Awesome little machine with rather impressive specifications.

Provisional specification

700MHz ARM11
256MB of SDRAM
OpenGL ES 2.0
1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
Composite and HDMI video output
USB 2.0
SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
General-purpose I/O
Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)

I wish I could get a device like this in South Africa for R 250.00 ($25.00 estimated price in the article.)

I wonder if the hardware is good enough to run XBMC…

Dead mouse, before autopsy, repair and cleaning

This afternoon I drowned my mouse with a cup of tea and killed it. The mouse was a Microsoft Wireless 4000 Notebook Optical Mouse which I’ve had for over 2 years and liked a lot… Electronics + tea don’t mix

As previously promised on Google Buzz, I’m going to “autopsy” the mouse and see if I can revive it, below are the photos (gadget lovers may want to look away).

I’ve killed or nearly killed a few peripherals with tea… the trick to keeping things alive is to disconnect power ASAP after the spill, hopefully before things short out and the magic smoke gets let out.

Open Mouse

First thing to do is get the screwdrivers out and strip the mouse, as usual some of the screws are hidden under the little “slick” pads that the mouse glides on.

Tea in the bottom of the mouse.

Once you’ve got the mouse apart you can check for damage, I was lucky that the electronics was mostly dry and most of the tea was confined to the plastic areas, some tea had got between the lenses and the little “camera chip” on the board.

Plastic Mouse parts drying.

All the plastic was stripped off and carefully taken apart and put in some hot water with dish washing liquid and brushed clean then left to dried and finally finished off the last bit of drying with a dish cloth. The electronics were dried off with a tissue, but surprisingly enough weren’t that wet.

Re-soldering the battery contact.

During re-assembly I found that the battery contact was broken, this explains some of the intermittent problems I’ve had with the mouse. After some careful positioning with the helping hands I re-soldered the battery contact.

Finally I finished screwing everything together, put a battery in and the mouse lit up, always a good sign when the thing you’re fixing lights up correct when its assembled again. Tested it on a computer and after a few seconds of windows trying to initialise it I could move the mouse pointer and click… Success!!!

Coffee Table Workbench

Special thanks to my wife who allowed me to turn the coffee table into a make shift workbench for these repairs, I can’t wait till we’re in our own place and I have a garage I can setup a proper workbench in.

For those of you who don’t know about this there is a conspiracy theory (which I actually think may be true) about how printer companies make their printers print mysterious yellow dots in certain places in order to allow law enforcement agencies to track down the source of the printout.

In the days of things like type writers it was actually possible to match a particular type writer to a particular page by the printing as each type writer had a slightly different wear pattern on the letters, it was even possible in the days of dot matrix printers to still do this although I’m not entirely sure how reliable this is. Of course its much harder to do this with modern printers as there is no “wear pattern” or anything that acts as a fingerprint.

I love these kinds of conspiracy theories… Like the governments have nothing better to do than track down who printed what… obviously the way to prevent them tracking you down is don’t print anything or use someone else’s printer.

The system would also lower the cost of the book as publishers no longer need to worry about doing large runs of books, storing, shipping or even having an order handling department.

Don’t worry my wife hardly ever reads this site so I doubt she’ll read all this and anyway she’s unlikely to puzzle out what I’m up too, but because I don’t want her to know what I’m building I’m going to stick to describing the technology and tools I’m using and show snippets of code but try not give it all away.

Without giving too much away about the project, I’m busy re-purposing things and trying to squash them into a new housing. One of the bigger problems is trying to do this without my wife finding out what I’m up to, so I can’t unpack everything and spread it all out on the dining room table.

I’ve decided to modify a store bought item to be the casing for the project mainly this is because the project is going to be displayed in the lounge and I’m not sure if my wood working skills are good enough to ensure it looks good.

I’ve been doing all my design and test fitting on my laptop using a free tool from Google called Sketch-Up, its an easy to use 3D design program. The cool thing about Sketch-Up is that it does things in millimeters (or other units of measure) so its easy to transfer measurements from the real world into the 3d one. I recreated all the components whose sizes can’t be changed in Sketch-Up and then did test fits of the items to see if they fit correctly.

Sketch-Up has allowed me to virtually build the entire present and solve many problems that I had not originally foreseen without the Wife finding out or it costing me anything in lost time or materials. Once I’ve designed and worked out what the individual parts are going to look like and how big they’re going to be it just requires a quick trip down to the shops to buy the items and then a few days of cutting, sanding,  painting and soldering.

I’ve also been using Sketch-Up to design furniture for our flat, the biggest problem is that a lot of store bought furniture is very badly made and rather expensive and its never just the right size for a room if you live in a small flat. On the right you can see a 3D diagram of a desk that I’ve been working on for the 2nd bedroom.

Sketch-Up can also be used to do 3D buildings and once you’ve built the building you can pull it into Google Earth to see what it’ll look like in the real world.

