Thinkpad T400 and Ubuntu 9.04

So my new work laptop arrived the other day, it’s a Thinkpad T400 with a 2.6Ghz processor, 4gigs of ram and a 160gig 7200rpm drive. I decided to go with Ubuntu for the OS this time since I have not tried it before and some other people I know appear to have had good success with it on their Thinkpad laptops. They also had just recently release the new 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope version so what better time to give it a try.

So far I have been very happy, the only hick-up I ran into was when I loaded the proprietary hardware driver for the ATI videocard. After installing the ATI driver and rebooting the system it would start to load X and then lock with corrupted graphics on the LCD. After some digging I found a post about other Thinkpads with a switchable graphics card that can operate between a low-power mode and a discrete mode. After turning of the OS detection and forcing the BIOS to only use the discrete mode all of the graphics lock up issues went away.

For everything else, the wireless, ethernet, suspend, bluetooth, sound, webcam, dvd burner all worked out of the box with no configuration required.

2009 Iditarod Standings KML Feed

Every year at work we create a KML feed for the Iditarod race standings. This year is no different with the addition of some GPS data added in from the IonEarth Iditarod website. Unfortunately I couldn’t add in all of the GPS locations for each musher due to the ITC charging for the service this year but I did add in the data feed from the free demo that is available.

Checkout the KML feed for the 2009 Iditarod Standings here

Server/CMS Updates

Over the next week I’m going to transition the website over to a server and cms system. I’m not really happy with typo, it’s a great system but I really want something that is a bit easier to customize and hack on myself, I am a web developer after all. Of course the server upgrade is being prompted byt he fact that the current host is a bit limited on resources and we have several users currently trying to use the system. I really wish that I hosting service I am purchasing from would over a Gentoo install but alas it is not and most places that offer them tend to be a bit to expensive for my budget, so I’m going with the next best alternative CentOS.

So my current plan for the new CMS to try out is Radiant. We recently starting using it at work for the new versions of a couple sites we host, and it has been fairly painless to get used to working with and creating content in. The main developer appears to be fairly available and easy to interact with along with a lot of other community support that I have found lacking with Typo. It also looks like it will be simple to bring over the current content, especially since I haven’t lived up to my goal of posting every week so I don’t have much to move over currently.

New Server and CMS

Hurrah for a new server that works!   Took long enough to get all the hardware working correctly but it looks like I finally have a new functioning system. Things left to do

• Look for the extensions I want to use
• Test various markup for posts to see if they look fine
  
• Convert content from old CMS into new CMS
• Find a new header image, something a little better than a flower.
  

1 Class Foo
2   def bar
3     puts 'foo bar'
4   end
5 end

Using Linux and VMWare to update IPhone firmware

So I was finally able to get update my IPhone to use the 2.2 firmware using VMWare The problem is seems is caused by the restart of the USB interface on the IPhone during the update process. This is done to put the IPhone into the recieve mode for the update but when it reconnects the USBHID module detects the camera and will grab control before vmware is able to. The solution then becomes making USBHID ignore the IPhone when it is put into its receive mode.

WARNING: There are still other things that can go wrong during the update, please make sure to sync your IPhone before doing any updates. If something does go wrong you can restore your phone from another computer running windows and then go back to the VM image to restore your backup.

Here are the things you’ll need:

1. IPhone that needs an update of course
2. Some flavor of Linux – I’m using Gentoo with a 2.6.23 kernel. Note: Your kernel must be configured to load USBHID as a module
3. VMWare >= 6.5.1 – Any 6.X version will probably work it, but 6.5.1 doesn’t require focus to be on the VM inorder for it to capture the USB connection from the IPhone.
4. Windows VMWare Image with ITunes – Using Windows XP SP3 with ITunes 8.0.2