Linux Users of Victoria, Inc.

There are two reasons why I want to have a sorted table in my software.

Reason #1: Email client

When I'm reading email I care most about new email, so I sort chronologically. I have a special interest in one end of the table, where the newer email is.

Reason #2: Music Player

When I'm playing music I want the music to be in alphabetical order so I can find my way around the list. However, there is nothing special about one end of the list. AC/DC and ZZ Top are not more important to me than Michael Jackson.

Scenario: I want to find something quickly

These tables come with search textboxes so you can type in a few letters and it will find all emails or songs which match. Awesome.

Application #1: Thunderbird

I type "quote" in the search box to find the email thread about a quote I gave a client couple of months ago.

Several messages appear about different quotes. I click on the one I want. I remember I had another email conversation with my boss at the same time so I clear the search box by clicking its "x" clear button.

Thunderbird now displays all emails in my inbox again,  but it remains centred on the last message I had selected. Because my email is sorted by time I can quickly look up and down and find my other email conversations about that job.

When I'm done reading up there I press the "End" key on my keyboard and I'm back at the interesting end of the table where my new email arrives. I'm happy.

Application #2: Windows Media Player

I want to play my favourite song, Bananaphone by Raffi, so I pop "banana" into the search box at the top of my library. Amongst Harry Belafonte and Bananarama my target song appears. I double click on it and it begins playing.

Now I clear the search box and... I am taken to the top of the library. Yep, back with ABC and AC/DC. The reason I am using the search box is because I care about Raffi right now. The reason I sort by artist name is because when I'm looking at Raffi, I want to see more Raffi. THERE IS NOTHING INTERESTING ABOUT THE TOP OF THE LIBRARY. Seriously.

This might be partially forgivable if like iTunes there was a keyboard shortcut to jump to the currently playing song. But there isn't. It should be the DEFAULT behaviour because it's the most logical.

In this case I'm forced to scroll through my music collection manually using the scrollbar to find the song which I just used a search box to find, in order to find songs by the same artist.

Conclusion: Think about it

If you're writing a program which uses a table, think carefully about how it will be used for search.

If you're in a situation where you're sorting by time or priority, and looking up items in the middle is going to be relatively rare, moving to the interesting end of the table MIGHT be a sensible default. A keyboard shortcut won't go amiss either.

In just about every other case, spatial locality matters. The user doesn't care about one extreme, so focus on what they've clicked on. Please.

(P.S. WMP does unfathomable things with its playlist depending on what rows you have displayed when you double click on songs. The whole program is rubbish. This rant, however, is intended to be applicable to every computerised table ever.)

A few days ago I talked about how noisy my new Dell Studio 15 was but I can now report back with the beginnings of a solution to that problem, and it doesn't appear to be ACPI related.

The first clue I needed was that if I switch to the proprietary fglrx drivers for the Radeon the fan quite quickly drops off to a much more reasonable level. It seems the fglrx drivers have issues, however, in particular I get big black patches on my screen. This video corruption happens especially in Firefox, but sometimes in other applications as well. They also appear to screw up my suspend/resume, which is probably even more annoying to me.

The second clue that I needed was that Radeon power management support has only just made it into recent kernels. Thanks to Michael Kirkland for providing me with both of those clues :-)

Looking under /sys/class/drm/ I find a whole bunch of stuff, but in particular there are /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method and /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile.

Looking through the kernel source code I can see that power_profile can be set to low, mid, high, auto and default, while power_method can be set to either dynpm or profile.

Trying out all of these values, it seems I get the quietest result with the profile method and either the low or mid profile. The dynpm method is nearly as good, and I would think it should really be the default for a 'Mobility' chipset. From the detailed benchmarking that Phoronix did I wonder if it shouldn't be the default for everyone.

For myself, I see some small 'tearing' artifacts occasionally when running with the low profile. These disappear when I run with the mid profile, and since that seems to have pretty much the same temperature (and noise) results I'll go with that one. Though the laptop often does still make more noise than I would prefer it to, it is no longer annoying everyone in the room.

Not unexpectedly this seems to have a huge impact on power use, too. It appears that the laptop should now give me around 4.5 hours when I do everything I can think of to lower the power use, whereas before it was more like 2.5 hours.

