Will's blog

I ordered a Seagate Barracuda Ultra ATA/100 drive from Amazon.com the other day and it arrived today. I opened it up to discover it's a PATA drive. However, I thought I ordered an ATA drive and not a PATA drive.... Long story short after an hour of researching and finally calling up a friend who does hardware work, I discovered that "they" renamed ATA to PATA so that it won't be confused with SATA. No one sent me the memo.

I was at Tag's Hardware in Porter Square (Cambridge, MA, USA) to buy Poly-acrylic for some shelves I'm putting up and they're selling decent bookshelves for $20.00. We bought one--it's pretty sturdy and it folds up for moving/storage/whatever. They probably have more left if you're in the area and interested.

I've been working through PyBlosxom stuff. I updated the web-site to use PyBlosxom 2.0-dev (in trunk). We worked through entry caching plans on the mailing list and implemented most of them. We've also been discussing and working through template variable syntax and semantics. I've been adding new unit tests and using tests to help work out the design issues. The testing framework has made it so much easier to do development work.

I've been writing a todo-list-tracking application in Django. I'm hitting a point where it's half-implemented, but I'm thinking I may switch back to Pylons because it's Paste-friendly and easier to deal with.

Bunch more stuff, but it'll be in separate entries.

Last night, S and I were walking to meet some friends at the crepe place when I spotted a black mini-tower with a "free" sign taped to it. I looked at it and it had been hand-built and had case fans with LEDs. I figured that's kind of interesting. So I picked it up and brought it home.

Needless to say we were late to meet the friends. But the next day (today), I took a better look at the machine (i.e. I plugged it in and turned it on). It's an Athlon XP 1800+ with 640 MB of RAM (or something like that). I figure I'll slap one of the half-dozen hard drives I have sitting around in it and use it as a spare build machine or something along those lines. The things you find on the side of the road....

I don't use the right alt key much and at some point in time it just stopped working. I thought the key itself was dead, though that was puzzling. Turns out Ubuntu Feisty (and possibly earlier versions--I have no idea) maps the right alt key to a third-level character input key for extended characters.

I bumped into the System \rightarrow Preferences \rightarrow Keyboard panel and also discovered I can very easily switch my caps lock key to a control key. Ahhh... happy emacs pinky....

I upgraded my Nokia 770 to Internet Tablet OS 2006 and it's fantastic. It's faster, more responsive, and more stable. Additionally, there's an application manager that downloads from a repository just like Debian which is _hugely_ awesome. The browser is faster, too.

My only issue so far is that I haven't quite got the knack of launching the thumbboard. At some point, I'll look into that.

Well-written review of the 2006 release here.

Carrying a Nokia 770 through airport hoo-ha is much easier than carrying a laptop, so that was really nice. I packed a series of pdfs onto it (Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation, Free Culture, Open Source Development with CVS, ...) and read through a good portion of only one of them.

Also, the Nokia 770 comes with two stylii (not sure why), which allowed S and I to play Mahjong together. That was a little comical since there were two of us huddled over this little tiny screen. Still, it was really fun.

I also had WIFI and web-browsing capabilities everywhere I was which was really nice.

Batteries held out pretty well. I went two or three days of medium usage with the light set to low and the WIFI off without any problem. I brought the charger which is pleasantly small and charged the battery at the airport before the return flight home.

It's been helpful at school, too, since I can check my gmail account wherever I am on campus.

I read A 770 is ultra-small and mobile, but not a UMPC over at Internet Tablet Users Blog and they mention a series of issues people are having... but I'm not having any of them. My browser has never crapped out, the device has never hung, I'm not having problems loading any web-sites that I look at (though I don't look at Palm Addict), no problems with memory or speed of the device, ...

I have to admit when I first saw the Origami marketing, I wondered for a bit about whether I should have waited and bought a UMPC, but... the Nokie 770 runs on free software and I can write programs that run on it without having to purchase Microsoft software licenses and that's a big plus for me.

Additionally, I think I'll look for a digital camera that takes the same kind of MMC card my Nokia takes when I'm in the market for a new digital camera. That'd be really neat: take a picture, put the card in my Nokia, email it to people I know--all with devices I put in my pocketses.

