Streamyx sucks big time. I have a lot of problems accessing my blog from home. For some reason, most of the Internet is fine. I say most because there are a couple of other sites that I am having problems accessing. Unfortunately, these sites are also my favourite sites – such as Stack Overflow.

The trouble is that it is really difficult to report such problems. I had tried reporting it before and goodness knows what actually gets done. You see, my internet speed isn’t compromised. I can still get downloads at the correct speeds. So, it isn’t a question of bandwidth. However, when I try to ping my blog server, the number of packets that get lost is astronomical. I get about a 80%-90% packet loss.

As a result, my connection to the blog server constantly times out or gets rejected. You may think that it might be a problem with my blog server. However, my blog server works fine from elsewhere. That is the only way that I have been able to update my blog recently. I am forced to access it from elsewhere.

I’m not really keen on investigating the source of the problem as it is my ISPs job to do so! Streamyx sucks ass. I will try making another fault report later today and see if any action is taken. Otherwise, I may just consider switching over to another ISP. Packet One has been marketing itself aggressively in recent weeks. I believe that they have a 14 day trial period.

Streamyx sucks!

PS: Their favourite trouble-shooting method is to restart the port. Damn it, that doesn’t solve the problem!

While I think that there are valid reasons for not liking what Wong Chin Huat did, I think that our police needs to learn some lessons in public relations. The police have been so heavy handed for so long that they don’t seem to know how to act with an even hand.

I would think that on the governments’ side, they would argue that he was the ‘ring leader’ and tried to stir things up by getting everyone to wear black on Thursday. Incidentally, I would be wearing black, if only because I have only black shirts left in my clean pile.

I think that this is quite different from getting people to wear yellow, like for Bersih. With yellow, it is easy for the police to catch the people who are involved. Not many people wear a bright yellow shirt. But for black, things are a little more dicey. Lots of people wear black, if only to blend in.

Moreover, they have probably learned that it is difficult to catch the masses. Instead, they should focus on the ‘leaders’. However, what the police and the government may have failed to understand is the nature of the present fight. There are no ‘leaders’ per se.

What the Internet allows is the flattening of hierarchies. Anyone with a connection and some perseverance can be a ‘leader’. Anyone with a blog can shout his mouth off. It’s kind of difficult to identify ‘leaders’ in the traditional sense anymore.

So, maybe the cops should bear this in mind for the future. Denying him an audience with opposition politicians is fine. But denying him an audience with his lawyers is definitely illegal in some book. They should have at least given him a chance to speak to the lawyers. That would have been good public relations.

In fact, the police could have even issued a public statement to the press, to explain the motivations behind their actions and what they plan to do. At the very least, that would neutralise the FUD that the opposition politicians try to create with this situation. The police are trying to create their own FUD too, but it does not work anymore. The people have gotten tired of it. Plus, the opposition politicians are much better spinners than the government.

So, I’ll be wearing black tomorrow, if only because I only have black shirts left in my clean pile and I do not want to wear some stinky shirt.

This is how it finally turned out – my server rack within a shoe rack. It is not much to look at, nor does it claim to be the greatest server rack in the world, but it is the nicest server rack that I have at home.

The rack itself is made from a re-purposed shoe rack from Carrefour/Tesco (I forget which). The shoes were all removed and a hole was cut into the back to let wires through. A single power cable goes from the external socket to an internal 5-way extension. Everything is powered from this.

The middle rack holds the networking equipment – an ADSL modem provides the Internet connection, a wifi access-point that provides an older 802.11b network, a wireless router that provides a 802.11g network and runs DD-WRT. In the future, this whole rack can be consolidated into a single device that acts as a modem and dual 802.11b/g router.

The top rack holds the servers – a proxy server running Debian (lenny) and the file server running FreeNAS. The proxy server runs a local web proxy using squid and a repository proxy for Debian and Ubuntu using apt-cacher-ng. It runs a bunch of other less interesting services too. Basically, it serves as a multi-purpose server.

However, the computing power available is fairly limited. They are both VIA Eden 533MHz machines. It maybe worthwhile to replace these servers with a single dual-core Atom 1.6GHz based system in the future. I could feasibly run a virtualised instance of FreeNAS within the Atom system, which would get around the pesky problem of FreeNAS not recognising the ethernet chip on the Atom boards.

Thermally speaking, everything is passively cooled. Therefore, it gets a little warm inside during the day. According to the sensors, it reaches 50C during the day but drops to 40C at night. When a 12cm desktop fan is placed inside, it can bring down the temperature by a further 8C but it is rather noisy. I like things quiet.

