BinaryJam

For those unaware, we had a little earthquake, 5.2.  Largest in the UK for 25 years.  So for those of us who are not used to these geological events it was bad enough.

Bad enough when you live an a house only 8 years old made of paper, or seemingly so, I certainly felt every bounce and wobble, if that’s what earthquakes do. Whilst in my house, the effect felt amplified by the banging of the mirror against the wall in time with the wobbles.  It lasted 10 seconds they say, I say it lasted a lot longer, as the mirror continued to bang as the lesser quake ripples continued for another 20 seconds or so.

I wasn’t sure if we were in for a second larger quake or what, not being used to quakes, it was only my third after all.  I wondered whether or not to wake the kids and go wait it out in the car, well it was dark and late I was tired and a little worried to say the least.

The last thing on my mind was to remember to pick up the external USB disk drive that holds my backups, or the pack of dvd’s holding an older set of backups.  No, leaving was on my mind.

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It would appear that I am suffering from a similar problem that many others have encountered.  Some more digging and exact wording in google has found my particular problem.

The documentation is lying.

Xubuntu requires a 192mb to install.  I have 192mb.  It’s just that some of it is running linux.  Its because of this I get the system install hanging at 15%.

Apparently the installer for [X]Ubuntu, ubiquity, disables the swap files to install, a sensible precaution if you are about to rebuild the whole disk, however in my situation in a manual partitioning case, the swap could have been left alone, in fact some clever so and so edited the perl scripts to stop it disabling a swap he created on a USB key, I could not find those scripts as they had been relocated in the new version else I’d have give it a go.

Unfortunately the text-installation is not included in the primary ISO’s and the alternate CD is required.  This is good news for me and other with even less ram as the Alternate CD only requires 64mb to install.  Just what it will install I am curious about.  I’m hoping that a text only version of linux is not on the cards, that’s so 1988*.

*Xwindows may have been about in 1988 but not in the commercial sector of the SME’s it was VT220’s as far as the eye could see, with some really bad terminfo and termcap entries, I had to rewrite them for our installations.

Apparently Ubuntu - Just Works.

Well I thought I’d find out.  I have an Old Laptop its a Sony Vaio PCG-F403, basically it is 450Mhz and has 192mb of memory.  Its old and slow. 

So I start with the ISO, downloaded it eventually from a mirror and burned away.

Here goes.  It opened with a pretty Ubuntu logo did some linuxy things, more linux things, then a sample from the Lion King before opening into, Linux. 

That was a surprise, no horrible stand-alone installer, straight into Ubuntu Linux and you can use it there and then.  This looked promising.  So I started the Installer, an icon on the desktop saying Install with an icon of a drive and an arrow going into it, fairly self explanatory.

The installer starts and I pick my country etc then get to the Partitioning, the bit that always went wrong before, the bit I end up having to go into dos, delete partitions, then back in use something called disk druid to manually partition things.  Only this time no disk druid, just three radio buttons.  Guided - resize, Guided - whole disk and manual.  So I selected Guided whole disk.  Enter some login details and away it goes.

Or rather it doesn’t.

I had tried to install Suse before, it had decided that the 5gb drive was all swap space and took that leaving nothing for anything else.  Now Ubuntu decided to use that swap space and could not install as it was using it.  Well it all fell in a heap.

Unlike Suse I had the power of linux behind me so could halt the installer and manually edit the partitions with GParted a partition editor.  So I deleted everything and created a small swap partition.  Having done all this I started the installation again.  Again I let it do Whole disk, hoping that this time it could delete partitions correctly and cope.  Its taking some time.  Its crashed.

Ideally I would just nuke the drive, but then because the memory is low it needs to swap to do the install.

Time to try again, my partitions are still intact so its a manual partition installation this time.

Crashed.  Again.

So thus far, Ubuntu “doesnt just work”.  Well not on my system.  Perhaps I need the Xubuntu version instead for teeeny tiny systems. 

Shame it was looking really good and the bits I came across were really good, if you ignore all the crashing.

Being an MS developer, well a sap developer of late (but I keep sneakily writing Sharepoint interfaces to it), I have used MS for a long while (86-90, 95-07+), I toyed with Linux having started my career in unix and had to work with “green screens” for 8 years and having a GUI in Linux just didn’t feel right.  So I been running Vista for a while now. 

Of course being the techie in the family all the family have windows too, many of them now happily working on XP SP2 all virus checked and firewalled up to the eyeballs.  And yes all the extra security on machines designed before SP2 make them run slowly.

Slow machinery is something my brother-in-law can’t stand, he’s worse than me for gadgets and tech and relies on me to advise him of what’s coming up.

Having been to PDC05 I got a Vista Polo shirt, it was great, a good fit, great quality, does exactly what I need it too.  Unlike Vista.  I’m a bit ashamed to wear it now everyone knows what Vista is like.

