As I was downloading OpenOffice for the wif last night, I couldn’t help noticing that it was coming down at a very respectable 110KByte/s via my home ADSL link. This of course means that my bandwidth upgrade is complete. Rejoice!
Improve that UI
This guide to user interface differences between Winblows and Mac OS X (by Apple) should be consulted when you ever have to think about getting that UI perfect. Apple makes several very valid and straightforward points.
It works!
After some more hacking on the DRI Radeon drivers, I can now suspend/resume with running hardware-accelerated 3D applications. Whoohooo! See this posting for details.
Note that this is very different from our DriReInit work.
Death to censorship
Yahoo reports that a group of record labels (UMG, Sony, RCA and Warner Brothers Records) are suing American back-bone providers because they allow end-users to download illegal music from Listen4ever.com.
The preposterousness of this aside, should they succeed, a precedent for backbone-level censorship on the internet will be created. Personally, I don’t condone the illegal download of music (and I also don’t care if you do download your music like that), but I do feel very strongly about the current freedom of information flow.
William Gibson knew it then…
This article in Wired documents the efforts of a scientist to restore sight with brain implants and external signal processing and optical acquisition equipment. It also mentions the work of one or two other scientists in the field.
I read Neuromancer years ago and it was very good. I read it very recently again and suffered a severe attack of goose-flesh. Gibson’s visions of the future are super-naturally accurate: if you haven’t read this book yet, stop what you’re doing now and start. You’ll see that virtual reality (AFAICR, Gibson coined the term “cyberspace”), brain implants, artificial human augmentation and artificial intelligence are all there and that the current state of affairs is excitingly close to the bleak picture that Gibson paints. I hope I live long enough to see where it ends…
11:14:37 up 43 days, 23:01, 2 users, load average: 0.27, 0.24, 0.29
It’s pure bliss when your workstation doesn’t need to reboot 43 times per day, but just keeps chugging along doing its job…
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We went to Köln (Cologne, yeah?) this weekend. The Dom is incredible, but I guess that’s what you get if you spend a few hundred years constructing a masterpiece. The Cathedral and the Bazaar? The Cathedral wins, hands down…
Sipping Kölsch on the bank of the Rhine in the summer sun is also an activity that I can highly recommend. :)
I managed to update my laptop page as things have been moving quite fast on the DRI front. My kludge idea has been reworked/redone by Michel Dänzer and it is now actually about ready for prime-time. XFree86 can now seamlessly drop back into software rendering if it can’t regain DRI resources after a VT switch.
I scream you scream we all scream for 802.11b
My house now has an Actiontec 802.11b access point and my laptop has an 802.11b wireless network card. Whoop!
Too … much … water.
I have come to the conclusion that the Netherlands exist in a subtly alternate dimension. There are several observations which allude to this, but the most prominent and convincing is the physically impossible amount of water that can fall from the sky in a finite time. This would not be possible in the reality that we are used to… but in the twilight zone of NL it can happen and does, often.