Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

MacBook Air insides

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

The MacBook Air is lovely, but could use a bit more disk-space. Looks like the 5mm 1.8″ drive in the 1st generation product doesn’t come in larger capacities than 80GB. Ifixit and AnandTech have illustrations of the insides.

Free X server for Windows

Monday, June 16th, 2008

I recently found XMing, a free X server for Windows, providing a useful alternative to VNC for accessing remote Ubuntu desktops. Instructions here.

Preserving UTF-8 filenames from Windows to Linux

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

On occasion I access (Ubuntu) Linux servers from Windows using Putty and WinSCP. In order to preserve UTF-8 filenames, some snakeoil is required. (more…)

Setting up SCP/SFTP chroot access to Ubuntu/x64 server

Monday, February 4th, 2008

scponly provides a mechanism to enable secure file-access to a server, with marked improvement over FTP.

scponly can be setup in a) normal mode, whereby the user can see the whole of the file-system of the server, or b) in chroot’ed mode, whereby the user only sees the files the server administrator has granted access to. The latter is what I wanted, but there are a few extra steps required for 64-bit kernel servers. (more…)

iPhone application development

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

Until Apple release the SDK for the iPhone, we are relegated to creating iPhone aware web-apps. I was inspired by the Facebook and Google optimised pages for the iPhone to investigate the details of the Safari browser.

Here are some resources to help you create Safari-savvy pages:

(more…)

Safari for Windows

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

As my iPhone sports Safari, I’ve been investigating this browser with more gusto than before. Safari has recently become available for Windows!

Vista ATI PCI Express driver problem

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

I just had a BSoD on my laptop running Vista. It rebooted, and when I selected the option for it to tell me why. It ‘fessed up to a BlueScreen crash. I took the recommended solution to install a service pack, selected all available updates and let it reboot – and now my display driver won’t load so I get 1024×768 instead of 1280×800!

Following a bit more exploration, it seems the ATI PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver grabbed some resources that the Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family Driver wanted. I rolled back the ATI driver, and now my display works again.

PS. The exercise did something nasty to the Aero Glass theme, but I’m not all that bothered about that.

PPS. I subsequently got a ‘Superfetch has stopped working’ error. Jeez, Vista is a pile of …

Google IMAP support

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

I’m very pleased to find Google have added IMAP support to Gmail and their hosted email services. At long last I can process my email whilst offline, and keep Gmail in sync manually. And it’s all still free!

Read Google’s FAQ on IMAP.

Dell shipping PCs with Linux

Monday, October 8th, 2007

I spotted on Ubuntu’s news-section that Dell finally have commenced shipping products (1 desktop, 1 notebook) with Ubuntu. Available in UK, Germany and France. Excellent!

Leveraging the connected humanity

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Stumbled across this Google talk, nicely illustrating the additional information that can be obtained about data if you design your platforms in a way that engages the users to enjoy a challenge. A virtual hat tip to Luis von Ahn.