As Christmas and New Year approach, many geeks expect shiny new toys. Imaging-resource.com has many detailed helpful reviews of digital cameras.
Dpreview.com allows one to review several currently available cameras side-by-side.
A colleague and I got a bit surprised when on a stripped Solaris, a program refused to work cause it couldn't find a shared library. But even after setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, the program behaved in the same way. In cases like that, one should try to modify the global ld path, which is /etc/ld.so.conf on Linux, but that file is not present on Solaris. Even greater frustration arose when it turned out that setud binaries cannot be trussed, so no list of syscalls to find out where the program is looking for its libraries.
Turns out that the use of LD_LIBRARY_PATH is restricted for setuid and setgid programs, as part of the Trusted Solaris environment. However, the list of shared library directories can be extended to the list of trusted directories in /var/ld/ld.config by use of the crle command.
Westegg.com has a nice overview of many Simpsons quotes with humor derived from subtleties of language, esoteric allusions, or just plain wit. Even Wikipedia has a page devoted to some neologisms in everyones beloved animation TV show.
A long living Xorg bug has finally been fixed : on my Ultra-10, Xorg crashes the system when starting up. The code in Xorg was trying to mimmick VGA routing by disabling I/O responses behind the Simba PCI controller. Unfortunately, doing this also happens to disable access to the IDE controller I/O registers, thus crashing the system. No console messages because the console has been put into framebuffer mode by the X server already.
This took a painfully long time to track down and debug. Luckily, once fixed, the code got blindingly fast implemented in the Debian packages, and the fix is now available in xserver-xorg-core-1.1.1-10. No luck however in SparcUbuntu, cause the package isn't yet available, and the Debian xserver-xorg-core package cannot be installed on Ubuntu, because of conflict issues. However, by unpacking the deb file, one can simply copy the Xorg binary to /usr/bin, which fixes also the problem.
Some more info about this bug and how to resolve it :
In the xorg log this is the error displayed before the crash :
xf86MapPciMem: Could not mmap PCI memory
Inappropiate ioctl for device
You can unpack .deb files with the 'ar' command :
ar x mypackage.deb
This will give you 2 files : data.tar.gz and control.tar.gz. Unzipping the data file will present you a tree with all files from the package included.
It seems the bug is back....
I tried the experimental version of debian with a feisty install of ubuntu but the problem is again there. (x 7.2)
I recently got subscribed to Google Reader, and I love it. A nice Web2.0 application for browsing RSS subscriptions. And one that puts my own home-brewed Darkchannels into the shadow. I started it to get my own XULChannels, and it did what it had to do, but the last two years, I even didn't had time to change one bit.
The same for the GDM Bluecurve theme, which is basically caught up by time. So from today I won't link them on this page, and by time they won't be available any more on this site.