Entries from November 2006 ↓
November 29th, 2006 — hardware
Following the “what-should-I-buy” type of articles, I’ve just read one that intends to help deciding among Wii, Xbox 360 or PlayStation3 (pt_BR only). Nothing changed my idea about buying a PS3, I just realized that it would be more difficult than I thought because Sony won’t officially sell it in Brazil. Dam! 
Well, besides it, here are my points that made me choose PS3 over the others:
- PS3 comes with a Blue-Ray drive, which IMHO is much better than HD-DVD.
- PS3 can run Linux (another article).
- PS3 will run legacy games from PS{1,2} (even emulation from other platforms).
- PS{1,2} market is very big in Brazil, so it will be easy to find games for PS3.
- Xbox 360 is from Microsoft (big negative point).
- Wii looks fun, but the graphics are just horrible (maybe I’ll buy one just to satisfy my geekness).
So, despite the fact that I will probably need to spend some considerable amount of money, PS3 looks much better to me, and it’s in my 2007 Christmas’s shop list. Why not now? Because I first need a decent TV. 
November 22nd, 2006 — hardware
I have a Pixelview PlayTV Pro Ultra which I wasn’t able to get any channels above 60 when plugged to my local cable TV company.
After some brainstorming on video4linux-list, Hermann Pitton came up with the final solution. He guessed I wasn’t getting it because of an incorrect tuner setup.
Well, the default setup for my TV card was made using YaST2. It added “tuner=27” to my modprobe.d/tv. Hermman suggested a new approach:
/etc/modprobe.d/tv
options cx88xx card=27 tuner=69 i2c_scan=1
So the trick is changing to “tuner=69“, and be happy! Now I get all my full 80 channels! 
November 22nd, 2006 — smart
After my recent call for translators, Pascal Bleser sent us a 100% French translated ‘po’ file for Smart. Very good!
November 21st, 2006 — smart
Today we finally managed to reach 100% translation for pt_BR on Smart.
We still need some help. For those reading this blog, that aren’t on our mailing list yet, please join and help us translating to your native language.
de = 692 translated messages, 17 fuzzy translations, 15 untranslated messages.
es_ES = 690 translated messages, 9 fuzzy translations, 25 untranslated messages.
fr = 652 translated messages, 43 fuzzy translations, 29 untranslated messages.
it = 227 translated messages, 15 fuzzy translations, 482 untranslated messages.
pt_BR = 724 translated messages.
zh_CN = (formatting errors, needs further checking)
November 20th, 2006 — smart
Following the Smart i18n changes I started yesterday, today we decided to remove the .mo files from the SVN and make them build during install process.
Here’s the changelog for r814:
* setup.py
- extend class InstallData to add _compile_po_files (generates .mo files while installing)
* locale/zh_CN/LC_MESSAGES/smart.po
- add ‘\n’ to line 2662 to make po compile
* locale/*/LC_MESSAGES/smart.mo
- remove .mo files from svn since they are generated during ‘make install’
November 19th, 2006 — smart
It’s always nice to have a productive sunday.
I’ve made some modifications to Smart on SVN r813 that I think some people might be interested.
Added the file ‘contrib/smart-completion.sh’. It’s a bit ugly and slower than I wanted to, but it works very nice since it completes options, action commands and even options from the action commands. It was fun to write it.
I’ve added ‘check-po’ into Makefile so it would give statistics about missing translations on the ‘po’ files. If someone wants to use it to update the ‘po’ files, you’re welcome to contribute.
And last, but not the least, thanks to Raúl Moratalla we now have es_ES translations!
Changelog:
* locale/es_ES/LC_MESSAGES/smart.po
- added es_ES translation (thanks Raúl Moratalla )
* contrib/smart-completion.sh
- added bash command completion script
* Makefile
- more verbose output of ‘update-po’
- added ‘check-po’ macro (stats about missing translations)
November 15th, 2006 — hardware
I just want to express a recent experience I had about thermal compounds.
My home desktop uses an Athlon 64 3000+, which was running on very high temps due to improper ventilation on the computer room. Unfortunately I can’t change the room, not even add an air-conditioner, so I have to find other ways of cooling it.
I’ve already tried adding more fans to the case, different configurations on the air flow inside, change the case position and location, but nothing did any great effect on the high temp issue. The best I could get was a 5ºC drop. After a little research, I decided to change the original thermal pad that came with the stock CPU cooler to some other highly recommended by overclockers. By the way, I’m not overclocking this processor as I did with my old Sempron. I simply don’t see the need for this.
