I used to connect a Mac Mini to it and changing the video to turn it upside down was something easy. Now that I have switched to my newly acquired Atom N330 ION machine, I have to learn how to do it in Linux Mint (ubuntu derivative)

If you use the stock drivers, you can use XrandR to rotate the screen, but i wanted the proprietary drivers in order to have hardware accelerated graphics and video playback.

After you have installed the propriety hardware drivers for your nVidia card, do the following changes:

Add the following line to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in the “Device” section (ignore the extra ” coming from the WP theme I’m using)

Option  “RandRRotation” “True”

Now you can simply restart GDM by issuing the following commands in a TTY (ie: CTRL+ALT+F1):

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

Once you login into your account you should be able to specify the rotation of the screen in Preferences>Monitor

If asked if you’d prefer to use the Nvidia panel, simply say no.

You will notice that the login screen will still be upside down, this can be fixed by adding the following option below the one you just inserted in your xorg.conf:

Option  “Rotate”        “Inverted”

Please note that you will not be able to change your resolution using the Preferences>Monitor application anymore.
The Rotate option takes Right, Left and Inverted as parameters.

Blow is my xorg.conf, for reference:

Section “Screen”
Identifier      “Default Screen”
DefaultDepth    24
EndSection

Section “Module”
Load    “glx”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier      “Default Device”
Driver  “nvidia”
Option  “NoLogo”        “True”
Option  “RandRRotation” “True”
Option  “Rotate”        “Inverted”
EndSection

“Microsoft researchers have slashed desktop energy use with a sleep proxy system that maintains a PC’s network presence even when it is turned off or put into standby mode.

10 Microsoft research projects

Microsoft has deployed the sleep proxy system to more than 50 active users in the Building 99 research facility in Redmond, Wash., according to the Microsoft Research Web site and a paper that will be presented at the Usenix technical conference in Boston later this month.

“A number of studies have noted that most office machines are left on irrespective of user activity,” Microsoft researchers write in a paper titled “Sleepless in Seattle no longer.” “At Microsoft Research, we find hundreds of desktop machines awake, day or night – a significant waste of both energy and money. Indeed, potential savings can amount to millions of dollars per year for larger enterprises.”

Sleep proxies allow machines to be turned off while keeping them connected to the network, waking the machines when a user or IT administrator attempts to access it remotely. ”

for more… click the link to the article

http://www.memo.tv/ofxiphone

1. Pre-selection of components from Tank and I
2. Shopping with Tank of the following components:
   Cheap Keyboard, Mouse ($68)
   SATA to MINI-SATA adapter ($35)
   Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @2.93 gHz with 3MB L2 cache ($1090)
   ZOTAC Geforce 9300-ITX WIFI motherboard ($1190)
   SILVERSTONE NT07-775 cpu heatsink ($200)
   2THEMAX 8KR1 ITX case with 120W PSU ($455)
   TEAC DV-W28S 8x DVD+-RW – slim ($360)
   2x OCZ 2GB DDR2 @ 800 mHz (w heatsink) ($260)
   HITACHI 640GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB HDD ($450)
   TOTAL: $4108 (leaves $892 to purchase 19″ LCD)
3. Assembly of the computer with Tank(very easy)
4. Installing Windows 7 beta and Linux Mint on the drive
5. Finish installing drivers and compiling wifi drivers for Linux.
6. Bring it back home, use the “stress” command under linux. Stressed RAM + CPU + HDD at maximum for 24hrs. No problems. Consider system stable
7. Test of HD video playback with videos from Apple.com/trailers. No dropped frames under linux and windows. Settings: Max resolution on 22″ + 15″ dual-screen. Windows with Aero turned on and using the task switching to stress system. Linux with Desktop compositing enabled (Compiz), rotating cube effect applied without any problem.
8. installing XBMC – Xbox Media Centre (www.xbmc.org) on linux in order to test more video playback.
9. Installing the “ubuntu-studio” suite of programs under linux
10. TODO:
    Installing, Processing.org and Arduino suite of programs.
    Buying 4more copies of the config
    Buying 5 LCDs (ended up with 5 19″ ACER LCDs. they are quite decent and have a vesa mount on the back. The plan is to hang the computers at the back of the screen.
    Testing on HDTV using HDMI port
    Backup and restore system for ease of use by all
    Restricted account for casual internet browsing by other users

Below, a shot of the small ITX case that will eventually be hung behind the LCD screens.

