This is what I’m going to see for the next seven days. Yes. Finally, I will once again travel to a small cottage in Pontresina, enjoy the great landscape and do nothing businessish at all.
So don’t expect any postings next week. While I will have extremely limited internet connection (GPRS), I will use it only if something bad should happen.
Quite exactly one year ago, I reviewed my then new IBM Thinkpad T40. To save you from going there and have a look: I really liked the device.
In the year that has passed, I had some things that began to bug me me, though they are somewhat minor. I have not noticed them back when I made the review:
And that’s about it: Minor issues. I am a really big fan of my T40. Really. Believe me. And continue to believe me when I tell you this: IBM has announced the T42 model which finally comes with the 1600×1200 screen resolution. And not only that: The built-in Fire GL Chip from ATI should definitely provide enough juice for epsxe (though I’ve not tested that yet because of the lack of PSX-CD’s here in the office). I could not resist getting one
I mean, 1200×1600 resolution is just great for anything you do beyond just surfing the web. While you can use more than one monitor, it’s always more convinient to have everything on just one screen. Just think of Delphi with all it’s palettes and stuff. Very convinient
And this harddrive spinning down feature. Very convinient too.
So, I’m writing this blog entry on my brand new IBM ThinkPad T42p. Time for a review, don’t you think?
From the outside, IBM has not changed much: With it’s 15 inch monitor, the whole thing got a bit bigger (and a little bit thicker, if I’m not mistaken), but else they have left the outside unchanged from my T40 model.
On the inside, when installing Windows XP (while the IBM preinstallations are quite un-intrusive, I still prefer a completely un-customized installation of Windows and downloading just the drivers I need. That way I could even test my slipstreamed SP2 installation), I noticed the immense power this thing had. After just about 15 minutes, the installation was completed (excluding the drivers, of course). Boot time was much shorter than what I had on my T40 – even considering the emptyness of the harddrive. And it remained to be that short after copying over my profile. I really think, they finally used a better harddrive. Because the new computer is just 100 Mhz faster than the old (1.6 -> 1.7 GHz), I think that it must be the drive performing better.
The display is great. Highly readable and very bright. I really like the resolution. Display-related, though is my one big problem I have with this wonderful toy (why oh why must everything have at least one flaw?):
The DVI-Port (provided by my docking station) is (still) limited to 1280×1024 pixels, so I have to use the analog output to power my 1600×1200 monitor, giving me a somewhat suboptimal performance. Too bad. Maybe tey’ll fix that later.
Now I’m looking forward to check the computers 3D-performance. If there’s something unusual about it, I’m going to post it, of course.
Overall, I think, if you don’t need the 1600×1200 resolution, you can live without upgrading. If you really like (or even depend on) that big resolution (and consequently high DPI count), you should maybe consider updating. Was there not that problem with the DVI port, this would be the perfect notebook. With this flaw, it’s just the best one existing on the market. ;-)
UPDATE: Jepp. ePSXe works. It works extremely well, actually. I’m using Pete’s OpenGL GPU plugin with nearly everything turned on and I’m still not getting any lag. This is nice.
I will certainly be there. Will you?
I’m currently making first steps using Subversion and it’s going quite well. It took some time to get the $Id$ expansion to work though, but this article helped me in the end.
The next thing I’m going to do is trying to migrate a simple project (no braches, no tags) from CVS to subversion. I know there are some tools out there which promise being able to do that for you, so I hope it’ll work.
The final step would be to migrate over PopScan, which has gotten quite complex these days: About 5 branches, countless tags and three years worth of history data. If that too goes well, it’s “welcome subversion” for me. If not, I think, I’ll postphone the migration until the tools get better. I absolutely don’t want to have my code in different source management systems.
I’ll keep you posted.
As you surely know, PHP 5 has been released. Actually, it’s already 5.0.1.
What you also may know is that Gentoo’s dev-php/mod_php package was promoted from -x86 to ~x86. This means from broken to unstable in Gentoo-terms.
This means that I can now make some tests with PHP5 which I already began doing: I’ve upgraded PHP on our developement server to 5.0.1 and it’s working quite well so far. The only problem I’ve come across is this stupid code in a osCommerce installation:
class something{
function something{
// do something
$this = null;
}
}
New or old object model in PHP: This is just something you don’t do. Not in PHP, and certainly not in any other language. You should not assign anything to this, self or even Me (or whatever the implicit pointer to your own object is called in your language).
New year, new iPod. They made so many small usability enhancments with those new models, that you actually ask yourself, whether the predecessors are really made by Apple (because if they would be, there weren’t that many usability flaws in the first place)
Convinience-wise, the jump to the third generation of iPods was the biggest step. Thanks, apple.
Oh and the Music I’m playing on the photo is this CD. The music is difficult to describe. A bit jazz-ish, but not really. I really like it – especially as a passionate gamer of the Chrono series and Xenogears, where the music is inspired from. Consider buying it. It’s great!
First, my apologies for not posting for quite some time now, but I have a hell of a lot of things to do. One of those was setting up yet another IBM xSeries 345 Server. And yet again, I deceided to install Gentoo Linux on it and yet again this distribution does not stop to amaze me:
On their current livecd (used for installing the distribution), they have actually installed an OpenSSH-Server ready to be started, allowing you to do the whole installation procedure remotely. This is incredibly nice.
