Engadget / Gizmodo both reporting on the official launch of the new line of Sony Laptops.

From Engadget:
“The VAIO Z packs an option for dual SSD in a RAID configuration (which is just rubbing it in, if you ask us)”

yes. yes it is…

I’ve been really pleased with how my current laptop - The Sony SZ - has held up over the last two years. The form factor is great and it’s tough to find a similarly portable laptop that packs as much power. I just came across some information on an upcoming line of Sony laptops that will feature Intel’s new Montevina chipset.

The Sony Z. And the specs look great…

Core 2 Duo 2.53ghz 6mb Cache 1066Mhz FSB
4GB DDR2-800
Nvidia 9300M (speed) / Intel graphics (stamina)
320GB
HSDPA
1600×900 13.1″ (wahey!)
and all at ~3.3lbs

I’ll throw in a Solid State Disk when I get one, and let’s hope it places nice with Ubuntu.

Skype is a quite popular at work - used for most of our online conversations with the Seattle office.

This means I tend to have bothкомпютри Pidgin and Skype active at any one time. As well as having a single consolidated view of all my I.M. accounts… I personally prefer the Pidgin interface;

Just came across Skype API Plugin for Pidgin - created be Eion Robb.

UPDATE: after using this for a few days… I turned it off again. Pidgin was unstable, Skype didn’t always start automagically in the background.

Last night I spent a bit of time attempting DVD playback on the latest Ubuntu - Hardy Heron Beta.

Whether I tried vlc / totem / ogle / mplayer - I was getting the following hard crash

X Error of failed request:  BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)

I was running my Sony SZ Laptop in ’stamina’ mode - which uses an Intel i810 graphics card. I had to sift through quite a few pages before I came upon a solution that worked:

Add the following line to the Device section of your xorg.conf file:

Option "LinearAlloc" "16000"

Also checked out bluetooth-alsa again - came across this site to ease the installation of a2dp (stereo bluetooth headset) on Linux. Worked incredibly well - comes with a nice script to toggle between speaker/headset. VLC & Amarok play nice as soon as you select the ASLA device as ‘bluetooth’.

(Watched a fair bit of TV over the weekend; West Wing, Lost, Southland Tales, Meet the Spartans, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)

Happy Valentines Day Anna Lynch.

Might be time to change your profile picture.

I’ve really been missing this feature for my Mac. Zooom.

It enables resizing and moving a window with keyboard shortcuts. Similar to the “Alt + Left Click” window drag and “Alt + Middle Click” window resize I’m familiar with in linux.

Spent a few hours this weekend finally getting some documentation together for modularity. It has been a pet project of mine ever since I was introduced to the concept by Malcolm Sparks.

modularity is a set of Ant tasks to help with the software configuration management of Java projects with a large number of modules. modularity aims to make maintaining ant build files a thing of the past - instead you maintain a set of ‘metadata.xml’ files describing your project’s layout and dependency tree.

I’m currently using modularity for all my pet projects (yes modularity also builds itself!) and I’m also luck enough to be allowed to use it at in NewBay. At work it is used to create the developers IDE workspace, build all software modules and ultimately release software.

Maciej Baranowski, Darragh Curran and Guy Granger all have helped tremendously on its development to date.

Solved my first Professor’s Cube just there. It’s a good workout for your damn hands not to mention your mind.

I’ve been using Vodafone Ireland as my mobile operator since my first mobile phone - so probably for the last 7 or 8 years now. I’m tied into a damned contract with them until early Jan 2008. I’ll hopefully be switching to 3 Ireland then because of their groovy mobile phone data plans - 100mb for €6 a month or unlimited for €20.

Now couple the “3 Ireland” data price plan with the Linux + Bluetooth + Mobile + GPRS tutorial below and I’ll be laughing.

1. Turn on bluetooth on your mobile phone (ensure visibility is enabled)

2. Find out your mobile phone mac address is:

sean@viper:~$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        00:19:2D:43:00:D9       button

3. Find out what channel DUN (dial up networking) is running on your device:

sean@viper:~$ sdptool search DUN
Inquiring ...
Searching for DUN on 00:19:2D:43:00:D9 ...
Service Name: Dial-Up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10002
Service Class ID List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 2
Language Base Attr List:
  code_ISO639: 0x454e
  encoding:    0x6a
  base_offset: 0x100
Profile Descriptor List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
    Version: 0x0100

4. Establish a connection with your mobile’s DUN. With Ubuntu Feisty this will trigger an automatic pairing of your device if you haven’t already done so. Also this will automagically create a /dev/rfcomm0 device if all goes well.

sean@viper:~$ sudo rfcomm connect 0 00:19:2D:43:00:D9 2

5. Configure wvdial (this is how I do it at the moment - should be trivial to configure Ubuntu’s swish NetworkManager applet to do the same with a similar configuration). I’ve included both Vodafone and 3 Ireland settings below for completeness - both have been tested and work well.

sean@viper:~$ sudo vi /etc/wvdial.conf 

[Modem0]
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Baud = 115200
SetVolume = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Init1 = ATZ
Init3 = ATM0
FlowControl = CRTSCTS

[Dialer vodafone]
Username = “vodafone”
Password = “vodafone”
Phone = *99#
Stupid Mode = 1
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”isp.vodafone.ie”,”",0,0
Inherits = Modem0

[Dialer three]
Username = “none”
Password = “none”
Phone = *99#
Stupid Mode = 1
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”3ireland.ie”,”",0,0
Inherits = Modem0

6. Launch wvdial

sean@viper:~$ wvdial vodafone

7. Ping google.com and shout “I am so wireless right now”

With all of the above in mind - why would one want the USB/PCMCIA GPRS modems these operators offer - which in some cases are more expensive?

At work I’ve been using the Tambur MMS Library to encode and decode MMS messages. Recently I encountered an unusual bug; some data parts were not being encoded correctly. The bug was related to how the MMEncoder sets the indicated data length of the image/payload.

The packaging date of the MMS Library on the website says 18th April 2005 - So for anyone using that version of the library be aware of the bug. And heres how to fix it:

MMEncoder:

protected static void encodeUintvar(ByteArrayOutputStream res, int l)
throws Exception {
    //.....
    for (int i = 0; i < buf.length; i++) {
        if ((buf[i] & 0xFF) != 0x80)
            res.write(buf[i]);
    }
}

It should read:

protected static void encodeUintvar(ByteArrayOutputStream res, int l)
throws Exception {
    //.....
    boolean hasWrittenOnce = false;
    for (int i = 0; i < buf.length; i++) {
        if (hasWrittenOnce || (buf[i] & 0xFF) != 0x80) {
            res.write(buf[i]);
            hasWrittenOnce = true;
        }
    }
}