Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
So, having had my Eee and put up with Xandros for over six months, I finally caved recently and installed Ubuntu Eee on it. This is a customised version of Ubuntu using the netbook UI and with a number of tweaks to things to install the OSD and other Eee-related packages by default.
Install was easy, running off my USB stick that I had set up following instructions on the Ubuntu Eee website - with the traditional live-USB style beforehand so I could test that things work.
So far things are good, and in installing it over the recovery partition too I’ve managed to gain some more space for things I want to install, which is certainly nice. The one issue I have encountered is that the wifi seems to be stuck in some sort of powersaving mode as it works in bursts, which is a touch annoying, but I haven’t looked at this properly yet.
The interface is intuitive and good, very similar to the default Xandros one in terms of the large icons on the home app that sits above the desktop and all in all I like the way it works.
At work I spent a reasonably large amount of time dealing with email or instant messaging with co-workers, all of which is accomplished through Microsoft products - Outlook for email and Office Communicator for IM.
By default both of these are the 2003 versions, and there’s always been a number of things that have annoyed me. So when a co-worker recently pointed me in the direction of the internal pilots for newer versions of both of these, I set about installing them.
The first, and most noticeable difference, is obviously the appearance. Office 2007 has famously done away with conventional menus and toolbars in favour of the ribbons, although seemingly not across all applications in all circumstances as Outlook only uses them when editing individual items (be they emails, calendar entries or tasks). Office Communicator 2007 also has a UI change, heading towards the Microsoft Live Messenger style, which is probably better than ribbons as there’s not really much scope for them in an IM application. Aside from the obvious niggle that neither of these applications now fit with the rest of the look and feel of my operating systems, the interfaces are actually usable and the ribbon makes a lot of sense.
Moving on from the initial visual impressions and onto the new features, a number of the things that annoyed me appear to have been fixed (such as only being able to search for contacts in communicator in ‘Surname, Firstname’ form - although it doesn’t yet go as far as working by mailid) and there are a number of new features that I like (such as being able to view other people’s calendars in overlay mode with your own).
Communicator 2007 also now stores the conversation logs in a folder in Outlook, making it much easier to find the conversation you had with someone last week compared to the previous implementation we had involving a (often broken) web interface, and also offers an easy way to view previous logs when a conversation has been resumed.
The addition of document previews and image resizing in emails within Outlook is good too, allowing for a quicker look at the contents of attachments without having to load other applications - although it appears we are yet to acquire previewers for PDF files.
I’ve yet to use the other applications properly - having only viewed a couple of Word documents briefly, but if my experience with the editor in Outlook is anything to go by they’re certainly quite usable. The popup formatting element when you select text, for example, is very useful for quickly editing documents.
So far the only downside I’ve discovered, is that they might use slightly more RAM, which can be somewhat of an issue given my machine needs more memory at the best of times when running the variety of other applications that I need to do my job at times.
All in all, Office 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 are a good improvement over their predecessors and I’m happy with them so far.
Tags: microsoft, office 2007, office communicator, outlook
So, google took a step into the browser market this week with the announcement (and subsequent launch) of Chrome, their webkit based browser. This has been widely blogged about as an interesting move, for various reasons.
Of course, the technology is the first one, with the process-per-tab model being there to stop it from crashing horribly when one tab is dealing with a website that decides to go off on one. A nice idea indeed, as is the idea of jailing off plugins in a similar way (I’ve got pissed off with Flash taking down Firefox at work now, so am currently running with Flashblock enabled to stop this). In a strange turn of events, Microsoft actually got there first with the process-per-tab idea with IE8, so I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Firefox and other browsers look into it.
The main thing, however, that caught my attention was the idea that they’d get much of the market share. As much as we hate it, Internet Explorer has the majority of this, and in the corporate environment things aren’t too likely to change any time soon (especially not with webapps still being deployed that make use of activex controls and broken rendering). This leaves us with Firefox in a comfortable second, albeit miles behind, then Opera, Safari and some other browsers (I’ve not researched this, I’m just going on what makes sense). So where would Chrome fit in?
To my mind, there are two groups of users when it comes to browsers - those who are stuck in their ways using IE, and those who are happy to switch. Obviously the first group is a lost cause, so lets look at the second. This savvy group has already abandoned IE for some other platform, be it Opera or Firefox. To my mind (and at least in my own experience), they’ve likely got whichever browser they picked configured how they wanted; with the extensions and plugins they want installed and set up. Everything just works.
