the whole kit with a laptop and its charger plus everything else that I need makes carrying the camera kit a burden in more sense than one.

With that idea in mind, I began searching for a compact camera that is capable of replacing the DSLR to a certain point, with a good quality sensor and some manual override functions. Since I have always had Canon photographic gear since the days of chemical photography, naturally I thought about getting a Canon G10 (I already own a Canon G6, but it is not in anyway pocket sized).

However,when I went to the camera shop I became interested in the Ricoh range of compact cameras. They looked good and seemed to be solidly constructed. I became interested in the odd-looking viewfinder attachment on the top of the GX200 and when I found out from the sales assistant that it was a tilt-adjustable viewfinder I was seriously smitten, but there was a slight problem.

One of the things that I have found to be quite annoying about cameras in general is the lens caps. The lens cap is the single item that I have to detach from the camera lens in order to take a picture. When I have to take a picture in a hurry, usually I end up not remembering where I have put it. There have also been occassion when the lens cap just fell off the front of the lens and these caps (if you buy the genuine Canon ones) cost about $25 each.

When I found out that you could replace the lens cap on the GX200 with a self-opening ones (it’s a lens cap made up of three leaves which get pushed open by the lens barrel when you switch the camera on), it was a deal nearly done. So I bought the camera with the self-opening lens cap and an extra attachment with an extra wide-angle lens.

After two days of use, I found that the GX200 is a solidly built camera with magnesium alloy body and a soft rubbery grip. It takes pictures in the RAW DNG format (licensed from Adobe?) and 12MP JPEG files. I found the battery to be worryingly small, but its ability to be replaced by two AAA sized batteries to be a stroke of genius (means that you can get emergency batteries from many different places). It is light and slim enough to be carried everyday, but I have found that the focusing is a little hesitant at times, which can slow down your picture-taking speed.

Overall, I have been very happy with this latest addition to my equipment bag.

camera · compact · GX200 · Ricoh

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

With rumours circulating in the last couple of months of Apple’s plans to open new stores in Sydney, I wonder if this will mean a vastly improved customer experience at the store level. If it is, then it will be the one-stop shop for all my Apple needs (everyone has an Apple need, right?).

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academy · apple · counter · offensive · store

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Right after I had had enough of Knoppix in a PMI (poor man’s install) configuration, I decided to look for something better. While Knoppix was a great beginning and an eye-opener to what could be achieved in a well-configured Linux laptop, it was not enough. It did not allow for software install (well, without a lot of difficulties anyway) and everything I worked on had to be saved onto an external USB drive.

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computing · Linux · os · ubuntu

Having three notebook computers has its own problems. My main notebook at the moment is the Macbook that I purchased nearly 11 months ago. It has been a solid companion of mine in doing teaching work and general everyday computing. Then I have my old Dell Inspiron 8600 which functions similarly to an everyday desktop computer. It is also the machine on which I play games such as Colin McRae and Medal of Honor (not the latest ones, of course).

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Linux · open source · os · ubuntu

The other day I was working on my file server after a couple of hard drives failed within almost an hour of each other. Bizzare and unfortunate as it may sound, I was not in so much of a panic as I had the two drives mirrored onto another large, hard drive daily using Delta Copy. While potentially I could have lost nearly 200GB of data on the two drives, the fact that they were mirrored meant that I only lost around 10GB of files that were mainly DVD rips (will have to rip them again).

To cut a long story short, I was waiting for Windows to install on my server when I noticed that the response time for my web server seemed to have increased considerably. While it is not the fastest web server around, it has been doing its job well for nearly five years with a few reboots in between. Usually it responds to web requests quite speedily, but for some reason it was taking its time. For a very brief period I felt a little panicked about the possibility of the server’s main hard drive failing, but after seeing half of my website load I figured something else was up.

I looked at the netstat and it showed there were quite a few connections open and on reading the server’s log file life (via tail -f) I realised that not only I had Googlebot crawling my site, I also had Slurp from Yahoo and another bot from Webalta in a Russian domain all crawling all over my web server at the same time. This kinda crawling gave my web server the creeps.

Can’t these bots at least have a roster about who was going to crawl which site at any given time? What is the point of being indexed by the search engines if no one can reach your site without patiently waiting for nearly a minute?

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