The laptop has arrived. It’s big, it’s bad and it’s a bit cranky, which is why I’ve decided to call it Dr Evil. It racks up a pretty respectable 1700 to 1800 FPS with glxgears and the bleeding edge DRI tree Radeon drivers. There is still a (known) problem w.r.t. switching to a VT and back which I’ve documented here. I will let you know if/when this is resolved. I am planning to generate more documentation in the form of a mini-review and of course a Linux howto for this laptop: stay tuned. All in all, I’m very happy with my purchase.

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If you want hotplugging and gphoto2 (and consequently things like gtkam, KDE kamera, etc.) to work nicely with your Kodak dc2xx, remember NOT TO COMPILE DC2XX SUPPORT into the kernel. This sounds counter-intuitive, but trust me. Please.

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Yes boys and girls, the bitch of a motherboard (MSI-694D dual FC-PGA) in my work machine went tits up last week. I never trusted the regulator on that thing: if the CPUs were under an oscillating load, one could see small fluctuations on the screen in time with the load. This was the case even when it was new, but do you think any of the suppliers took my complaints seriously? So, the regulator has finally gone bye-bye… I believe it’s just shit quality on the MSI-694D.

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I finally broke down and ordered that laptop: Promedion (Clevo) 5600 with Northwood P4 1.8GHz CPU, 256MB DDR ram, 30G HDD, 64MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, 15″ 1400×1050 TFT, 3 year on-site.

When I get the thing, which should be in a week or so, I’ll make sure to write up a detailed review and document the laptop’s transcendence to the next level of computer consciousness (i.e. the Linux installation). Fortunately I didn’t have to pay the Microf*ck tax (the forced inclusion of a Microslop OS) like with so many other mainstream notebooks.

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I found this posting on groups.google.com, bless its heart. It’s very positive about the Clevo 5600 and mentions that it’s also marketed as the Fosa 5600, Prostar 5694 and the Area 51 gaming laptop by AlienWare. I’d been drooling about the Area 51 before, but at that time I didn’t know what the Clevo looked like, so I didn’t recognise it.

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Mozilla 1.0 has been released! Nuke IE (unless you’re already using a real OS), install Mozilla and enjoy some compliance goodness.

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SpamAssassin kicks ass. What to do with all this extra time…

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The Clevo 5600 is also sold as the M-Tech 5600 as well as the Sager NP56xx series.

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The Acrobat Reader 5.05 linux plugin just works with Mozilla 1.0rc3. Of course. :)

Here is an interesting article about why Eric S. Raymond likes Python. It’s an interesting read, whether you’re an esr fan or not.

My VisSym 2002 trip to Barcelona was great fun. We made good use of the time in Spain and even spend a few nights in a Parador in Cardona. This was on the pricey side, but is definitely worth it.

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I’m in browser heaven. I bought Codeweavers Crossover 1.1.1 for a measly $24.95, so now my already hard-core Mozilla 1.0rc2 can also make use of all the winblows browser plugins, such as Quicktime, Windows Media Player 6.4 (ugh), Flash 6, Shockwave and so on. This is a great piece of software and it’s stable too!

Did you know that “xam = reduce(operator.add, map(operator.mul, xa, xa)) ** .5” calculates the magnitude of n-element vector xa? I had to wipe away a tear when I wrote that. It’s fast too. To run an interesting python benchmark, download this.

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