A co-worker of mine uses one of the stranger keyboards I’ve seen, a Kinesis Advantage. He picked it up his after a bout with tendinitis and was sold on it. He was kind enough to let me borrow his spare for about a week so I could try it out. It’s been an interesting week. :) The Advantage differs from conventional keyboards in a number of ways, the ones I think most relevant are:...
Lenny released yesterday. This is great news, and congratulations all around to everyone that worked their asses off making it happen. By my calculations this comes 677 days after the initial release of Etch, (or 22 months and change). I’ve said before, Debian releases When Ready and that (to the best of my observations), consensus seems to be that somewhere between 18 and 24 months is the sweet spot. Not only does this make for the second “on-time” release in a row, but there was an Etch-And-A-Half sporting new kernels and video drivers in the mean time....
On Monday I attended Martin Krafft’s talk, Packaging with version control systems. Martin has started a project, coordinated via http://vcs-pkg.org, to explore work patterns for packaging and cross-distro collaboration using distributed version control systems. This is a topic that I’ve spent a fair amount of time on so it was interesting to see Martin’s packaging work flow, and hear him discuss its evolution. Today I attended a Bof organized by Luciano Bello....
The Texas Open Source Symposium in San Angelo is a wrap. This was a small one day event in San Angelo organized by Jeremy Fluhmann (who did an excellent job by the way). I rather enjoyed it, and providing that it becomes an annual event (which I understand is the idea), I will certainly try and make it back next year. I gave a talk on Mercurial during the 11:00am slot....
I’m giving a talk on Saturday at the Texas Open Source Symposium entitled An Introduction to Mercurial. I’ll be driving there but hadn’t considered making a room reservation until today. How hard could it be to book a hotel room in San Angelo Texas, right? Sheesh. I started out with a Google maps search that included the zip code of the venue, and began working through the options ordered by proximity and user submitted reviews....
Radeon R5xx 3D programming guide released NP: Running Out Of Pain, 12 Stones
There’s been a lot of “Ubuntu kills laptop hard drives” buzz going around lately. The implication is that over aggressive power management is causing excessive load/unload cycles, exceeding a reasonable duty cycle, and drastically shortening the life of your drive. I run Debian unstable on my laptop but I looked into it anyway and sure enough it’s something which is effecting me as well. As Matthew Garrett points out, it doesn’t have anything to do with Ubuntu, Debian, or Linux in general, the culprit is aggressive power management settings in the drive firmware, or settings applied by the BIOS....
I’ve been backing up all of my important machines to Amazon S3 using Duplicity for sometime now. It’s worked out really well but required just enough hackery to prevent me from providing straight forward instructions for others. I’m all about sharing the love so I submitted a new S3 backend to upstream using the excellent [boto] (http://code.google.com/p/boto/) library from Mitch Garnaat, and I packaged boto for Debian. The new backend made it into the 0....
Wow. Less than two weeks ago AMD announced that they would be opening the specs for their graphics cards, a few days later they followed through, and yesterday a driver for R5xx/R6xx cards was released. How’s that for fast?
This is excellent news. I look forward to the day when I can be oblivious of my graphics adapter.