Dual SIM Phones vs Amaysim vs Contract for Mobile Phones

October 27, 2011 | etbe

Currently Dick Smith is offering two dual-SIM mobile phones for sale in Australia. One is the LG T510 for $99, but it only supports GSM on each SIM. This might be a good phone for someone who needs to receive both work and personal calls and doesn’t want to carry two phones, but the lack of 3G support is a major limit on what can be done with the phone.

The other phone is the Huawei U8520 which supports 3G on one SIM and GSM on the other. It costs $249, runs Android 2.2, has a 320*480 display, and a 3.2 megapixel camera. For comparison the LG Optimus One is a single-SIM phone with similar specs that only costs $179 from TeleChoice, so there is a 40% price premium to pay for a dual-SIM phone.

When I first heard about dual-SIM phones (before they were commonly and cheaply available in Australia) I had thought that it would be a good option for using a cheap 3G broadband SIM along with a SIM for voice calls from one of the cheaper pre-paid mobile companies. But the helpful guy at Dick Smith informed me that Amaysim offers good pre-paid deals for voice and data [1]. With 10G of data quota to be used in one year for $100 and reasonable rates on voice calls it should be easy to keep under $200 per annum if you don’t use many calls.

Rene Cunningham has described how to use a pre-paid data-only plan on the Optus network with VOIP for most outbound calls [2]. To do that he is paying $30 every 6 months to keep his old number for inbound calls for which he gets $30 of credit, with Amaysim you can pay $10 every 3 months to get the same result with $40 per annum call cost instead of $60. As Amaysim are on the Optus network the result should be the same as long as Amaysim have enough capacity for IP data transfer. Rene uses an iPhone but the same result can be achieved with an Android phone.

If by using VOIP the cost of running a phone on Amaysim was reduced to something like $160 per annum (with a possibly optimistic aim of $20 per annum for outbound VOIP calls) then over two years that could save $376 over a $29 per month contract. A Virgin $29 contract includes a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 which is a fairly nice phone if you can deal with the short battery life and the fact that it’s locked to Android 2.1. An Xperia X10 can be bought on Ebay for less than $376 but the hassle of setting up VOIP and Amaysim will be more effort than it’s worth to save $100 over two years.

A couple of my relatives have phone contracts that are about to expire. I’m not going to set them up on VOIP as it’s too much effort for too little benefit and the dual-SIM phone really isn’t an option. I will recommend Virgin contracts with Xperia X10 phones or Amaysim with their existing phones (2yo smart phones that are still quite usable).

Donating old Hardware

October 27, 2011 | etbe

On a recent visit to my local e-waste disposal place I noticed an open PC on the top of the pile with a pair of DIMMs that were begging to be removed. I also noticed three PCI Ethernet cards that were stacked in a manner that made them convenient to grab – possibly some nice person deliberately placed them so someone like me could take them. The DIMMs turned out to be 3G of DDR2-800 RAM and were regarded as good by Memtest86+ – a nice upgrade for one of my test systems that previously only had 1G of RAM.

If you have old hardware to dispose of then please try to take the RAM to your local computer users’ group meeting. In any such gathering there’s always someone who wants old RAM, anything better than PC-133 will find good home unless it’s very small (128M sticks of DDR-266 and 256M sticks of anything faster probably won’t get any interest). RAM is small and light so you can carry it in your pocket without inconvenience. Ethernet cards of all vintages are in demand due to people reusing old desktop systems as routers and PCIe video cards are in great demand, PCI and PCIe cards are small enough that it’s usually not a great inconvenience to transport them.

Hard drives larger than about 100G are in demand as are ATX power supplies, these are really inconvenient to transport unless you travel by car.

For computer systems, anything that can use DDR2-800 RAM will probably be of use to some member of a computer users’ group, if you offer it on the mailing list then you can expect that someone will want to collect it from you at your home or a meeting.

There are organisations such as Computerbank that take donations of old hardware and make systems for disadvantaged people [1], it’s worth considering them if you have hardware to dispose of. But for me the hardware I use every day is quite close to the minimum specs for donations that Computerbank will accept so there’s no possibility of me discarding systems that are useful to them.

I’ve created a page listing hardware that I need, if anyone in my area has such hardware that they don’t need then please let me know [2].

