Fighting with computers

I was looking for a new 12x zoom camera with image stabilization. I turned to eBay to see if I could find better deals and, specially, more offer than you might get from local retailers. I settled with a reputed seller from Hong Kong, and I paid almost the same as the list price from a local seller but the deal included an extra battery and a 1GB SD memory. In the process of looking for a deal on eBay, I detected numerous problems on listings of various products (i.e: digital cameras and USB flash storage). I reported my findings to the Spanish branch of eBay but to date, four days later, I've got no answer from them. I did the same thing to eBay.com Safe Harbor and I've got an automated reply, but some hours later I could see that some of the users accounts had been cancelled. After searching a bit on the 'net I can see that a common scam is to sell fake flash storage (either USB or SD or any other format). The trick is that the storage actually works, but it only contain...

After some months of use I think I can provide you my impressions on how this Ubuntu thing behaves. I used to be a SuSE Linux user since 8.0 and then, after 10.0 I had several minor issues with some hardware. I decided to give Ubuntu a go and since then I have succesfully migrated six different systems desktops to it. I have also installed more than four other copies on several relatives computers. The net result is all of them are happily running. I have been consistenlty using Ubuntu on a daily basis since mid-June and I'm very happy with the result. I was familiar with KDE and I am now using Gnome and I cannot complain either. It just works, though I am sure some of the days I needed to pull one or two tricks out of the many on-line forums about Ubuntu (like getting 3D acceleration on some ATI cards). If you use Ubuntu Dapper Drake I can recommend you this site . My advice is: try it out. If you do not like you can get a refund. Till now it Ubuntu is the only distro you can get ...

Some days ago I saw this nice gadget on the website of a distributor. I thought it might be a good idea: A notepad you take with you, you write as many pages as you want and, when you are back home you can download all your handwritten text or drawings. Of course you can do this with a cheap scanner without having to recourse to buying any new hardware (provided you already own an scanner). However, what I was looking for when I learned about this product was a tablet for drawing. The Genius G-Note series does both: You can use it off-line to write more than 100 pages in the built-in 32MB of flash memory and it can also be used online as a mouse substitute (or companion). I feel much more comfortable when writing and drawing with a pen than with a mouse. The unit came with some Windows software which was ok. Without any software the tablet looks like a USB flash drive to your system where each page drawn shows as a different file. Filenames are numbered (i.e. BK-01-001.DNT, BK-...

I've recently learned that the software taught at the Fine Arts School at the university I am with is based on three comercial programs: Adobe's Photoshop, Macromedia's Freehand and Microsoft's PowerPoint. The three are nice pieces of software in my opinion and I am aware they are used by many companies. What troubles me is that students are left either bankrupt (Photoshop €1.042 , Freehand €520 and PowerPoint €338 , which totals €1.900) or having to get a pirate copy of the software. With all due respect I think they could teach the same concepts (which I guess are the very basics as it is an undergraduate course) using the free counterparts The GIMP , Inkscape and OpenOffice's Impress . These programs have a similar functionality (ok, maybe just 90% of the others features) but are available for free for almost ANY platform, including Windows, Linux and Apple's OS X. For those unfamiliar with the software world, let me put an example: If we compare the soft...

I've been visiting the School of Engineering and Business in Raahe , which belongs to Oulu University of Applied Sciences. It's a nice place to go and it has to get quite cold during winter time. I was giving a talk on Information Security. I was lucky I did not need to fight with any computer during my stay and even skype worked as expected to get cheap phone calls home. The most amanzing device I use there was the new Canon 5D reflex camera and 28-105mm lenses. It's worth more than $4,000 so you do not want this equipment to get lost of damaged. It seems to have very low noise 13.3 Mpixels CCD. Have a look at some of the sample photos . It's kind of heavy weight though (at around 4Kg including the lenses).

As you can see below, for reasons I do not know two copies of the same post are shown. I swear only one showed up when I did my original post, but somehow it appears now. Instead of deleting one I will keep it as a living proof of how many times our computer systems are unfriendly with us :-)

Not sure about commercial success. But it's just awesome.

Not sure about commercial success. But it's just awesome.

