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iPhone updates

mitch @ 7:08 pm on July 24, 2008

The word press app for the iPhone is pretty cool. I just might get more blog posts now.

Apple· Technology — No Comments

New Laptop! Lenovo ThinkPad T61

mitch @ 8:47 am on May 26, 2008

My boss decided I should have a company purchased laptop, instead of using my own. Since we had another guy starting at the same time, he wanted us to purchase one for each of us. I went with another Lenovo, but this time a ThinkPad. A ThinkPad T61 with a Core2 duo 2.5Ghz, 4GB RAM, and the WSXGA+ screen, and 250GB drive. I went with the 15″ one just for the screen res. I also ordered it preloaded with SuSE. It was $200 cheaper than the one with windows, and I just wanted to add to the tally of the demand for Linux Pre-Loaded. I will be reloading it with Ubuntu once I get it, but not a big deal.

The great news is that it was saying it wasn’t going to ship until the 16th of June, well I just got an email saying it shipped today! I ordered 2 Business day shipping which is what I did for my last lenovo, and it came from Hong Kong in 2 days. So, I should have it by thursday, or friday at the latest.

Technology — No Comments

Hibernate on Lenovo 3000 n100

mitch @ 8:42 am on April 13, 2008

I’ve been shutting down and booting my laptop since the day I got it, and to be honest, the one thing I like the most about the mac is its ability to hibernate, and just “be there” when you want to use it, otherwise you can shut the lid and leave it for hours or days without plugging it in.

Well, I was up at 3:30 this morning not able to sleep and I thought about it, as I had immediately grabbed the macbook instead of my Lenovo 3000 n100. Even when I was getting up to read more of the online version of the Django book, I knew I wouldn’t be doing any actual testing or playing with any django code, unless I installed it on this web server and “tested” it from here. The reason I find it interesting is because I’ve yet to like to do any form of coding on the Mac, other than the couple times I’ve played with the new iPhone development tools in XCode. So, I ask myself… why?

I find the reason is simply that it was more convenient, I could take the MBP and open it up, launch firefox (3 beta 5 - its awesome!) and be reading in 10-15 seconds. Instead of having to wait for my lenovo to boot.

after I had read a couple pages worth of django, it made me curious, because I haven’t looked for any information about hibernate for my laptop for a long time. Everything else works (well, that I use anyway, I’ve yet to test the modem, and I don’t much care about the finger print scanner.. that will probably be my next quest or possibly fixing the stupid alsa drivers for the sound)

And sure enough, I found an Ubuntu wiki post about my specific laptop, and to get hibernate working all I had to change was add one line to my grub config and reboot. Heres what I changed:

from the file /boot/grub/menu.lst
# defoptions=quiet splash
to this:
# defoptions=quiet splash locale=en_US i8042.reset

sudo grub-update

and reboot.

apparently the part that makes it work is the i8042.reset line, not sure what the locale has to do with it, but the poster on the ubuntu wiki had his locale set as well, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.

Sure enough it works and I updated my power setting to start putting my laptop in hibernate mode when I shut the lid.

On that page, it also has the information about fixing the alsa drivers, as well as the much annoying touchpad while typing fixes, which I’ve also applied. I’ve yet to experience any issues with random grazes of the touchpad like I used to when I was typing, so I believe it has worked, but it rarely happened at home and was usually while I was at work for some reason so we’ll see on that one.

Linux· Technology· Ubuntu — No Comments

Not going switching to MacBook Pro

mitch @ 8:03 am on April 13, 2008

Since getting the MacBook Pro from my boss, I’ve had some time to play with it. As it turns out, I still only like to use it as much as I like to use my wife’s laptop, mostly just for checking email and web browsing. It just seems slower than my Lenovo, even with its faster procs and same amount of ram… to test I got it dual booting Ubuntu, but even that seems slow. All that I could deal with, however, I really don’t like the keyboard. Or rather the lack of an insert, and a delete and back space keys. Page Up and Page Down also seem to be missing. These keys I use alot, and they’re all very accessible on my Lenovo. So, I’ve decided, I won’t be fully switching from my Lenovo as much as my boss wants me to. The biggest reason so far that I could have used the mac was more for the 1Gb nic it has in it. At work I’ve had to do some testing of the network and I have some scripts and other applications that can fully maximize the throughput of the network, and my current hardware peaks at 100Mbit so, I didn’t see some problems that others in the building were experiencing because of it.

I had the choice to buy a laptop with a 1Gb nic in it when I bought this, it would have cost me more, but to be honest, it was a laptop, when would I EVER actually be able to utilize a gigabit nic. Well… saving to or reading from the hard drive its impossible… but reading and writing straight from ram, you can actually get around to filling a gigabit pipe.

