MIT team designs bio-suit

News from July 2007:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.html

DisplayPort versus HDMI

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/09/19/displayport-and-hdmi-square-off-in-uber-thorough-comparison/

An astonishingly detailed report at EDN pits the two digital-display-interface standards against one another in an attempt to discover whether we really, truly need two ways to plug things in:

http://www.edn.com/article/CA6594089.html

There's also a comparison of main features of different standards.
Included here as a screenshot:

High frequency of disk load cycles in Ubuntu

Finally somebody wrote some useful stuff concerning the following problem plaguing Ubuntu 8.04:

High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime - original report at https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695

Alexey Borzenkov on May 7th 2008, 23:49 wrote:

A note of observation. After I switched back to Windows XP I found that
Windows indeed didn't let my drive to spin down or park heads, however
all this came at the same price I had in Linux, i.e. frequent superclicks
and Load_Retry_Count increasing. So the problem is not with Linux or
Ubuntu at all, the problem is solely with the hard drive.

It is also worth noting that with Ubuntu I was able to reach any comfortable
increase rates by carefully tweaking /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf.
The most important are ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_AC=1,
LOST_WORK_SECONDS (the default value of 360 ensures only 10
Load_Cycle_Count per hour), READAHEAD (which in my opinion shouldn't
default to 3072, since huge delays every half or one minute between
reads effectively prevent playing videos, setting it to LM_READAHEAD=128
was the best in my case), IDLE_TIMEOUT (if you want your drive to really
cool down when idle, in my observation 60 seconds on AC was the best),
and WRITECACHE set to one (this adds another good layer of caching by
the hard drive).

Now don't forget to set ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true in your
/etc/default/acpi-support.

BUT ALL THIS WON'T WORK unless you edit your /etc/acpi/power.sh and do
the following modifications:

Comment out all $HDPARM nonsense, since laptop-mode controls this for
you (provided you set your settings in laptop-mode.conf, of course).
Next, where you see "$LAPTOP_MODE stop" it should be "$LAPTOP_MODE",
WITHOUT STOP. The latter is very important, because when
"/usr/sbin/laptop_mode stop" is called it effectively TURNS OFF LAPTOP
MODE, even if you have ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true in your
/etc/default/acpi-support. While calling "/usr/sbin/laptop_mode" without
arguments does autodetection, and depending on your settings will either
Without laptop mode "lost work seconds" do not work and this means that
mount option is not applied and pdflush will drop caches half a second
after some program (i.e. firefox) writes something to disk. The constant
writing to disk by many applications is what actually causes heads to
unpark, and when manufacturer sets some very ridiculous timeout for head
parking (i.e. 3 seconds in my case) heads keep unparking all the time.

I'm not sure if acpid is at fault here for calling laptop_mode with stop
argument, or laptop_mode not honoring your settings when stop is passed,
but current settings make laptop mode effectively useless. When I did
the above modifications and tweaked config files for my tastes I was
able to get rid of all problems. When my computer is idle heads park and
disk spins down, staying untouched for 6 minutes. When I'm doing
something active, like watching a movie, my drive is constantly accessed
and heads don't park needlessly. When I'm having a mix of the two (like
active browsing, or doing something else) my heads unpark only 20-30
times per hour, which I consider very good. And best of all, my drive
was not thermally abused and super clicks didn't happen.

As a comparison, average temperature of my drive under Windows was
41 degrees Celsius (and never below), under Linux it was 34-36 degrees
Celsius.

I consider that the main issue with this bug is that laptop mode (as it is)
DOES NOT WORK AT ALL. Please either fix acpid or fix laptop-mode.

Thank you.

I only wonder if this procedure really would work for me, but since I have a copy of his post here, I'll be able to test it eventually.

One thing that holds Linux back

Recently a video card refused to work in the computer of my wife's parents. No video signal, no beeps from inside the case, no smoke (luckily!), just nothing. My wife being the second local computer geek (I am the first one, you know ;)) just took a card from our desktop and used it for replacing the faulty one in the problematic machine. It worked as expected, but she run only up to BIOS screen to receive some video output and confirm that the old video card was in fact broken.

