Rabidgremlin's
Soapbox

Just prior to my Christmas break last year I “dropped” my laptop as it was hibernating, it was only an inch or so as I put it down but the knock was hard enough to corrupt my Windows registry! After trying to recover the damaged file I got XP to reboot but it was all a bit messed up.

Not having my XP install disk (it is a work laptop) and desperate to have my laptop up and running over the holiday I decided to install Ubuntu 7.10. The install was painless and as a bit of an experiment in using Linux as a desktop OS I have kept Ubuntu on my laptop since then.

So when my automatic update offered me to upgrade me to 8.04 I thought, “Why not?”. Having never done a complete OS upgrade via an automatic update process and knowing that I had tinkered with my 7.10 install quite a bit, I expected that it wouldn’t be a smooth process but kicked it off anyway.

So after about 6 hours of downloading and answering a couple of questions I was pleasantly surprised, when after a reboot, I was running my bright and shiny 8.04 install.

Then I was informed that propriety video card drivers were available and did I want to install them ?

Now my laptop is an old Del Inspiron 8600 which has an ATI video card in it. ATI unfortunately hasn’t quite joined the open source party so although they support Linux it is with a closed source driver. When initially setting up 7.10 I did try this driver but did not have much luck especially with issues when hibernating my latop.

Hoping that things had gotten better I decided to give them another go.

First off I enabled the drivers but had a persistent red dot on the hardware drivers screen that indicate that the driver “was not in use”.

Additionally I wasn’t able to turn on the desktop effects and I was beginning to miss my spinning desktop cube.

After digging around on the web it turns out that running:

fglrxinfo

should list out information that indicates that OpenGL support is been handled by ATI. In my case, no matter what I did Mesa stubbornly remained listed as the provider!

I then found this link: http://ubuntu-utah.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=569654&highlight=600m+gutsy which had an excellent guide (although targeting 7.10). Following this guide I came to the conclusion that my fglrx kernel module wasn’t been loaded because running:

lsmod | grep fglrx

Didn’t produce any output. Using some Google-fu I then found this link: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6017 which had an suggestion of commenting out a line in /etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video.

Following this advice and a reboot later, everything was just peachy. I was able to enable the Visual Effects and get my spinning desktop cube, all using a nice speedy ATI driver.

So was the hibernate problem had been fixed? Closing my laptop lid I waited with baited breath… and no its still broken. In fact it appears hibernate flat lined my CPU, all my laptop fans came on and the laptop got very very hot ! Not so good.

For the moment I have simply changed my power settings to shutdown instead of hibernate when the lid is closed. Its a pain but at least I get my 3D acceleration.

Hopefully this problem will get fixed but if you follow the various forums the root cause is some incompatibility with a library that the ATI drivers use and of course because they are closed source we have to wait for ATI to fix them.

Since this has been an issue for a while I’m not holding my breath but 8.03 has LTS (long term support) for 3 years so we may get lucky.

After the success of my laptop upgrade I also did my home theater PC which I’ve also been running Ubuntu on (after surprise, surprise another Windows issue caused me to migrate). This one was completely painless.

At this rate I’m not going to have any Windows machines left in my household !

Well working into the wee hours of the morning I finally finished off my Google Android Developer Challenge entry.

Bubbles! allows you to create a pop (point of presence) that is ‘broadcasted’ from your phone. Other Bubbles! users in close proximity (about 50m) get to see your pop and you get see theirs. Of course as you move around so does your pop.

A pop is anonymous and consists of a message and a nick name that you choose for yourself.

I was going to implement a feature whereby you could tie a pop to a location. This would allow you to attach messages to a point in space for other users to see. Unfortunately I ran out of time but its next on my list to build.

Here are a few screenshots so you can see Bubbles! in action (click to see them full sized)

I’m also thinking of including the ability to see the history of pops for another user and perhaps even the ability to initiate a chat session with another Bubbles! user. Maybe even overlay the pops unto a MapView (which would hook into Google Maps) .

Of course if I get into the top 50 for the first round of the challenge I’ll have some money to invest into more development. We’ll have to see how I go but here’s hoping.

The BBC has an article on the peace sign, which recently turned 50 years old.

What was really interesting was its origins, apparently it was created as a symbol for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the the 1950s. The designer (Gerald Holtom) decided to combine the semaphore symbols for N (for Nuclear) and D (for Disarmament) to form one of the most widely recognised protest symbols.

Very nice, using “military” symbols to form a anti-war sign :)

Found this very nice “design” site called NOTCOT.org. Its tag line is ideas+aesthetics+amusement and its interesting picture oriented layout and content certainly does just that.

