Handyman's Home

Whoa, I'm a dad yet again! Kwint Samwel was born on April 9, 2010. He's in good health, and so is his mother.

YES! I've finally got suspend working reliably on my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) setup. Here are the steps:

• Use the binary nVidia drivers in the nvidia-glx-new package.
• In xorg.conf, add the line Option "NvAGP" "1" to the graphics card section.
• Install the nvidia-settings package
• open nvidia-settings (System > Administration > NVIDIA X Server Settings), go through all of the screens, and disable all three sync-to-vblank options.
• Go to /etc/pm/config.d and create a new file (the name doesn't matter -- I called it "local_config"). In this file, place the line SUSPEND_MODULES+=" ehci_hcd".

And voila, suspend works, both from the command line using pm-suspend and through gnome-power-manager!

Here's some of the docs (to which I just added the bit about nvidia-settings). The ehci_hcd stuff is not in there though, might want to add that as well...

Earlier, I reported on my experiences with the Ricoh 5-in-1 card reader included with my Dell Inspiron 9400. I was just prodded by an email from Ankit Tanna, who had the same problem (blue screens of death) and asked me for a solution, since the drivers I pointed at didn't work for him either. Well, it turns out that they didn't work so well for me either, I just hadn't reported back on that fact. When I put a card in the slot, I get a blue screen 50% of the times. When I boot up with a card in the slot, I get a blue screen 100% of the times. Shutting down with a card inserted is a no-go too. So I've given up on this thing and I'm currently just using the USB cables provided with my camera and mobile phone.

BTW, anybody else notice that the USB connection on the Sony Ericsson W810i is just dog slow? I suspect that the Bluetooth file transfer option is faster than the USB version! I have an 8 GB Memory Stick Pro Duo in there, and I get perhaps 100 KB/s. Transfering an entire CD's worth of MP3s takes bloody ages. If anybody knows a trick to speed this thing up, please don't hesitate to share it with me!

I just spent quite some time figuring out why du told me that I only had about 4GB in use on my 15GB ext3 partition, while df told me that I had only 1GB worth of free space. There are apparently a number of possible causes, including the stealth already-deleted(=unlinked)-but-not-yet-closed-by-some-application files. I tried rebooting, but that didn't help. I tried forcing an fsck. That didn't help.

In the end, it turned out that I had the least common situation: a large file had been placed in a directory that was also a mount point. The result is that du -x does not find the files because they are hidden by the file system that is mounted on top of the mount point. Now I'll just have to find out if I can restrict access to the mount point while it's not used, without restricting access to the mounted file system if one is mounted.

My friend Jeroen just released his grand opus Taggl. It's basically a tag search engine, which finds content from multiple sites (such as Flickr and YouTube) by their tags. It also allows searching your personal stuff on those sites, if you give it access to that. And for every search, it shows you the tags that occur in combination with that tag, and it allows you to drill down to specific combinations of tags. All in all, a very cool tool for Flickr and YouTube addicts.

Whoa, I'm a dad! Lucas Samwel was born on April 6, 2008. He's in good health, and so is his mother.

Richmond is actually a big melting pot. Where you can easily live in The Netherlands and never befriend a Turk, a Moroccan or a negro (is that PC? Oh, the sensitivities of the States!), it's simply natural here that blacks and whites are equals -- you don't notice any distance between people at all. This is so different from The Netherlands. But there is one other difference: the black people here actually have an education. One of the main reasons I don't have any black, or Turkish, or Moroccan friends (that I can think of) is that I simply didn't meet that many of them at university. Here, you have hordes of highly educated black people, and I can easily relate to them, no problem there. It's probably a cultural thing as well, black people don't really have different value systems than white people here.

Another observation of equal opportunities: I noticed that at Delta Airlines, half of the stewardesses were black, and the other half were really old compared to what I'm used to for stewardesses. No problem as far as I'm concerned (they were doing a very good job!), but a stark contrast with some other airlines. Also, I met a female VP of the client company I'm doing work for right now. Not something you'd see in The Netherlands, were it's still the men who decide what's done. We're so old-fashioned!

Just another note about the parking lots: it seems that if you have an office building with cubicles, the parking lot is usually double the size of the building. Why? Well, everybody has a car, and a car takes up about twice the size of a cubicle. Do the math.

I always wondered how people would be able to afford college fees of tens of thousands of dollars. Now I read in a magazine today that there's a special savings method where you can put aside money for college, and this is tax free. OK, then I can understand that it's actually somewhat affordable -- although it's still pretty expensive!

OK, that's it for now. Maybe some more notes tomorrow, if I notice some more weird stuff.

Now let's talk about pedestrian-friendliness. Basically, it doesn't exist here. I tried to cross a major road, and although there are traffic lights, it's pretty much impossible to cross the road on foot. Larger Richmond is very spread-out, there's lots of space between properties and all of the buildings are single-storey. Also, almost every building has a parking lot outside. Cars here are generally huge, and everybody goes everywhere by car. No wonder, if you can't even cross the road without using a car.

I was working at the client's site, and the boss came up to me and told me that I wouldn't have to bring my tie on Friday. Casual Friday, oh yeah! Of course, normally every day is Casual Day at Aia headquarters, except for people who have to deal with clients. I found it very interesting to actually witness something like Casual Friday, which I'd only heard of in stories before. I must say it wasn't really a big difference at our client's site -- AFAICT only the managers tend to dress up in Business Casual on Mondays to Thursdays.

It was also very interesting to see how cubicles work in practice. In fact, it's not as bad as it seems when you hear about them, although I must say that I still prefer the open work areas with 3-7 people per office that you see in The Netherlands. The one weird thing was that half of the people in the building were working without any daylight whatsoever. In The Netherlands, having actual daylight at your desk is compulsory, so it's really weird to be deep in the catacombs of a single-storey building with not even a skylight to tell you whether it's day or night.

(To be continued...)

Actually, the airplane was only half full. It was a 767, they're probably using it because it's one of the smallest planes that has enough range to do Amsterdam - Atlanta in one go. This was very good: I had two seats to myself at the window!

Before I left I bought a set of noise cancelling headphones at Schiphol airport. I chose to get the in-ear type, and it turns out that they work perfectly under one condition: the plugs must be plugged airtightly into your ears, or otherwise you're not going to get any useful noise reduction. At first I didn't plug them in completely, and I thought that they didn't work. Wrong!

Now for some observations about Richmond (and perhaps many other similar places).

First of all, the people here have weird eating habits. For instance, the guy who was working with me at the customer's site went out and got me breakfast on two consecutive morning. On the first morning I got a breakfast from McDonald's, on the second morning I got one from Burger King. The McDonald's breakfast consisted of a large chicken nugget or something like that, a hamburger without a bun, a bit of egg and a piece of sweet bread. The Burger King breakfast was weirder: I got a miniature croissant filled with a piece of grilled chicken, bacon and egg. On top of that, lunch was also eaten out of the office: burgers or pizza, with a large beverage (with free refills). Add a large dinner to that, and you understand the following fact: people in Richmond are either very much overweight or very normal, and there's nothing in between. There's simply the people that don't keep track of their eating habits and the ones that do, and it's extremely easy to get loads of easy food with lots of calories here. The Supersize Me story starts to make more sense every minute here. In general, I think the percentage of overweight people is way higher here than in The Netherlands.

(To be continued...)