The Matrox device is small and I was able to hide all the cables behind the monitors but it put up a fight to let me use the 3840×1200 resolution. At the beginning and out of the box it would only do 3360×1050. I had to reach out to the Matrox tech support to get help. All I had to do was change the firmware, something that I had tried but then realized that I was using the wrong firmware and thankfully the software didn’t let me change it. The Matrox website is quite confusing.

Quoting the tech support’s answer to my email:

From the “M” Matrox icon, access EDID management. Remove all of the active resolutions and refresh rates from the 4 cells on the right.

Now select {number of monitors} 2 and aspect ratio {wide). From the drop down menu select 1920 x 1080@50.

If you do not see this resolution available to you, perform a firmware update: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/drivers/download/?id=443 and then repeat the aforementioned steps.

I ended up achieving the 3840×1200 resolution after the firmware update. There’s only one catch with this, OSX sees the two external monitors as one but the Matrox software helps to handle the dock and shift it to the left or right. I recommend it if you want two external monitors connected to your Macbook Air (I guess it also works with the Pro).

That’s it! Now you should have proper NTFS support on OSX. I tested this on Lion and Mountin Lion.

What can you do in advance?

1. If you are currently renting a house and will be moving to San Francisco, ask your landlord for a recommendation letter;
2. Update your resume. You will want to make a positive impression and giving a copy of your resume;
3. If you have savings in your account ask your bank for a financial statement. Some land lords will take this into consideration;
4. If you are moving to start a new job or have a grant be sure to get an offer of employment (or whatever letter a grant gives you) to prove your future income;
5. Ask your company or university for a letter of recommendation, explaining why you are coming to the US and what you will be doing;
6. Make several copies of each document including your Passport. I would recommend 10 to 20 copies of each document.

You need to understand that San Francisco has a great demand (this article may help you understand why) and prices are expensive (rents are rising). The city has a high life cost, mostly because of the rent price.

A friend of mine told me “the house will pick you and not the other way around”. This remark is exaggerated but he made it because you will need to apply and submit a rental application (get the standard rental application here) to be able to rent a house. That’s why I recommended to make several copies of each document. You will be attaching them to your rental application.
That being said, be very careful with application fees. It is typical for landlords to ask for a non-refundable application fee of $25-$50. The fees are supposed to cover the cost of looking up your credit history but if you don’t have any Social Security number, they can’t look you up and you shouldn’t pay any fees. If you decide to pay the fees ask what they are for. Some landlords may ask for large deposits of $200 or more, which they will keep if they offer you the place. I wouldn’t play along with this.

Now that you know what you need, do you know where you want to live? Where will you fit in?
Google SF and SF neighborhoods and get to know them. SF is not that big but has lots of different places. This article is a good intro intro to SF neighborhoods. I also recommend reading this one, it has two great maps of the cities neighborhoods.

At this point you are ready to start looking for a place. You can try several sites but Craigslist is the place you need. The ads came and go on a daily basis. I recommend you to save them because it will be easy to get back to them. Take some time searching Craigslist and understand the rent cost. Each month you need to pay rent and utilities. In most cases, gas and electricity is metered and extra, but many landlords will cover water and garbage removal (they are required by law to cover at least one utility).

When I started searching Craigslist I only emailed the landlords but I found it to be much more efficient to call every ad you like (that has a phone number) to try to get the landlord to setup a private visit. You will have less pressure and will be able to see the house and if you like it, you can try to talk the landlord into renting the house to you. Otherwise you will end up going to an open house with many others.

Another piece of advice, some landlords promote bid wars. Be careful with this.

In my opinion the secret of successfully renting the place you want in SF is to be pushy. You need to be pushy and convince the landlord to rent the place to you. You need to convince them that you are the right person for them to rent the house to and that you have the money to pay the rent.

Tip 1. You will be packing your stuff and wondering how the weather is in San Francisco and which clothes you should pack. Bring layered dressing, the weather is very unstable, you can start with a sunny day and after a couple of hours have fog/wind and vice versa. It’s not very cold neither is it very hot. Hoodies are a good choice and come in very handy over here.