It covers art, architecture, websites, advertising and the like, I always seem to be able to find something of interest here.

For example today’s links includes:

Pi10k – This experiment attempts to convert the first 10,000 digits of pi into a musical sequence. you pick the scale or ten notes of your choice and watch it go.

Stop motion Gmail – To promote in Russia Gmail, Google along with the agency Saatchi & Saatchi, manually created a giant gmail interface in stop motion.

Oslo Opera House – Construction progress of the new Oslo Opera House by Snoetta Architects. The project is based on slopes, converting the roof in a massive public space.

Staircase bookcase – A cool staircase combined with a bookcase design for a small apartment.

Check it out.

Grabaseat now has an official blog.

The intro text reads:

“Welcome to the official grabaseat blog. Here you will find behind-the-scenes information and great ‘insider’ tips for grabaseat.”

Should be interesting to see what info lands up there. Check it out at http://grabaseatnz.blogspot.com/

I’m forever running out of books to read and never quite make it to the library so my interest was piqued when my friend Tim told me about a website you could download free sci-fi from.

I was thrilled when I visited the site and found that the books were from authors I knew because to be honest, many free books are not really that good.

The Baen Free Library is fantastic, it contains a large number of free books from the Baen catalog. The site is a little hard to navigate so this link will take you straight to the download pages (hosted on another site).

I would highly recommend:

• The Honor Harrington series by David Weber
• The Legacy of the Alldenata series by John Ringo (very hardcore sci-fi military, so be warned)
• Elizabeth Moon
• Andre Norton
• Mercedes Lackey

The books come in a variety of formats, HTML, RTF etc. I have found that downloading the RTF format and then using OpenOffice to generate a PDF works really well.

If you are not using OpenOffice then download PDFCreator and you will be able to generate a PDF from Word by printing to the PDFCreator “printer” that the software installs…

Apart from the free books, you can also purchase other books in the Baen catalog from the site and get them in electronic form, quite a bit cheaper then buying the paperbacks.

The following is the currently list of authors with free books:

• Aaron Allston
• Andre Norton
• Christopher Anvil
• Catherine Asaro
• Lois McMaster Bujold
• John F. Carr
• Paul Chafe
• Rick Cook
• John Dalmas
• David Drake
• Rosemary Edghill
• Linda Evans
• Eric Flint
• Michael Flynn
• Dave Freer
• Mark A. Garland
• Scott Gier
• Roland Green
• Ellen Guon
• James P. Hogan
• Sarah Hoyt
• Karen Koehler
• Mercedes Lackey
• Keith Laumer
• Murray Leinster
• Holly Lisle
• Duncan Long
• Elizabeth Moon
• Howard L. Myers
• Charles G. McGraw
• Larry Niven
• Jerry Pournelle
• John Ringo
• Richard Roach
• Fred Saberhagen
• James H. Schmitz
• Ryk Spoor
• D. W. St. John
• Harry Turtledove
• Lars Walker
• David Weber
• K. D. Wentworth
• Michael Z. Williamson

Happy reading…

I borrowed a water blaster from my in-laws to clean off a fence, figured it would be messy and tedious but truth be told I love it.

Just point and shoot and all the dirt and grime just vaporise, it is endless fun (even if it is wet and messy).

Found an awful lot of interesting spiders and bugs too. Even some really big (and ugly) wetas, had to be careful not to vaporise them as they are protected, but the spiders were fair game (I don’t like spiders).

It is also very effective, just check out this picture:

The bit on the right has been freshly water blastered, the bit on the left is still to be done.

Each fence section took about 20 minutes to complete and I’m giving the wood a few days to dry out before I stain the fence. We will see how it goes.

Now I’m eyeing up what else I can blast, I have a couple of other fences, a concrete driveway and the house itself…. think I’m going to enjoy myself !

So I have a new site up and running. Its called whatistheinternet.info

The site is an easy to use introduction to what the Internet is and how it works. It will have a strong focus on security and safe surfing as well.

Currently its very basic but check it out anyway.

Summer seems to finally here and whilst waiting for Portal to finish downloading, I thought I’d update my blog’s theme.

Turns out there are tons out there but not that many that look good and do a “fluid” layout well. I was tempted to start fresh and build my own using these free blank templates but decided I was just too lazy.

In the end I went with this theme called Skittish. Works out of the box and I’ve only had to do some minor tweaks.

Portal is still only at 69% (sigh) something really wrong with Steam at the moment… think I’ll go sit in the sun.

Not quite what the licensing department had in mind when they decided to allow customized plates :)

BOL0X belongs to my work mate, Dave…