Those crazy Sunnies really did it this time. I tried to enquire as to exactly what the status of the domains were on the 10k in the lab downstairs:
10kinthelabdownstairs # ./domain_status ./domain_status: scotty: not found
But don’t worry children… I hear that Spock is doing just fine. He’s in row 17, rack 3.
The new Workstation beta is definitely a step in the right direction. For me there is one killer feature: virtual monitor support.
Running VMware fullscreen normally results in a great big sloppy mess of taskbar across both screens and dialogs and pop-ups ending up right in the middle where they are least readable.
I’ve now configured my XP image with two virtual displays. In Windows these appears as two physical displays would, and I can use them as such.
VMware easily allows me to resize the guest OS (by dynamically changing the XP resolution), handles single-monitor fullscreen and allows me to expand to two-monitor fullscreen. Very useful stuff.
Of course, for me, this is just a stop-gap solution until we get proper rootless applications.
A must see!
In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to leave a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month; not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they started by attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it.
Clearly some purchasing of a Dell 2407WFP (24” widescreen TFT) and a Dell 2007FP (20” TFT) in combination with an EMM312 dual VESA mount.
Imaging it: on the left you have your 20” TFT panel for web browser and other full screen apps and on the left the 24” widescreen panel for other work, photo editing and film viewing.
A match made in heaven.
(both have a vertical resolution of 1200, so it would work well; unfortunately the dot-pitch is marginally out and it is unlikely that both panels would have the same “brightness”)
After working on a bunch of images in Photoshop for a little over an hour, Windows decided that it would tell me to restart for some updates. Not being quite finished, I politely declined, did some more work and then stopped to read a website.
When I came back, I was very happy to discover that it had ignored me and issued a reboot.
Bye-bye one hour of photo editing changes.
My previous suspicions about the Firefox cache being bypassed were actually not correct… it turns out that the local disk and memory caches that Firefox uses are still in-place. This is all good for me, a quick clear of my local cache and all of the stale fuzzy images will be force-fetched from the appropriate servers.
The subject is a little misleading, but I couldn’t remember what the datacard that I’ve borrowed from Vlad is called.
I’m connecting to the Internet from home via a T-Mobile PCCard, which uses some fangled 3g technology to give me a 1.8Mbps Interweb connection. Latency is a little higher than with conventional ‘broadband’, but the overall feel is good.
The big issue I have is with images… T-Mobile made a blanket decision to enable image compression by default. This means that I get garbled crappy images which are a pain in the backside.
After a little reading about I discovered that you could use a force reload (Shift+Ctrl+R in Firefox) to get the full-res samples. Yet more reading and I discovered that some people were setting a custom User Agent (appending “Blazer/4.0”) to fool the transparent proxy server into thinking the browser was incapable of page compression (although I don’t fully understand how this would help with inline JPEG compression, but anyway). Unfortunately this neat little trick didn’t work to me.
This got me thinking… if I can use my browser to force the proxy to send me a full-res image then it must be doing something special. A trip over to livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/, a new Firefox plugin and restart later and I was able to observe the HTTP headers that Firefox was sending to the server.
I quickly spotted that the following two extra headers were being sent on a force reload:
Pragma: no-cacheCache-Control: no-cache
Modify Headers is a neat little plugin that allows the user to send any custom headers in a reasonably fine-grained way. But for me, I wanted the headers active for all requests.
The result? It was good… all of the pictures were now pretty. Of course, this isn’t without its drawbacks… all requests bypass the cache, which means I’ll be pulling more data down, but in exchange for the good images I guess I don’t have much other choice.
I’ve not played around much yet, but I’m sure there will be other issues. I’m a little curious as to how a regular page refresh is different to a forced page refresh… from what I’ve read there are a bunch of odd little things that go on, mostly historical.
But for now, I’m a happy bunny :)
Thanks very much to Vlad… I’m now fully equipped with an Interweb connection in my room… and more or less anywhere else I fancy!
The T-Mobile datacard and SIM turned up in the post today and after a little faffing to get the necessary config files in place (the driver and application were a doddle by comparison) I was able to browse the Internet at whopping GPRS speeds from the office! Great… but still kind of sucky: ten minutes after starting the page load, I was still waiting on a bunch of images for my blog.
However, now I’m back home I’ve found that the speeds have ramped up… a lot! Obviously I’m now connected via the 3G network and I theoretically should be able to download at around 1.8Mbps.
The latency isn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected: Google responds in around 300ms and SSH sessions are easily usable.
I’m definitely chuffed about this… doing anything without the Internet these days is a royal pain. With this in mind, I ordered myself a 2Mbps NTL connection at work, presumably due to be installed sometime in January.
Anyway… I’m off to read “Internet volumes December 16-19th 2006”!
P.S. By now I’ve obviously got my laptop NATting for the WRT54G and my desktop machine for true big-computer goodness.
Damn. The more I read about people who have bought their Wiis… the more I want one!
Absolutely awesome concept and, by all accounts, impressively implemented.
Way to go Nintendo!