Will there ever be a new PictureBook?

I guess you wonder what this post will be all about? With good reason, as most of you may never have heard about the Sony PictureBook laptop. Go search for it on google (just use the search box over there at the right) - it was a great ultratiny laptop in its time (think 2000ish). In some respects it is flat out the best notebook I ever had. The list of laptops I have had the pleasure of using in the past currently contains:

• IBM ThinkPad 570
• Sony PictureBook C1VFK
• Fujitsu P2120
• IBM ThinkPad T41p
• Fujitsu Siemens P1510D
• Apple MacBook Pro 17"

These are computers I have used from 1998 until today.

All these was or is great computers, but also very different. Adding Sharp Zaurus C860 and HTC TyTN, which are more PDAs than laptops, and you have my complete list of carryable computers. But as a system administrator I have also been involved in setting up a lot of other models as well, including most X and T models from IBM, different Dells, Fujitsu Siemens, Acer and Asus. So I have quite some background here. When I say that the PictureBook is the best, of course I have to define in what sense it's the best. Sure, it is not a good desktop replacement because it is slow. But I don't need a desktop replacement as I want to keep the desktop computer. The PictureBook is the best notetaking, travel, meeting, watching-tv, sitting-in-the-livingroom-with-the-computer-on-the-lap computer.
The most important thing with the PictureBook is not the size or weight, but the formfactor. Smaller computers exist, and lighter as well. Sony did the smart thing making a small computer that is somewhat wide, but not very deep. By fitting a display with the unusual resolution 1024x480, the display is wide enough for all applications, but you need to scroll vertically. To make that easy, a jog-wheel was put on the right edge, very easy accessible. The width cater for a good keyboard - to this day the keyboard on the PictureBook C1VFK is one of the best I have ever used; on par with the IBM 570. So even though the computer is not tiny to the extreem, it is easy to carry around, weight is just 1kg and because of the short depth, it is very easy to stick into some bag or under your arm or just hold with one hand. Again because of the short depth, you can always use it on plane or bus, even in the cheapest seats. And because of the good keyboard, you can keep typing for hours.
My wish is therefore: Look at the Sony PictureBook, you guys out there creating notebooks. Make something similar, maybe with a 1280x600 display or something like that. Stick a Core duo cpu into it as well as the connectivity, disk and memory of today. Computers like the Oqo O2 are too small to be useable and too big to carry everywhere (we have cellphones/pdas for that). The keyboard on the new small Sony thing, UX50/90/180, is just terrible and highly unusable (yes, I have tested one). Computers like the Fujitsu Siemens P1610D does not have a keyboard in the same league, and the bigger irons we can save for the desktop. Please, give me a good carry-around computer! 1kg is ok, the cellphone is what I carry everywhere. And the size of the PictureBook is also ok. Give us tools we can actually feel good with!

Do I have to change phone already?

According to this post in engadget, there is a new device comming up from HTC:



While my HTC TyTN still does a fine job, there are certain things with this device that seems to be particularly interesting. First the display of course; 5 inch and more resolution than the TyTN. Next better cpu. A camera with higher resolution and built in GPS is always nice to have.



I have to follow this closely. Maybe I can have this while I wait for the iPhone. This device is probably to large to be the only phone in the pocket as well, so I can still keep the iPhone when it appears as my phone. Hmm, though decisions to make!

Do I want the iPhone?

I will not add much to all the buzz about Apple's iphone, there is already way
to much said about it as it's still months out in the future. For us living in
Norway, I guess it will take almost a year before we can get our hands on it,
unfortunately.

What I will say is: First, I want one! Second, as it is clear now that the
operating system is MacOSX, I really hope that Apple is clever enough to add a
terminal, a bash shell and a ssh client as optional install items on a dvd that
will follow the phone. That will make it so much more interesting! If we even
can get a python interpreter and some GUI toolkit to do programming right on
the phone, we will be happy!

The vim blogger plugin

The other day I found a plugin that make it possible to post to blogger directly from the editor Vim. As you see I don't blog a lot, and an important reason for that is that the interface for actually posting something to my blog is so awkward.

The other reason is of course that I do not have interesting things to say all the time. That is not likely to change, but with this plugin I hope I can do at least some more posting.

