tensixtyone

So I finally rebooted my laptop after the 10.4.10 update, fine a few months late but what the hell. Anyway, my Powerbook started kernel panicking on boot. After a few minutes investigation I found that the iScroll kext was causing all the issues, quickly remove the file in single user mode and I was back up and running…

So much for seamless updates eh?

The BBC reports that Symbian dismisses the “gPhone” or Android as it’s now been dubbed, by the looks of it the BBC have snubbed the new “Open Handset Alliance” as theres no 100% dedication to the plaform, which is hard to expect when not even a demo version of the OS and hardware has rolled off production lines.

Looking at the members list, it seems that Symbian have got something to worry about. While Nokia and Sony Erricsson are about 60% of the mobile market and both Symbian customers it seems the rest, Motorola, HTC, LG, and Samsung have took the jump to join this group in its early stages. Also, alot of the big carriers are behind them, NTT DoCoMo, T-Mobile, and Telefonica.

Google has used their corporate might to pull in a few “big boys” from the industry, once a prototype is out and interest starts brewing i’d expect a few more to join in.

I’d been mulling over getting a N95 for a few weeks, and I was quite hyped up with moving to a intelligent handset (compaired my Nokia 3 Series mobile). To cut a long story short, I didn’t get the handset but Jo got it for me on Orange. I’m 6 days into my usage of the N95, so I feel now is a good time to air some initial views.

First of all, lets start on the obvious. The N95 is Nokia’s convergence product combining 3G, Wifi, and GPS with the Series60 3rd Edition (SymbianOS 9.1) software. The N95 has been a hit with few due to the ever crowded market place (HTC smartphones, iPhone) and a few minor issues. Nokia have recently addressed the major concerns with the launch of the N95-3 which has 8gb on-board storage, better battery, and larger screen, but it could be a little late with the impending arrival of the iPhone in europe. I’ve got the N95-1 version of the phone which was the main release version for the UK.

First boot, the phone showed the traditional “holding hands” Nokia branding, date/time setup, then dropped into the front screen. For the last year or so I’ve been using a HTC Wizard running Windows Mobile and have had to deal with a fair share of awful interface design from the hands of 3rd party developers, but the only way I could describe the front screen that came with the current firmware is a abomination. Orange had decided, in it’s infinite wisdom, to replace the plain and simple Series60 front screen with a menu driven nightmare that chews RAM and makes the whole phone sluggish. I had to get rid of it. I jumped into the familiar menus and tried in vain to remove the horrid front screen, it seems orange don’t want you to remove it.

I might as well admit, I’ve voided my warranty already, in fact, I voided it on the same day. Theres a few details available on-line to change your product ID to a generic Nokia one, then using the official Nokia Software Update to re-flash the phone with a nice generic firmware. This worked a treat. It might just be my opinions, but the Orange menu was just too much of a hindrance on the phone, enough to warrant trying to get rid of it as fast as I could. This is a carrier issue, not really what everyone would experience with the phone.

Bar the misfortune of the Orange menu, the interface is slick and easy to use. The menus for the phone are a tad over-complicated but you soon get used to the location of the commonly used functions. So, i’m keeping it, flashy menus and features win me over. The battery life could do with some improvement, and hopefully Nokia will release the improved battery for N95-1 edition handsets, but I guess only time will tell.

After a few days of thinking i’ve decided it’s time to move away from Textdrive onto GMail and my own hosting. Why? Well lets have a quick overview.

1. Memory allocation on shared servers

Recently i’ve been dogged with Mephisto spitting feathers after a few page requests, saying it’s hit its memory limit and the MySQL lib can’t run a command. This is a new change that happend on the TxD servers which i’m not impressed about, especially how the process never seems to tick over the acceptable limits for ruby processes.

2. Joyent

Joyent, the Gmail replacement, or so I thought. Over the last few months its suffered from developer time being concentrated on the wrong areas. Want to make a mail alias for your Joyent account? No you cant, but you can make spiffy lists…

If the guys at Joyent actually worked on features that are needed and not what they want to develop then its quite possible that i’d stick with it. Another fantastic example is that you can’t mark mail as read/unread, even simple webmail clients have this feature but it seems to escape Joyent.

3. Mish-mash of solutions

Textdrive shared hosting run via Webmin, Mail via Joyent or Webmin however you want to do it, Billing related changes via another control panel, Storage space via another panel.

I can understand that Textdrive/Strongspace/Joyent are three products that have been thrown together into the all encompassing “Joyent Core” but they should of worked on the integration before they announced it.

4. All or nothing

I like Strongspace, I like the idea, but now i’ve got to have Textdrive hosting and Joyent mail with it as well, all i want is Strongspace, nothing more. integration is a good thing but why an’t we allowed to buy seperate services? I could go for Bingodisk but that doesnt support rsync. After a quick investigation it seems that S3 is my best bet, and probably a bit cheaper.

