personal diary – Page 17 – frans goes blog

Bored of Verdana

Staring at this blog numerous times per day, I am starting to feel it needs another facelift at some point. But since I do not have the time to start tweaking with the WPress theme frameworks, child themes etc., I just try a minor tweak — changing the typeface and the character spacing a bit towards more spacey and readable (I wish) format. Any comments?

Our little lion

21.08.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

The second lion to our family, the little brother was born to Luka today, at five minutes past seven in the evening. Long waited, the birth was finally quick (albeit not painless, like these things tend to go). Happy? Yes. Tired? Very. Now we just stare at his little round face, and try to understand.

Delayed deliveries

I have been having bad luck before with various companies, but this is now getting epidemic — are all of these delays explained by the economic recession, of some other such factor? For example, I pre-ordered my iPhone 3GS from Sonera (the exclusive carrier in Finland) already late June, I think — and was promised a delivery in July 31st. Then I received a call from Sonera telling that it will arrive in 5th of August instead. Then nothing happened. I have been calling Sonera and Verkkokauppa.com where I should be getting the phone delivered, but no-one have been able to give any sort of estimate for when the phones could really become available.

The delay was particularly nasty for me, as I had ordered my previous mobile subscription to be closed at July 31st, and then needed to get to Sonera to have a new subscription opened, without the phone yet available. I had also scheduled some work with analysing iPhone apps for August, but now it seems that I need to get my hands on an iPod Touch in order to be able to do that work. Damn, such delays are irritating in an already too busy schedule.

On another front, we are still waiting for two armchairs we ordered from Asko more than four weeks ago (the delivery promise was 2-4 weeks). No contact to the customer, no explanation. Is Finland just the country of bad customer service, or is this universal?

Testing HD video

Got finally a camera today that can produce HD (720p) video clips. Testing the low-light characteristics of Canon PowerShot SX200 IX in the shot below: night time, HD and imported directly from .MOV into Youtube — the you can see that auto exposure creates lots of grain. Still some nice sky tones. (Click the “go full screen” symbol below, in the low right corner of the player.)

There will be a couple of more experiments posted into my profile later. My first impressions of this small camera are positive. It is surprising to see how versatile system this kind of pocket camera can today be. Digital photography has gone long way, at least as far as technology is concerned.

Plugged-in coffee

I attached a mobile DVB-T television reveiver to the top of my coffee maker couple of days ago. The idea is that I need not switch on my big screen TV in the living room in order to see the morning news while getting my mocha. Nice, but there is no built-in antenna plug anywhere in our kitchen, and I had to “hide” a terrestial digital television antenna also to the coffee corner. Decorative mistake, I was told… (Maximum TV-710 CX receiver: was 99 euros in the local Kodin Ykkönen store.)

Ubuntu Netbook Remix in AA1

Ubuntu Netbook Remix, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Another thing I did the late at the other night (not getting much sleep this summer) was finally install another OS version for my netbook, Acer Asprire One. The stripped-down Linpus Lite it shipped with was ok for basic stuff, but I kept on tweaking it, pushing it towards a full, networking capable desktop system. Since Linpus is built on Fedora, you can actually do pretty much with it, but at some point it just became so patched up and broken I realised I needed to do something.
I had been following the development of netbook versions of popular operating systems, but for a long time there appeared to be serious problems: a full Ubuntu desktop, for example, would be running very slow, being too heavy for a meagre AA1 (my system is version ZG5, with 512 MB of DDR2 memory). There are also many hardware drivers that would stop working if one reformats the Linpus environment Acer had set up.

But finally, it appeared that the Ubuntu Netbook Remix project had managed to produce a version of Ubuntu that would be running smoothly on weak systems, plus it would support almost all of the AA1 hardware out of the box. Trying it out now for couple of days, I am pretty happy. It is not a speed demon, but I am amazed at the scope and quality of functions they have managed to pack into a lowly 512 MB netbook machine. Reason to be happy for a while! 🙂

Canon LBP5050n driver problems

As a part of this summer’s transition to a new home server environment, I upgraded my printer to a colour laser one. The print quality of Canon i-SENSYS LBP5050n was the ṕrimary reason for choosing that one. I was originally going to buy an USB model and use my home server as the print server, but it soon appeared that Windows Server 2008 as the Web Server edition does not allow printer sharing. MS strikes againg – they have actually disabled all printer sharing functionalities so that they can sell more expensive versions of Server 2008 for those who need more than only the web server stuff. In this (as probably in many other accounts) it makes much more sense to use Ubuntu Server Edition or something similar rather than MS products if you want to have a cheap, yet efficient general purpose server of your own.