In order, from left to right: cheap Linksys router, SIG-CALCULATOR1, Mac Mini G4 (1st generation), 1TB backup E-SATA drive, (under all of this) my home computer

Audio

• The Linux Action Show – Show about Linux and Open Source news (OGG feed, MP3 feed)
• Radio Revolver – Old radio drama shows that feel into the public domain (MP3 feed)
• Windows Weekly – As the name says, a weekly show about windows news. Hosted by Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte (MP3 feed)
• The Mac Observer’s Mac Geek Gab – Weekly show about mac/apple related information, tips and tricks. (MP3 feed, enhanced AAC feed)
• RTHK: Naked Cantonese – quite infrequent podcast about learning cantonese in HK. Very casual and apparently full of mistakes. (MP3 feed)

Video

• Linux Journal – Podcast from the creators of the Linux Journal (video feed)
• Systm – weekly DIY show for geeks (Quicktime HD feed)
• Lab Rats – weekly show for newbies to computing. I watch it to learn how to teach the basics. (DivX feed)
• What You Ought to Know – all in the title. short episodes. not too frequent anymore. (Quicktime feed)
• TED  Talks – Talks from the TED conferences. If you don’t watch this one already, you really should. (MP4 HD feed)
• Alive in Baghdad – Short snippets of life in Badhad. How life goes on, is improved, deterred or rebuilt. (Quicktime feed)
• Meet the Gimp – regular shows teaching how to use The GIMP (MP4 feed)
• Make Magazine: Make podcast – weekly podcasts from MAKE. (m4v feed)
• Tiki Bar TV – very very infrequent podcast. slightly funny. really enhibriated. (m4v feed)
• IT idiots – Used to be a frequent podcast about system administration and IT (h264 mp4 feed)
• Hak5 – Hacking (not only computers) show (HD Quicktime feed)
• Geek Entertainment TV – Infrequent snippets of the Geek life in the SanFrancisco area and geek conferences (m4v feed)

How to subsribe to all of these ?

• Miro (Mac, Linux, Windows)
• iTunes (Mac, Windows)

I have been using it for a couple of weeks not and I can say that I am more than satisfied by the improvements made. Of course, it is very similar to Vista as we could all call it an upgrade to Vista. There are a lot of improvements though. I find Windows 7 to run a lot faster than what I experienced on Vista (especially on old hardware).

One of the black points of W7 for the moment has been a bug with the legacy Transport Driver Interface causing BSOD when accessing windows shares (Samba Shares / SMB Shares… whatever rocks your boat). The error message being “IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL tdx!TdxEventReceiveConnection.” and complaining about tdx.sys.

Many people found out that it would sometimes be caused by conflicts between network card drivers and Anti-virus programs and tdx.sys.

All the fixes given on the web could sometimes prevent those BSOD but yesterday, Microsoft released a fix on their website and so far… it seems to have fixed the problem.

You can find the hotfix here: KB967891

It is also said that the build 7032 fixed this issue. It is not a public release so I cannot access it sadly

The topics covered were widget development, the S60 touch interface, S60 programming using API and S60 Touch application development workshop.

Nokia seems to be going the good way for their development. Most of the develomnet tools are free of charge and they say that they have plans to make some of the OS components as Open Source.

After the programming workshop we learned to control the UI elements to create a painting application. It was a good epxerience and makes me want to learn a bit more about application development for Symbian. One of the problems though is that the programming sometimes is not that simple and a lot of API calls need to be learned and initialised.

Before leaving the lecturer talked with me and told me a lot about the security features and the signing features for the applications to provide them with different levels of access to the hardware. From self-signing to Symbian approved. He also told us there are a lot of opportunities to make money by developping for symbian as well.

One thing to note is that the chinese wiki/forum gives out mobile phones to the best contributors. Good to know if anyone would like to get started with the development.

Well… I always believed in backup, but never put it into practice. Since my first PC computer with a hard-drive inside (aged 10) I have been loosing data on a regular basis. The only reason why this happens less and less frequently is because I run Linux and do not have to re-install my system every other day and also because I have more than one drive, thus spreading the data over several mediums.

During my recent holiday in France I was lucky enough to slightly fry one of my drives. The cause? It was an external drive that suffered from the several power cuts that happened at home. You see, this winter the power consumption was the highest, ever, due to the intense cold and many people switching to electric heating.

Enough background. How am I trying to save the data (obviously essential data. Work, exhibition material, video footage) and how will I try to remedy to this problem in the future.

