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To mention that VMWare’s free virtualisation product, Player, now features Unity under Linux. For those who haven’t seen this feature before, Unity lets you break applications out of the virtual machine’s window and seamlessly use them beside your native applications. There’s a few rendering quirks and it’s a little slower than using them in full windowed mode, but I have high hopes these will be smoothed out. This feature was previously only available using the OSX desktop virtualisation tool Fusion, so I’m pleased to see a premium feature filter down into the free-as-in-beer product. Thanks VMWare!

I recently went looking for a good beginner’s resource for a budding Linux user, and came across Linux in Easy Steps by Mike McGrath. It’s an excellent primer for the new Linux user. Focused on the Ubuntu Linux distribution, Linux in Easy Steps covers installation, desktop configuration, and basic command line use in a slim volume with plenty of screenshots.

The ground covered makes an excellent prerequisite for more serious tomes on Linux systems. At the end of the book the reader should have managed to install Ubuntu and customise it to their liking, and have a general understanding of the Linux filesystem heirachy, the command line, and vi with which to embark on more complicated projects.

The pace is thorough without unnecessarily belabouring simple concepts. Preparing your system for Ubuntu is covered in reasonable depth, and the install process is detailed with step-by-step explanations. Once installed, the basics of desktop customisation are covered before moving on to a discussion of the Linux file structure and manipulating files in the graphical file browser.

OpenOffice is covered in some detail, and the last desktop-centric section rounds off with a look at working with internet and media applications, including how to get proprietary codecs.

Fully half of the book covers the shell and administration, and is a credible crash course in the basics of understanding the shell, manipulating text and files, and performing administration tasks. A command reference finishes the shell section wiith a clear, well formatted list of useful utilities.

Every section in this volume is colour-coded, making it easy to turn back to as a reference. Current Linux users who are shell savvy will find nothing here, but to the person holding an Ubuntu CD thinking ‘Now what?’ this may just be the book for you.

Working with as many systems as I do, I have to keep track of a pretty huge number of user accounts and passwords across many diverse environments. For a long time I used a GPG encrypted text file to store this information, but recently I went looking for a more structured solution. I found KeePassX, and promptly fell in love.

KeePassX is a password management application for Linux and OSX. It supports the same database format as KeePass Password Safe for Windows, providing a cross-platform solution for managing passwords securely. It’s database is protected using either AES or Twofish encryption with a 256 bit key, which provides adequate encryption for the majority of users.

The interface is extremely simple. Select ‘File -> New Database’, and then enter a password or passphrase. KeePassX has the option to also use a key file for authentication - allowing you to place a key on a USB stick to add a physical authentication token to your password for added security.

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Once your database is created, choose a name and location for it with File -> Save Database As. KeePassX sorts your passwords into groups that you define for easier organisation. To create a group, right-click in the group panel of the dialogue and select ‘Add New Group’ or select the ‘Add New Group’ option from the ‘Edit’ menu. Name your group, and then select it in the group pane and click either the small + symbol on the toolbar or ‘Edit -> Add New Entry’.

The ability to attach a file to an entry I find extremely useful to attach keys, seed files, or other tokens that are linked to this account. I also find the feature to generate passwords directly in the Entry dialogue extremely valuable, saving me from making transcription errors when I store or change a password.

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While KeePassX doesn’t natively support any kind of synchronisation, a service like dropbox would easily allow you to keep your password databases in sync between your Windows, Linux, and OSX machines. I use Subversion to make sure that my passwords are up-to-date on every machine I use them on. I also maintain separate databases with separate passphrases for home and work use, allowing me to only check-out the database I need on that particular host.

A feature I find surprisingly useful is that KeePassX will copy usernames/passwords to clipboard without the text being viewable. In an office environment where I often have a vendor or another consultant sitting by me assisting, being able to get at infrequently used passwords I haven’t memorised without showing them to all and sundry is a relief. KeePassX will clear the clipboard of secure information within a configurable time period, to minimise the risk of accidental pastes of root passwords into work IRC. Yes, $colleague, I’m looking at -you- =)

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For those using locked-down or shared Microsoft Windows workstations, KeePass Password Safe is available as a portable app from PortableApps.com.

