As scary as it may seem, back in the late eighties I used to be a programmer. Luckily after a few years of coding for a living I realised that I was not a bad programmer. I was awful, and so moved into the world of hardware, and then later software, support.

Recently, though, I have found that I want to accomplish certain tasks and there just aren’t the tools available for what I need. A good example is a bit of software that Microsoft supplies (I think it is a snap in for MMC but cannot for the life of me find a link to it right now) that allows you to connect to multiple Terminal Services sessions inside on app/windows. Very hand if, like me, you have to manage multiple Windows servers.

The problem is I don’t run Windows on my desktop PC. I run Ubuntu Linux and although there are many ways of connecting to a Terminal Server (rdesktop, tsclient) there doesn’t appear to be a way of connecting to multiple Terminal Server connections in one application, all in one switchable window.

The nearest application to what I need is Vinagre which does exactly what I need but only for VNC connections.

So the plan is to kill two birds, as it were, with one stone. I intend to get back into coding some basic applications as well as writing an application that fills a gap in my work flow.

Having not done any coding at all for the last fifteen odd years I took a look around and it seems the easiest way for me to accomplish this is to use Gambas. In the words of the Gambas website: “Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, a bit like Visual Basic (but it is NOT a clone !).”

As I learn the basics of Gambas I hope to post a few updates as well as any source code I create. Anything that ends up being release worthy will be released under the GPL.

This should prove interesting.

Yesterday I noticed my macbook battery (model no: A1185) had started to swell.

This was troubling as it was performing well and only a month or so ago I tested it using coconutBattery and found it to be working perfectly.

When I called Apple support today I was shocked and quite angry to find out that not only would they not be replacing my battery, despite it having only had 34 power cycles, but that two of their support staff told me that the swelling battery was a “safety feature” and the batteries could not explode.

After an hour or so on the phone I decided to call it quits and just email a complaint to their customer services dept.

This is the first time I have ever had to call Apple support, despite having owned Apple products for seven years or so. All I can say is that if this is the level of support you can expect, I will be switching back to Linux next time I buy a computer. OS X is a fantastic OS but if you have to run it on hardware that’s so badly supported I’ll forgo the Apple tax next time.

UPDATE:

10th July 2009

Still no word from Apple customer support. 4 days now and no reply. In this economy I would have thought customer services would have been their top priority to keep customers.

UPDATE:

31st July 2009

After a lot of moaning Apple gave in and decided to send me a new battery. The new battery arrived today and is installed and working perfectly. I still think it’s a shame that you have to moan so much just to get decent customer service though.

I recently reinstalled my eeepc with Eeebuntu 3.0 and came across a very annoying problem.

When you try and set up a show at ustream.tv, you would normally wait ’till the flash video software loads, right click, choose “settings” and allow the site in question to have access to your camera and microphone. Only when I tried this the “settings” option was greyed out. I have not quite worked out why it is greyed out yet but have a workaround that will allow you to get the video working.

First of all you need to go to the following site in the browser on the computer you have Eeebuntu installed on:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html

Once there a settings manager box will appear at the top right hand corner of the page. This is not an image, it is the actual Flash settings for the browser you are using.

Add the necessary sites for ustream to work (ustream.tv, www.ustream.tv and cdn1.ustream.tv). The image below does not contain cdn1.ustream.tv as this post was written on my mac which hasn’t been used to broadcast using ustream.tv yet but it should show up in your window if you have tried to broadcast at all.

Now make sure that all three sites are set to “always allow”. Close the browser, reopen it and you should now have full access to your webcam and microphone inside the ustream broadcast flash app.

chicken head, originally uploaded by phowardcom.

All my decent pictures recently seem to be of birds.

OK. So a week ago I started project 365. I uploaded one picture and since then I have yet to take a photo. Not even on my camera phone.

I think the whole idea of taking a picture a day is fantastic. Just not sure I am ever going to have the time to do it continuously.

Will try again this week.

From today I am going to start trying to take a photo every day and post it to Flikr. There is a group set up called Project 365 which is designed for everyone to post to.

