Here is the way to make a quote:
Things always take longer than expected. In this case, it wasn’t actually finding the venue (which was done in 4 days from start to finish), but sitting down in front of this computer long enough to blog about. (Well, I’ve been sitting many long hours in front of this computer, dealing with things like budgets, designers, partners, and registration — just not blogging.)
This text comes from this post on Going Solo.
Back into full force.
With my rekindled love for Ruby I started hang around in #ruby-lang again and got the question how you use Cairo to draw inside a Ruby-Gtk2 program. I cooked up a small example and figured that sharing it here might be useful for others as well.
Otherwise you can just enjoy the cleanness of Ruby 
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'gtk2'
window = Gtk::Window.new
window.signal_connect("delete-event") do
Gtk.main_quit
true
end
area = Gtk::DrawingArea.new
area.set_size_request(100,100)
area.signal_connect("expose-event") do
cairo = area.window.create_cairo_context
cairo.rectangle(10, 10, 50, 50)
cairo.fill
true
end
window.add(area)
window.show_all
Gtk.main
You can find my complete coverage here. Screengrabs hosted by flickr.
After writing my impressions on Eeedora, it seemed only natural to write about the hardware. There are definitely some issues that I found with the Eee PC that I am not too happy about (and some that are just great).
For starters, who makes a laptop these days, without integrated Bluetooth? It just seems daft. This is a tiny sub-notebook, and how can I get on the Internet if I’m sitting in a train or a bus? The most natural thing would be for me to enable Bluetooth on my mobile phone, and use it as a modem. Oh wait, the Eee PC is missing Bluetooth, and its a WiFi only device. Sure, I can stick a USB Bluetooth dongle on it, but thats an external contraption, that I’ll have to make do with.
I was going through the fine print, and while ASUS provides a 2-year warranty on these laptops, the warranties themselves, seem to be limited to the country of purchase. These warranties, are not international. Who makes a laptop these days, that doesn’t expect the user to travel much? I can imagine that when travelling, the Eee PC can’t be my only laptop - I’m the kind of person that finds Dell’s next-day-onsite-business warranty pretty darn useful.
The keyboard, is tiny, but its expected for such a tiny laptop. I’m wondering why so much space is reserved for the speakers, and why not just give us a larger screen? I have a feeling its got to do with cost, and this can only get better in the future. I’ve noticed that the keyboard requires you to occasionally “jab” it harder, to get the key press that you want. Or its just that my fingers aren’t nimble enough, on this small thing.
The location of the left Shift key, is silly. In VIM, you occasionally tend to press the Up Arrow key, as opposed to the Shift key. I’ve seen people hack their Eee, to ensure that this stupidity is reversed. However, I’m not into moving keys around, to satisfy my needs at this stage.
The one button mouse, that does both right and left clicking is a very nifty feature. How do I middle-click? This is a very crucial feature in Unix land, and especially useful in Firefox (tabbed browsing).
The battery life, for something this tiny, sucks. It sucks even worse, when the WiFi is enabled (quite naturally). My dreams of it being used daily during a conference, or at a meeting, has clearly been shattered. To fix this, I might have to order an external battery pack, that outputs between 9-12V (apparently, 9V is too little to power this 9.5V device, but 12V is just fine).
I’m pretty happy with the performance of the SSD:
[root@Eee ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sdc /dev/sdc:
Timing cached reads: 566 MB in 2.00 seconds = 283.05 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 4 MB in 4.39 seconds = 932.40 kB/sec
[root@Eee ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 566 MB in 2.00 seconds = 282.50 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 66 MB in 3.07 seconds = 21.50 MB/sec
/dev/sda being the internal SSD, while /dev/sdc being a USB thumb drive (2GB, Sandisk Cruzer Micro).
The built-in video-camera, is pretty standard. Its resolution isn’t great, but it suffices for a video chat.
Sound, is OK. I installed VLC, to allow me to play video/audio, and realised that it was going to set me back, in total, about 21M, with all its dependencies. Hardly appealing, but I was going to have a more interesting time, bringing in Totem, for instance. I have managed to watch a DivX movie, without too much trouble. Will I be able to watch one, entirely, say, while on a plane (or train), I don’t know.
Yes, video, and DivX decoding, works fine on a 630MHz processor. Why has ASUS under-clocked the Eee, giving it a 300MHz performance slack? Did the difference, really save battery life?
There are many ways to hack an Eee. The many guides online, showing how and what one can do (from simple Bluetooth, to a GPS or a touch screen) is just amazing. I don’t plan on hacking my Eee (yet, anyway), and the most I’m going to do, is go get more memory- RAM is always a good thing.
Its small. I spent this week using the train and tram system quite a bit, and realised that even though the trips themselves were short, I was getting some work done (like finding time to write blog entries, and some code - I haven’t gone as far as installing a toolchain on the Eee yet, but if you can find some Internet access later, committing code is easy). Its OK that its cramped. And its OK that it works on top of my huge backpack. These are clear benefits of its size, and hopeful durability.