Velkommen til steinalderen

Forleden dag tok jeg den eneste fornuftige bussen jeg kan benytte til
arbeidet. Jeg bor langs E18 i Ås, og jobber på Fornebu. De aller fleste
offentlige kommunikasjonsmidler jeg kan benytte vil forutsette at jeg bytter i
Oslo. Men Timeekspressen kjører en rute fra Mysen/Ørje som går direkte til
Fornebu. Riktig nok går bussen innom bussterminalen på Grønland i Oslo, og den
bruker lang tid. Men jeg kan sitte på samme buss hele veien, og gjøe noe
fornuftig. Altså et bra tilbud som kan få folk som meg over fra privatbil til
kollektiv transport.

Denne spesielle ruten, linje 9 i Timeekspress systemet, har ganske få avganger
som kjører gjennom Oslo og videre til Fornebu. Faktisk bare 2 om morgenen og 2
om ettermiddagen. Siden dette er en så bra tjeneste med potensiale til å bli
benyttet av en del mennesker skulle man tro at om man gjorde endringer så
ville det bli for eksempel ved å utvide med flere avganger. Men hold dere fast
folkens. Et eller annet supperåd i Oslo har bestemt at slike gjennomgående
ruter - det skal man ikke ha noe av. Buss får gå til Grønland og snu der. Man
kan ikke bare komme her og kommer her liksom, sitte på ut av Oslo igjen på
andre siden. Så fra nyttår avsluttes dette tilbudet.

Så hva er alternativene? Timeekspressen har ingen annen rute som passer, så å
gå av på Grønland blir bare tull - derfra kommer jeg meg ikke videre. Jeg må
nok heller bytte til sporveiens rute 31 på Oslo S. Da får jeg ikke overgang
selvsagt, og må betale full pris, så det blir dyrere. Dessuten er det en
melkerute, selv når den kjører ekspress. Så lang tid vil det ta. Men det er en
fin bonus da. Jeg må vel vente mellom 5 og 35 minutter før 31-bussen dukker
opp, så da kan jeg slurpe inn deilig 20-minusgraders januar luft mens jeg
venter. De har tenkt på alt disse folka. For å ikke glemme all mosjonen. Inn
på buss, av med skjerf og stor jakke (som jeg trenge når jeg skal vente på
31-bussen), opp med arbeidssakene. Oopps, fremme på Oslo S snart, ned med
tingene, på med jakke, skjerf og hansker, ut av buss, vente, hutre, vente. Inn
på overfylt 31-melkerute-buss, glem å jobbe for det er det ikke plass til her.
Setene er vonde også. Dessuten må jeg uansett stå og svette med den store
jakka på. Og skjer. Og hansker.

Nei, takk skal du jammen meg ha. Jeg tror jeg tar bilen isteden. Lenge leve
det kollektive Norge. Og det flotte supperådet som har bestemt dette.

Ha en fin dag da dere!

What to do in a Lisa tutorial

You are sitting there in a training class at Usenix/Lisa06, or any other lisa for that matter. It supposed to be really good. The most knowledgeable person in the world on the target. Ok, that's a bit over the top, but at least hi should be good. Then you just realize that he is a very lousy speaker. You have paid good money to be here, so what should you do? You should not leave, that's not polite. But, see, stuff is happen right there behind your back:

1. Bring up your laptop
2. Pull up your irc-client. Sure you have one, right?
3. Connect to irc.sage.org
4. join #lisa??, insert the current year.
5. have Fun!

It is as simple as that. A large crowd, with all the knowledge and great humor, can make event the most boring lecture quite fun.

I don't know. I'm probably just a bit bored. I think rehearsels should be mandatory for instructors people have to pay that much to get to listen to. Rehearsel in front of a board of referees, that is.

That's my idea for the future!

Take care, and be nice to bad instructors. And tell the organizers what you think!

The nerds are gathered!

With the usual buzz and fuzz, Lisa'06 kicked off tonigth with a beginners BOF (with some oldtimers and not-so-oldtimers sitting in the back). The training chair Dan Klein delivered the goods as usual, with a lot of humor. Everyone feel welcome, there is plenty of sodas around, the wiki and irc-channel (#lisa06@irc.sage.org) is up - everything is in order. Quite a few of the crowd are heading over to a nearby place for something stronger than soda... others just go out for dinner. By the way, there seems to be about 1200 attendees this year. Not bad consider the topics!

Tomorrow morning, at 9:00, the real thing starts, with tutorial and training on lots of interesting topics, by fine lectures. I will start out with a light topic, on distributed source code management systems. We have converted from CVS to subversion, but folks are not satisfied, and have started looking into mercurial (Hg). I have to figure out what is the best option, and what this really is all about. Theo Ts'o (of linux kernel fame) will be the lecturer, so this should be really good.

