In the twinkling of an eye

Karmic on the X200s

Since I was a good boy this year, Santa gave me a new Thinkpad X200s.

Here are the part numbers:

44C7625 SBB I.C2DPSU9400(1.4GHZ3MB L2
45M3093 VBB GENWIN7HOMEPREM32
45M3511 SBB G.WI.7HM.PR.US ENGLISH
45M3027 ** SBB 12.1WXGA2X3ULTCONN.IIANT.
42X6308 VBB 3GBPC3-8500 1067MHZ2DIMM
44C5216 SBB KEYBOARD US ENGLISH
43Y5868 SBB TRACKPOINT
43Y5879 SBB 250 GB HDD, 5400RPM
44C5184 VBB SD CARD READER
42X6325 SBB INT.WIFI LINK5300
44C5196 SBB THINKPADX200SER.6CELLENH.
41W1787 SBB CPK NORTH AMERICA
45M4162 SBB LANG PK US ENGLISH

Installation
The install was smooth as can be. I created a bootable usb key using unetbootn, and once I remembered that you press F12 at boot to select an alternative boot device, things went swimmingly. Out of the box the following worked:

Wireless
Suspend/Hibernation
Sound
Blue keys (display brightness, external display, thinklight, etc)

It is currently set up to dual boot with Windows 7 which came pre-installed. As this doesn’t have a burner on board, I used an external usb dvd/cd drive to create the restore disks that are on the hard drive.

Post-install I set up the trackpad to use the middle button for scrolling by following these instructions. To vertically scroll you hold the middle button down while pushing the trackpoint up or down. Very slick.

External Monitor
I tested the external monitor by plugging a vga cable into our home tv. Worked just fine. I’m looking forward to using this machine for presentations/lectures and not having to remember, but invariably forgetting, to carry around an additional cable as I have had to do with the Macbooks (pro and air).

Summary
This is easily the best Linux setup I’ve had on a laptop, and likely the best laptop I’ve had (out of many).

Battery life is great. With the 6-cell battery I’m getting roughly 5:15 on regular usage – meaning wifi browsing, screen at medium brightness, general computing work.

I have always really liked the Thinkpad keyboards and the X200s has, once again, reminded me of this. I’m even thinking about replacing my desktop keyboards with one of these as it basically has a fantastic feel for typing plus it does away with the need for a mouse.

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Evernote on Linux

I spent the morning experimenting with getting Ubuntu up as a dual boot on my Macbook Pro. Pretty straightforward process with everything pretty much working with only minor tweaking. I’ll post more details on the dual-boot install and usage in another post.

After exploring around a bit, it came time to install my must-have applications. The first one being Evernote. As there is no native client for Linux I tried to install it via Wine following these instructions. It turns out the current beta (3.51) won’t work with wine, as you will enter an infinite loop asking you to download some .net thing that never arrives. So instead I grabbed the 3.1 version and all was good.

Evernote on Koala

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SciPy 09

I was fortunate to get to spend two days at SciPy this year. The community there is just fantastic and I was very impressed with the array of projects going on and the energy folks are bringing to scientific programming with Python. They also recorded all the talks, which you can find here. My presentation follows below.

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svn client middle age crissis

Lately on different boxes I’ve been working on I’ve been getting the following message

serge@highfalls:~/Research/e/Econometrics/spatialEconometrics$ svn update
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'.  You need
to get a newer Subversion client, or to downgrade this working copy.
See http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#working-copy-format-change
for details.
serge@highfalls:~/Research/e/Econometrics/spatialEconometrics$

This has been on both Leopard and Ubuntu machines. For Leopard the solution is to grab updated binaries from here.

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Ride Log

Gilbralter Road, Santa Barbara

.

The view about 1/2 up Gilbalter road. The fire damage was pretty dramatic as there were a lot of foundation only properties along the way.

Very strange view as the weather was just stunningly beautiful, but the landscape was one of decimation.

Miles: 47
Climbing: 5000
Time: 4:20

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Evening ride

Evening ride

Originally uploaded by sergerey.

On the way home on an easy out an back looking off to the east on the 125 overpass by Grossmont College.

At the moment I was taking the photo I was listening to Democracy Now’s rebroadcast of MLK’s speech from the evening before we lost him. Very powerful stuff. Makes one ponder that tomorrow is built on the blood and tears of yesterday.

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Sign of the time

For rent

Originally uploaded by sergerey.

On today’s ride I was coming through an industrial park in SD that I hadn’t
been to for a few years. It was a bit startling to see that just about 3 out of every four properties had a for rent sign on it. The eeriness factor was
heightened as I was listening to The Ascent of Money and what happens in times
of credit crunches.

Oh well, it was a spectacular day for a ride and the brilliant sunshine was a
enough antidote against the grim financial context – at least for the duration of the spin.

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Helmet wars

It has always seemed a bit ironic to me that the vitriol directed towards cagers by cyclists is of the same intensity as that directed by helmet proponents towards their bareheaded cycling brethren. For the record, being a social scientist, my own view is that the helmet crusade has done more harm than good in terms of the social cost reflected in reduced cycling, the misperception of the relative risk of cycling, and has not resulted in reduced rates of head injuries.

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Pic from the road

Pic from the road

Originally uploaded by sergerey.

Wasn’t drunk when I took this, more like rushing to make it home before the sun went away after realizing I forgot my light.

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Training log rss

Since I seem to be better at getting out on the bike than I am writing about it, I’m adding a rss feed for those of you who are in need of sleep inducing material: my training log – get it here.

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