Al Hoang

Awhile back I bought a Kohjinsha SA1F00V to test it out as a lightweight Tablet PC. After a few months of usage, I can say that I’ve not been that impressed with the device but neither have I been so frustrated with the device that I felt the need to toss the thing out the window.

The Bad

Annoying default partitioning scheme

I hate these laptops that advertise the hard drive size (40Gigs) then you get some weird partitioned scheme that you didn’t ask for
(with of course a few more gigs knocked off for a recovery partition). What this means is that you really only get 16GB or 19GB but not the full 40GB - (Win XP + Bundled Garbage) thanks to these partitions if you’re not willing to suck it up and reinstall the preinstalled OS

Slow

Yes it’s slow as a dog. This is one of those things that I wish you could test drive at the store by being allowed to install a stack of apps that you like and play around with it for a couple of hours. Once I loaded up an AntiVirus program, iTunes and Firefox life got pretty miserable trying to use iTunes and Firefox together. Also, the virus scan just slows the machine down each time I boot up Windows since it feels compelled to download updates and run full disk scans when I’m planning on using it. *sigh*

Keyboard tactile is awful

There have been other reviews on the keyboard not being that great and I’ve even came to the conclusion it wasn’t that great before I picked one up but decided to forge ahead anyways. After using it for a longer period of time I realize a crappy keyboard makes it very annoying to do anything requiring serious input on it without readjusting your brain how to type well on it.

Graphics drivers don’t support monitor mirroring

This is really bizarre and disappointing. I came up with a plan to try to use it as a cheap tablet by mirroring the output of the display to a larger monitor and drawing on the 7″ screen however the drivers for some inexplicable reason don’t have mirroring support which sucks. I spent some time trying to see if I could just use the touchscreen while outputting to an external monitor but it’s really disorienting. Even some SLIGHT visual feedback on the 7″ touchscreen itself would have been REALLY helpful.

The Good

Okay now that you’ve read some of my more outstanding gripes on the device. Here are some things that I considered nice about the Kohjinsha

Not a complete ripoff

The price point wasn’t that bad considering you do get lightweight tablet functionality

Standard components

The parts that most people will fiddle with are mostly standard laptop components instead of weird proprietary junk. The hard drive is a normal 2.5″ PATA drive which you can swap out if you try instructions like these (I just did). The memory is standard SO-DIMM instead of Micro DIMMs which saves a bit on price.

Portability

This thing is easy to toss into a bag and be mobile with it. I’ve even held it one handed while traveling on the train from Yokohama to Tokyo and that didn’t kill my arm (try that in a crowded train you 17″ notebook warriors)

Decent battery life

The battery life is around 3-4 hours with the usage that I do

Standby when the lid closes doesn’t suck

I’ve had so many variables with trying to get a Windows laptop to sleep when I close the lid compared to a Mac. I’m happy to say the Kohjinsha does the job without requiring a lot of fiddling with anything. Perhaps if I was a heavier power user on it I’d bork the drivers to prevent it but in my usage it worked which was a lifesaver when you’re trying to catch a train transfer.

Better than the rest of the PDAs at reading PDFs

The design of the Kohjinsha makes it a very good platform for reading stuff while on the move. I’ve tried a Zaurus, Palm, and a couple of other PDAs and reading novel or long textbook type of stuff was very painful due to screen resolution and slowness of the platform. I can say that the Kohjinsha makes a better eBook reader than these other solutions.

Quick thought on IT stuff…

I’m a firm believer that the idea is only as important as a working tool that implements it.

Ever try using an idea that had no implementation? It’s a lot of fun writing it yourself…

This is a nice chart explaining the choices a network admin has for dealing with shaping bandwidth in a large campus.

I’ve been slowly reading the Design Patterns in Ruby: Rough Cuts on Safari and have been finding it a pretty good read so far. I have to admit I’ve slept through the original Gang of Four Design Patterns book since it looked so excruciatingly boring and I wasn’t really convinced I needed such patterns for most of my boring run of the mill scripts. (Sure sure, crucify me now)

The book is roughly broken into

* A quick quick intro to Ruby (thank the heavens he made this short since I am getting sick of reading so many of these Ruby intros)
* The traditional Design patterns and how they would look like in Ruby
* Design Patterns suited for Ruby

I’m still reading through the traditional Design Patterns section but am enjoying how the author shows a small implementation with a pretty good example then goes on to refine it and point out how some features of Ruby make certain pieces of the implementation irrelevant or could be shortened. He also spends time explaining common gotchas and emphasizing the use cases for the particular pattern.

I can definitely see this occupying a place on my bookshelf as a nice reference guide for Ruby. It’s getting nice seeing more books that cater to people who aren’t complete Ruby newbies (while that market is important too, don’t forget the journeymen if you want to sustain a community). I’ll add more as I read through more of it but even as a Rough Cut it has been an enjoyable read so far.

Go get yourself a Safari account and start reading

This past Saturday I tried checking out the Second Life version of the November TLUG Meeting due to some previous obligations barring me from attending in person.

So I went through the rigmarole of installing Second Life on my Linux machine at home and getting it configured to work properly with these things called SLurls which seem to be some way to handle URLs that can send you directly to a location in Second Life.

This HOWTO was awfully handy in configuring Firefox. (You need to play with the about: URL) So now I’m all ready to listen in on the conversation and run into this bug

Basically, voice chat won’t work under Linux at this point in time. So I was basically having my avatar hang out in this room with some occasional text messages coming by with other people complaining about the sound. But I had zero sound… wonderful. I quickly disconnected since there are better things to do than watch a virtual presentation with virtually no sound. Bleh…

The main site says this about the Lively Kernel project

The main goal of the Lively Kernel is to bring the same kind of simplicity, generality and flexibility to web programming that we have known in desktop programming for thirty years, but without the installation and upgrade hassles than conventional desktop applications have.

Basically it is Morphic [1] [2] crammed inside your web browser. I guess technology moves in interesting ways when such an interface can easily be duplicated in Javascript alone. It does tax your web browser when you play with it and some parts of the UI were cut off for me but I guess we’ll see where this takes things.

I ran into this exact problem when trying to upgrade a bunch of ports lying around on my FreeBSD system.

Luckily Well-Rounded documents the fix for this. You’ll have to upgrade portupgrade manually to rebuild its database with an updated version.

I ran across the news on the passing
of Professor Jun-ichiro Hagino aka ‘Itojun’.

Although I never knew ‘Itojun’ personally I
was always impressed by someone who was able
to hold commit rights to the main 3 families
of the *BSD trees and make a real difference
in trying to push out the adoption of IPv6 out
far and wide.

My understanding is that parts of the kame stack
that he had a major hand in were at one point
used as the basic for the IPv6 stack in the Linux
kernel. I’m not sure if that is the case anymore
with the IPv6 stack in Linux but I thought that
was an interesting tidbit in Linux networking
implementation history.

May he rest in peace.

• The Wide Announcement
• Undeadly.org’s News Post on it
• OpenBSD 4.2 Commemorating Itojun