Now I guess I can get back to hacking on DAViCal...

World Didn’t End, Annoying Reporters

If I hear another reporter talk about who would win if we went back to the polls or who has a mandate or who got the most votes (on a two party preferred basis) I may well scream.  Our Constitution does not recognise parties, or policies, or platforms.  What we vote for is people.  People.  We elect them to make decisions on our behalf as our delegaterepresentative (whence “representative democracy”).   Who forms government is the person who can convince enough of those delegates to support them in a no confidence motion on the floor of the House.   That can always change, and where there is a minority government, change is perhaps a little more likely. We don’t vote for mandates.  Any analysis which talks about which party has a right to hold government presumes that one or other of the parties has some pre-existing right to govern.  They’re caught in the two party box.  The reason we have a two party box is primarily because of Labor’s caucusing system, where party members have to vote as a block on any policy which has been debated/agreed in caucus.

A minority government is good news for everyone – or at least everyone interested in democracy, primarily because it is now more likely that there will be greater transparency generally and greater independence to the public service in particular (“without fear or favour” and all that).  The Independents have already signalled that they want improvements to question time procedures.  The media should be happy because it will be an environment rife for leaks.   This is not to say that minority government is always best, but after such a long period of party dominance it should be a good thing now.

Rob Oakeshott is completely right when he says it’ll be “beautiful and ugly”.   Whether it will hold together will depend entirely on whether the three independents + Mr Bandt can control the urge to pork barrel for their electorates and make law for the benefit of the country instead.

With a little luck we’ll also be given some respite from the ridiculous overanalysis of every little action or statement of the Independents.  Heavens!

Because my insanity knows no bounds, I’m helping out with a second miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2011 in Brisbane.

It’s called the FOSS in Research and Student Innovation Miniconf, and I’m running it with my fellow ex-UTAS Honours Student, Peter Lyle. Here’s how we describe it in the CFP:

The FOSS in Research and Student Innovation Miniconf brings together researchers and students with an active interest in Free and Open Source Software with the broader Linux.conf.au community to highlight exciting work taking place within the often esoteric world of academia and educational institutions.

The Miniconf is part of Linux.conf.au 2011, being held at the QUT Gardens Point Campus in Brisbane, Queensland in January. It’s being organised by Peter Lyle of the Urban Informatics Research Lab at the Queensland University of Technology and Christopher Neugebauer from TUCS, the University of Tasmania Computing Society. You can e-mail them at frsi2011@googlegroups.com

The CFP is now open at the Miniconf web site, so if you’ve got something to say, please do submit a proposal!

For those of you who have not been following the lca2011 news, the results for the lca2011 miniconfs have now been publicly released – please see the lca2011 latest news. Sarah has been continuously working to get this out so quickly after the recent decisions by the lca2011 papers team and should be commended on [...]

10:57: Mikal shared: Diving in - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Some of these pictures are amazing. I especially love the ones where there is water deformation...

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"Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was 'Oh no, not again.'" - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

As I write this, we still don’t have an election result—although I imagine that will change some time today. I have no idea where the country will go once the result is settled, but today I’m thinking of my own immediate future.



I’m about to have a few days off with my sweetie, partly to do some family duties, but chiefly to have a break from our routine. Most of the vague big ideas that I had for 2010 have borne only minimal fruit, so I’m hoping that this time of recharging my batteries will allow me to see what I really want to do in the last third of this year.

Tonight Donna and I cooked some fish and I thought I’d try my hand at making GFCF parsley sauce, never having made it before in any form. So a little bit of Googling got us some ideas and so we ended up making it like this:

• Nuttelex margarine (reasonably lump)
• 1 onion
• bay leaf (fresh from the garden)
• gluten free flour
• rice milk (I think we used about 300ml)
• Tofutti (dairy free soft soy cheese, about a desert spoon)
• garlic salt
• pepper
• parsley (fresh from the garden, finely chopped)

Slice the onion then melt the margarine in a saucepan and lightly fry the onion. You are then meant to add the flour and mix it in but we forgot and added the rice milk first, so instead mixed the flour with some water in a cup to make a paste and then added it. Stir all the time. Add the tofutti and flavour with the garlic salt and the pepper. Keep stirring. Wait for it to start to bubble and add the finely chopped parsley. Stir more until ready.