Tip 2. Plan things ahead of time. San Francisco’s housing is very expensive and the city has so much activity that the good  and cheap hotels are always packed. Make your reservations ahead of time to save money and get a nice place. If you will be searching for a permanent place to stay, find a place near a BART station or in the center of SF (north of Market Street) and avoid the Tenderloin neighborhood. Booking is a nice website to find hotels and see reviews and airbnb is also a good place to find some cool bed and breakfasts in SF.

Finding a permanent place to stay (renting) will take time. I’ll right a dedicated post with tips regarding “house hunting” later.

Tip 3. If you are flying from Europe you will probably be changing planes somewhere in the East Cost. This can be tricky for first timers. Once you arrive at the layover destination and deplane the first thing you will need to do is pass through the Passport Control, follow the signs to the International Arrivals. Be sure go to the non US line. Don’t lose any time looking around if you have a short time between flights, go directly to the line because you will spend some time there (between 30m to 2h). After you get cleared you have to go claim your baggage and pass through Customs. Because you have another flight to connect to, follow the signs marked “Connecting Flights/Connecting Baggage Drop-off” to drop off your baggage. Then you pass through the screening area again and go to the your gate. Your gate can be in a different terminal so be aware of the signs. It’s not difficult but it’s time consuming and on a tight schedule you may end up missing your flight, so be very focused and aware. Don’t hesitate to ask for help or directions.

Very Important:  If you don’t have TSA compliant baggage, don’t use the lock codes or keys to lock your baggage otherwise they will break the locks to  check your baggage. This will permanently damage your suitcase and you won’t be refunded.

Tip 4. Once you get to San Francisco get a clipper card. It will allow you to ride all the Bay Area public transportation we no need to have cash and change at all time. It’s very convenient and makes life allot easier. If you get here near to the end of the month you can charge your clipper card with some money but you can also buy the monthly pass for $74. Each bus ride costs $2 and BART costs $1.75.  You can buy clipper cards in lots of places but Wallgreens is probably the best place to look for because there are so many Wallgreens in SF, you’ll find one everywhere.

Tip 5. I came from Portugal and my mobile phone provider  was charging me loads of money for text messages and phone calls. So you’ll probably want to get a American mobile phone / SIM card. There are lots of providers and prepaid plans to choose from.

I have an unlocked smartphone and I just got the SIM card from T-Mobile. They have nice prepaid plans with unlimited data and a nice extension pack for international unlimited talk and text. This came in very handy as all my friends and family are back in Portugal and this way I can call them for an extra $10 per month.
You can find cheaper prepaid plans but if you have a smartphone you will want to get one with unlimited data. I have an android smartphone and google maps is one of my best friends here! You will be able to know which public transportation to catch in a matter of seconds.

Tip 6. Prices don’t have tax. When you go to a supermarket, clothing store, restaurant, etc, and see something you’d like to buy have in mind that things are listed without tax. This happens everywhere.

Tip 7. People expect to be tipped. For example, if you go to a restaurant with table service the waitress will expect to be tipped. There is a nice article about tips on tripadviser.com.

I wont be getting into the differences between them. There are lots of great articles online that already do that and also a great book by O’Reilly called “Backup and Reovery” that also convers both these solutions.

• http://rbackup.lescigales.org
• http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
• http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2008/02/backup-on-linux-rsnapshot-vs-rdiff/

The idea
Start with a 5Gb MySQL database that would grow between backups. Each growth would add random data to tables and new tables (new files). Rsnapshot would do new hourlys and rdiff-backup would do incremental backups once the first one was made. All backups would be run manually so that no simultaneous actions would happen.

My expectation
I had the expectation that rdiff-backup would be more efficient than rsnapshot once it started doing incremental backups.
Given a week of backups (7 days) doing 1 full backup and 6 incremental backups seams like a good idea, compared to the idea of doing 7 full backups. My idea is that 7 full backups had to be more time consuming than 1 full + 6 incrementals.

Machine Specs
I used two machines directly connected with a gigabit cable.

