Monday Oct 29, 2007
Monday Oct 29, 2007
You can NEVER have enough toys... never.
Ummm so, I have a new toy. I bought a Nokia N800 a couple weeks ago. It is, in my opinion, one of the Ultimate Geek Toys. It is officially what is known as an Internet Tablet. OK, ummm.. what does that mean. Well... it's basically a palmtop computer. It is almost a full replacement for lugging a laptop around when I travel. I say almost because I cannot run OpenOffice.org on it (although ABIWord works just fine), and I cannot connect it to a projector and give presentations from it. Otherwise... it is everything I need for a travel computer. I can read my email, browse the web, play games, work on spreadsheets, write documents, make Skype or other VoIP calls, do IM chatting and IRC chatting, connect a Bluetooth GPS unit and have live mapping with directions (or download the maps beforehand and use the mapping in offline mode), VNC to my home computer.... the list goes on and on.
To make it even more geeky, the OS, called Maemo, is a Debian derivative. It's 100% Linux. This means there is an ever growing library of Linux applications available, and if you are so inclined, you can adapt and recompile your favorite Linux application to be installed on the N800.
Nokia has done an amazing job putting a whole lot of functionality into a very small package. The screen is crisp and clear at a resolution of 800x 480 on a 10.5cm screen. Websites render very very well on this display. Internet connectivity is WiFi or Bluetooth (via a mobile phone) so it's main use is generally limited to being somewhere you have WiFi internet access. Offline, you can still use it as a full blown palmtop PC.
If you haven't seen one of these nifty little computers yet... well... find someone who has one and who will lend it to you for 10 minutes, and you'll probably find yourself ordering one too.
Wednesday Sep 19, 2007
So, I arrived in Barcelona at around noon on Tuesday. What a shock from Hamburg. It is actually warm.... and yes Toto, there is a sun.. and it even shines. The weather here is just about perfect. Warm... humid... but not so hot that you can't move. Checked into the hotel, and wandered down to the University where the OOoCon is being held.
First impressions... WOW!!! What an amazing campus! I have taken some photos, and if they are reasonable, I will upload a few here. The University buildings are absolutely amazing. It is like a gothic cathedral when you walk in the main doors. It is stunning.... much like a the rest of Barcelona.
The community meetings got underway fairly quickly. The NLC meeting I addended in the afternoon was full, and had really good representation from communities from all over the world... Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam (by IRC), Germany, Netherlands, Canada, France, etc etc. It was really interesting to sit in a room full of people from so many differnt places and cultures and see how they worked together.
The evening ended with an NLC welcome party. I kinda missed that in favor of wandering around Barcelona a little.
So.. first day.. or day zero... very interesting. The good stuff comes the next day though...
To Be Continued....
Thursday Aug 23, 2007
There you are at home... in a moment of geekiness, you decide you want to try out an old copy of OS/2 or the latest Linux distro you just stumbled across... do you repartition and install? Or simply fire up a Virtual Machine and install there? I almost always opt for the VM. It's so easy. But.. VMware is expensive... and I am cheap... so now what?
Well, earlier this year I bumbled onto VirtualBox. http://www.virtualbox.org It is a very nice VM application that supports almost every OS you can throw at it including Solaris, and OS/2 (if your computer hardware is up to it... it needs a special CPU mode for OS/2, and only certain CPU and motherboard combinations can provide this mode).
Right now, at home I have 3 versions of Linux and 2 versions of Windows installed into VirtualBox (running on an openSUSE10.2 host) and they work amazingly well... for example I can play avi and streaming videos full screen in XP (in the VirtualBox window) with no speed issues at all. The various Linux installs run as if they were native (for the most part). Of course Compiz-Fusion does not work, but that is to be expected since the emulated video card is not up to the task of OpenGL rendering... so that also means no fancy games in any Guest OS.
I would say it is not yet as robust as VMWare... especially for corporate use, but for home use, it is perfect. It is very simple to install and configure, and setting up a new VM is quite easy. Well worth checking out.
Monday Aug 06, 2007
It is interesting to see what people are doing to try and make the internet more of a tool than simply a massive repository of uninformed opinions, naughty photos, and dubious facts.
This past weekend I bumbled onto something called StartForce at http://www.startforce.com. Basically it is an OS embedded into your browser. You start with a simple login prompt.
Setting up a new user ID is relatively easy, and not any different than pretty much any other user account setup on the web.
After you've set up an account, validated, and then logged in, you are presented with a desktop that is similar in some respects to Windows XP, and yet not. It also has some flavor of KDE and Gnome mixed into things.
The desktop works exactly like you would expect a native OS desktop to function. The Start menu gives you all the familiar options and application categories.
Is it functional... yes... it is even usable. Speed is relative, but after tinkering with it for a while (over a broadband connection, I have to say that the speed of loading each app is comparable to what you would find loading native apps on most computers. Applications include a text editor, spreadsheet editor, presentation editor, PDF viewer, web browser and so on... all the basic office desktop applications you would need. There is even a media player, a video player and a couple of games.
Each user is given a disk quota and a bandwidth quota.
So... curious yet? I'd be interested in what other people think of this concept... I have lots of questions.. like what about security of your data? Can you work offline and have your status and data synchronised when a connection is re-established? Is that important?
Anyway, things are getting interesting the wacky world of the internet.