Ubuntu 10.04 server on 10.04 desktop on netbook

Maybe I'm getting old but it seems amazing that you can play around with Ubuntu server running in a virtual machine running on a $400 netbook.



To tell the truth, I did add another GB of RAM to the netbook to take it up to 2GB.

Recently I've been playing with virtual machines and trying to standardise on a platform for quickly deploying software. Ubuntu server 10.04 is a "long term support" release and it looks good for my purposes (typically apache2, mod_wsgi, django, mysql).

Debian, which seems to have failed to move on from python 2.5, is no longer an option. Ubuntu is looking to the clouds and that's the right direction as far as I'm concerned.

10.04 desktop is looking really good too.

The rest of the long weekend here has been spent reading epub books on the iPad and going for walks in the autumn sun.

iPad review on ABC Radio National

A piece of tripod was missing this morning so Roi went all "Hill Street Blues" with the camera. For a change you get to look around and see Fran and the team.

Great fun.

iPad vs Kindle

The neighbours just came over for lunch outside and brought their Kindle.



The eInk display technology will definitely persist. In this image I'm cheating and shielding the reflection of the sky from the iPad screen. The Kindle looks better the more light there is.

Indoors, the iPad is far far superior in every respect. If your use-case is reading on the beach then yes, get a Kindle.

iPad in Australia - Cygnet Lavish case review

Even though the iPad is another month away, accessories are available right now.

At Maccentric I picked up a Cygnet "Lavish" case for my new toy:



It's a beautiful soft padded leather case with a soft interior and a magnetic clasp. The iPad slides in sideways from the left so there's no way it can slip out when closed. There are openings for the dock connector and speaker at the bottom and the headphone and power button at the top.

Unfortunately there is no opening for the volume and the screen rotation lock switch. (You can push the volume control through the leather without too much trouble).



The wide margin around the screen means that the iPad is securely held. As you can see above there's a hole to access the "home" button.

The opening for the screen is a tiny bit too narrow and can block the view of pixels at the edge. It's a little bit hard to extract the iPad but I think with wear this will improve.

Overall it's a lovely case and makes reading a book on the iPad as much of a tactile pleasure as a well bound book. $69.

Accessories for an iPad in Australia

The iPad eco-system is going to support a very profitable business in luxury cases. You very quickly realise that you definitely need a case. On a trip to Melbourne yesterday I slipped the iPad into a netbook case, which worked pretty well but was larger than it needed to be.

This morning, I took some vinyl and made a rough slip case that will protect the device until I see something nicer.



I'm not keen on having multiple wireless broadband accounts so I've been on the lookout for the equivalent of the US MiFi, it turns out that local maker Netcomm has just the thing:



It's a capable little travel router with the ability to use most of the wireless USB data modems on the Australian market as the internet connection that it shares over Wifi. The Netcomm 3G Travel Router t1 - 3GT1WN (clumsy name) supports all 3G/Next G TM/UMTS/ HSPA/ EV-DO/ USB modems from leading vendors. I have a pre-paid Telstra modem which, while it takes several minutes to get started, works fine in the end.

The router can also share internet from an ethernet port and has many more features than you really need for just creating a Wifi cloud from a USB broadband dongle. Here it is in use at Melbourne airport.



The rechargeable battery is said to last up to five hours. My only complaint is that I can't see a way to talk to the SMS service that is how you determine your balance on the pre-paid model (I just top mine up when I travel and let it go off in between). More features than I need but the perfect iPad accessory for Australian road warriors.

Using an iPad in Australia - in search of books

I couldn't wait. My rationalisation is that I have a couple of iPad reviews to write and while normally Apple Asia are kind enough to get me "hands on" time, in this case they've completely vagued out.

So I got on eBay browsed through all the iPads on offer to Australians and picked a vendor hoping it wasn't a scam. In the end I paid AU$780 for a US$500 iPad, which seems a lot but given shipping and service and in the context of some of the crazy prices being asked (over AU$1,000) I'm prepared to wear it.

I can vouch for flint316, he shipped the iPad quickly from Texas via USPS and I watched as it made it's way here.



It was in perfect condition on arrival. (That was my big fear really).



The way they pack the iPad, with the screen right at the top of the box, does seem to leave little margin for intrusions into the front during rough shipping. Anyhow, it was fine.



What, no books?

I really wanted an iPad so I could buy and read books rather than stuffing the house with more paper. When you activate an iPad with an iTunes account outside the US the iBooks application isn't there.

The trick is to open a US iTunes account... but I don't have a US credit card. Turns out all you need is a valid US postal address.

