Yet another “I can’t decide what to buy” post.

I really need a new mattress. My futon has fused into a solid back-breaking lump – lately I’ve moved to sleeping on the sofa. I’m not complaining about the futon though, it has lasted at least four years since it replaced the previous futon. But this time I’m looking for a mattress with a little bit more support and softness.

Now I could just go into Farmers or Harvey Norman, lie on a few beds and then pay up thousands of dollars, but for a big purchase like this, I normally like to do research. Buying a new mattress is so complicated. Prices are all over the place, from $300 up to $8000. You can’t compare because there are so many different names that you never see the same mattress model twice. (I think that’s a deliberate strategy, and camera sellers do it too.) Also, there’s always a sale on, full price is just an abstraction.

Big name manufacturers seem to be Sleepyhead, Sealy, Simmons, Tattersfield, and Serta. (Any others I should look at?) The retailers I’ve identified are Harvey Norman, Beds-R-Us, Farmers and Bed Post. (Only Harvey Norman and Beds-R-Us actually bother to put their catalogues with prices on their websites.)

The Sealy bed selector recommended a queen-sized Crown Jewel Plush. That seemed like a good start, but reviews on Epinions are very mixed. Those who’ve just got the bed seem to love it, but there are also many pissed off complaints from people who’ve found the mattress has sagged and the warranty is worthless and not honoured by Sealy. This is obviously US-centric, Sealy is made in NZ under license, but I guess the same thing holds?

Digging further, mattresses sagging is a very common complaint with inner sprung mattresses and actually in the report from SleepLikeTheDead.com Sealy was the manufacturer with the least reported sagging. On this video Nick Robinson says “a lot of people nowadays consider inner-spring mattresses to be old-fashioned” and “find air beds and memory foam mattresses more comfortable”, and “there is no price advantage”. According to his research the best bed to buy would be an air mattress from Comfortaire, but of course that’s not available in Auckland?

So, should I try and find an air-bed? Buy a traditional inner-sprung? Keep on procrastinating like I have all day today? Probably any new bed would give a better night’s sleep at the moment. At least I’ve got an idea of what I might get. Now I need to go lie on some beds for five minute rests.

I’m pretty sure I just saw a very bright meteor, either that or it was a skyrocket (firework). Unlike any meteor I’ve seen before this was quite low, bright, orange and had a tail. I guess it could have been a firework, but I haven’t heard any sound of them and why would anyone be letting it off tonight?

If anyone else saw it, or if it was reported elsewhere, please leave a comment. Was at about 6.45pm and seemed to be over Avondale/Rosebank Penninsular way.

I’ve been running Fedora 11 at home and work for a three days now, and I am very impressed. With Linux being a very mature product and Fedora releasing twice a year, an upgrade isn’t the radical experience it was nine or ten years ago, when Linux was raw and new. Nowadays each release is an incremental improvement.

There are new versions of the familiar apps: Open Office 3.1.0, Firefox 3.5, Gnome 2.26.1, GCC 4.4.0, Python 2.6, Gimp 2.6, Pidgin 2.5.5. Open Office can open those annoying .docx files. Gnome’s menus seem a bit tidier. PulseAudio is meant to be much better. Will hopefully solve my friends’ sound problems, but it was alright on my laptop before, so I haven’t noticed that difference.

Boot times are faster. The goal for Fedora 11 was to be at the login screen in 20 seconds. On my laptop it takes 30 seconds, but that’s still pretty good. My laptop is a Dell D620 with, I’m very happy to report, suspend and resume working perfectly on it. Also fixed on my laptop is an annoying problem Fedora 9 had with simulated middle mouse button clicks. Now either the top two or the bottom two touchpad buttons can be used. Power usage is meant to be optimised, haven’t tested if this means I get an extended battery life yet.

The kernel installed is 2.6.29.4. This is a bit of a problem at work, as VMware-Player can’t build modules to run against this version. Ubuntu, openSuse and Gentoo users have also hit this problem. There are long, complicated, discussion forum threads with different patches which claim to fix things, but don’t work for me. Eventually VMware will catch up and release a new version of VMware-Player which will work with the 2.6.29 kernel. It’s a pain to wait, but that’s what you get with kernel code which doesn’t live with the rest of code in the kernel source tree.

Fedora 11 has the new ext4 filesystem format as default. This should make file access faster. I was working on ext4 support at my previous job for their product. I’m a bit surprised the Fedora installer (Anaconda) won’t allow the root filesystem to be ext4. ext4 can support a mix of on-disk structures (pind/dind/tind blocks or extents) and I thought this allowed Grub to still boot from it. Oh well, ext3 will do for /boot until Grub2 is finished (or the world ends, whichever comes first).

Lastly the fonts look fantastic. I’m not sure exactly what has changed there. Fedora has had nice fonts for a while, but text is looking very smooth these days. Though I did have problems with DDD (the GDB debugger front end). The DDD user interface hasn’t changed much for many many years and obviously can’t use the new fonts. It was displaying very large ugly letters, so I installed a bunch of the old font packages like xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi. That’s fixed DDD so it is at least acceptable to work with.

I’m pretty pleased with how the upgrade has gone. All up Fedora 11 seems a bit faster, more polished and nice and stable. I recommend giving it a try.

I’m brewing a new batch of beer – Black Rock Lager. It has been very cold for the yeast, but I have the vat on a heating pad which I switch on at night. The air-lock has been bubbling away, so the yeast lives. Hopefully will be good in a couple of months time.

Started a new job today. And as a bonus I’ve been given a Solaris/Linux project to work on. Now just waiting to get a Solaris/Linux box to do it on.