This article in Wired documents the efforts of a scientist to restore sight with brain implants and external signal processing and optical acquisition equipment. It also mentions the work of one or two other scientists in the field.

I read Neuromancer years ago and it was very good. I read it very recently again and suffered a severe attack of goose-flesh. Gibson’s visions of the future are super-naturally accurate: if you haven’t read this book yet, stop what you’re doing now and start. You’ll see that virtual reality (AFAICR, Gibson coined the term “cyberspace”), brain implants, artificial human augmentation and artificial intelligence are all there and that the current state of affairs is excitingly close to the bleak picture that Gibson paints. I hope I live long enough to see where it ends…

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It’s pure bliss when your workstation doesn’t need to reboot 43 times per day, but just keeps chugging along doing its job…

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Ben has frikking finally decided to update his Livejournal for a change. There is rejoicing.

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We went to Köln (Cologne, yeah?) this weekend. The Dom is incredible, but I guess that’s what you get if you spend a few hundred years constructing a masterpiece. The Cathedral and the Bazaar? The Cathedral wins, hands down…

Sipping Kölsch on the bank of the Rhine in the summer sun is also an activity that I can highly recommend. :)

I managed to update my laptop page as things have been moving quite fast on the DRI front. My kludge idea has been reworked/redone by Michel Dänzer and it is now actually about ready for prime-time. XFree86 can now seamlessly drop back into software rendering if it can’t regain DRI resources after a VT switch.

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My house now has an Actiontec 802.11b access point and my laptop has an 802.11b wireless network card. Whoop!

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I have come to the conclusion that the Netherlands exist in a subtly alternate dimension. There are several observations which allude to this, but the most prominent and convincing is the physically impossible amount of water that can fall from the sky in a finite time. This would not be possible in the reality that we are used to… but in the twilight zone of NL it can happen and does, often.

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Brave souls can get their filthy paws on my driReInitKludge patch/binaries. If you use a Radeon under linux with DRI (i.e. hardware accelerated DRI) and wish to be able to suspend/resume, this is for you. The page is here

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Yes, dear reader(s), I have hacked the radeon drivers so that I can suspend from and resume to an XFree86 server running with active DRI. You can read the low-down here. There is probably going to be some resistance from the developers, as this is still a kludge. It’s quite a good kludge though, don’t you think?

By the way, please read the posting carefully. Some people haven’t and got the wrong idea…

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Just for clarity: no, I don’t work for emusic, nor am I affiliated with them in any way. However, I would like the concept of affordable and legal on-line music to be proven viable.

In anycase, if you have a taste for for the alternative/industrial (I hate to categorise), you should take a listen to the Evil Mothers. You could perhaps start with Pitchforks and Perverts or even I Love Fur.

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I’ve ported the XFree86 Synaptics touchpad driver to GPM.

I’ve spent too many hours trying to diagnose the VT switch bug and finally fixed it with the help of Michel Daenzer.

Now I’m trying to get the Radeon to survive a suspend-to-disk and resume whilst in DRI mode. I can suspend and resume (with swsusp) out of X successfully if I’m not using DRI. With DRI I resume into a frozen X. I would really like to be able to suspend with DRI, as I do “3d thingies” often. At the moment I’m scratching in the Radeon kernel DRM to see what can be done. As always, I’ll keep you posted.

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