After I got back from work I quickly started Ubuntu in the "single" mode, changed little bits in the xorg.conf and then the parents' Linux system worked as before. It took several minutes at best. Then I assisted the sister-in-law in the Windows XP routine: run in VGA mode, unistall driver, reboot in VESA mode, download and install a new driver (I don't like the drivers that come on a CD), reboot and tweak settings. At least twice the time, and I really tried to be as quick as possible. At home I dig out an old PCI card and did a similar thing to both OS-es on my own computer, to be able to search for a new video card.

Then it struck me: even though X.org has made great leaps forward, there was still something tricky with configuring it.

I was quicker in Linux, and even though I don't like to admit this, it was possible to guide a person through the Windows way of replacing the video drivers. Even though the procedure was lenghty and required reboots, most of time I was able to explain each step in a simple way. On the other hand, after several years of Gentoo experience I think I do know the Linux stuff. Things like "X -configure", horizontal and vertical frequencies, settings for additional mouse buttons - I tried them all throughout last years on different hardware (and I really could go on and on). Just a couple of quick edits and the X server worked again; a simple procedure in my opinion, however rather hard to explain to the said person.

And yet, I still felt like there was something tricky.

You see, it's perfectly possible to configure the X.org server up to the user's heart. Despite this you can see here and there a call for help: "black screen", "unsupported frequency", "unable to set correct resolution", "extra mouse buttons don't work", "issues with additional monitor", you name it.

To all these people it is this one specific program, the X.org server, that gives them impression of Linux being "hard". Most of time problems with the graphics makes the less skilled users unable to jump into the Linux land or unable to do their work if they already have Linux installed (as may be the case for replacing a faulty video card).

What I really mean is this: it seems like all the bases are covered for X.org. The drivers work, all the functionality is there. It's just that X.org lacks serious attempt at handling errors like these, should they arise. Even more user-friendly than it is now. Yes, it's getting better - BulletProofX, displayconfig-gtk - but for example, not all Linux distributions offer a way of booting into a safe graphical mode (PCLinuxOS stands out nicely here). With the other OS from Redmont, there are at least means of failing back into safe defaults. I guess someone should get a hint here.

From the end-user point of view there are two biggest roadblocks that should be improved: better X.org error handling and configuration tools, as well as better wireless support. But the latter is worth an article on its own.

Explanation of Ubuntu Hard Drive Wear and Tear

http://www.linux-hero.com/rant/explanation-ubuntu-hard-drive-wear-and-tear

Undestanding Linux Kernel

http://kernel.org/doc/gorman/html/understand/index.html

Linux device drivers - part 1

/dev/hello_world: A Simple Introduction to Device Drivers under Linux
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2007/07/05/devhelloworld-a-simple-introduction-to-device-drivers-under-linux.html

Driver porting: The seq_file interface
http://lwn.net/Articles/22355/

LTSP network traffic forwarding

Started from this one:

Activate NAT on Debian etch and Disable IPv6 support on Debian
http://www.debianadmin.com/activate-nat-on-debian-etch-and-disable-ipv6-support-on-debian.html

and ended up with this one (in Polish):

Re: NAT + IPTABLES
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-polish/2006/03/msg00176.html

Boot Records Revealed!

http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/MBR_in_detail.htm (broken link)

Update
New website address: http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/index.html

Project PIONIER

http://www.pol34.pl/pionier.html (broken link)

Update
PIONIER - Polish Optical Internet   (in English)
http://www.pionier.gov.pl/eindex.html

PIONIER - Polski Internet Optyczny   (in Polish)
http://www.pionier.gov.pl/index.html

Mounting Solaris CDROMs

http://bolthole.com/solaris/mount-cdrom.html

Mounting ISO images on Solaris

http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2003-January/002959.html

SunBlade 150 boot-floppies trouble

http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2002/debian-sparc-200210/msg00359.html

The Wonderful World of Linux 2.6

Review of Linux kernel 2.6 features:
http://kniggit.net/wwol26.html

LinuxJournal - Favorite Embedded Distribution 2003

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7029

Favorite Embedded Distribution

• Qtopia
• MontaVista
• Lineo

Information on OpenBoot

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=130778