Stop HRL

October 24, 2011 | etbe

Today I attended the Stop HRL demonstration [1]. The government plans to spend $100,000,000 of federal money and $50,000,000 of Victorian state money to build a new coal power station. The state government has imposed some unreasonable restrictions on renewable energy which includes allowing a single person who objects within 2Km of a wind turbine to block the project while also not allowing anyone to object to coal power plants or fracking (both of which have proven health implications). Today VCAT had a hearing about this issue, HRL wants to double the size of the proposed coal power plant while Environment Victoria, Doctors for the Environment Australia, local climate action group Locals Into Victoria’s Environment Martin Shield from Climate Action Moreland are opposing the plan.

What the government should be doing is permitting (if not encouraging) renewable energy production, particularly wind power which will drive down energy prices by undercutting the energy auctions due to it’s almost zero marginal cost. The government should not be spending tax payer money on new coal projects due to climate change and air pollution – in addition to the fact that coal is simply more expensive in the long term.

As usual it’s disappointing that the National party which supposedly represents farmers is supporting the government in such things. The pollution caused by coal power and fracking ends up damaging farmland. The Liberal party doesn’t have a majority on it’s own in either house of the state government, so this proposed coal power plant could be stopped immediately if the National party supported renewable power, or even if they merely opposed giving $50,000,000 of state tax money to HRL.

The demonstration went reasonably well, there was about 80 people there when I arrived and by the time it ended there were more than 150 people. I took the above picture at the start and it missed many people who were off to the right. I think that’s a good result for a demonstration that had little publicity and was held in business hours with really bad weather.

Update:

On Sunday the 13th of November at 13:00-14:30 there is a “Going Backwards Under Baillieu” demonstration at Parliament House. This is to mark the negative affects that the Liberal state government has had on the environment of Victoria.

[1] http://www.stophrl.org/

Desks

October 22, 2011 | etbe

Lindsay Holmwood has written about the benefits of a standing desk and how to buy one [1]. The case for avoiding sitting is strong, but I couldn’t stand up all day.

One thing that’s been on my list of things to do if I had an unreasonably large amount of spare time or money is to make a reclining computer station. The idea would be to take a bed and mount a TFT display above it so that it can be viewed while lying down. Then a split keyboard would be required so that each hand can be used for half the keys (this would be difficult or expensive). If the keyboard halves were aligned correctly then it would reduce the carpal tunnel problems associated with computer use (which has been a big problem for me in the past and is something that I will probably never fully recover from [2]). As far as I am aware the risk of back problems is eliminated when lying down, so two of the major problems with regular computer desks would be avoided.

I don’t think that lying down all day would be that great and it wouldn’t work for collaborative projects. But as monitors are so cheap nowadays it would be viable to have a second monitor at a desk connected to the same computer. Then I could spend about half my computer time lying down.

Occupy Main Street

October 22, 2011 | etbe

The Occupy Wall St blog has an informative summary of attempts to reclaim the American political process which has been pwned badly by financiers in recent times [1]. The basic concept is that people who represent the 99% of the population who aren’t super rich have protests in Wall St and now other business areas. Care2 has an interesting article about US marines opposing the brutal actions of police against Occupy Wall St protesters [2], apparently they treated Iraqis better than US police are treating Americans.

The movement has spread to other locations, the OccupyTogether.org site has information on related events all around the world [3].

We have an ongoing event in Melbourne, Australia. It’s been going for a week and yesterday Robert Doyle (the Mayor of Melbourne) ordered police to disperse the protest, so riot police and mounted police forced the protesters out of the city square [4]. According to the news reports there were only 100 people there at the time, here is a Google Maps link to the location, as you can see 100 people would not take up much of that space, not even with banners etc. The smart move would have been for the government to ignore it all until the protesters got bored.

Now of course we will have more and bigger protests. The use of riot police will probably be considered as a good thing by some of the more aggressive protesters, but anyone who doesn’t want to make the government (and the corporations that control it) look bad would consider it a gross error. Robert Doyle needs to be replaced, the liberal reason for replacing him is that we just don’t want unnecessary force used against peaceful protesters. The “conservative” reason for replacing him is that he’s grossly incompetent, he transformed a small protest that wasn’t getting much media attention and appeared to be losing interest into a large protest with a lot of media attention.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Dedicated vs Virtual Servers

October 21, 2011 | etbe

A common question about hosting is whether to use a dedicated server or a virtual server.