I plan to put the printer/scanner on top of the shoe rack. This would make the shoe rack my central computing hub in the house. The rest of the computers in the house are connected to the central hub via WiFi. I particularly like the idea of having my local debian/ubuntu repository, which would save a ton of bandwidth when I install/upgrade the computers at home.

Well, at least that’s what it says on the label – Full HD 1080p. The price of these screens are coming down. In fact, they may be cheaper than some 720p screens.

While there are many old 32″ 720p screens selling for under RM2k, newer ones are selling for more than RM2k. I saw a 32LG53FR screen, which is a 32″ 1080p screen selling form under RM2k today with a 5 year warranty, at Best (a local tail chain for electrical appliances). This is the cheapest Full-HD display in the market.

The difference between a 720p and 1080p screen is in the screen resolution. The 720p screens have 1366×768 (1MPixels) while the 1080p screens have 1920×1080 (2MPixels). While resolution is not the primary measure of image quality, it is an important factor.

Most Internet sites seem to suggest that there is no discernible difference in image quality between a 720p and 1080p screen at 32″. I have been struggling to find a side-by-side comparison as most local stores don’t keep them side by side.

However, while I was out shopping the other day, I managed to come across a 32″ Samsung 4 series (720p) and 5 series (1080p) side-by-side. I can say for certain that there is a difference in image quality.

In most cases, there is absolutely no difference except for on-screen text. The store was showing a bunch of movie trailers on them. These Hollywood trailers all start with the screen on the left (except in green). And it was during this time that I spotted the difference.

The word “PREVIEW” was smooth on the 1080p screen but displayed jagged edges on the 720p screen. However, that was the only perceptible difference in image quality. The rest of the trailer looked exactly the same on both screens.

This probably means that for movies and films, the screens are similar in quality but not for text. So, if one intends to use the TV for watching movies, a 720p display is more than enough for a 32″ screen. However, if one intends to use it as a living room computer screen, a 1080p display is much more suitable. Plus, a 1080p screen will future proof itself as an investment.

What can I say about this film. It has far exceeded my expectations. I had only bought it because there wasn’t much else left for me to buy. I have purchased a large number of Korean films from the local inventory. Since this film was relatively cheap, I thought that I would give it a try.

This is a seriously good film. It kept me at the edge of my seat, made me cry, and caused me to scream at one point. Instead of writing my own, I thought that I’d just quote one from the Internet:

Ex-cop pimp Jung-ho is irritated because his girls keep disappearing without clearing their debts. One night, he gets a call from a customer and sends Mi-jin. Jung-ho realizes the phone number of the customer matches that of the calls the missing girls got last. As something smells fishy, he searches for her. During his search, Jung-ho dents a car in the alley. When Jung-ho spots blood splattered on the driver’s shirt, he senses the man, Young-min, is the suspect. After an intense chase, Jung-ho catches Young-min. But because of Jung-ho’s pretense as a cop, they are both taken to the police station. At the station, the man bluntly confesses he has killed the missing women, and the last girl, Mi-jin, may still be alive. As the whole police force is obsessed with a random search for corpses, Jung-ho is the only one who believes Mi-jin is still alive. With only 12 hours left to detain the serial killer without a warrant, Jung-ho’s hunt begins, searching for Mi-jin entrapped in a place nobody knows.

All I can say is that this is one hell of a show. After watching so many Korean films, I’m starting to get a sense of their style of cinematography and story telling. This film is classic Korean with one heck of a story. I’d watch it again just to be able to scream out loud again.

In a recent blog entry on Education Malaysia, Ong Kian Ming mentioned setting up a neighbourhood network (NN) so that kids would be able to play multi-player computer games at home and they would not need to hike off to the seedy cyber-cafes (CC) for their regular fix of group fun. However, it dawned on me that this NN is an excellent idea.

Disclaimer
The kind of network that I am describing can be seen as a form of wireless mesh network. Incidentally, the OMRP, which is an open hardware/software platform for implementing wireless mesh networks, uses my aeMB processor at its core. However, none of what I have to say, is processor dependent.

Installation
It is extremely easy to set up a NN today. Gone were the days when cables had to be lain from point to point. Today, we can just do the entire thing with WiFi. If every family buys a wireless router and sets up a home zone, all these zones can be combined together to form a blanket network. This can be achieved using something called the Wireless Distribution System (WDS), which is present on almost all modern routers.

Applications
There are some very obvious applications with the NN.

It would now be fantastically free to call up your neighbours on voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology. There is no need to use any phones to ring up your neighbour. Furthermore, you don’t need to limit yourself to just streaming voice, but you can also stream video over the network. So, it would be easier than ever to bug your neighbours. Of course, there are many other more creative pursuits that one can pursue using this technology.

