idle();

Prolonging the battery life on your laptop/netbook running Ubuntu

2010-12-09T15:50:00.043+02:00

mdz pointed me to Idea 24782 over at Ubuntu Brainstorm that urges the Ubuntu community to increase focus on making Ubuntu run longer on devices with batteries. I support the idea wholeheartedly. Since the advent of laptops and netbooks, users have wanted to stretch the battery to last that extra 15 minutes it'll require for them to finish up their email or their documents.

In fact, the most popular idea ever on Brainstorm is about fixing suspend and hibernate. Unfortunately, it ended up becoming a whirlpool of several different ideas, albeit with a common theme - making the battery last longer.

There are several things that can be done to make the battery on a mobile device last longer - some under user control, others under OS/firmware control and some others dependent on HW capabilities.

I am going to attempt to summarize the various use profiles and what Ubuntu does (or can do) to prolong battery life in those profiles. Power management, when done right, should not require the user to make several (difficult) choices. It should just work - providing a good balance of performance and battery life.

Battery Maintenance

Let's start with the most basic fact of mobile devices - most have batteries made with Lithium technology (LI-ON mostly). These have a typical life of 2-3 years because then have a limited number of charge/discharge cycles (between 300-1000, check your manual)[1][2]. Keeping your mobile battery in good shape will make it last longer. Hence,

Don't keep the mobile device plugged into mains all the time; letting the battery discharge is important for it's longevity. If you must do leave it in all the time, consider removing the battery (at the risk of losing your work on power failure).
Don't expose the battery to high temperatures. The cooler your working environment (including your laptop chassis), the longer your battery will keep its charge.

Toward this end, solution 3 is a very good suggestion. gnome-power-manager, for instance, could tell us when to unplug the power cord.

When not using the device for long periods (greater than 4 hours)

Turning off the device when not in use for long periods is an obvious way to improve your battery life. With Ubuntu booting in under 30 seconds on most machines now and ~15 seconds on machines with SSDs[3] this is a good option.

Using suspend (to RAM) here continues to drain the battery (about 25% per day on most machines I've had). That means 4 days of suspend just reduced the remaining charge/discharge cycles by one.

Hibernate (suspend to disk) is a better option than suspend here since the state will be saved to disk and the machine turned off completely. But in practice, with the current implementation of hibernate in Linux, we take almost as long to restore the disk image on resume as a fresh boot up. So hibernate really isn't my preference. If hibernate could be made a lot faster, it could become more attractive than a fresh boot.

When not using the device for short periods (under 4 hours)

This is a very common case when you're using your device on the go - at the airport or a conference or a coffee-shop or a meeting. You use the mobile device for a while, then close the lid to move to a new location or to concentrate on the discussion, etc.

You do one of two things: let the device idle with the lid open or close the lid and let the device suspend. We need to ensure that both these cases draw the least possible power. This requires co-operation from the applications and Linux drivers.

Idling device

When a device is left to idle (no keystroke or mouse/touchpad movement), power saving policy kicks in through gnome-power-manager and dims the backlight and turns off the display. Other devices should autoidle themselves when not in use. This needs in this mode are identical needs in the active mode discussed below - shutting down unused hardware.

Suspend

The default action for Ubuntu when the laptop lid is closed it to try to suspend the device. New batteries can last several days in this state if it all works correctly.

However, it requires every device in the laptop to be put into a low-power/off state. These include the camera, backlight display, lcd display, wireless, bluetooth, usb ports, ethernet ports, mmc controller, graphics chip and cpu. In other words, each device driver has to do the right thing. If driver is buggy, a device/peripheral won't go in to a low power state and the high consumption could drain your battery quickly. Hence this work to fix drivers never really ends with hundreds of new components being introduced into the market each year that need drivers to work in Linux. Only a very small proportion of them, however, cause problems with suspend.

The most common problems related to suspend seen in Ubuntu are related to the backlight or LCD staying on or the graphics chip getting wedged. Video drivers are the cause of a large proportion of these problems, but one that we can't always fix by ourselves since documentation is not always available. Canonical works with graphics card vendors to ensure the new versions of the drivers support suspend and don't cause regressions with older graphics cards.