EDIT: As people have pointed out in the comments, there are also mobile versions of KeePass - in fact I have the J2ME version on my Nokia S60 cell phone. Unfortunately my insanely long passphrase is almost impossible to type in even with qwerty on a phone so while it’s a great idea to have access to the database on my phone I find myself unable to really use it =)

It’s been overcast but warm most of the time we’ve been here and we’ve had a very lazy and rellaxing holiday of walks along the beach and a little swimming. Evenings are being spent working our way through the local restaurants with some very nice finds. A Touch of Salt, down by the Ross River, served up a sublime eye fillet with baby carrot and whole baby beetroot. I mistakenly ordered a dreadful Pinot Noir, but the exceptional late harvest Viognier that arrived with my apple pie more than made up for it.

We’re a little bewildered as to what people actually do here - the city mall is half empty, with an entire row of shops vacant due to the planned construction of a new plaza. There are a couple of bars and a scattering of places to eat but compared to Wellington, Townsville is lifeless. We did visit the local aquarium, which features living coral and is the largest of it’s kind.

I took the opportunity to go and visit some gadgets that aren’t easily available in stores in Wellington - the Acer Aspire One, for which a review should appear in Linux Journal soon, and the 10″ EeePC. It’s enormous for an Eee, but with it’s 80GB hard disk and 95% full size keyboard it compares very well against my partner’s 11″ Sony Vaio, and is much the same size and weight.

It’s incredibly relaxing to be able to walk around in shorts and sandals and breathe easily without fighting Wellington’s cold winds. The only real problem we’ve had so far is that the hotel WIFI is dreadful. Not only do the cleaners unplug the AP every morning to vacuum, but the internet connection seems to be running off a 56k modem.

Oh, and don’t ask about the coffee.

We awoke at 0340 to make our 0600 flight to Brisbane, only to find once we’d gotten to the airport that the flight was cancelled. We were lucky enough to be the last two people transferred to a flight to Coolangatta, approximately 100km south of Brisbane. Never heard of the place? I don’t blame you at all. It’s like ending up at Levin rather than Wellington, except that Levin doesn’t have tropical beaches.

AirNZ did look after us very well, providing a reasonably comfortable air-conditioned coach to take us to Brisbane airport where we had a very long wait for our next flight. Poor Oliver wasnt feeling well after we’d been foolish enough to induldge in some pre-packaged sandwiches at Wellington airport so instead of spending the day in Brisbane we found a comfortable pub in the airport with squishy seats and camped there until our evening flight to Townsville.

Unfortunately Oliver accidentally dropped his bag and for a few moments we thought he’d destroyed his camera. Experimentation showed it was actually the lens, and probably just that the mounting ring where it attaches to the camera was slightly wrenched in the fall. Other lenses are working fine, and hopefully we can get the damaged one repaired or replaced in Townsville.

That screw is really not supposed to be sticking out like that.

Our flight to Townsville was pretty uneventful, apart from a child throwing up all over the waiting area just before we were to board. Thankfully said child was not sitting anywhere near us on the flight. Our first day in Townsville all we’ve done is a little shopping and getting our bearings as it’s quite overcast. Sun is forecast for the rest of the week and the swimming and beach lounging part of the holiday should commence tomorrow.

I picked up the ASUS EeePC 901 Windows 12G edition in black from Ascent about a week ago and I don’t think I’ve gone anywhere without it since.

I’m getting between 5 - 7 hours battery life pretty consistently and it runs cool to the touch. I’m unconvinced about the chrome touches, but there’s no doubt the glossy black finish and rounded edges make the Eee 901 look like a far more expensive gadget than it is. The touchpad is nicely improved over both the 701 and the 900, and the slight extra weight from it’s more solid construction and larger battery balances the machine far better on the lap. The keyboard is exactly the same, but I’ve gotten fairly used to it by now.