Sketch-Up is a very nice, relatively simple and easy to use application. There is a basic free version, which is what I’ve been using although you can upgrade to rather fancy pro version if you need too.

Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance…

Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

SGI Unveils Octane III Personal Supercomputer (via BoingBoing)

When I lauched the application I was running it kept giving a error when it tried to open the device “Load Datalogic Scanner XML Settings Failure!” No amount of searching online was able to reveal the answer to this error and because its load via the OPOS control which is in my application via COM.Interop there is no easy way to step into the code and see why its going wrong.

After a little testing and debugging I discovered that it works if the application is “Run As Administrator” it’ll work fine so it had to be a permission problem just wasn’t sure which permissions were wrong.

If only there was a way to see which files and registry entries the driver was trying to access and which failed because of a access denied error… Thats where this cool tool called Process Monitor comes in. Lauching the app it’ll show you everything going on in your system, a few quick filters so that it only shows my apps calls then tried to use the scanner, it gave the error again but this time I could track down the cause.

It turned out that it was trying to write to the C:\Program Files\DLSOPOS\ folder and was failing and was trying to access these 2 parts of the registry and getting access denied errors.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\OLEforRetail\ServiceOPOS\Scanner\USBScanner and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\DATALOGIC\DL_OPOS_Service

Changing the permissions on those registry keys and the folder fixed the problem.

A few quick search’s revealed this forum entry on the Ubuntu Forums and from there I found this site with .deb packages for the Samsung Unified MFP drivers. After installing the packages the scanner suddenly work in XSane and I could scan. I’m really like the fact that more and more hardware “just works” now in Linux, or works with minimal tweaking. I haven’t had to compile a kernel or any other software in a very long time.

After getting the scanner to work I found 2 nice apps to use instead of XSane, the first is flegita a nice little app that makes it easy to scan things from the scanner to png, jpg, tif and PDF and the other app is gscan2pdf which allows you to scan to pdf.

Shouting in the Datacenter

I wonder if this will prompt people to make quieter server rooms? Found via this blog post and this one.

The problem? I know what the client wants/needs but explaining that to the companies with the servers is rather difficult. Either I have to sit on the phone with a sales droid who doesn’t know what they’re talking about or I have to go play with a website which doesn’t work the way I think it should or the worst, go through thousands of spreadsheets trying to puzzle out what goes with what.

So far Dell has the best website I know of for configuring servers, but it still doesn’t do it right because it makes you make decisions up front that if you’re “just shopping” you can’t really make upfront. Obviously this all depends on the way you will be doing your shopping, but let me go through the way I would like these stores to work.

My client is looking for a new server to run there SQL and act as there Syspro Application Server for about 30 users, it also acts as a terminal server for 3 of those 30 people and runs a complex web application for managing picking, shipping etc. The reason for looking for a new server is increase the speed of the current applications and allow for future expansion and improve the reliability as the old server is over 4 years old and starting to give trouble.

So I want to go to a website and tick off a few basic things upfront like this:

Chassis
[  ] Rack Mount
[x] Tower
[x] Hot swap power supplies
[x] Hot swap drive cage

Processor
[  ] AMD Processor
[x] Intel Processor
[?] 64bit Processor
[1] Number of Processors

Storage
[x] RAID
[6] Maximum number of drives

RAM
[4]gb Minimum amount of RAM

Warranty
[x] 4hour on site
[  ] Next business day
[  ] Drop off and collect
[  ] Whenever we feel like it

You’ll note that options should be Yes, No and Maybe (?) so that if you’re unsure if you want a 64bit processor you can say “maybe” and it’ll include both 32bit and 64bit.

Then you click a button and start configuring your actual machine with details like what type of processor you want, Xeon/Core2 Duo/Quad Core etc. and on the page where we actually get to play with the real configuration is where they put the pricing so that you can choose between the 3Ghz or the 2.9ghz processor on price. Perhaps after selecting the above it could give you 3 options, “entry level/mid range/enterprise” or something like that to further decrease the number of options.

You should put the most important questions first, and in the case of a server things like processor manufacturer, number of processors, number of drives and whether its rack mountable are important. I don’t care as much if its a 2.9ghz or 3.0ghz processor as much as I care that it has hot swap power supplies.

I love the idea of having this on a website rather than reading through spreadsheets or speaking to a person because I want to “play” with the configuration. I want to do things like “How much will it cost if I choose 6 drives in stead of 2?” so that when I take my final quote to the client I can say that you’re getting the best value for your money.

I’m often doing a quote with a budget in mind for example it would be something like “How much server can we get for R 30 000 and it should have the maximum amount of hard-drive space and fast drive speed rather than processing speed.”

I admit that this isn’t the easiest kind of site to develop, but it is possible and if you get it right you’ll get me at least as a customer. By the way if any company would like something like this, you can always get in touch with me… I’ll have a go at writing it for you