bl1nk

A list Apart is currently running its annual web design survey. Not just for designers, the survey covers many aspects of working on the web. Go do it.

Today in Amnesty International Australia’s online day of protest against internet repression in China. A wonderfully long name for a silly little gag. Whoop de doo!

Except this is important.

Given that people are imprisoned, tortured or murdered for political activity on an almost daily basis in China is the freedom to do what I am currently doing all that important? Well, how do we know when other (more important?) rights are expunged, violated, swept away etc? Do we rely on Xinhua to tell us?

I was in a cab recently. The taxi driver was interested in what I do for a living and was instantly skeptical about ‘rights’ (mix rights with charity and I am immediately labelled a rabid lefty by most people I meet). My point was simple: how often do you complain about the Government? Daily? Weekly? Never - all politicians are wonderful altruistic models of humanity who do a brilliant job?

The point is, if you don’t like what pollies do you can complain. At worst maybe occasionally you will find yourself being ridiculed on today tonight. You won’t (in Australia) usually find yourself in prison or getting a bullet to the back of the head (we are discussing politicians here - police officers are a different matter).

So express yourself and make all the noise you can. Because you can. Which is a right worth fighting whining for!

I have been using a HP Mini-Note 2133 for about a month. It ain’t no MacBook Pro but then again it ain’t no Vaio either. Here is what I have found.

Base specs:

• 1.6GHz AMD K7 processor - about the processing equivalent of three hamsters flipping a 20c coin
• 1Gb DDR2 RAM - which I updated to 2Gb after two days of testing
• 120Gb HDD
• 8.9″ screen running 1280×768 @ 60Hz - this rather then the HDD was the Eee killer I have tried to run various linux GUIs on 800×600 in the past and it was not fun. 1024×640 isn’t quite good enough any more!
• 802.11 b/g wireless
• 1000/100/10 ethernet
• bluetooth
• SDHC card reader, 2 USB ports, horrible 3 cell battery, VGA out, unpleasant sound card, massive speakers, miscellaneous stuff

It shipped with Vista home Basic and the usual pile of crap-ware. I used Vista for a couple of days whilst testing how it worked with my P1i (it didn’t), how it responded under normal office use (a bit of Excel goes a long way, and takes a long time) and what a fully conditioned battery would do (less than 2 hours because all Australian 2133s ship with the useless 3 cell battery).

Out came the XP and instructions on how to install from USB thanks to Eeeguides.com, followed by the drivers from HP and a few odds and sods from hp2133.com. This was really just a fall back in case something went horribly wrong with the next bit.

Ubuntu on a mini-note

I can state categorically that it works.

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and followed the rather copious instructions on the Ubuntu wiki some of which has now become defunct due to 8.04.1 being out (oh if only I had waited another few weeks). I had no real trouble getting wireless to work with ndiswrapper but waiting for the WPA Supplicant to work can be painful. Video works fine but won’t play with anything except a basic desktop - no flashy compiz for me. Sound, ethernet, touchpad, bluetooth (such as it is), power management and the built in camera all work out of the box.

There have been remarks about the problems getting 3d effects working. Really, this is not a machine for graphics processing at the best of times, it is just too puny. Sub pixel font smoothing works a treat and that is as hard core as my mobile graphics requirements get!

Working with the little machine

Physically moving from a MacBook Pro to a Mini-Note has been a challenge. I like the keyboard. I am still not used to the positioning of the mouse buttons or the size of the touchpad scroll area. The screen is tiny and is not good for hours of uninterrupted use. Attached to a 66cm LCD HD TV it works real nice. It is an effective personal heater in this Sydney winter.

As for its performance, Open Office apps work fine if a little slow to start up. Firefox 3 works flawlessly with adblock plus, flashblock and web editor installed. Evolution is getting better with the recent updates and may replace Thunderbird because I cannot seem to get GCALDaemon to sync Lightning with Google Calendar (I also need to sync to a P1i - see below). GTKpod and Rhythmbox take care of the music, though I had to enable crossfade to make Rhythmbox play anything at all; totem works ; I haven’t been brave enough to try GIMP yet.

Bluetooth works. What can I say? I can connect to my P1i. I can copy files and use it as a 3G/GPRS modem. I cannot get a sync tool to work over bluetooth though. This seems be be a common problem. To overcome this I set up funambol and syncevolution and now I can sync the phone with the mini-note via wlan. Yay me!

Surprises

I have an Elgato EyeTV-DTT Stick. Yes, I am a sad Mac user (well, I was briefly a sad Mac user, now I am a sad mini-note user which is probably worse). The stick is a Hauppauge in disguise and works fine. I have given it a quick test with Me-TV and it plays and records just as it is meant to. Me-TV is extraordinarily primitive compared with my MBP experience, but then again Elgato charge a lot of money for their pretty interface.

Problems

I have an irritating issue with the wireless. There is an intermittent failure when coming out of hibernation. Usually everything comes back fine. Sometimes the wireless network won’t find my home network (mixed mode with WPA due to the aforementioned P1i) until I unload and reload ndiswrapper. Annoying. I also have a weird screensaver freeze going on. If xscreensaver decides to load the ‘matrix’ screensaver it won’t turn off. Nothing will make it go away! I have had to kill the X server. Very annoying!

