By accident, I discovered that my thinkpad has got an internal microphone. Now I can get rid of that stupid headset I have to use for skype.
(Yeah, I know macBook’s have got a camera too)
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Internal Microphone
Sunday, February 11th, 20074 inches
Thursday, February 8th, 2007Today several schools (including miine) stopped early because of ‘heavy’ snowfall. 10cm of snow, that are about 4 inches.
It’s ridiculous.
Codeyard Community Day
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007It was fun 
.
Intel’s free literature
Thursday, February 1st, 2007I noticed that you are able to order hard-copy’s of Intel’s books on the IA-32, 64 and Itanium architecture. So I did.
Today, a few days later, I received them. They’re very informative thorough and well structured. And, in contrary to other professional literature, you are able to read it without crunching your brains on one jargon-filled sentence. Basically free, dense and easily read books and great references.
So, a big thank you to Intel for this nice free service.
By the way, Itanium seems to really rock. (256 registers, compiler branch prediction, 8-superscalar, etc)
Also, I’ve got no spare room anymore on my desk.
Hashcash 3.2
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007I upgraded to hashcash 3.2. I hope that will stop the new wave of spam I had on this blog. When you’re upgrading yourself, note that now wp-hashcash resides in its own subdirectory in the plugins folder, I didn’t notice that and couldn’t find what was wrong until I noticed the ‘/wp-hashcash/’ bit in the source.
By the way, happy new year!
Rotating Beryl cube using HDAPS on a Thinkpad
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006I hacked together this little ruby script to read the G-measuring device in the Thinkpad’s harddisk (HDAPS) and rotate the desktop cube of Beryl when sudden movement occurs. A bit like what has been done for the MacBook already.
http://w-nz.com/~darkshines/projects/rtollina.rb
GPL, obviously. It’s not really perfect yet. I’ll try to improve it tomorrow and add support for compiz and maybe even make a little widget out of it.
It’s based on code by Fer, which is for Compiz instead of Beryl.
XGL take 2
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006I tried to get AIGLX to work on my Thinkpad yesterday. AIGLX is an API similar to XGL, but is a better implementation. Unfortunately AIGLX requires implementation by the video-card driver (which is good because it allows more performance), but the proprietary drivers of ati still doesn’t support it. (nvidia’s do, note to myself: get nvidia next time).
So I had to revert to XGL. A lot has changed since the last time I installed XGL. Other gentoo overlays, other windows managers, other hacks.
I used the gentoo-xeffects overlay to get Xgl.
Installing Xgl was a lot more straight forward and less of a problem than it used to be. An emerge and writing a simple startxgl script was enough.
The compiz-quinstorm patchset seems to have evolved to a proper branch of the compositing window manager, now called Beryl. It also includes a nice settings manager now.
Even hibernation and suspend finally seem to work.
A nice screenshot:
One thing left to do: integrate Xgl into xdm.
Avoiding multiple lock dead-locks by memory addresses
Monday, December 25th, 2006Sometimes you need to lock several resources. If you don’t take great care you are likely to get yourself into dead-locks. A simple example with just two lockable resources A and B:
function foo {
lock A;
lock B;
// Do something with A and B
unlock A;
unlock B;
}
function bar {
lock B;
lock A;
// Do something different with A and B
unlock B;
unlock A;
}
When foo and bar are called at about the same time then there is the change that foo locks A and bar locks B which will make bar wait on foo’s lock on A and vice versa.
Solution: fixed order on memory address
The simplest way to get rid of the deadlock is to always try to acquire a lock on A before on B. A generic solution would be to always lock the resource with the lowest memory address first.
This only works when memory addresses are fixed or that there is an otherwise fixed order-able property.
Reiser4 for 2.6.19
Saturday, December 9th, 2006I found this patch: reiser4-for-2.6.19.patch.gz.
A loud present
Monday, November 27th, 2006Today, a friend of mine, Gerben, gave me a birthday present (a tad late). Not the usual beverages (turned 18 
) (usual, but still very well appreciated ), but a home-made portable speaker with built-in amplifier. Here seen making more sound than the internal speaker of my Thinkpad:
It’s a nifty little device: it’s powered by either an internal battery or an external power source.
