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Some time ago I managed to pick up an IBM Thinkpad A21p for $200. I was motivated to make the purchase because it has a 1600x1200 15" display, which if you do the math is 133 ppi, an extremely high-resolution display. The display ended up having some lines down the side (display or flexible circuit problem) but all in all the system works quite well. I've since spent another $120 or so adding 256MB RAM (up to 384MB) and the 3Com MiniPCI combo ethernet/modem. The modem will likely never work in Linux, so I also have a Xircom two-slot-height cardbus ethernet/modem card which is supported.

This is a fairly sweet little system for its time, although it's nothing special now. It's got a Mobile Pentium 3 which runs at about 850 MHz and will step down to 700 or so, and really amazingly crap speakers. And the biggest problem? ATI Rage Mobility M3. The display does not properly report resolutions via DDC (Windows manages to figure it out, but that's not saying much since it's special-cased up the yin-yang) and so you get a horribly mangled display.

As discussed in a previous article, KVM is a kernel-accelerated virtualization package for Linux that utilizes AMD or Intel VT to reduce the cost of virtualization. It is based in part on qemu, a long-lived processor emulation package which also has a non-VT virtualizing engine, kqemu. One of the benefits of using qemu as a codebase is that qemu already has emulation for various pieces of hardware, including network cards. qemu can use a variety of methods for providing networking, including slirp, tunneling, and various others.

To me, the most interesting type of networking is VDE, or "virtual distributed ethernet". This is most similar to the type of networking performed by VMware. vde provides virtual switches (or hubs) and lets you connect them together at will. This document will not explain how to configure a complicated setup; it explains only how to set up a single TUN/TAP interface and utilize it. I will also briefly cover IP Masquerading, which is necessary for your system to access the outside world if it doesn't have a real, routable IP address.
howto • Ubuntu • kvm

KVM is a kernel-level virtualization technology/application that provides a complete PC virtual machine under Linux when you have a processor supporting VT. AMD and Intel both have processors which provide hardware support for virtualization to decrease the cost of translating all privileged instructions. In a recent study, vmware showed performance losses of 46% when functioning as a webserver. This is not out of line with expectations; the primary purpose of vmware is to consolidate little-used servers into a single machine.

This is a fairly niche application, but at my place of employment I have an Epson Perfection 3170 Photo Scanner. I'm not even using the photo (negative/slide) scanning capabilities, I'm just using it as an ordinary scanner. It is however very fast and unprecedentedly quiet. I wanted to use this scanner under Linux (Epson provides Windows 95+ drivers and MacOS 9+ drivers, but no Linux drivers) sometimes, and on the Mac sometimes.

Any of my frequent readers are likely to know that I am a slashdotter. Slashdot, for all its faults, is still by far the finest geek-oriented news aggregator and forum around, at least in English. Slashdotters have long had a battle with Slashdot over story submissions. Duplicate stories abound, and so many press-releases-as-stories have shown up over time that a term has been coined for it: "slashvertisements". The result was that Slashdot introduced the Firehose, in which users (paying or not) can vote for or against story submissions and mark them with descriptive tags.

When I started reading the firehose my first reaction was one of revulsion. Are people really this stupid? Absolutely tons of the submissions have no link, and of those that actually have them, most of the links are absolutely atrocious. This and several other typical failures of story submissions prompted me to write a Slashdot journal entry entitled Slashdotters need Help with Story Submissions in which I railed against poor HTML link etiquette and other issues. Obviously I have some extra time on my hands.

I'm something of a science fiction freak. It's my genre of choice whether we're talking about novels, movies, or video games. Thus, when I encountered Gate 88 I thought I was in heaven.

Gate 88 is a fairly simple top-down realtime strategy game in which the player is represented in the game - by a space ship. As you fly about you can build structures (provided you have sufficient resources) and your goal is to protect your base. You can build factories to produce more resources, research labs to develop new technologies, shipyards which (shock, amazement) produce ships, and various types of turrets to protect your base defenses. The game is designed with a very console-game sensibility in that it is ideally played with a gamepad, and playing with a keyboard will drive you absolutely insane.

When we want to send files over the internet, we typically want to compress these files so that they take up as little space as possible. We generally also need to bundle files together. Today, the default format for doing this on personal computers is the PKZIP format, while on Unix systems we use tar to group files together, and a separate program to compress them - these days that's generally gzip or bzip2, and in olden times it was the compress program. A lot of PC users are also using the rar archiver, because for a long time it has provided the best compression.

Today, that is no longer true; the crown is worn by 7-Zip. 7-Zip is a newer archive manager which, in addition to being able to handle older archive formats at various levels (for example, it can decompress but not create rar archives, but it can both make and break zip archives) it implements the new 7z compression algorithm. This is not actually the most efficient algorithm available today, but it is the best one that has a decent application wrapped around it.

In an attempt to decrease page load times, I threw out sIFR and re-re-redid my page layout. We're back to using 100% CSS (no tables) which breaks IE, but not as badly as the last theme did. Pages are now typically loading in under a second.

My theme is kind of wonky - it looks like my drupal install is weird. I'm just going to keep it limping along until 5.0 and the modules I need come out, and then I'll upgrade and start working on THAT database.

This was my 1993 Subaru Impreza LS. USDM MY1993-94 Imprezas all have the 1.8 liter H4; Like all MY93-94 LSes, it's got an automatic transmission, but also AWD and ABS. The L model is available with AWD and a 5 speed, but not with ABS. The base model is always FWD, and always a 5 speed. I sold this car to a friend and the water pump promptly failed, fun times. At least I sold it cheap (less than I paid, with more stuff than I got it with...)

Mau is a card game for two or more people played with one or more decks of regular playing cards. It is similar to Crazy Eights, and even more like Uno.