After lunch I will attend intermediate topics in DNS admin. This is something I don't know much about, and want to look into. Maybe I have time for some reports tomorrow night.

Take care, folks.

From 35000 feets

Wow - internet up in the sky; that is quite cool! Right now I am on a SAS flight to Washington DC (to Lisa'06), cruising away in some 850km/h. As Connexion is shutting down the service, the service is also free. It's maybe not extremely fast, but decent enough to read email and browse the web. And making blogposts as this.

Hopefully, SAS and Star Alliance can find a new partner such that we can keep this great service. If we can get poweroutlets in the cheap seats as well it will be very good.

See you at Lisa, folks, and take care!

New phone choosen!

As I reported earlier, I gave up on the SonyEricsson M600i, due to the problem of sync that phone with MacOSX. For a while I have looked around, and hesitated, but it turns out the best solution right now is something unspeakable...

My choice is: HTC TyTN. Allthough that phone uses the winblows mobile 5 operating system, it seems to be the best smartphone around that both have WiFi, qwerty keyboard, and possible to sync with Mac. To sync it, I have purchased missing sync from Mark/Space, it works quite well. It was some issues with connecting TyTN and the Mac on bluetooth, but once up it is a ok combination.

Maybe I care to give a more thorough review of the features of TyTN and how it pairs up with the Mac later on, but for now I just want to say that I can sync appointments, contacts, and I can mount the phones' storage as a drive. That I can both use skype and IM clients on the phone is of course a plus :-)

Take care,

Updated entry on my Unix commands in Norwegain page

For a long time, I have not made any updates to my page at http://home.simula.no/~aasmundo/unix, where I describe various tips and tricks for linux/unix users, in norwegian. Today, I looked up something for my own use, and created an entry on ssh tunnels. The entry goes like this:

Ssh tunnel

Av og til har man behov for å kunne koble seg til en maskin som befinner seg
bak en brannmur på en eller annen måte. For eksempel kan du tenke deg at du har
satt opp en linux maskin for noen som ikke er så kjempeflinke i linux, og de
ønsker å ha den stående hjemme, hengende på en adsl-forbindelse og gjerne
NAT'et bak en trådløs router. Hvordan kan man løse en slik utfordring? En fin
mulighet er å sette opp en ssh-tunnel fra maskin til en annen maskin som du
alltid kan nå. En slik tunnel kan settes opp med følgende kommando:

ssh -f -N -R *:20022:localhost:22 -lbrukernavn maskin.fastip.net

Opsjonene har følgende betydning:


-f: Tving ssh til å kjøre i bakgrunn.


-N: ssh skal ikke starte noen spesiell kommando på maskinen man kobler
til. Uten denne opsjonen vil et shell bli forsøkt startet.


-R: angir tunnel fra annen maskin. Alle maskiner (*) som forsøker å koble
seg til maskinen vi kobler oss til, på port 20022, vil bli sendt videre til
denne maskinen (localhost) på port 22, der ssh som regel kjører.


-l: angir brukernavn vi vil benytte for å koble oss til


Endelig oppgis maskinen med fast ip som vi vil koble oss til.
For å ta vare på sikkerheten er det nok lurt å definere en
spesiell bruker for formålet, og passord/passphrase må håndteres på en
passende måte. Det er også en del utfordringer med å holde forbindelsen oppe.
Dersom adsl-systemet får en dynamisk adresse (som er bakgrunnen for hele denne
løsningen), vil tunnellen måtte restartes dersom adsl-systemet får en ny
adresse. Man er selvfølgelig også avhengig av å ha tilgang til en maskin med
fast ip.

By the way...

If someone has some suggestions regarding my previous post on new smartphone, I welcome comments!

Time to move on

A few months ago, I bought the Sony Ericsson M600i smartphone. Initially, I had a few problems with it but most of thoses error was fixed with a firmware upgrade.

One thing remains, though: Synchronization with Mac OS X or Linux. This is really important for me. I like the keyboard of the M600i, I enjoy the screen and the multitasking capabilities. But I _need_ sync. So much that I have now returned to my older Z800i phone. That phone lack most of the capabilities, but I can sync it using iSync.

I have waited through two minor upgrade of OSX (4.6 - 4.8), but the M600i is still not supported. And from what I can see, Sony Ericsson will not fixed the problem eiterh.

