The factory installed Linpus distro is OK-ish, but it doesn’t get upgraded as new versions of the component software gets released, so still includes Firefox 2, rather than 3. Also, it tries to simplify things too much.

I tried installing XP Home, which isn’t as easy as you’d think because there’s no optical drive. I followed this guide to installing XP using a USB key, and after an age (well 2 1/2 hours actually) I had a working XP install. The problem is that this isn’t the speediest of hardware (the SSD in particular is woefully slow) so there’s a huge amount of tricks and hacks to get it running at an acceptable speed. In the end I decided to revert to Linux.

There are a few distros tweaked to run well on these systems. About the best is Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It’s an official branch of Ubuntu, so gets continuous support/maintenance. I ditched Evolution for Thunderbird, but other than that it’s pretty much perfect out of the box.

Version 1 had a web UI for day to day management (starting & stopping VMs, tweaking networks etc.) and a separate Windows application for console access. VMware tried to make an all powerful web UI for version 2, and integrated the console functionality.

There must have been a backlash during the beta, because they’ve included VMware Infrastructure Client at the last minute. It leads to an odd division of capabilities. On the VMware Infrastructure Client I can create a new VM or import an appliance, but I can’t open an existing VM. On the Web UI I can create a new VM or open an existing one, but I can’t import an appliance.

What’s happened is that in version 1 you had a web UI for management and a console application for maintenance. Now both functions are split between interfaces, which is a pain in the rear.

While push IMAP worked perfectly fine with our previous service, it’s a bit flaky on Gmail. We tend to see random disconnections without warning and the phone’s “reconnect every X minutes” function seems to be a bit of a crock and isn’t fixing it……

3 Skypephone FAQ

As long as you top up with €20 a month, even the data transmission is free. In theory you could use up the €20 on Irish mobile calls (where 3 are about the same price as SkypeOut) and use SkypeOut for everything else, thereby getting very close to the absolute cheapest call rates anywhere….. on a mobile!

It seems that 3′s Skype client is actually a bit of a cheat though. These guys say that the software actually makes a standard local voice call, and it’s only at a central hub that the call gets routed over the Internet/Skype network. It makes sense, seeing as the Skype clone (IM+) that actually does a full Skype implementation has fairly major lag, due to the weedy CPUs in most smartphones.

Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Testing out the 3 SkypePhone

They’re a serious R&D outfit that will take on anything that takes their fancy. They’ve been working on active suspension for a few years. Springs and dampers are reactive. A bump in the road hits them, and the springs compress to soak up most of the jolt. The damper then slows down the decompression so the car doesn’t kangaroo down the street. No two bumps are the same severity, so even the best mechanical suspension systems can only cope best with an average bump at an average speed.

Cars roll when going around corners. Again, passive systems can only do so much. As long as the centre of gravity is above the road and the springs can be compressed, the car will lean away from the corner.

Active systems such as Bose’s take dumb mechanical components out of the equation. Springs and dampers are thrown away and replaced with computer controlled pistons that move the wheels up and down to lift them out of the way of bumps and push them into potholes. It’s trivial to ensure that a car stays level the whole way through a corner. They could even make a car lean into a corner if they wanted to.

there are two key things to get right. 1. "something" needs to read the road ahead and make sure the suspension moves at the correct time, and 2. the pistons need to be very precisely controlled and be capable of moving extremely quickly. Bose are nicely positioned to work on both problems.

Bose do very nice noise canceling headphones. They work by taking the sound wave, generating the exact opposite, and feeding it through the headphones. One cancels the other out and the wearer hears nothing. Bose treat the road surface as just another sound wave. They generate the exact opposite, and feed the output to the suspension actuators.

A conventional speaker moves a paper cone very rapidly to produce sound. The cone is attached to a magnet which is positioned inside a magnetic coil. A good speaker must very accurately and quickly move the magnet in and out of the coil to produce the best sound….. which are the same requirements that a good active suspension system needs.