Sometimes you bump into a new idea that solves real-life problems in a simple way. Sometimes it is even free (I do agree here with Mr. Torvalds' quote that says "Software is like sex: It's better when it's free"). Meet-o-matic is a simple web application that seems to solve the problem of scheduling a meeting. I am aware some groupware (i.e. Exchange or Lotus Notes) provides a well crafted system to do this but it is not free nor you can use it everywhere. Meet-o-matic is a simple web page with a simple working model, no registration required. It looks good enough to me. You can give it a try to get your own opinion. You cannot lose much. In a way, I like it as much as Mailinator.com (because no user registration is required, so no more forgotten passwords and time wasted with silly emails).

If you use GRUB as your Linux boot loader (it happens the same with LILO) you may notice that your boot menu is gone after installing most flavors of Windows, including Windows XP SP2. One way to avoid this problem is to install Windows first and, later, to install Linux or BSD. Another possible solution, more general, is to fix the boot that is gone. My favourite way is to use a Knoppix CD to boot your system in Linux. Then, as the root user I mount the hard disk partition that holds / and /boot and then to chroot to the first one (/). Now you can issue the install-grub command to get your partition table boot code fixed. Example: Boot hard drive is /dev/hda and Linux / and /boot are in /dev/hda3 partition. Open a Knoppix terminal and type: sudo bash mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3 cd /mnt/hda3 chroot ./ /bin/bash grub-install /dev/hda exit reboot That should be it. Do not forget to remove Knoppix CD before the next system boot.

It seems I cannot escape the yearly ritual of hard disk swapping. This year I'm getting a 250 GB IDE drive to replace my 120 GB drive at home. As usual I do not want to lose any data and I want the process to be as painless as possible. This time I used a slightly different approach: I connected the new drive to my office computer as a slave drive to copy all the data I've had at the office (back-ups are always a good thing). Then I moved the drive home. I was keeping SuSE 10.0 in my home computer but I was willing to replace it by Ubuntu's Dapper Drake. So I copied my Ubuntu install from my office and I saved myself the configuration process. I was lucky enough to get the system working (including X) without changing a bit (as have ATI graphic cards on both systems and the rest was properly auto-detected). At home I am keeping a MS Windows Fat32 partition with some software (like taxes forms) I need to use yearly. I had a 6GB partition that was almost full, so I just did a...

I was having a beer with a friend in a small cafe in Peñíscola. Later, when we headed to the beach my friend missed his sunglasses. He was recently shooting a movie in the Moroccan desert. When we returned to the cafe looking for the sunglasses we were told nothing was left on our table. However, after insisting on our point the cafe owner "discovered" the sunglasses in their box. Curious. I was not familiar with that brand and my american friend told me it's Revo , a high-tech brand of sunglasses that claims to offer the best bandpass filter using space-age technology. I cannot tell you first hand, but on paper they look good if you have two hunderd dollars to spare. They are only available in USA though.

The Qosmio line from Toshiba adds a new capability to their laptop line: It's a DVR and DVD player using some BIOS software. The result is that you don't need to boot any OS (i.e. Windows Media Center) to use these features. It also means that even if your system is destroyed by a virust these features will still work. On top of this, Toshiba ships the system with a remote control that will make your experience even more comfortable and the Harman/Kardon loudspeakers deliver a good audio experience too (with richer bass sound than most other laptops). But there are several catches that Toshiba let slip under the carpet. My first surprise was that inside the package they include a USB infrared receiver. My first thought that it could be there just in case you do not have a good angle when using the built-in receiver. I was wrong. I latter learned that Media Center Software is not compatible with the laptop's built-in infrared receiver so the USB one is required to use the re...

I'm visiting a friend who has a new house and a new wireless setup from Telefónica. He needed some help from his company IT department to get the thing working. On arrival he tells me that he can use the wifi connection and it works, but at the same time the computer says it is not connected. I suspected that odd behaviuor could be due to the common WinXP/manufacturer driver schizophrenia where both the system and the wifi card manufacturer's software are trying to manage the card settings. I tried to disable the WinXP handling of the card but then I was getting disconnected. So I tried the wifi card's software: Hmmm, cool! Network scanning shows a beautiful sonar-like display where you can the different networks on your neighbourhood, names, MAC addresses, channels and ... surprise: There are two different AP using the same ESSID nearby on different channels. This is probably because a neighbour has a similar setup as my friend's. Ok, time to change the ESSID to someth...