It contains a voltage converter and a rectifier which allows a variable AC power source to be connected. This has been added to be able to connect the speaker to the electrical generator of a bicycle. Why? The previous version of this speaker was taken on the bicycle trip with a few friends to the Hertog Jan Brewery in Arcen (~70km) which was only powered by a battery (which tends to be exhausted).
Even better, when set into external source mode it recharges the battery. And because of the voltage converter, the sound doesn’t get louder when you are cycling faster, but the quality of the sound gets better!
I’ve had quite some fun dissecting the little device. Thanks again Gerben!
P’tit-doux
Monday, November 20th, 2006E-Mail server issues
Thursday, November 9th, 2006I had some problems with a recent mysql update — it broke some packages including qmail-send, which caused quite a lot of mail to be dropped the last few days. Sorry for that.
Update: mail was fortunately not dropped , it’s still in the qmail queue, it just hasn’t been delivered yet. So there’ll only be a delay.
Fallacies (1)
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006I just read this on slashdot:
statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching
Offcourse this relation was explained as televisions causing children to become autistic. This is a very annoying fallacy. Why? Because just maybe children with autism like to watch television more than other children.
If there is a relation, and if it’s not coincidental, there are still two ways to explain it as a cause and effect relation — you cant just blindly assume that one of the two is the cause.
Same goes with relations like:
“Children that play violent games are more likely to become criminals” or “Children that are to become criminals are more likely to play games”
Stupid shout culture.
T60 (2)
Saturday, October 7th, 2006After 2 days installing gentoo on my great T60 I’ve accomplished quite a lot so far:
- WiFi works. 4 seperate components (userland, firmware, kernel module and yet another kernel module) increase complexity a bit. Although the fifth component caused trouble — I forgot to tweak
conf.d/net - Radeon X1400 and video card worked almost directly after using
aticonf— nice! When I upgraded toxorg-server-1.1, though, I got a few crashes when closing X in a not-so-nice manner. - Using the
synapticsdrivers my touchpad now support drag’n'drop, right and middle mouse click and scrolling emulation. Still got to find a way to bind the thinkpad shortcut to disable/enable the point or pad. - Finally got the DVD rewriter to work. It seems I overlooked one little stupid generic E-IDE option in the kernel config.
- Bluetooth and infrared should work — haven’t got the gadgets to try them out
- Never even saw a PCCard, so didn’t even bother to look into ti
- Software suspend (hibernation) doens’t work yet, but I definitely be working on that.
T60
Thursday, October 5th, 2006I just received the Thinkpad T60 notebook I ordered last week from nofost.de. And I’m thrilled!
I’ve been busy all day installing gentoo on the beauty (and removing the ugly windows sticker).
Some nice pictures:
New google reader
Friday, September 29th, 2006Google Reader has been updated. It resembles bloglines a bit more concerning the tree view. It has still got the usual items by popularity/date view as the “all items” view. It’s looks nicer and seems to work pretty well.
One thing still bothers me: the load times. Sometimes it’s just slow (same with gmail). It’s annoying.
18
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006My brother and I turned 18 today!
Feel free to visit us today and have some coffee and a slice of pie.
Send a mail to x@y, or call 024 6421829 (in holland). Where x=bas.westerbaan and y=gmail.com
Arcen
Friday, August 18th, 2006Last tuesday I cycled with some friends (about 11) to Arcen to visit the Hertog Jan brewery. The ~75km of cycling went pretty well — way better than expected. We stayed on a 4 star camping for the night and cycled back the next day.
Needless to say, this was a great experience and we all had a lot of fun.
Some photos were made, I’ll post them as soon as I get them.
WP 2.0.4
Friday, August 18th, 2006Upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.4.
As usual, slam the F5 button (or similar) once (or twice on stupid browsers) to invalidate the old stylesheets and images in the cache. If your browser is really stupid (*cough* IE *cough*), you might need to purge the whole cache manually, but that isn’t my concern .
bcmap 0.1
Sunday, August 13th, 2006bcmap is a simply program to be linked against klibc to map Broadcom RAIDCORE disks to more sensible and stable device nodes.
Currently the bcraid drivers assign the next available sd node to a detected disk, which is very inconvenient when you have a usb stick inserted on boot which pushes your root disk from sda to sdb.
bcmap ensures that your first array will always be /dev/bca, which is a nice thing.
>>> bcmap-0.1.tar.bz2 (source code)
Licensed under the (holy) GNU GPL v.2