| 2009-12-26 My desk |
 OSNews every year asks its readers to publish a picture of their desktop. I never did because my desktop are always stock, or very close. This year they asked to show your workspace. Well, this is mine :)I change it often, but it is always more or less similar to this. Below the desk, my self built quad-core Q9650 is playing World of Warcraft, which you can see on the 23" monitor, on Windows 7 Professional x64. On the desk, my MSI Wind U100+ is running Haiku; sometimes it runs Ubuntu as server for my web development. But my real "personal" computer is the one on the right: a MacBook running Snow Leopard. Add a comment |
| 2009-12-25 Merry Christmas! |
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Merry Christmas to everybody!
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| 2009-11-15 HDMI odyssey |
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Past week I purchased a new 23" Full HD monitor, a Philips 231E1SB. First, it was some time I wished to go full HD, second I wished to solve some compatibility issues with my A/V receiver, an Onkyo TX-SR606, which I thought they were because my former monitor - a Samsung 225BW - was not Full HD. Well, I was wrong: the Philips just does not work with the Onkyo. When I switch computer, my MacBook begins to loop from single monitor to multi monitor mode without actually displaying anything on the Philips, while my PC needs to have the HDMI cable unplugged and then plugged in again to detect the monitor. Even worse, I cannot return the monitor, and even if I could, I already sold my poor faithful Samsung: I couldn't test the new monitor earlier because the design of the back panel doesn't leave enough room for a HDMI cable plus a HDMI adapter below the DVI port, and I had to buy a DVI to HDMI cable. I felt so frustated, I just ordered a simple HDMI switch - in the hope it'll work. If I know myself, I'll end up replacing the monitor again. Other discoveries I made:
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| 2009-10-21 Back from BeGeistert 021 |
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BeGeistert 021 is over! The last BeGeistert I attended to was the 17... how I missed the atmosphere and the people! It's incredible how little the BeGeistert has changed from my first time in 2003; the most obvious difference is the renovated (read "completely demolished and rebuilt from the bare ground") hostel, which is a nice modern and technological building - like the whole Haiku philosophy - but it lost its "warm and familiar" feeling. This year, thanks to the release of Haiku R1 Alpha1, promised to be very interesting; most of the major contributors to Haiku were present, and it was nice to talk with them and seeing them work, either on their 20 years old IBM Model M or a $300 keyboards). The discussions were seriously interesting as well; I liked a lot the Auckland Layout Manager demo (live from New Zealand), the Distro Guidelines Debugging by Nicholas Blachford, the plans for Haiku R1, and the WiFi stack presentation. As for me, I travelled by plane with both my MacBook and my new MSI Wind U100 Plus; the first was running Haiku in VMWare Fusion, while the second was booting native, and both received some attention. I worked to make my CAD compatible with Haiku again (it was a bit behind from the Mac version). I also helped Mattia Tristo revamping its BeWake screensaver, which we will publish soon. See you soon at the next BeGeistert! Add a comment |
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2009-09-18 Haiku Alpha 1 |
 Yesterday evening I drove for 140 km to bring Haiku Alpha 1 to ComPVter, a retrocompunting club in Pavia, and test it on the tons of computers they got. I had only a couple hours, in which I hoped to test at least ten machines, but when they seen how easily I picked up the first machine available - a rusty, dust covered assembled PC sitting in a corner that nobody cared about - and booted it with the Live CD, everybody was so impressed that they started asking me a lot of questions about this operating system they just heard of.Inevitably, my testing evening turned into a little Haiku show: I shown how fast Haiku was even when booting off a CD, multi-video playback (kind of hard reading the videos from a USB 1.1 port), WonderBrush, a tour of the APIs, and all other Haiku goodies. The computer was an Athlon 900 with 512 MB of RAM and everybody agreed that their new notebooks with Vista or Linux feel much less responsive. Haiku probably gained some new users there. Add a comment |
| 2009-09-14 Haiku is here |
