4 months out of warranty and my laptop HD dies. Joy! Thankfully it is easily replaced and I can try reseating tonight to see if the magic HD gremlins just pulled the socket out. Now I’m glad I saved my old laptop so it can be a donor of a 2.5″ drive :)
Archive for September, 2007
And it bites once more
Friday, September 28th, 2007Naughty link of the day
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007Trolled…
Thursday, September 13th, 2007Saf challenged me to take a screen-shot of her desktop remotely. Fairly simple of course if you’re already logged in to her user account over SSH but I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw [slightly NSFW]. That’ll learn me :)
Annoying Firefox bug of the day
Thursday, September 13th, 2007If you’re reading this in Firefox and have a font with ligature support enabled, take a look at a ligature test page. Ligatures are an advanced feature of fonts whereby special glyphs are provided for specific letter combinations (usually ‘fi’ and ‘ffi’ but sometimes ’st’ and ‘æ’). Firefox’s rendering engine appears to only half support them: ligatures are rendered but the character metrics aren’t adjusted appropriately.
Apparently it isn’t scheduled to be fixed until the Fx 3.0 time-frame. In the mean time I have to stare at ugly web-pages or use a different font :(.
Gods praise SSH
Thursday, September 13th, 2007I was late for work today. The reason lies somewhere in the nest of twisty little gotchas which comprise printing on Linux. For some reason, despite great strides being made elsewhere, printing is still not the ‘plug it in and it goes’ process that it should be.
Now don’t get me wrong, I have no solution to the problem but it has the same feel to me that configuring a dial-up modem used to back in the dim-distant days of the late 90s. It is unlikely to be a CUPS problem either. Mac OS X uses CUPS as it’s printing back-end yet still manages to Just Work for me.
The printer I was fixing was that at Saf’s house. They have a big Ubuntu box that sits and serves, amongst other things, their 1TB of backups and the printer. The particular gripe this morning was a combination of four things:
- Phil masochistically upgrading to gutsy last night;
- A loose printer cable;
- Incorrect permissions being set on /dev/usb/lp0 upon re-insertion — in this age of fancy all-singing, all dancing user-space device management dæmons, I thought that was a thing of the past — and
- The paper-size fluctuating between A4 and Letter.
The first two were fixed fairly quickly thanks to, respectively, lsusb and less-ing various things under /var/log/. The last is still not fixed.
The point of this post is not to bitch about printing however but to praise Unix’s networking pedigree. The problem was worked around rather than solved by tunneling the lab printer’s IPP interface over SSH and adding it via the ‘Add new printer’ dialog on Saf’s own Ubuntu install (sensibly still on feisty).
The upshot? Saf can print directly to the lab printer instead of sending me PDFs, can prin in colour and double-sided just like magic. The ‘Printer Properties’ dialogue Just Works and all is good.
Printing might be complex to set up under Linux but you can do some funky tricks :).
A good deal
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007The BBC news has a piece on a couple who have stayed in a Travelodge for more than 20 years. By booking 12 months in advance they get the room for £90 per week or roughly £390 per month. That is a lot cheaper than my current rent and in the ball-park of my friends’ average rent in Cambridge. Not that this couple also get a maid to come and clean for them every day for that price! Perhaps there is something to be said for staying in a hotel permanently.
Old hardware
Monday, September 10th, 2007Since it looks like it’ll be the best part of a week before my new computer arrives here, I went down to the basement and pulled my old PhD machine out of mothballs. For comparison with my new box, this machine is a P4 2.4GHz with 512MiB memory, 80 GB of hard-disk and (currently) a Radeon 9200 GPU. Despite being just-under 5 years old, and being the dog’s proverbials at the time, it now seems a bit of a creaking relic.
I should note that at some point during its stay in the basement, the moderately nice GeForce 6-series card got whipped out and replaced with the Radeon.
Sitting on the hard drive was an ancient Gentoo install (remember that) and a copy of Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog (which was my main desktop at the end of my PhD). Deciding that I hadn’t suffered enough pain recently I decided to vim /etc/apt/sources.list, %s/hoary/feisty/ and apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade. How exciting!
Amazingly, even with all the cruft, the upgrade managed to succeed (after a number of apt-get -f install cycles); all I needed to do was to blow away my (hand-edited) GRUB config at the end and fix xorg.conf to recognise the change of GPU. I say ‘work’ — the boot process spews out a mass of errors and usplash has gone bye-byes but the machine does come up and appear to function.
I am a bit stuck with the GPU I have here though since all of my work kinda requires a decently programmable GPU which the Radeon 9200 is not.
A week of work
Sunday, September 9th, 2007I started going into my new place of work last week. For those that don’t know, I resigned from my former employer to have a bit of a wind-down over the summer. At some point I’ll probably post a write-up of what I did then but for the moment let’s concentrate on the future.
Last week I mostly spec’ed out my new machine, did a bit of literature review and started tidying up some software I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks this holiday.
Yet again I am amazed at the cheapness of hardware. Four hyper-threaded cores of execution (i.e. 8 logical CPUs under Linux), 4GiB of memory, 1.5 TB of HDD and a GeForce 8-series graphics card all for under £1,500 — incredible!
Of course I’m left using my laptop at work until it arrives but that gives me time to port my OpenGL toolkit to OS X. I’m getting pretty impressed at the new Intel GPU in this regard. With its hardware support for programmable pixel and vertex shaders, I’m a happy bunny. The one problem is that I can only get Cg to use the arbfp1 profile. I know that the hardware should be capable of ps_3_0-level stuff, I just can’t find a way to get Cg to believe me :). I might be able to persuade GLSL to work I suppose.
Playing with AJAX
Thursday, September 6th, 2007Today I are b’in mostly fiddling with getting this blog to appear in MediaWiki. To this end I’ve decided to try and brush up my DHTML knowledge and write a funky AJAX interface which uses the Atom feed from the site. Unfortunately it would appear the IE fails and so, until my vista machine arrives at work, IE-using luddites will have to install a real browser.