The Tech Dragons Hax

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Of synergy & desk harmony

The issue of managing an increasing number of devices is a growing concern.
With the pressure of a certification exam approaching me. I reached for a way to bring back my desktop into the fold.

My first such experience was using Synergy (goggle for it) an open source app, to simultenously work on a freebsd workstation & my xp machine. Having heard about Stardock software's similar program some time ago, when faced anew with a desire to corrale multiple machines to one keyboard and mouse, I checked to see if their fabled claims of looking at a mac client were true. Alas they arent after quite likely a year.

With that i was forced to Synergy and will quite likely be very happy once i get it setup... But that is the trick... getting it setup...

Friday, January 12, 2007

Of Updates & iPhones

Its time again to sink my thoughts to technical matters into an appropriate venue, and so i fire up the blog again.

Im in possession of a small wad of cash, which i intend to use to get my Cisco Certified Network Associate certification. I have been trying to get a job uneventfuly for some time, and it seems that my biggest stumbling point is the lack of prior experience or some other proof of competency. Thus i have reached out, grabbed hold of some cash, and im going for the goal. Crunch time and ill have to knuckle down and lock in all the stuff i studied this year at uni. Ill have a formal qualification should I be successful, and with a formal qualification, ill stand a much better chance of getting a job despite my lack of experience.

Now, i said iPhone... I love it... Its everything i want in a phone from the look of it. Now with that said, small nag, 8gb is not very big, support for a memory card would have been nice, for movies especialy so... But with that i have to say that if apple are intending to only release this phone under 2 year contracts AND such a high price... theyre likely to hurt its adoption rate. Theres a market for such a high tech phone, i know because i had one untill it broke and i want one again to replace it. But tying the phone to a 24 month contract is something that gives me pause... Id happily sign a 12 month contract for the iPhone but by going with a 24 month contract theyre going to cut out a lot of people that arent confident in being able to commit to such a long contract due to any number of things. This isnt a clear step ahead for the iPod, its an odd twist. Its good to finaly see this technology they patented emerge and prove its working. But now it should be capitalised on.

an 80gb (or 60gb) Widescreen touch interface iPod would be good...

The natural pinacle of this haptic interface patent they have (thats the multi touch input touch screen btw) is a tablet. 12-14 inch, wifi, bluetooth, usb & firewire. Stripping out all the usual components of a laptop and moving them to peripherals. No Keyboard, No optical drive, no crap. Just a tablet. All the different peripherals can be moved out into either a docking station or to usb & firewire, and leaving it as slim and lightweight as possible so its the most comfortable tablet possible.

A powerful idea... and one im sure apple can make fly... question is... will they. The OSX interface is nearly perfect for such a touch tablet. But only time will tell wether it happens or not.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Mac Musings

All this was typed from a full screen console known as GLTerminal, on the mac

the extra polish put into the design of the mac user experience pays off. with the overall experience of both owning and using a mac having far surpased any other machine ive had before.

From the sheer simplicity of the setup process that remembers who you told it you are so all other software can reuse your initial setup information, to the unified password management, the .mac account syncronisation recently added is also a nice bonus allowing any mac you sit down at to be... just that little bit more like your own.

While anyone can claim that the overall experience using something is better or worse. The proof is always in the facts. From my own experience the battery life is superb on this G4 14inch iBook, and i can only expect it to be even better on the latest Core(2) based laptops.

Along with mentioning the improved battery life. I have to mention something quite specific to the laptop experience. The "hibernation/sleep" functionality on this iBook is fantastic. Its smoother, faster, and though not something i can verify offhand, it has caused me the least amount of trouble of any device with similar features that ive ever used. I close the lid and seconds later its sleeping, I open the lid and a few seconds later its awake. Something im sure has only improved in performance in the newer models.

I preffer the unix command line, i like having the the power to drive everything through the keyboard, or remotely, and having a wonderful fairly standard set of commands to do what i want on almost any unix system. But being a gamer, and a long term windows user, ( windows NT isnt as bad as it used to be, or as good as it first was... but if you look after it, its not as tempremental as yould think) I find myself accustomed to using a GUI to manage multiple tasks, and using mulitple consoles. And i still occasionaly like to game, so having some kind of entertainment type programs is good, and there are a fair few.

I'm rambling now I think. So I'll leave it there, having said plenty for now about how nice i find this Mac.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

I swear im not dead

Ive just been busy with my head in the sand

Ive had an extremely busy new years, done a pile of stuff.
Ive suddenly gained a large amount of social momentum which is also cutting back on the exessive thinking time that spawned this blog in the first place.

I will get back to updates more regularly once things settle down and i get my own internet back ... again

And while im at it http://www.ampledesign.co.uk/va/ owns in that funky electroplankton, music anyone can make kinda way.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

New Hardware

Ive now taken possession (abeit of a temporary and 'non permanant' fashion) of a 14inch iBook G4

So ive been around Mac OS X and ive been getting used to all the things more and more and im fairly convinced should apple produce a tablet i will purchase it. I just love how nice everything is on the Mac... i dont want one as my main workstation but as a laptop... i cant fault it. Everything works!