Client machine:

• IP address: 10.0.0.100
• CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7700  @ 2.40GHz
• System Memory: 4GB
• Network Card: NetLink BCM5787M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express
• Disk: ST9120823AS (120GB)

Backup machine:

• IP address: 10.0.0.200
• CPU: Intel(R) CPU 2160  @ 1.80GHz
• System Memory: 2Gb
• Network Card: 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller
• Disk: MAXTOR STM325031 (250GB)

The Tests
I decided to use a MySQL database since it would be similar to what I would be backing up. After each test I increased the databases size and added new tables to also add new files (InnoDB). So the backup would be handling changes on files and new files. Some tables have more fields than others and the data consists in random strings.

The starting size for the tests (and database) is 5Gb.
I started testing each software and soon realized that rdiff-backup has some issue when you move the files around and the inode for the file changes. I was trying to do a LVM snapshot and then do the backup from there but seams like rdiff-backup doesn’t like that very much even with –no-compare-inode option.

At this point this wasn’t a problem, I only wanted to discover which software had the best performance with the same environment. I would work on the rdiff-backup issue later on if that was the case.

I used the following options with rsnapshot:
rsync_long_args --delete --numeric-ids --delete-excluded --compress


The results

Again, I’m not trying to prove which software is the best. They are both great softwares and you should choose based on your needs. This is also a very limited benchmark, I would have done a 100Gb benchmark but I had no storage left to do such tests.

As you can see in the graph, rdiff-backup is generally quite faster, but not as fast as I would expect. I thought that doing incremental backups would be very fast. It’s great to use if you have limited space though.

Rsnapshot on the other hand keeps the backups in what I would call “normal format”,  if you need a specific file from the backup it’s very fast and easy to get it.

for f in *; do if [ `stat --format %y $f|cut -d "-" -f1` -eq 2010 ]; then rm $f; fi; done

Another possible solution would be to use find but the time options require one to calculate the days and make a range.
Feel free to comment and share if you have other solutions.

I didn’t have a clue of what I needed to do in order to load the color theme. So after googling a little, here’s what worked for me:

1. Copy the color-theme do emacs.d in your home.
cp color-theme-tomorrow.el ~/emacs.d/

2. Create or edit ~/.emacs file with the following:
(require 'color-theme)
(load "~/.emacs.d/color-theme-tomorrow.el")
(eval-after-load "color-theme"
  '(progn
      (color-theme-tomorrow-night-bright)))

PS: Thanks for the nice theme Chris!

Comprei um TF101 em Agosto e só depois descobrir que era uma versão “não rootavel” (sbk2) pelos meios disponíveis. Quem tiver curiosidade em saber qual a versão do seu TF101 pode faze-lo usando o SBKDetect ou SBK2Detect.

A espera acabou no dia em que foi lançado o Razerclaw (One click Root for all ASUS Transformers, 3G and Slider). O processo é simples, é necessário instalar o Razerclaw correr a aplicação e seguir as instruções. No entanto fica a nota, não instalar o ultimo update (OTA) de dia 25 de Dezembro! Fiquem pelo versão 8.6.5.19.

Depois de ter o TF101 rootado o passo seguinte é instalar o ClockWorkMod Custom Recovery para que seja possível alterar a ROM. Graças ao gnufabio também este processo é simples. Para instalar o CWM Custom Recovery basta instalar o RecoveryInstaller.apk.

E como tudo até aqui foi simples, reiniciar o TF101 directamente para a recovery não é excepção e pode-se usar uma app que está disponível no market chamada Transformer reboot to Recovery.

Atingindo este ponto o TF101 está pronto para as experiências. Aproveito para partilhar que estou a usar a ROM PRIME! v2.1.1 com o kernel Clemsyn (22A que inclui o voodoo sound patch).

I got current with GTG and corrected some bugs, some small ones and two “high” ones (lp:~pcabido/gtg/hackathon). Curious thing, they were all plugin related bugs. I also started getting up to date with the gtasks backend. I will be giving it some love over the next weeks.

It was the first GTG hackathon and it was fun. I hope to be participating in hackathones more often.

Another great thing I read about yesterday was a techradar article that elects Getting Things Gnome as app number 7 on the top 50 best Linux apps of 2011. It’s a motivational boost to keep hacking and making GTG better.