Damn Small Linux gets my nomination for logo of the year. :)
Suspend-to-disc update
As reported earlier, swsusp v19 is slower than v16 and can cause kernel oopses. Well, it seems that the work that Nigel Cunningham has done on v19 yields much better results. Apply all patches (patch-beta19-01 up to and including patch-beta19-06) over swsusp v19 to enjoy some of this goodness.
The magic combination is now: Linux 2.4.21-pre5, acpi 20030228, swsusp v19, Nigel’s 19-01 to 19-06, my khubd thread killer workaround and my DRI resume patches.
The Aggregator
I’ve installed blagg, a simple Perl-based (yuck) RSS aggregator. If all is well, it should aggregate 4 times daily from various of my favourite weblogs and post the loot to Charl’s Weblog and News Aggregator.
Cross yer fingers.
Have eyes, will watch movies
I saw two good films this weekend. The first, Adaptation, is screenwritten (actually far more than that) by Charlie Kaufman. It tells the story of Kaufman’s struggles to turn Susan Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief, into a screenplay. Watch this: it’s an extremely entertaining “film within a film” setup with some dubious reality thrown in for good measure.
Avalon is directed by Mamoru Oshii, also responsible for Ghost in the Shell, one of my favourite films. This haunting exploration of virtual reality asks questions about the solidness of our perception and interaction with the world around us. These questions have been asked by many other films, but Avalon does so with a grace and a style that are unique.
Keeping the writer in suspense
I downgraded my kernel to 2.4.21-pre3 with acpi 20030109, swsusp v16 (my version of these patches) along with my hub.c thread kill kludge. The latter is so that USB doesn’t cause your suspends to hang forever because the frikking khubd thread doesn’t want to die. It sometimes gets cranky like this after one suspend/resume cycle.
This is the combination that stopped working after my RAM upgrade and incited the upgrade to 2.4.21-pre4, acpi 20030228 and swsusp v19. However, as reported in a previous posting, the swsusp v19 combination can be quite slow and has caused the occasional oops at suspend.
You can’t have your cake and eat it
My laptop is now equipped with 768MB of PC2100 DDR RAM. Wow, a year ago it would have been quite a machine! :)
In anycase, the downside of all this is that it takes about 1.5 minutes to resume from disc with Linux kernel 2.4.21-pre5, acpi 20030228 and swsusp v19. If only ACPI S3 suspend-to-ram worked!
Smart Guns
I am against the use of firearms and also against the right of any civilian to own and use such a thing. However, there are more than enough people who aren’t and who’re willing to fight for this right.
In that case, maybe a compromise is in order, such as
this smart gun which is only able to fire if its registered owner is operating it and also records (as far as possible) the circumstances at the time of use. If the design is robust, this should make the abuse of firearms much more difficult.
Mutiny on the Bounty
Read this letter of resignation by John Brady Kiesling to Colin Powell. Truthout summarises it best: “The letter below, delivered to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is quite possibly the most eloquent statement of dissent thus far put forth regarding the issue of Iraq”.
Oh yes, I just BEAT Ben to it, lazy weblogger that he is.
Centrino Notebooks
If you are a rich geek-oriented philanthropist, please buy me this notebook. I believe the world will be a better place once I am in possession of this super light and super battery-efficient ATI FireGL 9000-equipped toy.
I almost forgot… it’s probably going to be another year or three before Linux fully supports all this laptop’s features, but for this juicy piece of hardware I’d probably be willing to do my duty as Microsoft’s bitch, at least for a while.
Nugget of the day
Here is a site explaining a whole list of common fallacies in arguments. I’m now less impressed with the site than when I first stumbled onto it, but it’s still useful. Really.
You can now use phrases like “ad hominem attacks” in your flames even if you don’t know any Latin. Come to think of it, even if your knowledge of Latin is non-existent (you barbarian), you should be able to deduce what that means, unless you’re really stupid, in which case it took you half an hour to read this sentence anyway and you’ve now forgotten what it’s all about, which is exactly the reason why I prefer writing long sentences.