Windows 98 screenshot from the 6-year-old Compaq Presario (click to enlarge)

HIS blog post is not concerned with giving away a laptop, but rather about my recent decision to give up laptops altogether. In this item I have collected some notes on my reasons for neglecting the world of mobile computers that are simply over-sized and are thus not contributory quite so often.

For increased productivity (e.g. dual-head, fast Ethernet), I find desktop machines to be an absolute necessity. I have learned this over time and I recently gave up the laptop which I had lugged for 6 years. It used to serve me fairly well while travelling, yet travel is the exception, which does correspond with daily requirements.

There are endless issues with laptops: hardware upgrades, components that become difficult to replace or even find (e.g. built-in speakers). These are just a few among the more prominent factors. One cannot ignore inflexibility with regards to hardware probing and peculiar vendor-specific drivers. I am not necessarily referring to Linux to Windows (or vice versa) migrations, but also to ‘intra-O/S’ migrations where drivers may be missing and so-called QuickRestore CD’s (factory defaults) can never resolve recurring incompatibilities.

I ultimately decided to stick to a PDA, preferably with folding keyboard. Along with desktop wordstation/s it works flawlessly unless one travels all the time. I have become accustomed to this over time. Synchronisation of memos with the desktop gives me the convenience I have probably sought all along.

A week back I became familiar with the World Community Grid. Described in their own words,

World Community Grid’s mission is to create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.

Our work has developed the technical infrastructure that serves as the grid’s foundation for scientific research. Our success depends upon individuals collectively contributing their unused computer time to change the world for the better.

I am hoping for my medical imaging research to become part of a localised research grid. Fortunately, this may actually happen sooner than I had anticipated. Yesterday I handed over C/C++ code to become a Web service.

I also have particular intersting in the way grid computing can assist the Web. My recent initiative called Iuron, once resumed, might rely on available, idle computer resources.

VER wondered how quickly and trivially you could produce plain-text banners for a given word, name, or slogan? Using fixed-sized characters and common cross-platform fontsets, you can use an on-line tool to produce banners of choice. This obviates the need for manual and laborious composition or ‘off-the-shelf’ ASCII graphics (my long-standing favourite source). Below is some example output from the tool:

The real issue is trying to fit the characters properly given fonts that are not the same as specified in the original site. This tool might be valuable, on occasions at least, for E-mail that is plain-text or even for UseNet/newsgroups.

Other Internet-based tools:

• Cyborg Name Generator
• Polaroid Images
• Name Popularity

RedHat Linux

previously mentioned the $100 laptop initiative and repeatedly referred to cheap computers in general. An article in the Wall Street Journal now claims that the $100 laptop is nearing reality. It will supposedly run Red Hat Linux on AMD processors.

A novel plan to develop a $100 laptop computer for distribution to millions of schoolchildren in developing countries has caught the interest of governments and the attention of computer-industry heavyweights.

Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.’s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company’s operating system, OS X, for the machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative’s founders. “We declined because it’s not open source,” says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Older items on inexpensive hardware:

• How Cheap Can Computers Become?
• Cost-effective Computers
• Dirt-Cheap Computers
• Expensive Developers, Cheap Hardware

The new Dell XPS 600

ELL are trying to lure more customers using superficiality of looks. Dell have recently seen a sharp drop in earnings, particularly due to hardware repairs.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Dell Inc. is trying to spice up its image — and turn around lagging sales growth — by shaking Apple Computer Inc.’s hold on hipness, but it may be tough to match its smaller rival’s flair.

OR several years I have retained one spreadsheet on my Palm handheld. This was, in fact, a crude timesheet which was needed for work. Several months ago I decided to migrate everything to OpenOffice and access that spreadsheet using SSH from virtually any connected Linux box. This sounded reasonable at first, but frequent updates made this rather impractical and cumbersome.

Later on, I decided to export all data from OpenOffice as plain HTML tables and then repeatedly modify the HTML files on my Web server. This was rather time-consuming, so I sought alternatives which I knew existed.

I wound up using a Web-based spreadsheet application that is very light and retains all data as comma-separated values (thus no database needed). That powerful tool was Open Source, as always.

phpWebSheet has powerful and advanced (from a Web-based point-of-view) features such as tabular copy-and-paste, Wiki-styled formatting, and support for formulas/functions. In my perception, it is yet another winning application for PHP. There are many similar free applications at freshmeat.net, but I only investigated two which appeared better-suited for the purpose and rather mature too.

Spreadsheets are of course password-protected, but can still be accessed rapidly from everywhere at any time. All in all, the transition was a rewarding one. I sometimes wonder if I should have just stuck to the Palm PDA rather than make a progressive 3-step transition (as outlined above).

Spreadsheets have been on my Palm for years, virtually seconds away at pocket’s distance. Nonetheless, Being a Web technologies fanatic, I am always enthusiastic about ‘Webward’ transitions. On that same batch of installations, I set up phpshell which enables me to obtain shell access to my shared Web server. I can even see what the administrators are up to. This does not require a cron job hack as I once described.

Access to so many free packages (roughly a dozen of them on my domain already) is why I love Linux and the GNU ideaology.

I stumbled upon free OpenOffice training videos in a variety of news sources this morning. Although the videos demonstrate the recently-released OpenOffice 2 in a Windows environment, these are just as relevant to Linux users.

As a public service for Commonwealth of Massachusetts employees (and everyone else), NewsForge is presenting — absolutely free of charge — 11 OpenOffice.org training videos as part of this article.