Fess-up time: I got a rather fetching painting in exchange for the tiny site.

Anyway, I keep a copy of my oldest working xorg.conf file sitting in /etc/X11 just in case. So a boot into text mode allowed me to replace the broken config with the basic vesa config. All started nicele and, as the LaptopTestingTeam wiki page will tell you it will run with vesa drivers at 16:9 (1280×720) which looks terrible.

What it didn;t tell me (at least not yesterday) was that via have released a beta of the chrome drivers for 8.10. These are 2D only but work very well for that. And you still need to fix the config (use your old via conf file - it is fine). So I do have Intrepid running nicely on the Mini-Note 2133 with decent quality 2D graphics. The nicest improvement so far is much better wireless reliability using WPA. It seems pretty flawless now and getting connected to my home network is much quicker.

Booting seems to take significantly longer than with 8.04. I haven’t timed it but I would guess 30-50% longer for a cold boot. Battery life was woeful and seems to be slightly worse now. Down from about 90 minutes with wireless to about 75 minutes - but I will keep an eye on that.

after the storm

Coalcliff is not famous for its beach. Actually, Coalcliff is not famous. It is really rather nice though, especially after a big spring storm.

A few years ago I embarked on a mission to educate the team in my day job. I got them all to refer to all the bits that make up HTML and CSS by the correct names, This was done partly so they could explain to me what they want, partly because I am a neurotic labeller, but mostly because they wanted to be professionals in their field and so needed to use the language correctly. Things, and teams, change and just this week, for the first time in over two years, I heard someone who would consider himself a web professional use the term alt tags.

There are no alt tags

Never were.

Anyone involved in web production who refers to image elements’ alternate text attribute as alt tags is a moron.

The basic unit of HTML is an element. A tag is part of an element. An element Starts with an opening tag. This is the angle-bracket stuff, and ends with a closing tag. The element is everything between the opening tag and the closing tag including the tags themselves. Self closing elements don’t have a closing tag and the element is equivalent to the tag.

Note I stated that an element is everything from the < of the opening tag to the > of the closing tag - inclusive. Therefore an element can (and often does) contain other elements. The DTD describe the allowed content for each element. For the purposes of the rest of this rant I will describe elements which require a closing tag as per the HTML 4 DTD. The accompanying image outlines all this in much clearer fashion so I apologise to anyone who cannot view it. Those of you who choose not to view it can just deal.

A representation of the parts of an HTML element

The opening tag may contain attributes. An attribute consists of name/value pairs represented as the name, equals sign and value, white space is ignored. In HTML 4 some attributes may be entered as singletons; that is as a name only with the value implied, I don’t consider this good practice but there is no reason not to do it. Attribute values ought to be quoted. This is required in XHTML. In HTML quotes are optional for single word values; this is really bad practice and you ought to quote all attribute values. An image’s alternate text is an attribute. Some attributes are required by certain doctypes, the alternate text attribute of an imgage element being one such required attribute.

There are some restrictions on attribute values but these are often specific to certain attributes. For example the id attribute’s value should not start with a numeric. Some parsers seem to expect some attributes in a particular order. The W3C HTML validator seems to chuck a wobbly if an image element’s opening tag has something other than a source attribute as the first attribute. This is not strictly required.

A (non-self-closing) HTML element usually contains child nodes. These may be other elements or text nodes (which is just text and is usually referred to as text except by weird DOM-nerds). White space only text nodes usually exist within a DOM tree but can be ignored for most cases except when traversing the tree.

Some elements are restricted in what they can contain as child nodes. An unordered list element, for example, may only contain list item elements as its child nodes and (in HTML 4.01) a fieldset element must contain a legend element. There are some general rules of thumb to make this a little clearer (these rules omit the possible existance of whitespace text nodes withing the DOM tree):

• inline elements must not contain block elements;
• block elements except the paragraph element (<p></p>) may contain other block elements;
• ordered and unordered list elements must contain list item elements as their immediate descendents;
• definition list elements must contain definition term and definition data elements as their immediate descendents;
• select elements must contain option elements or option group elements as their immediate descendents and option group elements may only contain option elements;
• uou cannot nest forms (which stuffs up many ASP applications) or textareas;
• use your common sense!

A few months ago I blogged early thoughts on my HP Mini-note 2133 and noted a couple of issues. I finally got compiz running. Horrah! And WPA is now much more solid. The big issue was There are a couple of problems with the Laptop Testing Team’s wiki entry. Until I get approval to update the wiki this is what I found:

• In /usr/bin/compiz adjust the WHITELIST to include via but do not remove the fglrx entry - add via to the WHITELIST. Then compiz works
• Create /etc/default/wpasupplicant but the only line in it should ENABLE WPA - seems obvious but, well, I feel foolish. So your /etc/default/wpasupplicant file should contain ENABLED=1

The P1i and mobile internet

GPRS was working via bluetooth. Then it wasn’t. Then it was again. And yesterday it wasn’t. However sticking a cable in the side does work - and helps preserve a little bit of battery life which is almost as bad on the P1i as  the mini-note. the P1i makes an effective usb 3g modem. This page helps - the important bit is the initialization string (modified for vodafone): AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”vfinternet.com” and the phone number - the lovely people from vodafone reckin *99# works fine in AU; and it does on the Mac Book Pro; but *99***1# seems to work with Ubuntu. Can’t for the life of me think why that should be the case. The rest was cleanly set up by wvdialconf.

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!

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.

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).