George Wright's Blog: Category Computing

Twitter!

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:48:00 +0000

I have now joined Twitter! Final year’s going to be a laugh…

ThinkPad X40 SSD conversion and battery woes

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:03:00 +0100

My CF card and CF-IDE converter board arrived in the post and so today I started trying to get Linux installed on it.

At first I thought I’d try installing from a USB CD drive, but this was a horrendous mess and ended up wasting a good 8 hours of my life. In the end, I dumped the CF in a USB reader and debootstrapped hardy on, then booted it and installed kubuntu-desktop.

The installation is still going, but I did have a chance to run a quick hdparm -Tt on the disk; seems it’s doing a fairly consistent 25MB/s which is excellent given the old disk only did 18MB/s or so. hdparm also tells me that the disk is in UDMA-2 mode which is not too shoddy.

In other news, I’ve noticed that the batteries on my X40 are clapped out after nearly 3 years of abuse. The main 8-cell I have is down from 61Wh to 35Wh, and my extended battery which clips on the bottom is down from 27Wh to 12Wh. I can handle paying £30 to get a new 6-cell, as that’ll give a good 8 hours or so of life, but extended life batteries for the X40 are very seldom seen on eBay and the ones which do end up on there go for silly prices.

Does anyone have any experience replacing the cells in a ThinkPad battery manually? I just ripped my extended battery apart (luckily I had the correct triangular screwdriver bit…) and the four cells inside there are shaped in exactly the same way as in the normal 4-cell battery, which leads me to believe they share identical cells. My theory is that I can buy a normal 4-cell on eBay then rip the cells out of it then put them in the extended life battery. The only problem I can see at the moment is that ACPI reports design capacity and last known capacity, and I don’t know how to flush these values for recalibration. I’m assuming the charging circuit should be clever enough to work it out for itself?

I’d appreciate any comments or suggestions.

Bit the bullet...

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:30:00 +0100

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!

Using a CF disk in an X40?

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:37:00 +0100

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.

First week at Cendio

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:28:00 +0100

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.

Sweden at last

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:48:00 +0100

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

Eee PC

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:26:00 +0100

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.

Desktop on Demand NX clients

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:24:00 +0000

So today I released what is hopefully something very close to the final release of my NX client, but this time as a branded version for Desktop on Demand.

The Windows client has now been tested a lot more thoroughly, and it shouldn’t freeze anymore (due to some lovely hacks… turns out that the Qt/Cygwin build likes to freeze if you’re using the Windows XP native theme engine, so I told it to use Plastique), doesn’t bring up an ugly terminal window and it no longer fullscreens the NX window in all cases.

The OS X client has had minor usability updates as it was all pretty much working beforehand anyway. It’s generally a lot nicer to use and I’ve confirmed it works on both OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (x86 platforms).

The best thing about both these clients is that they do not need installation to the computer; I tested them by putting them on USB flash disks and taking them to friends’ computers and seeing if they’d connect without any trouble - and they did.

Kudos to NoMachine for being incredibly helpful about the NXWin problems; they created a knowledge base article detailing exactly how to compile it and also updated the source packages as the original ones I used didn’t work at all. I’m very impressed with how quickly they got back to me on this!

The clients are now available from here and their md5sums are:

61c3902c6ae4342b23c303425bfb6718 Desktop on Demand.dmg.zip f0d24af8e1900cdc7fd4ab9470245113 Desktop on Demand.zip

As for Linux, I’ve yet to package that; I will be packaging a standalone tarball with the NX client statically linked to Qt. For those of you who don’t like that, there’s always the source code in the FreeNX subversion repository and NoMachine’s site.

Qt/Windows and Cygwin

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:22:00 +0000

So in the process of learning about cygwin/mingw/qt in order to port qtnx to Windows, I concluded that the easiest way would be to compile nxcl using cygwin (which, luckily, compiled with no changes at all), and then to compile Qt inside cygwin and then compile qtnx inside cygwin, linking to both Qt and nxcl.

Turns out getting Qt 4 to compile inside cygwin is a non-trivial task. Thankfully, however, the LyX guys have done most of the work. It just needed a minor alteration to the source, though, otherwise a linker error occurred during compilation of Qt/Win 4.3.3.

In src/corelib/codecs/qtextcodec.cpp, there is an #ifdef block starting on line 528. You just need to add

&& !defined(Q_CYGWIN_WIN)

to stop the Asian codecs from being compiled in; there’s probably a better solution to this, but I don’t see this as being particularly problematic. After that you can follow the instructions in the LyX wiki and link to Qt just fine.

From this you can probably tell that I now have QtNX compiling inside cygwin on Windows. Well, yes, it works, but I haven’t yet tested whether it will actually connect to any servers. Theoretically, it should so long as I set the PATH properly to point to the directory where nxssh and nxproxy are, and hopefully all should just work fine! I may need to append “.exe” to the binary names in nxcl though, but all in all I think it should be fairly trivial from now on (so long as nxproxy behaves as expected and doesn’t start making annoying noises about X11 and Win32).

Gratuitous QtNX on Windows screenshot

Nokia N810

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:35:00 +0000

Now that they’ve released the Nokia N810 in the UK, I ordered one yesterday and it arrived this morning; hurrah for prompt delivery!

My initial impressions are mixed.

Good things:

the screen is fantastic
it came with maps for the GPS for free
it has a keyboard
it’s responsive
it’s nice and small

Not so good things:

the battery cover is incredibly hard to take off
the battery doesn’t clip in - it just sits there and is held in place by the cover
the GPS takes ages to lock
the keyboard feels a bit mushy, and the top row is hard to type on

Anyway, I’ve now installed Maemo Mapper which works like a charm (a bit of hackery is needed to get the internal GPS to work with it though), and ssh from xterm is very usable with the new keyboard. Haven’t installed our WebKit stuff on it yet, but the Gecko-based MicroB engine isn’t too bad.

Overall a very nice piece of kit, and I’m very pleased with it.