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Managed to make it home after a fine wait at DIA for by luggage. Hopefully I can sort though pictures and write up the fine events of this weekend. It was a very nice time.
Well, all packed up and hopefully everything is arranged for this weekend. I need to leave for the FINE airport in about 10min, then fly to dallas. There I meet up with V and C and we get our rental car and go meet folks for some piles of BBQ. Then to the hotel for sleep. Will try and take a bunch of pictures and such.
Whiled the evening away tonight playing around with software suspend again. I am running 2.6.6 + software suspend 2.0.0.81 on my laptop. It's almost all good news. I no longer have to make sure the ohci-hcd usb module is unloaded, and it even works ok with cpufreq now. The only module I still have to unload and reload now is the prism54 module for my network card. If I leave it in, the suspend never completes. I can also suspend and resume with 3d enabled for video and no need to switch to a virtual console. I can also use all 1GB of my memory and have preempt support. It's all looking very good now.
Was a pretty quiet weekend. I did go and see Kill Bill: Vol 2 again. It was good the second time, although not quite as good as the first. I will have to watch it back to back with the first one and see how that works out.
Need to get ready to head down to Scarborough Faire this coming weekend. Should be a fun time. Bunch of us gathering out there for the faire and visiting.
Last night at hacking society I upgraded my laptop to the shiny new fedora core 2 release. The update itself went fine. It used all 4 of the binary cd's (I have a ton of stuff installed on my laptop, I suspect I did a everything install last time I installed it). The little splashscreen was pretty boring, there was only one, so not much to watch while it upgraded.
After the upgrade completed I rebooted and found my first issue. It had upgraded to the new kernel and removed all my old custom kernels. I compile my own kernels so I can add in software suspend2 for my laptop. Luckily, I have all my old kernels as rpms on the laptop. So, I booted single user and re-installed my custom kernel and booted from that.
Next issue was the firmware wasn't loading for my wireless card. Had to modify the /etc/hotplug/firmware.agent file to make sure and look in /sys instead of /sysfs. I should submit that as a bug to the script. Got that working and back on the net.
KDE fired right up, but anoyingly still has the inability to remap the windows key. I spent probibly several hours playing with keyboard layouts and xmodmap, and pretty much nothing I did worked. The Windows key is mapped to pop up the KDE menu, and thats what it will do. I used to have it mapped to allow me to use the windows key and the arrows to switch desktops, but not anymore. Finally gave up and started trying to get myself to use control-alt-arrows instead. ;(
For some reason the font I was using in xemacs looked like junk under the new release. Spent a while looking at fonts. Finally settled for lucida-typewriter for now. Still not great, but will do.
Everything else worked fine from the upgrade. Very smooth. Probibly one of the easier ones I have ever done. Good work fedora folks.
I really dig the macro mode on this camera. It does a pretty nice job. Here's some pictures of flowers in the back yard that I took eariler today.
Since I am running the 2.6.6 kernel on my laptop now, I decided to take a look at laptop mode since it's included in the kernel now. The laptop-mode.txt readme that comes with the kernel has the approprate scripts in it, so I copied out the /sbin/laptop-mode script and ran it. I saw no mention of JFS support in the readme or the script however, so decided to go look on the net. The laptop mode page does say that JFS is supported, but thats it. Digging around on google got me a discussion about JFS and laptop mode on the JFS list. Looks like JFS didn't need any modifications to work with laptop mode, it just works. So, then I did a '/sbin/laptop-mode start' and a 'hdparm -S 4 /dev/hda' to set the spindown time on my drive low and start laptop mode. Nothing happened. To figure out what was keeping my drive spun up, I used: "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump". That spews out every process that hits the disk and if it's a read/write or a cache hit. Using that I fixed a few things: Set syslog to not sync after each log (a - before the filename), closed some firefox windows that were autorefreshing and writing to cache, setup syslog not to log my fetchnews jobs on each run. Tried laptop mode again, but it still wouldn't spin down. The drive was inactive as far as I could tell. Perhaps it's an issue with my drive somehow, so I looked around a bit more and pulled down smart_spindown which is a handy script that checks for activity and then spins down your drive if there isn't any. It has backoff so that if things seem busy it will wait longer and longer to spin it down. Using that script things spun down and appeared to work ok. Running it overnight I was able to see up to about 10min of spin down time at various points, sometimes as little as 30 seconds. I think this might be worth the savings if you were really hurting for power, but otherwise seems kinda pointless.
