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I bought this computer a few months back and have been using it as my laptop since. I wanted to write a review after having used it for a while to avoid the type of review that goes like I got it out of the box and its shiny.

The Laptop

It is a very nice looking laptop. Not on the same league as Apple’s, but, in the PC space, it looks very good. When I take it out and show it around, it makes a good impression.

It is also surprisingly thin and light. I had previously owned an Eee because it was so light and got this one because I’d be using it as my primary computer when away from home. So, I do value a light laptop over raw power.

Speaking of raw power, this is a pretty responsive machine. Even editing images doesn’t feel slugish. The only time I wish for a faster machine is when editing video. Then again, if editing video is your primary usage, do get something other than a laptop.

It has a HDMI and a VGA output, which is essential. Even Dell now got the Apple bug and ships some laptops without a VGA output. Since one of my main uses for a laptop is to do presentations and there is almost no rooms equiped with an HDMI input, I didn’t want to have to put up with the Mac owners curse of carrying adapters everywhere. For such a thin laptop, having 3 USB plugs, plus a flash card reader, and an Ethernet port is very good.

The only negative is the trackpad whose buttons are too thin and slightly unresponsive. The power on button is also slightly unresponsive, but otherwise workable. The battery is not that impressive at 2 hours for regular usage. There is sometimes a flicker on the screen, which had me worried, but it only happens every once in a while.

The Linux Installed

It came with pre-installed Ubuntu (9.10 was current at the time, now it would ship with 10.04).

I was disappointed to find that it still required an extra step to install the drivers for the webcam and such. There is no reason why it shouldn’t all be pre-installed, no? This is the same with Dell’s preinstalled Linux stuff, but I had hoped that System 76 would do a better job.

The webcam worked once I installed the drivers and interfaced automatically with Skype. Wireless internet works, except when it doesn’t. I didn’t debug it, but at a friends’ house, I couldn’t connect to his wireless network even when I had the password. I just gave up, but not a 100% positive experience.

Hibernate and sleep work well as does CPU frequency scaling. I also got an external DVD writer and it works well for CD and DVD playing. I had to fiddle for a while with k3b’s settings to record DVDs, but I’m blaming k3b on this one.

Verdict

Overall, it is a nice computer. It is not the definite Linux-preinstalled laptop I would hope for, but better than any other experience I’ve had.

I would definitely buy again from System 76 (fortunately, I had no problems with the computer so I can’t comment on their support).

Follow me on twitter: @luispedrocoelho

Django-gitcms is finally getting to be a real framework instead of just the basis for my personal website.

I am doing a new website (on Python for computer vision) and using django-gitcms. This has forced me to make sure that the framework makes it easy to build different websites with it. It also led me to fix a lot of installation bugs. Right now pip install django-gitcms should get you a working system.

For an example, check the example-website/ directory, which should work after:

1. python manage.py syncdb to create the database.
2. django-gitcms-load-content to populate it.
3. python manage.py runserver

Should just work (otherwise email me).

I really got software testing (after over a year of usage!) when someone asked me why did you write this function this way?. I had written a function that took another function, a cost function, as input. In our programme, that cost function is always the same, so why the extra input. I answered it’s much easier to test than the alternative, so overall, the implementation+test is much more natural.

The interesting thing is that I hadn’t even thought about it that way before. I had just written it like that as the first thing that came to mind.

There it was, testing had changed the way I wrote code even if I wasn’t paying attention to testing.

It upsets me when people use “[sic]” to just mark obvious typos in quotations. Besides makes the quotee seem smarter than the quoted, what is the advantage for the reader compared to just correcting the spelling?

What’s wrong with people? The movie is just awful.

I hadn’t expected an excellent film, but it’s just boring.

As someone in my party commented they spent so much money on the visuals that they couldn’t afford creativity, a plot, or characters that weren’t paper thin.

Since Greece does not control its currency (which is controlled by a country [Germany], which is interested in keeping it strong), is it fair to say that it is on a sort of Gold Standard?

If so, what do its current budget troubles say about the ability of a gold standard to push governments towards balanced budgets?

For extra credit: Is California on a Gold Standard?

I read about this book in Less Wrong and immediately added it to my queue (a mental queue at this point).

The book is really good and its flaws are of the I wish he would tell me more type.

Most of the book is a recollection of experiments performed by the author or his associates, where people were asked to perform as if they were dictators of a small country/village/city/factory/… or simply having to set a thermostat in a room (many failed at this task!).

Some of the examples are eerie in their resemblance to real events, like the player who introduced worker’s ownership and later, when the factory wasn’t producing enough, proposed to shoot any worker who wasn’t producing his quota. In fact, this is one of those examples that seems to fit almost too perfectly. Other examples show the intellectual knots that people get themselves into:

In one of our planning games, people were asked to shape a country’s [policies]. [...] One participant found himself threatened on the foreign-policy front while at the same time he needed to cope with vast unemployment at home. The solution he hit on to deal with both these problems was to introduce universal military service. [...] However, he recalled that only a few hours earlier he had announced decisively that the government should do nothing to strengthen the military and should certainly not introduce any forced measures to that end. [...] What did he do? He introduced *voluntary conscription*, commenting as he did so, “Everybody will surely understand the need for this.”

Brilliant. As is the fact that many people seem to start distrusting the experiment when their hare-brained ideas cause problems.

Also interesting is the discussion on how teaching people some introduction into the problem field will make them feel much more confident while still performing poorly, while actual experience in the field helps much more (which should temper the hubris of the educated fool).

Many little examples such as this abound in the book. They are held together by the common themes of human folly so that it is not simply another management book of anecdotes. Also, unlike anecdote books, this one comes with numbers that show that not everyone does poorly and that there are significant differences between how those that do poorly and those that do smartly behave.

On the negative side, there is a tendency to spell out tables of numbers that is sort of annoying. I suppose someone told the author that (non-technical) people are too stupid to understand a table of numbers so the author sometimes seems to spell them out: “30% of users of type 1, fell into category 1, 40% into category 2, …” in a way that is tedious. Also, many of the references are just given in German, which makes them a bit harder to look for.

I have been thinking for months that Barack Obama will be a debt President (particularly if he gets a second term). By a debt president, I mean a president whose term is dominated by discussion of how to deal with the debt and interest payments. Not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not banks, not green energy, not health care, but debt (i.e., how to pay for Iraq, Afghanistan, the bailing out of every bank and its cousin, health care—green energy will never be a big item).

Maybe the fact that the NY Times put the topic on the front page is a sign that this discussion is moving to the fore. I predict it will becoming dominant in a couple of years.

In Norway, tax returns have been made public.

Alex Tabarrok asks:

Perhaps most interesting–does conspicuous consumption fall and efficiency increase in a society in which income is conspicuous?

An interesting variation on this is: Can we find evidence for people declaring more than what they truly earn so that the neighbours comment on it (reverse tax fraud).

He drives a really old car, but, in fact, he makes a ton on family income alone. I guess he just doesn’t want us to know. You know, old money doesn’t show off.

Probably this effect would be higher in the lower tax-brackets!

(I don’t know how to test for this based on that data, however.)

You know an idea is a crackpot idea when it tries to wrap itself in the veneer of respectability by borrowing the name of Economics.