J’ai enfin compris à quoi servait un écran au format 16/9ème :
Ça a beau être du 61 cm, ça ne suffit encore pas pour voir la homepage de MicroWorld, obligé de finir sur un autre écran 
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Écran 16/9ème
2011/02/07 — laurent3D?
2010/07/05 — laurentEach time I go to the cinema to watch a movie in “3D”, I’m a bit disappointed. First you have to put those heavy active glasses, and it’s not always easy if you already wear glasses. Then… well, the picture is bad. I recently watched a bit of an animation movie made for 3D on one of those big 3D LCD screens, and it’s not better, I think it’s even worse.
If the picture is not moving a lot, the 3D effect is quite good (that’s the only good point I see). Otherwise, the picture flickers, there are some “ghost” images (maybe due to LCD remanence), when the picture moves, it’s not fluid (maybe because the frame rate drops from ~24 pictures per second to 12…) and the 3D effect mostly disappear.
It seems to me that this technology is far from being ready yet, and in fact it looks like a scam to me since the technology I have seen is very old. I can’t believe they haven’t found a way to make it better. All this 3D buzz is surely just a marketing thing to sell more screens.
Magic Mouse
2010/03/08 — laurentMy current mouse was not good at scrolling, so I decided to buy Apple’s Magic Mouse. Yes, my “old” mouse is still working, so I should not have bought a new one (but in fact I’m still using it).
As usual with Apple, it’s a nice piece of hardware and as usual with Apple, it’s sucking in some ways.
It’s a beautiful mouse, with its complete surface being tactile. I bought it because my previous mice was not scrolling correctly. Does the magic mouse does the job correctly? Yes. Scrolling is very nice. And with the momentum option activated it’s even better.
Some people are complaining because the edges are a bit too sharp, in fact I didn’t noticed it before reading it, but yes, a bit smoother would be better.
Some other people are complaining that the cursor’s movements on the screen are not fluid. I had the same problem from time to time and the simple solution was to have the mouse closer to my laptop, I reduced the distance from 1 meter to 50 cm. Yes it’s lame, it’s bluetooth, I experienced the same problem with an other bluetooth mouse. And bluetooth is also slow, it introduce a latency in cursor’s movements that you can feel when switching from a wired mouse to a bluetooth one, but it’s small enough to go unnoticed after few minutes.
An other thing is that you can’t do the nice gestures you can do on the trackpad. You can download MagicPrefs which enables lot’s of gestures, but in fact I found it quite awkward and difficult to do most of the gestures on the mouse.
Forget about gaming. Of course this mouse is not designed for hardcore gamers, even for gamers at all. The simple fact is you can’t do left and right click at the same time (you were thinking about jumping and firing at the same time in QUAKE LIVE? So that’s why I’m still using my old mouse when I want to play).
But to me, the major problem is that the mouse is way too slow. And it looks like a lot of people think the same.
Event when putting the track speed to the maximum, the magic mouse is still a bit too slow. Interestingly, when removing the drivers, the mouse is way much faster but no more scrolling or gestures which was the point of buying this mouse. MagicPrefs allows you to increase the speed a bit, looks like MouseZoom do the same as well. But I don’t really like the idea to have to install an extra software to increase the speed. I should be able to set it directly somewhere. Some people are giving some commands like this one:
write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -float 5.0
It seems that it’s the value written in the system when changing the track speed. In the System Preferences the max value seems to be “3”. So with this command you can set it to a higher value. But each time you have to log out and log in!
If you have to do it only once, it may do the trick. But here I come to an other problem. Let’s imagine I want to play on some games requiring a “classical” mouse, I need to change the tracking speed to a lower value for the “gaming” mouse and when I’m not playing anymore, change back the value with the command line, and logging out, then logging in…
I already talked about it, but why operating systems are designed for only one mouse and one keyboard?
Have a look at this (from Mac OS X System Preferences):
What do you notice? We can configure several displays, but only one keyboard, one mouse and one trackpad… One mouse and one trackpad? Those are two point and click devices, aren’t they? So in a way we can have two different pointing devices with different settings, so why limiting this difference by “kind” (mouse/trackpad) and not by plugged devices?
