Archives 2006

I'm getting so behind on projects that it's just getting ridiculous. Shidan was asking this evening if I still wanted to work on StarPy... I'm hoping to make it a key part of my toolbox... but I just don't seem to get time to work on it. Though my title is Research and Development I ...

Spent the day at Linux Caffe training Seneca on the VoIP project. Went well. I only wound up having 7 drinks in total, for about $20. Given that wireless access alone often costs $7/hr (and we were there 8.25 hrs) a good deal.

Seneca and I got interviewed by a chap from CBC radio about ...

Okay, I think I've got the OpenVPN connection working now. I'll have to try it out tomorrow morning and fall back to ssh if it fails. Surprisingly involved setup, required compiling a kernel module, editing multiple files, building large numbers of certificates and doing a lot of customisation for the settings.

I finally got the fonts installed on the laptop (took forever to do the installation for some reason), have regenerated the PDF so you can download it and curl up with a nice cup of hot chocolate.

Twinkle is a little Qt VoIP Softphone. It seems to work quite nicely with the VoIP account. Haven't tried phoning a live person to see how it works with my microphone, but incoming audio is pretty good on my cable connection. Seems to have all the features I need (and more), so probably go with ...

Productive afternoon at Linux Caffe. Have finished off the first draft of the section on Depth and Complexity. The last few sections are too brief still, but the basic message is there. Next section in the original outline is the one on play, but I've skipped the "discussions courtyard" (keeping in mind that the original ...

The suspend2 kernel didn't work with the madwifi package I emerged. Updating to an unstable version got it working. The laptop-lid action, however, is no longer actually locking the KDE session (though it's trying, it's not the ACPI system that's failing, the dcop message just isn't doing anything).

The trick with the suspend2-sources tree is to get the latest version (2.6.16-r1), not the (comparatively ancient) stable version. Emerging that with the .config I was using for the 2.5.15-r7 with the suspend2 options enabled gives me a properly suspending desktop (when I explicitly tell it to hibernate).

ssh sessions are lost, which is to ...

For those using an ACPI laptop (testing only with the Toshiba Satellite 5100) who want the KDE session to lock when the lid is closed (so that the lid can be closed in a semi-public area to prevent casual snooping), here's a simple script that locks all of the KDE sessions on the machine. Note ...

Finally got the ACPI code working. Key is to use the Gentoo power management guide. With that the KDE laptop power control is working properly. Makes the on-power/off-power changes work quite nicely. Next up is the synaptics touchpad. Also got the dhcpcd timeout set so that booting without the wired network connection doesn't take ...