Today was the gilly girls dancing greyhounds team event down at the adams county fairgrounds. Here are some pictures. I took a bunch more, but it was impossible to keep the camera at all steady with all the dogs pulling me in 4 diffrent directions. I did get to talk to some folks I hadn't seen in a while, the dogs got a ton of pets. Sounds like things will start to gear up for the ren faire booth soon.
Went up to Fort Collins for the annual meeting for CGC. It was a pretty nice laid back time. They had a Rekki/Healing touch person giving the talk. Not sure what to think of that, but whatever works for people. On the way back there was a nasty wreck on I25. They called in the helicopter.
Nothing to exciting to report the last few days. Just the regular routine. Went down to therapy dog class wed night and had a nice time. Took twyla with me this time and she really enjoyed it I think. Thursday was BLUG with dinner before hand at fiascos. A pretty nice talk from socket about his mailing list reasearch. Tons of possible things going on tonight: A BBQ up in Fort Collins, a group of folks possibly meeting in boulder for drinks/dinner, a group going to the Concrete Blonde show down at the gothic, a group going to see movies. Of course just staying home and relaxing sounds good too.
At 5pm today I take kurt in and get his stiches removed. He's healing up nicely. Still also looking for a dog/house sitter for Memorial weekend. Hope I can find one.
Some pictures of kurt's wound, shattered glass tables, and snow in mid may.
You ever have "one of those days"? I don't usually. Most of the time I have nice mellow days where I work on things that are fun to work on and enjoy the company of my dogs and listen to my music. Today was not a mellow day.
The other day my mp3/dvd entertainment machine's main drive decided to die a painfull death. Luckily it was only the OS disk and had no mp3's or movies on it. So, I quickly looked over techbargains to see what place had the best deal on a drive. Turned out to be bestbuy. Ran over and picked up a new drive and put it in the machine and re-installed it. Got things mostly resetup. That was yesterday. This morning I awoke to the machine being locked up tighter than a drum, so no music. Lots of work stuff going on, so I didn't have time to mess with it. I had forgotten how Really really bad radio is. It's mostly commercials. If they are playing music it's something you have heard about 1000 times. ;(
So, finally got some time to work on the mp3 box and then a gigantic gust of wind came thru the back yard. This wind managed to pick up my glass topped table on my deck and shatter it into about 100000 peices. So, out with a snowshovel and a broom to try and pick it up before the dogs got cut. Managed to mostly get it, but some of the glass fell thru the slats in the deck and wedged in there. Hope they stay there.
Finally got the mp3 machine working and music back. Had a nice beer. Had a nice dinner (cheesey rice and cajan chicken breast) and was just thinking about what movie to watch or the like when a client calls with an emergency. I try and call them back and my cell phone doesn't seem to want to work right. It says "calling..." but after waiting for about 2minutes it's clear it's not going to get past that to the point where it's "connected". After a while get it all sorted and now it's time for bed. What a day.
Here's some pictures of walking the dogs and socket's graduation party which I stopped by.
The DVD drive on my DVD/mp3 machine decided to die. Very anoying. It basically would play a movie for a few minutes, then sieze up and stop working. Then I would have to reboot to get the machine back. So, today I pulled out an old DVD drive from a old broken machine, and it also turned out to be broken. Finally I managed to borrow one from tkil 's machine thats here. It seems to work ok finally. What a pain.
For those who are morbid or like to look at such things, here is a picture of kurts wound.
Got back from the backpacking/hunting trip this morning around 1am. It was quite a blast. You can read all about it in exquisite boring detail (with pictures!) here.
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