How to save my drive:

Since the drive is still under warranty, I decided that it was not an option to open the case and plug the drive straight into my computer. Furthermore, the logic of the USB case was not dead so I did not see the point. From the preliminary tests, the issue seemed to be noise and possibly the reading heads hitting a platter while the power cut, thus damaging some sectors. FYI, the drive was formatted in NTFS since I need to use it on my office computer running XP.

First unsuccessful attempts were the following:

• Mounting the drive under Linux and using the cp command to put the files on another drive. The copy would stall at some point and would stay stuck.
• Same as above using rsync
• Same as above using dd_rescue for each of the files
• Then I tried mounting the drive under XP and using Roadkills unstoppablecopier, some of the files would copy, but it would take forever and leave a lot of errors.

After all these trials, I decided that the NTFS partition must have been corrupted and that there is some physical damage to the disc. If I eliminate one of the problems, the recovery should be easier. I took the step and finally did the expense of buying a hard-drive that would have enough capacity for me to image the broken drive, fix the image if need be and then mount the NTFS partition and go from there.
For this, after some reading, I used ddrescue (and not dd_rescue). GNU ddrescue is praised by many and seems to be the way to go. It combines all the good aspects of dd_rescue and dd_rhelp and where all the others have failed so far, it seems to be doing quite good.

The current ETA is: 227663MB copied at an average of 3438kB/s and still counting.
The partition that is being copied is about 300gig.
More update on this later.

How to prevent the same thing from happening

I have a total of 5 systems currently:

• “home” computer / multi-purpose machine / home server (ubuntu studio)

• SATA II 250GB – system disk
• SATA II 320GB – home folder
• SATA II 250GB – misc documents
• SATA II 250+250+250GB raid 5 array – backup of important documents

• IDE 80GB – system and data

• IDE 30GB – system and data (on different partitions)

• SATA II 160GB – 80gb for data and 80gb for system
• FW External drive 250GB – for work files, video files, office-related data (the data which i’m trying to recover)

• SATA II 160GB

The new drive I bought is a E-SATA/USB2.0 1TB drive.

My new plan for backing up is to use the 1TB drive to make backups of the most important files on each of the systems. The Raid array, since it can be easily reconstructed, will also be holding some of the most important files. The really important files will be burned to DVD and spread over several physical machines so as to make sure that there is also a working copy in at least one place.
I also have some online server space. I will make sure that this will also be put to use for some of the important files.

Further plans:
Frequent check of the SMART status of the drives.
Frequent backup
Try and add more space to RAID array so that more data can be kept safe. (I know that RAID is not a replacement for a good backup, but it sure does help keeping the data safer than having just a single point of failure. Also, the RAID is software so it can be reconstructed easily if the motherboard came to die.)

Vivek is a “new media designer / developer” (cf name card), a drummer and a comedian. I first heard of him on youtube. His clip was about a competition he won in october 07′.  love that clip esp because he uses simple terms (so i can understand the jokes in cantonese) and he just is plain funny~

The main reason he was here was to talk to us about Freelance. He is a graduate of the School of Creative Media ’05 and has been freelancing for about 3 years.
He gave us a rundown of the things we had to keep in mind and a little bit about his parcour. It was an honor to have so much knowledge and insight given to us. Following are some notes taken during his presentation. All in bullet points…