 After eight years of waiting, Haiku Alpha 1 is available. I regret I couldn't help more, but I've been using it for years on my computers and in VMWare, under Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. I can only say that it rocks!Tuesday update: one of the major Italian computing news site, Punto Informatico, published an article on the release. Thursday update: I'm going to test Haiku on several computers this evening! Thursday update 2: Somewhat I managed to hide this news when I edited it Monday, just after a few minutes I published it, and didn't notice until now. So nobody seen it. Add a comment |
| 2009-09-13 Olivetti PCS 286 |
  Yesterday I was visiting an old electronics flea market in Marzaglia looking for some retrocomputing goodies, when I spotted a Olivetti PCS 286 under a table. It is the same model I had at home in 1989, on which I learned programming! GWBASIC, QBasic, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++... the goold old DOS days.I couldn't resist and I bought it for a couple of coffee cups. The seller only told me it was missing the operating system. At home, I disamblessed and cleaned it thorougly, and it seemed OK. Disassembling a PC from the '80s is quite a different experience from a today PC: the body of the machine is made with heavy 1mm thick stainless steel, after 20 years there isn't a single spot of rust. Also of note is the disposition of components inside: to maintain a compact design, the drives and the PSU are all in the front side of the machine, leaving all the rear to expansion boards; the ISA slot covers are on the right side of the machine, not in the rear. I was also pleased to notice that this unit was super-charged with 4 MB of RAM (the maximum it can get onboard) and a 40 MB hard disk, the bigger offered at the time with this machine. After cleaning, I hooked it up to a keyboard and a monitor; it has PS/2 and VGA ports which are still the most common ports, so almost any keyboard and monitor will work. The CMOS battery was drained, so I had to enter the BIOS setup and configure the machine. But after rebooting, it did not recognize neither the hard disk or the floppy drive! That's why it complained about the operating system. Calm down. I first tried the units on another PC: the hard disk, a Conner CP3044, is a standard IDE unit and worked OK, but the floppy drive, a Sony MFD-17W-86, did not. However, the Olivetti didn't like any other floppy drive I gave him - looks like Olivetti did some modifications to the floppy interface. Unfortunaltely I don't have any manual, and I couldn't find anything useful online for this machine. This is a show stopper: without a floppy or an hard disk, I can't load any OS to do any other test. If someone can send me some info, like a scan of the technical manual, I will really appreciate. Update: it now boots from floppy! It looks like it wants the hard disk connected, even if it does not recognize it. Some chipset issue, I think. Olivetti has simplified the BIOS setup so you can choose only a couple options (20 or 40 MB), there are no signs of customizable settings for heads-cylinders-sectors so I cannot try with a different disk. I read some suggestions of trying the BIOS from another motherboard with the same chipset (a Headland HT101A), which is probably doable on such old boards. I'll take a look into this someday. 1 comment |
| 2009-09-06 I did it again. |
Less than two years ago, I
replaced my old iBook with a second hand black MacBook. The first generation
MacBook is a lovely machine, but its major shortcoming - the infamous integrated
Intel video adapter - made me wish to replace it with one of the newer MacBooks
announced in late 2008 with a dedicated nVidia graphics adapter, which is
something like five times faster. Unlike the first generation, which were
available in white or black plastic, the newer ones were available in white
plastic or a "Unibody" made out of a block of aluminium. I didn't like the white
model - I find my older black model more pleasant and elegant - and the price for
the aluminium model was too high for my tastes. So I sat down waiting for them to
appear on the second hand market at better prices: my expectations were for the
first half of next year.Then, early June, Apple refreshed the notebook lines, moving the aluminium MacBook into the Pro line (at an even higher price) and leaving only the white model in the plain MacBook line. Eventually, a few weeks ago, a Monday morning I seen an advertisement from a local shop willing to sell off their remaining stock of the previous MacBook Unibody quickly... at a 20% discount. Later the same evening, my beloved MacBook got replaced. Read more to see how I compare them. Read more... Add a comment |
| 2009-08-26 New anti-spam system: Akismet |
