underdevelopment

I recently purchased a sony vaio VGN-BZ31VT. To be short, everything works for as far as I know and care.

Specs

CPU: Intel® Core™2 Duo-processor P8700 @ 2,53 Ghz
mem: DDR2 SDRAM (2 x 2 GB)
graphics: Mobile Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD

Wifi: intel wifi link 5100
audio: intel HD audio
ethernet: Intel 82567 Gigabit
bluetooth: ?  2.0 + EDR

what works

Well all the basics seem to work, the special function keys on the keyboard, the mouse pad, the screen, wifi and ethernet port.
But most importantly, suspend and hibernate also work. All of this out of the box, just install and go.

incidentally, this CPU also support intel VT, it is off by default, but you can easily enable it in the bios. If like me you use virtual machines a lot, it is rather nice to have. Haven’t done any real tests to see if it is faster, but at least it’s there.

Not tested

I haven’t tested bluetooth, don’t need it.

What doesn’t work

The laptop also has a fingerprint scanner, which with some tinkering can be used. It’s not so much a problem of hardware support it seems, but more that there isn’t a mainstream way of integrating fingerprints scanners with the security system in linux. The solution I read needs you to install some fingerprint scanning software and load that as a module in PAM. Too much work for too little gain for my taste, but if you really want it, then you can get it to work (probably).

conclusion

I wanted a no-nonsense development laptop with lots of memory and preferably virtualization support in the CPU, it should also work under linux with minimal fuss and suspend working was a must have.
Mission successful it seems.

Seeing as there is very little recent user experience info about this laptop out there at the moment, i figured i should write this little blog, if only to give people the peace of mind that you can safely buy this laptop for running linux.

admin hardware laptop, sony vaio, ubuntu

Sometimes in applications you will have certain user settings that you want to apply, even when the user is not logged in. Take for instance these examples:

• “welcome back <name>” msg on return.
• You have a portal type page where the user can control what content is shown where
• You want to track where the user was when he last visited the site, perhaps to offer him the option to return to there.

I recently needed some functionality like that. So I’ve created a object that can help me with that.

I thought about it for a moment and created a singleton settings object for me to call upon to set and retrieve certain settings. Now I have to warn you that there is a small problem with singletons, if you use unit testing it can be difficult to control the behaviour of singletons over multiple tests. So be wary of this when you are running unit tests.

I also wrap all data in a separate array. This isn’t really necessary, but it makes handling the data a lot easier. If you wanted you could also add some sort of encryption to the cookie data so that users couldn’t easily tamper with it.

admin PHP, software development design patterns, object oriented programming, PHP, singleton, techniques