So it is time to move on. Someone (windows user...) need a new smartphone?

take care,

Ubuntu under Parallels

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg! If you do that, inside a running ubuntu in full-screen, under Parallels, you can enable full resolution. So, on my 17" MacBook Pro I now have 1680x1050 resolution.

Really slick :-)

Just a quick follow up on yesterdays post

I wrote 'I'm not sure I like turbogears' in my previous post. Right now I don't remember why I wrote that. I have django up and running, and are doing some tests with it. But as I don't remember what I did not like with turbogears, I have decided to test that one as well. 

So that's what I do tonight.

Python and Ajax.

From time to time I need to implement some webstuff, where "need" may be as in work or as in "want to", related to private stuff. With all the buzz around Ajax, I guess everything I do in this respect should be "Ajaxified". In addition, I don't want to use PHP anymore, that's so stone age. Python is the rule these days. That leaves me with the question: how to use Python to make "Ajaxified" websites?

There are several python tools for creating webstuff out there, some of the main players are:
     * Django
     * Turbogears
     * Plone/zope
     * 
I guess there are many more, but which of them have Ajax tools? Django does not really, Turbogears uses MochiKit but I'm not sure I like Turbogears. I don't want to use Plone/zope. We use that in my company (Plone that is), and it is great for large corporate websites, but I don't want that for small sites created more or less for fun. And what about Ajax.

As you understand, I am searching. And this is a buzz compliant post. If I end up with something, I will probably make a post about it here.

Take care!

Still no support for M600i on MacOSX

Ok, folks - I am just polling on this. Still, there does not seems to be any support for m600i in iSync, no 3rd part vendor, nothing. I guess I have to switch to another phone. If not GCalSync (http://www.gcalsync.com) can make it. That will be a sync directly to the google calendar, but that's just fine with me as my main calendar is there anyway.

Take care, folks.

The new Apple MacPro

So, the new MacPro with dual core Intel Xeon processors is released. No doubt, its a kewl machine. 

I just want to  give a few of my own toughts after having heard the keynote deliverd by Jobs and his coworkers at WWDC'06 today. 

First, regarding performance the only comparison we saw was against Opteron was a performance per watt. I don't doubt that this is an interesting comparison for lots of people, but it also leave us with the tought that the new MacPro is not the fastest computer around.

Next, the standard graphics adapter delivered is a Nvidia 7300 card. Come on, Apple, you could have done better than that. Of course, there are other cards available as upgrades/built to order and keeping the price down on the standard configuration is really important to spread Mac to even more users. But you could have put at least a 7600 card into the box. 

Besides this, the only thing that is wrong with the new MacPro is that I have to get rid of my PowerMac dual G5.

Take care. 

M600i as a modem

First, I was not able to use my M600i as a modem from my MacBook. Then my colleague discovered some scripts made by Ross Barkman, available from http://www.taniwha.org.uk/. By using the CID1 script from that page, I can now use the M600i as a modem on 3G (UMTS) and GPRS networks. 

Great work by Ross, and my colleague Martin who discovered them!

Me from an airport near or far, through M600i. 

That was the summer!

Tomorrow I have to get back to work again. So, summer 2006 is history. Or maybe not completely, it is still nice and warm in Norway, and I plan for another week of vacation later in august - hopefully I can go swim in the fjords a bit more then. 

As I am back to work, there will be updates of the blog from time to time. And WWDC is comming up the next week, and I will be there, so expect some comments on that! 

Update on M600i

I have now used the Sony Ericsson M600i for a few days, and want to
give a status update. I think what's going on is that I adapt my
habits to the equipment, and therefore the equipment start feeling
better over time. So also with the M600i.

Initially, I had some problems with the built in Opera 8.60 browser,
it crashed on me a few times and things like that. Now, I think it
functions quite well. Probably because I visit pages that I know
works. Still, there are no pages that I need to visit regularly that
does not work, so it is probably ok for general use.

As for email reading, there seems to be something funny going on in
the network I am using. I tried a whole lot of different settings for
both imap for my regular mail accont, as well as pop from my gmail
account without any success. Then I tried pop against an account I
created with the Ventelo, the provider of the cellphone subscription,
and alas, then it works. Maybe the block pop and imap traffic? At
least something strange is going on. Anyway, as soon as I got things
right with my provider, I can send and receive email on the phone. It
is quite comfortable both to read and write messages as well.

So, in general I am quite happy with the M600i, but I still need to
figure out stuff. Maybe I write down a more complete review later on
(but don't hold your breath, it may never happen!)

Take care, and have a nice summer :-)