• Book to read: Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Assume clients are idiots
• Never be affraid to ask queastions to clients
• HK mentality is to fin it: for example in class no-one will raise his hand if he doesn’t see someone else doing the same
• “if you fit in, you won’t stand out”
• GTD: Getting Things Done
  • Time management
    • PC
    • PDA
    • Remember the milk – Todo lists
    • Gmail
    • MS Outlook
• Understand your skills
  • You cannot know everything
  • Know your weapons
  • Know what service you are able to offer
  • Know your limits
  • Combine your skills:
    • Programming -> web programming
    • Design -> web design
    • Both -> web solutions
• Personal vs Professional
  • Setup rules for yourself
    • get a life outside work
  • Separate clearly personal and professional life
• Experimental
  • Be curious
  • Step into new land
  • Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
• Willing to constantly
  • Vivek used to borrow between 20-30 books at one time from the library.
  • Have access to all the resources you need
  • Pick the best way for you to learn:
    • Reading: library, web, www.sitepoint.com
    • Videos: www.lynda.com
    • Teachers
• Open-Source / Free tools
  • At the beginning we don’t have the money to buy all the software, so use free tools:
    • OpenOffice or Google Documents instead of MS office
    • Aptana instead of Dreamweaver
    • Bamboo Invoice
    • Gmail and Google Calendar instead of MS outlook
    • Gliffy for flowcharts
    • www.colorcombos.com for color swatches
• Don’t ever feel intimidated
  • Companies don’t know everything
  • They just fake it better because they seem more professional with a company name and staff
  • Study your competition
  • Study your market
  • Read: The art of war (business aspects)
• Find out market rates
  • Ask the competition
  • Read the book: Art of deception
  • Pretend your are a client
  • Ask people for a quote
  • Don’t tell lies, just don’t tell the truth (don’t say you are fresh graduate for example)
  • www.freelanceswitch – to calculate how much you should charge vs how much you need
  • Estimate the number of hours needed for a project
• Know your tools perfectly
  • Someone might already have solved your problem\
  • Google it
  • Post issues on forums
  • Hire someone to do it for you can be cheaper sometimes
  • Don’t re-invent the wheel
• Begin with the end in mind
  • Keep track of invoices
    • Bamboo invoice
    • Excel spreadsheet
  • Review every 2 weeks all the outstanding payments of clients and remind them (gently)
• Crazy Clients
  • Most clients think you are only working on their project
  • Most clients think you never need to rest
  • Most clients think everything is very simple
  • Avoid replying emails after office hours (so that they don’t think you are available at all hours – can be done by scheduling emails in outlook or saving as draft before sending later)
  • Never be afraid to “fire” a client
• Be personal
  • Use a contact management system
    • ACT! by Sage
    • MS outlook
    • www.Keepm.com (free)
  • Remember personal things about your client like their hobbies and what food they like.
  • Imagine you were a client, how do you want to be treated
• Know yourself
  • forget any real-world limitations
  • What excites you everyday
  • How can you make money from your interests
  • Calculate the costs
  • “create once, use forever”
    • Libraries
    • free Tools
• Are my things easy to duplicate
  • sell your design style not a design
  • sell you communication style
  • sell your sense of humor
  • Personal aspects cannot be copied
• Sell yourself
  • Name as a brand
  • www.vivekmahbubani.com
  • create a personal relation with the audience
• Templates
  • Templates are not evil
  • www.templatemonster.com
  • www.templatewise.com
  • Learn to modify templates, you can make a lot of money from them
• Ready-made tools
  • Research first (ie dun re-invent the wheel
  • modify and sell end product
• Get noticed
  • SEO
  • get your name branded on a product (link at bottom of page)
  • Word of mouth is important
  • People trust their friends more than a fancy website/name card/ad
• Study audiences: Google analytics
• Keep in touch
  • Be proactive
  • “it was really nice meeting you”
  • Write down interests and how you met
  • Offer them a next action: what they should do or when to meet
• Be one step ahead
  • make them feel under control
• Keep track of progress
  • Project manager
  • Clients have final say
  • Basecamphq.com
• Aftersales service
  • project never ends
    • suggest potential services
    • monthly subscriptions to updates/services
    • creates stable flow of income for the freelancer
    • you know your project best
  • updating the copyright info on 1st of jan every year
    • with happy new year message to owner to remind them you stil exist
    • suggest services they may find useful
    • add something personal to the message
• Motivate yourself
• Enjoy your freelance life
  • Satisfy your 5 senses at work
    • Sight
      • Mentally adjust into work mode (lighting)
      • Light should hide personal space
      • Associate this light with work mode
      • You will, by habit, feel like working in this situation
      • Use the lighting to hide things that remind of non-work related things
    • Audio
      • Listen to good music
      • Lounge music: Buddha bar
      • Free online lounge radio
      • disconnect from the rest of the world
      • Brainsync
        • Get your brainwaves in the right mode
        • Control your mind through sound
    • Smell
      • Buy scented candles
      • Make your room a certain smell for work
      • Enjoy fresh air
      • Different smell for different “modes”
    • Taste
      • Eat healthy
      • Need energy to keep going and keep focused
      • Chocolates, candies, red-bull, are going to drain you
      • Eat 5 small meals instead of 3 big ones
      • ~ every 3 hours eat something
      • Plan your meals the day before
    • Touch
      • get comfortable
      • spend a good amount of money on a good chair

I really hope it will not be the last time that I get the chance to come to Linz for the festival since it seems to be quite a nice place. I quite like the scenery and the feeling of the city. Nevertheless, I am sure that I would not want to live there since many of the things I do not support such as abusive driking and violence seem to as present as in Scotland.

Back on 11-09-2008, classes to catch up from the pas two weeks and morning class on the 12th.

Please keep checking the ars electronica blog as there will be more updates.