Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Monitor : follow-up and end

Yes.... I've got my LCD monitor at my post office this evening..
Thanks to Seb, I ordered a Sony SDM-X82 18" LCD monitor, with a discount of 300 EUR, compared to public price.. I got the explanation
from shop vendor : this is an soon to be ended product which was featured with special price offer last June in all FNAC shop in France..
And now, they are finishing their stock using their website, at a very interesting price (700EUR).
This monitor is really great.. I had to tune it a little to get a stable picture (I'm not using DVI plug) and changed anti-aliasing to
sub-pixel but it was quite easy.
I've also tried to use it on my TranquilPC without any luck. Unfortunately, when using both TV and standard output, all output are
running at 50hz (for PAL output) and this Sony monitor only works for frequency greater than 56Hz :(
Anyway, I'll wait for Alan to finish fixing XF driver for the VIA chipset, since the PAL TV output is still broken (I have to use FB
driver at the moment).

Friday, August 15, 2003

Beware when you discuss with Mikael, he has some magic power

Yesterday afternoon, after spending half of the day searching for a S-Video->Composite convertor in Paris without finding one, Mickael told me about gossip new mailing list and 5 minutes later, my monitor died.. I had planned to finish plugin my TranquilPC to my TV so I had now a very good reason to do so..
After fighting with FB, I finally got XFree86 and GNOME 2.2 running on my TV.. I had to use "Sans 20" fonts and use "MouseKeys" accessibility stuff but it works.. Well, I still need to pressure my boss so he finish integration of VIA XFree86 driver into Mandrake package so I'll be able to use them (at the moment, only the center of my TV is displayed right, sides are somehow blurry, it is probably caused by FB display.
Anyway, today is a closed day in France, so I have the entire day to choose for LCD monitor (I wanted to buy one for some time but since my CRT one was still working....). I'm still wondering if I'll buy a 17 or 19" (my CRT was a 17"). If you have bought one recently and are happy (or not) with it, please comment :)

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Trackback fixed

Thanks to Micke, I fixed Trackback, so now, it should be working correctly :)

Saturday, August 9, 2003

Trackback

After some fighting to correctly understand how it works, I've added Trackback support to my blog. Thanks to Mark Paschal TBPY, I can now provide TrackBack for other weblog authors.
I still need to merge those trackbacks with the other comments (well, I'm not sure if it is really important or not) and add trackback power
to my own entries.
I also need to add email ping (or something similar) for people who posted comments, when new comment is added in the same topic. I've
discovered the template I was using was asking for email but its wasn't stored anywhere :((

Wednesday, August 6, 2003

TranquilPC

I'm a little late on this subject, but I think it can be interesting for other people to know.
Three weeks ago, I ordered a TranquilPC to replace my firewall/webserver/mailserver/whatever system. It served well its purpose (Pentium MMX 233, running Mdk 9.1+MNF) but it was too much
noisy, since I live in 2-rooms flat. So, after one or two months wondering, I ordered it three weeks ago in England (official distributor
is Mini-ITX.com). After 1.5 week waiting with no tracking number received, I contacted them and they apologized because my order was stucked between their credit card company database and their own order database without them notificing (According to Mini-ITX, it was the first time their developers saw this problem.. Maybe I should switch to Mdk QA then :).. Anyway, my order went back on track and I received it last Wednesday.
I had to buy a UK/Continental Europe plug converter but it is now up and running, and it is really great. I've taken some photos of it.. Currently, it is only doing firewall/webserver/mailserver but I
intend to also use it as my own media center and maybe PVR if tests are successful (ie if my TV card is doing correct capture and if the system has enough CPU to handle it).
Anyway, I'm very impressed with the system : it is small, completely silent (no fan, the only mechanical (noisy) part is my hard-drive, and
I've used a very silent one (Barracuda IV).
If you have any question about it, don't hesitate, I'll be happy to answer :)

Planet GNOME

Wow, Jeff has added my blog to Planet
GNOME
, after some fights with my RSS feed..
This means I'll have to do entries more often. I'm not sure if it is good or bad :)