Category Archives: PCs/Laptops

PCs, laptops and hardware

Caught by The Law!

Posted on 18 July 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Don’t get too excited. Those of you hoping to see me carted off in manacles and an orange jumpsuit will be sadly disappointed…

No, the law to which I refer is Moore’s Law, which states effectively, if you need reminding, that computing power doubles roughly every eighteen months.

Recently I’ve been doing some work to model a system in which two sub-systems collaborate by exchanging a very large number of relatively fine-grained web services. (I know, I wouldn’t have designed it that way…) The two partners disagree about how the system will scale, so it fell to me to do some modelling of the behaviour. I decided to back my analysis up with a practical simulation.

Working in my preferred environment (VB.Net) it didn’t take long to knock up a web service simulating the server, and a client which could load it up with either synchronous or asynchronous calls on various threading and bundling models. To make the simulation more realistic I decided that the service should wait, with the processing thread under load, for a given period before returning, to simulate the back-end processing which will occur in reality. The implementation should be simple: note the time when the service starts processing, set up the return structures and data required by my simulation, check the time, and then if necessary sit in a continuous loop until the desired total time has elapsed.

It didn’t work! I couldn’t get the system to recognise the time taken by the internal processing I had done, which threw out the logic for the loop. Effectively the system was telling me this was taking zero time. The problem turned out to be that I had assumed all processing times should be measured in ms. 5ms is our estimate of the average internal processing time. 6ms is our estimate of the round trip time for the web services. It seemed reasonable to allow a few ms for the processing in my simulation. Wrong!

It turns out that VB.Net now measures time in Ticks, which are units of 100ns, or one tenth of a microsecond. So I rewrote the timing logic to use this timing granularity, but still couldn’t quite believe the results. My internal processing was completing in approximately 1 Tick, or roughly 10,000 times faster than I expected.

Part of this is down to the fact that my simulation doesn’t require access to external resources, such as a database, which the real system does. But much of the difference is down to Moore’s Law. The last time I did something similar was around 10 years ago, and my current laptop must at least 100 times faster.

The moral of the story: beware your assumptions – they may need a refresh!

Posted in Agile & Architecture, Code & Development, PCs/Laptops, Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

Mac OSX–A Third-Class OS?

Posted on 29 February 2012 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

A recent post on The Online Photographer (More Planned Obsolescence: Evil Lion) really chimed with me. Apple’s implacable opposition to virtualisation is a significant opportunity lost.

I’m a Windows user, spending much of the working week away from home. I get a vast amount of value from virtualisation. It allows me to carry just one PC with multiple “client specific” images, and enables me to keep running legacy software almost indefinitely. My main client uses the same technology to provide legacy support for essential software, which in long-cycle engineering businesses can easily be 20-30 years old, as physical assets in such businesses age many times more slowly than the computing equipment around them.

I also develop plugins for the Bibble RAW processor. The same code should work on Windows, Mac and Linux, but you have to compile and test on each platform to confirm this. I’ve recently added a Linux Virtual Machine to my kit. This was remarkably painless, just a few hours work, and I can now rapidly cross-compile and test my Windows-based developments under Linux. If there’s an issue which means having to support more than one flavour or version of Linux adding it would be trivial.

I just can’t do this for the Mac. I don’t want to buy and carry another laptop (which would be useless for any other purpose), and you can’t get virtualised OSX, either as a VM or as a service, through any legal and “safe” route. The result: as far as I am concerned OSX is a “third-class” OS, almost a “technical ghetto”, and I have to rely on the good offices of other developers to deliver my plugins for it.

People will put up with a lot in the name of love. Maybe Mac users “love” their computers enough to tolerate this behaviour. But looking in from outside I find Apple’s attitude perplexing and very annoying.

See http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/02/more-planned-obsolescence-evil-lion.html
Posted in Code & Development, PCs/Laptops, Thoughts on the World, VMWare | 1 Comment

I Thought They Were Supposed To Be Getting Smaller?

Posted on 14 November 2011 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

I’m in the process of replacing my laptop, and yet again finding that the alleged miniaturisation and convergence of digital solutions is nothing more than a figment of marketeers’ fevered imaginations. I suppose that after the experience of my last desktop replacement (see here) I should have expected nothing more, but hope springs eternal…

I’ve been very happy with my 15″ Toshiba Satellite Pro, new in early 2009, but recently it’s been showing some signs of reaching the end of its economic life, plus the way I now develop my photographs is very compute-intensive, and a faster device would speed that activity up considerably. I also find that the relatively slow single 2.5″ disk leads to very slow startup times and virtual machine operations, both of which slow down my professional use.