With a network communications infrastructure in place, it would be trivial to install various IP-security devices. There is a lot of interesting work being done in the field of sensor networks, which generally employ a large number of simplistic sensor devices to produce all kinds of telemetry data that can be analysed for any number of applications. This brings the neighbourhood watch to a whole new level.

Issues
There are some legal issues to deal with, especially if the NN shares multiple Internet connections. The NN can combine and aggregate these multiple connections into a single large pipe. However, ISPs often have legal restrictions in place on the freedoms of end-users to ‘share’ their connections. Obviously, if a resident does something illegal on-line, it creates a whole host of legal issues as well.

Anyway, this sounds like a great idea to me. Maybe, instead of rolling out a state-wide WiFi infrastructure, our local governments should actually focus their resources at setting up and linking a number of neighbourhood networks. The people can help fund the project by supplying part of the equipment while the government takes care of the pipes linking the disparate networks and the Internet.

This is another example of my engineer-ness. I was thinking about adding a computer to my car, what is known as a CarPC. Such a computer is typically used to provide music and videos for entertainment (it could also possibly be used to build a mobile WiFi hotspot if configured correctly).

Anyway, I was thinking about doing it. A CarPC could be installed in the boot of the car with little problem. I was thinking that an Atom based mini-itx board could be used, coupled with a small amount of memory and a solid state harddisk. Because the car will experience bumps and shocks, it is important to use a solid state drive. So, I was calculating the cost of doing this – about RM300 or so.

Then, the only trouble was with building a user interface to the computer. It has to be something that can be accessed from within the car. So, I thought of building my own little device with a screen and some buttons. Then, I suddenly realised that I could just use a PDA to control the CarPC. That was when the though hit me.

I could just use a PDA as the CarPC!

I have two old PDAs lying around, a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 and an Acer Palm S10. The choice was evident on which to use. The Zaurus is infinitely hackable and had more computing power than the Palm. It has a 200MHz ARM processor, 64Mb RAM, 320×240 LCD display, keyboard, SD card slot, CF card slot. I plan to use the SD card slot for adding storage while using the CF card for peripherals (I have a wifi card for this device).

So, I dug up my old trusty Zaurus from my box of old stuff and plugged in the power cable. Nothing happened. Then, I shook the power socket a bit and the power-LED came on. That is a good sign. Then, I tried to turn it on and again nothing happened. I kept tapping away at the different buttons until something came on screen. However, the screen was dark because the back light did not want to come on. But after more fidgeting, the entire unit came to life! The batteries were just weak.

So, I logged onto the Internet and downloaded the latest version of OpenZaurus, a Linux operating system designed for the Zaurus. I flashed the internal firmware to the latest version and everything worked. This made me infinitely happy as I now have a semi-powerful computing device that I can install in my car. It runs on a 5V power supply which is easy to tap into, in a car.

So, the plan is to install a media player onto the Zaurus and test it to see if it can play MP3s and OGGs. If that works, the next thing to do would be to find a nice way to interface the Zaurus’ headphone socket to the car radio and provide a suitable 5V power supply. If that works, then it’s done!

In addition to playing media, I can install the wifi card onto the Zaurus and use it as a mobile way to say, check emails and such at public hotspots like at McDonalds or some other cafe. Now, that would be a real accomplishment. Wardriving is also a potential plus!
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The more I consider it, the less likely it is that I will ever buy myself a NetBook PC. A NetBook PC is basically a stripped down laptop that usually weighs less than 1kg and comes with a 10″ screen or so – basically a small and light laptop that you can carry around in your handbag. The main component that makes all this possible is the use of low power microprocessors, which reduce the need for an expensive and bulky cooling system.

However, due to price reasons, it is making less and less sense to actually get a NetBook. For example, consider the following devices from Lenovo (single unit dealer prices are quoted):

• Lenovo S10 (NetBook) – Atom 270/1.6GHz/512kb/533FSB/10.2″/1GB RAM/160GB HDD/GMA950 (RM1619)
• Lenovo G410 (Laptop) – CoreDuo T2390/1.86GHz/1Mb/533FSB/14.1″/1GB RAM/160GB HDD/X3100 (RM1489)

It is plainly obvious that the G410 is a better computer than the S10. It has a better graphics chip, a faster processor and a larger screen. The G410 is a real machine that can be used to do real work while the S10 is more a toy that is useful for checking email than running simulations. Moreover, if the devices are further scrutinised, there will be further advantages for the G410 including the cheaper price tag of RM130.

The only advantage that the S10 has is size. It is sufficiently small to be mistaken for an organiser while the G410 is a real laptop. Therefore, netbooks are pretty much only useful for yuppies and teenagers with rich daddies. For a price conscious student or a serious worker, an older model laptop is definitely a better buy.

