I downgraded my kernel to 2.4.21-pre3 with acpi 20030109, swsusp v16 (my version of these patches) along with my hub.c thread kill kludge. The latter is so that USB doesn’t cause your suspends to hang forever because the frikking khubd thread doesn’t want to die. It sometimes gets cranky like this after one suspend/resume cycle.

This is the combination that stopped working after my RAM upgrade and incited the upgrade to 2.4.21-pre4, acpi 20030228 and swsusp v19. However, as reported in a previous posting, the swsusp v19 combination can be quite slow and has caused the occasional oops at suspend.

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My laptop is now equipped with 768MB of PC2100 DDR RAM. Wow, a year ago it would have been quite a machine! :)

In anycase, the downside of all this is that it takes about 1.5 minutes to resume from disc with Linux kernel 2.4.21-pre5, acpi 20030228 and swsusp v19. If only ACPI S3 suspend-to-ram worked!

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I am against the use of firearms and also against the right of any civilian to own and use such a thing. However, there are more than enough people who aren’t and who’re willing to fight for this right.

In that case, maybe a compromise is in order, such as

this smart gun which is only able to fire if its registered owner is operating it and also records (as far as possible) the circumstances at the time of use. If the design is robust, this should make the abuse of firearms much more difficult.

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Read this letter of resignation by John Brady Kiesling to Colin Powell. Truthout summarises it best: “The letter below, delivered to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is quite possibly the most eloquent statement of dissent thus far put forth regarding the issue of Iraq”.

Oh yes, I just BEAT Ben to it, lazy weblogger that he is.

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If you are a rich geek-oriented philanthropist, please buy me this notebook. I believe the world will be a better place once I am in possession of this super light and super battery-efficient ATI FireGL 9000-equipped toy.

I almost forgot… it’s probably going to be another year or three before Linux fully supports all this laptop’s features, but for this juicy piece of hardware I’d probably be willing to do my duty as Microsoft’s bitch, at least for a while.

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Here is a site explaining a whole list of common fallacies in arguments. I’m now less impressed with the site than when I first stumbled onto it, but it’s still useful. Really.

You can now use phrases like “ad hominem attacks” in your flames even if you don’t know any Latin. Come to think of it, even if your knowledge of Latin is non-existent (you barbarian), you should be able to deduce what that means, unless you’re really stupid, in which case it took you half an hour to read this sentence anyway and you’ve now forgotten what it’s all about, which is exactly the reason why I prefer writing long sentences.

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Ed does have a way with words, but what did you expect? In this posting, he points out another example of the fact that this stupid war is all about economics. Once again, did we ever think otherwise?

This article (thanks to Paul for the URL) documents yet another list of examples showing how the US is able to use its dollars to garner support for its war plans.

It’s a very silly kind of democracy.

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In other news, I was able to put time in on Friday and do some

PyColourChooser hacking. Michael Gilfix (the author) has integrated my patches. You know it’s a good patch when it removes far more code than it adds, yet increases the functionality. :)

I’m still wondering why wxWindows doesn’t wrap the GTK colour wheel though. The wxWindows generic colour selector (used on GTK setups) isn’t worth the photons it was coded with. PyColourChooser alleviates this deficiency in wxPython to some extent, but that durn colour wheel would have been nice too!

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This weekend I gave Knoppix 3.1 a spin on my workstation. Knoppix is a complete Debian-based Linux distribution that runs directly from the CD. It’s a simple question of downloading the ISO, burning it and booting from it: a minute or so later you’re staring at a KDE 3.0 desktop and everything Just Works(tm).

Knoppix is an impressive feat. There is an amazing selection of ready-to-run software on the CD, including Open Office 1.0.1, as much of KDE 3.0 as you can handle (including KDevelop) and much more. This is definitely my new rescue CD: hardcore system repare in GUI style.

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By making use of the outline minor mode of Emacs, one can do Python code folding. However, it seems MOST of the available .emacs examples illustrating this are broken, as you’ll find if you try to use them on any Python code longer than three lines.

Here is a correct example, thanks to me and goof.

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