Category: technology

Fixing my tablet again after a failed solaris install

My tabletPC installing sun solaris 10

I made the mistake of letting SUN install Solaris 10 on my laptop on Tuesday afternoon. The guy did say it would take about 15mins over the network because obviously my TabletPC has no CD Rom. I had to rush off before 6pm and to be fair I didnt turn up till 5pm, so I was always pushing it. And as you'd expect there was problems, solaris wouldnt detect my network card which is essential when your network booting over PXE! By about 5:30pm it was starting to install but the solaris server must have choose to transfer data at 10BaseT instead of 100BaseT. So it was going so slow that I had to switch off half way through the transfer and go. To be fair the Sun guy gave me a DVD of the Solaris 10 with wireless drivers and also instructions and contact details if I get stuck.
I didnt know my TabletPC was screwed till the day after when I switched it on and was given a cryptic message about the Master boot record. Yep, I thought – My tablet is screwed again!

A couple of good things did come out of this mistake. I now know my Sanyo 3G Camera phone supports EXIF metadata unlike a lot of the camera phones on the market which is pretty cool to know. And I also learned how to boot my TabletPC off a compact flash card. Roman swears you can boot the Tablet off a USB key chain but I tried and tried and gave up. But lets step back a second, how on earth do you create a bootable disc in Windows 2000 anyway? I remember in Windows NT and 98 you could click bootable when you format a drive, but theres no option in windows 2000.
In the end I reliased I could fake a PCMCIA CD Rom by using a Compact Flash card and PCMCIA card adapter. I then built a Custom bootable CF card using this nice HP application and this bundle of DOS tools. I then stuck the DOS version of Partition Magic 6 on the same CF card and was able to boot in to DOS by using selecting the PCMCIA CDROM and load up PMagic 6 for DOS. Where it fixed the MBR problem and set the Windows Partition to Active. Then I was sorted! The URL which helped me through all this was this tutorial – Tip: Boot from USB Key Addendum. But the key for TabletPC's is using the CF as the booter not a USB key.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

What’s in your bag?

What's in the bag?

Simple and fun thing to do. Take everything out of your bag place them on a table or floor and then take a picture and upload it to flickr. I got the idea from some blog but I forgot where sorry, Found it – Boingboing. But its important that you tag your photos using whatsinyourbag or whatsinmybag. Once your done its a good idea to make some notes for others to read and then watch as you get some really silly comments back… yes knock yourselves out guys…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Services at the wireless point

project placesite browser screen

I was listening to a IT Conversations a while ago and some guy talked about services at the access point which made me think but I was doing the washing up so kinda of forgot about it. Then I saw Project placesite via http://www.cheesebikini.com. I honestly I couldnt find the IT conversations talk I was listening to but if I do I will update this entry. I'm also sure slashdot had a thread about this a while ago which I will need to find also.

It makes so much sense to do this, at the moment when you connect to a public access point you get some crap half baked tabled driven page from the company which runs it. The best one I have used is the Sony wireless network node in the Sony Centre in Potaplatz, Berlin. That node provide you with information about the area, how to book a viewing for the consumer flats and general Sony stuff. I guess the question is if people will actually stick around on such a screen if theres bandwidth? I certainly dont but then again I've not come across a access point sporting a range of services like the ones suggested by Placesite.

The ability to see who else is using the access point is a great idea, and leads on to great uses of mDNS. I mean iTunes with rendezvous at a open access point is fantastic when your after something a little different from the Starbucks lounge music. But going deeper into community and mesh networks, you could offer so many services at the access point. From Webdav for temp storing of digital camera pictures to radio streaming using icecast or something else. So to the question asked by placesite can we use these technologies to strengthen local community? I would say yes you can with carefully picked services and applications picked for there location and people connected. Placesite is a good step forward, and honestly I would actually fill in quite a bit of the optional information if asked on a open access point. I look forward to placesite in the UK soon…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

CeBIT Coverage from Charbax.com

Chineese companies talk about their Pmps, and make fun of my Archos

If you have not yet seen http://cebit.150.dk then i highly suggest you check it out plus the comments on Slashdot. A guy walks around Cebit with a camera on his head and stores the footage on his Archos multimedia jukebox. Awesome stuff, and just the kind of thing I thought the Panasonic SDAV series of Mpeg4 cameras would be perfect for along time ago.

Theres a couple of things I would suggest to the guy whos doing this or anyone who tries this next time. First thing, get in touch with legal torrents and ask them to help you out. Dont worry I've wrote them a email on behalf of the guy already. Second, upload your stuff to Archive.org if possible. I know it takes a while but it will much more accessable to people later, plus you can place a licence on it if you like. Third, provide RSS feeds with Bit Torrent enclosures for people who use Azureus and the TV Torrents plug-in. That would easily take some load off your site because not everyone will be hammering it for new stuff everyday.

