Computers are definitely becoming commodity items. Have a look at this hilarious Usenet posting to see one of the reasons why I say this.
Small Victories
Oh, this is SO sweet. This morning a SPAM managed to get past my SpamAssassin installation. I immediately reported it to the four networks involved in its delivery and at least one has taken immensely pleasing action:
“Dear Charl,
Thank you for using ****!
We have ternimated the account for ***\**.****.net. Thank you for
reporting the AUP violation.
Please feel free to email us with any questions or comments you may
Diplomacy
“In any conflict your fate will depend on your actions. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people.” — Bush addressing the Iraqi people in a televised speech.
I’m sorry, but I really find it very hard not to be very cynical about this carefully worded advice by Bush.
My kingdom, my kingdom for S3 suspend to RAM!
After spending (wasting) this whole evening hacking on the disassembled ACPI machine language ripped from the firmware of my laptop (ACPI assembly language is strange), studying the stupid ACPI 2.0 specification and mucking around in the code of the latest BitKeeper snapshot of the latest 2.5 development Linux kernel, I am still no closer to a usable S3 suspend to RAM. The sleep button simply refuses to wake the laptop up: Maybe that’s why it’s called a sleep button.
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!