Anyhow, happy so far. The only minor issue is that the text for books is so small that it's hard to read if I'm in an airplane going through turbulence.

I've been reading about them for about 6 months now and I've been tossing around whether to get one or not since they started selling. I have a Sharp Zaurus 5600 which I never use and so I figured I'd pine over but never actually buy a Nokia 770.

Then I had a change of heart. I bought one because it's easy to use, small, has a full-blown Linux distribution that takes .deb packaged files, has a great web-browser, is in constant development as an Open Source project, and someone's gone and ported Python to it.

I ordered it on Sunday and it showed up on Wednesday. I've been getting to know it for a little under a day now and I'm really impressed--it both fits my needs and extends my ability to do things very nicely. I'm planning to bring it travelling next week with a load of PDFs on it of things I want to read. Additionally, I've been able to check email which helped me get to a meeting yesterday night after I had forgotten the location.

w00t!

This is more for my notes. I figured if I post it here, then I've got it written down in a place I can find again some day.

I have a Canon Powershot S230 and it records video in some format that has a .AVI extension and I think it's Motion JPEG or something like that (I have no idea what I'm talking about in terms of video formats/codecs/whatever).

Kino doesn't like the format, though. So I need to use ffmpeg to convert the files to a format that Kino does like:

ffmpeg -i _file_name_ -target ntsc-dv file_name_.dv

Kino seems totally kosher with that. No clue why or how--I figured it out by trial and error.

Then I insert all the .dv files I want in a given "movie" into Kino. After doing some fiddling around, I Export, click on the DV Pipe tab, make sure the frame of: dropdown thingy is set to All, write the file name in, make sure the tool is set to FFMPEG VCD Export and then click on the Export button. That creates a file that's in a format that I can record to a cd as a data file and it plays magically on my Philips DVD player.

Back in 1998, I bought a Dell Inspiron 7000 PII 266mhz monstrocity of a laptop which weighs in at over 8 lbs. It's really heavy. It's seen its fair share of action since then: it was toted back and forth between MA and CT while I was doing consulting work; it was abused by an x-girlfriend; it was shipped in a flimsy letter-sized envelope thing via USPS; and then it's been through several moves since I move on average once every 8 months. It's been through a lot.

The case is cracked, the things that latch the lid shut are broken, and the power adapter has been fixed a few times (the last one by Brian who had the right tools to fix it and thus it's been fine since [Thanks, Brian!]). Even so, I powered it up last night, did an apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade and it's going fine. Slow, but fine.

So this post is in homage to a laptop I bought back in 1998 that's stuck with me through thin and thick and is still usable even after all these years.

Dell Inspiron 7000 PII 266 mhz circa 1998 laptop, I salute you.

I need an external HDD enclosure so that I can [fill in obvious use cases here]. I have a couple of 3.5" drives that I'm not using, so that eliminates a 2.5" enclosure that can power off USB which is a bit of a shame.

Anyhow, I was looking at these:

• 3.5 & 5.25 USB 2.0 External Drive Enclosure (ME-320U2)
• Sabrent 5.25" USB 2.0 Aluminum External Hard Drive Enclosure
• Vantec NexStar 3.5" USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure
• Kingwin Silver 3.5" USB 2.0 Aluminum External Hard Drive Enclosure
• PPA 3.5" USB 2.0/Firewire External Hard Drive Enclosure with Light Bar

I haven't heard anything about any of these companies, though. So that makes it a bit difficult to decide which one to get.

Anyone have any thoughts? Anyone have a HDD enclosure they prefer over these?

The OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus folks released 3.5.2 today. I flashed with the new image and it's pretty cool, though I don't notice any differences. Mostly I just flashed and pressed a bunch of buttons and then shut it off.

I need to get a case before I really want to bring it around with me. I'm still paranoid that I'm going to break it while using it. I need to get a wireless card or figure out how to sync with the docking station or something similar so I can back up my information.

I gave my desktop to my girlfriend's parents because their machine was about to die (like, serious _death_) and my machine was more machine than I needed and I figured I'd borrow some spare components from my dad and after that series of transactions, everyone would be happy. Thus it transpired and everyone was happy! w00t!

