[Sussex] Vaios, CORBA and life - was: CORBA - Success!

[Geoff Teale]

Steve wrote:
------------
> [Eraly] Morning Geoff

*Yawn*.. somewhat later morning now.

Didn't get to bed until 1AM as I was waiting for Sarah to get in from her
work Christmas do (yes that time is upon us again..).  It meant I got some
decent hacking time in though so I'm quite happy.  Only problem is I'm due
to be at the BBC Radio2 Young Folk Awards tonight in Islington so it'll be
another late night.  I feel a Saturday morning lie in coming on..
 
> On 5 Dec 2002 @ 18:02 The ol' tealeg wrote:
> > Evening,
> Evening!  Evening!  I was just going off to bed for a 01:00 (Yes 1 AM)
> start of work day :-)

Euuuw.  Is this a common occurance ?  I can only assume your going up to
Yorkshire again(?).  I've done 24hour on call support before now.. not a
pleasant experience (Especially when you're not getting paid extra for the
pleasure).

> > I have now had some encouraging success with CORBA (its 
> easy when you
> > know how).
> 
> Like life it self

Oh, I wouldn't claim to know anything about life... maybe that's why it's so
complex ;)

<snipped>
> But it proves that CORBA works

Yeah, this is true.  Very impressed that it can pick out the right machine
to run on from the IOR.  Of course ultimately I'd like it to use the CORBA
name service - but I need to read up on that a bit more.
 
> Koooool - Can we have a demo next meet.  I'll load my lap top with 
> whats needed and will run this over WiFi

Well, the next meet (other than XMas dinner) that I can attend will be in
January so maybe I'll have it to a presentable stage by then.

I was thinking we should try and follow up the formula we had at the last
meet - it would be nice to get people talking and exchanging information.
Prior to last week VOIP was not a subject I had paid any attention to (I
doubt it will be a subject I think about often even now) but the discussion
of network issues (or lack thereof) in the context of what is potentially
the most important real-time network service of the future was fascinating
and thought provoking.  So thank you Mr director chappy whose name I forget
;).

...and I hope Mr Director chappy also feels that he gained from the meeting,
if not anything else, the knowledge that liking the Outlook UI and
facilities (a strange affliction) doesn't mean you have to stick on a
Windows machine.
  
> > BTW, Monster is now also completely covered in Duck tape.. 
> dunno why, it
> > just gives it a very strange look - certainly not like any Vaio I've
> > seen before ;)
> 
> As a Vaio own and don't like this.  It makes me think the 
> Vaio's are not
> as robust as other laptops (Dell) that I've used.

Well a few points on that one:

1
==
Monster was a lame duck from day one.  Read the stats and you'll find that
most electronic kit either fails in a short period near the begining of it's
life (commonly referred to as the 'burn in' period) or until nature wear on
mechanical parts cause it to break down.  The later case is usually not
experienced in computers because they become obsolete before the parts wear
out - the only machine I've had this happen to was a Carrera Pentium[1]
166MMX which was happily running Solaris 8 for x86 up until a few months ago
before it suffered complete IO failure - which would have meant a new
motherboard, which frankly, was hard to get and not worth the effort.  

2
==
I know two other people with exactly the same model (actually they have
F801's and monster _was_ an F801A - but disgustingly enough the 'A' just
indicates that it was pre-installed with windows ME rather than 2000 (which
made it little lighter on the M$FT Tax and thus the lesser of two evils))
and none of them have had any problems.  

3
==
I thinks I should point out (before I moan about Sony) that the machine was
hauled back and force to London every day during it's active life (be
advised that this totalled about 6 months out of the first 12 months since I
purchased it - it would have been 12 months, but the rest of the time it was
either not working at all or was with Sony.


Monster's history
=================
Within the first month I suffered total screen failure.  After a two month
holiday with Sony (Waiting for the part to be available) the machine came
back in working order (note, incase anyone worries about this, Sony didn't
care that it was running LINUX rather than the preinstalled Windows ME).
Two months later it started failing to boot properly.  Another trip back to
Sony and it came back with a new CPU and now it would hang at POST unless it
was held at a certain angle (it still does this now!).  It went back to Sony
a couple more times and they did  about it, saying they could not repeat the
fault (and thus refusing my demand that they should replace the laptop).
Since that time (living with the fact I had to tip the machine up to turn it
on) I discovered that the machine would crash if it was left running for
more than about 30 minutes and that the keyboard and pointer pad both
suffered intermitant faults.  

At this point the warranty had run out and Sony seemd to be unable to fix it
(and refusing to replace it) so I bit the bullet and popped open the case
(I've no fear of this on big boxes, but laptops are complex and delicate
beaties).

So crashing thing I have traced to the fact that the Sony engineers bent the
heat sink somehow so it was not in contact with the CPU and thus not working
properly.  One old work laptop (with the same CPU to replace the mildly
cooked old CPU), a hacksaw, some judicial filing and  a little drilling
later and presto I have a working heat sink and problem number 1 is solved.
As for the keyboard and mouse, well, the pad is now disconnected, the
machine works fine with my happy-hacker Lite II on the PS/2 and as soon as I
get a splitter cable we will have a fully operational (if slightly less
portable) laptop.  As for the having to be held at a funny angle to boot.
Well, that's an odd one.  The ribbon cable that connects the motherboard to
the panel above the keyboard (where the speaker are mounted along with the
power button) has an unafixed, thick metal hoop around it - this seems to be
a device for stopping this cable touching other parts of the machine.  The
long and short of it is this - this metal band is supposed to sit in a
particular position, but unfortunately it can move when you move the
machine.  If it is out of position the machine won't get past POST, so you
need to tip the machine to put it back into place.  All this makes me wonder
is the band was originally fixed in place somehow and the engineers left out
that part - who knows, not me that's for sure.


-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
geoff at tealeg.uklinux.net
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