The Ubuntu Kernel Team provides a script to stress test suspend/resume on your machine.

One corner case we don't handle gracefully in Ubuntu is the case of running out of battery while suspended. We should detect this condition, automatically wakeup and hibernate the system to save state rather than just let the laptop die with unsaved state.

When we're actively using the device

Suspend/hibernate are only interesting when we're not actively using the mobile device. But we need to minimize power consumption during active use as well. This is often called runtime or dynamic power management. It involves turning off all unnecessary hardware or at least running it in low power mode.

Common examples include:

Turn off audio chip when not playing sounds (pm-utils enables powersave mode for Intel audio chips)
Turn off bluetooth chip when not paired
Turn off WLAN when not used for networking
Scale down the CPU voltage/frequency when you don't need the highest performance (cpufreq with ondemand governor enabled).
Idle the CPU when not in use for short periods of time (cpuidle and menu governor enabled)

Further enhancements being investigated and worked on upstream

Reducing display refresh rates (reclocking)
Clock gating (cutting clocks to parts of the graphics chip) to save power. This is a very common technique on ARM-based devices e.g. on your mobile phone
Memory hotplugging to switch off parts of the memory banks
USB autoidling (not supported on all usb devices)
Turning off unused ports e.g. External VGA

Lesswatts.org has several interesting articles on the topic of power management on Linux. Powertop is a tool that can be used to see what frequencies (p-states) and idle states (c-states) your cpu supports and what applications are responsible for waking up the CPU.

Miscellaneous optimisations

Undervolting allows us to reduce the voltage on certain processors as mentioned in Solution #6. But the patches have been rejected upstream because there is no easy way to tell which processors have these capabilities and which don't. Hence they won't be considered in Ubuntu.

Non-Intel platforms

While x86 processors rule the PC/laptop market, the mobile phone market is ruled by ARM processors. These processors are popular for their extremely low power consumption compared to x86 processors. In the past, they had limited performance, but lately you can find dual-core 1GHz ARM processors that would be able to handle the basic computing tasks of web browsing, email, chat, video/voice calls with ease.

While there aren't many netbook-like ARM-based devices in the market at present, many are expected to start showing up next year. Currently, one can get a Genesi smartbook that uses an older generation single-core Cortex-A8-based Freescale i.MX51 processor that can get ~5hours of battery on a 31Wh battery or a Toshiba AC100 that uses a new dual-core Cortex-A9-based Nvidia Tegra 250 processor that gets ~8h on a tiny 25Wh battery.

Organisations such as Linaro are working to speed up development of such devices on the ARM platform. Linaro partners such as Freescale, TI, IBM, ST-E and Samsung are working to make ARM a first-class Linux platform, not just for mobile phones, but for general-purpose computing devices too.

Disclaimer: I lead the Power Management working group in Linaro.

Topics of Interest

In conclusion, Ubuntu could focus efforts in the following areas to prolong the battery life on mobile devices and generally improve the Ubuntu experience on battery-powered devices:

Teach g-p-m to prompt user when to plug/unplug power cord based on charging history (including deep discharges once in a while)
Investigate ways to speed up hibernate to be faster than a fresh boot
Allow graceful handling of the case where the battery runs out while suspended by waking up and hibernating the system
Turn off bluetooth hardware by default, activate it only when user requests it and remember the active/inactive setting
Turn off external VGA ports by default and activate it only upon user request
Investigate whether graphics toolkits stop drawing to screen when screen is off
Make sure Ubuntu on ARM-based chips runs as well as, if not better than the mobile OSes that've been traditionally used on these chips.

[1] http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

[2] http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/

cross-compilation re-redux

2010-09-09T10:53:00.004+03:00

Sigh!

I don't think I'm going to get the cross-compilation article right, ever!

The repository has now moved to a Launchpad PPA.

