Zein’s place on the net

I have being meaning to get myself a mobile broadband USB modem for casual use. It makes sense if you do not want to shell out $15-$20 for wifi an hour. Whenever I take my family for a holiday on the cost, or find myself waiting at an airport I can just get online. The only catch is that you either shell out $150 for 1 year and 10GB of data. or you plan ahead and use $15 to get 500MB valid for 30 days prior to your vacation.

After much deliberation and googling, I decided to go with the Optus network as it has reasonable coverage and has many resellers. I found Virgin Mobile offering their Huawei E1762 modem for $89. This is a 7.2MB modem. It has a microSD slot that supports up to 8GB cards and it even has an external antenna connection.

It works fine in ubuntu 9.10 (that’s all I have tested). But I first had to activate my account via a windows machine. I don’t believe that windows based activation is a necessary step except that I needed a working connection to get the correct setting to configure the ubuntu netbook.

I started off with the default setting offered by network-manager. I then edited the connection and changed the APN to: virginbroadband (was VirginInternet) and disabled all the authentication mechanisms except PAP.

And there you go… it works… I am using it to type this

I just updated 3 machines to ubuntu 9.10. My Desktop, my netbook and my mythtv machine. All of them were updated flawlessly except my notebook where the grub2 configuration was not updated… Chaos followed until I figured out that the kernel being booted was messed up and subsequently figured out that I needed to fixup the grub2 config file.

Since grub2 is not a standard ubuntu installation (this was done by Dell) I don’t blame them. In all I find ubuntu 9.10 to be pleasant and in particular I am very happy with 3 things:

Often with LDAP setups a user will log into a box where his home directory doesn’t exist. Linux provides us with a pam_mkhomedir.so module that automagically creates missing home directories for you. No such module exists for opensolaris. This bug report offers an alternative using autofs.

#!/bin/bash
# if the filesystem is available under /export/home, then serve that
if [ -d /export/home/$1 ] ; then
    echo "localhost:/export/home/$1
    exit 0
fi  
 
# else create a file system under /export/home
/usr/sbin/zfs create "export/home/$1" || exit 1
# and copy /etc/skel stuff
/bin/find /etc/skel/ -type f -exec cp {} /export/home/$1/ \;
chown -R $1 /export/home/$1/  
 
# now we can serve our newly created file system
echo "localhost:/export/home/$1" exit 0

A bout 2 weeks a go, I started a new Job at ANU Supercomputer Facility (ANUSF). I must admit that I am a bit excited and hope that I will be content over there. This should be getting exciting in the next couple of months as they are installing a new supper computer. They are also upgrading their tape silo and planning new storage infrastructure.

I hope I can get some pics of the installation phase posted here soon.

Today I finally submitted my thesis titled “Use of Graphics Processing Units for Sparse Matrix Vector Products in Statistical Machine Learning Applications”. The relief I feel is amazing. To all the research students out there in the final stages of submitting, may your journey be easier than mine.

I am off to watch a movie or something….

I was looking at the new Pursebook at engadget [link] and I noticed that the keyboard had Arabic characters. Kind of exciting I as I am planing to get myself one of these new ARM netbooks when they come out later this year. Having an Arabic enabled keyboad would be a big plus.

كل عام و أنتم بخير و الى الله أقرب
May every Eid find you ever closer to Allah

Once upon a time, the options available to Linux users interested in managing their book collections were limited. The situation was so bleak that I attempted to create my own web-based application. That app was fine until I tried to host it on my 64MB VPS and failed (RoR had a footprint of 60MB all by itself)!

Lately, I have been missing the ability to browse through my books. I started thinking about having another attempt at a book collection manger. Maybe this time I would try and write a desktop application. I could use python or even try out mono. So today I did a bit of googling and stumbled upon Alexandria, a book collection manager for GNOME.

This application is brilliant! It is almost the perfect application. All I needed to do was get a list of books in my old app:

echo "select isbn from books;" | sqlite3 mybooklist_production.sqlite > import-list.txt

I was then able to import all my old books into Alexandria using the import ISBN list feature. I would like to recommend this app to anyone who is looking for a book collection manger for Linux. The site also has deb packages for those who use Debian or Ubuntu.

I have not found a netbook that I feel 100% comfortable with. All the products out there have either too much or too little. The EEEPC901 comes the closest but is a bit too expensive for my taste (I would guess it is all the extra SSD).

Zein’s perfect netbook:

o Linux based (No Windows tax for me!)
o 9″ or 10″ screen.
o Atom 1.6Ghz
o 1GB RAM
o Large track pad (the Acer for example is too small)
o 4GB (at least and 8GB at most) of storage.
o 4 hours (at least) battery life.
o 1.3 MP Webcam
o Wifi
o bluetooth (optional)

And so I got very excited when I saw that the Dell Mini 9 had been released. The Dell is a lot more customizable at purchase time them the EEEPC, Aspire One or the MSI Wind and therefore a lot cheaper since you only pay for what you want. I got a surprise when I discovered that the Linux and Windows XP versions are identical in price!!

Here are screen shots of the 2 systems after configuration. Both are $US 454 (after $40 instant savings on the XP version) and while that is a lot less then an EEEPC 901. I am baffled to as why I am not saving by not paying any windows tax! I would have expected the Linux version to be at least $US 50 less than the windows version.

The Linux version
The XP version

I found this today and I found it so funny I had to share it!