However, I am quite interested to see a Atom based server system though. These babies would work very well in the data centre. Some early benchmarks have shown that an Atom 330 with two cores at 1.6GHz and capable of running two threads each, has excellent MySQL performance, easily beating a Pentium 4 2.8GHz machine by 265% (and consuming less than 5% of the electrical power).

I am now considering buying a Atom based system to power my back-end file server. I plan to set up a file server for storing all the encoded videos that I will be encoding for my HTPC. Having a dedicated file system would allow me to grow my storage according to my requirements. That way, I can just get a HTPC system without any built in storage (or remove any bundled storage), which will further reduce the noise levels of the system.

PS: As for the claims of being ‘energy efficient’, this does not translate into real world advantages. While the NetBook uses less power than a normal laptop, it also comes with smaller batteries. In effect, you still only get 2-3 hours of effective use before the thing dies on you. Less so, if you’re using wireless or 3G Internet.

I have recently just made a family wide wipe out of Windows. My sister’s home computer recently got infected with a virus (all it took was a simple connection to the Internet) and I was tasked to fix it. My mom complained that she did not have enough games to play on the same computer. So, the solution to both these problems (and more) was just to install Linux on it.

Since I had a free CD of the latest Kubuntu install, I decided to install it everywhere. I installed it in my dad’s computer at home and also my sister’s home PC. Adding that to the Linux installs on my two laptops and my home theatre PC, makes every PC in my family, Linux running. Although I still think that Slackware is probably the coolest distribution around, *buntu makes a very compelling case for the desktop market.

The fact that this distribution has made great inroads in the short time that it has been around, speaks volumes of it. It has recently been featured in a New York Times article, along with its backer, South African billionaire – Mark Shuttleworth. My experience with Kubuntu has shown me that desktop Linux is already here. I honestly sympathise with the people who struggle along with Windows simply because they do not know any better.

However, this article was as much about Mark as it was about Ubuntu. I liked the fact that Mark is a technical guy who understands technical things and is truly passionate about open source. The fact that he is a billionaire, and who can afford to fund a free operating system out of his pocket change, is quite appealing to me. Sometimes, I feel that more of the rich would emulate people like Mark, who put their money to good use and fund things that can fundamentally change the world, rather than to just hoard everything.

People like him are my heroes. People with technical knowledge, who put it to good use, make wads of cash and continue to turn that cash into doing some real good and making a positive change in this world. Now, Mark certainly does not have enough money to take on the empire that is Microsoft alone, but with an army of volunteers behind him, he can definitely succeed – and he has just such an army of trained volunteers.

Finally, I love this quote from the article: “It is not because I need to watch porn in high-definition but because I want to see what you do differently.” – ditto.

I passed by Harvey Norman today and decided to drop in to look at the new Compaq Nettop. Let me just say that I am quite taken in by the price of the thing. It is much cheaper than I had expected. Internet reports claim that the price of the high end model (2030) is about US$386 (RM1355) but they are only selling it for RM998 (US$285) here.

The high end model that they are selling here is dubbed the Compaq Presario 2035Q, which seems to be the branding that HP is trying to achieve with it’s compaq line of products. As the detailed specs seem rather hard to come by on the Internet, I decided to check out the specs using the software on the display unit. Here they are:

• CPU: Intel Atom 330
  This is the most powerful Atom processor to date. It is a dual-core HyperThreaded processor. What this means is that the software sees an effective 4-cores. This is sweet as the extra processing power can definitely be put to good use for high quality video playback.
• VGA: Intel GMA950
  Unfortunately, it comes with the same terrible 945GC chipset that every other Atom platform comes with. Although NVidia has released the 9400M for Atom processors, no vendors seem to be pushing out products with them yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed though.
• AUD: Realtek ALC662 HD Audio
  This information had to be gleaned from the vendor and device ID numbers. This bodes well though, since this device is capable of 5.1 surround sound. However, it seems to lack the actual ports that do the output.

Besides these important things, it also has 1Gb of DDR2 memory and a 160GB harddisk. It also comes with a LightScribe capable DVD burner. There is also a card reader on the front that can come in useful for displaying photos from digital cameras directly on screen. Also on the front are 2 USB ports and the earphone and mic ports. On the back are another 2 USB ports, ethernet port and modem port. It does not come with wifi but I am sure that there is a free internal USB port that I can jack one into.

While it is not a perfect HTPC, it does come awfully close to being one. The only thing it lacks are the higher end audio and video outputs. If this is the best thing available when the time comes to actually make the purchase, I might just get it. However, I will still continue to look for a nettop with a DVI or HDMI video output and a 5.1 surround sound output.

PS: Then again, it might be possible that the 5.1 surround sound output is multiplexed on the rear ports. Some devices do it this way. I’ll need to look up more info about this.