I’m on the way to ApacheConEu

I’m on the way to ApacheCon Eu , yeah.

Google Release App Engine

Everyone probably knows about Google’s new “app engine” released earlier today. It looks great and I think it’s a very smart move by Google in their effort to takeover the web “platform”. I wonder what this is going to do for Python’s popularity? Or will they release other languages such as PHP or JAVA? The Database does not look very relational as it does not support any Joins – Does anyone know how this works, seems very inefficient, but I guess resources are not an issue for Google and it may be a better fit across their distributed systems. I know this is a developer preview but I would be interested to hear from anyone with plans to roll out a live app.

Intel announce the release of PowerTOP for Linux

Do you have issues with your laptop battery’s performance under Linux. Intel have just released the PowerTOP utility along with a series of ‘tips and tricks’ to increase your laptop’s battery life. Worth a look.

To ATI or not to ATI

I am planning on building a MythTV HTPC in July and I have started spec’ing components.

My requirements are as follows:

1. Must use energy efficient components
2. Must handle DVB-S and DVD-T
3. Must output digitally (DVI & analogue audio or HDMI) in 1080p
4. Must be capable of S3 suspend to memory and resume
5. Must support Linux (obviously)

At first I thought this would be relatively easy. Most processors are energy efficient these days, so there is no problem there. Either a Core Duo or AM2 65nm EE should do the trick. 1GB of DDR2 and a 2.5” laptop hard-drive are also easy choices.

Graphics should be integrated on the motherboard to save a few extra watts and keep things cooler and should be Linux compatible… that should be easy… right? Wrong, Intel’s 965G chipset looks interesting, the 965G spec allows for integrated DVI, the drivers are fairly well supported by Linux out of the box, the GPU even handles MPEG2 and WMV decoding in hardware. The only problem is that there are no actual 965G ATX or m-ATX boards with DVI or HDMI, only VGA.

Next choice, AMD’s new 690 chipset looks interesting. I particularly like the MSI K9AGM2-FIH on Dabs.ie with integrated HDMI and VGA. The AMD690 chipset has lots of good value boards with HDMI and or DVI and or VGA. But the GPU is ATI and has all sorts of issues like not supporting XVideo and messing up S3 suspend and resume.

NVidia are not really an option at this stage because I have yet to find a board with integrated HDMI or DVI.

I know AMD marketing recently announced at the RedHat summit that they are going to improve their ATI drivers for Linux, but how much of this is fact? Their track record for keeping promises of that sort is not exactly very good.

Have I missed out on some other option? Should I wait until something better comes along? Or should I just buy the AMD690 board and hope for the best?

WAL-MART $299 HD-DVD player too good to be true.

It seems that a Wal-Mart HD-DVD player for $299 may have been too good to be true. Both Wal-Mart and Chinese manufacturer Fuh Yuan have denied that any such order has been placed. More here.

 

 

HD-DVD for $299, who will win the format war?

Toms Hardware reckon that even though Blueray is leading HD-DVD by a factor of 2:1 any lead can probably be attributed more to PS3 penetration than to consumer mind share. They conclude that it is still impossible to predict the eventual winner of the format war. I tend to agree with at least part of their analyses, Sony included UMD as the default format for millions of PSP’s, but expensive, proprietary formats don’t tend to gain traction when they are competing with cheaper, more ubiquitous formats. Toshiba may have put Blueray into checkmate by outsourceing HD-DVD production to Chinese manufactorers. And it seems that WAL-MART may be the first to introduce HD-DVD players for around $299. Blueray machines typically cost a lot more than that. If the rumors are true then history may be about to repeat itself for Sony.

Useful means of appending PDF’s using Ghostscript

gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH \

-sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf \

in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf ...

Dell Latitude X1 and FC4

I got a new notebook a couple of days ago, a Dell Latitude X1. I have been using the “Traces of Martins State” site and blog which shares the experiences of an FC4 user in tweaking Linux for this laptop.

I’m using a fully updated FC4 build (as of 21 December 2005), and bios version A4.
So far, I have full video resolution 1280×768 working with Vesa. ( no DRI yet, it seems that my i915GM video card may not to be supported by http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Intel?action=highlight&value=CategoryHardwareVendor yet – I’ll have to investigate more if Vesa prooves to be too much of a bottleneck for working with video.)

Getting full resolution to work was quite tricky. The card does not advertise it’s default 1280×768 resolution to software and so X has to be convinced that this resolution is possible using an application called 915Resolution

Wireless Lan seems to work using the instructions available here.

Everything else should work fine, except for the closed source Ricoh SD card reader. And the Modem (haevn’t tested these yet)

So far I am very happy with the X1, except for the battery – which only apparently lasts for about 1Hour & 40 Minutes – although I have yet to confirm this.