So, how do Google then get these users to move to Chrome? It’s an interesting puzzle. So far (having not used it myself due to the lack of Linux build) people seem impressed with the speed, but miss their extensions (especially an adblock one - which I’m sure google would love to implement) and have found that it is possible to crash the whole thing. Convicing these users to move over is clearly going to take more than a bit of a speed improvement over Firefox. People will want their extensions, and this provides an interesting technological problem for Chrome if it wants to stick with the jailing that they seem to have happily advertised everywhere in their documentation.
Of course, it’s still very early days, and I’ve yet to use it - so will reserve judgement on how well it works until I have - but it’ll be interesting to see how it does in the marketplace.
Tags: chrome, firefox, google, internet explorer, opera, safari, web browser, webkit
So, this week the new version of Ubuntu (and therefore Kubuntu) was released; version 8.04 LTS - aka Hardy Heron (and a variety of other names…). As a result I decided this weekend to update my desktop (previously running Gutsy Gibbon) to this using the update manager.
Previous updates haven’t gone so well, and last time the update manager crashed out during the upgrade; leaving in place some stuff that caused my machine not to boot until I managed to track down the cause and uninstall it from a maintenance prompt. This time, however, things seemed better and the upgrade went without a hitch… until I rebooted.
It was at this time that I discovered that no longer were my drives appearing as /dev/hd<foo><bar>, but as /dev/sd<baz><gaz>. This wouldn’t have been a problem, had I been using my drives by uuid in /etc/fstab. I wasn’t, and this is probably my fault as they were updated during the edgy upgrade but I changed the file and got rid of them somewhere between edgy and feisty.
So, after some jiggery pokery I got that problem solved and my machine was back up and booting, although I can’t seem to find my DVD drive anywhere in /dev, and a post on the ubuntu forums suggests that some drives might not be compatible with things (who wants to bet that mine is one of them).
This aside I’ve not had any problems so far. I’m still running KDE3, so can’t comment on the KDE4 variant, and haven’t played around with the desktop effects stuff. One thing that I did notice, however, was the decision to ship with Firefox 3 beta 5 by default, which most of the plugins I use don’t support. This was soon fixed by reinstalling Firefox 2 and manually updating the symlink in /usr/bin (as for some reason it doesn’t use /etc/alternatives unlike a lot of other applications).
All in all this has gone pretty smoothly… although it could have been better, and I would like my DVD drive to work at some point (although I only really used it for watching films, which I can do on the xbox instead now)
Tags: gutsy gibbon, hardy heron, kubuntu, linux, upgrade
This week I purchased as Asus Eee PC as a laptop for me to take to the US and generally as a replacement for my IBM X21 with its broken screen and having had a few days of use, I’m really happy with it.
Sure, it’s tiny and doesn”t have much in the way of power (although at 900MHz/512MB of RAM it’s more powerful than my X21) but the keyboard is still more than big enough to allow me to touchtype on it with minimal mistakes and the screen is big enough for most uses. As noted in Skumby’s blog post on it it doesn’t really work too well with websites such as Google Maps.
By default the Eee comes with Xandros Linux installed, although the manual does have instructions on how to install Windows XP and which elements can be removed in order to make it fit on the 4GB drive, most of which is actually taken up by the restore image. For me this is fine, as it means I have access to the utilities that I’m used to on my other machines. At the moment there seems to be a limited number of additional packages available in the official repository, but from what I’ve read this is increasing.
All in all it’s a very nifty little device that will certainly do me fine for my portable computing requirements.
Tags: asus, eee, laptop, linux, xandros
For those who don’t know, BT Vision is an digital television service provided by BT with no annual charges. As part of the service you get a “V-box”, which is essentially a computer running a version of Windows CE with a couple of DVB-T tuners in there to allow it to function as a PVR. It also connects to the internet and, through Microsoft’s service that they’re also going to implement on the Xbox 360, allows you to access a whole raft of on demand content.
Now, I’ve had this for a while - having decided to get it when I moved in due to it being cheap - and until last night I’d only really used it as a PVR. In this it works remarkably well, with a couple of niggles - mainly that sometimes the schedule isn’t up to date (as it gets that over the network rather than airwaves) and therefore it doesn’t adapt well to programs running a little late. I’ve also discovered that occasionally the clock gets a bit out of sync, and therefore I get the last few minutes of a show cut off. Other than these things it’s great and you can record up to two channels at once whilst watching something else that you’d already recorded (you can’t watch a third channel due to there only being a pair of DVB-T tuners).