Take a look at the video clip above. At the end they really start showing off. They do a Knight Rider "turbo boost" move and jump a Lexus equipped with their suspension over a kerb without a ramp.

Link via link

They’re also going to have phones with wi-fi, which, in conjunction with a free hotspot, will avoid one of the calls, instead connecting directly to their international SIP infrastructure.

Irish firm launches ‘global’ mobile phone | The Register

Phase one was to install a webcam in the office, so he could see and hear what was going on, but he couldn’t answer back, and it wasn’t what you would call mobile. They ended up building a remote controllable platform with a webcam, speakers and a touch screen on a pole, so he can roam the corridors, attend meetings and drop into coworkers cubicles just like he was there. He controls it all remotely using a joystick, and the touch screen displays a live feed of his face from his webcam. Some would discard the idea as a toy or gimmick, but I see this as a very workable solution to the disconnect often felt by those who work away from the office.

The Record via Slashdot

But why rely on the colo to do all the hard work? Some people put their own UPS equipment in their racks, but if the colo’s power dies, then the aircon goes too, so personally I’d have the servers drop suddenly rather than slowly cook themselves. Besides, the power to the meet me rooms will go too, so you’re going to be without connectivity in many cases too. Fires, floods and earthquakes happen, so all the power, server and storage resilience in the world won’t help with that.

What we’ve had to do is setup a remote warm site. If we lose Dublin totally we use BGP and a few cooperative bandwidth suppliers to route the traffic to our London site where we’ve got replicated data and servers powered on and waiting in the racks. In theory the changeover is instant, but in practice some customers could see up to 5 minutes of an outage, but most are back connecting again within 90 seconds. It’s not cheap to operate this way, but surely Craigslist & Co. have the cash.

Edit: This would have to happen on the very day that they issued a press release boasting about 2 years of 100% uptime for one of their major customers who closed their redundant site because they didn’t need it

Steorn

This has to be a con. These guys must be trying to get some fool with a wad of cash to buy them out before the world finds out, but the shear quantity of money being spent is huge. They could have announced the technology in an obscure physics journal, but instead they took out a full page ad in The Economist. Wikipedia has more.

The Free Energy Blog is tracking the progress…

My next option was to try VMware’s new free VMware Server application. It installs as just another application on a base OS, so if the OS supports the wi-fi card, VMware will. It’s a fully virtualised solution, so stock OS kernels interact with the VMware server application instead of the hardware. It takes 10 minutes to install and it works just like having VMware Workstation installed on a local PC, only with the additional benefit of the VMs staying running when you disconnect from the server.

The server is now up and running (it’s a Dell PowerEdge 400sc, with a 3.4GHz P4 CPU and 2GB RAM) and is running 2-4 VMs. A Debian Etch email server (Postfix/Courier-IMAP) and a Debian Etch web server (Apache/PHP/MySQL) are running constantly, and I run a Windows 2003 and/or CentOS VM when I need to.

I bought a Navman F20 from Currys a week ago, primarily because cheap (???????260), but also because it was new on the market, so the maps would have some chance of being current. First impressions are pretty good. UK coverage is 100%, but Irish coverage is only 40%, so while it has every house number inside the M50 in Dublin, it doesn’t have anything other than N grade roads outside the cities. This would be a major pain in the ass if I was a Dublin jackeen who didn’t have a clue where I was going outside the pale, but I’m the exact opposite, a culchie lost in the big smoke, so it’s OK. The real nifty feature is the lack of a “make a U-turn as soon as possible” warning every time you make a wrong turn. It just shuts up and automatically recalculates the quickest route.

I’ve got a few gripes though…. The display is big @ 320×240, but the signal and battery strength indicators are so small as to be useless. There is also no way of knowing what method you’re connected with. It would be nice to know if I was connected by wi-fi (free) or 3G (not) before I start downloading the latest podcasts.

