Colin Charles Agenda

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.

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.

Merry belated Christmas. As usual, I threw one of my annual Christmas lunches, which was well received. Before that, caught the Chronicles of Narnia – good show. Also caught Along Came Polly on cable. Leave has enabled me to do other things – catching up on reading as well as getting up to scratch with various things. Oh, and photography – plenty during the holiday in Penang it would seem.

Before the holidays started, I did get the R51 back to a sane OS; I then setup a Xen/Qemu based virtualization environment, and the first guinea pig was Ubuntu 5.10. Pleased to say it installed well, and runs just fine. Feeling a bit of slowness on a Pentium-M 1.5GHz, but it’ll be fine. Fedora has had 1.7GB of updates since the time FC-4 has been released – thats an amazingly large number! And remember to get the ipw2100 firmware or wireless won’t work…

Looking thru the tabs, I found an article from LWN, titled Mandriva to ship Skype. This is a really smart option, as VoIP on the Linux desktop makes sense. Calling a Linux user just got easier.

However, Skype isn’t open source. But it does have market share – Mac and Windows users. In terms of numbers, the Gizmo Project doesn’t come close. And from a business perspective, there’s greatness as folk will see how SkypeOut (and SkypeIn) work, and further add dollars (okay, euros) to the deal.

Ubuntu seems to be behind the open source project Shtoom. I believe a similar idea was abound – let every Ubuntu user call one another. Looks like Mandrake beat them to the punch.

Which becomes more useful? I’m going with the Skype option, even though Mandriva’s user base might not be as large as Ubuntu’s. Its all about being cross-platform. Especially with the platforms that have the greater market share (aren’t we still fighting a 90% Windows marketplace?).

Got to keep a watch on Google and Gtalk. They seem to be standardizing on the Jabber protocol.

I see 2006 being an interesting VoIP year.

So, I need my Fedora fix on x86. But I also wanted to verify disc 3 badly, seeing that I had to download it over many segments. Come OpenSSL to the rescue.

openssl dgst -sha1 FC4-i386-disc{1,2,3,4).iso

That magic command gave me the right sha1sum’s, to match with the SHA1SUM that is provided. man openssl and man dgst clearly helped!

• Caught Extreme Measures; not too bad a show.
• My disk on the Thinkpad (potter) died. Taking with it, some recent work, and lots of mail from mid-August till now. So if you sent me something important, don’t hesitate to send it down my way again, thanks. I probably lost a bit of ~/Desktop/Downloads for certain as well. But I don’t think there was much “real work” in recent times that I’d have lost (seeing that everything real, tends to sit on the Net somehow). R.I.P. No more Samsung disks for me, ever. 5,400rpm/80GB.
• Downloading FC-4/i386 now. Its about time I head out for a hair cut, and get a new disk as well. Point to note is that disks are cheaper in Melbourne than they are in KL.
• Yes, yes, thanks for all the SMSes telling me I was in today’s Star In.Tech. Yes, it is me. Well, it was me, like seven years ago. I don’t look anywhere near that young any longer. Article in question is the “Protecting our borders in Cyberspace”, yes that’s xearth running on my desktop, with PGP freeware, and the other one has a blank terminal that may have had gpg running.