Expose above all is a pleasure to work with. Just flick to the corner and all your windows are at your fingertips... another corner and all the windows from your current application appear... its a joy to watch things flow so well when i work now.

Im looking forward to getting a lot out of this laptop over the next couple of months. And ill probably be mentioning some of the things here.

First things done were, setup, aquiring a .mac account good for the next 12 months, installation of firefox and the TigerLaunch app (quite a good one), and VLC to make up for some of the inadequacy of Quicktime as a general movie player.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Hardware Updates

To solder hax or not to solder hax, that is the question...

While working on my power cabling efforts ive grabed some solder and begun wrestling with the urge to Solder the IEC sockets from 2 power supplies to get my outside of case to insde of case 'passthrough'. Along the way toying with the idea of using the fan mounting on the back of the PSU for an extra fan for more drive bay ventilation.

Im not entirely confident of my soldering ability and dont know if i should procceed with the soldering of these wires intended to carry 240V AC. Theyre already soldered, so while its obviously not a bad thing... I dont wish to screw anything up and cause further damage to any components i cant afford to replace. Thus im deadlocked with myself on how to do this... likely ill wind up hacking around some more till something crops up thats a better soloution to my power supply passthrough... ideas are brewing but i cant check them while out at the moment.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Hardware Work

Case Work Time!
Ive had a renewed desire to work on improving my machine since my acquisition of extra memory.

I'm planning on redoing my Power Supply layout (dual PSUs can be tricky to manage cables without modular cabling, which i don't have on these two) In addition to this im thinking of trying to obtain some rounded and longer cables for my UDMA5 cabling (ATA100/133 - IDE 80 Pin cables) to clean up the biggest source of cable clutter which is at the moment the large number of drives ive got installed. Powering them is second to this but with molex cables taking up only a fraction of the space of an IDE ribbon cable, and their lengths being far easier to manage, I'm beginning to get very frustrated by standard UDMA5 cables, so the search has begun for replacements.

With the extra memory in my system, I've put back the plans to purchase a 512MB module quite a significant way down the to do list, and shifting into 1st place on the hardware list is the purchase of a SATA hard drive of reasonable size. Quite likely a Samsung 250GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive for about $90AUD. This is going to consolidate all 4!! drives I'm presently using and give me freedom to experiment a bit more with Gentoo since it will free up my 120GB PATA drive.

If I get a camera I'll take some photos of the before and after of my case through this work.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Apple Tablets

With my growing desire to have a tablet PC, tablet related news has increasingly grabbed my attention and I'm hoping to at some point be able to obtain one. With news like this only increasing the likelyhood that a future laptop purchase will be a tablet. Apple are apparently experimenting with a tablet concept for home & educational users.

This kind of untapped market would probabyl latch onto an affordable well built and attractive tablet PC and do nothing but bolster the growing support Apple has had of late.

Friday, November 24, 2006

Confirmed Suspicions

Blog This was the main source of my blog posts for some time when i started using Blogger and the issues ive had with it since starting use of the blogger beta are most annoying. Finding this confirms that theres an update needed an id realy encourage the developers to sort this out.

Amazing Art

Well this is certainly something to be stunned by.

500 Hours of work in MS Paint

Very Impressive

Friday, October 27, 2006

Busyness

Well I'm going through an incredibly busy few weeks at the moment and with a million things going on its hard to even work out what your doing when your doing it, let alone what else you need to do.

The short list for me includes distributed systems assignment work from university, Open Card framework development in Java for a wireless information devices assignment. As usual theres exams rolling in soon so theres going to be lots of study for those.

But along with all that theres a few spare time things... with what little spare time i do have.

Ive recently started experimenting with the Psyc protocol and it seems very interesting.

Among my server fiddlings, Ive installed Apache 2 and Mod_Python on my server . They were fairly straitforward to do and run well. Though compiling apache with the Threads useflag does fill up the output of ps -aux a fair bit.

Along with the regular apache fiddling every other admin does, ive also been setting up and testing out Subversion with some success so far, and begun looking at setting up Trac to go with the subversion server.

And in a fit of insanity i attempted to install the Zope and Plone stack. users of this amazingly powerful software incluide SGI, NATO, and NASA. Well i got it installed after the 4th try. But the hassle didnt end there, once installed i had to contend with rather developer centric documentation that did little to explain what i could do with the stack without custom coding. As well as having reams of errors for various reasons as i waded through the issues. The final error that killed it for me was that after getting a fully configured and setup, i began recieving errors when trying to simply create new content for the site. What good is an amazingly powerful web application engine to me if i cant post a single thing to the website Im running on it?
...
None. So Zope + Plone have fallen from my favour as i begin exploring Pylons.

Along with the various software experiments underway Ive got my hardware experimenting in full swing and will post a list of the hardware later.

Monday, October 16, 2006

E3 is dead

Well it was a long time coming but the news is official now. E3 as we know it is completely dead.

Now Invite only and dramaticaly different.