Only few people are using more than one of these devices? OK maybe, and most people are also using only one display… and most people I know using a laptop as their main computer plug an external keyboard, so they have the laptop keyboard (and trackpad) and the external keyboard (and mouse) and usually laptop keyboards and standalone keyboards are different and may require different configurations. And of course the case when pair programming.
Mice and keyboards are not dead yet (they are not going to be wiped-out by touchscreens and virtual keyboards before long (in the end they may, but not before at least a decade or two)). So please, you people writing operating systems, would you be nice enough to handle that problem?
Conclusion
After few days using the Magic Mouse, I can say that I found it being a nice device in general, a very good mouse for common usages, not suitable at all for games and way too slow (a fix for that should be trivial to release).
Goodbye TB
2009/12/07 — laurentA long time ago (2004?) I bought a LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB. At that time it was quite a huge hard drive (by size and capacity), biggest single disks were about 250GB (given the size I supposed that the LaCie was made of 4 250GB disks in some RAID-0 or JBOD array).
So five years later (last week) it died. But even now, losing 1TB of data is a bit disappointing. Hopefully there was not much important data on it (I store important data on a RAID-5 array or on a TimeMachined part of my Mac).
So, what to do with a dead disk? Dismantle it of course.
First unscrew the back panel:
Push the content / pull the case:
Unscrew everything else:
So yes, there was 4 Maxtor MaXLine Plus II 250GB hard disks inside. I already tested 2 of them, one is dead, the other one is fine. I hope only one is dead so I will be able to reuse 750GB of the original 1TB.
In the overall I think it’s the third hard drive dying this year. Last year it was two mother boards. Why electronic hardware is so unreliable lately? (and I try to do my best to take care of it but it looks like it’s not enough, hardware is still failing at some point)
I still have somewhere an old Victor computer from the 80s (I can’t find it on the internet, but it’s not a Victor 9000) and it’s still working (at least last time I plugged it in).
fit-PC2
2009/08/24 — laurentLast year I bought a fit-PC in order to replace my old router (which was a desktop PC). This year I bought a fit-PC2 to replace my home server (which was a big fat computer).
Requirements
This time my needs were a bit different than the ones for my router. I was looking for a low power consumption device with at least 512 MB of RAM, fast enough to read videos (I may use it as a HTPC in the future), fan-less and of course, it must work with Linux.
fit-PC2 specifications
So I end up with Compulab’s fit-PC2. Here are the official specs:
- CPU: Intel Atom Z530 1.6 GHz
- RAM: 1 GB DDR2-533
- HDD: 160 GB SATA 2.5”
- 1 Gigabit ethernet port
- 4 USB 2.0 ports
- 2 mini-USB 2.0 ports
- 1 mini-SD socket
- 1 IR receiver (infra-red, for remote control)
- DVI output (using a HDMI connector, HDMI to DVI cable provided)
- Power consumption: 6 W idle, 7 W reading H.264 videos, 8 W at full load
- Shipped with Ubuntu
Several flavors are available (with WiFi, without hard drive, with an Atom Z510 CPU…).
Pictures
Usage
I tried the pre-installed Ubuntu but it’s an old version (8.04). Anyway, it was working quite fine. For video playback only MPlayer was using hardware acceleration provided in fit-PC2. I played Sita Sings The Blues on it, it works wonderfully (the movie is a Full HD (1920*1080), 4.12 GB file (I was hardly able to read it on my MacBook)).
But I don’t really want to use Ubuntu. If I want a *buntu linux I would install Kubuntu instead, anyway I installed Debian. Here is the beginning of my troubles.
First, I’m using Debian’s “testing” version, which proved to be quite stable so far. Except with the new 2.6.30 Linux kernel which froze my VIA C7 powered Dedibox and is behaving weirdly on the fit-pc2. I don’t know if the problem is in linux kernel, gcc, debian but installing 2.6.30 kernel was not a good thing on my debian boxes. I’m using the fit-pc2 remotely (ssh, music streaming, time machine backups ) and from time to time it stops to respond, but if I hit a key on the keyboard, network operations resume very weird. A problem in power saving code? a deadlock which resolved itself when a new interruption is raised? No idea, I’m clearly not competent in that domain. Easy solution: revert to 2.6.26 kernel.
