Chris’ Blog

If you are a British citizen, I please ask you to help scrap the proposed idea of tracking vehicles for the purpose of taxation and other sinister profiteering activities, and that is forgetting the extreme evasion of privacy. I don’t want the government where the pwnage roads are around my house, and certainly not how fast it is possible to go… So please, sign it!

While we are at it, Ban DRM as well!

Found a cartoon about the situation with Hans Reiser, this is a bit old but hey.

I have stared using SVK for a few projects which I am working on at the moment. I found nice tutorials here: Part I, Part II, Part III.

I found Medibuntu as a replacement for Ubuntu PLF repository, they provide very simple installation instructions. My one line installation instructions are below:

wget -q http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo wget http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -c | awk '{ print $2; }'`.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get update

To get glxgears to display FPS with X.org versions greater than 7.0 you need to execute it with an under-documented parameter, either:

$ glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark

or

$ glxgears -printfps

will do.

I have made some adjustments to the configuration of my Thinkpad, I now only see one error in Xorg.0.log, far better than the 20 or so each startup.

In X I removed touchscreen and touchpad support as my thinkpad has neither of them, and they were willing the logs with errors. Next was to disable hardware 3d acceleration rather than allowing X to attempt it, my thinkpad doesn’t have enough graphics memory to use DRI. I also fixed some S3 standby issues with regards to power consumption in the X config and my adding radeonfb to /etc/modules

I also prevented some irrelevant kernel modules from loading things like ACPI drivers for laptops made by other manufacturers, etc.

Sources:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/walter/geek/linux-t40.html
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_keys_to_work

This is the gstreamer pipeline I am using in Sound Juicer to rip CDs to MP3.

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc preset=1001 bitrate=192 vbr=0 ! id3v2mux

Note: Use gst-inspect-0.10 to view a plugins properties and arguments.

I went to see SOiL play again, last time I saw them in the Bristol Bierkeller, this time in the Exeter University Lemon Grove. The venue was more packed out but it is much smaller than the Bierkeller but the acoustics are better, shame about the stringent alcohol policy (due to lots of minors in attendance.)

Last night I went to see SOiL at the Bristol Bierkeller, they were being supported by Lennon, Brand New Sin, and Godhead.

It was an amazing gig, 4 really good acts, with the exception of Lennon’s supporting guitarist (appears he is a roadie) best thing is, I get to see the gig again free in Exeter: I am on the guest list ^_^. I can hear them sound testing now…

I will be performing some administration tasks which will means killing the RAID array which serves most of my data, temporarily, so, expect evident breakage.