Today's musings

Vodafone 3G
My Internet access is with Vodafone 3G here in Australia. I have a Pocket Wifi, which allows connection of up to 5 computers.

I buy prepaid, usually pay AU$125 for 15GB, 365-day expiry.

The problem is, I went through that 15GB in less than 6 weeks. Which took me by surprise.
Previously, it has lasted much longer, and it leaves me wondering if Vodafone have changed the way they are metering transfers.

A few days ago, I bought another $125 worth. Checked usage at the "myvodafone" site, found that in one day, 5th March, I had used 2.18GB!

That was the day I uploaded Quirky 7.0.1.
No way I transferred that much!

I didn't watch any videos, no Flash Player, just usual browsing, visit the Puppy Forum, etc. These activities normally log about 10 - 50MB per day.
The uploads for Quirky 7.0.1 were about 1.4GB.

Hmmm

Ubuntu Phone
Much as I want to support Ubuntu Phone, I have had doubts about the gesture-based UI.
Swiping from left-side, right-side, top-side or bottom-side, each does something. So, if you want to touch or swipe something within the window, you have to be careful not to do it too close to one of the sides.

That was my thinking, seemed logical to me, though I haven't had any hands-on with the phones.

But, it turns out, this is exactly the problem, see a recent hands-on report from MWC2015:
http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/05/ubuntu-meizu-hands-on/

Quoting:
Furthermore, dragging your finger too close to either the left- or right-hand edge of the display triggers other features in the OS, which meant I was constantly hunting for "safe" gaps in the UI. When I handed the devices to the staff at Canonical's booth, they also seemed to struggle with the number of gestures that can be activated by mistake.

Perhaps the whole swipe-from-the-side concept is a bad idea. Perhaps just four capacitive buttons at the bottom of the phone (not in the screen), is a superior solution.
Which of course is getting back to how Android and others do it.

Tags: general

Raspberry Pi 2

Fascinating, a new Raspberry Pi with quad-core ARMv7 SoC:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/products/

Snappy Ubuntu Core is available for the Pi 2:
http://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/02/02/snappy-ubuntu-core-on-raspberry-pi-2/

And Windows 10 is coming:
http://dev.windows.com/en-us/featured/raspberrypi2support

Read more...

The end of Dr Dobb's Journal

Oh wow, this is the end of an era:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/17/dr_dobbs_journal_sails_into_the_sunset/

Back in the early 90's I used to purchase Dr Dobb's from my newsagent. I even contributed a couple of articles:

Object oriented flow design:
http://www.drdobbs.com/object-oriented-flow-design/184409977?queryText=barry%2Bkauler

TERSE operating system:
http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/terse-a-tiny-real-time-operating-system/184409682?queryText=barry%2Bkauler

Do you old-timers remember Byte magazine? In its heyday it was about half an inch thick. Another one that I used to buy sometimes.
Byte magazine bit the dust many years ago.

Tags: general

Aaah, Mewel

Us old-timer coders recall our DOS and Windows programming days, perhaps with a touch of nostalgia.

I have ongoing rendering problems with the Intel xorg driver on my laptop. Parts of the screen suddenly disappear, or suddenly get replaced by a coloured background. it is weird.

I had this problem with Quirky Unicorn, still have it with Quirky April -- except it is now manifesting a bit differently.

Where does the blame lie? The Intel xorg driver? The kernel, the kernel i915 module? GTK?

Dunno, but I might do a rebuild of Quirky April with an older kernel, see if that makes any difference.

This set me off reminiscing... GTK is a bit of a mess, and I recall fondly my programming days with the win16 and win32 libraries.

I have an application, 'eve.exe', a freeware app, that was compiled back in early 2000, and it still works on recent Windows machines.
The win-api tended not to change, rather get added onto, unlike the madness of Linux libraries.

Then there is the implementation of win16 and win32, technically excellent. Apart from the lack of many modern features, I still consider those libraries to be technically superior to GTK and Qt.

I am writing of products developed fifteen years ago, superior to current efforts in the Linux world.

Then I recalled mewel, made by Magma Systems. I purchased Mewel late 1990s or very early 2000s. It is a win16-compatible library for writing graphical applications for msdos. it is not for writing applications to run in Windows.
I bought the cheapest one, to create text-mode graphic applications -- yes, text-mode. Quite remarkable product.

I hunted around, found this:
http://softwareuno.com/magma/mewel.htm

This got me thinking about WINE. A couple of years since I checked-out WINE, but I used to evaluate it periodically, and always found it to be slow and very imperfect.
Yet, 18 years ago these Mewel guys wrote a beautiful win16-win32-clone, worked very well indeed, very fast. They even sold the source code.

I am in a grumbling mood, aren't I!

Read more...

Distributions using eudev

Puppy Forum member wyzguy sent me this link, that catalogs all distributions using eudev:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7645956.html

Note, if you are new to this udev/systemd/eudev issue, google around, also my blog has some posts on the subject.

I am currently playing with Buildroot, and that also has the option of eudev. Which is the option I have chosen of course.

Tags: general

Played with Gentoo

"Played", notice the past-tense.

I never really looked closely at Gentoo before. Yesterday I went through the whole install procedure. But, I didn't use Gentoo's bootstrap CD, I installed a Stage-3 tarball from my running Quirky 6.2.

it took a long time. Fiddling around, I felt like I was using Linux from 15 years ago.

I have documented every step, so if anyone wants to repeat my experiment, I can send you my notes.

At the end, I tried to do an "emerge seamonkey", but it reported a conflict between 'ffmpeg' and 'libav', as both cannot co-exist. However, it seems that some packages want libav, some want ffmpeg, which left me in a quandary.

So, I tried "emerge vlc", but it wanted package 'minizip', but there is no such package. There is a bit more to it than than that, but I couldn't figure out how to tell the system that minizip isn't actually needed.

I had been at it for about 12 hours, and I just ran out of patience.

Yeah, I could go to the Gentoo forum and ask, probably could solve those problems.
But, decided there is too much "messing around" and Gentoo is not for me.

Tags: general

Laptop with Windows 8.1

A friend who works in a remote town, entrusted me to purchase a cheap laptop for her, and bring it when I next come to visit.

So, today I found an inexpensive sale-price laptop at Dick Smith, an Asus X551MAV-BING-SX391B, with 15.6inch screen, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD, USB3 and DVD burner, for AU$348.

First time that I fired it up, I was somewhat bamboozled by the Metro user interface -- this is the first time that I have used Windows 8.x.

Fortunately, I found this site, which explains how Windows 8.1 can be restored to a reasonably sensible desktop:
http://www.howtogeek.com/167013/how-to-optimize-windows-8.1-for-a-desktop-pc/

Thank goodness. There are all kinds of peculiarities in the 8.x UI, that seem either confusing or unnecessary. I have now set it up so that my friend will feel comfortable using it -- as she is only familiar with XP and 7.

She also entrusted me with her Microsoft Office 2010 DVD, a legal one, with product key, and I installed that. I wondered whether there might be issues with installing a 2010 version of Office in Windows 8.1, but no problem, it runs fine.

Tags: general

Galaxy Note 4 bend test

Ha ha, I expected Samsung to take full advantage of the iPhone 6 #bendgate, and here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrhCz6PnT78

The "butt test" is quite amusing.

Except not quite realistic, as the bending forces in the back pocket are more likely to be more of a twisting force, or more applied on one side than the other.

It is the force applied on one side that is the downfall of the iPhone 6, due to weakness near the frame cutout for the buttons.

That situation has not yet been tested for the Note 4.

Tags: general