Thus my first decision was that my new device should support an Intel Core-i7 processor and 64-bit Windows, at least 8GB RAM and ideally have solid state disks, at least for the boot drive.

The next driver was forced on me by the vagaries of the market. Prior to 2007, most laptops had a 4:3 (=16:12) aspect ratio, but suddenly the market decided that all laptops should be “widescreen”, with a 16:10 aspect ratio. This was great for viewing movies, but meant that for a given diagonal size the new devices were more than 10% smaller than before. Not much good if you’re working on text documents (usually of vertical orientation), or digital images with <3:2 aspect ratio, which is most of them… That’s one reason why my next laptop went from 12″ to 15″, just to maintain the vertical size of the display.

Now they’ve done it again! Almost all new laptops have a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means a further reduction of about 8% screen height for a given diagonal size. This is a right royal pain in the neck, particularly as it is typically accompanied by an increase in pixel resolution, which combine to make text and icons much smaller, just as I’m getting to that age where my eyes are starting to change, and slightly larger text would work better. There are other disadvantages too: a given laptop model is around 8% longer than it’s predecessor, so it may not even fit in the same bag.

This all appears to be driven by fashion, and targeted solely at those who watch movies on their laptops. The goal appears to be “true HD”, and hang the consequences. After some brainstorming, I can only think of three things short wide screens are good for:

  1. Watching films
  2. Browsing spreadsheets or other tables with lots of columns
  3. Working on photographic panoramas

On the other hand, they are much worse for:

  1. Reading and writing documents (most pages are portrait orientation, and the human eye has problems tracking across very long lines of text)
  2. Developing – you want to see plenty of lines of code and diagnostics, and most lines of well-written code are quite short
  3. Working on any normal image, especially if it’s portrait orientation
  4. Working with any application which has multiple top and bottom toolbars, or a Microsoft “ribbon”
  5. Everything else…

So where does this put my laptop choice? After rather more agonising than usual, I’ve gone for a desktop, or should that just be “desk”, replacement system :), an Alienware M17x. This is very fast, has the usual stunning Alienware looks, and importantly supports dual disks, with a highly-rated quality screen. The screen is just slightly taller than the Toshiba, but the laptop is a full 5cm wider, and over 1kg heavier. It’s a good computer, but portability is definitely down a notch. The thing which makes it feasible, of course, is the iPad, which now fills the role of the portable, meeting-friendly launch to the Alienware cruiser. Admittedly carrying two devices increases the weight of my computer bag, but usually only until I have decanted the laptop into its base location for the day, and maybe it justifies the weight training…

Thus far, I’m impressed with the beast. CPU performance is certainly as expected, and I’m pleasantly surprised by battery life, at almost 5 hours in light usage. This makes up for the fact that the main power supply is about the size of a house brick, and although the laptop will run off a smaller Dell supply, it won’t charge the battery. On the disk side I’ve installed a Seagate Momentus hybrid drive as the secondary data drive, and that seems to be working well, but my first attempt to install the SSD for the boot drive didn’t work, so that’s still pending. What is annoying is that like all my previous laptops, the LCD panel is nowhere near correct colour calibration with the default profile, so I have to sort that out before serious photographic use. Further updates will follow…

To wrap up, here’s the potted history of my laptops since I started buying my own, and why:

  • 1999-2001: Compaq Presario with 12″ screen. Worked for VB development and general office use, but slow
  • 2001-4: Dell Latitude LS400 with 10″ screen. I got the “light, portable” bug, and this little laptop fitted the bill, even if I did have to haul a separate CD drive and floppy drive around. It was good on the move, but never quick and I worked off an external screen when I could.
  • 2004-6: Toshiba Portege M200 with 12″ screen. The first decent convertible tablet, great in meetings (in tablet mode), and decent for development although you had to be patient…
  • 2006-9: Toshiba Portege M400: The only time I’ve done a straight upgrade, this was basically the M200 with built in CD and a dual core processor. CPU performance was fine, I/O was very limited. However, the thing which really started to frustrate me was the difficulty of getting accurate colours on the screen.
  • 2009-11: Toshiba Satellite Pro A300, 15″ screen. With the change of aspect ratios, I had to go to 15″ to get a screen as “tall” as the 12″ of the Porteges. This workhorse has served very well, it’s fairly light, and only the most extreme image processing or virtual machine work exceeded its abilities.
  • 2011-: Alienware M17x. Fast, elegant, and just about preserves the important vertical dimenion of the screen! Also heavy and expensive… The jury’s out.

