Technologists Notes

Not all that long ago I expressed optimism about hosting VMWare on Fedora (Virtual satisfaction with VMware Server and kernel 2.6.31). I should have seen the writing on the wall, but I didn’t.

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A few days ago I was passing by the neighborhood RadioShack and thought “Maybe I could get an Evo from RadioShack faster than directly from Sprint?”.  I walked in, asked a few questions, and a few minutes later I was pre-ordering an Evo, only my second “smartphone”, my first being a Samsung SPH-i300 purchased in late 2001.

I think the i300 was the 2^nd Palm OS (3.5.2) phone on the market (soon after a monochrome phone from Kyocera). I loaded it up with SSH, VNC, a PDF reader, Java ME, Java apps of my own devising and probably some less used apps I’ve forgotten. Using the i300 changed my thinking about email, about web browsing, and application development. But ultimately, the hardware and network weren’t up to what I wanted — I wanted much more screen area in both pixels and physical size, faster processing, and faster transfers.

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The machine hosting this post is going on 11 years old. The original 8G disk has been displaced by three PATA drives totalling 340G. The memory is maxed out at 768M. Otherwise, the Optiplex GX1 with a 450MHz Pentium II is pretty much the same as when I bought it at the (then bricks and mortar) Dell Factory Outlet. When first put into production in ’99 as a mail/web/name server, I think it was running Red Hat 5 (4? 6?). Now it runs Fedora 11. Unless/until it needs to handle dramatically more traffic, performance should be more than adequate — load average is usually less than 1, and right now it is using only 64M of swap space. Xvnc & GNOME stuff are always running and perform OK when needed.

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I’ve not used my XO nearly as much as I anticipated:

1. The keyboard is even more a “fatal flaw” than I thought at first.
2. The LCD panel failed (right side went blank) just before I was going to take it to Nicaragua. (A free under warranty replacement machine was shipped promptly, but not promptly enough.)
3. Miscellaneous software annoyances, most notably the WiFi limitations and the power management deficiencies, also limited applicability.

Obviously, the keyboard is not going to get better, the LCD failure is history, but there is good news about #3.

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Thursday, Caroline and I traveled to Richardson (heart of the Dallas “telecom corridor”) to see her father and record his bi-weekly gig. I hadn’t done much with the equipment or Cubase since the trip last year. Setting up the equipment and the actual recording seemed to go smoothly, but I should have been better prepared, for monitoring the recording and better framing the video with the camera.

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