dri_resume for XFree86 4.3.0 RC 1

I’ve made binary snapshots of my suspend/resume capable DRI Radeon drivers for XFree86 4.3.0 RC 1 (i.e. 4.2.99.901) available on the dri resume pages.

My patches weren’t submitted early enough to be included in the looming XFree86 4.3.0 release, but will be merged with the XFree86 CVS shortly afterwards. Once more distribution vendors have standardised on 4.3.0 and things have settled down, my binary drivers should also be able to stabilise.

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Extremely narrow text boxes in Movable Type

It could be because I set something up incorrectly, but people have been seeing unusably narrow text entry boxes (TEXTAREA) in Movable Type 2.51 with Mozilla (1.0 and 1.2.1), Opera 7 and IE 6.0. So I ran:

mkdir new && for i in *.tmpl; do cat $i | sed -e \
's/<tmpl_if name="AGENT_MOZILLA"> cols=\"\"&lt;\/TMPL_IF&gt;/\
cols=\"80\"/g' &gt; new/$i; done &amp;&amp; cp new/* ./

in the tmpl directory and it all seems to be usable now. This is probably not the Right Way(tm) but it makes the entry boxes usable.

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Valuable lessons learned today…

After having gone back to my workstation vendor for the 4th time in so many months today with a broken graphics card and after having had to replace the now scarce SMP motherboard, I’ve learned two very valuable lessons:

  1. When you buy a workstation for Real Work(tm), get at least a three year on-site guarantee. You might think that you can’t afford the extra EUR150 (or roundabout), but after you tally up all the time you might have to spend fixing your own workstation during its lifetime, you’ll realise that you’re wrong.
  2. When given the credit card at the beginning of a four year project to buy the machine of your dreams, DON’T splurge. Buy a somewhat more modest machine, but make the arrangement that you’ll have the right to purchase a brand new computer half way through the project. Remember how fast computing equipment ages.

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Porting woes

This is brilliant. Microsoft Visual C++ violates the ISO C++ standard (at least as far as my 1998 document is concerned) with regards to this very fundamental and simple scoping behaviour, but they do not admit that this is a violation as such. Instead they claim that one can work around this “problem” by using a special compiler switch that disables “language extensions”. However, depending on your configuration, making use of this switch will break compilation of certain Visual C++ headers (ntheader.h IIRC). You have to love this.

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