This item originally posted here:



Gluten Free, Dairy Free Parsley Sauce Recipe

Don't you hate it when you send a file to someone by email, and two seconds after you press "Send" you realise that you forgot the attachment? That happens to me all the time.



So I wrote a mail filter, which plugs in to the mail server Exim (but could probably be adapted for other mail servers), which attempts to detect this...

When Brazil’s Association of Archivists first invited me to speak at their congress, I offered to supplement my conference presentation with a half-day workshop dealing in some detail with our digital preservation software. Ideally I wanted people to bring in their laptops so that after demonstrating the operation of our software, I could help people to install and configure their own copies of the system to learn from. Aside from bringing their own computers, we decided that it would be useful if participants could be fluent in English because no translation would be available and I speak no Portuguese. A total of ten people pre-registered for my seminar and a handful more turned up on the day.

Anyway, the day started with another session of talks in the main auditorium with simultaneous translation. I sat at the front with my headset on and the netbook on my lap. I decided to make a quick check to see that all of my software components were in place for the afternoon’s workshop so I used one of the memory sticks full of our code that I’d brought along to give away and set about unzipping and trying out software. I quickly ran into a problem when I found that a couple of the bzip files on the memory stick wouldn’t unzip. These were files I had downloaded from our sourceforge site in Canberra less than a week ago. Perhaps I messed up the download? With free hotel wireless available from my auditorium seat I decided to use the local Brazilian sourceforge mirror to download the files again. It took a few minutes but it soon became evident that some of the bzips at sourceforge were broken. I emailed the team back home to take a look but knew I’d be on my own for a while due to the 13 hour time difference.

The morning’s presentations included one by another of the overseas guests, Professor Bruno Delmas from France. His talk was made doubly interesting to me because of what the translators told me immediately before it. Apparently, only one of the translators was fluent in French. So he would be creating a simultaneous translation from French into Portuguese and his colleague would listen to the Portuguese and render it into English in parallel. This ‘Chinese Whispers’ form of simultaneous translation resulted in an interesting set of words that sometimes almost made sense but I think I’ll need to seek an English copy of Professor Bruno’s paper in order to properly understand his musings on the dematerialisation of the document.

I left the morning session early and returned to my hotel room to assess all of the pieces of software I had brought along and to attempt to build the missing pieces from source. Most things were working and the only obviously broken pieces would not affect anyone at the workshop unless they were Linux or Mac users wanting to install only one software component. I figured correctly that the risk in that case was quite small. For the workshop, I changed from my suit to my National Archives of Australia Xena Digital Preservation shirt. A little bit of marketing can go a long way.

There was some initial confusion in the seminar room when the infrastructure people wanted to insist on me using their computer rather than mine to do all of my demonstrations, but we eventually sorted that out and I managed to get the netbook talking to their projector and plugged into power for the long haul. People trickled into the room and I was gratified to see that my audience would consist of nearly all of the invited speakers, some Brazil and Santos archives people and the event organisers. All of them understood English and most were able to converse in English.

For those who hadn’t seen my keynote and to reinforce the concepts for those who had, I started with a brief slide presentation explaining the NAA approach to digital preservation. This led naturally into a demonstration of Xena and a bit of an exploration of the various outputs created during a Xena process. Next up I detailed each of the steps of processing a digital records transfer into a digital archive and this led to a detailed demonstration of the Manifest Maker and a full run through of the DPR. With everyone on the same page in terms of the operation of the software I checked to see what operating systems we might be installing on. Everybody had brought along machines running one variant or another of MS Windows.

Johanna Smit from São Paulo University volunteered the use of her new EePC netbook for me to demonstrate the use of our all-in-one DPSP installer and I connected it to the projector. I displayed and explained the contents of the memory sticks that I’d given out and walked through a software installation while others followed along on their own machines. Annoyingly, some quirk of the Windows setup on Johanna’s netbook prevented the menu entries for our software from pointing to the new installation but this issue didn’t occur on any other machines. I overcame it with some manual intervention but it made an otherwise smooth demonstration just a little less smooth.

