After removing all the details from the previous project I hold in my hand (so to speak) a 25 page skeleton of all the details I need to fill out. At least I have managed to get all the details into Redmine and so now I can begin working on the SRSs for both of the new programs I want to work on.

The first is an extension of cPanelSVNManager, not completely sure on all the details yet, hence the reason for the SRS. The other is one you will just have to keep your eyes out for that will be released as Open Source software and will mostly be targeted at bloggers or people with personal websites.

If you are interested I will be tweeting somewhat more regularly as http://twitter.com/OSBField_Stuart or as always you can follow me on my personal twitter account http://twitter.com/ereality.

Alas at this stage I will not be releasing the SRS for cPanelSVNManager however I may do so for the other program that I am working on.

Stuart

For quite some time I have worked on little projects here and there and not really had anywhere solid to put them, this has included a couple of wordpress plugins including WP-Honeypot. Sadly these projects have been forgotten and need some maintenance and review and so I have put together OpenSourceBattlefield.com

Currently I am working on getting the site up and running. The biggest project I currently have open is cPanelSVNManager which is a script designed to make the installation and upgrade of Subversion (with Apache Modules) on cPanel servers far easier and far less painful than doing it manually every time. My vision for this in the long run is to actually convert this into a WHM plugin so that it can be run and managed from within WHM itself.

The other projects I am having to import and build the documentation up for bit by bit, however if anyone is interested in contributing you are more than welcome (details on the site on how to do so).

So that is where I have been

Keeping myself busy and in lots of trouble.
Stuart

After many a phone call to Dell and some extensive testing, Dell finally admitted there was a problem and escalated my call to Level 2 Devs. Needless to say after a long and painful experience Dell owners can now be free of the clicking on their Seagate ST9500420ASG model drives.

Out of curiosity it looks like it was due to something with the g-shock sensor as it was essentially parking the drive heads to protect the drive thinking it was in a free fall even when this was obviously not the case.

You can get the patch which supports the following seagate models from the dell support site:
80G – ST980412ASG
160G – ST9160412ASG
250G – ST9250410ASG
320G – ST9320423ASG
500G – ST9500420ASG
(referenced directly from the Dell Website)

As with everything, do a firmware upgrade at your own risk and ensure you have a backup (that you know will restore successfully) in case of failure.

I look forward to hearing if this fixes the issue for you as it has seemed to work perfectly for me.

Stuart

Little did I realise that this particular site was being indexed by Google and therefore my ISOs and Virtual Machines were then made public. Luckily the bandwith was not too much of a killer (this is lesson one… even where you run your own dedicated server… ALWAYS put limits in place, they are there to save you as much as restrict you). However in this I managed to lose control over a Virtual Machine which had a lot of licensed software contained therein.

At least in this case no personal data was lost, however valuable lesson learned, if you are going to store ANYTHING on your personal hosting that you do not want to be seen, make sure you password protect the directory. Just because you have not linked to it anywhere… believe me Google will find a way to find it HAHA.

Peace out people.

Stuart

In the interest of keeping with the theme of this blog I came across this video of a comedian that I find extremely funny, singing about something tech related. Personally I think it is SO damn true and I LOLed when I first watched it. What are your thoughts?

Dear Stuart,
I am in the process of buying a desktop for my house and am currently computer illiterate (but learning more each day). Your article was extremely helpful to me and I think being a newbie that I should stick with the 32bit. It is my understanding that I will have fewer headaches and can always upgrade later.
I would love to see a newbie section on your site, but again am grateful for the information.
Sincerely,
Newbie in Los Angeles

I decided that the response was in itself worthy of a post so that I could help bust some of the jargon and hopefully help a few people in making their decisions on their next computer purchase. So Helen, I hope this answers the question, should a home user use a 32 bit or 64 bit operating system.

What is the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit?

The main restriction on a 32 bit operating system (and therefore the main reason to upgrade to 64 bit) is that 32 bit OSs have a limitation of 4GB of RAM. Due to the way that RAM is addressed on a computer (i.e. how everything knows where to find the RAM) and the fact that other components within the computer share the addresses the most amount of RAM you will see in Windows is between 3GB and 4GB and that will vary from computer to computer.

Another way of looking at it is as though all the components of your computer were houses on a street. Each requires its own address and your RAM takes up several of those addresses with a big apartment estate on the street which uses a large block of addresses. When more components “move in” on the street, the apartments start to loose their addresses bit by bit and can no longer be occupied. So the more “components living on the street” the less amount of “addressing space in the apartment estate” and hence less RAM is able to be accessed (a.k.a addressed) by Windows.

Am I likely to need more than 4GB RAM

As a general rule, for a home user I would see no requirement at this point in time to go for a computer with any more than 4GB of RAM, it is just something that you are very unlikely to use. I am a geek and I only use more than 4GB under very specific testing situations so I can be 99.9% sure that the average home user will be fine with 4GB.

