Since the Foehn & Hirsch laptop was a bit of a fiasco, I decided to re-use an old laptop of mine that I’ve had kicking around for a while. I bought an Acer TravelMate 3000 about four years ago now, because it was the best spec that I could find. I can’t remember the spec off the top of my head, but I remember the hard drive being over 100GB (huge in those days) and I’ve since doubled the memory to 2GB to make it last a bit longer. It’s been running Windows XP Professional since I got it, and that’s been fine, but as I said in the original post about the F&H laptop, my wife was so taken with my Linux Mint laptop, so I decided to rebuild it from scratch.
Firstly, I downloaded the 32-bit version of Linux Mint 8 from their website, as the version I used to build this laptop was the 64-bit and the old laptop doesn’t support 64-bit architecture. I burned the image to disc using Brasero, stuck it in the external DVD drive that came with the laptop, and booted it up.
As I’ve found on every system that I’ve built with Linux (Mint or Ubuntu) apart from the Foehn & Hirsch one, there were no problems – or certainly no obvious ones. The screen resolution was fine, the wireless network connected immediately (including the light on the front of the laptop working correctly), everything I checked was fine – so I reformatted the hard drive and replaced XP with Mint.
I then went off to work (I was away for a couple of days), and the girls told me that there was no sound working – the children want to watch childrens programs on iPlayer, play on CBeebies and watch YouTube and the like. I thought that it would be something really obvious like the speaker just being muted, but there was just nothing working. So, when I got home, I thought “this will be straight forward and take a couple of seconds…”
After about half an hour, I managed to track down the problem – the modem seemed to be conflicting with the soundcard (I think). Here’s how I found the source of the problem and resolved it.
Quick update – they found that the laptop was faulty when it arrived back and have refunded the cost of the laptop. I have raised a new customer support note because eBuyer have kept hold of the £9.99 shipping costs for sending the faulty unit out to me, which I don’t believe they should have done.
So far, it has cost £9.99 not to get a working laptop from eBuyer, so the complaint goes on.
Last week, my house was broken into and one of our laptops was stolen. Not too much of a big deal, since there wasn’t much data on there (thank goodness for Cloud computing!), and once the insurance assessor visited, I went out and bought a new machine. Since this was for my wife, I left her using my Toshiba Portege M800 which runs Linux Mint 8 x64, just to see what she thought of it and whether she could move from Vista to Linux.
After a few days of it, she was mightily impressed – there are some nice features of Mint that she liked over Vista, so asked if the replacement could be one that ran Linux. No problems – might be a bit cheaper, after all! – so I hunted down a Foehn & Hirsch laptop on eBuyer.com which was cheap, and came with no OS. Here’s the detailed spec:
Processor
Intel T3000 Celeron Dual Core Processor 1.8Ghz,
1MB Cache
SIS M672 + 968 Graphics Chipset
Memory
4GB DDR2 667MHz
2 x SO DIMM
Expandable to 4GB
Hard Drive
320GB SATA 2.5″
Optical Drive
DVD+/-RW Supermulti
Software
Operating System: No Operating System
Display
15.6” HD TFT
Resolution: 1366 x 768
Graphics
SiS M672 Integrated
Shared Memory Architecture 256MB
High Preference 3D/2D graphic Accelerator
Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Compatible
Super Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0
Audio
High Definition Audio
Compliant With Microsoft UAA
Direct Sound 3D
2 x Built in Speaker
Built in Mic
Input Devices
Multi Language Keyboard
Touchpad with Scroll zone
Networking
56K Fax Modem
Built in 10/100MB Base-TX Ethernet LAN
WLAN: 802.11 b/g
Power Supply
Full Range AC Adapter 65W
AC in 100~240V, 50~60Hz
DC Out 19V, 3.42A / 18.5V, 3.5A
6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
up to 2.5 hour battery life
Dimensions
Width 374mm
Depth 256mm
Height 25~37mm
Weight 2.7kg
Interfaces
3 x USB 2.0 ports
1 x VGA port
1 x Headphone port
1 x Microphone port
1 x S/PDIF output port
1 x RJ-11 port
1 x RJ45 LAN port
1 x DC-in jack
Expansion
7 in 1 Card Reader (MMC / RSMMC / SD / Mini SD / MS / MS Pro / MS Duo)
1 x Express Card Slot
Warranty / Miscellaneous
1 Year Manufacturer Warranty
1.3mp Webcam
That should be fine, I thought – keep her in laptops for a while, good spec and should be fine for Linux. There was nothing anywhere that I could find that said otherwise, apart from a line that said “Please note that this Laptops does not have an Operating System installed, Ebuyer recommends Genuine Microsoft Software”
I’ve just been asked a question which seems to fit the classic Tom Kyte “my car won’t start” scenario – a few pieces of information (which are of relevance to the asker, who has been looking at it for a while) but there is nothing there that provides any information about what the problem actually is.