Then I discovered I couldn't put the massive full tower case under either of my desks and with the fourteen fans (some of which were parts taken from dismantled B-52 flying fortresses) it sounded like my desk was sitting on the tarmac of an air field during an air show.

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I decided to get a smaller quieter case and picked up an Antec Sonata. It's great. Everything I had read about it was right on down to the fact that you can count exactly how many times you touched the top of the case due to the amazing ability of the piano black finish to preserve in a pristine fashion every single detail of every single fingerprint.

Then after wrestling with the IDE ribbon cables, I decided to pick up two rounded IDE cables for $8.00 each.

The machine is super duper! Total monetary cost to me so far is $112. My girlfriend's parents got a machine to replace their very seriously almost dead one. My dad freed up some room in his computer room. Everyone is happy!...

Well, except for my girlfriend who's a little unexcited when I spend long periods of time over several days futzing with hardware.

Antec Sonata case ASIN: B000087ZQC Buy at Amazon

24" Rounded IDE cable ASIN: B0002344O8 Buy at Amazon

I have a Sharp Zaurus 5600 that I bought when Amazon.com had them for like $260 (might have been $280). It was a price at which I decided it was definitely worth getting a handheld computer with a thumboard that was running Linux.

Anyhow, so I ended up with a minor issue... The Zaurus 5600 I got had a PXA 250 Intel chip which has some problem with caching or something like that. The PXA 255 chip fixes this problem. In order for Linux to work on the device, they slowed down the something or other. So I think the end result is that the 5600 with the PXA 250 is slower than the 5600 with the PXA 255. I'm really fuzzy on all of that mostly because I don't really care a whole lot.

The OE team put out the 3.5.1 OZ release a couple of weeks ago. I followed the instructions here and downloaded the files from here.

Everything seems to be working on the pda itself. OPIE is pretty neat--I'm definitely very excited. The ability to rotate the screen is awesome. It's definitely a lot more snappy than the Sharp ROM that comes with the Zaurus 5600 itself.

Next step is to get a wireless card. After that, I want to install some games for those dull moments in life.

My grandfather is a (apologies if I get this wrong) Geotechnical Engineer and co-wrote Soil Mechanics, one of the seminal soil mechanics books.

Anyhow, he either broke or misplaced his HP 10c calculator recently and he's looking for another one. Turns out that the HP 10c calculator is considered "rare" now and HP hasn't made them for quite some time. It's in the Museum of HP Calculators.

I don't want to get into a discussion of why alternative calculators aren't good enough.

So, given that, any ideas on where I could get an HP 10c? I checked Ebay and there's one for sale, but it's up to like $160 now. Are there other places to look? Specific places ("Have you checked [site x]?") are better than generic ones ("You should check your local flea market"...). Any thoughts? Anyone have one they'd like to part with?

Gizmodo has done a few articles based on tech people and what gadgets they've got. They're just phenomenal. I have these "I have problem x and want to solve x, y, and z (with z being not so much of a priority) but really want the solution to fit in with my life" issues and reading about what these folks are carrying and why they're carrying those things is amazing. Most of the blurbs also include what gadgets they used to carry and why they stopped carrying them.

I wish there were more of these sorts of things around. I don't want to feel like a Ghostbuster walking around town with an unlicensed nuclear power pack on my back to power the myriad of things I'm carrying. I want to have the fewest number of highly functional gadgets on my person and I'd rather not go through trial and error to get to that point if I don't have to.

Anyhow, these articles are fantastic. The latest one is Dan Gilmor.

I'm tossing around getting an mp3 player again. My car only has a tape deck and the radio reception is kind of flakey for no apparent reason I can discern [1]. Also, I take the T around town frequently and it'd be nice to have a portable device that I can listen to at work, on my work commute, at home, on the T, and in other places.

I don't really need to upload my entire music collection. Having said that, I'm a mood-centric music listener and I have a bunch of different moods and it'd be nice to have at least 10 or 20 songs for each mood. Thus I've tossed around getting a hard-drive based player.

I'd rather have a player that doesn't require a fancy gui thingy on my host computer. Having said that, I realize those gui's are nice since they frequently build an index of the songs on the drive, so it makes boot up of the player much faster. I HATE Creative Labs Music Center (or whatever it's called). I've never used iTunes. I don't need something to categorize my life--just something to load songs onto the mp3 player.