Dedicated Servers

If you use a dedicated server then you will face the risk of problems which interrupt the boot process. It seems that all the affordable dedicated server offerings lack any good remote management, so when the server doesn’t boot you either have to raise a trouble ticket with the company running the Data-Center (DC) or use some sort of hack. Hetzner is a dedicated server company that I have had good experiences with [1], when a server in their DC fails to boot you can use their web based interface (at no extra charge or delay) to boot a Linux recovery environment which can then be used to fix whatever the problem may be. They also charge extra for hands-on support which could be used if the Linux recovery environment revealed no errors but the system just didn’t work. This isn’t nearly as good as using something like IPMI which permits remote console access to see error messages and more direct control of rebooting.

The up-side of a dedicated server is performance. Some people think that avoiding virtualisation improves performance, but in practice most virtual servers use virtualisation technologies that have little overhead. A bigger performance issue than the virtualisation overhead is the fact that most companies running DCs have a range of hardware in their DC and your system (whether a virtual server or a dedicated server) will be on a random system from their DC. I have observed hosting companies to give different speed CPUs and for dedicated servers different amounts of RAM for the same price. I expect that the disk IO performance also varies a lot but I have no evidence. As long as the hosting company provides everything that they offered before you sign the contract you can’t complain. It’s worth noting that CPU performance is either poorly specified or absent in most offers and disk IO performance is almost never specified. One advantage of dedicated servers in this regard is that you get to know the details of the hardware and can therefore refuse certain low spec hardware.

The real performance benefit of a dedicated server is that disk IO performance won’t be hurt by other users of the same system. Disk IO is the real issue as CPU and RAM are easy to share fairly but disk performance is difficult to share and is also a significant bottleneck on many servers.

Dedicated servers also have a higher minimum price due to the fact that a real server is being used which involves hardware purchase and rack space. Hetzner’s offers which start at E29 per month are about as cheap as it’s possible to get. But it appears that the E29 offer is for an old server – new hardware starts at E49 per month which is still quite cheap. But no dedicated server compares to the virtual servers which can be rented for prices less than $10 per month.

Virtual Servers

A virtual server will typically have an effective management interface. You should expect to get web based access to the system console as well as ssh console access. If console access is not sufficient to recover the system then there is an option to boot from a recovery device. This allows you to avoid many situations that could potentially result in down-time and when things go wrong it allows you to recover faster. Linode is an example of a company that provides virtual servers and provides a great management interface [2]. It would take a lot of work with performance monitoring and graphing tools to give the performance overview that comes for free with the Linode interface.

Disk IO performance can suck badly on virtual servers and it can happen suddenly and semi-randomly. If someone else who is using a virtual server on the same hardware is the target of a DoS attack then your performance can disappear. Performance for CPU is generally fairly reliable though. So a CPU bound server would be a better fit on the typical virtual server options than a disk IO bound server.

Virtual servers are a lot cheaper at the low end so if you don’t need the hardware capabilities of a minimal dedicated server (with 1G of RAM for Hetzner and a minimum of 8G of RAM for some other providers) then you can save a lot of money by getting a virtual server.

Finally the options for running a virtual machine under a virtual machine aren’t good, AFAIK the only options that would work on a commercial VPS offering are QEMU (an x86 CPU instruction emulator), Hercules (a S/370 S/390, and Z series IBM mainframe emulator), and similar CPU emulators. Please let me know if there are any other good options for running a virtual machine on a VPS. Now while these emulators are apparently good for debugging OS development they aren’t something that are generally useful for running a virtual machine. I knew someone who ran his important servers under Hercules so that x86 exploits couldn’t be used for attacking them, but apart from that CPU emulation isn’t generally useful for servers.

Summary

If you want to have entire control of the hardware or if you want to run your own virtual machines that suit your needs (EG one with lots of RAM and another with lots of disk space) then a dedicated server is required. If you want to have minimal expense or the greatest ease of sysadmin use then a virtual server is a better option.