Last night, however, I decided to investigate the on demand service. This provides a whole range of content from films (both provided by BT Vision and Film4 On Demand), to TV (BBC and Channel 4 providing a lot of content here), music and specialist know-how things (I discovered an entire section on pickles…) with prices varying from £0.79 for some TV up to £2.99 for a newly “released” film, with optional monthly subscriptions allowing you to watch an unlimited number of items from certain sections (depending upon the pack), although there isn’t one for Films. Once rented, you can watch the content an unlimited amount of times within the 24 hour period after playback starts, which is instantaneous due to it being streamed over your internet connection, and despite my connection not always being the best, it worked perfectly when I tried it out last night.
Of course, Microsoft also recently rolled out films to the Xbox 360 marketplace video store recently (in the UK at least, it’s been in the US for a while I believe). This also provides some on demand functionality, including HD versions of some films. This operates on much the same principle, only you download the film to the Xbox’s hard drive, and can start watching it any time within a 14 day period, with the same 24 hour limit after playback commences. The downloading to the hard drive, however, means that you can’t just select a film and go - and the selection is no where near as wide as that on BT Vision.
All in all, however, I think that on demand content like this is a great idea and certainly going to be used more in the future. Sure it might be more limited than going out and buying a DVD; but for one off situations where you just feel like watching something it’s great.
Tags: bt vision, films, on demand, pvr, xbox
So, the other day KDE4 was released, with a new interface and widgets and whatnot. It all looked pretty shiny, and I finally got around to installing the kubuntu packages for it this morning.
It all looked rather promising when logging in for the first time, it started up my media player of choice (amarok) and that started where it’d left off with my previous KDE3 login, although this might have been to do with me having run a pre-release version of KDE4 before. Unfortunately there wasn’t much else to endear it to me at the moment.
Firstly there’s now no longer any sort of run dialog, be it the search bar in the new application launcher thing acting as one if it can’t find anything on the menu (ala Vista) or an option on the “classic” look one. It just doesn’t exist, for me to run a command that isn’t on the menu I need to navigate the menu to find a terminal, load that, run the command, and then close the terminal. Hardly great - especially when there are apps that I need missing from the menu (kontact is an example) - I’m guessing due to lack of KDE4 packages at the moment.
Then there’s the new panel, plasma has added all these new widgets and stuff, which is great, but it seems that they forgot to include some of the settings that existed in the old ones. The task manager, for example, seems to only be able to show windows from all desktops, which I don’t want. This makes it rather hard to use once you get over a few windows open, especially given that the panel is now around double the size that I had it at in KDE3.
I was also frustrated by the keyboard shortcuts, of course I could change these - but there seemed to be no preference settings in the system settings dialog that I was forced to use due to the lack of kcontrol for KDE4 in kubuntu. This system settings thing, however, should just display the relevant “pages” of kcontrol, so I’m going to guess that the option might be missing. It also seemed to fail miserably at handling my attempts to use my “Windows” key on my keyboard for stuff, and even when I made no changes crashed when I closed it… hardly a good thing.
All in all I gave up trying to use KDE4 in about 30 minutes. Hardly great.
Please feel free to comment on how I was doing things horribly wrong, but to me it seems that KDE4 isn’t really finished yet… at least not on kubuntu.
Tags: kde, kubuntu, software
Having visited the family over Christmas I brought my laptop back down to my flat with me in case I found a use for it. The first use was on the train where I took advantage of National Express’ free wireless on the trains. It wasn’t too bad, aside from a couple of internet drops and a bit of lag; but on a train I was hardly expecting wonders and it certainly helped alleviate boredom.
Once back in my flat I figured it’d be sensible to connect it up to my wireless network provided by my BT HomeHub. This all went simply enough, but the connection (despite seemingly being strong) was never reliable; even when sat next to the wireless access point. This is something I had previously experienced with my Nintendo DS, and I’m putting it down to the mass of interference that is no doubt being given off by my TV/PC (with bluetooth adapter)/XBox/BT-Vision box.
