Posted by George Wright
Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:30:00 GMT
So I buckled under temptation and bought myself a 32GB CF card and a CF-IDE converter board off eBay just now; whole lot came to about 74 pounds including postage, which I think is not too shabby for what should be a fairly good 32GB SSD solution.
Claimed read/write speeds for the card are 36/40MBps which would be very nice if true, but I’m expecting it’ll probably be around half that at best. Still, I’ll do some rudimentary tests with hdparm to see how it is; hopefully it won’t be slower than the 4200rpm 1.8” disk that’s currently in there!
I also hope the battery life improves… I’ve only ever had the X40 down to about 7 or 8W power consumption at minimum; with this setup I hope to inch an extra watt out of it!
Posted in Computing | 8 comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:37:00 GMT
Has anyone seen this - it seems to be fairly interesting. I’m tempted to do it myself as the disk drive in my X40 has died on me..
eBay seems to have the relevant components for about 70 GBP.
Posted in Computing | 6 comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:28:00 GMT
So I’ve been working at Cendio for a week now; I must say it’s been one of the best times of my life.
Sweden’s a great place, especially Linköping; it’s clean, cycletastic and everyone is so friendly here. Our office is a fantastic place - it’s spacious, cosy, has a hot chocolate machine (!!!) and my colleagues are awesome! I especially like that I get my own office as well.
Over the evenings and weekend I’ve been on the bike a fair bit, having nearly been run over by several buses (silly traffic driving on the wrong side…) and tomorrow I’m going with Inge Wallin (of KDE fame) on some boat thing on the canal which should be great fun.
The cycle routes around here take a bit of getting used to; in the UK I’m quite happy to cycle alongside cars on dual carriageways and take on large roundabouts without any trouble, but with the combination of being on the other side of the road, and not knowing the customs on the road here, I’ve been sticking to country lanes and cycle paths for the time being. I’ve had no crashes so far this year (as opposed to six last year, including 3 pretty major ones…) and I intend to keep it that way!
I shall be sorry to leave on the 15th July.
Posted in Computing, Misc | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:48:00 GMT
Today’s been a somewhat hectic day for me; after getting up at 0500 to get to Heathrow by 0700, I managed to get on my 1030 flight to Arlanda and arrive in Stockholm just after 1400. After hopping on a train to Linköping, I was greeted by my contact at Cendio, Peter Åstrand, who has been exceptionally helpful and accommodating with my moving in.
I’m staying in university accommodation which is rather nice; it’s a bit Ikea-y, but not too shabby. There was a particularly bad dead fly infestation in my room but a dustpan and brush seems to have taken care of most of it, and I may have to vacuum around when I can get hold of one. The luxury of an en-suite is always welcome, and I have a 10Mbit/s internet connection which is definitely most welcome!
My room
As for my job out here, I’ll be working on the next release of ThinLinc, Cendio’s flagship remote desktop product. At first I believe I’m mainly doing testing of the upcoming release to ensure it meets quality standards, but Peter is keen for me to dig into the coding side soon.
In my spare time, I decided to bring my bike over and I’ll hopefully spend most of my evenings racing around the roads on it. It really is a delightful little machine. When I’m not on the bike I hope to get some work done on nxcl/qtnx as well.
The bike
Posted in Computing, Misc | 10 comments
Posted by George Wright
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:05:00 GMT
My exams finally finished about 2 weeks ago, and since then I’ve been vegetating (mainly in bed, on my bike or shooting) so I’ve not really been doing much in the way of work.
My roadmap for the summer is fairly packed; on Monday I move to Sweden to work for Cendio on their ThinLinc stuff then after three weeks out there I’m moving back to London to work from there for the rest of the summer.
Interspersed with ThinLinc work I’ll be doing lots of work on NX hopefully and working on my nxcl 2.x branch with my Summer of Code student, who is starting to make progress with his stuff now that his academic commitments are finally over!
I think this summer will be the best summer for open source NX work there has been; we now have a fairly mature server in the form of FreeNX, and my client is taking shape in the form of nxcl/qtnx, and the work on nxcl 2.x will be a much needed restructuring of the client code.
It would be great if anyone interested in NX at all could take a look at my nxcl 2.x roadmap and give me any feedback as to what they’d also like to see or see changed. I’ll also be working with Seb James on his GTK+ based frontend as well (nxlaunch) and hopefully we’ll see a fairly decent KDE and GNOME client come out of all this work.
Posted in KDE, NX | 1 comment
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 26 May 2008 21:26:00 GMT
With my parents going on holiday to Taiwan last month I asked them to pick me up an Eee PC to play with. It’s a really nice little machine; I got the 8GB flash/1GB RAM model, and I’m very impressed with how responsive it is. Even Open Office is fairly nippy…
The keyboard is a little small and takes a bit of getting used to, but I can just about touch type on it now. The machine as a whole is very sturdy and seems solidly built, and the touch pad is just about usable (the mouse button isn’t too great though). The screen is a little grainy but very crisp - it seems better than the screen on my X40 (albeit at a lower resolution) - and the default Xandros distribution is quite nice.
Anyway, I’ve built qtnx debs for the Xandros that is on there (I added the Debian Etch repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list to complement the default Eee repositories) and uploaded them to my server if anyone wishes to use them (hit ctrl-alt-T to bring up a terminal, then use dpkg -i to install them). The configuration dialogue doesn’t quite fit on the screen but you can use the alt+mouse button trick to drag the window around.
Posted in Computing, NX | 3 comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:33:00 GMT
Congratulations to Gross David for successfully being selected to take part in the Summer of Code this year to work on NX support in krdc. Hopefully this will lead to some interesting changes ahead!
Posted in KDE, NX | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:02:00 GMT
Thanks to Matthew Johnson, both qtnx and nxcl are packaged in Debian Sid for all to use. This is a slightly modified version of nxcl which uses openssh instead of nxssh thanks to some recent work done by Fabian Franz. nxproxy and nxcomp should be coming soon it seems.
I should be releasing a minor update to nxcl/qtnx in the next few days to address some issues regarding custom keys and including the new openssh code.
Posted in NX | 3 comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:57:00 GMT
Today I finally decided to make a formal release of qtnx and nxcl, both version 0.9 as they are not tested enough to be a 1.0 release yet, especially as I made some API changes to nxcl which might have broken Seb’s nxlaunch frontend.
They’ve been tagged in freenx’s subversion at svn://svn.berlios.de/freenx/tags/freenx-client-0.9. Relevant instructions are in the README files for both subdirectories.
Debian packages should be appearing shortly courtesy of Matthew Johnson.
Posted in NX | 4 comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:57:00 GMT
As Google have announced the Summer of Code for 2008, I would rather like to see NX support finally appearing in krdc, KDE’s pet remote desktop connection client.
Back in 2006 I did a fair bit of work on an abstract client library for NX, and in 2007, Urs Wolfer did a fantastic job of cleaning up krdc and making it far easier to add a different backend to it. What I’d like to see is someone come forward this year and tie these two efforts together to make an unbelievably awesome NX client for KDE.
I’ve put up a preliminary proposal at the KDE SoC wiki, and I’m quite happy to mentor the project so long as the KDE demigods agree (Thiago?)
Posted in NX | 6 comments