But the cheapest option for virtual hosting is to rent a server from Hetzner, run Xen on it, and then rent out DomUs to other people. Apart from the inevitable pain that you experience if anything goes wrong with the Dom0 this is a great option.

As an aside, if anyone knows of a reliable company that offers some benefits over Hetzner then please let me know.

What I would Like to See

There is no technical reason why a company like Linode couldn’t make an offer which was a single DomU on a server taking up all available RAM, CPU, and disk space. Such an offer would be really compelling if it wasn’t excessively expensive. That would give Linode ease of management and also a guarantee that no-one else could disrupt your system by doing a lot of disk IO. This would be really easy for Linode (or any virtual server provider) to implement.

There is also no technical reason why a company like Linode couldn’t allow their customers to rent all the capacity of a physical system and then subdivide it among DomUs as they wish. I have a few clients who would be better suited by Linode DomUs that are configured for their needs rather than stock Linode offerings (which never seem to offer the exact amounts of RAM, disk, or CPU that are required). Also if I had a Linode physical server that only had DomUs for my clients then I could make sure that none of them had excessive disk IO that affected the others. This would require many extra features in the Linode management web pages, so it seems unlikely that they will do it. Please let me know if there is someone doing this, it’s obvious enough that someone must be doing it.

Update:

A Rimuhosting employee pointed out that they offer virtual servers on dedicated hardware which meets this criteria [3]. Rimuhosting allows you to use their VPS management system for running all the resources in a single server (so no-one else can slow your VM down) and also allow custom partitioning of a server into as many VMs as you desire.

Servers vs Phones

October 18, 2011 | etbe

Hetzner have recently updated their offerings to include servers with 16G and 24G of RAM [1]. You can get a dedicated server with two 3TB SATA disks, an i7-2600 quad-core CPU, and 16G of RAM for E49 per month plus an E149 setup fee. That is a good deal and I’ll probably soon be running a few more servers at Hetzner because of it.

HTC is currently offering five different Android phones that have 1G of RAM [2]. So while Hetzner is offering some great deals on dedicated servers, the affordable option has 16* the memory of a modern phone and the high-end option and the biggest option has a mere 24* the RAM of a phone!

Linode is a virtual server provider that I’m using for some of my clients, they offer virtual servers with 20GB of RAM for $US800 per month [3]. That doesn’t compare well to Hetzner’s offer of 24G for E59 ($US81) per month. Admittedly the management interface for Linode is really good while the process of recovering from a Hetzner server with a serious configuration issue is painful – but getting two Hetzner servers in some sort of HA configuration would be 1/5 the cost of a Linode virtual server.

HTC offers two Android phones with 16G of built-in flash storage that have the ability to take a 32G microSD card for a total of 48G of storage. Linode’s smallest virtual server plans have 20G, 30G, and 40G of storage, so a modern phone can store more than twice as much data as the smallest Linode plan and more data than any of the three smallest plans.

While it’s obvious that phones don’t perform well for any real server use (lack of fast network access, disk IO speed, and CPU power being obvious issues) it does seem that the recent announcements of newer cheaper server plans aren’t that exciting when compared to mobile phones. For a similar monthly rate I could get a mobile phone “free” on a two year contract or a Hetzner server that has 16* the RAM.

It’s a pity that Hetzner does’t offer servers with up to 128G of RAM and more than four disks. RAM isn’t THAT expensive nowadays and their business model includes having the customer pay for various options that other companies don’t tend to offer in a similar price range (such as SSD and other hardware customisation).

Also see XKCD’s comparison of HDTV and mobile phones [4].

Akonadi on a MySQL Server

October 11, 2011 | etbe

Wouter described how to get Akonadi (the back-end for KDE PIM) to use PostgreSQL [1].

I don’t agree with his “MySQL is a toy” sentiment. But inspired by his post I decided to convert some of my systems to use a MySQL instance running on a server instead of one instance for each user. In the default configuration you have 140M of disk space and 200M of RAM used by each user for a private MySQL installation which has about 24K of data (at least at the moment on systems I run, maybe more in future).

