TIME have an interesting photo essay called "China on the Wild Side". A set of 17 photos taken in Changsha city, capital of Hunan province in south-central China and home to just two million residents
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1843145,00.html
Sunday, 21 September 2008
Ubuntu 8.10 on the D630
Ubuntu 8.10 (alpha 6) works brilliant on the Dell D630. Audio, Bluetooth, wireless and power management all work out of the box
pre-alpha 6 there was a gtk+ regression that caused external displays to flicker when loading applications. This has now been resolved. The bug is detailed at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+2.0/+bug/245383/
By default I find the ALPS touchpad sensitivity to be too low, but this can be resolved by updating the xorg.conf file with:
(this is added to the synaptics driver section)
For the most part use with a standard D-series D/Dock is also very good... external displays can be configured with xrandr (my D630 has an X3100 graphics chipset; the nvidia tool can be used for nvidia chipsets), USB devices are correctly detected, etc. Audio output via the mini-jack on the dock can be enabled with by checking the "IEC958 Default PCM" switch for the HDA Intel (Alsa mixer)
pre-alpha 6 there was a gtk+ regression that caused external displays to flicker when loading applications. This has now been resolved. The bug is detailed at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+2.0/+bug/245383/
By default I find the ALPS touchpad sensitivity to be too low, but this can be resolved by updating the xorg.conf file with:
Option "MinSpeed" "0.75"
(this is added to the synaptics driver section)
For the most part use with a standard D-series D/Dock is also very good... external displays can be configured with xrandr (my D630 has an X3100 graphics chipset; the nvidia tool can be used for nvidia chipsets), USB devices are correctly detected, etc. Audio output via the mini-jack on the dock can be enabled with by checking the "IEC958 Default PCM" switch for the HDA Intel (Alsa mixer)
Currently the main problem I have is with repeated undocking/docking leading to a crash in the ehci_hcd (high-speed USB 2.0) driver... this can be worked around by a) disabling high-speed USB in the BIOS; or b) running "echo "blacklist ehci_hcd" > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-usb && update-initramfs -u && reboot" as root. I have logged a bug for this over at http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11472. When time permits I will continue my investigation and hopefully come up with a proper fix
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
Harnessing the power of Google (updated)
As part of a case I'm working on I'm regularly wanting to know the exact number of Bytes in N Gigabytes and how many Gigabytes M Bytes are
If you've not used Google Calculator before, it's brilliant. Just type, for example, "1TB in Bytes" into Google and bam! you have an answer
It is also capable of many other conversions, another example might be "100RMB in GBP" (how much is 100 Chinese yuan worth in Sterling)
The net result is my new gcalc script... it's a really nasty hack (I can't see why gawk won't let me include a + in my field sep. and all attempts to escape it fail)
In case you're wondering about the final sed... I don't like the way Calculator groups numerics in groups of 3... it's a real pain when you want to copy/paste values quickly
If you've not used Google Calculator before, it's brilliant. Just type, for example, "1TB in Bytes" into Google and bam! you have an answer
It is also capable of many other conversions, another example might be "100RMB in GBP" (how much is 100 Chinese yuan worth in Sterling)
The net result is my new gcalc script... it's a really nasty hack (
#!/bin/sh
q=`echo "$@" | sed 's/ /\+/g'`
curl -s -A foo "http://www.google.com/search?q=$q" | gawk -F "font size=\\\\+1><b>|</b><tr>
In case you're wondering about the final sed... I don't like the way Calculator groups numerics in groups of 3... it's a real pain when you want to copy/paste values quickly
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