So, theres a quick run down of my dealbreakers, the issues i’ve been living with for the last few months. I currently pay around £15 for a low powered dedicated server in London which I hardly make use of, due to the traffic I get to my sites it seems like a good candidate. I’ll use Google Apps for Domains for my mail and related stuff, and S3 for backup. Now, the long trawl of migration…

Over the last two weeks i’ve been consumed with the need to setup a MythTV box, PVR and TiVo-esq features bundled with the power and verciticy of Linux, yes I know that reads like some marketing document but I don’t care. Jo was totally bemused as to what I was doing, all she could see what the several hundreds of pounds of hardware purchasing.

My old mobile sold, as did a few pieces of idle electronics from the house, and from nowhere I’d managed to drum together £200 for the inital parts. CPU, Motherboard, 1.5Gb RAM for £70 from eBay, Nvidia FX 5200 for £14, 200GB HDD for £22, also eBay. Chieftec Case from my local Freecycle and various other parts from my electronics “stash”, Throw in a DVB-T, DVB-C and analogue tuner and i’ve got a MythTV box ready to go.

So, was it worth it all? I’d say so. While I only have one tuner its still a very flexible platform. Myth’s recording logic is very good, especially when combined with reliable listings such as Radio Times, the box can detect programs for the next 14 days and schedule in times to record the program you’ve selected, avoiding conflicts wherever possible. This small feature alone is enough to use MythTV, while other software probably supports it as well this is the first PVR/DVR system i’ve used.

As for the PAF, Jo has said its around 7 at the moment, which is good for a system which has its little quirks and crashes every so often when recording programs, mostly due to corrupt feeds.

More will come with experience.

In the last few days I’ve had issues with my temperamental PSU, I’m not sure if its due to high load or just being faulty after a year of using it, but it just sometimes refuses to start up the PC. Yesterday I had to fix it, I went to Alpha Computers and purchased a £16 450 Watt PSU. The PC now boots first time and I’m happy.

Or at least I thought I was…

I wandered into the computer room this morning to find my PC off, I get the PC started again but I’m bemused to what has happened. Checking the logs I see one painful line:

localhost kernel: ACPI: Critical trip point

No mention of any temperatures or overheating processors, everything is running below 30c and high load presents no heat spikes, not even on the GPU. I check lm_sensors to see what else is failing to see a flurry of “ALARM” entries, all on the 3.3v, 5v, and 12v lines. It seems that this cheap PSU can’t even keep up with a load of a Geforce 6 series, 2 HDDs and a Athlon64.

So now i’ll have to invest in a worthwhile PSU, at a higher cost. Really I deserved it for trying to skimp on one of the most critical parts of a PC.

It seems that Jobs is winning his campaign against DRM, and his inital warcry wasn’t just a shallow attempt to gain supporters. EMI have finally dropped the DRM deadlock, they will still continue to offer DRM versions of songs at a discounted rate but the DRM-free version are available without restrictions, in AAC format, and at a higher bitrate. How much? Just 30 pence more…

So is it worth it? Checking EMI’s current signed list i’d say its worth it just for the Beastie Boys and Queen. EMI’s move is interesting to the community, others speculate that no other lables will follow this move and EMI only commited to this due to their ever falling stock price. All we can do is wait and see…

In a attempt to get ActiveSync running on QEMU with my HTC Wizard I had to custom patch QEMU to support USB devices with multiple interfaces. I’ve packaged up a version for Edgy which is available from the tensixtyone repository.

[update]

For anyone interested, the patch is available here along with a few other of Lonnie Mendez’ patches.

In its response, the government said these digital locks, known as Digital Rights Management, helped give users “unprecedented choice”. – BBC News

In other news…

Henry Ford announces that the Model T is available in any colour, as long as it’s black.

Need I explain more?

At ManLUG on Saturday, Robin Johnson did a presentation on their current project to restore the MCC Interim releases to a working condition using QEMU. The MCC Interim releases present the first distribution that wasn’t dependent on an existing OS, a real milestone in the history of Linux which, until recently, has been lost in the sands of time. Robin, along with John Heaton and a little help from Owen LeBlanc, have managed to recreate 3 releases of MCC Interim which are now available as QEMU images.

Now the question, Why do all of this? These releases represent a real change in the Linux community, after several months of development time Linus released his kernel and MCC Interim was created months afterwards to make installation easier. Essentially, this reduced the required knowledge level from Unix gurus to experts and system administrators. This shift is a notable milestone in Linux’s history which should be preserved, some may write it off as useless but I hope they would understand why it has been done. A further (possibly small) note to add, Linux “genealogy” also shows that MCCI had spin-off distributions, TAMU, MJ, and SLS. SLS morphed over time into the Slackware distribution, a key distribution in the early days of Linux.

The archiving of legacy software is essential, you never know when someone will come across a VAX that needs a OS reinstall, a piece of software that requires a specific version of AIX, or some other issue that would torture a system administrator. Looking away from day to day issues, the software needs to be archived for the prosperity of humanity, understanding the roots of computing which will intertwine more and more with modern life as time goes on. With projects like ManLUGs we can show the next generation how it was “in our day”.