Jason Sidabras

Okay, I admit. I get swooped up sometimes by glamorous things and high expectations. Luckily I have friends who don’t. With that being said: Netbook is out. The price is right, the power is not. It just can’t compete. So instead, I will be saving up for the Sony Vaio Z. This was my original love I just wanted something here now.

This weekend I went to the Sony Outlet store in ~Kenosha and checked out what they had in stock. They had the 13.3″ Vaio SZ and the 11.1″ Vaio TZ. Both had 1280×768 screen resolution which actually looked pretty good on the 13.3″ screen. The SZ is heavier than the TZ but the distribution of weight both seemed balanced unless you had the 9-cell battery in the SZ.

Size wise, the 11.1″ is just a tad uncomfortably small. But the 13.3″ is right on the money.

So where does the Vaio Z sit in: at 13.1 inches it should be about the same size as the SZ but with a 16:9 aspect ratio of 1600×900 resolution. I could be happy with the 1366 x 768 that they have but for only $200 more I get the nVidia 256MB 9300M GS and the bump in resolution instead of the nVidia 128MB.

So here is the specs and price

Price: $2200 tax/shipping included.

• Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P9500 (2.53 GHz) 6MB cache 1066 MHz FSB
• 2 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
• 160 GB SATA HDD (later to replaced with SSD)
• 13.1 ” 1600×900 Screen
• Bluetooth
• Wireless N
• Fingerprint Scanner
• DVD+/-RW DL

I will be much happier with this system.

So I’ve been kicking around in my head the past couple of days of really pulling the trigger on a netbook. I have a few reasons. First, my battery life on my Powerbook G4 is 20 minutes on a good day. Weight is about 4 pounds and all I ever use it for is typing master’s thesis and some programming. So, why do I need a new one? Eh, I can never answer that question. But I think in the next couple of weeks, pending friends reviews, I might pull the trigger on a new netbook.

I’m looking at the HP 1000 series. I saw them at the store a few weeks back and really like them. It didn’t seem cheaper than the HP2123 netbook that made some waves 9 months back.

So what are the specs:

• Intel Atom N270 (1.6 GHz) Single core 2.5W
• Intel MA950 graphics
• 1GB DDR2
• Bluetooth, webcam, wireless n
• 16GB SSD
• 10.2″ 1024×600
• 92% full keyboard

It seems that the N270 is a 32-bit chipset which is a little bit disappointing. I could wait until the Atom 230 hits or even the 300 series (dual core) for a little hit on power, 4 W and 8 W respectively. But I doubt they will come out because they are for mini-desktops. Which don’t care as much about the power constraints.

Although it comes with a 3-cell battery I will quickly be looking for a 6-cell, for 2 times the battery life (linear?). Also soon MIE will be available which seems to be HP’s Ubuntu version. But I will be reformatting it and installing either OpenBSD or Ubuntu myself.

The bad… seems battery life. Three hours on the 3-cell and a 6-cell is in the works. This may have been tested with regular harddrive, because SSD option is new.

Also proprietary cable for VGA

So, what do you think?

EDIT: All of this and I forgot the price. End of the day $519. Plus whatever the 6-cell battery costs.

Other choices:

Lenovo S10 -  Anti-glare screen. Same basic specs $449. No SSD option (yet?).

Dell Mini9 - Same specs $20 cheaper, not sure on looks or keyboard. Ubuntu 8.10 on bootup! 4 hours battery life on 4-cell. No upgrade options noted. Glossy 8.9″ screen

Ever since Firefox 3 came out and google browser sync was no longer supported, I’ve been looking for a replacement to keep my computers in-sync with each other. The first maintainable sync program I found was Weave. It currently has a little lacking in support across platforms and is in highly beta mode. This will become my bookmark program when it becomes more stable.

As for my current bookmark program I just changed to foxmarks. It supports encryption, your own server and seems fast and stable. I’d like to take the rest of the blog to show you how to set up your own bookmark WebDAV server on Dreamhost, and then generalize it.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve been complaining about the mouse speed in Ubuntu and that the GUI doesn’t have enough controls to tweak it the way that I would want it. Joe sent me to a blog he did back in 2007 for tweaking the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to get the mouse working just right. Well, I’m sorry to say, but it’s not 2007 anymore.

The newest version of Ubuntu (8.10) has done away with configurations in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf for inputs and hardware. This is a move done directly at the freedesktop.org facilities to introduce the Hardware Abstraction Layer or HAL. HAL is a daemon which runs at startup and configures all of your hardware. It is configurable by the user with some “simple” XML tags in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/<filename>.

You can find all of your information by running:

So this is what I put in there:

Reading the Ubuntu documentation on HAL for input devices gives you the idea.

Editing your /etc/x11/xorg.conf file still works, just don’t be surprised when one day it doesn’t.

NOTE: For all you apple users who want to change your driver to “synaptics” DON’T you will completely botch your keyboard. Still looking for a way out of this… yes, USB keyboards don’t work either.

Single User mode for the win.. at yaboot:

This is a draft I just want to get out there… if I can re-think what I was thinking this may become something.

So I had an idea the other night and I would like to try to articulate it and get some feedback.

The main idea is a serverless distributed versioning system. This is very similar to research work that is going around on P2P Wikis with the exception that I would like all files to be useable in this system. It seems there are commercial products that does this on a set of known nodes (i.e. your software developers or other groups) but I would like to extend this to anonymous nodes.

Read the rest of this entry »