If you use OpenOffice, I highly recommend upgrading to version 2.2. Autokerning is now enabled by default. It makes a noticeable difference in making documents easier on the eyes.

I tried out the Folding@Home client on my Playstation 3. It is interesting to watch the ball-n-stick molecule model twist in real-time. In the background is a rotating Earth with points of lights around cities. The program caused my PS3 to run hot. The fan was so loud I had difficulty getting to sleep. I decided to move the PS3 out of its shelf in the entertainment center and place it on top where it can get better air circulation.

I believe the trouble with my Linux box is the Ethernet adapter card. Since NewEgg didn’t have the Intel card I wanted I decided to get a Trendnet TEG-PCITXR gigabit Ethernet card. It is supposed to have good Linux support. Does anybody have experience with this card?

I am helping to write the Spycraft LARP (Live Action Role-playing) game for DieCon 7. I set up a Wiki for the all of the authors to use. I have spent the better part of the past week creating pages for last year’s characters and brainstorming pages for this year’s game. I’m a little disappointed that the organizers don’t have more of a sense of urgency since the game is close to eight weeks away. Last week I changed my plans in order to get together with the others. I didn’t hear anything so I contacted one of them who told me the meeting wasn’t going to happen. Frustrating! Ah well, I gotta tell myself I am only volunteering my help. If I was in charge of getting the game together, I would do things differently.

My buddy Tom E. has been experimenting with writing a X-windows framework in C++. He wanted me to look over his source code and get it running. This motivated me to get X Windows running again my Linux box. It has been many distributions and kernels ago since I’ve run X. Mostly my Linux box acts as a server. I secure shell (ssh) into it whenever I need to do anything.

So I downloaded the latest version of the ATI proprietary drivers. It seems to install successfully but X fails to start. I see the following message: “No devices found”. Grr. After tweaking my xorg.conf with no success I decided to get X running with the generic VGA drivers. This time it failed with a message about being unable to load the default fixed font.

I poured over online forums discussions. Eventually I discovered that between distributions of Fedora, they decided to move files around including the fonts. They now live in /usr/share/X11/fonts. I modify the xorg.conf file again as I shake my fist at Fedora. Finally I had success!

The issue with the ATI driver bugged me. I used the lspci to determine what kind of Radeon card I had in my PC.

$ lspci | fgrep -i radeon

It told me I had a Radeon 8500 LE. Oh, no wonder! According to the ATI drivers page they no longer support the Radeon 8500 as version 8.28.8. I was trying to use the latest version, 8.35.5. So it turns out “No devices found” really means “We don’t support your crusty old video card”. Fortunately I remembered I had a Radeon 9800 Pro as the result of a recent upgrade. I installed the card and rebooted. X now works in all of its accelerated glory. Hurrah!

My Fedora Linux installation does not update itself automatically because of a bug that has been documented for at least five months. I could disable the yum-updatesd script and hack a cron script to manually do a yum update daily. But I am a little sour. The distribution maintainers have an apparent lack of interest in fixing the update mechanism at the heart of Fedora. It does not help that yum is written in Python, a language that triggers my gag reflex.

I feel the pain that Eric Raymond, a high profile Linux developer, wrote about in his public trashing of Fedora. After 12 years as a faithful Red Hat/Fedora user I am seriously considering switching to the next version of Ubuntu which is due out on April 19th.

Also, R.I.P. John Backus and thanks for BNF

Our break room at work had some yummy baked goods today: a giant cookie, some doughnuts and a cake that read “Thank you Engineers of Lockheed Martin”. Our site manager sent an email that mentioned National Engineers Week and thanked us for our contributions and support. w00t! So to all my fellow software engineers out there: Happy Engineers Week!

I decided to troubleshoot my dead Linux box last night. It booted up right away! It lives! I stayed up late installing over 200 updated files. So far it seems to be running well. I plan to continue to watch it and replace it sometime in the near future.

When my mail software came back online, I caught up on my email and realized I missed a memorial service for my best friend’s mother this past weekend. Words fail to describe how terrible I feel. He drove to my home town to pay respects when my father passed away last year. He’s probably disappointed; I’m a bad friend right now. I’ll give him a call tonight to try to make amends. I’ll see if he wants to go out for drinks and will make a generous donation to a charity in his mother’s name.

UPDATE: I took my friend out for drinks. We had a great time. I’m going to give a donation to the American Cancer Society.

I saw the following nugget of information on the Kernel Newbies website:

‘Atime’ is the ‘Access time’ field of a file: When a process reads a file, its atime is updated. Disabling atime updates, with the ‘noatime’ mount flag, is probably the most used performance tweak that linux administrators use: An active server is continually reading files, generating lots of atime updates, which translate to metadata updates that the filesystem must write to disk. And writing those updates can seriously damage your performance. Believe it or not, a busy server like kernel.org (vsftpd + apache workload) cut their load average in half just by mounting their filesystems with ‘noatime’.

It is time for my third annual list of underrated items. The past year, 2006, once again gave us its share of hype and hero worship. This is my list of underrated items that I feel deserve some exposure.

Last year I mentioned a gazpacho dot net podcast netcast. I am still toying with the idea. I am especially inspired to produce something light-hearted and funny.

I installed the latest Red Hat Linux distribution, Fedora Core 6. The kernel paniced on me! This causes all of the Windows boxes to not see the Internet since the Linux box hosts my DHCP server. Grr, my Internet access may be spotty for a few days until I determine what I want to do.