So I decided to buy the Arctic Silver Céramique, along with their suggested ArctiClean cleaning kit. After half an hour reading the instructions, cleaning the processor and the fan very carefully and applying it, I’m very impressed and very happy with the results.
After the proper applying of the thermal compound I noticed a 10ºC drop on the idle temperature, and 1KRPM drop on the fan speed. That’s very impressive. So now I have less heat with less noise. Even on a steady 10 minutes 100% CPU usage the max temperature is still 10ºC less than when I was using the stock thermal pad, while the CPU fan runs 500RPM slower.
Bottom line, having big CPU fans or big cases with many noisy fans aren’t always the best ways of cooling a processor down. Some times you just need to help the heat reach the heat sink properly so it can be quickly dispersed, and that the Arctic Silver Céramique does that easily.
By the way, I’ve been also recommended the Arctic Silver 5, which some say would do the work much better, but since it’s 90% silver, an error when applying it may cause shot circuit on the processor. So I prefer to walk on the safe side and choose a ceramic compound. But if you plan to overclock or want even lower temps, maybe you should give AS5 a try.
November 14th, 2006 — hardware
O IDG Now publicou uma matéria interessante com o título “Como escolher uma TV de alta definição“. A matéria é muito pertinente no Brasil, já que em 2007 iremos começar a enfrentar o processo de migração para a TV digital. Também a época do ano é muito propícia para essa discussão, já que nesse natal o mercado está demonstrando uma forte tendência para o aumento da venda de TVs LCD e plasma. Foi legal ler essa matéria, porque acabei pesquisando mais algumas informações relacionadas, e achei interessante compartilhar.
Não adianta eu ficar aqui versando sobre vantagem disso, vantagem daquilo, se alguém deve ou não comprar seja lá o que for. Cada um sabe a profundidade do seu bolso, o seu interesse por novas tecnologias e, acima de tudo, quando vale à pena investir nisso (vide o último link). Mas se realmente alguém quer saber minha opinião, ano que vem (nas liquidações pós-natal) eu vou comprar a minha LCD (só não decidi se 32″ ou 42″). Depois que eu comprei meu notebook com widescreen, não consigo mais viver sem o espaço extra (vou até trocar o monitor do desktop em casa por um 19″ wide, mas isso é assunto pra outro post).
November 7th, 2006 — smart
Gustavo Niemeyer gustavo at niemeyer.net
Mon Nov 6 15:44:46 PST 2006 [link to original text]
Yes, that's right. 0.50rc1 is available, and brings a number of
cool things you definitely should check out, experiment, break,
and report problems about.
This is the most exciting Smart release in quite some time.
Besides a load of bugfixes, we've got several small improvements,
and one huge feature that was being planned for a long time.
Thanks to Eran Tromer, Smart 0.50rc1 integrates changes in the
transaction algorithm which makes it able to survive massive
whole-distribution upgrades with good results, and in acceptable
timings!
No, just *that* wouldn't make Eran happy enough.. he's also changed
the way that priorities are considered by the transaction mechanism,
so that tracking individual packages from arbitrary repositories is
actually much more predictable and manageable.
In the field of not-so-huge-but-still-cute features, Mauricio Teixeira
has implemented ETA reporting during downloads for graphic and textual
interfaces.
What? You're still reading!? Go get it right now!
http://labix.org/download/smart/smart-0.50rc1.tar.bz2
MD5SUM: bd387fd07549751acda1c98745cce6bb
Special thanks to Eran and Mauricio for the great work done.
(hopefully this mail won't get into your spam traps
--
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net
November 3rd, 2006 — linux, suse
–en
I simply can’t express any opinions yet. I’ll just post the links to the bombastic announcement. Let’s read all of them so we can have a consistent idea of what is happening.
The funny part, a brazilian site published a note saying that “the Saint Never-gonna-happen” day took place yesterday. While RedHat limits to say: “Unthinkable“.
Ps.: Interesting to see that Microsoft’s web site doesn’t have a single note on this issue, even though you can find some of their developers spreading the news.
–pt_BR
Eu simplesmente ainda não consigo expressar nenhuma opinião. Vou me limitar a apenas postar os links para o tal anúncio bombástico. Vamos ler todos eles para termos uma idéia consistente do que está acontecendo.
No lado engraçado da notícia, o br-linux.org publicou a nota dizendo que “o dia de São Nunca foi ontem”. Enquanto a RedHat limita-se a dizer: “Unthinkable” (impensável).
Ps.: ? interessante como não há nenhuma menção no site da Microsoft, apesar de encontrarmos alguns de seus desenvolvedores espalhando a notícia.
–links
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