Here’s some pseudo shell script to dump the database and get a new config:

mysqldump --socket=$HOME/.local/share/akonadi/socket-$HOSTNAME/mysql.socket akonadi > dump.sql
akonadictl stop
rm -rf .config/akonadi
rm -rf .local/share/akonadi
mkdir .config/akonadi
cat > .config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc <<EOF
[%General]
Driver=QMYSQL
SizeThreshold=4096
ExternalPayload=false

[QMYSQL]
Name=${USER}_akonadi
Host=IP_OR_HOST
User=$USER
Password=$PASS
StartServer=false
Options=
ServerPath=/usr/sbin/mysqld

[Debug]
Tracer=null
EOF

Then with DBA privs you need to run the following in the mysql client:

create database $USER_akonadi;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON $USER_akonadi.* to '$USER'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '$PASS';

Then run the following to import the SQL data:

mysql $USER_akonadi < dump.sql

Ideally that would be it, but on my test installation (Debian/Squeeze MySQL server and Debian/Unstable KDE workstations) I needed to run the following SQL commands to deal with some sort of case problem.
rename table schemaversiontable to SchemaVersionTable;
rename table resourcetable to ResourceTable;
rename table collectionattributetable to CollectionAttributeTable;
rename table collectionmimetyperelation to CollectionMimeTypeRelation;
rename table collectionpimitemrelation to CollectionPimItemRelation;
rename table collectiontable to CollectionTable;
rename table flagtable to FlagTable;
rename table mimetypetable to MimeTypeTable;
rename table parttable to PartTable;
rename table pimitemflagrelation to PimItemFlagRelation;
rename table pimitemtable to PimItemTable;

I am not using any PIM features other than the AddressBook (which hasn’t been working well for a while), so I’m not sure that this is working correctly. But I would prefer that something I don’t use and is probably broken take up disk space and RAM on a server instead of a workstation anyway.

[1] http://grep.be/blog/en/computer/debian/no_more_mysql?show_comments=yes

Modern Laptops Suck

September 9, 2011 | etbe

One of the reasons why I’m moving from a laptop to a cloud lifestyle [1] is that laptops suck nowadays.

Engineering Trade-offs

Laptops have always had disadvantages when compared to desktop systems. The screen has to be smaller, the keyboard is inconveniently small on the smaller laptops and netbooks, you don’t get PCI slots (CardBus isn’t nearly as good), you usually can’t have multiple hard drives and expansion options for other things are limited. Also due to the difficulty in designing a computer that uses a small volume it’s very difficult to repair a laptop and there are no realistic options for upgrading the motherboard to use a faster CPU etc. This is OK, it’s engineering trade-offs that we have to deal with.

CPU Speed

Modern laptops however have some bad design choices. Firstly they appear to be trying to compete with desktop systems for CPU speed. This was reasonable when desktop systems had 200MHz CPUs which dissipated about 15W (see the Wikipedia page about CPU power dissipation) but now that desktop CPUs are dissipating 65W at the low end and more than 100W at the high end it’s really not practical to try and compete. My Thinkpad T61 has a T7500 CPU that can dissipate 35W, getting that much heat out of a laptop case is a significant engineering challenge no matter how you do it.

It’s a pity that no-one seems to be making laptops with large screens that have a low-power CPU. Sure it takes a moderate amount of CPU power to use a large display for games or playing video, but if you want to use a laptop for work purposes then not much CPU power is required. For tasks which take a lot of CPU power you can offload it to the cloud, I can ssh to a server to do compiles, and one of my clients is setting up an Adobe After Effects render farm [2] (in the broadest sense of the word “Cloud” can include a server accessed by ssh and a few servers on the LAN running After Effects).

Thin Laptops

The next problem is laptops being thin, it is really convenient to have a thin laptop, but the thinner it is the smaller the fans have to be and the faster the cooling air has to travel through small heat sinks. At the best of times this results in more noise from the cooling fan (which really isn’t so bad). But it also increases the rate at which dust builds up inside the case and insulates the heat sink. When a laptop is thin and light for convenience and also wide to have a large display it just can’t be that strong, so laptops tend to bend. If I put an Australian 10c piece (the size of a US Quarter) under one of the feet of my Thinkpad T61 the other three feet touch the desk! Presumably the laptop would bend in every way imaginable if you were to put it on your lap – which of course you can’t do because there are cooling vents in the bottom so it can give you a hot lap and an overheated laptop.

