Kristof.Willen.be - Life in the trenches of the data center

Since the upgrade to Karmic on my desktop, graphic performance has gone down considerably. I solved this in the past by downgrading Nvidia, but since Lucid, this has become impossible. It's not that I cannot live without the desktop bling, but suspend-resume is impossible without running the Nvidia drivers. The problem manifest itself by very high CPU bursts by kernel processes (kondemand, ksoftirqd), which makes the desktop unworkably slow.

I tried everything, from disabling PAT, KMS modesetting, switching framebuffers, all without success. I even tried to enable Lenny's Nvidia drivers, but that pulled in a 2.6.26 kernel, which I cannot use, because my filesystems are ext4.

I eventually turned in despair to the Nvidia website, looking for older drivers. The 173 release was still available in the archive download section, which came as a ncurses-based installer. These Nvidia based drivers are famous for messing up a Linux system, so I was rather reluctant to use those. I still decided to give them a go, which rather went surprisingly really well.

Finally a performant system again !

Dear Nokia,

the times I give advice to companies are quite seldom, so please shut up & listen. The next time you announce an 'important phone software update' on my N97 mobile, make sure that :

1. I don't have to do the upgrade with my computer, especially if it's a minor update. FOTA will do fine, thank you.
2. when starting the Nokia software updater on my computer, I don't want to be forced to upgrade this POS 'software' called "Nokia Software Updater"
3. when upgrading this Nokia Software Updater software, I don't want to have to wait 20 minutes for it to finish - this is a dualcore with 2GB, not one of your Symbian turtles, for cryings sake !
4. after the upgrade of the upgrade software, I don't want to reboot my computer
5. after reboot, and starting the upgrade software, I don't want to receive a warning that OVI suite is already running.
6. No, for crying out loud, I don't want to upgrade OVI suite !!! Can we finally update my mobile firmware, pretty please ???
7. when finally be able to start the Nokia Software Updater, I do want you to find my USB-connected phone, it's the only USB-connected thingy, goddammit !
8. I don't want to reconnect my mobile 5 times before your POS software finally recognizes it
9. I don't want to see your 'important phone software update' to be the most minor upgrade I've ever seen
10. And most of all, when pressing the 'Upgrade' button, I don't want to receive a final message 'Phone software already on latest level' after this whole irritating procedure !!!

Nokia, please fire your Symbian QA management. It's incompentent !

Now where's my aspirin ?

If you like Anne Geddes, you need to check out Mila's Daydreams. A mother taking pictures of her dreaming baby in an arranged background, resulting in some surreal photos.

Proxmox OpenVE looks the closest to a VMCenter/VMSphere alternative based purely on Linux (Debian to be more precise). You can add pure virtualized environments a la VMware guests, or run container based Linux(-only) guests. It comes with a cluster option with live migration possibilities.

Two disadvantages on first sight :

1. It's 64bit only
2. It comes only in the form of an appliance-based installation (which will wipe your /dev/sda)

Apart from that, very promising.

The Ben Nevis distillery, now overtaken by the Japanese Nikka distillers, is named after & located at the foot of the highest mountain in Scotland (1334m). For one or other strange reason, Ben Nevis is called the Banana Whisky. My interest in Ben Nevis was sparked by my colluegue Peter B., who refers it as one of the best whiskies ever made, and very difficult to find. However, I had no problem locating it in my favorite dram shop.

The color : dark amber
The nose : orange with chocolate flavors. Some maltiness, then spices are flowing in.
The taste : *Very* malty, quite spiced, bit of pepper. Lots of dark chocolate, the very bitter taste of orange zest. Bit of spice & smoke. Smooth but very firm. Not complex at all, warm.

Where are the bananas ? Probably a referral to the littering of banana peels on the peak of Ben Nevis ?
This whisky has a very strong taste, especially empowered by the malty taste in combination with the bitterness of chocolate and orange. I'm sorry, Peter, too bitter for my cup of tea.