Second problem: drivers. The graphic chipset used is an Intel GMA500. Even if Intel recently helped the Open Source community by giving specifications of its chipsets, they didn’t for that one (because it’s not really an Intel one, it was developed by PowerVR (and they are much less cooperative)). Somehow Compulab/DeLL/Ubuntu managed to get a partly open source driver with hardware acceleration (that part is still proprietary), but according to various websites, the driver is crappy and not well maintained (but it looks like some people are trying to make that better). So, for now, hardware acceleration does not work easily on Debian. I hope it will work soon.
Power consumption
- Off: 0.3 W
- Idle: 9 W
- H.264 playback: <10 W
- Full load: <11 W
It seems that it consume a bit more than expected (my watt-meter is a cheap one, I’m not sure how reliable it is), or maybe figures on fit-pc2 website were given for an Atom Z510.
Note: the case can be very hot.
Conclusion
fit-PC2 is a nice bit of hardware, but if you are going to install an alternative BSD/Linux operating system, you have to know that you may get some troubles with video drivers (if you need nice graphical interface).
D-Link DGS-1005D “Green”
2009/08/18 — laurentPreviously I was using a NetGear JGS524 switch (24 Gigabit ethernet ports) which was doing a good job for my small home network but was a bit noisy.
So I went to my local store and bought a D-Link DGS-1005D “Green” (5 gigabit ethernet ports, fanless, said to be eco-friendly).
Eco-friendly?
First, the package. At the same time I bought this switch I also bought a D-Link modem, same size, not green. Both were provided in boxes with mostly the same content but the switch’s box was smaller, with less “materials”. So yes, the packaging is a bit greener.
The switch materials: no idea. I don’t know what kind of plastic was used but it looks similar to the modem one. No more clue on the electronic parts. The power adapter is smaller than the modem one. Anyway, electronic devices in general are very energy greedy to build.
The D-Link switch is able to reduce power consumption on a port if nothing is plugged in (or if the connected device is powered off), the switch is also able to adjust the power on a port depending on cable length (plugging a 1 meter ethernet cable should consume less than a 100 meters one).
My “old” NetGear was consuming about 13 W while doing nothing (no ports connected), on constructor’s website it says to consume up to 40 W (under full load I presume).
The D-Link DGS-1005D consume 1.1 W with a bit of traffic (0 W with nothing connected to it (my watt-meter is not really done to measure power below 1 W).
So yes, it consume much less than my previous switch, but I wonder how much other small switches like this one consume.
Functional?
The question here is mostly: is it working? Well I’m not really sure. I usually listen music streamed from my server to my MacBook, it looks like that from time to time, since I’m using this switch, iTunes stops the music and displays a “buffering” message (before resuming when data are back). At some point I was not able to backup the MacBook with TimeMachine, it failed with a network error.
To be sure about that I plugged back my NetGear switch. Same problems, but less often (I have changed to many things in my home network recently and it looks like I have things to fix).
Conclusion
The D-Link DGS-1005D “Green” switch seems to be quite efficient (working not so bad and not using too much power).
OpenBSD and PPPoE
2009/08/03 — laurentI’m using a new ISP (since I moved in a different country) which does not provide a DSL modem as part of the subscription. So I bought the first ADSL2+ modem I found that was not also a router (since I have my own router).
I ended up with a D-Link DSL-320T. I was a bit disappointed to see that the modem DOES some routing but quite poorly. I tried several configurations and my conclusion is that this modem is severely bugged. It’s based on an old BusyBox 0.60 (you can telnet the modem to see that and do some stuff manually (if you manage to )). I went on D-Link website to find firmware updates the firmware loaded in the modem is more recent that the ones I found on the website! Anyway, after some research, it looks like D-Link people have no clue about how to manage version numbers (it’s a complete mess), but it’s not a problem since the modem does not want to load any firmware (there is something in the interface to do that but it did nothing when I tried).
At some point I find out that the modem has a “bridged” mode, to it will does mostly nothing and I will have to do the authentication with the ISP on my OpenBSD 4.5 router.