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I've done some little tweaks to my blog, and now it's using the Akismet anti-spam service. Seems to work good so far. Of course I can switch back to my system at any time. I also prepared it to handle comments to any page, not only news. So you'll be able to comment on my pictures, my software, or even other comments (effectively creating threads). But there aren't the buttons yet, so don't look for them :-) Add a comment |
| 2009-06-15 MacBook and RAM |
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I just tried to put 3 GB of RAM in my first generation MacBook (a Core Duo model). Officially it supports only up to 2 GB, but some people reported that their Core Duo MacBook accepted 3. Mine didn't. It actually refused to boot. Reading back those reports, I think that people is just unable to read their "About this Mac" window, specifically the line saying "Core 2 Duo" (the ones with this CPU are known to accept 3 or 4 GB). I can also confirm that having two 1 GB modules is better than having one 2 GB module. So I'm stuck with 2 GB. That's more than enough for Leopard, but it starts to get uncomfortable running Leopard, XP, and Haiku all at the same time... Add a comment |
| 2009-06-11 World of Warcraft on Atom? Don't make me laugh |
It's some time now I wanted my own personal server. I wanted something small and
silent, but I couldn't find anything on the market with the features I needed,
at a price I liked. So I just bought an Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard with a dual
core Atom 330 1.6 GHz, a suitable cabinet and built the machine myself. However,
during the assembling, I couldn't resist the temptation to push the Atom to its
limits by trying to play my favorite game, World of Warcraft.
Read more...
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| 2009-05-21 How to order IP addresses in MySQL |
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For my blog's admin interface, I needed to order the thousands of spamming IP addresses. The first solution that comes to mind is something like this: SELECT * FROM spam_ip_table ORDER BY ipBut this does not work, because it will handle the IP address like a string; the address 100.1.1.1 will come before 20.1.1.1, and that's not what we want. How do we sort correctly IP addresses, then? Searching for a solution in Google brings a lot of results - and most of them are some kind of homebrew multiple queries, sometimes including external code, other views, hex codes, or other absurdly complex solutions. For some reason, the simplest solution never come out in the first page of search. What's this simple solution? The simple solution is, MySQL already comes with the solution: SELECT * FROM spam_ip_table ORDER BY INET_ATON(ip)INET_ATON is a function that turns the IP Address into a 32 bit Number, so they will sort correctly. Easy :-) Add a comment |
| 2009-05-12 A visit to the LEGO Factory |
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I'm a bit late with this news (and I lost the text I written for it), but last September I attended the LEGO® Fan Weekend in Skærbæk, Denmark (pictures here). Of course, a visit to the original Legoland park in Billund was obligatory, and, as a plus, we got the chanche to visit the LEGO Museum (pictures) and the Factory (the real one!). When I was a child I was a big LEGO addict, so I felt like Charlie visiting the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures there, but I found this video on YouTube that shows how the bricks are made. It was shot in the late '80s, but today the factory isn't changed that much: just imagine less people but more computers and robots. There are more pictures and videos around, just let me dig through my bookmarks... Add a comment |
| 2009-05-11 For serious Star Trek addicts only |
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I can only admire this man: Ultimate Star Trek Bachelor Pad I am not a fan of Star Trek - ok, I don't like it at all - but I am the kind who can do something like this to his house. Add a comment |
| 2009-03-30 High Finder CPU usage? Check files on the desktop |
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This was funny. For some days, my MacBook had very high CPU usage (around 80%); it was the Finder, but after several tries I couldn't find what was causing it. I didn't change anything recently. A suggestion I found on Google pointed me to the "Show item info" in Desktop view options: a very old bug in Finder may cause it to loop indefinitely if some of the files on the desktop are corrupted. It turned out that the culprit was the MP3 of Wrath of the Lick King main title theme, which I extracted myself from the game data files. File moved, problem disappeared. Can you believe it? Add a comment |