LevelsOfDetail

Today I discovered a totally sweet feature of Google Document's Spreadsheet. You can hook it up with Google Finance to pull stock quotes in near real time. All you need is the following in a cell:

=GoogleFinance("VTI"; "price")

The "VTI" part can be a reference to another cell. I'm guessing the "price" part can be too.

Yep, that's right. Three releases in one day. And a new page for it to boot.

I now have a dedicated page for this side project . I haven't decided for sure yet, but I'll probably make it some open source license.

I discovered how to do Outlook COM add-in's using pure python with win32 extensions, so I converted back to my python code base. The pywin32 stuff also makes installation and uninstallation super easy. And also thank god I can write in python again. Anything lower level feels too inefficient for hobbyist programming.

I've reported my experiences on running previous versions of Ubuntu on the Thinkpad X60. Here are the notable updates with Hardy Heron:

• Wireless: Ubuntu dropped the closed source ipw3945 driver from their restricted packages repository, instead, opting to use the iwl3945 driver that's included in upstream kernel sources. Unfortunately, the version that gets shipped with the kernel is way out-of-date and doesn't work well. Or in my case, not at all. The solution is to grab newer drivers from the compat-wireless project. They have a build system that can overlay newer drivers on top of an existing kernel module directory. I tried a snapshot from April, and it worked fine for me. After a reboot, the card came up and worked fine through the NetworkManager.

  One remaining gripe with the wireless is that the hardware kill switch only works half way. It will kill the wireless if you turn the switch off. However, turning it back on doesn't re-enable the wireless until you re-insert the iwl3945 driver. I can script it, but still a major pain in the ass.

• Graphics: Compiz seems to work fine (though I don't care to use it). Metacity's compositing mode seems to work too, though it's disappointingly slow.
• Battery: Battery life seems better than with Gutsy, provided that you're willing to do some work. First step is to install the powertop package, run the utility, and follow it's recommendations. Next, take a look at this guide on Thinkwiki, detailing a few more settings that can be tweaked. It still sucks that you have to do this all manually. Most of the settings are easily scriptable, and I'm sure there's a way to automatically trigger them when you go into battery-powered mode, but I haven't quite gotten there yet. Feels like I shouldn't have to do this much work.
• Suspend/Resume: Seems to work. Only tried it about 5 times.
• Temperature: This is still my biggest gripe. Even with all the tweaks described above, the laptop as a whole gets considerably hotter than when running windows. Particularly the bottom side and the right side of the palm rest. While it's better than before, it still annoys me enough that I'll run Windows most of the time. It's particularly bad when it's plugged in (and some of the power saving features get turned off)
• Software: Overall, Gnome hasn't changed much (which is a good thing IMHO). Firefox 3 seems like a huge improvement, except for the fact that FoxMarks doesn't work yet (but I expect that to work before the temperature control does).

Progress I suppose. But less than I had hoped for. I know Lenovo sells these things with SuSE, but I don't think the experience is much better on those models. I made a feeble attempt at running the Emperor Linux Kernel, but couldn't get it to boot. I'm getting a little pessimistic that Linux will ever run completely fine on this machine (read: all the hardware works) during it's useful lifetime. Oh well.

Still tinkering away with Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the Thinkpad X60. Since my last posting, Ubuntu updated their kernel to 2.6.24-16, and the corresponding modules package has a newer iwl3945 driver (version 1.2.0, though compat-wireless has 1.2.23). The wireless on this machine appears to work out of the box now. I suspended and resumed a few more times, and that appears to work fine as well.

The only last remaining show-stopper is the heat. This laptop's thin design means when its insides get hot, you can really feel it in your hands. In particular, many internet postings note that the right half of the wrist rest area tends to heat up.

In addition to what I mentioned in my last post, I've learned a few new tricks. For example, to set the power saving setting on the hard drive:

sudo hdparm -B 250 /dev/sda

The value can be anywhere from 0-255. The higher the value, the more power saving. Apparently 255 can have some issues with parking the drive heads too often to wear out the drive, so 250 is the compromise (I'm sure there aren't actually 255 distinct settings, but it seems like setting 255 is the important part.)

To get a good read on the temperature of the drive, use the hddtemp utility:

sudo apt-get install hddtemp
sudo hddtemp /dev/sda

With a value of 250, my drive appears to warm up to about 36C and then stay around that level. That's about body temperature, so it doesn't feel particularly warm. Making sure to run hdparm seems to keep things a bit cooler.

I've set the fan to run at max cooling (using the thinkpad_acpi module in experimental mode), and the followed all the tricks detailed at Intel's LessWatts site. After all this, the CPU temperature hovers under less than 38C, but my mini-PCI sensor still tells me that it's between 41C and 42C, which I can definitely feel.

I even went so far as to track down this image (courtesy of PC Watch), that shows the board layout of the x60. It's that big black chip in the middle that's getting hot. Unfortunately, form the image I can't tell what that chip is, and I don't really feel like dissecting my laptop. If anyone has any idea what that chip is let me know. But my current working theory is that there is some other power management setting that should be tweak-able, but it's just not available on Linux at this point in time.

Oh well, back to Windows.