HP Offers Notebooks Without Windows XP

I just bought a notebook today for my nephew. Well, helped in buying it as it’s his father’s money. It comes with FreeDOS. Cool. Now users can choose whether or not they want Microsoft® Windows® on their notebooks.

At first I was looking for Compaq Presario M2232, but it was already replaced with Compaq Presario M2241. The difference as I can tell was only the processor speed (1.6GHz vs. 1.73Ghz). For the same price, I was happy to get a higher clocked processor. Plus it’s new Centrino, with 802.11b/g (the Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection) – speed up to 54Mbps. 😀

The notebook specifications taken from HP:

presario_m2000_b.gif 

Processor Intel® Pentium® M Processor 740 (#) supports Enhanced Intel® SpeedStep Technology (1.73GHz, 2MB L2 cache, 533MHz FSB)
Operating system FreeDOS
Standard memory 256MB (1 x 256MB) DDR SDRAM (333MHz)
Maximum memory Upgradeable to 2GB max (with discard)
System memory 256MB (1 x 256MB) DDR SDRAM (333MHz) upgradeable to 2GB
Cache 2MB Level-2 Cache
Hard drive 40GB (4200 rpm)
Optical drive DVD/CD-RW combo
Graphics Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 900 (up to 64MB Shared Memory)
Modem High speed 56K modem
Network Integrated 10/100 LAN Ethernet, integrated wireless LAN 802.11g
Battery 6-cell Lithium-Ion battery
Display 15" colour TFT XGA (1024 x 768 resolution)
Pointing device Touchpad pointing device with 4-way scroll
I/O interfaces (1) 6-in-1 Digital Media Reader slot, (1) IEEE 1394 port, (1) S-video port, (1) VGA port, (1) Notebook expansion port, (1) Headphone, (1) External Microphone, (1) AC power connector, (1) RJ-11, (1) RJ-45, (3) USB 2.0 ports
Security features Kensington MicroSaver lock slot
PC card slots (1) Type I/II PC Card Slot with support for 16-bit PCMCIA and 32-bit Cardbus
Status display System Power, NUM Lock, CAPS Lock, SCROLL Lock, Battery charging, HDD/Optical activity, Media slot, Mute, Wireless
Audio Altec Lansing branded speakers, AC97 audio, volume control and mute button
Keyboard 101-key compatible keyboard
Dimensions 3.81cm(H) x 36.32cm(W) x 28.45cm(D)
Weight 2.95kg – may vary, depending on configuration and components

At last, consumers have the power to choose what they want and don’t have to pay extra RM300.00 for the unwanted Operating System. This is a very good news especially for *NIX users. Way to go HP! I really hope that this same option is made by HP all over the world.

Too bad I bought mine with XP preinstalled. 🙁

Keranamu Malaysia

For this special entry of Malaysia’s 48th Independence Anniversary I will be writing in Malay.

malaysia_flag.gif 

Hari ini, tanggal 31 Ogos 2005 Malaysia meraikan ulangtahun kemerdekaan ke-48. Banyak yang telah berlaku sejak hari bersejarah 31 Ogos 1957. Malaysia kini lebih matang dan melangkah pantas ke arah kemajuan.

Sudah tentulah, apa sahaja yang ingin dicapai semestinya datang dengan harga yang tertentu. Malaysian semakin maju, taraf hidup rakyat semakin baik, namun agak sedih apabila mengenangkan semakin banyak keruntuhan akhlak dan moral yang berlaku di sini. Tidak kurang juga, Malaysia yang dahulunya aman damai semakin tercemar dengan kes-kes jenayah yang tidak berhenti-henti. Kes bunuh, ragut, rogol, rasuah, dan sebagainya bagaikan lumrah kehidupan saban hari. Menonton Buletin Utama di TV3 sudah cukup, tidak perlu lagi menonton filem-filem Hollywood.

Saya tidak akan menyentuh langsung perihal politik di sini. Politik adalah amat kompleks bagi saya dan ada di mana-mana sahaja di muka bumi. 

Saya bukanlah seorang tokoh masyarakat ataupun seorang ahli bijak pandai, oleh itu rasanya kurang layak bagi saya untuk memberikan pendapat yang lebih mengenai masalah-masalah negara. Tetapi apa yang nyata, kekal nyata. Hanya dengan menggunakan akal biasa saja kita fikirkan… Malaysia sudah merdeka sejak 48 tahun yang lalu, merdekakah budaya dan akal rakyat kita? 

Keranamu Malaysia… Selamat ulangtahun kemerdekaan ke 48! 

Services and Price List

Since I have received a lot of requests and people complaining about getting prices for specific services, I have created my own price estimation list for your convenience. For interested parties, please do not hesitate to contact me directly via email (ady at romantika dot name) or (ady dot romantika at gmail dot com).