So, for Maverick, you can do the following:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:hrw/arm-cross-compiler
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi g++-arm-linux-gnueabigcc

Eventually, the idea is to replace this PPA as well, because the cross-compiler will be available in Ubuntu.

cross-compilation redux

2010-09-08T12:17:00.008+03:00

It has been a while since my last blog post about developing for ARM platforms. We last looked at how to cross-compile the kernel. It is time to revisit that recipe.

Linaro

I've been working with Linaro for the last few months to improve the toolchain, kernel and other components of Linux plumbing on ARM. There is also work to refactor the partner BSPs so that they can co-exist peacefully i.e. single kernel source tree, single u-boot tree, etc. We're just getting started but you can see the status for the first Linaro release in November.

Cross-compile toolchains

One of the first things that an embedded project has had to do is roll their own toolchain. This is obviously wasted time and effort. Linaro is attempting to fix this problem by pushing fixes into gcc upstream and by providing a standard toolchain for ARM development. This toolchain will take advantages of features of the ARMv7 architecture (NEON acceleration, various performance optimisations, SMP support, etc.). Some of this work in already available in the next release of Ubuntu (10.10 aka Maverick). Tarballs are available for other distributions.

If you're compiling your software for ARM, you should consider switching to this toolchain.

Cross-compile toolchain for Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick

The Toolchain working group at Linaro has made available a gcc-4.4 and gcc-4.5-based cross toolchains. For Maverick, just type the following in your terminal:

echo "deb http://people.canonical.com/~hrw/ubuntu-maverick-armel-cross-compilers/ ./" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cross-compile.list

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi g++-arm-linux-gnueabi

Cross-compile toolchain for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS aka Lucid
If you're not brave enough to run Maverick beta, the same toolchain can be made to work on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with some additional steps.

Install the maverick versions of two libraries: libmpfr4, libcloog-ppl0
Follow the steps for Maverick above

Cross-compiling the Ubuntu Kernel

Time to take the shiny cross-toolchain for a testdrive:

git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-maverick.git
~~debuild -eCROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- -b -aarmel~~
Unfortunately this command breaks because of perf, I believe. It complains about libelf/libdw missing. I'll try to update with a dpkg-cross command when i get a chance.

Cross-compiling other stuff

And here is how you could use it to compile non-debian packages:

make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-

Enjoy!

Flight pricing madness

2010-05-31T00:16:00.003+03:00

I was looking at my options to takes a flight from Helsinki to Prague on a business trip. AFAICT, there are only 2 outgoing flights from Helsinki to Prague on my preferred day of departure - one leaving at 16:45 and the other at 17:35.

And I got price quotes from €232 to €1151! (Pictures linked below) WTF?

AFAICS, the flights are a code-share between Finnair and Czech Airlines. But can that be the only reason?

Anybody have a better explanation?

Touchscreen = fail?

2009-08-06T11:55:00.005+03:00

Do you have a touchscreen that isn't working in Ubuntu? We need your help!

We are trying to get as many touchscreens working as possible for Karmic. Bug #317094 is attempting to collect hardware information about these them. As a first step, we'd like to enable the ones that can use the in-kernel usbtouchscreen driver.

Do you have a touchscreen?
Is it connected over USB? (lsusb is your friend)
Get the vendor and product id of the USB touchscreen (lsub)
Load the usbtouchscreen module and add the new id to it through sysfs

A made-up example follows (I don't have a touchscreen handy, sorry!)

example output from lsusb

Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0483:2016 SGS Thomson Microelectronics Fingerprint Reader

0483 is the vendor id, 2016 is the product id
sudo modprobe usbtouchscreen
sudo sh -c "echo 0483 2016 > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usbtouchscreen/new_id"

Replace the vendor and product id with what you found from lsusb.

If this makes your touchscreen work in Karmic, please reply on the bug with the ids and name of the touchscreen.