Even though its very tempting to do this for Xtech 2005, I may not. Maybe just images and audio will be good enough. But not taking anything from Charbax, this was clever and great to watch on the way into work today.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Moving from personal server to real hosting

I have made the choice to move away from using my server to host cubicgarden.com. Last month I used over 10 gig of upload bandwidth just serving cubicgarden.com. This is not ideal while on my standard 512k down | 256k up ADSL broadband connection, which may be strange for some of you guys else where in the world with DSL connections. Also next month the cubicgarden.com domain name is up for renewal, and I'm not sticking with UK2's stupid framed redirect crap. It drives me and others nuts everytime I suggest going to cubicgarden.com, I also swear once I sort out the paragraph and blockquote validation issues – I will mighty ignoyed to know the frame is invaliding my site.

Anyhow with my rant over, I'm looking for a cheap hosting company which runs either Tomcat, Resin, Jboss or some other upto date Java Servlet container. Will transfer my domain name over from UK2 and are cheap and come with about 100+ meg of server space. I need to run Blojsom, Cocoon and Flock on the server and I do not need PHP, Perl, Frontpage extensions or CGI's. I may use some kind of database like MySQL in the future but its not needed right now.
So thats an open offer to hosting companys to get in contact with me, or if anyone knows hosting companys I should consider or could get a discount on let me know soon.

So far http://www.interadvantage.com seem to be the best value for money, and it would seem even there sales people are clued up going by the answer to one of my questions yesterday.

4. Would it be possible to disable PHP, Frontpage Extentsions, Perl, etc support? I also will unlikely need the databases, can these be disabled and enabled later?

FrontPage is only enabled on an as-needed basis. We run Apache as a front-end to Tomcat on port 80, so I don't think disabling PHP for one site will be much of an option unless you just put some PHP directives in the root directory's .htaccess so as to limit what PHP can do. Perl can't really be disabled. Are you wanting to disable PHP/Perl for security reasons? I've never seen any successful hacks at all on Tomcat-only sites. Nearly all hack attempts are brute-force password guesses or exploitation of specific security holes in popular open-source software (PHPBB has been hit hard during the last few months, but PHP-Nuke used to be a hacker favorite, so was the Coppermine Photo Gallery).

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I am not getting a mac!

I reinstalled my tabletPC and have installed the usual software. And finally come back to reality, I dont need a mac at all. That plus the fact I can only get 400 pounds maximum for my tabletPC while a brand new Mac is 1000 pounds. And yes I could get a discount but even 800 pounds isnt enough to make me buy. And i'm not going to sell my tabletpc for a bloody mini mac. I got 3 desktop machines already thank you. So all you mad mac heads drop it.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

TabletPC for Sale, will swap for 12inch Mac Powerbook

Toshiba Portege TabletPC

Yes shock horror, I am selling my TabletPC in the hope of getting a Apple PowerBook. For everyone who knows me well, this is a very difficult thing to admit. I somewhat like Windows but cant deal with all the crazyness of Windows XP (specially Tablet edition which has this crazy bug), so I'm moving sideways and changing to a Mac. I would move to Linux but the Mac will do for now. Apple have done some good things in the laptop world and I could deal with changing to Apple for my general laptop computing. So who will take my tablet off my hands? I mean no disrespect but at somepoint Microsoft are going to dump the TabletPC (in my own eyes) and then where we all be?

However this move to Apple does not mean I will turn into one of these nerdy apple boys! Dusting and polishing there apple laptops while the playing with there Sony Ericsson Phones! Oh no, I'll use the laptop but it doesnt mean I'm part of the cult of Apple! I pledge I WILL NOT GET A IPOD, IPOD Mini or IPODSHUFFLE ever!

Anyway has anyone got a clue of where I can actually just swap the tabletPC for a Mac laptop? Ebay does not seem to have the greatest range of TabletPC's which could be a good thing or a bad thing. And no matter how tempting, I'm not going to sell it abroad through ebay.com. I've also been thinking I must beable to get a educational or some kind of discount, as I should just buy the Mac new from Apple. I mean 1100 for the G4 powerbook, I'm sure the price wont go down much 2nd hand. I'm really hoping I will get about 1000+ for the TabletPC which is a little less than half of the street price.

So after a super humorous conversation with Harry on the phone where I almost laughed to death of hysterical choking. Why have I made the change? Well let me explain a little more.