I am ready to consider lowering the prices a little if you’re a home user or a student (or group of students). Just email me first with all the details. If you’re a company, try looking for other companies providing the same services and compare the prices with my services. You’ll see that my prices are much lower. If not, just show me the quotations and I shall see what I can do. Not exactly TESCO or Carrefour style. 🙂

FYI I am in the process of registering a company, so later we will have formal stationeries and documents for your convenience.

You can download the list here (in PDF format). 

By the way, if you have read my previous articles and have comments, do leave some for me to improve. If you have any questions regarding Linux or IT in general, send me a request and I shall try to write. Just note that I am a technical writer, so don’t expect too many political or review type articles here.

Afdlin Shauki Dah Hilang Akal

Did you guys ever heard of Afdlin’s new album (Fuyoo)? I did a while ago, but I don’t see it on the shelves of music stores. Anyway, Afdlin has initiated a project Afdlin Shauki Dah Hilang Akal where he’ll mail you the CD/cassette to your doorstep. Read about it at the official page made by Afdlin: http://hilangakal.blogspot.com/

I’m still waiting for mine, as I just emailed him asking for a copy. I just hope he hasn’t run out of it yet! 😉

I read about this in Pancaindera (Mingguan Malaysia) this morning at Sungai Petani. Read it online here.

Ooopsss… Google Dit It Again

gdesktop.pngGoogle has released its latest release of Google Desktop. Google Desktop 2, now includes a sidebar suitable for nerds like me.

Features of Google Desktop 2 includes: 

Email: This panel will display all of your latest emails in your gmail inbox. If you think nobody will look over your shoulder or you have nothing to hide, this will be great to display on your panel.

Google Talk: Google Talk is integrated directly inside the sidebar, so it won’t mess your desktop. Google Talk is one of the latest addition to the Google family. 

News: This panel collects and display feeds, most probably from Google News. Google News syndicates and retrieves news from all over the world.

Photos: I don’t know how this work, but the panel displays randomly photos that it can find from your hard drive. It displays the photos in slideshow style. Cool.

Quick View: This panel displays the latest (or most frequent) items you have opened. This is an easy tool for people withmemory loss problem. 😉

Scratch Pad: Another tool, which conveniently waits for you to scratch something on it. Think of it as a notepad, only that it sits on your screen. The contents then can be saved somewhere.

Stocks: This panel displays selected stock quotes and information of the symbols you select. Useful for investors. Not in realtime, though.

Weather: A very useful tool, especially for those in the USA. I’ll just keep it hidden until Google covers the area where I live.

Web Clips: RSS reader. My Thunderbird will thank Google for this. Now I have all my favorite feeds displayed on my desktop, waiting for me to click on them. There’s a nice feature where when you click on a title, it’ll display the summary first and it is up to you whether you want to see the full story.

What’s Hot: This panel displays Hot News from the Internet. So far I see a lot of entertainment news, and since I am not very interested in entertainment, I keep it hidden.

That’s it so far.

Google Desktop 2 also uses a new indexing method, but I can’t see much different in terms of disk usage. Overall, I think Google has improved the performance a little.

I think that’s enough for now. Have a try yourself, and let me know whether you like it.

🙂 

 

Jabberd2 initscript for Debian

I was compiling and installing jabberd2 on a server at office and everything went great except for one thing: no initscript provided. I was baffled to find out that the great software didn’t have any initscript. So I wrote one:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53

#! /bin/sh
#
# Script to start/stop jabberd2 on a Debian
#
# by Ady Romantika, 23 August 2005
#
 
DAEMON=/usr/local/bin/jabberd
NAME=jabberd2
DESC=jabberd2
JABBERUSER=jabber
 
# Uncomment if needs debugging
DEBUG="-D"
 
# PID files base locations
PIDBASE=/usr/local/var/jabberd/pid
 
case "$1" in
   start)
   	echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
   	su $JABBERUSER -c "/usr/local/bin/jabberd $DEBUG &"
	echo "$NAME."
      ;;
   stop)
      echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
      if [ -e $PIDBASE/router.pid ];
      then
        su $JABBERUSER -c "kill -9 `cat $PIDBASE/sm.pid`"
	echo "$NAME."
      else
        echo "jabberd2 is not started."
      fi
      # Delete the PID files as jabberd does not do this automatically
      rm -rf $PIDBASE/router.pid \
               $PIDBASE/resolver.pid \
               $PIDBASE/sm.pid \
               $PIDBASE/s2s.pid \
               $PIDBASE/c2s.pid
      ;;
   restart)
      $0 stop
      sleep 3
      $0 start
      ;;
   *)
      N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
      echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload}" >&2
      exit 1
      ;;
esac
 
exit 0

The script might work with other distributions with minor modifications. 🙂 

jabberd is one of the many server softwares for the popular jabber open instant messaging protocol. If you need logging for your jabber server, you might be interested in Bandersnatch provided by Funky Penguin.