Here’s a video from ZD Net Australia – it’s an interview with Tom about how developers should ask for help:
I recently started a new blog for my photos, which I’m starting to advertise for sale through Etsy (links to follow once I have some more things in place ) and I added the WordPress Flickr Manager plugin so that I can easily pull in pictures from my Flickr account into the blog. However, it didn’t work with WordPress 2.9
So, I made a couple of changes to some files and it seems to be working now – so, if anyone is having the same problems, here’s a list of the files that I changed:
wordpress-flickr-manager/js/wfm-lightbox.php
wordpress-flickr-manager/js/media-panel.php
wordpress-flickr-manager/js/wfm-hs.php
In each of those files, remove any ‘@’ characters that are in the files, for example:
Once you have made the changes, the plugin should work fine.
EDIT – March 15 2010 @1534
I’ve just had a look at the files that I changed to provide a fuller explanation of what I changed. I can’t see what I have changed in the media-panel.php file (just downloaded the plugin again and can’t find any ‘@’ signs in there now), but the changes I made to the other files are:
wfm-hs.php
Line 13 - wfmJS('a[@rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
becomes - wfmJS('a[rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
Line 21 - wfmJS('a[@rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
becomes- wfmJS('a[rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function() {
wfm-lightbox.php
Line 58 - wfmJS('a[@rel*=flickr-mgr]').click(function() {
becomes - wfmJS('a[rel*=flickr-mgr]').click(function() {
Line 91 - wfmJS('a[@rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function(){
becomes - wfmJS('a[rel*=flickr-mgr]').each(function(){
I’ve tested this with WP 2.9.2 this afternoon and it seems fine.
UPDATE – 11th July 2010
I’ve just been looking a bit more at this and have added a few replies to some comments. I have the plugin working on WP3.0 now – I made no changes to the version I had before though. The one thing that doesn’t work is trying to add photos from a set rather than just from the stream.
When you try to add a photo from a set, it only finds photos that are publicly available. If the photos are not public, then it doesn’t find them in the set. I don’t know whether this is a problem with the plugin, or a problem with the Flickr API though. I make most of my photos private, so if I want to add from a set then it’s a problem – that said, I have the same problem when adding from Flickr to my photo printing service, which makes me think that the problem lies with the Flickr API rather than the plugin.
Looks like a more in depth examination of the plugin is required – if I get chance to do it, I will, but I am quite busy with work that brings in money at the moment, rather than coding for fun and hobby.
OK – so now I’ve got the VMWare default username for logging in.
It’s “root”. EEK!
Couple of minor things there – firstly, I’m not too keen on just running these things as the root user. Secondly, not everyone knows the root password. And thirdly, not everyone changes the root password from the default that is generated when you install Ubuntu.
Now, in Windows, any Windows user can log into the VMWare console. In order to get that to work under Ubuntu (and I guess every flavour of Linux), you need to edit the configuration file which can be found in /etc/vmware/hostd/authorization.xml.
So, modify the file and then restart VMWare using
sudo service vmware restart
and you should now be able to log in as your different user.
Today, I had problems getting the 64-bit version of VMWare server to install correctly. I uninstalled it, started again, hit errors (some of my own making, some not) and then found out that it was a bug.
Since it took me a while to find out how to fix it, I’ll just give you a link to where I got the info from – it’s here.
Thankyou AcmeLabs – now I just need to find out my username and password to get into it!!
When Windows 7 was released, I gleefully decided that this was going to be my chance to get away from XP Professional 64-bit, since it crashed reasonably frequently (every day or so). Not too much of a problem, since it normally happened overnight, but when you are downloading the latest version of eBusiness Suite, then it can be annoying to say the least.
So, I stumped up my £150 for Ultimate edition, and a couple of days after the release date, it duly arrived. Nice clean install – two new 1.0TB hard drives, two new ATI graphics cards, all ready to go. No problems with the install (which was only to be expected, since the drives were completely new and hadn’t been used before), and then I started to actually use the system.
And it crashed.
And it crashed.
And it crashed again. At least once a day, and every night – the PC crashed. Annoying when you aren’t using it – VERY frustrating when you have just waited 20 minutes for a virtual machine to start and it blue screens. No help from Microsoft, no help on the net, nothing.
And so, this week, while I was at UK OUG, I decided to leave the machine running a live CD version of Ubuntu 9.10 to see how that went. Last night, when I got home, it was still running – 5 days of uptime.
So, today it’s goodbye to Windows 7, hello Ubuntu – and the installfest continues
Normally, I’m described as wither a “consultant” or a “contractor” depending on what the client is expecting me to do – I much prefer the more consultancy-oriented roles, where there is a genuine interest in your input to help devise the best solution for them, rather than the contractor-oriented roles which tend to be much more of the “here is what you need to do, here is how to do it, now go and do it and don’t ask any questions” variety.
Recently, I found an amusing definition of consultant, contractor and freelancer on The Daily WTF (Worse Than Failure!) blog:
Consultants fill the gap when an organization needs to leverage their collective synergy with a quality-driven approach that focuses on delivering key objectives. Contractors are great when the only remaining solution is throwing more bodies at the problem. And freelancers, they’re perfect for companies on a budget, hoping to build their technology infrastructure ten dollars at a time.
I can’t remember how long ago it was, but there’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is looking at a prompt on his computer that says “To start, press any key” and he’s saying “Which one’s the any key?”
I always thought that it was a made-up scenario, until I saw this example from a RAID controller:
) and I added the WordPress Flickr Manager plugin so that I can easily pull in pictures from my Flickr account into the blog. However, it didn’t work with WordPress 2.9 
