Today, I received the HCL "diamond" (HCK 5600) mechanical keyboard after a delay of two weeks.While ordering I specifically asked for a USB version and I was told that it is available. The keyboard I received however is a PS/2 version and I now have to use those lousy PS2->USB converters.
Here are my impressions:
The keyboard uses cherry black switches and is very quiet even when typing fast and the actuation point is somewhere around the half-way mark of the key travel.
The key caps have both English and Hindi lettering (QWERTY and INSCRIPT respectively) with the English lettering etched and the Hindi letters painted (in an ugly white) making the whole keyboard look ugly. I guess this keyboard is re-branded by HCL and as a part of the rebranding they’ve added the hindi lettering. This is clearly visible in the ink colour and quality. The keys themselves are somewhat smaller than the ones I had used earlier when I was working at ETV. The right control and alt keys are smaller than the arrow keys!.
The base frame of the keyboard is light and feels "cheap". The ones I had used earlier were much more solid and heavy. To make matters really worse, one corner of the keyboard is short by 2-3mm making the keyboard wobble even when typing mildly.
HCL charges Rs 950 on a buyback scheme or Rs 1500 otherwise. I opted for the buyback scheme by returning my old Microsoft Keyboard (another pathetic excuse for a keyboard) that I got a few years ago. In short, this is a pretty bad keyboard (except for the switches).
This is a fantastic exposition of the idea behind fourier transform. It is self-contained, intuitive and very approachable for people who have not studied Mathematics beyond high-school. In fact the math involved is completely omitted and instead working code is presented as results. I like this idea.
Since my laptop, an HP Pavilion DV6000, is on the verge of dying, I decided to buy a replacement. A Macbook was what I looked at first but it is too expensive for me. Besides, I work mostly on Windows and Linux. The next choice was a Thinkpad T400. Mixed reviews of the model sold in India and the expensive price tag even without the Windows tax left me searching for alternatives. Then I received a nice deal from Dell for the new Inspiron model 1464 and I bought it. A fast machine at a much lower price.
Last week I received my new laptop and here are my initial impressions. Note that this is by no means a proper review. The focus is on things that are either essentials or major annoyances on my previous laptop.
The model is a 14" laptop powered by a Core i5 430M with 3G of RAM and a 320GB SATA HDD running at 7200 RPM. The build is decent for a low-end laptop. The design is similar to the newer Vostro models and also borrws a few things from the Studio line.
The keyboard is decent with fullsize keys and with a rounded bevel on the keycaps. The travel is just a bit on the shorter side. The tactile feedback is pretty decent. I think it uses one of those "scissor" switches. I typed on it for a while and could detect no flex unlike my previous laptop where there was a lot of flex at the center. While the keyboard is good, the layout of the keys is where Dell screwed up badly. Firstly, the right shift key is smaller and not aligned with the enter key. To hit the right shift key with my right pinky I’ll have to curl my other fingers and this can be painful when done frequently. The bigger screwup is the arrangement of the function keys. The function keys are swapped with the hardware control keys!!! and require an Fn keypress. This is simply ridiculous. The function keys are also off as there is an additional key to toggle the touchpad. Sigh.
The touchpad is a nice one with a large surface area and has a matte texture that adds a nice feel. The touchpad buttons are firm and provide a good feedback when pressed. The right edge of the touchpad can be used as a scroll area as well.
The display is 14" across with a native resolution of 1366x768 which is pretty basic considering other laptops offer much higher resolutions (eg: the similarly priced Travelmate gives you 1280x800 for a 12" display). The display is bright with upto 15 levels of brightness adjustments which is quite good. The display is housed on a bevelled screen with firm hinges that is bridged with the main body and can tilt upto 120-135 degrees easily. The screen does not wobble when typing fast.
Performance seems to be quite good but then every laptop that I’ve touched since my HP Pavilion seems to run faster :). The machine comes bundled with 64bit Windows 7 Home Premium. I managed to get rid of 800MB of stuff from "Program Files". Never understood why these programs are installed in the first place.
Windows 7 - the taskbar is an improvement. However Aero as an interface theme simply sucks. Nimbus, Nodoka, Clearlooks are all so much better. The window manager animations stutter sometimes and it is not a pretty sight. I guess the cheap GMA 4500 HD video card is the culprit. But then I won’t be needing fancy animations so I’ll turn those things off. Good to see the disk management tool being able to resize the partition(s) as otherwise it would have taken much longer to do it with gparted.
Compiling software is a good test for measuring overall performance. A full debug build of wxWidgets-trunk (make -j4) using GCC was completed in 11 minutes (approx) with all the cores 100% most of the time and running on battery. This is pretty good as my quad-core desktop gets the same thing done in 7 minutes (approx). This will perhaps be the most resource intensive thing I’ll be doing on this machine so I’m happy with the performance that I got.
The laptop comes with a 6-cell battery which lasted for roughly 2.5 hours under a typical workload with wireless on most of the time and normal screen brightness. In comparison, the HP Pavilion’s 6-cell battery gave at most 35 minutes. I had replace it with a 10-cell one last last year and I get about 2-2.5 hours. Something is definitely wrong with that machine. My experience with HP’s support was quite bad.
There is one area of concern: the fan seems to be on all the time even when the machine is idle. Need to contact the support people and get this sorted out. I hope that the experience won’t be as bad as it was the last time I called the customer support.
Finally, got around to upgrading this site. It is now running on Pier-1.2. While Pier-1.2 contains a number of improvements, the two most important improvements for me are:
- clean urls, without the _s and _k parameters as is typical with seaside applications
- based on Pharo VM. While I’m not exactly sure whether Pharo is faster than Squeak, it definitely uses less resources which is important for sites running on VPS slices with limited RAM.
I did attempt to upgrade when Pier-1.1 was released. Around the same time Lukas Renggli released a plugin to automatically export and import data from a running site to another image. When I tried doing the same , after upgrading the 1.0 image to the latest code, the import plugin failed. Later, the patient folks on the mailing list told me that the exact version of the code, core classes and the plugins, need to be installed and in my case I could not get the bibliography plugin to load on the new image. In the end, I gave up as I was hard pressed for time. Data migration is perhaps the biggest problem of Pier and I hope someday it will be addressed.
This time however, I decided to simply create a new "pier" and manually copy over the contents. This is feasible only because the site currently does not have much content. But soon, I’ll have to think of a better strategy.
The thought of replacing Pier with something file based and backed by a revision control system did occur a few times, but I’ve decided to stick with Pier. There is a certain elegance to Pier. It is also very programmable partly due to being hosted in a smalltalk environment, which I’ve come to fully appreciate after having written some code this year. I’d like to build an RDF exporter but before that, a ton of things to finish. sigh.
The news is that I’ve managed to reclaim my old blog and that is where most of my blogging will happen. This blog will serve as a place to hold information related to Scriptek.