After reading a couple of reviews of other people that wanted to perform the same upgrade as me, from 2GB into 4GB, I’ve finally decided to bet on Kingston, and I bought the KVR800D2S6K2/2G modules.

Now you may be wondering why I didn’t bought 8GB instead of 4GB since the netbook supports them, the reason is plain simple: in my humble opinion they are way too expensive!

Here is a list of Kingston memory upgrades for Asus Eee PC 1201N.

While performing the upgrade I decided to take a couple of photos to illustrate the process.

First I took a couple of screenshots of Gnome’s system monitor before the upgrade.

The two brand new Kingston ram modules that I bought. As you can see in the picture their specifications are: KVR800D2S6K2/2G 2GB PC2-6400 CL6 NON-ECC 200-Pin SODIMM.

The backside of the netbook and a closer look at the memory compartment.

Another photo of it’s backside, after removing the screws from memory compartment, we can see the default memory ram modules: two dimms of 1GB each.

In this photo we can see a comparison of both memory ram modules. At the top we have one of the modules that is installed by default in this netbook, an ASint DDRII 1GB-800, and the new one at the bottom.

Another photo of it’s backside after installing the new memory modules.

To finish the sequence, here is Gnome’s system monitor screenshots after the upgrade.

Because I’m currently using a 64bits version of Ubuntu I didn’t found any kind of problem related with the recognition of the new modules, but from what I’ve read, in 32bits versions there may be problems which require a couple of updates.

As you can see performing the upgrade is a really simple process that takes only a couple of minutes. If after this, you are still with afraid of screwing your netbook here is a video that shows you, once again, how simple it is to upgrade your netbook memory.

With this in mind you only need to download this file which was referenced in this thread on post #134 and execute the commands below. Make sure to remove the NDISWrapper driver before doing this if you have already installed and set it up.

After download, unpack driver:

$ tar xvf rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1211.2009.tar.gz
$ cd rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1211.2009
$ sudo make

Then you need to edit two files:

$ sed -i 's/install: modules/install:/g' ./ieee80211/Makefile
$ sed -i 's/install: modules/install:/g' ./HAL/rtl8192/Makefile

Finally install and load:

$ sudo make install
$ sudo echo "r8192se_pci" >> /etc/modules
$ sudo modprobe r8192se_pci

Your wireless should now be working.

Credits go out to CompMas2 of ubuntuforums.org for the quick answer and to david woo of lauchpad.net for making this driver available.

For those of you who don’t know anything about this netbook yet, below is the list of specs that are commercialized in Portugal (in other countries there are differences in Memory and Storage specs).

Asus Eee PC 1201N Silver

* Display: 12.1 inch, 1366 x 768 pixels;
* CPU: 1.6GHz Intel Atom N330 dual core;
* Memory: 2GB DDR2;
* Battery: 6 cells, 8 hours;
* Storage: 250GB HDD + web-based storage;
* Touchpad: Supports multitouch gestures;
* Graphics & chipset: NVIDIA ION (GeForce 9400M);
* I/O: HDMI, VGA, 3 USB 2.0 ports, SD card slot, mic, headphones;

With this new acquisition I was only missing an external monitor and a keyboard to complete my docking station. Knowing this, my girlfriend offered me an HP w2216v monitor, which is really nice, great design, very shiny and it’s colors match perfectly with netbook colors.

HP w2216v

* Display size: 21.6-inch (54.8 cm);
* Display type: TFT LCD active matrix;
* Input terminal: VGA connector;
* Other connectors: 3.5 mm Stereo mini jack input;
* Integrated speakers: 2w per speaker;
* Recommended resolution: 1680 x 1050 @ 60 Hz;
* Contrast ratio: 1000:1;
* Dynamic Contrast ratio: 3000:1;
* Response time: 5 ms;
* Dimensions HxWxD: 18.9×20.5×11.3 inches;
* Weight Unpacked: 19.8 lbs (9 Kg);

Later I added a Mini Eee PC MK Plus Keyboard to complete the set.

