Archive for January 2006

Stammering Apple

Apple’s Knowledge Base says: PowerBook G4 (Double-Layer SD) audio stutters or skips. When playing music in iTunes, it tends to skip. Out of the blue, like a stuck CD. Its highly annoying, and I never noticed this before on previous Macs.

Adam Curry (podcaster extraordinaire) poked at the issue by mentioning it repeatedly on The Daily Sourcecode, and Apple finally came up with an interesting solution: “To avoid this, run only one audio application at a time.”

What the heck?!? Rebooting the same Powerbook into Fedora, and playing music in both Rhythmbox or XMMS doesn’t exhibit this “skipping” aura. Both with MP3s or OGGs.

MySQL 101

Some quickies that have been sitting in my blog poster for a while…

  • Quick Polls are an interesting bit of the MySQL site. Look at all the interesting polls, and see where the community come from!
  • I was doing a search on “migrate from Postgresql to MySQL” on Google, and all I seemed to have found in general were sites that showed how to do it the other way around!
  • mytop is great. RPM distributions have /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock, but it is located at /tmp/mysqld.sock if it comes out of the tarball. Run it as mytop -S /tmp/mysqld.sock if you’ve installed it from the tarball.
  • Seeing: Starting MySQL * Couldn't find MySQL manager or server as an error? Suggest you look at /etc/my.cnf, under [mysql.server], comment out (#) the basedir=/var/lib and like magic, things should work again.
  • Looking for Powered by MySQL logos? Look no further than the Official Logos.
  • Dispelling the Myths is a great article addressing common misconceptions with MySQL – transactions, supports large installations, excellent support team, is open source and much more. Give it a read.
  • Talked to Gafton about Conary’s new PostgreSQL package and skirted around the idea of using versioned data directories for MySQL; he said it was generally unnecessary as between upgrades MySQL doesn’t break tables. But it does seem like good practice…

The 770 arrives

Caught Venom; avoid it at all cost. Just got back from Malacca, which generally was another food fest; rained a lot, but I got to practice shooting photos without looking thru the shutter.

Friday was a good day. DHL came with a package from the company, and about ten minutes later I get a call stating that there’s another package with a possibly incorrect address. Its from Nokia. I get all excited.

At 2.30pm, it arrives. Pity, I left the house earlier. I finally get to it at around 10.30pm, after braving my way past the traffic jams, flooding and the closing of the NKVE at the Klang entrance. Hello Nokia 770! Anyways, first impressions time.

  • Was generally hard to open the RS-MMC slot; once opened, closing it was a lot easier.
  • Didn’t realise that there was a stylus at the back, but picked the one from the box instead (i.e. the spare).
  • First time setup was intuitive; even paired up with my Bluetooth phone. Then it was time to get on WiFi. Also a breeze.
  • By not reading the manual, it seemed that the Power button was what to press regularly. Seems closing the case puts the device into some sort of standby mode.
  • How do I let it install and run files of the RS-MMC card? If it can work (without me symlinking /var/lib/install to the /media/mmc) I might look for a larger RS-MMC card.
  • It has Bluetooth over the Tungsten C that I have, which is a clear boon. It also has a larger screen. But the virtual keyboard isn’t something I enjoy.
  • They included Ice Age 2’s trailer, which was nice for video. The online streaming radio station is highly neat, as the music that comes out of it is actually nice/modern.
  • Some apps seem to crash. Debug mode or log files will be handy to see why.
  • Installing apps via the Internet works a charm. They’re .deb’s, and you double-click it from the file manager, and they just work. Impressive! I now have Xterm, vim, pine, and Abiword installed.

Seeing that I managed to use an Internet tablet without the Internet for the weekend was not too bad. And the battery hasn’t even died yet. Impressive. I now also need to setup Scratchbox on my FC-4 box (again), re-flash the N770, and find a screen protector for it. I think the latter is going to be a challenge seeing that these devices aren’t available, in general, at least in this part of the world.


i