So, I have a reason to switch, I just don’t think I will be. If anything it will give me a reason to buy a new Thinkpad T61

Apple· Technology· Thoughts· Work — No Comments

Gigabit Ethernet

mitch @ 8:33 am on April 3, 2008

I don’t talk about work much on my blog, mostly because I don’t feel like it is appropriate. However, there are things that I learn while at work that would be appropriate to write about. The purpose of this post is just such a situation. I currently work as a network system consultant and I’ve been doing work onsite for a company for the last 8 months or so. They move large files around, (they’re a printing company) and have also put in a huge investment into gigabit ethernet equipment everywhere. However, most of their buildings are fairly old, and the last time they were cabled was around 1998. Most things are run with your standard Category 5 cable (not even Cat5e). Now the sharp person will know immediately that Cat5 is not supposed to run gigabit. Someone forgot to tell everyone else here, because they put the swithes in place and put gigabit ethernet on the desktops as well… and they negotiated at 1 gigabit…. so it should work right? Wrong! Gigabit ethernet is *very* sensitive to the type of cable being run over it, so much so, that technically you can run it over Cat5e, but if your really shooting for gigabit to the desktop, I wouldn’t go less than Cat6 and making sure you do not run the cable closer than 3 feet from florescent light blasts, and keep it the same distance from all power runs as well. We had a situation in one of the buildings, that they’ve been fighting speed issues for months/years, and in no way did they think it was possible to get faster speeds out of Cat5 cable if I were to drop their speeds to 100Mbit full duplex. Instead of the 1Gbit it was currently negotiating at. Finally we got the ok to force everyone in the building down to 100 Full (actually the switches are HP Procurves, and they have an option to set ports to auto-100 which allows the port to negotiate between full and half duplex and speeds of 10 or 100Mbit, essentially leaving out the option for gigabit). And sure enough speed times increased 3 fold. Imagine that.

Technology· Work — No Comments

New Harddrive!

mitch @ 6:44 pm on December 13, 2007

This past week was my birthday and for my present, I got a new hard drive for my laptop. Its a 160GB Western Digital I bought from newegg to replace my now full 80GB drive. So I’ve been copying over data off and on all day today from my old drive. The plan eventually is to place my 80GB drive into my PS3, and then I’ll use the 60GB PS3 drive in this drive cage I got at a deal with the hard drive. On my birthday I went go go-cart racing with my brothers. Which was also quite fun, I enjoyed it a lot.

Life· Technology — No Comments

New Web Host!

mitch @ 5:57 pm on November 27, 2007

Well… If your seeing this post, then your hitting my new web server! Its got about 2.5x’s more RAM than the old one so, we should be running on less swap than before… hopefully its faster for everyone…. and more stable…

Projects· Technology — No Comments

Cacti graphing for 1Gbit network interfaces

mitch @ 5:58 pm on November 19, 2007

At my current place of employement, gigabit is deployed everywhere. I’d rather not get into the details as to why it is, but it goes without saying that its not really needed *everywhere*. None the less, I had cacti up and graphing for a couple months, before I thought I’d really like to see cacti graph a fully utilized gigabit port. Well, it turns out that the default configuration of the ucd/net snmp network interface ports on cacti will not graph a gigabit port. It will appear to work, but seems to wrap around at about 120Mbit. The reason is, cacti by default uses 32bit counters for this setting. It has a drop down under the network interfaces when creating graphs on a device, to use 64-bit counters. This is required for gigabit ports (if you want to get a true representation for the graph). I will see if I can grab some screen shots of this when I get back to work.

But overall, I love cacti and even after looking at similar tools, I much prefer cacti over anything else.

Open Source· Technology· Work — No Comments

Word Processors = Horrible Document Editors

mitch @ 6:43 pm on July 31, 2007

I’ve never really liked word processors. It was always the “thing” to use for reports and such. But as far as trying to organize something like a resume? I find its horrible, frustrating and never does what it should. My new solution? I’m not sure, I’ve heard good things about LaTeX but I’m not entirely sure thats what I want. And I’ll probably end up falling back and just writing it in HTML+CSS. That always does what I want… The only problem will be getting that into word format, or PDF. Worst case I can always print to PDF from a web browser, and probably open the file in Open Office to save it to word. I’d prefer a script I could run that converts it to both formats, but thats something I’ll have to look into..

In case your wondering, I just like to keep my resume up to date and with my recent job change, it needs some updating. I used a template I liked from MS Office from way back and has worked well for me over the years, but I’m ready for a new one. This time around I’m seeing the benefits of having it in pure HTML form, who knows I might even keep it online and just drop out my address and phone number…

Technology· Thoughts — No Comments

Next Cell Phone, and other updates.

mitch @ 12:34 pm on July 9, 2007

Its been a while since I’ve posted, and in the time I’ve been out… I was on vacation, where my wife and I, along with her brother and sister, drove back home to New York to see their brother graduate and visit with the family. I couldn’t begin to describe how horrible the drive was… the rental we had was really bad… not that it had problems, it just was incredibly uncomfortable. But other than that, I had a relaxing time atleast.

Now for the purpose of the post. My next Cell Phone. I’ve seen this phone before, but I didn’t really like the colors that were shown before. Now that they’ve changed the colors, I love it. And I going to buy one. Even tho they’re still not really ready for the general public yet… Its called “OpenMoko” and its awesome. The specific phone I’ll get is the dark one probably, unless I can get the dark one with the orange ring, that would be sweet.

Anyway, have a look.

Life· Technology — No Comments