Hermed en officiel hyldest til Google-folkene. Jeg har tidligere brugt Google Maps Mobile – på det tidspunkt var applikationen absolut anvendelig. Man kunne slå adresser og kørselsvejledninger op på sin telefon, og hurtigt stå med kort og satellitbilleder. I forbindelse med at jeg har købt ny telefon skulle jeg hente Google Maps Mobile igen her til aften, og jeg ville lige se om der var noget ændret. Det var der.
Google Maps Mobile er blevet ekstraordinært sejt.
Skidtet kan nu benytte sig af GPS-data, hvis telefonen har sådan noget dyrt og smart halløj. Det har min telefon dog ikke, men alligevel fortalte den min nuværende position, efter at have advaret om at positionen var bestemt inden for en radius på 1700m. Hvis man accepterer betingelserne finder GMM simpelthen telefonens position ved hjælp af forbindelserne til mobilmasterne i nærheden, og kan derved bestemme positionen med en rimelig sikkerhed.
For pokker hvor er det anvendeligt når man (endnu engang) er ved at fare vild i København. Evig hyldest til udviklerne herfra
Posted in Software | December 7th, 2007 |
Jeg kom lige til at læse på forummet på kohanaphp.com, at frameworket, der er en fork af CodeIgniter, bliver releaset på torsdag, den 8. november. Det bliver interessant at se hvilke forbedringer der er kommet med i releaset – og om der er nogen af ulemperne ved CodeIgniter (der er ellers ikke mange), der er blevet rettet op. Det er dog ikke sandsynligt at den nye udgave af min uploadservice vil gå over til at bruge KohanaPHP lige med det samme – frameworket skal lige have tid til at modnes lidt.
Posted in Software, Web | November 6th, 2007 |
As I mentioned in my previous post, a lot of improvements have been introduced in Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”. Not all of them had a nice effect on the compatibility with my Dell D620 laptop, though. As a future reference, I have decided to document what improvements i have made on the laptop to improve battery life and the general user experience.
The most important specs for my laptop is as follows:
- Intel Core Duo T2500, 2ghz CPU
- nVidia Quadro 110M graphics
The screen resolution was detected correctly, but 3D acceleration was (of course) not enabled by default, as it relies on a restricted driver. As mentioned in the previous post, I downloaded the driver using these commands in a terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-new
You just have to enable the driver in System -> Administration -> Restricted Drivers to make 3D acceleration work – desktop effects are enabled in System -> Preferences -> Appearance. The touchpad was reacting very slow, so I needed to configure it to make it work properly. This is done by typing the following in a terminal:
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Find the part of the file containing “InputDevice” and “Synaptic”, and insert (in the end of the “InputDevice” section):
Option "LeftEdge" "130"
Option "RightEdge" "840"
Option "TopEdge" "130"
Option "BottomEdge" "640"
Option "FingerLow" "14"
Option "FingerHigh" "15"
Option "MaxTapTime" "180"
Option "MaxTapMove" "110"
Option "ClickTime" "0"
Option "MaxDoubleTapTime" "100"
Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "75"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "20"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "20"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.60"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1.10"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.030"
Option "EdgeMotionMinSpeed" "200"
Option "EdgeMotionMaxSpeed" "200
Option "UpDownScrolling" "1"
Option "CircularScrolling" "1"
Option "CircScrollDelta" "0.1"
Option "CircScrollTrigger" "2"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "on"
Optimize battery-life
To optimize battery-life on the laptop, i installed and ran powertop by running these commands:
sudo apt-get install powertop
sudo powertop
Powertop proposes a couple of optimizations for your particular computer. Most of these can be entered in a .sh file, which you should put in the directory /etc/init.d – it should be run every time the computer boots. This is accomplished using the command:
sudo update-rc.d YOURSCRIPTNAME defaults
YOURSCRIPTNAME should obviously be replaced by the name you have chosen for your script. I will post a sample script tomorrow, to give you an idea of how it should look like.
Powertop should gain you a lot of battery-life. One of the big wake-up causes on my laptop was the nVidia card, waking up about 60 times a second, to check if the screen had to be re-rendered instead of syncing to vblank. This can be solved by inserting a line in xorg.conf:
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Find the part named “Device” that contains the name of your graphics card. Insert the following line in the section:
Option "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "on"
Please note, that the option is experimental, and could cause system freezes. It should be noted, though, that I have not had any problems using it.
This concludes this small optimization reference. For further reference, see the ubuntu wiki, which have helped me a lot:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/DellLatitudeD620
Posted in Software | October 28th, 2007 |
Yesterday Ubuntu 7.10, codename “Gutsy Gibbon”, was released – I installed it on both my desktop and my laptop to see if any improvements have been made to the system. And – tadaaa: Several major improvements have been introduced in this version! The inclusion and integration of Compiz Fusion mean that it is pretty easy to get it working – on my desktop, desktop effects were working on first boot – but because I have a ATI Radeon 9800 graphics card, it was a bit tough to get 3D acceleration working (that’s my own fault for buying ATI and mixing it with Linux). On my Dell D620 laptop, I just had to download the nvidia-glx-new driver using the package manager, and enable it in restricted drivers to get 3D acceleration working.
The system feels more integrated, more slick and more user friendly. It took only 30 minutes to install, and using the package manager, I was enable to completely reinstall my system in around 1½ hours – the extra time was caused by a slow repository from which I were downloading additional packages. The only problem I have now is that my Audigy 2ZS sound card in the desktop is not working (oddly enough), but that is going to be solved tonight.
Posted in Software | October 19th, 2007 |
Når Microsoft Windows 2003 Small Business Server nægter at starte ordentligt op fordi event loggen er fuld – og den kræver at få den tømt med det samme før den kan starte alle services op. Der er indtil flere dumheder skjult i denne opførsel:
- Hvordan kan en log blive fuld? – Med masser af diskplads bør det ikke kunne ske, men det kan selvfølgelig være, at strategien fra MS’s side af er at lade brugeren vælge hvor meget plads der skal bruges på logs – så det kan man bære over med.
- Det er udmærket at gøre brugeren opmærksom på at event loggen er fuld – men hvorfor nægte at starte op? Er man tilstrækkeligt uheldig kan man ikke komme til serveren, og skidtet kan risikere at være nede i lang tid. En fornuftig opførsel ville være at starte ordentligt op, for DEREFTER at gøre systemadministratoren opmærksom på at der er noget galt.
Microsoft er selvfølgelig ikke alene om at lave dum software. Hvorfor skal jeg for eksempel belemres med at tage stilling til om jeg har lyst til at opdatere Adobe Reader, hver gang jeg starter softwaren – lad dog mig selv bede om en opdatering når jeg har lyst til det, og hold så ellers kæft! Og hvorfor findes der ikke en “Jeg ved hvad jeg laver”-knap i Windows, der kan få alle de irriterende status-popups til at forsvinde fra taskbaren?
Lad for pokker brugeren tænke selv – bare en gang imellem!
Posted in Software | September 17th, 2007 |