The session concluded with some excellent discussion of the limits of our capacity to process digital records and some speculation on what factors may influence our ability to scale up our operations in future. The participants seemed generally impressed with the polished look of our software and our documentation. The test now will be to see if anyone goes away to play some more and contacts us as a result.

Really, I should have known better than to buy myself a rather 'bleeding-edge' laptop. I suppose I've been lucky with my last couple of laptops and was thinking that pretty much everything works on Linux. Or maybe I'm being picky, because in fact pretty much everything does work on my new Dell Studio.

I bought this laptop mainly because it has a 1920x1080 screen, without being a 17" monster. I had such a monster about four laptops ago (an enormous Sony Vaio weighing in at around 5kg and with a 1hr battery life) and it was an disaster: lots of weird proprietary stuff that never worked, like the external speakers in the docking station. But I loved that screen right up until the day Fraser threw a pair of scissors into it.

With the advent of mass-market 1920x1080 screens I've been waiting for them to arrive in laptops at a reasonable price, and the availability of this screen in a few possible laptops seemed to me to be that point.

It's a Dell Studio 15, and as well as the nice screen, it comes with a new Intel i7 Quad Core CPU, 6G RAM, 640G hard drive and a Blu-ray drive. While there are a few similar models around this one seemed to have the best mix of features-for-weight-and-price, so I bought my first Dell.

I built a USB key with the latest Debian Installer from Squeeze and installed that and everything came up pretty well. I had to use the broadcom-sta driver for the wireless, since the BCM 43224 is not (yet) supported by the free b43 driver (though from looking the mailing list people seem to be working on it, and it looks like it might not be too far away).

Everything seemed good. X came up on the (georgeous) screen. I don't care too much about 3D performance, but it was nice to note that the ATI 5000 series is expected to have full support as soon as it's integrated into the right places - it seems the code is written, and public, it just isn't incorporated into the 'radeon' driver quite yet. The fact that ATI is nowadays a free-software friendly company was one of the reasons for choosing this, in preference to an NVidia-based laptop.

But it seems that it isn't all roses. The fan in the laptop seems permanently on, and not on, in a quiet-just-barely-audible way, but ON, in an 'IN UR LAPTOPZ KOOLIN UR P0RCESSAZ' kind of a way. Too damn noisy for me to concentrate in a quiet room.

I've investigated what's going on, and it seems likely there are some ACPI misunderstandings happening. Some googling and some pecking around in /sys makes me wonder if the laptop expects some kind of configuration choice between favouring Active cooling and Passive cooling, and it's defaulted to the first one. Perhaps you get better benchmarks that way.

Linux ACPI also seems to only half understand it, it has two thermal zones, and one of them always appears with 0 temperature. I can see set points for the fans, but have no control over them. In particular this got me out reading the ACPI 4.0 specification, and it explicitly mentions this choice of favouring 'Active' vs 'Passive' as being done by configuring the passive trip point setting to a higher value than the low & high active trip points.

In the ACPI 4 spec (page 409) it says:

To implement a preference towards performance or energy conservation, OSPM can request that the platform change the priority of active cooling (performance) versus passive cooling (energy conservation/silence) by evaluating the _SCP (Set Cooling Policy) object for the thermal zone or a corresponding OS-specific interface to individual devices within a thermal zone.

This laptop is showing 'passive' at 95000 millidegrees celsius, and 'active' at 55000 / 75000 so right in line with the suggestion.

However I don't see any way in Linux to change these trip point values, and in any case I'm not convinced the laptop is actually obeying them at all. It should be that if I do nothing on the laptop for a while the temperature would surely drop below 55 degrees celsius. Surely a modern laptop will sit at under 40 degrees when it's quiescent, and the temperature sensor that does show me something sits at around 30 degrees in this too, 26.8, to be overprecise. That one doesn't budge either.

Looking in /sys/ I can't for the life of me find a way to set that cooling policy, and when I disassemble the DSDT it looks like a noop...

Thinking that perhaps there was a newer BIOS, I looked at the Dell site and found there was one. Great! Investigating even further, it seems Dell hardware has some interesting capability via libsmbios and some utilities which will let me install my BIOS from a Linux system... even better!

Linux is a second-class citizen though, and when I look for the Dell BIOS Hdr file I need there is no version of the file for this laptop - let alone the current BIOS version. And when I download the BIOS from Dell's website and unzip the first layer of packaging I find that both of the files inside will only run on Windows.

I added a FreeDOS boot stanza to Grub 2 in order to discover this, also discovering in the process that this is not well explained, and I could not find how to do it on the FreeDOS or Grub2 websites, so in passing, here is what I added into /etc/grub/40_custom :

menuentry 'BIOS Flash 1558 A09' --class os { set root='(hd0,msdos1)' linux16 /boot/memdisk initrd16 /boot/1558_A09.img }

Which certainly does boot FreeDOS from Grub2, into the image built from the 8M FreeDOS base image, and which I called '1558_A09.img' because that seems to be one of Dell's reference numbers for this model / BIOS version.

So still no BIOS update for Andrew, it seems, and the laptop is probably going to continue to be noisy for some time. Possibly forever.

Suspend/Resume works though. Kernel mode-setting for the ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5450 (or whatever it is) seems to work. Building kernels seems to work. The Blu-ray drive seems to work, at least as far as reading CDs - just because I got a laptop with a "Full HD" screen doesn't mean I watch movies on it: those pixels are for programming on! In any case, after reading the literature of pain about playing Blu-ray disks on Linux I'm convinced that we won't be shelling out to buy one any any time soon.

After a bit more frustration I did manage to get the BIOS installed, using the hack I found here of running the Windows BIOS update under Wine and copying the BIOS file out of the temp directory while the error message is displayed. I could then download a random DOS-installable Phoenix BIOS to get copy of phlash16.exe and put those two files on the FreeDOS image I created earlier. Finally I was able to put that learning about how to boot FreeDOS from Grub2 to good use!

Unfortunately, having jumped through all of those hoops (including the frustration of trying to build and use Dell's firmware-extract tools on a Debian system), the fan continues to grind away at annoying volume, with no way that I have been able to find to control it, and the temperature sensors also seem wrong, since one doesn't budge from 0 and the other doesn't budge from 26800.

During boot I get a bunch of error messages, like:

[ 1.049936] \_SB_.PCI0:_OSC invalid UUID [ 1.052202] pci 0000:00:1c.0: PME# supported from D0 D3hot D3cold [ 1.052210] pci 0000:00:1c.0: PME# disabled [ 1.065228] pci 0000:07:00.2: PME# supported from D0 D1 D2 D3hot D3cold [ 1.065237] pci 0000:07:00.2: PME# disabled [ 1.079086] Unable to assume PCIe control: Disabling ASPM [ 1.086412] HEST: Table is not found! [ 1.249906] ACPI: Fan [FAN0] (off) [ 1.249959] ACPI: Fan [FAN1] (off) [ 1.250093] [Firmware Bug]: ACPI: ACPI brightness control misses _BQC function [ 1.259118] acpi device:02: registered as cooling_device2 [ 1.262132] thermal LNXTHERM:01: registered as thermal_zone0 [ 1.262139] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ00] (27 C) [ 1.262561] thermal LNXTHERM:02: registered as thermal_zone1 [ 1.262571] ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ01] (0 C) [ 1.262598] ERST: Table is not found! [ 2.769664] i801_smbus 0000:00:1f.3: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 [ 2.769670] ACPI: resource 0000:00:1f.3 [io 0x1840-0x185f] conflicts with ACPI region SMBI [bus 1840-184f pref window disabled] [ 2.769672] ACPI: If an ACPI driver is available for this device, you should use it instead of the native driver

I don't yet know what this all means, so I guess I'll be signing up for the linux-acpi mailing list to see if there's anything I can do to get things working better. Any pointers will be gratefully received :-)

Right about now I wonder if maybe I should have gone for the HP or the Asus, even if they were a little heavier and a bit more expensive and next time I get a new laptop I must remember not to spend more than $900 (USD$600) on it.

[Updated: 2010-09-08... Noise Problems Solved

19:04: Mikal shared: Ten ways to survive the pensions crisis | Money | The Guardian

The average UK retirement savings account holds 30,000 pounds? That's a bit worrying.

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After a year away from Melbourne’s live music scene, it’s taking me a little bit to get back into the routine. Last time, I forgot my earplugs and camera. This time, I only forgot my camera. Hopefully the next gig will involve me not forgetting anything! But in the mean time, you get some slightly lower quality photos and video, courtesy of my phone.

First up for the evening’s lineup was Pinky Beecroft and The White Russians. As a long time fan of Pinky’s work, it’s always a pleasure to see them on stage, tonight was no exception.

As he mentioned in the above clip, Pinky was in a good mood, so didn’t grumble too much when the traditional Melbourne request for a Machine Gun Fellatio song came up (in this case, Unsent Letter). With a little luck it won’t scare The White Russians off from performing here again in the near future!

Up next were The Boat People. Sadly, they were a bit underwhelming after The White Russians. The music was okay, but not spectacular. Girl jeans are a bad look on guys – the lack of room for boy bits makes for the rather unattractive “pocket dong” look. That said, they did finish on a strong note, their last song, Born in the 80s (from their previous album) was pretty rockin’.

Finally, the main act: The Bedroom Philosopher. I hadn’t had the pleasure of seeing him live, having only heard a couple of songs on JJJ. The public transport theme was cool, with his backing band (The Awkwardstra) dressed in old MET uniforms. I’m also a big fan of any band that can bring on a brass section, even if they only managed a couple of trumpets.

Sadly, the gig was marred a little by a (Crazy fan?  Jilted lover? Belligerent drunk? All of the above?), named Bridget, who felt the urge to interrupt, squeal and make a nuisance of herself, even when asked to stop by the band and the crowd. Bridget, if you’re reading this, stop doing that. You’re kind of ruining it for everyone else.

Luckily, the gig got right back on track, culminating in a magnificent “Pyramid of Power”!

A few more photos available here.

A quick look around the Internet will reveal that the general consensus is that the desktop market share of GNU/Linux distributions is about 1-2%. I have a theory about why that percentage is not higher for desktop usage, which I term “obscurity through omission”.

I have come across a recent example that had the opportunity to mention Linux, but did not. This was an article in this months “PC Authority“, where author Jon Honeyball discusses Dropbox. He mentions that there are clients for Windows and Mac. He fails to mention that there are also clients for Ubuntu and Fedora, in both 32 and 64 bit versions, as well as the ability to compile from source. Dropbox releases updated client versions for Windows, Mac and Linux simultaneously, showing that, to them, Linux is equally valued. However “PC Authority” readers would not know that Dropbox can be used on Linux just as easily as on Windows and Mac.

This is but one example. I am sure that readers of this blog post could come up with many, many more examples of Linux just being forgotten about or actively ignored. Most hardware and peripherals work just as well on Linux as they do on Windows and Mac, but we’d never know from the manufacturers or the reviewers. I am convinced that if given wider coverage, then people might begin to question “what’s Linux?” This may lead to greater adoption of Linux, which I happen to think is a good thing.

I will readily admit that “obscurity through omission” is just one of potentially many reasons why the adoption of Linux is currently quite low, but I believe it to be a contributing factor. What do you think?

My blog theme needs a little freshening. Any suggestions?

What’s your favourite way to make WordPress themes? Use something like Carrington (which I can’t stand), or code them 100% from scratch (like I did this theme)? Or base it on P2 or Twenty Ten?

What do people think of the Coolvetica typeface I use at the top logo? Some of the letters are hideous (in particular the letters T and Y), but I’m lucky that my first and last names don’t hit those letters.

Also there seems to be a distinct lack of speedy magic available in modern themes like K2, which are capable of AJAX comment posting. What’s the best way to get those features without reinventing the wheel?

I have been out of the WordPress loop for too long, it seems.

The front lawn doesn’t grow against the house out the front and has always been a bit of a dust bowl. So to solve the problem, I have start to put a garden in it’s place.

Below is a photo showing the progress so far. Hope to have this finished next weekend and then look at putting some nice hedging plant in. Want something that will grow about say 90cm high. Will create a bit of privacy and probably cut down on the amount of dirt dust that would otherwise blow onto the porch.

Last year when I purchased my MacBook Pro, it was about three weeks before Snow Leopard was to come out. Essentially the upgrade DVD was free and has been sitting on my desk for the better part of the year.

So I finally bit the bullet and upgraded. A few things of note:

• The upgrade took quite some time. It was in excess of an hour, and I noticed it stalled from time to time. I whipped out the log file and realised that it was repairing the disk quite a bit. Had I not noticed this, I would have assumed something had gone wrong and rebooted the computer. Command+L gives you the log.
• iTunes got a library update (it takes quite some time).
• Evernote got a database upgrade.
• My git went missing, so I had to reinstall it. Bazaar was however still gainfully installed.
• MenuMeters disappeared. I had to get a more modern version online to ensure it continued working.
• There was a huge combo update waiting for me, to take me from OS X 10.6 to 10.6.4. It nearly weighed in at a gigabyte.
• Mail, which has been handling my mail since I ditched Thunderbird, went through a rather lengthy database upgrade. While it upgraded, I could not use mail. This process was about one hour long as well, which I felt took too long.

After over two hours, all I can say is my laptop is a lot snappier than it was before. Everything works as expected. I guess its time to start rolling it out on the iMac, and probably clean installing the MacBook Air for travel use.

Related posts:

1. Snow Leopard to have ZFS
2. dist-upgrade time
3. wordpress 2.3 – wordpress.wp_post2cat error is Sitemap plugins fault

As I write I am sitting in the AirJaldi office in upper Dharamsala, Northern India. I am here to attend Extreme Com 2010. This is communications conference with a twist – early tomorrow morning we head up into the Himalayas for a 4 day trek, peaking at a height of 4400m! I am not sure how I will go, as I have never been that high before. The highest point in Australia is only around 2,200m. So I thought I better write this post. Just in case….

I arrived in Dharamsala a little early to catch up with Yahel Ben David, a good friend who I met when I first visited Dharamsala in 2006. Yahel lived in Dharamsala for 11 years and was key to setting up AirJaldi, a Wifi network that delivers Internet to thousands of people in rural India. I understand that AirJaldi has around 500 radios in their Dharamsala network, serving around 2000-3000 end user computers. I am using it now and it works really well, a lot faster than I expected.

We have already had a vigorous debate over mesh versus point-multi-point Wifi networks and I have been showing off the Mesh Potato. I have really enjoyed the discussion and look forward to learning more about Wifi for developing countries while I am here.

We have also been brainstorming some ideas for battery backed power supplies for rural Wifi. Many rural locations in developing countries have mains power. However it may drop out for days, and have nasty high voltage spikes such as 1000V for < 1ms induced from electrical storms. They also experience wide variations e.g. 60-400Vrms rather than the nominal 220Vrms. Wifi stations (especially relay stations) require battery backed power supplies that incorporate a charger and a “low voltage disconnect” that disconnects the battery when it’s terminal voltage gets too low. There are no suitable products on the market. So power supplies for rural Wifi are a surprisingly big problem that needs solving. If anyone is interested in working on a power supply for rural Wifi please contact me or Yahel. It is a very worthwhile project that could help a lot of people.

More when I get back down from the mountain in 4 days!

Last year when I purchased my MacBook Pro, it was about three weeks before Snow Leopard was to come out. Essentially the upgrade DVD was free and has been sitting on my desk for the better part of the year.

So I finally bit the bullet and upgraded. A few things of note:

• The upgrade took quite some time. It was in excess of an hour, and I noticed it stalled from time to time. I whipped out the log file and realised that it was repairing the disk quite a bit. Had I not noticed this, I would have assumed something had gone wrong and rebooted the computer. Command+L gives you the log.
• iTunes got a library update (it takes quite some time).
• Evernote got a database upgrade.
• My git went missing, so I had to reinstall it. Bazaar was however still gainfully installed.
• MenuMeters disappeared. I had to get a more modern version online to ensure it continued working.
• There was a huge combo update waiting for me, to take me from OS X 10.6 to 10.6.4. It nearly weighed in at a gigabyte.
• Mail, which has been handling my mail since I ditched Thunderbird, went through a rather lengthy database upgrade. While it upgraded, I could not use mail. This process was about one hour long as well, which I felt took too long.

After over two hours, all I can say is my laptop is a lot snappier than it was before. Everything works as expected. I guess its time to start rolling it out on the iMac, and probably clean installing the MacBook Air for travel use.

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