So I could put the server in our basement where its noise did not annoy anyone and still do the installation from my comfortable chair in my office. This is great!
But then I widened my thoughts: Imagine, you modify the CD just a little bit: Preconfigure the network with the IP of your server somewhere in a remote location, set a non-random root password and configure the SSH-daemon to automatically start on boot.
Then configure the server to boot from CD, if one is there.
Now, if your server (somewhere in a remote location where getting into is difficult or at least time-consuming) should crash and fail to come up properly after a reboot, just ask someone at the housing center to insert the CD and reboot. The rescue system from the CD will boot and the SSH daemon will start. Now you can try to fix your system remotely.
When you are finished, your customized reboot-script will eject the CD after unmounting it, allowing the server to reboot normally from it’s (hopefully) fixed installation. This would even allow to completely fresh-install a compromised system remotely, without forcing you to do that on-location.
This is extremely nice and just another reason why I prefer the seemingly simple and anachronistic installation procedure of Gentoo. I mean: Just try doing this with either Fedora or SuSE…
(Taken using Snes9x)
As you may know I really like watching speedruns of video games. And yesterday, when watching the updated Super Metroid movie, I came across this picture in the intro.
Have you noticed? Samus is actually giving her left hand to this scientist. I needed quite some time to understand that this was not an error of the artist, but actually just another of those well layed out details: The right arm of Samus’ suit is equipped with her beam weapon, so she obviously can’t use it to shake hands ;-)
And this leads to other conclusions:
It’s funny to see how much those designers seem to have though about all those details – either consciously or not.
This is great. This makes me incredible happy as it documents quite a relevant part of my live, which I though was long gone. Here is it:
And even more: Fabedit, too is still there.
I took the time to fix all long dead links and the syntax of the navigation tree, so it works in Mozilla (somewhat). Hell, I even fixed those little cgi-scripts.
I first thought, that fabgrats was lost, but I found a copy of it lying somewhere else. This is so incredibly great!
So. What’s the fuss?
In the years 96 till 2000, I was quite active in the web. The freeware tool RasInTask [the page has an usability defficit. There are some deeper links on the right side under “subtopics”] (unfortunately I lost the installer, so you cannot download the tool any more – unless you want to use the source, which is well-conserved) was quite well-known in the net. I actually got quite good reviews in two german magazines and I had quite some fans.
And I did more. I wrote articles, short stories, delphi components and such stuff. All of it, so I do think now, was kind of compensation for what I was not getting in real-life. Respect and a girlfriend. So this old page is not only interesting from a technical standpoint (I think, despite it being a bit amateurish, it was quite good back then [just look at how it’s possible to link directly into the page with an unique url despite frames being used. I did this with the RasInTask link above] – not to speak about RasInTask which I still think is quite good, though no one would use it these times), but also from a psychological.
This relict from old times is quite a good proof that people, extroverted on the web are quite different in the real live. And while I’m still kind of active in the net world, I think I can say about myself, that I’m finally adjusing my real live to what I always was on the net. This is a good thing, it seems.
So, what’s there for you, my fellow reader?
Not much. An old picture of mine, some texts written in quite bad english and this nostalgic flair of a webpage done in the 90ies. The only thing probably useful to you is, unfortunately, lost (and I really don’t think that you can still compile the sourcecode of RasInTask any more)
For me it’s something different. Its a testimonial of who I was and who I’ve become. Yes. Those years between 99 and 02 where great. And quite a lesson for me. It’s good to finally feel grown up after such a long time. And it’s good to see who I was, just to learn, who I really am.
Oh. And I will go back to more technical stuff the next time. I promise
UPDATE: I actually found the RasInTask installer somewhere, so it’s available do download now. But plase note: I know that the code is not very clean. I’m quite convinced that there are some access violations and synchronization errors just waiting to annoy you. So while it’s interesting from a nostalgic point of view, I’d recommend against installing it. Oh! And don’t ask me for support. I have not touched this fo years.
As you may know, we are using Exchange and Outlook for our Email and groupware needs. The thing just works and has some really useful groupware features while – in contrast to all those PHP-solutions – still being well integrated in the usual working area (read: has a windows client). And even better: Using Outlook / Exchange, even synchronizing the PDA works out of the box without that much of tweaking.
But with all this greatness, there are two problems: First, Outlook is not what I’d call a good email client, but it gets near. I still can’t use it for mailinglist consumption (bad threading, no qote highlighting,…), but for the rest it’s usable. The second problem is the search function. It’s so incredibly slow, even when you create a full text index on the Exchange-Server (without it’s even slower). And besides being slow, it looks like it’s searching forwards. When I enter some search term, it walks through the messages from the oldest to the nweset which is quite inpractical
So for reading mailinglists and for searching, I used Thunderbird
Then I found Lookout which was recently bought by Microsoft and released as freeware. This wonderful Outlook Add-In builds a fulltext index of all your Outlook folders and actually uses it (in contrast to outlook and the indexes on the exchange server). Additionally it has quite a powerful query language.
And with “fast” I mean fast: It takes just about 0.1 seconds to search my about 33’000 mails for this one message containing a certain word. This is great.
I’ve actually only two small problems with the tool:
Besides that: Great tool!
gnegg 