• Quit iTunes


• Hold down the Option key, and launch iTunes


• Create a new library, I called mine iTunes iPad


• Go to "iTunes Store" in iTunes


• If it shows you signed in, mine did, click down the menu triangle and "Sign Out"


• Now find something that's free, like a free app and purchase it


• You'll be asked to log in or create an account


• Click the link that says "If the billing address is not in Australia, click here"


• Create an account. Although it asks for credit card details, because your purchase is free there's a no payment option, take it


• I used a friend's postal address


• Download the iBooks app

I recommend making a separate iTunes library for the US iPad or you end up with problems of apps that are not authorised etc.

While there is the free Gutenberg collection there, I was looking for something a little more contemporary, so the next trick is to top up your US iTunes account. To do that you purchase an iTunes voucher from a US reseller. I went to iTunes Express which charges a 20% markup, isn't super fast, but did the job.

After a little while, 20 minutes I think, the US iTunes voucher code arrives in your email. In your US iTunes account, click "Redeem" in the Quick Links area and top up the account.

Sync and you can buy Books and Apps from the US store.



Getting eBooks

Apple's store is very nice but it's not the only game in town.

Probably half my computer books are from O'Reilly Media (the animal books). O'Reilly have done a wonderful job transitioning to electronic media.

You create an account and buy the electronic version of a book. The books are generally available for Android, Mobi, PDF and ePub.

Download the ebup version and drag it to the "Library" area in iTunes, enable "Sync Books" and the books will be transferred over to iBooks on the iPad.

These books remain available to you and you can download them again for other devices (no consumer hating DRM). I found that using the ePub reader Stanza on iPhone let me re-download my purchases direct from O'Reilly too.

Stanza is great by the way and while I'd like to see an iPhone/Touch version of iBooks, Stanza is an excellent alternative.

The other source of books is the Amazon Kindle app for iPad. It's messy having multiple book readers and worse, multiple libraries of books, but the Amazon book inventory is great and having the Kindle reader on multiple platforms is a good feature that I hope Apple with emulate.



I've lived with an iPad now for just three days and it's very much a part of my life. Apple has bowed to the anti-globalisation forces but the internet is a wonderful source of information on how to get around these artificial barriers. Hope this helps too.

Bigpond cable outage at my house

Once again our Bigpond cable is down. Although the service status page mentions a few known issues they are all planned outages and say nothing of the issues they really know about.

The bill does not have the number to ring for technical support on it (even though it says "turn over for other enquiries"). The number to ring is 133 933.

When ringing up, I've learned that you don't need to go through the long IVR sequence, you can cut it a bit shorter by saying "operator".

The operator confirmed a known outage in our area and said that it won't be fixed until Tuesday, 2-3 days. They did offer to SMS me when it's fixed.

Why can't Telstra make it easy to get help? Why can't Telstra be honest about known outages? I can only assume there are so many outages that to have them public would be bad for business.

It's amazing how addicted we are here to the internet.

Happily these days I have some other alternative ways to get to the net, a pre-paid USB dongle and iPhone tethering.

Eclipse Pydev support for Django coming

I'm a big fan of aptana's free Pydev IDE for Eclipse. It does all the stuff a Python developer could wish for: code completion, hover explanations, click to show declaration, debugging and much more.

If you set the source in Eclipse to http://pydev.org/nightly you'll get a peek at what's coming, especially for Django developers. You will be able to make a Django project without needing the command line tools:

You get to choose basic settings such as the database from a nice GUI:

There's menu items for common tasks such as creating an app within a project and syncdb:

Great stuff Fabio!

You end up with a useful start point without any typing.

I often run up a little Django project just to try something out, and I find myself copying and pasting the same old settings stuff to make the project portable.

Eclipse and Pydev is a big part of my daily life, this week I visited a friend working in Python in straight BBEdit (a fine editor), the other great hope is that TextMate 2 ever comes out and can have smarts like real code completion added in somehow. (Maybe Alan's busy on the port to iPad?)

Update

No sooner than I posted this, than the Django support in Pydev has been released so you don't need to use nightly.

Free anti-virus for Microsoft Windows 7

I've been assisting with and working with Windows 7 a bit lately. It's pretty good, they're really working to catch up with Ubuntu although there's a way to go yet.

On my little dual boot $400 netbook:

Windows 7

• boot to login prompt in 34 seconds


• login to desktop ready 11 seconds (a bit hard to say)


• Cold launch of Chrome 5 seconds


• Shutdown is 16 seconds

Ubuntu 10.04 (pre-release)

• boot to login prompt in 25 seconds


• login to desktop ready 12 seconds


• Cold launch of Chrome 5 seconds


• Shutdown is 5 seconds

Here's a chart I carved out of marble tablets to illustrate that (for real carving work, I use a Mac).