It’s been drawing comments everywhere I go. Everyone seems to want to hold it, and I’ve had many conversations over the last few days explaining where to get them and how much they cost.

I’m running Windows XP on it until Ubuntu Intrepid is released, which is slated to have 100% EeePC compatibility. I’m looking forward to it. Now for the mods! I’ve ordered a 30GB 1.8″ ZIF hard disk from trademe, and I intend to swap out the second SSD for it, and see what that does to heat/performance/battery life.

I’ll be blogging the process for anyone else who wants to do a similar mod - all I’m waiting on is ZIF cables to arrive from dealextreme =)

I spent a very enjoyable two hours today at the Ingram Micro Showcase. I had a pretty good look at the ASUS Eee 1000, the HP Mini Note and what was for me the star of the show, the Acer Aspire One. Sadly the only camera I had on me was my cell phone so the pictures are woeful.

The ASUS Eee stand had only Windows XP models on display, at which more than one attendee expressed disappointment. The 901 was conspicuously absent, but I was able to get a close look at the 1000. I’m not sure how I feel about the new styling choices – the original EeePC did look particularly cheap, but the glossy finish on the 1000 is a dreadful fingerprint magnet and the chrome highlights look a little overdone. The keyboard is very reasonable size, and would make an appreciable difference to those who found the original Eee too cramped. Unfortunately it still feels dreadfully thin and plasticky to type on. All around though I think ASUS have gently evolved throughout the Eee series to a very solid and capable machine.

The HP Mini Note was definitely the most stylish of the trio. With brushed metal casing and a minimum of frills, it conveys professionalism and class. It’s a real shame they made it completely unusable by loading up a sluggish VIA C7 with Windows Vista. I was surprised though that the performance wasn’t worse – it does seem like it would be usable for light productivity work as long as you were patient with it. While I only had about 15 minutes to fiddle with the device I also noticed that it a lot warmer to the touch than either of the Atom based models. Again, HP had no Linux based models on display which was a disappointment – I’d been hoping to get a glimpse at their SUSE based model. It was also lurking in a dark corner, and even photoshop can’t save that picture. Note to self: You *always* want to bring a real camera.

Then, across the crowded hall, I saw the Acer Aspire One.

It’s very slightly wider than my ASUS Eee900, to accommodate a larger and more usable keyboard. This gives it some quite chunky screen bezels, but the overall weight and size of the unit is still among the smallest of the netbooks. I think the Acer staff were a little bemused when I popped up a terminal and started digging around under the hood.

I was very impressed with the Linpus Lite distribution it was running. The interface draws heavy similarities with the ASUS Easy Launcher found on the EeePC Linux models, but I believe looks even smoother and more appealing. It looks just as hackable, but with more modern underlying libraries which hopefully means it’s easier to add software from a Fedora repository without risking incompatibilities with Acer’s customizations.

I’m trying to arrange reviewing this unit, and I look forward to seeing exactly how hackable it is while still maintaining the Acer drivers and software. An ASUS product manager spotted me shortly afterwards lurking in a corner taking advantage of the free wifi. He was very excited I was using an Eee900, and we discussed the decal I used to decorate it and where to get them from. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was using it to email my editor about the Acer Aspire One.

I also scored a jar of jellybeans for knowing Lenovo’s product line so well. Yay me!

The netbook is fast finding a comfortable niche as a second or even third computer. The majority of consumers seem to be buying them to supplement the systems they already own. I certainly saw the Eee that way when I first got my hands on one to review for Linux Journal. I already owned a 15” laptop for ‘serious’ use, and saw the Eee as a secondary internet device – much like a PDA or smartphone, but actually usable for light productivity and content creation.