Getting back to the point.  My brother-in-law being the gadget hungry monster he is asked me about upgrading his PC (again) to vista as he is tired of the “slow” speed of his 3ghz P4.

I told him to buy a MAC.

I can’t believe the words came from my mouth.

I had to say them again, slowly to try and see how something so square came from a round hole,

“Buy …a…. MAC”. 

Yep there they are again. 

“You could try a Mac book”, Eeek another one.

I said the unspeakable again.

“Mac OS is far better than vista, Vista is a pain in the back-side”. 

OMG who stole my brain. 

“The only reason I haven’t switched already is the investment I have and I do a little development now and again”. 

Yeh, this feels good, a little cathartic, what to do about Office and that mouse button thing I’m a little unsure of still, but yeah MAC…..

I won’t be getting one myself too much Vis studio and silverlight to do, hang on silverlight runs on a Mac…..No, no I can’t can I ?

It arrived.

 My Samsung 37″ R88.

So I set it up and plugged in Sky and the Xbox and the DVD player (no HD or PC yet).

From the moment I turned it on my wife was ooooh  and arrr thats fantastic. It’s so clear and crisp (this was just SD).  It’s a bit blurry I thought, this isn’t anywhere near as good as I hoped.

So I thought I’d better try some HD content.  Step in “Pirates 2″ clip on downloaded on the xbox 360. 

“Oh my god, that’s utterly amazing, we need a HD-DVD player now”  says the wife (I love having a geeky wife).

“It still looks a bit blurry to me the edges on the text are not well defined”. I say.

“Put your bloody glasses on then you dick” says the wife (never was subtle).

Whoops.

It’s as amazing as she said.  Its better than I could have expected.  I have been watching an old Toshiba 40″ rear projector.  Blacks and greys all run into each other, in fact unless your watching at night there is no such thing as a black on this old TV.  You could not watch this TV in bright sunlight without drawing the curtains.

The Samsung R88 with its 8000:1 dynamic contrast ratio really does have black. It has more settings than I know what to do with. 

I don’t have the technical no how to do a review of this all I can say is I’m really chuffed, its better than I could imagine.  So long as I wear my glasses.

Technorati tags: samsung r88

Well I finally upgraded my home PC, its been a while I was making do with an AMD XP1900+ and whilst faster than my previous PC it never behaved like the workhorse that was promised.  I mean take video encoding or picture manipulation, it was slow, real slow, primarily due to the lack of extensions in the chip that the intel had.

Living with the AMD was also a problem, it was so loud and cost to make it cool quitely was a little steep so it stayed upstairs in the backroom.  You could hear this thing from outside the room with the door closed.

This new chip though, talk about small, talk about cool, talk about quiet.  Hey I’m just using the standard components that come, admittedly the graphics card I have at this minute is passive cooled, but this new build is almost totally silent.  I have it in the lounge and you cant hear it above the TV, Sky+ box and of course the wind tunnel that is the xbox360.

Anyway a little advise for those thinking of upgrading to a core2duo.  BEWARE.  Hardly anyone else has one and when your build goes wrong for whatever reason there is no one to swap parts with.

Take my build put all the pieces together, turned it on, wheeeee……off……wheeeeee…off.  Not good.  So what is it Motherboard, Chip, Hard drive, graphics ?  I trim it down to smallest amount of components and connections, power, memory*1, chip, on switch.  Same again.  Swap Memory.  Same again.

Ring…Ring… “Steve Help”, “Well I have AMD64 mate with DDR not DDR2, but I have a card to try, bring it over”.

Long rambling short, the video card was duff, put in any machine it stops it booting, but had this not been the problem I was pretty much stuffed in diagnosing chip vs motherboard.

So bear that in mind if you upgrade, try and have a spare available for as much as possible (oh and a PCI graphics card is really handy).

In trying to convert this blog I had to knock up an application to read dasBlog dayentry files and write out a large RSS style wordpress import file.

Now I don’t do XML that often but when I do its been with simple XML so a quick “//Entries” XPath query and away you go.  However the dasBlog XML is done properly with lots of namespaces.

So when I’ve been doing my simple XPath query it returns nothing.  So for those having similar problems the solution is this.  You need a namespace manager.

Here is a quick code snippet that explains how you would use it.

XmlNamespaceManager mgr=new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDoc.NameTable);
mgr.AddNamespace(”def”,”urn:newtelligence-com:dasblog:runtime:data”);

foreach(XmlNode innerNode in xmlDoc.SelectNodes(”//def:Entry”,mgr) )
{
    //Do things with innerNode;
    title=innerNode.SelectSingleNode(”def:Title”,mgr).InnerText;
    //Do more things
}

Simple as that.

tags: .net, c#, xml+programming, xml, namspace+manager