Somewhere out there!

Mike Calligaro has posted a very interesting discussion about ROM/RAM battery usage in PDAs.

The requirement was that, at the point where we decided the batteries were “critically low,” they had to still have enough power to keep the RAM charged for 72 hours. The idea there was that you could discover that you were out of power on Friday on the way home and you’d still have your data on Monday when you got back to your charger.

A typical battery holds 1000mAh of charge. 128M of RAM takes about 500mAh to stay resident for 72 hours. 64M takes about 250. This is why you never saw a 256M WM 2003 device. It would have run for a minute then decided its batteries were critically low.

This is why switching to Persistent Storage can radically improve your battery life. With PS, we removed the 72 hour requirement.

I happened to have two IBM WinXP laptops on my desktop tonight as I was installing the NX client on one of these machine before my brother goes to China at the end of the week.

Anyway, I had a remote NX desktop running on his machine to my colo Xen machine about 256kbps (50ms) DSL away and on mine I had the local NX desktop which I’ve been using as a test install for the past two weeks. Compression was set at modem speeds for the remote and LAN speeds for the local desktops. I decided I need a test to show off NX off to him and figured a quick look at my gallery would be good. And it was. It surprised even myself.

The remote desktop loaded this page faster than the local desktop. There was a definitely noticeable difference in page display speed in Firefox. The quality of the remote desktop on the two screens was hardily different. The thumbnails on the remote were slightly blurry, but not by much.

The remote machine is sitting next (Xen-wise) to the gallery web server and obviously my local desktop load the thumbnails over the DSL link. So this is a certain testament to NX’s performance given that same page and images were rendered and presented faster from the remote location.

Detailed HOWTO on seting up Freenx on Fedora. Some comments about getting Gnome to work. I think Ubuntu has the same problem, but unfortunately doesn’t have the xkb config files mentioned. Will have to investigate further.

For a while I haven’t been able to get spellbound working. Today I got annoyed and discovered the following hint: Re: Firefox & Spellbound & Hoary – Solved.

The following worked for me:

* unzip spellbound\_lib\_linux_1.0.2.xpi
* cd bin/component/
* sudo cp \* /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/
* sudo mkdir /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/myspell
* unzip spell-en-NZ.xpi; rm install.js
* sudo cp * /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/myspell
* finally install spellbound as normal

I was trying to figure out how to launch X11 based OO2 (v109) open-document format files from Finder. Initially I found this useful OSX/X11 FAQ, but the particular item on “Launch X11 applications directly in the Finder” was good only for applications and not associating file types with an application. After hunting around a bit more I discovered X11 Extension.

X11 Extension is a background application that makes it easy to X11 apps, X11 documents, Window Managers and Desktops.

Basically X11 Extensions has a pref menu for setting up file types with X11 applications (ie dot-ods with …/program/scalc), you then associate in Finder the OSX application “X11 Extension”. This acts as the loader, which checks it’s X11 file type association list and loads the appropriate application.

Now by next is to figure out how to manage remote filesystems and map uids from my NFS mounts to my OSX uids. It would be nice if I could do this without having to change (find -uid #uid -exec chmod #nuid {} \;) all the uids associated with my current OSX user.

Short recipe for getting lighttpd and phpmyadmin to work on Debian.

Lighttpd is quite easy to build for debian. Once you’ve built that apt-get install php4-cgi phpmyadmin. During the install process for php4-cgi, some apache packages might get added. I suggest you remove them, they aren’t needed: sudo apt-get remove apache2-utils apache-common libapache-mod-php4 –purge.

Next step is to edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. Add “mod_alias”, to server.modules and alias.url = ( “/phpmyadmin/” => “/usr/share/phpmyadmin/”)

Finally, add or uncomment the following, making sure to note the bin-path.
fastcgi.server = ( “.php” => ( “localhost” => ( “socket” => “/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket”, “bin-path” => “/usr/bin/php4-cgi”) ) ).

You’ll need to access phpmyadmin via http://server.name/phpmyadmin/index.php. For some reason it doesn’t work without the index.php. Haven’t figured that bit out yet. (server.indexfiles is set appropriately.)

This cool little device (VGA2USB) even has Linux drivers. Perfect unit for closet-based headless computers.

A comment about pg_autovacuum:

People should use pg_autovacuum and *not* daily vacuums.

pg_autovacuums whenever it’s necessary, which may be *much* more
frequently than once a day (ie, once every 30min depending on mail
volume). -sc

From [Dbmail-dev] PostgreSQL and transactions.

Going though and cleaning up some old entries. “Mac Forums – 1.5 vs 1.67 PBs – maccentral suggests little difference” is probably still worth posting:

Mac Forums – 1.5 vs 1.67 PBs – maccentral suggests little difference

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the final version of a product is often its best, most reliable rendition. It seems to me that these are the last of the single-core G4 AlBooks. The next bid release will issue a new era, complete with new design issues, bugs, real-world failings, etc. I predict that these current AlBooks will be considered very durable and desirable, even when the new systems come out.

Given that the new iBook is still not out and Mac is moving in Intel, I think this comment is still on target. I’ve been working around things and I’m planning to put off my laptop decision until August/September now. Although I think a Mini-Mac with NX to a Linux/KDE server is going to be my primary desk workstation. I’m not swinging either way with regards to a laptop. WinXP again with NX is definitely workable. Fundamentally power saving in the biggest issue with Linux laptops at the moment. Using WinXP or OSX means you don’t have to worry about this.

When I look at the prices of the new IBM R52s at roughly 2500 for a 15″ P-M 1.8Ghz with 512Mb and DVDRW or an iBook 12″ with similar specs (need to add bluetooth, and more memory) for about the same price. The Thinkpad is very tempting. For the same price you get either better hardware or better software. That said the NX client works much better on Windows. I think regardless I’m not interested in a Powerbook. At 15″ PB seems pretty much the same spec as the R52s, but for twice the price. I’ll just wait until next year and buy a Mactel PB.

Bottom-line. I’ll try out the MiniMac/NX combo and see how my workflow functions. At this stage I’ll probably restrict myself to larger fast response 20″ screen, vs the 17″ the MiniMac current has.

I meant to post this a while back, but its been sitting in my queue. Back in February I purchase a x335. After some trials I got mpt-status and native hardware RAID functional under XEN. Although, testing the performance is still on my TODO list. Then April I got a x206 to replace a x205. The x206 said it had RAID 1 built-in with linux drivers, and thus didn’t require an additional RAID card. I should have recalled that linux drivers, most often for RAID means Redhat only binary drivers.

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