My first Thinkpad was 61mm high according to the IBM spec sheet. I measured my latest one at 34mm. As 61mm wasn’t too bad I think I could survive now with a laptop that was 45mm high and had more strength and less cooling problems.

My Thinkpad T61 currently has some serious cooling problems, I suspect that something is broken inside. As it’s out of warranty I took it apart but couldn’t find anything wrong, so I guess I’ll have to pay to get it repaired. This will be the third time I’ve had a Thinkpad repaired because of cooling problems, but the first time one has been out of warranty. I blame the engineering trade-offs required to make them thin.

Portable Desktop/Server systems

If you want a small portable computer that delivers great performance then a Mac Mini seems to be a good option [3]. The people who use a laptop at their desk at work and their desk at home would probably be better served by a Mac Mini. The Mac Mini can be purchased with SSD storage to reduce the risk of data loss due to being dropped. Admittedly the Mac Mini needs to be plugged in before it can be used, but if you had a USB Ethernet device and a USB hub then only three cables would be required, power, USB, and video – one more cable than the typical office laptop use with Ethernet and power.

Some modern laptop/netbook systems (such as the Thinkpad T61 and the EeePC 701) seem to be designed to use the keyboard as part of the cooling system. If you run it with the lid closed then it becomes significantly hotter. This makes laptops unsuitable for use as a portable server. Probably one exception to this is the Apple laptops which have a rubbery keyboard that doesn’t allow air flow – of course anyone who likes the feel of a real keyboard won’t buy an Apple laptop for that reason (but a keyboard that has one really hot section above the CPU doesn’t feel great either). In the past I’ve used laptops as servers once they become unsuitable for their primary use, probably in future I won’t be able to do that.

ARM Laptops

There are some laptops and tablets with ARM CPUs that should dissipate little heat. But I’m not aware of any such devices that I consider to be practical Linux laptops. I’ve done some work with iPaQ’s running Familiar in the past, it was a nice system but it was a niche market and everything was different from every other system I’ve ever used. That made all the work take longer.

What would be ideal is an ARM based laptop (not netbook – a big screen is good) that boots from a regular CF or SD card (so the main storage can be installed in another machine to fix any boot failures) and which is supported by a major Linux distribution. Does anyone know of any work towards such a goal?

Moving from a Laptop to a Cloud Lifestyle

September 8, 2011 | etbe

My Laptop History

In 1998 I bought my first laptop, it was a Thinkpad 385XD, it had a PentiumMMX 233MHz CPU, 96M of RAM, and an 800*600 display. This was less RAM than I could have afforded in a desktop system and the 800*600 display didn’t compare well to the 1280*1024 resolution 17 inch Trinitron monitor I had been using. Having only 1/3 the pixels is a significant loss and a 12.1 inch TFT display of that era compared very poorly with a good Trinitron monitor.

In spite of this I found it a much better system to use because it was ALWAYS with me, I used it for many things that were probably better suited to a PDA (there probably aren’t many people who have carried a 7.1 pound (3.2Kg) laptop to as many places as I did). But some of my best coding was done on public transport.

But I didn’t buy my first laptop for that purpose, I bought it because I was moving to another country and there just wasn’t any other option for having a computer.

In late 1999 I bought my second laptop, it was a Thinkpad 600E [1]. It had twice the CPU speed, twice the RAM, and a 1024*768 display that displayed color a lot better. Since then I had another three Thinkpads, a T21, a T43, and now a T61. One of the ways I measure a display is the number of 80*25 terminal windows that I can display at one time, my first Thinkpad could display four windows with a significant amount of overlap. My second could display four with little overlap, my third (with 1280*1024 resolution) could display four clearly and another two with overlap, and my current Thinkpad does 1680*1050 and can display four windows clearly and another five without excessive overlap.

For most of the last 13 years my Thinkpads weren’t that far behind what I could afford to get as a desktop system, until now.

A Smart Phone as the Primary Computing Device

For the past 6 months the Linux system I’ve used most frequently is my Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Android phone [2]. Most of my computer use is on my laptop, but the many short periods of time using my phone add up. This has forced some changes to the way I work. I now use IMAP instead of POP for receiving mail so I can use my phone and my laptop with the same mail spool. This is a significant benefit for my email productivity, instead of having 100 new mailing list messages waiting for me when I get home I can read them on my phone and then have maybe 1 message that can’t be addressed without access to something better than a phone. My backlog of 10,000 unread mailing list messages lasted less than a month after getting an Android phone!