Smaller is better.

Installing Windows is scary, it warns the user about things a lot, presumably with good reason. Right out of the gate it warns you that you need virus protection and directs you to a web page with lots of options.

When I ask long-time Windows users about what anti-virus software they use the answers are either that their employer pays for a commercial solution or that they use AVG-Free.

It turns out that there is a free solution from Microsoft that does the job. Microsoft Security Essentials seems to be good.

Presumably to avoid accusations of anti-competitive behaviour, Microsoft rather down plays their own product and lets the other vendors have a good go at selling their products.

My view is that we shouldn't have to pay extra for something the operating system should take care of.

Has anyone noticed how many Macs you see at conferences these days? Here's a shot from a PyCon 2010 conference video:

I doubt any of them are running a virus scanner, let alone a free one.

The "terminator" antenna line slingshot

I'm running a home made 80m dipole but out the front of the house I didn't have enough room. To run a line over the top of the tree is difficult, the highest I've got was by standing on a ladder with a squid pole.

The obvious answer is some sort of slingshot to fire a line on a sinker over the tree and then pull over a stronger cord. It worked out pretty well and after three shots I was happy with the height.



I need stronger fishing line, the stuff that came with the $12 reel is very stretchy, also the length could be longer as the reel gets in the way of the rubber band pull back.

It's amazing how many people drive and walk by when I'm attempting curious ham radio related activities out the front of the house, one guy kindly offered me a saw as he thought I wanted to remove a dangerous branch.

TomTom iPhone app update now includes computer voice

When the TomTom GPS navigator software was released for iPhone I didn't hesitate to buy it so that I could reduce the gadget count by one. It has been a little disappointing, not only the clunky user interface (compared to the high standards I expect from an iPhone app), the poor GPS reception (fixed now with the car kit and it's magic antenna), but mostly because it didn't come with "computer" voices.

Computer voices can pronounce the name of the street you need to turn at. This is really important as particularly in built up areas the GPS can get your position a bit wrong due to reflections.

I'm happy to report that the update released yesterday includes computer voices and the software now speaks road names. It made a right hash of Conemara Avenue, but then so do all the other GPSs I've tried.

This update has numerous improvements, including better integration with the rest of the iPhone. Great stuff.

Visualizing WSPR Spots

WSPR provides a database of stations who can hear my beacon and stations I could hear, along with their distance and the signal to noise ratio. You can see this data for all users on a world map and as a database here.

I wanted to get a feeling for HF communications to and from my location so I ripped the data for the past 30 days of my activity on 40m. The main variation is the daily cycle as the "grey zone" moves around the world, so I've just plotted against time of the day using gnuplot. Here's the result:



(Click for a larger view).

My simplistic interpretation is that for optimum long distance communication on 40m, the best times are 7:30am - 8:30am and 5:30pm - 8:00pm. The astonishing thing is that 5W can go 17,000Km at all, (remember that half the circumference of the earth is about 20,000km), but that's another story.

Here's my gnuplot script:

set title "VK2TPM WSPR Spots 40m" 
set xlabel "Hour of day (Local Time)" 
set ylabel "Distance KM"
plot "40mwspr.csv" title "Spots" with points

The data isn't CSV, it's just time space km.

ABC2 has The Daily Show & Colbert Report

Just spun the FreeView dial here in Sydney and came across Jon Stewart's Daily Show.

I have considered paying for pay TV just to get this show, but the fact that you have to pay for compulsory sport puts me off that idea.

Having said all that, both programs seem heavily edited to remove content that someone assumes would not interest the international audience. I want the original shows please.

The Daily Show is on at 7:15pm followed by Colbert at 7:35. Now it's a classic episode of The Young Ones.

The boys are bored and go to the pub where Madness are playing "house of fun", the boys say "do you know Summer Holiday by Cliff Richard.. the reply: you hum it, I'll punch you in the face".

ABC2 is a great channel, keep it up.

WSPR 2.0 build on Mac ports Snow Leopard 64bit

I've finally been able to build and run WSPR on Snow Leopard on top of the Mac Ports platform.



At this stage it involved some manual modification of the ./configure generated Makefile.

The "show stoppers" for me were:

portaudio as built with mac ports exits on an assert about integer size. To overcome this I downloaded the latest trunk and built that.

Then used:

./configure \
--with-portaudio-include-dir=/usr/local/include \
--with-portaudio-lib-dir=/usr/local/lib

Then during linking of wspr I got "/usr/bin/libtool: can't locate file for: -lfftw3f"

The fix for this was to change the Makefile to include /opt/local/lib as follows:

LDFLAGS	= -L/opt/local/lib -L/usr/local/lib 

I don't know much about mac ports but I'd love to get WSPR in there. Can anyone mentor me on that project?