Speeding up boot on an upgraded system

2009-06-24T17:33:00.003+03:00

So I have a laptop that I've been upgrading since Hardy (currently on Karmic Alpha) that I would like to boot faster. It has probably accumulated a lot of crufty daemons along the way that probably aren't being pre-loaded into memory. I picked up this tidbit from the fast boot expert. Add profile to your kernel command-line (at the grub prompt, press Esc e and then edit the line). This will update your system's readahead file list after a lot of disk churn. On my machine, it sped up boot by only about 5 seconds, but YMMV.

Also, if you have a machine or netbook with SSD (flash) disks, sreadahead might give you a boost. Again, apt-get install sreadahread is your friend. sreadahead also schedules profiling of the system every month-or-so, so it keeps those boot-essential programs in the readahead cache always.

Ubuntu kernels, vanilla kernels, kerneloops

2009-02-13T13:10:00.007+02:00

First, go read Pete's summary about the going-ons in Jaunty kernel-land.

The only bit I would like to add is to install the kerneloops package. This nifty little application will scan your logs for any crashes/warnings in the kernel and report them upstream as well as to Launchpad. This helps upstream and Ubuntu developers get an idea of what bugs a vast majority of their users sees and allows them to prioritize their time.

We are working toward getting it installed by default for beta, but for those of you that upgrade and keep a tight rein on what's installed please consider installing kerneloops.

sudo apt-get install kerneloops

Recipe of the day: Cross-compiling armel kernels

2009-01-23T10:52:00.010+02:00

ARM kernels can be very slow to bake because:

ARM HW can be memory constrained so Native compilation is slow
Setting up Native compilation for several boards is rather painful, if you, like me, have to compile several flavours everyday.
Compiling under QEMU is mind-numbingly slow

Here, we bake all the Ubuntu ARM kernels using a single command on you x86 PC using a cross-compiler.

Ingredients

A x86 machine running Ubuntu
A ready-to-use cross-compilation toolchain
Something software to compile, say, a kernel

Instructions

Get an ARM toolchain and set it up

I was too lazy to compile mine and got one from CodeSorcery. I used the 2008q3-72 tarball.

Untar it someplace in your $HOME, say $HOME/work/toolchains. You should now have a directory $HOME/work/toolchains/2008q3-72/bin with your cross-toolchain binaries.

Download the Ubuntu kernel

cd $HOME/work
git clone git://zinc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-jaunty.git
cd ubuntu-jaunty

Compile the kernel

debuild -eCROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- --prepend-path=$HOME/work/toolchains/arm-2008q3/bin -b -aarmel

Bake it

Let it bake for an hour or two, depending upon the speed of you oven^Wprocessor. If everything goes according to plan, you should have several .deb cookies for the various ARMel flavours of the Ubuntu kernel. Enjoy and share with friends and family.

Ubuntu on ARM

2008-11-14T15:04:00.007+02:00

So the wraps are off on this one - Ubuntu will soon come to a ARMv7-based SoC near you. Here are the press releases from ARM and Canonical if you are into reading those.

I'm going to be adding support for several popular ARM-based devices to the Ubuntu kernel soon.

Please refer to my other post to get familiar with nomenclature in the ARM world if you need.

If you've followed Debian, they've had an armel port (ARM-endian-little), based on the new ARM ABI for a while now. A link to the excellent Debian EABI is in order for people interested in the nitty-gritty of ABIs. The Debian armel port is compiled for armv4t to support every ARM EABI-capable processor.

Ubuntu is going to concentrate on ARMv7-based processors, including the Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9. In practice, that would mean bootstrapping the distro for ARMv5 architecture and then optimizing critical libraries and applications for the ARMv7 architecture.

Nomenclature in the ARM world

2008-11-13T23:04:00.000+02:00

The ARM processor architecture naming/numbering scheme is confusing.

Architecture version	Family	Sample devices
ARMv4	ARM7 (and some ARM 9s)	iPod, Lego NXT
ARMv5	ARM9	OMAP1 (Nokia 770), Nintendo DS
ARMv5	Xscale	Sharp Zaurus, Palm Tungsten, Gumstix
ARMv6	ARM11	OMAP2(N95, N800, N810), iPhone
ARMv7	Cortex-A8/A9	OMAP3, no major devices yet

The table above is a cheatsheet that I use to get my numbers straight. For all the gory details refer to wikipedia. Each family above has several cores each, differentiated by the various feature sets they offer such as Jazelle, DSP, Thumb, etc. The devices listed are ones that I have owned/worked on.