The e-mail client is far from perfect. My preferred method of connecting is IMAP. That way I can access all my mail folders and changes get synchronised with those on my PC and webmail. IMAP is pants on this device. Connecting is very slow, and it often hangs when disconnecting from the server.

The other problem with e-mail is the “access point groups”. Because this thing will connect using 802.11g, UMTS, or GPRS, you can define groups with automatic failover. That way you can always have it try the fastest or cheapest and try the next one down the line if it doesn’t work. Unfortunately the e-mail client has a habit of forgetting what group is selected and changing the setting to the currently active access method. It’s happened several times that I’ve been out and about all day on UMTS, and it wouldn’t switch back to wi-fi when I got back to the office

I then thought I’d combine the freebie ADSL modem and an old Linksys access point I had lying around to get up and running until I could get into town to buy a new one next weekend. Leaving something lying around in this house is A Bad Thing. It was dead as a dodo, so I had no choice but to go into Limerick first thing in the morning and buy a new Linksys one in PC World. It’s a shiny silver colour, and has green and red lights, but it violates my one requirement in purchasing replacement hardware. I don’t mind spending the money if what I buy is better than the one it replaces, but this one does exactly the same thing as my old router, in exactly the same way, at exactly the same speed An odd thing though. This unit was available in two boxes. I could get it on it’s own for €100 or with a bundled PCMCIA Wi-Fi card, as a “home networking starter kit” for €75!!!!!

It’s got me thinking though….. I’ve got enough parts lying around the place to repair or replace any other PC or PC related part, but for want of a €75 part, I lost two hours this morning that I had to spend going into town and buying the replacement, and an hour or two that I was going to spend working last night. I think I’ll be going on eBay later to find a spare. I also couldn’t go to IMDB.com last night to find out what else I’d seen the girl played Wil Ferrell’s wife in Talladega Nights before…..

I bought a PSP in the early days, before they came out in Europe and haven’t regretted it, for one reason: I bought a 1GB memory stick at the same time. What Sony have never promoted was it’s ability to play video and music off memory as well as UMDs. When I travel, I may bring a game along (GTA: Liberty City Stories usually), but I also use SimpleDivX & PSP Video 9 to convert movies from DVD format to DivX (which I retain on my PC’s hard disk, just in case), and then to a format that I can copy to the PSP. This way, I have a device in my coat pocket that I can store a couple of movies, a few CDs worth of music, and a game if I’m really stuck to keep my mind off how boring airports actually are.

It can get even better however. Since the platform was announced, indie developers have been writing their own games, emulators, and even complex applications to run on the platform, making it into a much more complex and feature rich device. I could have a pocketable device that along with the above, I could use to read email, track news feeds, IM, read eBooks and more. The big stumbling block however is DRM. Sony are a content producer as well as a technology company, so they will never produce technology that could impact the profitability of the other side of the business. These “homebrew” applications are written without the direct oversight (or income possibility) of Sony Corp., so they prevent “unsigned” code from running. Every time a way around the DRM is found, Sony close the loophole by releasing a new firmware revision with a minor feature enhancement. If you don’t update and close off the hole, you don’t get the feature. Newer games frequently require you to update your firmware before you can play the game too.

It’s a sledgehammer & wallnut approach in my opinion. It vastly cripples the hardware in order to protect a small part of the overall “package”. Removing the code signing requirement, and instead working on sandboxing the unsigned code, so they could have access to the wireless hardware, Memory Stick, RAM etc, but not the UMD media would protect their valuable movie/game content and open up the hardware to a series of new uses. It’s not a new idea. Java runs like that on every PC, so why can’t Sony do the same on the PSP?

My PC setup is actually looking pretty sexy now. Not a beige part to be seen. The monitor is black, the case, a Lian-Li V-1000, is brushed Aluminium. My keybord is one of Microsoft’s new Natural Ergonomic 4000s. They’ve even put in a padded wrist rest… mmmmm.