I have to visit Raahe (near Oulu , Finland) in September and the EU is quite stingy about ticket cost (unless you are a politician which I am not). Our staff wanted to get it done for not more than 650 Euros. Most airlines either do not fly to that destination or charge you more than 1000 Euros. Time to put some of my vacation time to the task of saving some of that taxpayers' hard-earned money. The old fashion way of using a brick and mortar travel agency seemed to be a no go, as I am still waiting for a quote from them. Expedia or Travelocity had served me well in the past but it is unclear if you can get a ticket from them if you are based in Spain. A local e-company, rumbo.es provided a very nice price of 476 EUR, but when I tried to complete the check-out it gave me an error. It was also unclear whether I would need to go to baggage claim when changing airline or not. It was time to give them a call (or more). First call: All our representatives are busy, line hung-up. (Nice...

I've just realized how many different devices my family is carrying around when traveling. I mean computer-based devices. I can count two laptops, three cellphones, five MP3 players, one DivX hard drive, one mobile DivX player with a small screen, a nice unit that doubles as a flash-based MP3 player and self-powered loudspeakers, a Palm PDA, a fantastic CASIO dictionary plus translator and a Canon digital camera. It is an amazing number of devices that suggests me that, at least for us, we are really far away from those devices that do almost everything. We are more the kind of customer that prefer one device that performs one task well. But I guess that other customers will enjoy multifunction devices. Just a question of user preferences.

It should not be that difficult. After all, last year I was attending a free Internet access (wifi) on a public libary in the north west of Spain (Galicia). But this year's experience proved quite tough and challenging. To make a long story short I will tell you the local hotspot was not properly configured to accept user's laptops. So until I was able to let that message reach the network management people the problem prevented me to access the Internet. The problem, as with cellphone operators, is that their CRM is designed to prevent user's complaints to get to the right technicians. So it took me some courage and time till I got things sorted out. Right now I'm sitting on the street with my laptop writing this message. The speed is so low that I am not sure I will finish the post before running out of battery :-)

Although media messages have been a bit confusing, it seems that Intel is regaining customers from AMD. At the same time that AMD is buying ATI (an therefore expanding the number of fronts the company will be fighting), Intel is presenting new versions of their saga of confusing names: Pentium D Core Duo Core 2 Duo Code names are not helping either as Yonah, Conroe or Merom tell you nothing about the processor (unless you are an Intel engineer). So will tell you my simplified version: Pentium 4 is dead. Hyperthreading is not bad but having a dual core is better. It means more instructions executed per time unit (faster processing). Trouble is that the thing tends to be hot, hotter as it gets faster. It gets hotter because it uses more power, so computers need these 400W or 500W power supplies to keep all the parts properly sourced of energy. Intel has moved from 90nm to 65nm which means transistors are now smaller (they have to be if you plan on packing 350 million transistors in a sma...

This is the name of a new service offered on my university campus. It really is a Plesk -based control panel with a choice of databases and content management tools running on top of Windows 2003 servers. As I have been running several servers and databases I thought I was well prepared to use this "advanced" new system: I was wrong. While Plesk's control panel looks nice (and you can chose the skins that pleases you the most) it was not very easy for me to manage through all the system. Eventually I was hitting against the wall when trying to import an ASCII file to fill-in a MySQL database table using phpmyadmin (because of wrong default options). I did not like the default management for SQL Server databases was done over (insecure) http connections. For reasons that were not explained PHP scripts returned a 404 Not Found error while at the same time I could not change any of the file access rights and, surprisingly, ASP files worked without any problem. Later on the s...

I already mentioned in this column that I was waiting for an article I wrote to be published on Circuit Cellar magazine. And there it is in the #193 August issue. It describes some of my work to get an RFC 2217 serial device server based on a Rabbit Semiconductor 8-bit microcontroller. Some of the problems were mentioned here in the past but I've put together all the details to give readers an understanding of the full process. My experience with Rabbit cores has been quite successful and I think it is a nice, cheap and low-power platform for not so complex systems' automation. The learning curve is not steep and the development tools work as expected, just keep in mind you need a serial port to get it working (and a real one will be faster than a USB-serial dongle).