Dear All!

For a month I’ve been using mentioned Asus U30jc, a stronger version, here’s some official specifications. I have a i5 520M and 500G HDD version.

For Polish readers: there’s a nice “pro” review in here: http://www.notebookcheck.pl/Recenzja-Asus-U30JC.29433.0.html

General impression

It’s pretty small, because its diagonal is 13.3” only. Such a choice was made because of portability – tests indicate about 5-8 hrs of continuous work. As shown in pictures under the article it’s metal styled, looks elegant but aggressive as well. Touch pad is not deep, keyboard is nearly natural size. Speakers are placed on the front panel, quite an effective solution. Overall quality of product is satisfying. Read more

After a long time – here comes a new post.

First of all – a question: how many devices, applications, services using some kind of contacts do you have? Mobile phone, or two, gmail, MS Outlook fetching mail from plenty of accounts…

Some of above have calendar features or even notes or email ones.

I have 4 such things. And one day, not very long ago, I found it confusing. And annoying: on each device or application contacts were disjointed. If I wanted to write a message to a friend – I had to think first where the contact information may be.

Or even better: some calendar events were at Google Calendar, some on my Nokia and some were written down in MS Outlook. Let’s keep in mind that some of them were doubled. Or tripled. Disaster…

First try

I tried to find a solution. Free solution, which got complicated. There are some free cloud solution, i.e. Google’s. http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/

I worked nearly great, because there’s no support for MS Outlook 2010. So I did a trick: I synced my Nokia to Gmail’s contacts and calendar via Mail for Exchange (http://www.businesssoftware.nokia.com/mail_for_exchange_downloads.php) and then MS Outlook to Nokia via Nokia PC Suite. Tutorials available all over the Internet are pretty descent, no problems should arise during configuration.

Running first synchronization was just a half of a success, because in my phone many items were doubled – because email address and phone number were separated into two contact entries. Fortunately traffic jams in Warsaw are enough time-consuming and within a few days I merged contacts manually. Then I did sync again and my life became easier!

Month or two later…

The solution mentioned before wasn’t enough. I couldn’t synchronize my web-mail (RoundCube or Horde) and idea of copying contacts manually isn’t funny at all. I’ve found and open source solution https://www.forge.funambol.org/DomainHome.html called Funambol – it allows you to run own synchronization server and community gives you connectors to Gmail, MS Outlook and mobile devices. And a Horde connector!

For now I’m negotiating possibility of running such a server with my hosting provider. So stay tuned, because due to poor tutorials about syncing Horde next post may be valuable!

Edit: 23.07.2010

Provider said no. So I had to export contacts to Roundcube manually: I exported (synced) contacts form Gmail and imported them in Roundcube. Seems to work The moral is: not everything can be automated…

Po raz pierwszy w Warszawie – festiwal Chopin Open! 11-13 czerwca tego roku!

http://www.chopinopen.pl/

Niepowtarzalna szansa na ucztę chopinowską, w wykonaniu wielu światowej sławy artystów, w miejscach o przejmującej i głębokiej artystycznej atmosferze. Kto się wybiera? Ja obowiązkowo!

Od kilku już lat z przyjemnością korzystam z progamu TagScanner (strona domowa). Jest to idealne narzędzie, które pomaga mi zarządzać plikami mp3, które leżą, bądź pojawiają się, na moim dysku.

Program obsługuje wszystkie popularne formaty muzyczne, a jego główne cechy to:

• generowanie nazw plików w oparciu o definiowalne wzorce korzystające z informacji z ID3 tagów
• pobieranie ID3 tagów z freedb.com do posiadanych płyt
• generowanie ID3 tagów z nazw plików
• player
• generator playlist

Gdzie ten program się przydaje? Ano – nienawidzę, gdy mp3ki, które mam nie posiadają ID3 tagów. Wbrew pozorom nie zdarza się to rzadko w kontekście plików napływających z sieci. A to brakuje numeru utworu, a to tytułu… Ręczne uzupełnianie zakrawa o bezsens, ale dobrze, że można pobrać komplet informacji o albumie z sieci.

Inną denerwującą sytuacją jest zmianianie nazw plików – bo chcę, żeby nr utworu był na początku, potem wykonawca, tytuł… Ręczna modyfikacja jest.. smutna. A przy pomocy TagScannera – to jedno kliknięcie. No, dwa. W przypadku ściągania muzyki z różnych serwisów – właściciele portalu dodają prefiks albo sufiks do nazwy każdego pliku. Bardzo denerwujące. Tagscanner jest rozwiązaniem.

Ripując pliki z CD np. do FLACa nie trzeba mozolnie wklepywać nazw utworów, ustalać wzorców nazwywania – bo potem przy pomocy Tagscannera – to wszystko robi się szybko i przyjemnie.

Plusem jest to, że program jest ciągle rozwijany, ma przyjemną szatę graficzną i ogromną ilość możliwości.

Nie jest to jednak program do codziennego użytku – bo jak często pojawiają się na dysku ripy albumów? Ale gdy już się pojawią – TagScanner jest nieodzowny.

Due to a course about real time operating systems I was to install a QNX 6.4.1 on my computer. Having it installed under VMWare Player i wanted to have a possibility to connect to QNX via WinSCP to transfer files easily. That wasn’t that easy, it took me some time, but there’s a solution how to run sshd server under QNX 6.4.1 RTOS:

You have to run sshd with full path, otherwise you’ll get “sshd re-exec requires execution with an obsolete path” error message. So:

/usr/sbin/sshd

But then we get such an output:

Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key
Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key
Disabling protocol version 2. Could not load host key
sshd: no hostkeys available -- exiting.

We need to generate those files. What is very important – while generating – you must provide NO passwords, otherwise sshd will not be able to read those files. Random numbers generator should be also fired, so:

random -t
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key -b 1024
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
ssh-keygen -t dsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key

We should be able to launch sshd server. Hooray!

But wait, it’s impossible to connect via ssh with user root under this OS! We have to add a new user. Under QNX there’s different command for this, comparing to the other *nixes. Type the following, where user_name is your new user name:

passwd user_name

After that answer for a few questions. Lastly you have to update /etc/group file. A little help for understanding groups is here: http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/qnx_4.25_docs/qnx4/user_guide/accounts.html . You can edit this file by:

vi /etc/group

Add your recently created username to adequate groups, my group file look like that:

root:x:0:root
bin:x:1:root,bin,profetes
daemon:x:2:daemon,profetes
sys:x:3:root,bin,adm,profetes
adm:x:4:root,adm,daemon,profetes
tty:x:5:root,profetes
sshd:x:6:root,profetes
mail:x:40:mail
news:x:50:news
uucp:x:60:uucp
ftp:x:80:ftp,profetes
guest:x:90:
nobody:x:99:

After that you should be able to connect to your QNX via ssh! Congratualtions!

To have sshd launched everytime QNX boots up you have to add it to launching scripts. Without it you’ll have to fire /ust/sbin/sshd every time you power on your machine.

Any feedback is appreciated