I am hoping this will show me where my strengths and weaknesses are and at the end of the year I should be a better photographer.

All images will be posted here too.

Should be intersting to see the type and quality of the pictures over the coming year.

I recently had to spend some time working out the costs involved in running Amazon’s EC2 servers compared to running full leased or purchased servers.

In the end I created a quick spreadsheet that estimated the costs based on running the servers full time over a 30 day period.

I thought I would offer the spreadsheet here in case others were trying to calculate the costs too.

amazon_ec2_pricing_calculator

All costs are correct as of April 2009. Please let me know if you find any errors or problems.

Out of over 200 images taken today, these were the only two that I liked.

Fantastic post today over at retrogeek

PCW Reviews the Spectrum, May 1982

Thanks to @shardcorefor putting these up, brings back lots of memories.

I’ve had an EEE PC 4G for about 4 months now and until recently had been happy with the stock Linux install that it came with. The OS was limiting in several ways but for day to day surfing, email and Skype chat it was fine.

The biggest problem, I had with it was the version of rdesktop that came with it only seems to allow you to connect to a Windows 2000 server. As I use mainly Windows 2003 servers at work I had to find a workaround. To start with I just added the standard Debian repositories and reinstalled rdesktop from there. After adding a new icon to the desktop to connect to the servers everything was working fine. That was until I did a software update and installed a few more bits of software and the desktop link disappeared.

After this I decided the stock Linux install was no good for me and I started looking for alternatives. The two main contenders were Linux distros specifically designed for the EEE PC, Eeebuntu and Easy Peasy. Both are built on Ubuntu and both look easy to use. After reading some of the reviews and forum posts I opted for Eeebuntu.

Eeebuntu offers three flavours of install. Standard, which is a full desktopinstall, Netbook, a smaller install with an interface designed specifically for a smaller screen and Base which is also a full standard Gnome based install but with almost no apps installed as default.

Since my EEE PC only has a 4GB SSD drive I opted for the Base install and would add extra apps as I needed them.

It is worth reading the FAQ page which gives basic details of how the OS works. Their documentation could be clearer and more concise but you will get the general gist of it. Installation is a matter of downloading the ISO file, then creating a bootable USB stick. Instructions for this oddly not found on the main site but in their forums. They have posts detailing how to create the bootable USB stick in Ubuntu and Windows.

After booting from the USB stick the install was pretty much a standard Ubuntu install. Nothing surprising at all.

The beauty of running Eeebuntu instead of a standard Ubuntu install is the Kernel is preloaded with the drivers to get the most out of the EEE PC. The webcam, sound, SD reader and WIFI card worked straight away with no configuration needed. The only thing I had to do was go into the BIOS of the EEE PC andenable the webcam, which for some reason was set to disabled. I had been in the BIOS previous to the install fiddling around so not sure if that is a standard step or just a problem with my pre-install fiddling.

The initial Gnome desktop looks good. A nice blue swirly background with minimal taskbar icons.

The standard desktop manager works well but I wanted to test Compiz. This was as simple as dropping into a terminal and typing:

sudo apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager

After a reboot I had full access to all the wonders that Compiz offers. I wasn’t sure if the EEE PC would be able to handle a lot of the graphical effects like Expo but it handles it all perfectly.

So far all the apps I have installed have worked as expected as long as you respect the limitations of the screen size. As my EEE PC has a 7 inch screen some apps and indeed some dialogue boxes do not fit on the screen. This is where the ability to run mutliple virtual desktops comes in. I have set up the virtual desktops in a square pattern (currently 4*4). If a dialogue box overhangs the bottom of the screen I just go to the screen below the one I am on to access the rest of it.

The only real problems I have come up against are the Fn keys. The volume controls works as advertised as do the brightness controls. Num Lock works but scroll lock doesn’t. Snooze is fine but the External Monitor switch doesn’t seem to do anything. I also found that if you look at the stats for the battery it shows it as having a design charge of 42.4 Wh and a current charge of 0.8 Wh. Although the battery seems to last almost as long with the full Eeebuntu install as it did with the factory installed OS.