Ready for prime time?

Not likely! I have a history of squeezing inappropriate linuxes onto laptops. I lived with a Thinkpad 240 running Debian for a few years and most of that spent in a command line (I toyed with killing X on the mini-note but that would just be perverse) and I have not owned a PC laptop which hasn’t run some flavour of Linux (usually dual boot I must admit) since 1997. However getting it working, whilst not difficult, is a chore and would not be countenanced by many. Once it is working it is far from flawless.

I am happy using the mini-note as my main machine because I use a text editor, a web browser and Planner/Omniplan/Project as my weapons of choice. The intermittent WiFi issue is annoying but is down to ndiswrapper and a bit of laziness on my part. The appalling battery life is a real pain. Would I give it to my mother? No, absolutely not. Ubuntu works on it, but there are still too many quirks.

This is my last post (Kangaloon, Kangaloon. KangaloonKangaloonKangalooooooon…)

It is my last post because I am lazy.

It is my last post because i can’t be angry all of the time and I have been bored (and boring) for most of the last two months.

Before I cut and run I am going to plug Solidariti because whilst her posting has slowed of late it has never wavered in quality. Yay P!

You may now go. I will start again soon on something a bit more grown up and well researched. Well, that is the intent but my slackness and willingness to make stuff up on the spur of the moment will undoubtedly win over my good research intentions.

In just a few days men around the world will start growing all manner of upper lip hair the like of which has not been seen since 1985. Why? To raise money for men’s health issues, particularly prostate cancer research.

Six of the Amnesty International Australia dudes will be attempting (except Steve who will succeed) to grow moustaches and I, as one of the less hirsute ones, will be not only joining them but attempting to get regular photographic evidence of their progress.

Get involved at the Movember site or to sponsor me just click on the Movember badge top right (on the index page).

Hooray for Joe Hockey giving us something to giggle about on an otherwise slow few campaigning days. “Our fear campaign is based on fact”, he told reporters.

Good on ya Joe!

It is fashionable to knock facebook (or facebollox as it is known in these parts) as the last big thing. Just because something is fashionable doesn’t make it wrong. Now that a tiny fraction of its equity is in the hands of Microsoft does it go the way of Hotmail (I can’t believe how many people still use that rubbish) as something one ought to be publicly embarrassed about using?

I was nearly going to let this go but the threat of up to five years in jail for not telling some cloth-head one’s password is almost amusing. In the UK it is now required that encryption keys be divulged to ‘the authorities’ upon request. Telling anyone that such a request has been made is also an offence.

I had a bit of a whinge to some colleagues about EU human rights and the notional right to privacy, not to mention article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However the real point is that once again a useless piece of legislation has come about because of a serious misunderstanding of technology. Once again, ‘those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear’ will be rolled out and once again they will be wrong because those with something to hide will be able to do so and the stupid and inept will be rolled up.

Being on the other side of the globe in the sunny antipodes (currently being rained on) does this matter? Of course it matters because whatever what the result of the forthcoming election the government will have no technical nous and will want to do the same thing. Be alert and alarmed.

And no I will not divulge my encryption keys; though I may just make them stronger and use them more. I also encourage all of you back in the UK to dust off your GPG keys, harden them and start encrypting everything just to annoy.

Oh, and before there is mention of terrorists please be aware that refusing to decrypt your stuff can lead you to spending 2 years in the slammer even if it is just the stock of bit-torrented porn you don’t want your mum to know about.

Well a federal election campaign is happening and once again we see a leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) deciding that the current PM has all the best ideas and is playing ‘me too - but not as much’. Now I am not a political pundit by any means but didn’t FatBoy Kim and the crazy one both lose previous elections by being weak-tea johns?

The response to the Liberal (that is the conservative or right of centre party for those in parts of the world who know what liberal means) bribe was predictable and stupid. What really got up my nose though was Mr Rudd’s position on the death penalty and the imminent execution of the Bali Bombers.

The ALP has a principalled and solid position: it is against the death penalty. End of. So why does their leader go around making exceptions (apart from the fact that it works with the Murdoch press)? Shame Kev, shame!

Just for that you deserve to lose. Though that would mean another 3 years of Howard and that would be worse.

Don’t forget (if you are able to vote in the Australian election) - vote below the line in the Senate.

Maybe we do get the politicians we deserve after all. Lazy, unprincipalled, conniving, greedy and not terribly bright, just like the rest of the population.

Another little known fact (I seem to be full of them of late) is that the Australian constitutional model is not based on the Westminster system, although some claim it is. However, there are still a few conventions which were upheld until the last decade or so.

The last of these to go by the board is the separation of powers. Indeed constitutionally this is far more obvious in Australia than in the UK [Attorney General]. However, it appears that current politicians have been to the Bjelke-Petersen school of political science. It seems that the executive now feel that they should overrule the judiciary whenever they disagree, even when those involved may be “more innocent than innocent”.

So I have asked Mr Andrews to explain to me the concept of the rule of law and the doctrine of the separation of powers; as I appear to be confused. I will keep you updated.