Friday July 18, 2008

Silence and Pavlov

Today I got my SunRay@Home. For those of you not working at Sun, that's a Sun Ray attached to your home network that directly VPNs (from the firmware) into SWAN, the corporate network. It allows for hot-desking from your cubicle to your study and vice versa. Pretty cool stuff.

Reason I wanted to have one at home was mainly eco driven. When I do things like software development I need a full blown desktop. But in the morning, between alarm clock and shower, I'm only drinking my first coffee and checking my email. Why should I fire-up the big desktop to only use a browser and an email client. And that was my background to sign up for the SunRay@Home program.

I got my unit today, installation was a jiffy. Everything fine, Sun Ray on my left display, PC on the right LCD. Around 10 PM I decided to shutdown the desktop PC. And then came the big surprise: For the first time in many, many years (probably twenty) I was using again a computer with zero background noise. No, not just the "nearly silent" that laptops give you, but simply absolute nothing!! It was lovely, but at the same time even weird, I guess a kind of reverse Pavlov effect (in this case I got the food but there was no bell). It appears that browsing the web and the noise of fans are by now in our minds tightly intertwined.

I do use a Sun Ray in the office, but of course modern offices can't be called noiseless. I have to go back 15 years, when I used my trusty VT220 and a modem into the office, for the last time I worked with a computer that didn't make noise. And then 20-25 years back when my desktop system consisted of a 6502 based BBC-micro computer. That one also without fans, but you still had the rattling sound of the floppy drives. :-) For the rest, it seems I've always had fans around me when I was doing my computer stuff.

So, this SunRay@Home is a keeper. I can hear the wall clock ticking again. The only thing I need to do is to replace the green power LED of my SR2 with a blue or a white one. That green is too ugly with the brushed aluminum.

Thursday June 28, 2007

Half Baked User Friendly

I guess since Windows 98 or so, it's the default in Explorer not to show you file extensions. Probably Microsoft hoped they could beat Apple in user-friendliness and thought that the icon would be good enough to show you the filetype. And maybe that would have been OK, if it had been implemented correctly (as a set of meta-data) like on my good-old NeXT.

It can't be that I'm the only one who completes every Windows install by: a) go to 'Folder Options' -> 'View' and unselect the 'Hide File Extensions', then b) take care that Explorer and the MS-DOS box are not hidden deep down in the 'Accessories', but are icons on the Desktop, part of the toolbar, and in the main of the Start menu. I guess I've done that now a hundred times. And it annoys me that with each and every newer Windows version, this stupid UI design is still there.

Tonight, this whole thing went a step further, and even more bizar. On a latest-greatest Windows Mobile phone, an application failed and wrote its results to a logfile (let's call it abc-xyz) in the root directory. I tried to open the file by double clicking it, but I got a pop-up that I had to open the application first and then open the file. OK, so I started 'Mobile Word', clicked 'Menu', then 'File' and found a wide range of options (like New, Save, etc.) but not 'Open'. Duh ....

In the options screen I discovered that there is a feature to select what types of files Word Mobile will show me, which even includes 'All Known FileTypes'. Mmmm, that sounded good, but still no luck. Finally I discovered that my file was in reality called abc-xyz.log, but the extension was, as explained above, not shown and secondly a .log file is appearently not a "known filetype" for Windows Mobile. When downsizing Explorer to the Mobile platform, it seems they had to drop the option 'Show All Files'. As if there is not enough memory for all the other bloatware.

But OK, I got closer to a solution. Let's simply rename the file to 'abc-xyz.txt', or even '.doc' and then all will be fine. Ehhh, not so!! Word still couldn't see the file. That was when I discovered that the rename in Explorer had rebaptized my file into 'abc-xyz.txt.log'. Which makes sense when you keep the .log part hidden, but it is absolute BS if the result is that you can't open a simple log file anymore. All in the sake of user friendliness.

You start to wonder how much usability testing has been done on a feature like this. And even more what audience the Windows developers had invited for these sessions. It's my guess that these were not a group of power-users and that the software developers were thinking that if the UI was good enough for them, it would be more than good enough for more sophisticated people. WRONG!!!

Long story short, in the end the only way to open my logfile in any application was to copy it from the phone to my desktop and use some editor to open the file and see its five lines of content.

Sunday June 17, 2007

External Display at Boot

My notebook — a Fujitsu P7010D — is light and small, therefore, when not on the road, I use it with an external display and keyboard. Solaris 10 being my main OS, some careful timing is needed for when to press the Fn-F10 key while booting. It has to happen when X-Windows hasn't started yet. The display of the grub boot menu is always a good moment.

However, couple of days ago I discovered another method. I guess it's also valid for other notebooks and although I didn't test it yet, this little trick should work the same way when you run Linux. This is what I do: First of all connect all external devices, then open the laptop, press the power button, and now immediately close the laptop again. Result is that the BIOS detects this and will select the external display straight away. No need to press any function key anymore.

Friday May 26, 2006

Xinerama

Last weekend I was installing a Xinerama system using a Matrox G450 dual-head card. Hey, $15 at TigerDirect, what do you want more. But it's not the price that this topic is about, it's probably even not Xinerama that it's about. When you install a dual-screen system – doesn't matter if it's Windows, Linux or Solaris based – you simply get a display twice as wide, with the result that among all other problems the pop-up window appears in the center. Oops, that center is where you have those two chunks of beige plastic, which is called the case of your monitor :-).

In some situations this concept of an extra-wide screen is maybe useful, but IMHO in most it is not very apropriate. I've noticed that more recent Xinerama versions have become more intelligent when it comes to pop-up's, but still I think that taking two screens as just a single extra-wide one is not the right choice.