As for its replacement. This is looking promising.
http://www.go3.com.au/

Frustration.

Im very interested in the possibility of claiming some kind of medical diagnosis for this. Its an ongoing problem of mine. Technical related Frustration and Depression.

Then again its probable just University related depression.

Moving on...

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Desktop Hijunks

Its an old habit of mine, once i get something set the way i like im loathe to change it.

But it has come time for me to change something i much apreciated.

My desktop setup has changed.

While i used to run differential resoloutions and divide my desktop i have been pushed over the edge by a recently aquired game. X2 the threat proviedes a bunch of advanced dual and tripple screen graphics modes for people running with extra screens and cards powerful enough to run them.

BUT, the catch is you have to have the horizontal span mode enabled for nvidia cards. So with my old "dual view" configuration i wasnt getting them.

The time had come for me to sacrifice my 1158 x 986 res primary mointor and drop to 1024x768 on both. Its a bit of an ajustment but so far im much happier and beginning to fiddle with my nview screen options and reaquaint myself with the way my desktop behaves.

Tuneage

Well its finaly ticked over, a little while ago they hit the net, the new torrents from OCR and damn i cant wait to get them setup.

These guys have been legaly providing me the bulk of my music for years and i love em for it.

I highly encourage anyone who loved the music in any game theyve played to check this out and see if they can find some new life in an old favourite.

Major Props to the DJs behind it and Heres to many more releases in future!

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Updates

Well its been some time since ive updated... A number of things it seems.
This blog, my computer, my laptop, and a few chunks of my life too, have all gone in for major overhauls.

My desktop with its glorious new graphics card has left 2 smouldering relics of power supplies in its wake, and is at present running in a drasticaly reduced capacity, even with a second power supply modded in, Ive got issues to deal with. Ill make it blindingly obvious. Generic PSUs are becoming almost impossible to use for a gaming computer of any caliber and its most unfortunate that a few dollars of electrical parts difference seems to define a price gap between generic and name brand PSUs that is anywhere from dozens to more than a hundred dollars difference between a name brand psu and a generic one of equivalent wattage. The reason is that the total output of a machine is not climbing as it used to. the same 550W design that seemed ample years ago when it started manufacturing in some place in China, is today not suitable for the majority of people that need 550W or higher PSUs.

I Come Seeking Amperage! At the moment my Full tower is equiped with 2 power supplies, a sturdy 300W is powering all my drives at present leaving my CPU and GFX card alone on the far insufficent 250W psu i had spare after the 550W i payed for after the GFX card shot my 400W one, in turn died from unknown causes. The reason... Amps. The 550W is ample for the card to run. But it needs more current! modern cards can demand over 20A on the 12V and it seems only a handful of manufacturers are providing it.

Following my graphics card tribulations, ive mostly switched over to using linux on my laptop. I had a 2gb drive spare and decided to hell with it and i started installing gentoo. It has been an interesting experience. Ive noticed a number of things i didnt know previously and now have for the first time found a number of things where i know linux to be insufficent and inferior to windows. Alpha Channel Transparency and suspend to disk hibernation are both very far behind in linux.

I have fresh Xorg and a nice new kernel and yet i cannot have the same simple TRUE transparency i have on my laptop under win2k. I find it highly frustrating to have such a limitation on my laptop but have begun dealing with it as best i can with apps like Tilda and good WM setup helping offset the lack of transparency well enough im happy to continue using linux on it.

Leaving my life in the not enough room to talk about here category, i move on to some general updates. With various ideas stirring and a number of things ready to roll, just held up by some annoyingly troublesome required phases. Speaking of these, should an Electrical Engineer or someone very well versed with DC electronics read this, feel free to leave a comment and try and get in touch, ive got a pressing need for one i can discuss some issues with regarding a number of plans i have.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

eXpensive Gadgets and Accessories - Soldier Shoots his Printer - Hardware - News

eXpensive Gadgets and Accessories - Soldier Shoots his Printer - Hardware - News

Haha if only i could shoot a few of my least loved items so easily.

Starting up in 2012 - Network World

Starting up in 2012 - Network World

One of the funniest things ive read in a long time.

So need any more motivation to think about switching ?

www.gentoo.org

Elias Fotinis OverDisk :: Visualize Folder Size Allocation

Elias Fotinis OverDisk :: Visualize Folder Size Allocation

Having been a long term user of 'i.disk' i found this while attempting to show idisk to a freind.

Its got my vote for sure. Though its only a beta ive yet to have any problems, its not only faster and smaller than i.disk its also more intutive and provides a lot more detail than i.disks bar graph based views.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Sabayon Linux 3.0 RC2 Public Release

www.lxnaydesign.net :: View topic - SabayonLinux x86/x86-64 3.0 RC2

Im not a fan of private internal betas but i can make exeptions, and i make one here, the team behind sabayon didnt hide it from us long. My earlier posts enthusiasm about testing it out was somewhaty dampened by the fact it was in a private beta, but the covers have come off and sabayon is now available to try. And try it i shall.

Ill have the results and my opinions in the next couple of days.

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