The circumstances described by Moore’s law have ensured that our computers today are vastly powerful, with more memory on my graphics card than was in my entire computer only 2 years ago. Outside of gaming though, how much have my needs really changed? As an experiment, I decided to use my Asus EeePC for a day at work. I’m a Linux specialist supporting a large number of Linux servers as part of an exceptional team of Linux administrators. Most of my day is spent head first in a terminal window and processing requests that come in through email.

I used an Asus EeePC 701, with a 2GB SD card for extra storage and 2GB of memory running Windows XP Professional SP3. Yes, that’s the 701. With the 800×480 screen.

I’m afraid I was mercilessly mocked by everyone who saw me with my ‘toy’ computer. We’re all issued a certain brand of big, black, serious business laptop at my office and while my fondness for gadgets is already well known, it seems the EeePC was considered just too much of a toy for real work. It was absurdly dwarfed by the 20” monitor I had it plugged into while sitting at my desk.

What workedl:

Processing email was relatively painless, although I had to disable the preview pane on the 480px high screen and open emails in a new window to read them. My job doesn’t require much in the way of content creation, but I get sent a steady stream of relatively complicated Microsoft Office documents to read. The EeePC handled 30 page design documents heavy with images and tables with aplomb.

Accessing intranet sites was a little frustrating. If you want to find some of the least usable web design ever to be rendered, the internal tools used by a large corporate are pretty fair game. I spent a lot of time scrolling around, and sometimes discovering certain frame layouts just completely broke on such a low resolution.

When it came to what I think of as Real Work, things got a lot better. I don’t think the system requirements for PuTTY have changed in the last decade or so, and even a 7” screen can display an adequately sized console. I found I was maximizing console windows and alt-tabbing between them, but that this wasn’t anywhere near as frustrating as it looks when I watch the people in marketing use their computers in the same way.

I spent a few hours in the afternoon sitting at a customer site, and here I really enjoyed the Eee. I found myself perched on the corner of someone else’s desk, working through configuring systems with them. One terminal window open with many panes in gnu screen (<3) and I barely noticed the screen resolution.

What didn’t:

Using Citrix/rdesktop was about the most painful experience of my life so far, and that includes breaking bones and military service. By the time I’d nested multiple Citrix sessions (don’t ask) I was left with a postage stamp of window at around 600×300 pixels. Ouch.

The battery life really wasn’t great. I had to go hunting for a power supply only 2 hours into work on site. My work laptop might be a brick, but it’s a brick that can be fitted with dual batteries. I also found that while the screen resolution wasn’t unworkable, it was just that little slower and more frustrating and the multitasking penalty was a lot higher when I had to sort through windows trying to find where I’d left off.

At the end of the day though, I’d managed 8 hours of solid work without once needing to fetch my Regulation Issue Brick. I did however cheat. There are two applications I use in my daily grind that require Microsoft Windows – on the brick I run Ubuntu Hardy, and have a Windows VMWare session running when I need to use those applications. VMWare just wasn’t going to be an option on the Eee, so I installed Windows on it natively. Had I tried to replicate my actual working environment instead of the nearest equivalent the Eee was capable of, it all would have gone pear shaped a lot faster.

I’m still impressed at exactly how close the Eee comes to replacing a full-sized laptop for tasks that don’t require a lot of storage. With cloud computing as implemented by Google becoming the norm, the EeePC becomes far less of a toy and more a serious productivity tool.

I enjoy reading Stepcase Lifehack, although I tend to skim it lightly. Many of the posts can seem a little trite and obvious at times.

Some are so obvious I wonder how, when I feel them shock me like electricity and trigger my mind’s resonant frequency, I never thought to apply this concept to my life before. Others on the surface can seem fairly ordinary, but have me thinking along tangents to the original premise for days.