Thanks to Ross, T61AA for assistance and prodding to get this far, and to John who helped him.

WSPR sure is popular these days:



And thanks to Joe Taylor K1JT for coming up with this amazing software.

Update

Seems rock solid on the Mac. WSPR has been running day and night. Not many spots on 80m last night but 40m is looking really good tonight.



I'm learning about Macports but still haven't quite got to my objective.

VK2ZNZ tries a Tecsun loop antenna

Neighbour Rob collects and restores valve radios. I recently suggested that a loop antenna might improve his reception and he picked one up at the Wyong field day.

In this video he shows how well it works. I also show some of his amazing collection as we chat after listening to the WIA Sunday broadcast on 80m.

Wyong field day 2010 - much bigger this year

Just returned from the Wyong field day and I'm pleased to report that it felt about twice as big as the past two years. Probably this is due to the weather being not wet and not too hot.

The "car boot sale" area was huge:



The undercover area packed:



Lot's of money and boxes changing hands in the flea market.



I bought a dual tone SSB test oscillator, something I need, for $8.

The home brew table was full of excellent projects



including this marvellous receiver from Steven 2BLQ:



Stephen told me that the modules all work - but not together.

My little SSB transmitter in a children's tin lunch box looked pretty funny up against these professional jobs, it was great to participate as always.

Lots of fancy black boxes on display too:



A highlight for me was attending a talk by Jeff Johnson who took it upon himself to walk across Australia from south to north wearing a solar panel, carrying an FT-817, and living mostly on "two minute" noodles.



It was great to look through all the gear, meet up with friends and munch on some cheese cubes once again.

Steve Jobs is right to avoid Adobe flash

The combination of new features in HTML5 and fast execution speed of Javascript in modern browsers means that it's time to finally cast off dependance on Flash for sites that want to do animation or play video.

Jobs is right, when using laptops I notice the operation of the fan and very often a web page with Flash in it single handedly uses enough CPU to heat up the device so that the fan kicks in. Undoubtably this sucks battery and there's nothing I hate more than a portable device that goes flat too soon.

The effect on memory and CPU of using Flash can be simply seen by comparing memory use on the Flash or HTML5 version of YouTube.

Here's Flash:



And here's the HTML5 version:



So 76.9MB to play flash compared to 53.9MB using HTML5. A total of 37.7% CPU for Flash, compared to 10.3% for HTML5. Hardware acceleration of H.264 video promises to further reduce CPU and power consumption in the future.

The thing that Flash has is mature development tools. Recently I've been using the animation effects in jQuery and they look very smooth. What's needed is a tool to construct animations that play in the modern browser.

Step one is for manufacturers of potentially very popular devices, like Apple with the iPad, to have the guts to not allow Flash on there. Once major site builders see their site littered with little lego bricks they'll have to start getting by without flash.

I choose battery life, stability and standards over Flash any day. Only Apple and Google (YouTube) have the power to pull this off, I support them.

Where I get my news

As we count the days until the iPad arrives, many of us have been thinking about how it will fit in with daily life, and in particular, how it might change the way we get my news fix each day.

Over night, if I can't quite sleep, I have an earphone plugged in to ABC News Radio which broadcasts BBC and other news services. So often, I've heard a news story develop through the night that it's shocking to see the newspaper arrive declaring some out of date story as the biggest thing on this morning.

Breakfast is consumed in front of a computer monitor, which isn't totally satisfying but it gives me an efficient rundown of all the news that matters to me compliments of Google Reader and Google News. Recently I've been using Google Chrome as my default browser and that now has extensions including Feedly which makes a nice looking "newspaper" out of my subscriptions.

I can easily imagine reading the news on a tablet in this form.

If there is a big story that happened sufficiently long ago that TV might have video, I'll watch the evening news to see it for myself. TV news is a slave to video content, for good reason, but as a balanced run down of current news it's with newspapers as "aged news" (is that an oxymoron?).

The other side of breaking news is analysis and for that you can't go past the ABC news and current affairs radio and TV. You probably know by now that I'm a devoted addict of all things Radio National but podcasts now illuminate any commuting time. Recently I've been listening to WNYC's Radio Lab which has some great content.

It's going to be a big year for news consumption. The challenge is not getting news, it's sorting and filtering it. As you see at the top, Google reader can sort your news by magic.

The epub book format supported by the iPad

A short chat on ABC Radio about the epub book format which seems to have emerged as the standard format for electronic books.



Listen out for the first use of the term "nerd herd" on ABC radio.

There's room on my desk for an iPad

I checked.

Fits in rather nicely I think. (Yeah yeah it's home made).