Has anyone else noticed or suffered from this odd trend?

Posted in Humour, PCs/Laptops, Thoughts on the World, VMWare | Leave a comment

Not from My Cold, Dead Hand…

Posted on 2 August 2011 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

My regular correspondent Malachy Martin recently posed another of his “research” questions:

What would work look like if you only had an iPad as your computing device?

My first reactions focused on whether my iPad could replace my laptop. Then I had a horrible second thought:

“I hope he doesn’t mean taking away my phone!”

I suppose I could go back to carrying a separate phone (or bag of 20p pieces), diary, address book, alarm clock, notepad, dictaphone, GPS, map, camera (well, I do do that, but that’s different), puzzle book, music player…

Yes, the iPad can do all of these, but it’s just too big to carry around all the time. I’m certainly not going to strap it to my arm in the gym, or hold it to my ear in public. So let’s assume I’m allowed to keep my phone, and focus on my first interpretation of the question. Could the iPad replace my laptop? What couldn’t I do without the latter?

First, say goodbye to a lot of content creation. The iPad touch keyboard is just too slow and inaccurate for entering large amounts of text. The ZaggMate keyboard which comes combined with a cover for the iPad screen is great, and at least allows you to navigate and select text accurately, but it suffers from some nasty key bounce and the keys are a bit too small for my fingers. Even ignoring physical text entry problems, you’ve got the challenge that there’s no truly compatible version of MS Office for the iPad, so creating properly compatible structured Office documents is almost impossible.

The problem is even worse in respect of graphical content. Set aside the fact that I do a lot of image processing on my laptop, which requires both substantial horsepower and a proper PC-level operating system. The iPad just doesn’t hack it for fine graphical manipulation. I can reliably drive a PC with a mouse to an accuracy of 1-2 pixels (in 1280 on my laptop, and 1600 on my desktop). The iPad is designed for operation with a 1/2″ paintbrush, and is realistically limited to operations suited to such a tool.

I do a lot of development work, with 2 full scale databases, 2 web servers, various modelling tools, a Java development environment and no fewer than 6 versions of Visual Studio on my laptop, plus a couple of virtualised alternative PC operating systems. That’s not going to work on my iPad! I could cheat and move to “thin client” (Remote Desktop) access to the equivalent running on a server somewhere, but that would function only when I’m connected (I’m often not when I want to do such work), and the navigation and text entry limitations of the iPad would drive me bonkers.

Even for general “office” work the limitations of iOS would rapidly challenge my sanity and productivity. For example, when I’m developing complex documents I do a lot of multi-tasking, working across multiple open documents each of which needs to be in a fixed known state under my control. I also make a lot of use of drag & drop and working with multiple windows visible at once.

The other big problem is iOS’ lack of content management separate from the “apps”. I manage about 200GB of “content” on my laptop: client files, my own documents, photos, technical library, publications etc. This is all synchronized to the big desktop/server at home, but available offline. The thought of all of this being tangled up with individual applications is just horrific.

So no thank you Malachy, the iPad isn’t going to replace the laptop or the phone any time soon. Now if someone can come up with a Windows 7/8 slate with the same performance and capacity as my laptop, and the same battery life as my iPad, and capable of operation with either a finger or a stylus…

Posted in iPad, PCs/Laptops, Thoughts on the World, VMWare | Leave a comment

Are We Nearly There Yet?

Posted on 25 February 2011 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

The trouble with having lots of gadgets is having to also manage and travel with a vast collection of power supplies, cables and chargers to make them work. I know I’m not alone in being annoyed by this – one of the late Douglas Adams’ last pieces of writing was a rant (there’s no better word) at the tech industry he otherwise loved, and how a lack of standards burdened him with an annoying plethora of single-use cables and transformers.