PPPoE
Configuring PPPoE on OpenBSD is quite easy. The modem is connected to the rl0 interface, first we need to create a configuration file /etc/hostname.pppoe0 for the new PPPoE interface pppoe0:
inet 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 NONE pppoedev rl0 authproto pap authname LOGIN authkey PASSWORD up
dest 0.0.0.1
!/sbin/route add default 0.0.0.1Replace LOGIN and PASSWORD with the credentials given by your ISP. The rl0 interface does not need any configuration except telling that the interface must be started. /etc/hostname.rl0 must contain only:
Restart network interfaces with the following command:
# sh /etc/netstart
ifconfig should now include pppoe0 configuration.
NAT and PF
I saw on some forums/mailing lists that since PF is started before the pppoe0 interface, PF might block the connection. I’m not having the problem right now, maybe for older versions of OpenBSD. Anyway, I had a different one. When PF starts, the pppoe0 interface does not have yet retrieve an IP, so PF is using “0.0.0.0”.
For instance in /etc/pf.conf, I had the following lines to create a NAT between pppoe0 and rl1 (rl1 is the interface on my local network):
ext_if="pppoe0"
int_if="rl1"
nat on $ext_if inet from $int_if:network to any -> $ext_ifIn order to tell PF to monitor the external interface’s IP, it just needs to be put between brackets, so the NAT command becomes:
nat on $ext_if inet from $int_if:network to any -> ($ext_if)Links
Moving a RAID array
2009/05/25 — laurentI blogged about how to create a RAID-5 array with GNU/Linux in a previous entry.
So my home server is running a 4 disks array (about 500 GB each, for a total of 1.5 TB available). I used SATA disks plugged in the server. For some silly reasons I wanted to move the disks out of the server and plug them using a USB interface (no, not a eSATA one, USB (I told you, it’s silly, but it could have been worse, like creating a floppy RAID array)).
I bought 4 Icy Box enclosures and a USB hub. Shut down the server, move the disks into the external enclosures, plug everything (lots of wires), switch on the server, cry.
As quite expected, it didn’t work right away. My Debian server stopped on a maintenance shell, complaining that it was not able to check /dev/md0 (the array).
No problem, I tried a simple command:
mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1
Array assembled, exit the shell, Debian finished booting, everything works. But, in doubt, I did a reboot. Again, array not recognized. After a bit of googling and man reading, I tried the same command with a little option added:
mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 --update=homehost
Not really sure about what it did, but after rebooting, the array was recognized and assembled automatically.
So YES, you can change the controller interface used to plug your disks in an RAID array.
What about speed? Well
high speed is obviously not the purpose of this experiment (but at least it’s > 30 MB/s in continuous read).
What about reliability? Well it’s Raid-5 so I might have to rebuild from time to time. So far I only get some USB reset events so transfer stall during ~20 seconds then resume. Of course I get more resets when doing a big transfer.
Keyboards and layouts
2008/10/20 — laurentWhen using eXtreme Programming (XP) as software methodology, you often get a lot of problems to put it in place (management does not agree, some developers are reluctant). But what you might not expect is having tiny annoying problems with keyboards.
One of the techniques pushed by XP is pair programming. This implies having two developers working together in front of the same computer.
At any moment only one developer is writing code (this is the driver) and the other one is reviewing the code, giving advices, making sure that the code written by the driver is following the design rules of the project, etc. (this is the navigator).
But the roles between the two developers switch frequently, or the navigator needs to write a little piece of code to show to the driver, so the keyboard is moving a lot between both of them.
Sometimes we end up having two keyboards plugged in the computer, one for each of them, like this:
Teams are frequently composed with people coming from different countries and having different habits and so many different keyboards layouts. I worked with an Irish guy using an American qwerty keyboard with an English layout (or vice versa), in France we usually use French azerty keyboards with French layout but I’m using an Apple international English qwerty keyboard with international English qwerty layout.
So each time you start pair programming you have to look at what kind of keyboard you are going to use (if it’s not yours) and what layout is used (and maybe change the layout each time one the developer start writing).
What I find annoying here is that even with two keyboards, you have to switch the layout because the operating system uses only one layout at a time. I have seen the same behavior on Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and even Mac OS X.
I’m wondering why layouts are not bound with keyboards. Maybe not a strict binding like keyboard A use only layout A and keyboard B use only layout B, but a list of layouts and the keyboards are bound with the last layout they where used with.
