Laptops as Development Workstations

I've tried off and on over the years to maintain a laptop with a copy of my development tools, but time and time again I am disappointed by the horrific I/O performance. Hopefully down the road solid state disks will help, but at the current time i'm just a little bit depressed about how long my installation of FC8 updates is taking.

And if you are wondering why I'm running this now outdated distro, it's because it matches up well with a particular compiler kit I'm using at the moment.

Soon I will finish rebuilding my development network, which generally includes a WIndows XP Professional PC, an FC8 Tower Workstation, a file server (terrastation) and a laptop. The laptop is ONLY used to remote desktop into the other two systems when I'm working remotely.

I miss Zimbra

Exchange is overly complicated. It's a system designed by committee. It's not that bad, and it has tons of great features, and when it works it's amazing. But when it goes wrong, it goes very VERY wrong.

I miss Zimbra and it's ability to run from a single box and support hundreds of users with zero issue.

If it hadn't been for the crazy timezone issues that were affecting every major calendaring system at the time, we probably would have stayed with it.

I'd definitely use Zimbra again though, and encourage anyone setting up a new startup to give it a shot.

Another tivo updated

I was really bored on Sunday, so I decided to upgrade one of the Tivo units to make it that much easier to record ALL of the Olympics.

Added a 320GB drive to the existing 120GB. Now rolling with approx 512 estimated hours of recording capacity.

I had done this once before with mixed results. I now think that my new bracket system is going to be better, as it offsets the placement of the second hard drive above the first, so that they are not completely flush, hopefully providing some additional room for air to get between them for cooling.

The last time I did this I had problems with stability when both drives were really spinning. Way too much heat. We'll see how the new setup proceeds.

MFSTools is an awesome package, and so easy to use.

New Otherton

Cool pic of "New Otherton" the village of the "Others" in the Lost TV show.

http://flickr.com/photos/69398923@N00/2511420523/

Prevent nautilus from opening a new window

It often becomes irritating on some gnome installs that nautilus will open a new window for every folder. My desktop quickly becomes cluttered.

The following post describes how to disable this "feature"

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-361989.html

For the impatient, the following commands will probably do the trick for you.


gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser true

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry true

so true, linux reliability and Ubuntu.

http://www.linux.com/feature/141546

Our computers really can be reliable, i promise! Thanks Ubuntu!

And PS, when XP just starts to suck a bit less, we switch to vista.

XP was the suck we can live with.

zee plane boss, zee plane!

Simple sleep timer for audio in Ubuntu

jonnyro@jonnyro-desktop:~$ amixer sset 'Master' mute

jonnyro@jonnyro-desktop:~$ at 2am

warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh

at> amixer sset 'Master' mute

at>

job 1 at Wed Apr 30 02:00:00 2008

jonnyro@jonnyro-desktop:~$ ps -A | grep atd

7882 ? 00:00:00 atd

cooling device with no moving parts

As paris would not say, thats not hot

Cooling device with no moving parts - this article describes what they say is a revolutionary advancement in cooling. Fun read. May help with those micro sized laptops of the future.

The world has lost an amazing author

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23697230/

A.C. Clarke has passed. I can still remember the first time I read Rendevous with Rama, and City and the Stars.

He will be sincerely missed.