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 is out

2008-11-02T12:52:00.004+02:00

6 months of work ended with the release of Ubuntu 8.10 (codenamed Intrepid Ibex).

We've tried to be a little more ambitious with our kernel this time by switching to 2.6.27 that was released only a few weeks before our freeze. On the whole it has been a good move, especially since Adrian Bunk has decided to make 2.6.27 a long term support release

I would like to ask people to install the kerneloops package in order to help upstream gather and fix any crashes in the kernel. I will be working toward making kerneloops part of the default Ubuntu install for 9.04.

On now towards 9.04 or Jaunty Jackalope...

Nokia Mobile codes

2007-05-20T14:56:00.001+03:00

OLS 2006

2006-07-25T15:26:00.001+03:00

I was at the OLS again this year. It is a great way to meet with people you are usually working with only over email. There were some great talks this year as well, the most notable ones being:

Self study links

2006-06-27T01:01:00.000+03:00

A few links for self study material, tutorials, videos for anything interesting. I will try to keep this post organised by subject material of the link.

Math
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2006/06/more-mathematics-and-theoretical.html

We have 9 lives too!

2006-06-27T00:39:00.000+03:00

So what would be the ramifications of living to be 1000 years old? Here are a few obvious ones that come to mind:

- What happens to total human population on Earth? Need to speed-up colonisation of Mars?
- New records for oldest mother, oldest father
- Father to daughter: No! You cannot date that 'handsome' 900 year old!
- Need to improve storage technologies; we don't want to lose our photos, digital data, email from 700 years ago, etc, do we?

My opinion: WON'T HAPPEN atleast in my lifetime.

DIY cell phone tracking

2006-04-18T14:54:00.000+03:00

Our pals at Popular Science have a write up of a low cost way to do your own cell phone tracking - '...Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I've turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time.'

Cabspotting: an alternate view of a living city

2006-04-08T18:57:00.002+03:00

San Francisco's Yellow cabs relay their GPS co-ordinate data once every minute to the central dispatch. This allows the collection of interesting data about cab movements throughout the city and has led to interesting use of this data by artists... Check the link for details.

Are you afraid of the unexpected?

2006-04-07T11:36:00.000+03:00

Neat article about Architecture against Death. The premise being that an active mind and body lives longer. I have to visit the Site of Reversible Destiny (and some more pics) by the same architect.

Linux Love Making

2006-03-23T23:14:00.002+02:00

So geeks don't get to be jocks. So what? They still have great command-line imagination :)

who | grep -i blonde | talk;
cd ~; wine; talk; touch; unzip; touch;
strip; gasp; finger; mount; fsck; more;
yes; gasp; umount; make clean; sleep;

Reading list

2006-03-08T12:39:00.000+02:00

A bunch of interesting books I plan on reading someday:

Clayton Christensen - The Innovator's dilemma
Clayton Christensen - The Innovator's solution
Tao of Physics
Mathematics and sex
Mapping the mind - Rita Carter, Christopher Frith
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Categories using labelr

2006-03-05T22:02:00.000+02:00

On the top of my wishlist for Blogger was support for categories or labels to organize my posts. Came across this service, www.labelr.com, that lets me do that seamlessly. Check it out.

770 ahoy

2005-10-23T21:07:00.001+03:00

With the Nokia 770 developer devices going out, interest has spiked on the maemo-devel and maemo-users mailing lists, with people getting through the teething troubles of finding the root password, installing ssh, vpnc, etc. Be sure to check the maemo wiki for updates to available software, hacking tips and tricks, etc.