I don't really care about size, but I'd like the player to fit in my pocket. I don't care about cool-factor. I don't care about user interfaces as long as I can select songs to play, play them, and skip songs I don't feel like listening to. I don't care about playing solitare or about organizing my life. A remote control would be nice but it's not necessary.

The battery has to last at least 6 hours and it's not acceptable for it to die in a year.

I don't want to pay a fortune. It has to be available at amazon.com.

And that's as far as I've gotten on this train of thought. Email willg at bluesock dot org if you have ideas [2].

[1] - I could be parked NEXT TO the WBUR tower and all I get is hiss one day, but the next day it comes in just fine--heck if I know what the problem is.

[2] - I keep tossing around adding comments to my blog. I don't think that many people read it and want to comment on it and I don't feel like dealing with comment spam. Maybe I'll add it next week for a trial period to see if it works out or not.

Every week or so, I have a 30 minute block of time where I decide I'm going to go tackle installing Debian on my Dell Inspiron 7000. It's good for me to keep trying this because it's incredibly humbling.

The machine has a CD-ROM drive, but it doesn't handle CD-RW discs (or at least it doesn't handle the ones I have). So every attempt I make, I create a coaster.

Going to try one more time. This time with a Knoppix cd. The biggest problem I'm having is getting the machine on the network. Once I get that done, then I'll be ok. But I can't seem to get the machine on the network with either my 3Com 10baseT pcmcia card or my SMC wireless pcmcia card.

One more time....

I was printing out the 1,203,481,288 pages involved in my tax return on my HP OfficeJet Series 700 printer which I got from my uncle a million years ago back when printers would print one dot at a time and it sounded like disco music, when suddenly an error message pops up saying in really big letters:

    PRINTER ERROR

    The computer has lost communication with the printer.

    Cancel printing, turn the printer off, then back on, do the hokey pokey,
    burn incense, twirl three times, tap your heels together and then
    try printing again.

I'm skeptical of stuff like that. I'm a programmer--I'm fully aware that computers and software have no clue what they're doing. My printer was still printing the pages--albeit so incredibly slow that a three-toed sloth would start getting impatient. I figured I'd wait until the printer was done doing whatever it was doing.

I came back 24 days later to discover everything printed out just fine. And in color--I had no clue this was a color printer!

I still don't know what that error was all about. Maybe the software didn't expect the printer to take so damned long? Who knows? Regardless, I'm done filing my taxes, it's 60 degrees outside, and I'm going to go get some breakfast.

My cell phone is doing things that are reminiscent of a small furry woodland creature in the throes of death. It even makes the same noises, though my phone makes the noises in a highly non-reproducable and intermittent sort of way. Thus, I've been tossing around getting a new cell phone in the near future. That's the first problem.

Along comes problem two: my schedule went from this easy-to-manage one-or-two-things-to-do-a-week to a massive stack of errands and events that I honestly can't come to grips with short of getting a helping hand. I tossed around getting another Palm Pilot or similar device and then decided I should replace my phone and get a Treo 600 (buy at Amazon) because they're waaay cool.

I tossed this around for a week and then ended up deciding to punt on the phone issue until it actually dies and getting a paper organizer that fits in my pocket.

The biggest reason I got a paper organizer and not a PDA (that's "personal digital assistant" and not "public display of affection" in this context for those who are wondering) is that I want _less_ gadgets in my life. Every time I add a gadget to the arsenel, it adds to the total amount of time I'm spending maintaining and fixing things not to mention the huge chunk of time it takes to get the things to work with all the other things I own. This is definitely a case where less is more and more is less.

My brother has a Mac. It's a something-or-other-with-high-end-thingies-and-stuff Mac, to be specific. Anyhow, I have a friend who after years and years and years of being a PC Windows/Linux guy got a Mac and never looked back. In fact, he then proceeded to get a few more Macs.

Their experiences and my needs for my next machine have caused me to think seriously about getting a Mac. Then I read this article and thought that was interesting because I want to create and produce things. If Apple really is focusing on that segment of the market, then I should get a Mac.