Thinking about this a bit more I decided that chances are I’d never really want to use my laptop in the lounge anyway, and that therefore the only room that I would want to use it in would be the bedroom. I also remembered that I had a set of homeplug adapters that I got with my BT-Vision kit that I never found use for. Clearly this was a perfect opportunity to try them out.
They were remarkably easy to set up, plug them into power, plug the one in the lounge into the network and plug the laptop into the other. Done. Their box claims speeds of up to 200mbps, and while sceptical I’ve got nothing over 100mbps to test them with, and don’t really care as I’m only going to be using it for web anyway.
As a result I’ve also killed off my wireless, as I’m not likely to use it (and couldn’t with the signal dropping as much as it was), and now have a single wire going along the wall in my lounge until I get another 4-way to go with the rest of the stuff by the TV… still, beats having to run a wire all around my flat and does the job.
Tags: homeplug, networking, wireless
Following up from my blog on IM Applications, mulletron linked me to the KDE Windows Project installer, which was recently released in a pre-release state. I had a rummage around and also found the instructions.
I therefore decided to give this a look and have installed some of the things that I use on my KDE install at home. First up, naturally, was the kdenetwork package containing Kopete. The installer itself is quite simple, you tick the packages you want, and it goes off and grabs the right dependencies and whatnot. These packages are then downloaded into a folder of your choosing, installed (again into a folder of your choice) and away you go.
As the downloaded files included Qt, kdebase and kdelibs it took some time, but this was not unexpected (especially over the wireless connection on this machine).
In the previous post I did suggest that ideally I’d be after a portable solution. Unfortunately KDE doesn’t really fit this at the moment due both to being over 1GB in size, and also requiring environment variable settings (which obviously won’t be possible everywhere).
Once it was installed and I’d set up my environment variables I ran kopete.exe… and it crashed. So, reading the other information on the wiki, I ran kbuildsycoca4.exe by hand and then re-ran kopete.exe, and hey presto there was the Kopete GUI (along with a whole host of other apps that I tested such as kwrite and konqueror - although that had some issues browsing HTML it seems).
Unfortunately it seems that there was something wrong with the Jabber implementation, as I couldn’t add that account, and there seems to be something else that’s not quite there with Kopete as it seems not to want to connect to the MSN servers.
Obviousy with this being a pre-release version I wasn’t expecting great things. The fact that it runs at all is a great indication to me that there is a chance of this all being pulled together very soon. I’d also like to see the install being more automated, with setting environment variables and whatnot, but we’ll have to see.
Tags: kde, windows
Being at home for Christmas, I’m using my family’s Windows machine for my computing purposes and as such I don’t have access to my usual suite of applications. For instant messaging this is usually Kopete, which allows me to connect to a multitude of different IMP protocols (MSN and Jabber in my case) from in a single client.
On Windows I have access to the official MSN client, but this fails to meet my requirements of supporting multiple protocols. That and it looks atrocious, failing miserably to fit into the style of Windows XP (even with the tellytubby theme).
So, after some rummaging around for something else that supports the protocols I need and is free. Ideally I was also after something that could be made portable (via USB stick).
Trillian was the first port of call, having previously used it, but this was soon ruled out due to not supporting Jabber in the “Basic” version.
I then moved on to looking at portableapps.com for a USB stick friendly client. This provided me with two options; Miranda and Pidgin.
Miranda seemed to be very lightweight, especially in terms of graphics, but was immediately obtrusive with asking for details for specific accounts for protocols I’ve never used. Investigating the options menu I found a mass of options (even more than Kopete it seemed - and people often say KDE apps are overloaded in terms of options), but not one to have multiple connections to the same protocol. Investigation on this matter resulted in a suggestion to copy the plugin and do it that way; hardly ideal.
So I was left with Pidgin, which used to be called GAIM. Again I’d previously used this back when it was GAIM, so I knew what to expect. Of course GTK on Windows is hardly ideal, but it doesn’t look that bad, aside from the large font used in the contact list (or “buddy list” as Pidgin seems to want to call it). Alas this doesn’t seem to do it right either, with the groups on my contact list being arranged in a seemingly random order - with no way of changing that.
Maybe I’ve just been using Kopete for too long and have got used to it, but compared to the other applications I’ve tried over the past few days it’s got them beaten hands down.
All I can hope is that when KDE4 and Qt4 make their way into the wild, a Windows version of Kopete also follows.
Tags: kopete, miranda, pidgin, trillian, windows live