At the moment I’m very happy with all these new gadgets. Unfortunately the only turnoff about this netbook is that by default it brings Windows 7 leaving you without other options, so I had to spend a couple of minutes installing the latest version of Ubuntu. After that everything is working fine, and till now I’m very happy with it.

If you want you can see a couple of photos of my new gadgets here.

Until last December 12, I had never used such services. So I chose to do a search for online booking agencies, which gathered the following conditions: Had several customers reviews, seemed to be reliable and the best relation between cost/quality.

After this I chose Hotelopia, an online booking agency who aims to help you find and reserve the right hotel at the right price, from a wide range of good quality accommodation.

Thanks to Hotelopia I’ve spent my New Years Eve in Albufeira, in a nice and cheap resort without the common problems of trying to find an apartment for rent in this time of year for a short time period.

Certainly the next time that I will need this type of services I’ll use Hotelopia again.

Today I had to use NTLM authentication method, unfortunately it isn’t supported by NuSOAP yet, but I’ve found that if you combine cURL with NuSOAP you can get through without a problem.

So here is the solution I came up with:

First of all I’ve upgraded NuSOAP to it’s latest version which is 0.7.3 (the one provided by SugarCRM didn’t supported cURL yet), then I wrote something similar to the code below.

<?php

$wsdl = 'http://project/file.php?wsdl';

$client = new nusoap_client($wsdl, true);
$client->setCredentials('', '', 'ntlm');
$client->setUseCurl(true);
$client->useHTTPPersistentConnection();
$client->setCurlOption(CURLOPT_USERPWD, 'auth_username:auth_password');

?>

1. Interactive Designer
2. Manager of Quality Tests
3. Web Engineer

If you have the required capabilities, feel free to get in contact through the email address supplied in each profile.

Ironically the last post was about time management and the wonderful advices of Randy Pausch. Even with these advices in mind and trying to put some in practice it becomes difficult to perform miracles when our days have twenty hours instead of the normal twenty-four.

This reduction in hours is due to some recent major changes in my life. Although I haven’t finished my Master degree yet (still missing one course and the Master Thesis) and as you may have noticed in a previous post, I’ve decided to look for a job. To be honest all the spare time was driving me insane.

At the moment I’ve returned to my homeland and left Évora behind. So I’m currently working in Lisbon and living in Setúbal (temporary solution, I hope), which are distant about 40 km’s and make me lose roughly four hours a day just on travels.

But not everything is bad, in fact, this must be the only “not so good” thing because I’ve managed to get exactly what I wanted, and that was:

1. Find a great business company in Lisbon.
2. Work in Web Development with Open Source technologies.
3. Try to make my final Master Thesis integrated in the business company that I’m in.
4. Learn new things with more experienced people while working as a team.

Now about the place that I’m working in.

It’s name is DRI – Open Solutions for Open Mind and we work as an Open Source integrator which delivers low cost technological solutions with high quality and efficiency. If you want you can read more about us at our company’s blog or website.

One thing that got me amazed is the work environment which is surprisingly relaxed and informal.

So far I had the opportunity to work with SugarCRM, ExtJS, jQuery and Zend Framework. Some of these tools were already known, others less so, which in itself is a big plus to who wants to leave it’s comfort zone and learn new things.

Another interesting point is related to my final Master Thesis. If the proposal which was suggested at DRI is approved, my goal will be to develop a specific module for SugarCRM in order to automate some of the processes at our company, I’ll talk more about this in another post.

In summary and at the time the balance is very positive.

Randy Pausch was a Computer Science Professor at CMU. Before he died of cancer in July 2008 he presented a couple of lectures about different topics some of which became very famous.

The video embedded presents a few tips on how to manage your time from the perspective of someone who had very few time left. Although it is a huge video, I think it’s worth to spend the time needed to watch it.

Today was one of those times that I needed to merge two PDF documents so I’ve looked around and found PDF-Shuffler which is a small python-gtk application, which helps you to merge or split PDF documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive GUI. It is a frontend for python-pyPdf.

You only need to import your PDF documents, the documents pages will appear on the main screen, then you are able to rearrange it’s order by dragging them with your mouse, or delete the ones you don’t need.

You can also watch the video below which is self-explanatory.