Maybe pair programmers are not very common, but I think that we are not the only ones with that problem. More and more laptops are sold, and quite often people use a desktop keyboard while using the laptop at home. They have to change the layout only once, but I’m sure we should avoid that (and on some operating system the task is really not easy the first time).
There are also programmable keyboards. On such keyboards you can change the code sent by each key when typing and create your own layouts. Maybe those kind of keyboards will solve the problem but they are expensive and hard to find.
Art Lebedev created the Optimus Maximus programmable keyboard where each key is an oled display. Here they solved an other problem: having one unique universal
keyboard. It can be used with azerty layout, qwerty layout or anything you can imagine and each key display the characters which is going to be written.
Among others, a thing I find very interesting in the Optimus Maximus is the software to configure the keyboard :
It provides a nice interface to configure layouts. I would like that kind of interface to configure my keyboards, since they are seldom recognized correctly, some keys are always wrong, or the behavior is not exactly what I want and finding the right layout in a big list is painful.
Here is the scenario I would like to have:
- I have a computer with an azerty keyboard plugged in and configured.
- I plug a new keyboard on my computer.
- A configuration window should open asking to type some keys in order to detect which kind of layout is configured (like Mac OS X does).
- If it’s recognized as a qwerty keyboard, each time I type something on the keyboard the layout switch to qwerty.
- If I type on the azerty keyboard, the azerty layout is used.
- When using the qwerty keyboard I should be able to switch to an other layout, azerty for example. The last layout used for a given keyboard is bound to it until I change it.
- A nice interface like Optimus Configurator should allow me to fine tune my layouts.
As far as I have seen until now, mainstream operating systems assume that a lot of things are unique. This situation started to change few years ago, now we can plug several keyboards, mice, screens on the same computer, but the software doing the configuration has not evolved a lot. The most common thing is having several screens. If you already tried to configure multiple screens, you may have found that it’s quite easy on Mac OS X, it’s hard on Windows and it’s really painful on Linux. The worst thing I have seen is some software considering that multiple screens equals 2 screens, with 3 screens it’s just not working and clearly not designed for. But most of the time, you can have only one keyboard/mouse configuration (you can’t have several mice with different speed configurations).
Consommation électrique
2008/09/17 — laurentQuelques mesures prises avec mon Watt-mètre.
Ordinateurs
- Ordinateur DeLL avec Pentium 4 : 0,5 W à l’arrêt, 60 W en idle, 100 W avec le CPU à 100 %
- Ordinateur DeLL avec Core2Quad : 5 W à l’arrêt (!!!), 85 W en idle, 150 W CPU à 100 %
- Serveur DeLL 1750 (assez vieux) : 110 W au boot
- Vieil ordinateur portable DeLL : 100 W au boot (!!!)
Écrans
Il y a une théorie qui dit que la consommation électrique d’un écran LCD est plus importante lorsqu’il affiche du noir que lorsqu’il affiche du blanc. La raison en est que dans tous les cas le tube lumineux est allumé, mais que pour faire du noir il faut activer tous les cristaux liquides pour arrêter la lumière.
Petite vérification empirique :
- LCD DeLL 17 pouces : blanc < 20 W, noir > 20 W
- LCD Samsung 20 pouces : blanc 48 W, noir 46 W
Conclusion : peut-être bien que oui, peut-être bien que non (j’ai vécu trop longtemps en Normandie moi). L’écart de consommation est assez minime et suivant les technologies utilisées la consommation peut certainement s’inverser. Bref, noir ou blanc, un écran ça consomme quand même beaucoup.
Freebox
- pendant le boot : < 7 W
- démarrée : 8,4 W
- TV allumée : 8,5 W (±0,5 W suivant la qualité vidéo de la chaîne de TV)
- TV + communication téléphonique : 10 W
- Téléchargement (1 Mo/s) : 8,5 W
Divers
- Ampoule basse consommation 16 W : 15,5 W
- Fonera : 4 W
- iPhone en charge écran éteint : 2 W (2,5 W écran allumé)
- Switch NetGear JGS524 (24 ports Gigabit) : 13 W (allumé, aucun port branché, aucun transfert)