8 Good Reasons to be a Lousy Musician

A lifehack I’ve always felt the strength of but had forgotten a little recently is developing creative space. As children many of us had the ability to get so lost in our art that we would reach an almost zen state. I found it all too easy to pick up a pen or pencil and be so absorbed in my task that I’d come to myself with a shock hours later realizing it was too dark to see my page and that I’d had no sense of the time passing at all.

I never lost the ability to reach that state of concentration, but as an adult a trap I often fall into is to focus on the performance rather than the art. There’s a certain pleasure to be taken in being good at something, but there are times it’s more enriching to seek the creative space rather than a polished end result. The art itself is just the means to reaching this place. When I focus too hard on the quality of the execution, this transforms the creative pursuit into just another activity to make time for. When I let go of caring whether it’s good and instead focus on whether it’s affirming, I take an almost spiritual calm and centeredness away with me when I come back to the mundane world.

As a writer and photographer, it’s a given that I make room for creative space in my life. Even if I hadn’t found avenues of employment for some of my more artistic passions, I’d still consider it a priority to set aside time to pursue them. Music, drawing, and writing give me ways to stop the world for a few hours every now and then and find some kind of serenity.

If serenity sounds appealing, I can wholeheartedly recommend giving creative space a chance. It’s easy to be so busy that you forget to make time to centre yourself. Some of us have almost forgotten how to.For those who have, reaching that state might take a lot more than just sitting down with a sketchbook. Even if you don’t find yourself reaching a zen-like calm every time you pick up your paintbrush, the abiding joy taken in creation is almost a defining characteristic of humanity and I at least can’t imagine ever feeling my life has too much of it.

The very day the EeePC 701 was available in stores in New Zealand, swept up in the internet hype, I bought one.

The hype was well deserved. The original Eee has been credited with turning the notebook market on it’s head. While the concept of the netbook has been tried before, this time, we were ready for it.

I had a lot of fun putting my EeePC through its paces for Linux Journal. I regularly tested its limitations, carrying it around for internet access and writing while out at cafes and travelling. It’s spent quite a few hours perched on racks in server rooms displaying build documentation or providing me internet access over HSDPA modem. I loved my EeePC, but I did find myself wishing Asus would market a premium model. I was willing to pay a little more to get a little more.

When the EeePC 900 was announced it felt like they were reading my mind.

The Linux version of the Eee900 has a 9” screen at 1024×600, a 1.3MP webcam and 1GB of memory as standard. It has two flash disks, one 4GB and a second 16GB. The second SSD is noticeably slower than the first, making it unsuitable for OS install but at least providing a lot more storage for your data. The touchpad has been tweaked, adding multitouch support and a larger surface area. The notebook itself is also slightly larger, the thickness and width remaining the same but the depth being increased by an inch or so.

Of course, the price tag has gone up, from $600 NZD for the 701 to $750 NZD for the 900. While some couldn’t justify the increased cost, to me it’s well worth it for a computer I can use more seriously. The display is certainly not overgenerous but has at least improved from downright frustrating to reasonable for many tasks. The aesthetics of the notebook are also vastly improved without the large black speakers either side of the panel.

It’s not all roses, however. The battery life is still a miserly 2 – 3 hours, and I find both models of Eee to get uncomfortably warm. I’m also less than pleased at Asus choosing to use a much slower SSD for the larger disk. The announced Eee901 should remedy all of the remaining issues stopping the Eee from being quite the most perfect computer I could envision, with 5 hours battery life, an Intel Atom CPU and the addition of bluetooth.

I’m very excited about where Asus is going with the EeePC line. I see the Eee900 and 901 not as competing for your upgrade dollars against the 701, but threatening $4000 ultraportables from the like of Sony and Fujitsu. They’re cute, they’re fun, they’re portable and the featureset is creeping closer and closer. All for a quarter of the price.

I’m unashamed about being on the netbook bandwagon. The 900 is the first thing I pick up in the morning and the last thing I put down at night. The EeePC has cemented itself a solid place in my heart by being easy to learn, work, and play – and even easier to love.