Eee's are good, Eee's are good

I got an Asus Eee PC the other week, and spent the weekend and the last few evenings putting Ubuntu 8.04 on it (compiz, Ubuntu studio themes, several desktop tweaks, scite text editor, installing wifi and other drivers). It's small and cute. The screen is surprisingly legible, even for tiny text at arms length, and it's smoother than my big laptop running compiz.

As I don't have a USB DVD drive, I installed off of a USB stick, which took a bit of persuading to boot, and then used rsync to copy the installation over to the flash drive on the computer. The various installation guides weren't much help getting it to boot off the internal drive - various settings around grub-install seemed to update the USB stick rather than the internal drive, but following the instructions from the grub manual to do a 'native' install did the trick. Once I'd done that it seemed to be OK, but it believed it had mounted /dev/sdb1 (the 16G internal drive) as /, whereas it had really mounted /dev/sda1 - the 4G internal 'system' drive. That was cured using UUID rather than /dev/sda1 in the grub menu.

Getting wifi to connect is still rather hit and miss - Wifi-radar seems to be the application which works for it. There are far too many wifi controller apps for Ubuntu, and the few I tried didn't seem to do anything. None have particularly good indication of why a connection isn't working.

[2008/06/14 - the issue was two-fold: instead of running cables everywhere, I was connecting into a wifi gaming adapter through a router, as I had two machines sharing the adapter, and that router appeared to be giving out DCHP addresses, even to other wifi devices, which mean DCHP wasn't working. As far as Wifi-radar and the network selector, wifi-radar was setting up the wifi correctly, but still needed network selector to turn off the ethernet. Doing that using sudo ifdown eth0 worked as well, and putting that command as a connection command makes everything work just by opening Wifi-radar then hitting connect.]

The GPS works fine with it. I haven't tried getting the web-cam working yet.

One odd thing is how rough the texture of the keys feels - I've had my larger laptop a couple of years now, and the home row is polished smooth. You can hold it at an angle to the light and see that Dvorak was right about letter frequency, except for the modifier keys.

XTech 2007 Summary

A short post with the best things -

• Joost demo - I need them to open source their sprite code as well as using the XULRunner base, or I'll have to write the same thing at work. It also would make a better platform for the UML modelling and SAM meta-tool stuff I used to do. Maybe they'll turn up on Mozpad.


• XMPP pushing - Several demos of making interactive applications on top of XMPP, and a cute demo of SamePlaceSuite, which I got my sister to install this evening; Strange Attractor have a fuller write up of the Jabber and ubi-comp talks.


• Arduino hacking - I first got into computers after messing around with analogue electronics, light sensors and making motors go on and off. This is the sort of thing I could make cool stuff for my nieces with, who might get tempted to take things apart. There seems to be a generation of programmers today who don't have any idea of the hardware below, because there's so many layers in modern systems; I don't know how many CS courses still have obligatory hex microprocessor programming sections now that microprocessor instructions are several times as long and have a multitude of addressing modes. 6800 was much simpler than modern cores, Arduino seems simpler still.


• Joins on open data - several talks mentioned using joins across open data sets, for example tags on photos with geolocation data can be used to infer tags for the locations, and also many cases of joins across datasets for space and time visualisation in stamen.com's talk.


• The eponymous stamen.com talk on interactive visualisations - but with very little actual interaction. They create beautiful, information rich applications, many simply play through a time selection and give a video scrub control, and you watch a population of events evolve in a space. The information-software as branch of movie making metaphor.


• Interaction embodiments - Nabaztag and Matt Webb and others, using simple metaphors and littoral devices which span between physical and web spaces. I like physical things that do one thing; gestures and simple control. I hate trying to do anything detailed with a mouse, though a trackpad is ok - something like drawing with your fingertips, and stylus or touch screen is much better. That most of the physical interaction we have with computers is with a soap-on-a-rope always strikes me as odd (they also hurt my wrists if I do use them, but that's another issue). I'm still waiting for the nanotech to get to the state that I can write code in my moleskine and it will execute and report the result on the next line of paper.
  


• Together-apart-together-apart flows in information/interaction embodiments and mediated spaces/private spaces. The dumber the network - and xmpp is pretty dumb - the more diverse the messages; getting information software as rich as print media and interaction as easy as a pocket book is hard. But fun hard.

Pete