To 64 bit or not to 64 bit

So that brings us to the 64 bit or not 64 bit question. To be honest 64 bit is not a headache perse but it can restrict you in certain purchasing decisions that you may have later down the track. Each time you purchase new hardware (say a webcam, scanner or even a printer) you will need to ensure that the manufacturer supports 64 bit operating systems, as they require a different set of drivers than the 32 bit operating systems. At a later stage if you find your needs change you can re-install the operating system to gain 64 bit functionailty but you will also need to re-install all your software and settings again and you must of course ensure that once again all your peripherals support 64 bit.

I guess the best way to look at it with the following question “Is 64 bit ready for adoption among the average home computer user?”. Personally I would say no, it still requires looking around for specific bits of software when they are required (and you need to know when they are required). I think with the adoption of Windows 7, the 64 bit environment is going to be far more widely adopted. The rate of adoption from manufactures with Windows XP 64 bit was almost non-existant. With Windows Vista 64 bit the adoption rate was far higher, my hope is that this will continue into the future and perhaps in a year or two it might just be at the stage of maturity where a lot of the complexity is removed.

Helen, I hope this answers your question and I thank you for the opportunity to respond.

As I said to Daniel in my email I could not be happier with the service I get from SingleHop and hence why I have stuck with them for longer than any host I have used previously.

Seeing as we are here, for all those SingleHop visitors, what is it that you love about SingleHop? I would be curious to hear your experiences as they have always been great for me.

Anyhoo, you will probably notice that this blog is extremely new, and I have only just started putting content up. As this blog will be technically oriented I would love to chat to people who work with computers or even just use them for fun. I will try to stay on chat a little more often over the next couple of days, so feel free to drop me a line either via the Contact Me Page or if I am on live chat you can just click on the live chat icon to the left.

So, seeing as this blog is starting out new, I am more than happy to take suggestions on what you might like me to cover or investigate for you. Feel free to follow me on twitter (as technotebook for site updates or ereality for my regular tweets). Also as a note if you aren’t already, don’t forget to follow the official SingleHop on twitter, to keep you updated with the latest news and offers.

I will be getting more content together in the very near future and as I said, would love to capture your attention more often, so let me know what sorts of things you would like to see.

Stuart

As my new laptop has 8GB of RAM this was the factor that forced me into a 64 bit operating system. As the support for Windows XP 64 bit has never been that spectacular (especially with hardware vendors), I decided that sadly Windows Vista was my only option. I thought I had managed to scrape by and skip over another Microsoft Blunder (think back to Windows ME!) however that is beside the point, here we are and Vista 64 bit is what I had to go with.

I did however want to put together a short list of issues that I have encountered as a part of upgrading to 64 bit, I would like to note as Vista is also completely new to me that some of these issues may in fact be specifically linked to Vista and not so much the 64 bit jump.

The Issues:

1. Hardware Support for a few of my more obscure peripherals (such as my Logitech Harmony 785 remote) is not available.
2. I find myself constantly having to check if the 64 bit version of the OS is supported when I purchase or download new software. (For example the Australian Tax Office software to submit my tax return, won’t work on Vista 64 bit).
3. Not many software vendors support 64 bit: This may not sound like much of a problem, and similar to my last point, however software like TotalIdea’s TweakVI is currently in a buggy beta on the 64 bit edition of Vista. I am starting to find that a lot of the software that *is* in fact currently available in 64 bit is still in beta and nowhere near as well tested.
4. With 64 bit, there are some programs (especially those that integrate tightly with the Operating System) that must support 64 bit and currently not all of those do.
5. and the last major issue is Internet Browsing. Vista comes with a 64 bit version of Internet Explorer and plugins such as Flash (the worst offender I have seen thus far) does not yet have 64 bit support so I am forced to use the 32 bit version. This has also become apparent in another issue, for programs like Java, I now need to install and maintain two completely seperate version, the 32 bit and the 64 bit if I want it to work in both browsers (and Firefox).

I guess those have been my main problems that I have discovered thus far. On the bright side however there have been some good points with going 64 bit as well, including:

1. I can now use the full 8GB of RAM.
2. Additional processing performance when using 64 bit applications as opposed to the 32 bit counterpart.
3. I can now run 64 bit Linux installations in VMware Workstation, this has been a HUGE plus.

For anyone that does read this (hard to get a readership on only my second article ) I would be curious to know, have you made the jump to 64 bit and if so how did you find it and what issues did you face?

Stuart

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After blogging for almost two years at Secluded Habitat (my personal blog) I wanted to start focusing on blogging more about the things that I know, and computers… well lets just say I know a fair bit. This is not to say that I know everything, in the world of computers everything is constantly changing and anyone who tells you that they know everything about computers is themselves a fool.

Technical Notebook is a place that I started up as I wanted somewhere to be able to put technical solutions that I have either found in the deep dark recesses of the internet or otherwise developed myself to try to make things easier for people when they run into problems.

Often the articles that I write will assume a minimum level of techical knowledge about the subject matter, so this will not be a blog that you can come back and visit regularly, more an archive of solutions etc, hence the name Technical Notebook. At times however I will include a post or two from the inner ramblings that are my mind or something funny to lighten the mood. For the moment however I do not intend to update this blog more than once every couple of weeks.

If you have a technical problem and need some help I am more than happy to see if I have the knowledge or help you find it, just drop me a like on the Contact Me page and I will see what I can do.