Colin Charles Agenda

I’m not the biggest fan of web mail, so couldn’t really rejoice when Yahoo! and the likes offered unlimited storage. Heck, I hardly ever log into Zimbra’s web mail interface, even though its a thing of beauty. But today, Gmail introduced IMAP capabilities.

Gmail and me have always had a love-hate relationship. I even have the Gmail Notifier plugin in Firefox, and still hardly ever read my email. This was a real problem when I had to deal with the Summer of Code Google Groups (which I just ended up setting a filter and pushing it to my real email account).

All that’s water under the bridge. I have 4GB of storage on Gmail, and its just growing (and if I needed more, ahem, I could cough up some cash). And now, it works via IMAP (for free). Ages ago, speaking to some Googlers, I was told that the idea of IMAP is hard to implement because tags aren’t folders. I see they’ve fixed said bug, and am totally stoked. I’m now happy to read Gmail in Thunderbird, and will be using it a lot more.

Lock-in? Google knows more about me now? Sure. But now I’m spoilt for choice – reading Gmail via my Series 60 phone (their client is pretty swanky), reading it via IMAP in Thunderbird, and if required, via the web (ick).

On a rather ironic note, I use Yahoo! for search, not Google.

Technorati Tags: web, gmail, imap, googlemail

With disk being as cheap as it currently is, there’s no reason to not buy some large disks, and create some redundant backup of images (DVDs are getting stale). Of course, my main requirements are writing to these disks via either Linux or Mac OS X.

And therein lies my problem. Should I just attach it to a NAS like the NSLU2? This ensures the filesystem will be ext3 based, and both Linux/OSX will connect to it via Samba. But it also means I need yet another device turned on.

If I plug disks in directly, I have to beware of the ext3 or HFS+ issue. Do you backup to disk? Are you using a NAS or plugging it directly via USB/Firewire? What are you using as a filesystem of choice? (please don’t suggest VFAT for 500GB disks…)

Technorati Tags: photos, large, disk, backup, ext3, hfs+, linux, macosx

Resisting an upgrade, is hard, so I finished some work on Friday, and proposed to upgrade away to Gutsy Gibbon. I’ll talk about what I like and don’t later, but I still face a problem. I can’t seem to get X/xrandr working as well as I’d like it to. I also can’t get all the desktop effect bling going, but that is not as significant a problem as working VGA out.

lspci says, I have a Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03). I drive my laptop at 1440×900, and externally, I’ve got a 17″ LCD panel that can go 1280×1024 (FWIW, I tested against an external 19″ wide panel capable of 1440×900, but it made no difference). However, xrandr thinks I can only, at most, display 1440×1440, and I think that’s why I’m not being able to get a nice “stretch screen” (i.e. two desktops, not mirrored displays) experience going.

xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1440 x 900, maximum 1440 x 1440
VGA connected (normal left inverted right)
1280x1024 59.9
640x480 60.0
LVDS connected 1440x900+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 303mm x 190mm
1440x900 60.0*+
1280x800 60.0
1280x768 60.0
1024x768 60.0
800x600 60.3
640x480 59.9
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right)

So, mirroring works. My desktop looks a little shitty, but at 1280×1024, all is well and dandy. I have a feeling that when I plug it into an LCD projector, I might get away with things working, for a change. That alone, is impressive. So, how do I magically get a dual-display, stretched desktop experience? My xorg.conf file for reference, is tacked to the end of this.

My heart goes out to whomever decided to write displayconfig-gtk. This is a step in the right direction. End-users will want a GUI to choose external displays and stuff. I love the idea of location profiles (so, at home, maybe I’m tacked to an external 1280×1024 monitor, at another location maybe another, a roaming locating that just creates a 800×600 display, etc.). Of course, it would help if this utility actually worked. It doesn’t, and is currently broken, from my experience with it. Why is it included, under the guise like it might work?

Kudos to Intel, and their page on How to setup Dual Head for Intel Graphics with RandR 1.2. Everyone says, stick to Intel and you won’t go wrong with Linux. Why then, does such a page need to exist? Why is my out-of-the-box experience, still so bad?

If it helps, here’s the xorg.conf configuration file (I didn’t muck with it, its dpkg configured). Help appreciated, and remind me to buy you a beer when/if I see you next.

Section "Files"
EndSection

InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

Technorati Tags: xorg, xrandr, gutsy gibbon, ubuntu, displayconfig-gtk, usability, external display, keeping it real, linux, intel, intel graphics, intel 945gm

There didn’t seem like a clear way to make a copy (or clone) of a virtual machine with VMWare Server. Not with the 1.0.3 build-44356 which comes standard with the Ubuntu Commercial repository (one of the good virtues of Ubuntu).

So, I fired up the console, and did:
cp -ax Centos\ 5/ Centos\ 5-new

It took 4m5.643s to copy this on my laptop hard disk (only 1.5GB). I loaded it into VMWare, via their Open a virtual machine option, renamed it in the inventory, powered my new virtual machine on and was asked if I’d like to create a new UUID for it. I’d advise you to create one, and once that was done, my virtual machine is ready to go.

Create a new UUID, and you’re set

Exactly what I like. Not re-installing CentOS everytime. Just create a “golden” image and start cloning from there. Maybe with some slack/puppet integration in the future, if I end up using a lot of VMs.

Technorati Tags: linux, virtualization, vmware, vmware server, cloning an image, image, clone, testing, testbed, test environment

Dear Yahoo!,

Things on the Internet die way too quickly. I was just going through my Liferea feeds list today, and noticed about half a dozen blogs that had died. Domains don’t resolve any longer, they’ve decided to stop blogging (and remove their blog posts), and so on. Highly annoying, seeing that I have bookmarked some of these sites in del.icio.us.

I’d pay a reasonable sum for del.icio.us (say, like how I pay for my Flickr Pro account) to take snapshots of the page when I add it to my del.icio.us feed. Something like a cache (like one from your competitor in search, Google Cache; heck even your search engine caches pages!). If I visit the link again via del.icio.us, it will ideally update (via a smart diff) the snapshot, if there’s new content. However, if the content is gone, I’ll always have the original snapshot to refer to.

I know I can muck around with Google Cache or even the Internet Archive, but its just added work. Worse, sometimes blog entries aren’t cached in either :(

Hope you implement something like this in the very near future.

    Kind Regards,
    Colin, long-time del.icio.us user

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, yahoo!, suggestion, cached pages, snapshot, del.icio.us pro

of all the hullabaloo of sending the first malaysian into space, only to find that the great sheikh muszaphar shukor is just a spaceflight participant (link). not an astronaut, but a space tourist. one that the government used tax payer dollars (okay, ringgit) to push him into. thats rm100 million to play children’s games and make teh tarik (pulled tea).

someone like mark shuttleworth, forked out his own cash, between USD$15 to USD$20 million to see space. this was an out-of-pocket expense, and now he’s the first south african in space. why are the malaysian tax-payers funding a space tourist?

malaysian spin-doctors better not make sheikh a laughing stock. now they’re talking about him praying more than 80 times a day, as the first muslim to go to space during ramadhan. was this one large joke?

p/s: rm100 million roughly equates to around USD$30 million. why was mark’s independent trip cheaper than this tax-payer-funded instance?

Update: Read Ditesh’s take titled The Angkasawan Programme is a political sham.

Technorati Tags: politics, tax payer, spaceflight participant, malaysian in space, first malaysian in space, sheikh muszaphar shukor, corruption, laughing stock, malaysia