gary’s web sofa

Steorn claimed last year (to a resounding chorus of “bullshit”) that they had developed a way of creating energy from magnetic fields. Their “Orbo” device is on display from today at the Kinetica Museum in London.

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…

And it continues…… Xen would be nice, but XenExpress’ hardware support isn’t perfect. I realise that it’s a bit much to expect it to support my wi-fi hardware, but it would be nice. Xen is a paravirtulisation solution. It usually uses a custom kernel for each “guest” machine to translate it’s direct hardware interaction into interaction with the virtualisation “engine”. The upside of this solution is that the virtualised servers run almost as fast as if they were running on bare hardware. The down side is that you cannot run closed source operating systems (unless the OS developer supplies a Xen compatible kernel, which they don’t). The new Intel and AMD CPUs supporting VT and AMD-V features remove this restriction, but my intention is to run this on a 3.4GHz Intel Northwood P4 CPU, which doesn’t support VT. I’ll come back to Xen when the driver support is better, and I have a VT or AMD-V CPU to play with.

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’ve got a fairly good sense of direction, but getting around Dublin is a pain in the ass. The road network is all over the place, and the maps are useless when you’re driving. I don’t need extra features like MP3 playback (my CD player does that), or bluetooth phone support (my bluetooth phone thing does that), so a low end unit will do fine.

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 got a Nokia e61 a few days ago and It’s almost perfect. I need 24/7 access to email, web and SSH because of my work, and up until now I was carrying around a Sony Ericsson K750i and a Palm T|X. I was thinking of buying a Palm Treo 650, but then this came out. It’s lighter and slimmer than a Treo, and the battery life is pretty good.

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 had a nice little Netgear ADSL wi-fi router that sat on top of a kitchen cabinet and broadcasted a nice stable 3Mb internet connection all over the house. It needed a fancy directional high gain antenna to reach the far corner, but it was cool. It had a firewall, a DynDNS client and pretty green and orange lights. Then yesterday, shortly after it’s first birthday (no surprise there!), the connection went very slow. Worse than dial-up. I assumed it was just somebody other than me soaking up the bandwidth. Just in case it was a router problem, I rebooted it….. Big mistake! No matter what I did, it refused to believe that I had a broadband enabled line. I dug out the old ADSL modem the ISP gave me when I signed up to figure out if it was the line or the router, and it connected first time, so I had a dud router.

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…..