Persisting against the odds, I went ahead and picked the 5050n model instead, since it includes its own ethernet connector and print server built in, so that you can print to it from anywhere in your home. Except for the printer driver. Rather than a regular Postscript printer, this Canon printer is a CAPT printer, meaning that it uses Canon’s own proprietary printer language. They have tried to develop driver versions for many operating systems, but according to my experiences, the development of 5050n drivers is still not yet finished. I at least hope they will release better versions in the future.

Luckily, two of my most important OSes are supported and working fine: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. Funny thing is, that neither have a dedicated driver version — you can install a Vista version and it works. But as I tried to install the driver to my two Vista systems, the driver did not produce test prints, and the status window actually completely stalled the computer/UI. I had to remove the driver. Also, trying to install the Mac version of driver to my Mac Mini (a OS X Tiger system) did not produce any working results.

See: http://software.canon-europe.com/products/0010663.asp

Since I am also using Ubuntu with my workstation and Acer Aspire One netbooks, I was interested to see whether I could finally print anything from there. No success. A Linux package of CAPT printer drivers also exists:

http://software.canon-europe.com/software/0028622.asp

But I tried to follow the instructions and tweak my systems, but it appears that there is not yet a printer profile file for 5050 models. I tried install using LPB5000 profile file, but it did not work out.

Thus: out of the five tested OSes that we are using, only two managed to print to this new, home/small office network printer. Not a very good result to my estimation (even while I am happy with the printer itself). Hopefully Canon will produce more and updated printer software for this printer in the future.

Site frozen, taken offline

An advance warning: since I am making a transition to a new server (and a new server OS, plus a new version of WordPress), this site will be frozen and all commenting functions temporarily frozen today. Sorry, lets hope site transition will be over soon. Since I will be carrying servers physically around, as well as transferring the databases and files, there might be times today when the entire site and domain will be offline.

Edit: this is continuation post of my log about transition to IIS 7.0 (Windows Web Server 2008).

Terrace and pergola project finished

Last summer, I wrote about our terrace and pergola project; and in May this year I mentioned that we are continuing with the paint layers next. After that, most of May and June free time was spent adding a couple of layers of paint to every surface of the construction. The rafters (or laths) supporting the transparent roofing were painted while still on the ground. The transparent roofing was made from Icopal Fastlock Uni — a strong polycarbonate sheet material, which has UV filtering top layer and a 10 year guarantee. However, I think “Fastlock” is a bit exaggeration on the fixing mechanism: it took a couple of days of dedicated pushing, pulling and nailing to get the thin, 20 cm sheets connected and then solidly fixed to the rafters. The outcome was nice, though. The roof looks pretty neutral (and it is a must in a climate like we have in Finland). Here are some photos:

Freshly painted terrace, doing some washing:

Fixing the “fastlocks”:

The finished terrace & pergola:

You can see the entire story of the project in photos via this link.

Syncing three kinds of calendars

There are three main types of calendars that I need and use:

the standard desktop calendar app (the one with the best interface, accessible also when offline)
the mobile calendar (handy when making notes in the meetings, on the road etc.)
the online, shared calendar (essential for groupwork, accessible from any webtop)

The challenge currently is that there is no single, seamless solution for a regular user that would (affordably) provide all these elements so that they would be automatically synchronized together. I tried to move away from MS Office and Outlook which is senseless bloatware and resource hog if the only thing you need is the calendar (I use Thunderbird as my PC mail client). And Google Calendar does nicely its job as the shared online calendar service. However, if you are using Nokia mobile phones/symbian devices, it is very difficult to do without Nokia PC Suite, and it only supports sync to Outlook (or Lotus Notes, and other MS calendars). There are workarounds where you use your phone’s GPRS data capabilities to sync the mobile phone over the air to Google Calendar, and you can integrate Thunderbird/Lightning calendar then to Google Calendar, but if you have couple of phones and no flat rate plan to some of them (like I do) then doing every sync over the air does not really make sense. For the data carrier and slow access reasons I do not prefer to load online calendar to a mobile browser and access the mobile calendar that way.

I was finally forced back to Outlook – Google Calendar Sync – PC Suite – Nokia/S60 combo, as I did not want to pay and install for extra software just for this (and we already have the MS Office licenced provided by our university to staff use). If you have found a better way to keep these three types of calendars synchronized together, please let me know.