Its cheap. I had a colleague who’s laptop (a Macbook) died the night before he was about to give a talk. He could head a few blocks down, buy an Eee, and immediately start re-writing his talk again. I saw him deliver his talk, using the Eee and the stock Xandros that was installed on it. In the old day, if your laptop died, you just started to walk around with a notebook and pen,and you gave your talk informally, without slides :)
Anyway, enough rambling (I’m about to reach my stop). Next up, what powertop thinks of the Eeedora install, and re-spinning it.
Technorati Tags: eeepc, asus eeepc, asus, asus eee pc, review, 7c, linux
I’ve been in Germany for two weeks now, and I miss a few things already…
First of all, my family and friends back home (of course!). It was great to spend quite a bit of time with my family, and I was able to visit a few friends before the big move. (Hopefully they’ll come to visit in the months ahead…)
Outside of that, I wasn’t able to bring my books, and I’m missing the Wii a little bit too (I’ll need an NTSC-compatible TV)… and… a power adapter for my 750 GB IOmega hard drive… the one that all of my photos are on! (What a thing to forget! Oops!)
Now you know why my flickr page has not been updated recently… (Well, that, and I ought to go out and shoot a few pics.)
So, I apologize for not posting any of my pictures on flickr recently… (:
With that, I’ll end this post with a few of my favorite recently uploaded photos.
Dave Bullock / eecue is the offspring of a photographer and a programmer. He has been sifting through bits on the internet since he was young and along the way has taught himself programming, UNIX and photography. Dave is a frequent contributor to WIRED News and a member of the San Bernardino Sheriff's Search and Rescue Team. When he's not shooting photos of geeky stuff around Los Angeles, you can usually find him crawling through a cave, out in the desert or rescuing a wayward hiker.
And here is my one liner:
Programmer / Photographer / Admin / Human
And my tags:
programming, photography, downtown los angeles, los angeles, cooking, desert, search and rescue, SAR, electronics, ham radio, microcontrollers, hacking, computer security, wired, photojournalism, hiking
Here is the daunting list of social networking sites I have profiles on, along with a short description of what it is all about. [If you want to join a site that is invite only, let me know and I'll make with an invite]:
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Self-portait, originally uploaded by Thoughts of an Aggie.
Photo hosted by flickr.
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Dear “lazyweb“,
How do I type all those funny European squiggles and dots on the mere 26-letter US keyboard on my Lenovo X61 laptop in Linux? Searching Google and copy-pasting found characters is getting old pretty quickly. The correct way to type these characters is not obvious.
If it involves special scripts and downloading configuration files, I am not interested. How would one of those normal, non-geek user do this? I’d like to know the proper way.
(For “bonus points”, typing a Euro sign would be great too.)
Thanks in advance,
Umlautless in Deutschland
En exclu dans Libération, les photos du mariage de notre Président !
Et comme un bonheur n'arrive jamais seul, toutes mes félicitations à Isabelle Balkany qui a su avant tout le monde réinventer le chèque emploi-service-féodalisme à Levallois et qui mérite ainsi sa Légion d'Honneur. Après enquête, il apparaît donc qu'une prise illégale d'intérêts n'est pas incompatible avec une « conduite civile irréprochable et méritante ».
Soyez l'ami des puissants, y'a que ça de vrai. Encore bravo, Isabelle Balkany !
© 2008 Michel Valdrighi - Posté sur Intraordinaire.
“ Has there ever been a situation in which a tiger has eaten a penguin? ”
© 2008 Michel Valdrighi - Posté sur Intraordinaire.
Being the long-time Linux user that I am, there was no way I was going to be satisfied with Xandros, which is the stock Linux that ASUS ships with the Eee PC. I was stuck for choice between Ubuntu and Fedora, and after some careful evaluation, I decided that Fedora, was right for me.
Getting Eeedora, was pretty straight-forward. The installation wiki is pretty accurate when it comes to the “how” of installing Eeedora. For me, it was made easier that I had a Fedora system already, so I could run the tool to create Live CDs from the livecd-tool package.
One snag I noticed, and this is more with the Live CD script, is that when you don’t have a bootable USB thumb drive, it tells you that, but doesn’t quite tell you it didn’t make an installation on the thumb drive. I guess the script could be more idiot-proof. Anyways, making the drive bootable is easy.
Now, once that was done, it was on to installing on the Eee. I ensured that in the BIOS (accessed via pressing F2), the first boot device was the USB thumb drive attached to the system at boot-up. However, it was never booting into Eeedora, and I only managed to see the Xandros start up. Highly disappointing.
Turns out, that hitting the Esc key was the magic sauce, during boot-up. Only when doing that, was I given a boot menu, and then I could choose if I’d like to boot off the internal SSD, or the USB thumb drive. Once that was sorted, I was pretty happy to see a familiar Fedora-looking screen (sure, it said Eeedora, for legal reasons, but I think its a pretty darn good spin :P).