Let's take a step back. Having a second display is not so much having a bigger screen, but much more similar to the multi-window feature X-Windows display managers have since a couple of years. It's also more like what in the old days you could do on a 80x24 display with Alt-F1, F2, F3 or F4, just switching from one screen to other. I think it is even very similar to what a tabbed browser like Mozilla / FireFox provides you. So yes, it is a second screen, but that doesn't automagically make it into a wider screen.

Now I know that I can solve the "popup in the middle" problem by having a third screen, or maybe five <g>. The popup then again appears centered, but that's beyond the point. Many desktop users like multiple screens, but most don't use them as one large canvas. It's most often something like "let's keep my email open on the right, while I keep working on the main screen". Notice the phrase "main screen"!! It's time to have an alternative to Xinerama, very similar to the multi display feature in X-Windows, controlled by the bar/panel at the bottom. I think the display needs to be more distinct, the mouse will not move "out of bounds", but still you can drag a window to another display.

For me, that would be a much more natural user interface. And maybe it does exist already (most things do :-) and I just haven't found out how to configure it in X-Windows. If not, it's probably time for me to start a little X-Windows hacking project ... ehhh, probably not so 'little'.

Tuesday May 02, 2006

Sun Desktop Manager 1.0

May 1st, Labour Day. Isn't that a nice date for my first article on BigAdmin. A small part of today's Network Computing Event, was the release of Sun Ray Software 4. Which includes Sun Desktop Manager 1.0, formerly aka APOC. The latter originated in Sun's JDS on Linux, but the current SDTM is targeting SunRay and Secure Global Desktop.

With Sun Desktop Manager you can store and manage the configuration of a user's desktop (his Gnome preferences, his proxy server, his Mozilla's home-page) in a central directory. The cool thing about this is that because a directory has an hierarchical structure, you can enter these settings not just for the individual, but for whole departments at a time. Or the hierarchy can be based on your network topology, or even both. Desktop Manager will also allow you to lock down desktops by disabling entries in the Gnome start-menu.

I could go on and on about the cool features of this system, but that's not the topic. In the last two years I helped quite some customers with setting up POC's. A stumbling block for many of them was always the lack of knowledge on how to configure the LDAP server. The folks that created SDTM always assumed that people would know that, but working in the field you realize quickly that that isn't always the case. I did some beta-testing of SDTM 1.0 and converted my ldif files from the old APOC to the new SDTM. And then decided to "finally" figure out how this could be done without some magic ldif files, but just with the available Directory Server console tools.

While doing so, I captured screenshots and glued the whole thing together into a step-by-step guide on how to set this up. And that resulted in this BidAdmin Feature Article with the name "Sun Desktop Manager Tutorial". It will be referenced from the SDTM product documentation, when that's released on May 16th.

Sunday April 30, 2006

Video projectors and Xorg

Recently, setting up at a customer site, I had problems hooking up my notebook, running Solaris 10, to the video projector. Not the best timing of course. :-) Playing around with this lateron, I discovered the following. If the function key to switch video (F5, F10, whatever it is on your laptop) doesn't work to switch from LCD to projector, there is a trick.

Logout, and with the Solaris 10 login screen in front of you press <ctrl><alt><backspace>. This restarts the X-Windows server. While it is doing this (so immediately after your three-finger salute) press <Fn><F10>. The trick seems to be that switching video only works when the X-Server is not running.

It will depend on your notebook of course, but it is my experience that where Windows normally allows you three video modes – LCD, external or both – with X-Windows it is either one or the other. However, this could be because my LCD is a 16:9 widescreen afair, while the video projector (or monitor) is the traditional 4:3.

Now we're on this subject: If you create an xorg.conf file with "/usr/X11/bin/Xorg -config", you better add (manually) to the Monitor section some "HorizSync 20-80" and "VertRefresh 50-90" entries. If you don't, Xorg will use the default modes, which are only good for 640x480. This is not specific for notebooks, in the past I noticed the same on a V40z.

(2006-04-30 12:12:22.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Friday April 21, 2006

Serial ports on Sun Ultra 20

Like so many PCs today, the Sun Ultra 20 workstation doesn't come with "legacy" ports. No serial or parallel anymore, it's all USB. And for some that's a problem, like when you need to connect serial matrix printers for receipts, invoices, etc.

The Ultra 20 is based on a Tyan S2865 motherboard. But with some modifications: the COM1 port has been removed completely (although the solderpins are still there) and COM2 is only a 10 pin header.

Trying to use the COM2 port failed at first, because by default all legacy ports are disabled in the BIOS. To fix this press F2 while booting, go to the "Integrated Peripherals", select "Onboard Serial Port 2" menu and enable the port. You can leave the IO and IRQ as default (2F8 / IRQ3). Finally leave the BIOS by choosing "Save & Exit Setup".

Now you need a cable and a bracket with a DB9 connector. You can do this two ways. You can probably avoid a lot of trouble by buying this from Cables To Go. I didn't test it myself, but these seem to be the right type. If you want to go the DIY route, you must be careful. On many serial or serial/parallel I/O boards, the DB9 plugs on the bracket are connected to the PCB header, according to the right side of the diagram.

click to enlarge

The wiring on the left shows how it must be. If you would use a cramp-on DB-9 plug you're automagically good-to-go. Hoever all the cables on serial/parallel boards follow a strict 1-1, 2-2, 3-3 to 9-9 wiring, while it needs to be 1-1, 2-6, 3-2, 4-7, etc. The reason is clear when you look how a header plug is numbered differently from a DB-9 plug.

OK, long story, but knowing the solution, it's all pretty simple. Use a cramp-on DB-9 (male !!), 30 cm of flatcable, find in your junk box a bracket with a hole for the DB-9 or buy one on eBay and off-you-go.