Clarification

2005-10-17T10:58:00.001+03:00

On recieving objections, this is to clarify that my Benelux trip was my best vacation, but by no means my best trip ever. My best trip was to the Grand Canyon in 2001(?) with Neha, Aditya and Vijey. But by vacation, I meant it in a non-American sense - that here in Europe we get a month off as vacation, so there is no worries about planning a trip with many constraints. Also, most people in the USA barely have enough time off to ever make a trip to Europe for their vacations - its always 'Lets take off for the long weekend!' syndrome.

Travelling

2005-09-18T03:23:00.001+03:00

I like travelling. Even better, I like travelling around the world! I like to meet up with people from different countries, cultures, traditions, backgrounds, what have you. What frightens me most is being consigned one day to a life of boredom in a single place - shudder.

I came across this website that allows you to highlight the countries in the world that you have visited. And you can see a map of my travels below. As you can see, lots of places still to see and experience.

I think next stop ought to be Africa!

Nokia 770

2005-08-31T02:17:00.001+03:00

I used the Nokia 770 on a recent vacation trip to BeNeLux. I have to admit is was very handy to have a small device for quick web access without having to lug around my laptop. And the fact that I could play a few games while travelling on the trains or listen to music just adds to its utility.

This device is beginning to look better by the day. So now back to work on it for the Q3 launch as promised.

A challenge to humanity?

2005-08-31T01:30:00.001+03:00

Alex Steffen @ www.worldchanging.com has written an extremely thought-provoking article on the need to start thinking about saving this planet. Its aptly titled "Winning the Great Wager". He starts an excellent discussion of the factors involved and the problems with solutions currently offered but does not offer a very cogent argument for his own solution. Even then, this is a worthwhile read for anybody concerned about the drain on natural resources on the planet.

Back from BeNeLux

2005-08-29T13:23:00.001+03:00

Got back from my first real vacation in 5 years yesterday. I did not think about work even a little bit for 10 whole days! It was greatly refreshing. Payal and I had lots of fun. Lots of wallking around Luxembourg city, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Antwerp and Brussels. So much so that I had my left knee aching after a week and Payal's feet were hurting too. But an overnight rest later, we would go at it again.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Payal handle it so well. And I am proud of her having the guts to go Bungee-jumping with me - Duo. Pictures/Movies will follow as soon as I am done retouching the digital pictures to my exacting standards. ;-)

Amsterdam was very dirty and stinky due to a garbage workers strike for a week before we arrived. It's a pity since we had planned a lot of things for Amsterdam.

New Center channel speakers

2005-08-01T17:24:00.000+03:00

Just got myself an Energy C-C1 center channel on my trip to Ottawa. Distinct difference in my movies. The dialogues are much crisper and it's not only because I spent CAD 350 on it. :)

Where will the next revolution take place?

2005-06-13T12:59:00.000+03:00

Lawrence Lessig has published an account of his visit to Brazil where he sees the rise of free culture to counter the threat from the copyright culture that we find in most developed nations, especially USA. It contains an excellent history of how the current copyright laws in the USA came to be. Changing the opt-in system of copy-protection to an opt-out system, it seems, has landed us into this soup that we find ourselves in. Nice read!

Resource wastage due to junk accounts

2005-06-12T02:23:00.000+03:00

I was just thinking the other day. (Yeah i do such strange things every now and then). Sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN have many many abandoned accounts - Could they salvage a lot of resources if they could detect junk accounts quickly and correctly? Questions are:

- Is it worth the effort with disk space and memory being this cheap?
- Surely they will save a lot of hassles in backup times?
- How are junk accounts defined? Currently, I believe they define it as accounts not accessed for a certain period of time (3-6 months)
- How can they detect spammer accounts?
- Reading and typing the characters from skewed images during account creation is one way
- Google has started account invitations based on SMS from a phone. So you need a valid (mobile?) phone number and you are limited to 10 Gmail accounts to a single number.

Version numbering 1.2

2005-06-12T02:10:00.000+03:00

Interesting article about the inconsistencies in version numbering conventions in open source software. I have heard a lot of marketing-speak about version numbering theories. Here are a few:

Version numbers shouldn't go too high, else it seems like the product has many problems that are fixed with every version. Microsoft marketing seems to think this way, Adobe doesnt.
Certain version numbers convey better software than others. Point-oh releases are a case in point, but odd numbers convey instability.
Your version numbers should be higher than your competitors' to signify a better product.