The installation process went on pretty smoothly. During partitioning, I was pretty much rid of Xandros - the chosen default was actually the most sensible. Just one / partition, filling up the entire disk, with no swap. As usual, anaconda (the Fedora installer) will warn you that not having a swap partition will be detrimental to performance - I wonder how many newbies might decide to create a swap partition (kind of a big no-no, on these SSD based devices).
One thing I did notice was the use of ext2 partitioning as opposed to a journalled filesystem like ext3. The natural question then comes to mind, as to why not just use jffs2?
Once the filesystem partitioning was sorted, and GRUB was chosen as the default bootloader, anaconda proceeded to install packages. This was a fairly speedy process, and once that was complete, it was a simple reboot, and I was booting off the SSD before I knew it.
You’re logged in by default as the eeedora user. You get a stock XFCE4 environment (or stock, that I would think anyway), and it comes with the basic utilities you need to get working (Firefox, wireless, etc.).
There were some things I obviously did not like, so decided to poke a little further. First up, was creating a user, that was not”eeedora”.
Dissecting the .bash_profile of the eeedora user, I noticed some things:
Needless to say, I disabled all this, in my new user account, as well as disabled autologin in the inittab.
Why XCFE4? Its a 900MHz Mobile Celeron processor, deliberately underclocked to 600MHz, with 512MB of RAM. This is the kind of environment, that can run GNOME. And when we notice problems with GNOME, its time we fixed it. Heck, I have an almost similarly configured IBM laptop, without PAE, that runs GNOME just fine!
I must commend WiFi Radar - this is something that pretty much, just works. And its small. It looks unmaintained, sadly, so its probably time to take an interest in it. Fn+F2 enables and disables wireless very well. I do however notice that even with the wireless disabled, the WiFi light (in blue), remains turned on. I find this to be rather quaint, and must prod it further.
Brightness control (Fn+F3/Fn+F4) seem to work well in Xandros, but I can’t seem to replicate such joy in Fedora. There is absolutely no reason why this shouldn’t work. It does annoy me, because its sucking precious battery life, from my usage of the Eee, by keeping it nice and brightly lit, when I’m on the battery.
Suspend and resume, just work. And because we’re dealing with an SSD, it just works, really fast as well. Sure, when I open up the screen of my Eee, I actually need to press the power button to get it to resume, but this kind of behaviour is perfect for me.
Do I like recompiling all the magic in /root/eee-setup, everytime I get a new kernel? No. Speaking with Dave Jones though, there is an expectation that all the drivers will be available in F9. Kudos.
Webcam? Works fine when I run lucview. Doesn’t work with the Skype beta that I get from the Skype download site. No idea what is missing, I just feel a bit bummed that I’ve got to find the solution to this issue at some stage soon.
As an install report, I think this does, just fine. Its now just time to hack on the distribution, to get it to the way I want it to work.
Really excited to be able to share some information about a project that we have been working on lately!
Pioneer recently released their new service SyncTV in a private beta. What makes it very interesting is that it’s built using GTK+ and GStreamer. SyncTV is an application and service to watch movies and TV-series over the internet.
SyncTV provide this service on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, all through the cross platform capabilities of GTK+. SyncTV also shows that you can make really slick applications with GTK+ that look identical no matter which platform you run it on.
At Imendio we have worked on the project since spring 2007, mainly by improving the GTK+ Mac OS X port, but also packaging the application into an easily installable application bundle.
The project also included making Webkit/GTK+ run smoothly on Mac OS X which involved replacing the font backend to make it use Pango. Sven blogged briefly about this last year.
The observant follower of All Things Imendio (TM) would also realize that part of this project was to create hooks for GTK+ to integrate with the Mac OS X menubar which Mitch blogged about.
For a more in-depth review, see Download Squad.
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Colin Charles (byte)
Dario S. Ernst (Nebukadneza)
David Bullock (eecue)
David Edmiston (nshade)
Garrett LeSage (garrett)
Gowtham S (Gowtham)
Hubert Figuiere (hub)
Jochen Maes (SeJo)
John Edgar (neom)
Knut Erstad (soulman)
Matt Gilley (Blondeguy)
Michel Valdrighi (michel_v)
Mikael Hallendal (Hallski)
Phillip Moore (pdm)
Photocritic.org (Haje Jan Kamps)
Riadh Djebrouni (keene)
Sean M Puckett (Kattbjorn)
Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)
Steph Meslin-Weber (Stephmw)
Stephanie Booth (bunny)
Steve Berryman (steveb)
Stig E Sandø (Fufie)
Thijs Deschildre (Teus)
Thomas Kjær (lang)
Tim Gerla (Tybstar)
Tony
Tor r0x0r Haugen (torh)
Will Simpson (linuxphotogeek)
varjag
Last updated:
February 06, 2008 02:01 PM
All times are UTC.
Powered by:
