Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Technology predictions

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I’ll add three to the ones that Stewart just posted:

  • Two years: The distinction between laptops, netbooks and mobile phones will get even more blurred with consumers demanding mobiles with more power and lighter and lighter laptops/netbooks;
  • Two years: Tivolised/Androidised Linux mobiles will grow, but there will be a few more open Linux phones around (mainly due to the convergence of mobiles, laptops and netbooks);
  • Five years: Peak oil will start to affect pricing of consumer electronics directly through raw materials.

Avoid Seagate 1.5 TB disk drives

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Sounds like the Seagate 1.5 TB drives are having some significant firmware issues, especially when used in certain RAID configurations. They tried blaming the Linux kernel for it even though the same issues appear to happen under Apple MacOSX and MS Windows. Here’s an example of the error that you see under Linux:

09:07:49 end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 8
09:07:49 md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0
09:07:49 raid5: Disk failure on sdc, disabling device.

Ka-ching!

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Now this is a monopoly lock in at work..

MICROSOFT will rip an estimated $70 million out of the aged care sector’s IT budget over the next 18 months as it forces users to pay full commercial rates for previously discounted software. Aged care providers are shocked by Microsoft’s decision to revoke their not-for-profit status, which gave them access to its products at a heavily discounted rate. As a result, Microsoft’s Office, Sharepoint and SQL server products are firmly entrenched in the sector’s IT infrastructure.

D’oh!

XVideo on VGA laptop output with radeon driver

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I’ve been doing a lot of playing with MythTV using Mythbuntu. One of the nice things it supports is diskless booting of frontend systems so I thought I’d try it out on my old laptop. It worked quite nicely until I was about to start displaying any video through the VGA output to our TV, then you’d get a blue screen rather than the video but the video would display quite nicely on the laptops own display. Needless to say that was pretty suboptimal. 😉

The reason that happens is that with the free ATI Radeon driver in Ubuntu the XVideo overlay is assigned to the first display (the built in LCD) even if you’ve disabled it through the XRandR config in your xorg.conf file. I tried a lot of mucking around with various Xorg settings and got nowhere until I stumbled across the rather simple solution!

The xvattr package is in Universe in Ubuntu and I make it happen each time by putting the command into the /etc/mythtv/session-settings file (just can just create it if it doesn’t exist, it just gets sourced by the mythfrontend command on startup).

Sadly I don’t think I’m going to be able to use the laptop after all because it doesn’t have line out, just headphones, and that doesn’t appear to be enough for my amp. 🙁

No Opt-Out for the Great Firewall of Australia

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So it appears there will be no way to escape from being blocked from seeing sites that are false positives due to buggy & broken filters or incorrectly classified, etc.. 🙁

Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government’s pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.

According to preliminary trials, the best Internet content filters would incorrectly block about 10,000 Web pages from one million.

I guess if John Howard was still around he’d want us to be blocked from seeing un-American content too.

No Ubuntu Linux Dell Inspiron Mini 9 for Australia :-(

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At work we’ve been interested in the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (Dell’s answer to the eeePC), especially as everywhere you go you’ll read about it being shipped with Ubuntu Linux, which was great news.

Unfortunately I’m sad to say that my sources in Dell have told me that it’s only going to be available in Australia with Windows XP, no Linux version for Australia. 🙁