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.

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

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.

The first things I did was create a new subdomain, but this isn’t needed since WebDAV at DreamHost needs a folder to be turned on. I would choose a folder 2 deep as in / + user/ or if you are using your main website use jasonsidabras.com/bookmark/user/. The reason for this is WebDAV on DreamHost makes the folder and anything else under the folder owned by dhapache. And you need to create an .htaccess file in the parent directory and turn mod_rewrite off.

This is simple, open up .htaccess, in this case in the “bookmark” folder and type:

Make yourself a user and password that you are going to use for your bookmarks and use that for the login in the WebDAV folder.

Finally, in the Dreamhost admin set up an .htpassword file in the user directory. This will make sure people can’t get to your private keys if you use weave, or unencrypted files from foxmarks.

Server side, that is it.

Just go into your weave or foxmarks and set up the username and password you used for your server. With weave its easy, just point the server to http://domain.com/path/to/user/. The only difference with foxmarks is you have to specify the file to save your bookmarks in: http://domain.com/path/to/user/foxmarks.json.

That’s it!

If you have your own server you can follow these instructions to set up your apache with WebDAV.

I’ve come down to the end and all I have left to do is write. This presentation gives a good summary of why I am doing it, what I have done, and where I have to stop. The conclusion: non-trivial problems are too complex for analytical solutions, full geometry 3d numerical modeling is needed. If each slot was individually excited this problem would have been finished, but since they are all excited by one source that gives rise to eddy currents to drive the slots they become mutually coupled in a non trivial way.

Either case great learning experience on the Equivalence principle, limits of Born’s first approximation and dyadic Green’s functions. All and all, I’m proud of my work.

All done in Latex with the beamer class.

Sidabras, J.W., “Coupling into Waveguide Evanescent Modes with Applications in Electron Paramagnetic Resonance”, Marquette Microwave Seminar, November 18, 2008.

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:

One of the perks of Sirius is that they are constantly updating content… well it was a perk until this morning.

I’ve been dealing with the fact that the Punk channel has been AC/DC radio for over a month. I thought it was going to stop when the new album dropped… but it didn’t. Now that channel no longer exists and is replaced by some light “rock”. My favorite channel Boombox, is gone. No longer are there any stations that remix rock and pop songs. Only 2 dance stations, where there used to be 5.

There are more classic rock stations that I will have to check out over the next couple of weeks, but there are also more “single band stations”. One of which is Led Zepplin. So, that is awesome, but only Zep? At least it will be a constant source of good music.

They have also upped the number of Jazz stations from 2 to 5. And I found a station called “real jazz” which sounded good this morning.

Anyway, here is the new linup. It seems Zepplin station will be going away 01/01/09.

This is pretty annoying.

This year is no different. But instead of looking for a song that says 27 in it, I’ve decided to go a different route.

The small particle potting soil I chose is primarily for Cactii, but since my main problem with growing things as of late is root rot, I decided this may be a good choice. On the bag it says that it drains more thouroughly than normal soil. I ended up using a small 6 inch tall pot that we had laying around and filled the first inch with the drainage rocks. The next 5.5 inches was filled with the catus potting soils and finally I added a 50% peat moss “seed starter” soil.

I planted 8 or so seeds about 3/4 deep and patted them down, watered and patted down lightly again.

With the rest of the seeds I placed about 2 cups of the peat moss starter soil in a sandwich bag and mixed the seeds in with it. I then put some water in the bag, just enough to moisten the peat moss. A second sandwich bag was put in place to catch leaked soil.

I chose a sandwich bag because it is closed enough to hold moisture but hopefully open enough not to rot the seeds. I expect once every couple of weeks I will have to re-wet the soil.

Currently the sandwhich bag of dirt and seeds resides in the part of the fridge reserved for butter. In 120 days I will have to remove it from the fridge and keep it in a warmer place, probably behind my television.

Pics when I get home…

Phew: everything works flawlessly again. Now… should i go back to installing mod_python?