I’m famous in Germany, just like my hero David Hasselhof

Chris Venter, a good friend of mine who’s spending some time in Germany working for Siemens, just told me that my Radeon DRI resume pages have been mentioned in an article in the April 2003 issue of Linux Magazin. The article, “Das Transmeta Crusoe-SDK im Kurztest”, doesn’t seem to be available online.

This would also explain the sudden increase in hits and binary downloads from the resume pages. :)

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Small Victories

Oh, this is SO sweet. This morning a SPAM managed to get past my SpamAssassin installation. I immediately reported it to the four networks involved in its delivery and at least one has taken immensely pleasing action:

“Dear Charl,

Thank you for using ****!

We have ternimated the account for ***\**.****.net. Thank you for

reporting the AUP violation.

Please feel free to email us with any questions or comments you may

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Diplomacy

“In any conflict your fate will depend on your actions. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people.” — Bush addressing the Iraqi people in a televised speech.

I’m sorry, but I really find it very hard not to be very cynical about this carefully worded advice by Bush.

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My kingdom, my kingdom for S3 suspend to RAM!

After spending (wasting) this whole evening hacking on the disassembled ACPI machine language ripped from the firmware of my laptop (ACPI assembly language is strange), studying the stupid ACPI 2.0 specification and mucking around in the code of the latest BitKeeper snapshot of the latest 2.5 development Linux kernel, I am still no closer to a usable S3 suspend to RAM. The sleep button simply refuses to wake the laptop up: Maybe that’s why it’s called a sleep button.

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Suspend-to-disc update

As reported earlier, swsusp v19 is slower than v16 and can cause kernel oopses. Well, it seems that the work that Nigel Cunningham has done on v19 yields much better results. Apply all patches (patch-beta19-01 up to and including patch-beta19-06) over swsusp v19 to enjoy some of this goodness.

The magic combination is now: Linux 2.4.21-pre5, acpi 20030228, swsusp v19, Nigel’s 19-01 to 19-06, my khubd thread killer workaround and my DRI resume patches.

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Have eyes, will watch movies

I saw two good films this weekend. The first, Adaptation, is screenwritten (actually far more than that) by Charlie Kaufman. It tells the story of Kaufman’s struggles to turn Susan Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief, into a screenplay. Watch this: it’s an extremely entertaining “film within a film” setup with some dubious reality thrown in for good measure.

Avalon is directed by Mamoru Oshii, also responsible for Ghost in the Shell, one of my favourite films. This haunting exploration of virtual reality asks questions about the solidness of our perception and interaction with the world around us. These questions have been asked by many other films, but Avalon does so with a grace and a style that are unique.

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