Update: 31 August 2005

There’s an rc script provided for jabberd2, but it is written with Fedora in mind. The script is more complicated, and probably is better. I didn’t have the time to check it out yet. You can download it at http://www.jabberstudio.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/jabberd2/tools/ 

Haze Haze Go Away

At first, everyone has thought that this haze will end in a few days. No one ever expected that it could be the worst haze episode ever. With API reaching critical levels here and there, it’s a nightmare. Emergency state have also been declared in two areas; Port Klang and Kuala Selangor where the API levels have reached over 500.

API VALUE STATUS

  • 0 – 50 – Good
  • 51 – 100 – Moderate
  • 101 – 200 – Unhealthy
  • 201 – 300 – Very unhealthy
  • 301 – 500 – Dangerous

API readings for multiple locations in the country can be found at Jabatan Alam Sekitar: http://www.jas.sains.my/jas/default.html

NEW WEBSITES DEDICATED TO HAZE

MALAYSIAN COMPANY INVOLVEMENT?

I am currently following on Jeff Ooi’s website to get the latest news on haze. Since yesterday, there were also news that some Malaysian-owned companies are involved in the fire in Sumatera. Quote: "Yesterday, Jakarta Post reported that Malaysian companies own large tracts of oil-palm plantation in Sumatra, and that these Malaysian-owned operations are often said to be behind the burning or to be turning a blind eye to it."

To read more, check out Jeff Ooi’s site – Screenshots 

GOOGLE EARTH

The following image was saved from Google Earth: 

haze.jpg

Oh well… with all of the efforts being done this year, I hope it’ll not happen again NEXT year! 

System Administrator Appreciation Day

I just found out that yesterday (the last Friday of July) is the System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Quote: "Let’s face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work. But seriously, we are asking for a nice token gift and some public acknowledgement. It’s the least you could do. Consider all the daunting tasks and long hours (weekends too.) Let’s be honest, sometimes we don’t know our System Administrators as well as they know us. Remember this is one day to recognize your System Administrator for their workplace contributions and to promote professional excellence. Thank them for all the things they do for you and your business."

Oh well, if I just found out about this, it’s not a wonder that other people didn’t know about this either. 🙁

Some fun things to read (well, at least they are fun for me) and i hope all the people in my workplace can read:

Happy SysAdmin Day to all SysAdmins out there.

Salary Survey

I am initiating a salary survey for research purpose. If you are a System Administrator (SysAdmin), I’d appreciate it if you email me your annual salary information at [email protected]

It is entirely up to you whether you want to be anonymous or not. SysAdmins include Linux administrators, network administrators, etc. It would be helpful if you provide a little bit of information on your tasks and workscope as well.

Important details that are needed:

  • Exact position title
  • Location
  • Currency
  • Also let me know are you satisfied with your current salary and whether you feel underpaid/overpaid/don’t feel anything. 

I shall post the results here periodically. There’s no expiry date to this survey… the longer the better so that I can see the changes within time.

Thanks! 

Where Did My Disk Space Go?

Although I am a Linux user, I do enjoy from time to time strolling around Windows. Especially since my Windows XP price was included with my notebook 😉

For the last few weeks I have been puzzled why my free space on drive C: keep decreasing eventhough I have not installed anything. Yeah I know, temp files, cache, etc. are in drive C: but the decrease was big!

After ransacking my notebook for a while, I finally found the culprit. It’s Google Desktop data!!! Anyway it’s OK I still love it, just that I have to free up some space. Google Desktop is a great utility for you to find stuff hidden away inside your computer. Oh well. Prove? Here you are:

googledesktop.png 

As fragmentation is becoming worst and worst, I later tried to format a partition, (actually I was saving up this partition for Solaris 10, just didn’t have the time to install it) and I was so lazy that I decided to use Windows’ Disk Manager. The next day back from work I was planning to uninstall and install software to the newly formatted partition but… my Linux partitions were all corrupted (and grub wouldn’t boot)! At that moment I immediately regretted my decision of using Window’s Disk Manager. Oh anyway lucky that my /home partition is still safe, and a knoppix CD lying around.

I booted up knoppix and used qtparted to reformat the corrupted drive. All is safe. However this has brought into attention this matters, which I have discussed in my previous posts here: Debian unstable immediately install Xorg so no need to manually update packages to make use of dri anymore! Cool.

So now I have my notebook all healthy again. As for Google Desktop, it’s still there, serving me when I am using my Windows XP 😀