So obviously there is no panacea here. Personally, I would prefer version numbers to be an increasing sequence - for the lifetime of the product.

Biodegradable phones anyone?

2005-06-11T21:23:00.000+03:00

The above link talks about phones that, once discarded, could be planted into the soil and you could have some blooms right there. Too radical? IMHO, considering the millions of phones that get thrown away every year, why not? Considering who I work for, maybe I should send it to some internally maybe? :wink:

It could also encourage designers to use better bio-degradable raw materials in the manufacturing process. But then the links says this all; be sure to check out the videos on the website.

:Edit: Found other links where University of Warkwick researchers, Motorola and PVAXX devised just such a way.

The Finns

2005-06-11T13:19:00.000+03:00

Having been in Finland for 6 months now, I feel they are too reserved. I mean reserved not in the common sense of the term, but as in too humble or understaters. If the British are known for their stiff upper lip, Finns probably come a very close second. Most people from other cultures that I have known, including my own (Indian), have a tendency to make a big deal about little things. Finns on the other hands practise the reverse art - making a small deal about big things. If only the rest of the world were like that - John Lennon wouldn't have had a chance to sing Imagine. ;-)

Spam-a-lot (ref. Ivana Humpalot)

2005-06-08T23:17:00.000+03:00

How can anybody get a few million SPAMs everyday? This guy at acme.com claims to handle that amount of SPAM and descibes his configuration in an essay aptly titled Mail Filtering. I still wonder what he did to get this amount of SPAM? Subscribe to every B-rated list on the internet?

Myth TV

2005-06-05T14:00:00.000+03:00

I run MythTV on a Ubuntu Linux install on my PC. MythTV is a great PVR application for Linux users. Incidentally, I try to be TV-free, meaning I watch very little of it. So I don't care too much about its PVR features. I peruse it for my media collection, using the various plugins that are available.

While it works nicely for what it is programmed to do, I am not sure about the interface features. From what I understand, it can do one thing at a time. It can't, for example, run the Music Player while viewing images. Or show the weather while playing some music. I haven't looked at the code yet, but I suspect that this is not a plugin implementation problem, but rather a MythTV architecture issue. Maybe someday I will find the motivation and time to have a look at the code to see if this can be fixed.

But a great application overall. Thanks guys!

Where are we going?

2005-06-04T20:58:00.000+03:00

Check out these pictures from the UN's evironmental atlas. I guess there is nothing new here - losing more forests to urbanisation, extreme usage of food resources causing chain reactions in the eco-system, etc. The pictures drive home the point though. Good going people!

Hometheater setup #1

2005-06-03T14:55:00.000+03:00

I am intrigued by the thought of building a state-of-the-art hometheater system. Being a DIYer, I have bought hometheater components as and when the pocket book would permit. Currently, I have the following equipment:

Yamaha RX V1400 - (review)
Energy Connoisseur Series speakers - (review)
Medion MD 41527 27" LCD TV
Advent (Chinese-made) DVD player
Server running Linux

I have a pair of C-3 speakers as my front L-R and a pair of C-1s as my surround L-R speakers. And I love what I hear on them when I play the movies in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround. And they do justice to my extensive music collection as well.

More details on the setup later.

Summer is here!

2005-03-06T14:37:00.000+02:00

Summer in Finland surprises me! Although I haven't yet seen the temperatures top 20 degrees, I am assured this is summer. In fact, just yesterday, I discovered that we were dangerously close to mid-summer (25th June). Mid-Summer is supposed to be a big event in Finland, almost as big as Vappu (sp?).

After Mid-Summer it will be all downhill as far as daylight is concerned. Not that I am complaining, since its never dark now. The sky was rainbow coloured at 1am last night! Luckily, I haven't suffered from any sleep problems on account of the light as people had led me to believe. 1am is standard sleeping time. :-)