  1. I never or hardly ever use the Tablet features of the TabletPC. I never got use writing on the screen and adopted style simular to my ipaq of tapping on the screen instead of writing.
  2. The same reason as I tried switching to Linux a while ago, all the applications I actually use on the PC are opensource, free as in beer or free as in freedom. From Firefox, Thunderbird and itunes to PSI, OpenOffice and VLC. All of them fit into one of the three categories. All of these Applications will run on the Mac no problem. So I will only loose Windows, oh what a shame…
  3. I've had it with the viruses, spyware, adware and crazy updates. Damm I had to install 8 patches the other weekend. I dont mind doing this for my computer and server but not for my laptop too. I'm an advanced computer user (hate that word) but when I pick up my laptop I dont expect to download patches, update and restart the computer before I can use it. I treat my laptop a bit like my ipaq, I just want to use it and do an update once in a while.
  4. The web is the platform, it doesnt matter what operating system I'm using on my machine as long as its secure and realiable. Windows Tablet edition isnt either
  5. I'm not one for looks and actually I think the Apple powerbooks are not all that but its consistent unlike my tablet which has bits all over the place and dont get me started on the construction of my tablet…
  6. Having no optical drive is great when your at home or somewhere with lots of networking but take it anywhere else and having no optical drive is a pain to say the least. In time no optical drive will make sense but Apple have fit an optical drive into the same space as my TabletPC.
  7. I look at whats going into OSX 10.4 (I refuse to call it by its stupid animal name) and I'm thinking what on earth is Microsoft doing? Longhorn (or as I'm now calling it Longyawn) is years off now and wont catch up with OSX 10.4. Microsoft would need to do something very radical like build on Linux, the hybrid strategy. To catch up with OSX for someone like me. For example, lets look at some of the highlights of OSX 10.4. Spotlight, a lucene/google for the desktop. Not that special but good to have, specially when compared to the built in search in Windows XP. Yeah yeah I'm sure Longyawn will have it and more but OSX will have it this year, when I need it. And I cant get over smartfolders which acts like smartplaylists in iTunes. I've been dieing for this for years and now my mail client (thunderbird) has it I want it on the desktop too. Automator, I wont be learning applescript any time soon but you know what this is just what I need now and then. Yes you can use VB on Windows but screw that when this builds it for you.
  8. The technologies of the Mac are pretty damm good. I love the fact Mpeg4 H.264 is built in now, Windows has never taken advantage of mDns (rendezvous or zeroconf) and still makes a pigs ear of bluetooth while the mac just does the job. OSX is just the gui, so I can skip to a Unix shell when ever I like which makes the cmd shell in windows look like a 486 processor in 2005. I actually really hate using the windows shell and look forward to getting rid of it on my laptop. The mixture of Open and propitery in OSX is much more balanced than Windows will ever be. I dont rule out Linux but right now the gui's are not as easy to use day in day out like OSX.

I will buy a Apple Mac, but it doesnt mean I will love or like it *smile*. Now who will take this TabletPC off my hands?

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Demon finally upgrade to 1meg and 2meg options

Demon Internet Access Home Office 1000

I was talking to Ben on instant messenger tonight and he sent me a link to the Demon 1meg and 2meg broadband services. I couldnt believe it. Just at the point when I was considering getting NTL cable 750k on top of my Demon ADSL Ben comes along and saves the day. Will miss having 2 xboxes but damm I cant believe Demon never informed there customers of the new 5 pound upgrade for double the speed. However the upload is still only 250k (usually get up to 300k with demon). I will happly pay 30 pounds a month for 1 meg but not 78 pounds a month for 2meg! Come on Demon sort it out! Thanks Ben….

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Bluetooth vs FM Radio headphones

I was talking to Dave today and was mentioning Apple's new powerbooks which now come with Bluetooth 2.0. The idea is to make streaming audio to bluetooth headphones much higher quality, which makes sense but why they jumped from 1.2 to 2.0 who knows. I think its just going to add a whole load of confusion to the market. Anyhow, Dave was not convinced bluetooth headphones were the way to go. He offer the alternative of FM headphones. At first I kinda of dismissed it but now I'm thinking there pretty damm cheap and last a long time in battery life when compared to bluetooth headphones. Also using a FM Transmiter (which is still not sold in the UK!) its really easy to use the same pair of headphones anywhere. For example at work it would be easy to plug in my FM transmiter and use a small pair of FM headphones or headphones attached to one of those cheap FM radios to listen to my music wirefree and anywhere within 50meters. Its even better if you have one of the phones with a FM radio built in. Maybe Dave is right about this, for now while Bluetooth evolves in this area at least.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

The service at the wireless point

I was listening to Dana Blankenhorn on The Impacts of Persistent Distributed IT at Accelerating Change. He suggests that we do not have a platform for this decade and that wireless (wimax and wifi) could be it. He states the simple but actually quite obvious fact that we use wireless to access the internet. So everyone is cramming the pipe beyond the access point and not using the actual wireless in ways we are only just starting to see.

And honestly it all makes sense. Wireless has effective bandwidth from 3meg (802.11b) to 100meg (WiMax 802.16). Why not use the wireless point as a platform? Dana suggests Linux is the key for this and he's not wrong. For example, I saw this linksys wireless router ages ago which can be hacked to put linux on it. Yes thats great but wheres the use in just having linux on it? Yes I know you could install anything you like on it but besides a webserver I've seen little else. Till a while ago when the Xlink guys released Xlink Kai station for the WRT54G. Which means you can route traffic for playing multiple player games on the free xlink network with just a xbox and one of these. (yes i have talked about it before, but highlighting whats possible when you think about wireless as a platform).
Yes limited example but a interesting none the less. I would like to see zeroconf aka rendezvous better known as multicast dns services happening at the wireless level. I mean its ideal because the automatic discovery nature makes roaming around wireless points a joy. And before I go, lets not limit wireless to one point. With Mesh networking it should be simple to extend the range and the users to the service. Lets also not forget machine to machine services would benefit from mesh technologies.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]