Maybe things are getting better. We seem to have standardised (for now, until the next bright spark tries to be different) on 5V supplies for most rechargeable hand-held devices, and some (but not all) expect the source to be a standard USB type A socket. This at least reduces the number of independent chargers. That’s the good news. The bad news is the device end. I really don’t get why we can’t standardise on the standard mini B USB port, but the creative types seem to want more variety.

Then there are the devices which take mains input. Set aside the fact that mains outlets come in several varieties, as it’s probably about 100 years too late to do much about that, there’s still the matter of the mains connection into the device (or its power supply). There are at least three standards, and while quite a lot of my kit uses the common “figure of eight” version, sod’s law dictates that my laptop uses the three-pin variant. Oh well…

On a more positive note, thanks to Apple I now have a transformer which is “figure of eight” in and USB out, so that will cover a lot of bases, and I have a pair of mains cables which the appropriate plugs for each region I regularly travel to, so I don’t need to carry adapters.

Despite the fact that my cameras all hail from the same manufacturer, Canon, they each take different batteries and each has a separate charger. The better news is that apparently Canon have declared that their next generation of DSLRs will use only two battery types, but I can’t see how that will help because knowing my luck I’ll still probably end up with a camera from each family.

So what’s the upshot. Here’s what I carry regularly:

  • Figure of eight mains cable with appropriate plug
  • Laptop power cable with appropriate plug, and laptop power supply
  • Mains to USB transformer (clever Apple version, which has a UK plug but also takes a figure of eight cable)
  • USB to mini B (doesn’t actually charge anything, but connects disks, cameras etc. to the laptop)
  • USB to “slim mini B” (I don’t know what they call this, but it seems to be an emerging standard, as my Zaggmate keyboard, Frances’ phone and her Kindle all use it)
  • USB to even slimmer non-standard plug for my phone. Thanks a lot, HTC
  • USB to Apple connector for the iPad
  • USB to HP iPaq connector, to charge the iPaq. In fact, you can’t buy this lead, but it’s amazing what you can achieve with a load of cannibalised bits and a soldering iron

Yes, I know I should be able to condense my phone and PDA into one device, and I might get one with either a standard USB or Apple connector. See here and here for why I might resist that…

Then for holidays, you add:

  • 2x or 3x Canon chargers, depending on what I’m expecting to photograph
  • Shaver cable and appropriate mains adapter

Is this getting better?

Posted in iPad, PCs/Laptops, Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

Keep Taking the Tablets

Posted on 7 January 2011 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

I’ve recently purchased an iPad, partly to satisfy some unrequited gadget lust, partly to satisfy some real needs for which I hoped it might be a good match, and partly to try and understand what all the fuss is about. As a long-time user of both Tablet PCs and Pocket PC (Windows Mobile) PDAs, I’m in a fairly unique position to judge what works well and what doesn’t. So far, it has to be said, I’m distinctly underwhelmed.

For several years in the mid-noughties, my main laptop was a convertible Tablet PC (actually a succession of Toshiba M-series tablets). I liked these devices with their dual ability to function as a subtle note-taking device in meetings or on the move, and as a fully-fledged laptop most of the time. Ultimately, though, such devices are too great a compromise: too heavy, battery-hungry and stylus-dependent for use as an eReader or travel companion, not powerful enough to meet my demands for a laptop capable of supporting virtualisation, multiple development platforms and heavy duty image processing. My main laptop is now a 15″ Toshiba, and it does the main jobs very well, but I’ve lost my subtle note-taker, unless I want to lug an old tablet PC as well.

Also, since 1999 I’ve always carried a Pocket PC, for the last 5 years a succession of HP iPaq 4700s (sadly, they don’t last forever). My PDA is brilliant for checking my diary, playing games, as a music player and for a variety of other uses. Thanks to the German company SoftMaker I even have a fully-fledged office suite which is absolutely compatible with Office 2003, right down to the menu and options dialog structures. I have composed some quite large documents using it, but unfortunately the screen size makes it just too fiddly for heavy-duty use.

It’s also unfortunate that HP set the bar so high with the iPaq 4700. I should really have been able to update it with a device including a phone, mobile internet connectivity and GPS, but two attempts to do so have ended in frustration (see “Digital Convergence – Still Waiting” and “Annoyance-Based Technology Selection” for details). Even HP haven’t really managed to replace it – their nearest current equivalent is much chunkier and has a much inferior low-contrast screen.