A few years ago I got an EeePC 701 that I use for emergency net access when a server goes down. But even a 920g EeePC is more weight than I want to carry, as I need to have a mobile phone anyway there is effectively no extra mass or space used to have a phone capable of running a ssh client. My EeePC doesn’t get much use nowadays.

A Cheap 27 inch Monitor from Dell

Dell Australia is currently selling a 27 inch monitor that does 2560*1440 (WQHD) for $899AU. Dell Australia offers a motor club discount which pretty much everyone in Australia can get as almost everyone is either a member of such a club or knows a member well enough to use their membership number for the discount. This discount reduces the price to $764.15. The availability of such a great cheap monitor has caused me to change my working habits. It doesn’t make sense to have a reasonably powerful laptop used in one location for almost all the time when a desktop system with a much better monitor can be used.

The Plan

Now that my 27 inch monitor has arrived I have to figure out a way of making things work. I still need to work from a laptop on occasion but my main computer use is going to be a smart-phone and a desktop system.

Email is already sorted out, I already have three IMAP client systems (netbook, laptop, and phone), adding a desktop system as a fourth isn’t going to change anything.

The next issue is software development. In the past I haven’t used version control systems that much for my hobby work, I have just released a new version every time I had some significant changes. Obviously to support development on two or three systems I need to use a VCS rigorously. I’m currently considering Subversion and Git. Subversion is really easy to use (for me), but it seems to be losing popularity. Git is really popular so if I use it for my own projects then I could allow anonymous access for anyone who’s interested – maybe that will encourage more people to contribute.

One thing I haven’t even investigated yet is how to manage my web browsing work-flow in a distributed manner. My pattern when using a laptop is to have many windows and tabs open at the same time for issues that I am researching and to only close them days or weeks later when I have finished with the issue. For example if I’m buying some new computer gear I will typically open a web browser window with multiple tabs related to the equipment (hardware, software, prices, etc) and keep them all open until I have received it and got it working. Chromium, Mozilla, and presumably other modern web browsers have a facility to reopen windows after a crash. It would be ideal for me if there was some sort of similar facility that allowed me to open the windows that are open on another system – and to push window open commands to another system. For example when doing web browsing on my phone I would like to be able to push the URLs of pages that can’t be viewed on a phone to my desktop system and have them open waiting for me when I get home.

It would be nice if web browsing could be conceptually similar to a remote desktop service in terms of what the user sees.

Finally in my home directory there are lots of random files. Probably about half of them could be deleted if I was more organised (disk space is cheap and most of the files are small). For the rest it would be good if they could be accessed from other locations. I have read about people putting the majority of their home directory under version control, but I’m not sure that would work well for me.

It would be good if I could do something similar with editor sessions, if I had a file open in vi on my desktop before I left home it would be good if I could get a session on my laptop to open the “same” file (well the same named file checked out of the VCS).

Configuring the Desktop System

One of the disadvantages of a laptop is that RAID usually isn’t viable. With a desktop system software RAID-1 is easy to configure but it results in two disks making heat and noise. For my new desktop system I’m thinking of using a DRBD device for /home to store the data locally as well as almost instantly copying it to RAID-1 storage on the server. The main advantage of DRBD over NFS, NBD, and iSCSI is that I can keep working if the server becomes unavailable (EG use the desktop system to ask Google how to fix a server fault). Also with DRBD it’s a configuration option to allow synchronous writes to return after the data is written locally which is handy if the server is congested.

Another option that I’m considering is a diskless system using NBD or iSCSI for all storage. This will prevent using swap (you can’t swap to a network device to avoid deadlocks) but that won’t necessarily be a problem given the decrease in RAM prices as I can just buy enough RAM to not need swap.

The Future

Eventually I want to be able to use a tablet for almost everything including software development. While a tablet display isn’t going to be great for coding I’m sure that I can make use of enough otherwise wasted time to justify the expense. I will probably need a tablet that acts like a regular Linux computer – not an Android tablet.

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

Author Archives: etbe