Thursday, June 28, 2007

life span of a LCD Beamer


My PT AE 700

About three years ago i bought a Panasonic PT AE 700 Beamer. Calulating the time how long a Lamp may live i thought i have worked it all out.. but i was wrong.

LCD Beamers are not supposed to be used the whole day, every day in the year.. just as you would use a TV.. but i thought it would only need more Lamps..

Unfortunately that's not the whole story. Without going into much technical Detail about how they work there is one piece which is the heart of it.. the LCD Panel. Basically it holds all three Panels (one for Red, Green and a Blue one) and the replacement unit costs as much as a new Beamer.


That's supposed to be a black Image.

I have now seen about 5000 Hours with that Beamer and after about 4500 there was a Blue Cloud in the Picture... this week i have some black artifacts in the Cloud... My Panel has broken before i even had changed the Lamp in it...

So my advice is: If you want to use the Beamer more than once a week, don't by a LCD.

Looking for a replacement i either would take a Plasma screen or maybe a DLP, but i am not entirely sure what costs you have with an DLP.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

WinXP not as secure as some thought

Working as a Programmer in a Company i have to deal with Windows XP, since they are installed on our Machines. That includes a Windows Server where we are connected together.

Now normally i configured a Screensaver with Password to activate after a period of time so nobody can make nonsense here.

Unfortunately WinXP is not as secure as i thougth. Althought the Screensaver is active i am able to activate the special keys on my Logitech Keyboard and Start my Browser, Email, Media Player etc.

In my Opinion if the Password has to be entered to get back, you should also not be able to start anything without that Password. I think it's a serious breach, even when you can not do anything but start programs, that should not be possible.

To be complete, i always have the latest updates installed through automatic update.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

ubuntu your way

I just installed ubuntu on my new/old company notebook and must say it was quite easy. Last time i tried this i had troubles with about everything, but that was about two years ago. This time everything went smooth.. i mean i had some troubles and had to install it about two times to get it up and running, but that's my fault.

The only real Program which made serious troubles was eclipse. Normally i use Vim to code but with growing projects i had to use a ide which was able to handle them. So i use eclipse and configured it to use Vim whenever i like to. (Added the editor to the php files).

Since i have a windows client i thought i just have to export my eclipse bookmarks and import them on the notebook.. wrong way.. i had so many errors that i did not know which way to go. Fortunately all was saved in the .eclipse directory in my home and i just had to delete it to start from scratch.

This time i started with one Bookmark after another, starting with PDT (since i code php) and installing all needed addons. Finally got it working.

Then subversive where i had to disable a certain update since it uses Win32 libraries (at least that what's the error message told me.)

After installing all addons i had troubles getting svn working since it showed me some kind of PROPFIND error..
Luckily i found some Sites which described the error and that i had to update java at least to version 6 and then tell eclipse to use it instead of the gcj runtime. (german site: http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/viewtopic.php?p=757773#757773)

Installing Java was not the problem, getting eclipse use it was harder. Although i changed it in my private eclipse settings (eclipserc) it still used the global java_home configuration instead so i had to change it there too.

Then finally I got it up and running with all I wanted ever..

Last Program I installed was synergy which is pretty cool! (you should try it)