Recently I created a work using Flash to play video file to create a computer-generated narrative by playing the files in certain orders. When done writing the ActionScript for the project and sure that it was going to work as designed, I came across another problem: how to install it in the gallery space so that it can be running by just turning the projector on and booting the computer. Due to the fact that the space in which the work is installed is run by mostly non-techies, the ability to make the work run just by turning it on is a requirement.

The problem that emerged later during installation was that to make the Flash projector run fullscreen on boot up was quite difficult. I tried using task scheduler to make the application run at full screen after the auto-logon feature of Windows XP, but the taskbar always appeared in front of the projector. I even tried to tweak the registry to hide the the taskbar on startup without success. In the end, I managed to run the projector fullscreen on bootup by putting a shortcut to the projector in the startup folder in the start menu.

With the shortcut installed in the startup folder of the start menu, Windows XP will boot and the computer will automatically logon to the desktop and then when the sequence is completed, the projector will be started at fullscreen.

As it turned out, running the projector at fullscreen in a fully-automated sequence was the least of my problems. I also had to deal with the memory leak issue in Flash player 9 and 10, especially with the use of the timer object. The whole installation would grind to a halt after a couple of hours due to these problems.

ActionScript · art · Flash · installation · kiosk mode

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

A couple of friends have got their Wordpress blogs hacked over the past week. If you are running an older version of Wordpress, you should update it to the latest immediately.

hack · security · wordpress · worm

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

Having worked on the Ubuntu 8.10 for a few months, when Jaunty Jackalope was released publicly it was a definite temptation to upgrade. Considering it was a real pain to install 8.10 last time around on my HP mini-note 2133 (Via C7 1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM with 120G HDD, originally was loaded with Windows Vista Basic), I was a little hesitant. However, since there were a few reports of success such as this article at bl1nk.com and the semester break is nearly upon me, I decided to bite the bullet.

Having upgraded the BIOS last time around, this time installation was quite sane and smooth. It was so smooth that it happened while I was watching TV without a single glitch. When install was done, I rebooted and voila! The screen worked OK, there was no need for funny hacks or even VIA’s driver to install and Wifi and Bluetooth worked out of the box! When I plugged in my USB modem from Three networks (Huawei E220), it was recognised straight away.

When I was done entering my wifi configuration, I was online surfing the net with a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04 on my HP mini-note 2133. I have not tested everything so far, but everything that I need from a basic notebook perspective was working quite well.

UPDATE

I have now had sometime to test the webcam and bluetooth and they are both working fine. Webcam works fine through Cheese, but I have not tested through Skype.

2133 · Australia · hardware · hp · Linux · mini-note · netbook · notebook · open source · Technology · ubuntu

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

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.

No tags

I have been somewhat troubled by the inability of my MacBook running 10.4.11 version of OS X to hibernate properly (suspend to disk). It all started when I upgraded the RAM from the standard 1GB to the 4GB it is now. After the upgrade, it could not reliably wake up from hibernation without a crash occuring after using some memory-intensive programs such as some Adobe software and Aptana and such, which would require a forced reboot. Having lived with this issue for sometime (started shutting down instead of hibernating), I decided to try to Google some answers.

After trawling through some forums and blog discussions, I found a Dashboard widget called Deep Sleep which is easy to use (one click) and seems to reliably put the notebook to sleep without wake up crashes (that’s what happens to me when waking up early morning). So if your macbook is a little insomniac like mine, then do give it a try.

apple · hibernate · hibernation · MacBook · notebook · OS X · suspend · tiger

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

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