Enter the iPad. Before I start complaining, let’s acknowledge that this is a great piece of hardware design which does some things really well. For a start, it’s a brilliant eReader: clear, light and an ideal size. When I print documents for off-line reading, I usually print two pages to an A4 side. The iPad screen almost exactly matches this A5 preference, but with the great advantage that I can easily zoom in or change fonts and text orientation if required. To read web pages I can either exploit the mobile capabilities, or save them to PDFs on my PC.

As a mobile web browser it generally looks very promising. Again, the size is just right, with none of the compromises of phone/PDA solutions. Apple’s lack of Flash support is an occasional pain, but otherwise no problems so far.

It’s also going to make an excellent portable photographic portfolio. The screen is widely acknowledged as one of the best on any portable device, with wide viewing angles and good colour fidelity, and my photos look great on it. Getting iTunes to show a sensible album structure is a bit of a challenge (of which more later), but I’m now fairly satisfied, although I may end up using third party software which doesn’t insist on renaming my files and hiding the filenames!

Battery life is great when measured by the standards of fully-fledged laptops: at least two days fairly steady use on tasks like document reading, note taking and web browsing. Of course strictly speaking we should measure by the standard of a monotasking PDA  (I assume that “monotasking” is the opposite of “multitasking”, but I may have just made that up :)), and on that basis it’s not so good, but still acceptable.

So the hardware is great, and everyone loves the glossy touch interface. The problem is that, as the saying goes, beauty is only skin deep. The elegant facade hides an astonishingly crude and restrictive software architecture, which puts me strongly in mind of a 1990 DOS computer (albeit with a glossy graphical skin). The problems of that architecture will be the topic of my next post…

Posted in iPad, PCs/Laptops, Reviews, Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

A Confident Prediction

Posted on 30 June 2010 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

I have been mildly surprised at various recent articles on the web, expressing surprise that Windows 7 is so popular compared with Vista. This brings to mind the old saying “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it”, and suggests to me that many of those commentators don’t know their history…

I remember the grand old days of Windows 3.0. This was Microsoft’s third attempt to deliver a window-based environment on the PC, and had a load of technical innovations which showed that this could at last be a reality. In practice, it was a bit flaky, with some enormous frustrations (does anyone else remember the old File manager?!!)

Then came Windows 3.1. This was solid, fast, and worked so well that some people are still using it.

Windows 95 introduced a radically overhauled architecture, with the object-oriented user interface we all know and love, and a much cleverer structure for common components like drivers and communication components. In practice, it was a bit flaky, with the odd enormous frustration.

Then came Windows 98. This was solid, fast, and worked so well that some people are still using it.

Is anyone else spotting a pattern here?

Windows 2000 introduced a load of technical innovations, merging the “NT” and “9x” code bases into a single workstation line and a separate server stream based on the same core. Interestingly, although this worked pretty well, I even caught Microsoft salesmen saying to corporate clients “there’ will be an update out next year – wait for that”.

That was Windows XP. This was solid, fast, and worked so well that some people are still using it. I still run it on my laptops, although the big beast now runs Windows 7 (and Frances’ laptop manages on Vista).

If you look at the history of other Microsoft products (Word, for example), you see the same pattern: an “architectural innovation” release, followed by two or three consolidation releases which build on the new architecture and make it stable. Any the reality is that the same is equally true for many other software suppliers – see my recent postings on Bibble for another example.

So here’s my threefold confident prediction:

  1. Windows 8 will introduce a load of new technology, which will move the world of computing on. It will also be full of frustrations and most people will hate it. The critics will pan it and explain that it’s the end of Microsoft and computing as we know it. There will generally be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
  2. As a result, some people will still be using Windows 7 in 2020. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few are still also using XP, 98 and 3.1!
  3. Windows 8.1/9 will be solid, fast and people will love it.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you!

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The Alien Has Landed, and It’s &*&^(* Huge

Posted on 1 December 2009 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Alienware Aurora
Camera: Canon EOS 40D | Date: 29-11-2009 17:03 | Resolution: 1731 x 1206 | ISO: 400 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 4.0 | Focal Length: 17.0mm (~27.6mm)

For any of you labouring under the myth that new computer hardware is smaller than old, please meet my new “mini” desktop! 🙂 If you’re struggling with scale, the monitor is 24″.

And what’s really scary is that this is the smaller model in the range. They make a big one, too!

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