30 Nov 07 Fear not the cookie for the cookie fears you

I installed Google Analytics as I’ve heard some good things about it. If I don’t like it after a few days I’ll simply remove it. In the meantime, if you do not want to be tracked by Google simply reject all cookies from my domain.

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25 Nov 07 I can’t believe it’s not coconut juice

During the second day of hack-a-ton Mikael and me went out to Lunch and while heading back we found our way to an Asian store where we found a couple of rather interesting beverages. Both came complete with refreshing coconut shavings. I can’t help but feel slightly violated after having guzzled down these vile mixtures.

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24 Nov 07 pivot_root sun_e250 broken_hardware

Finally back up again!

Not only did I get my blog up again thanks to an awesome Sun Enterprise 250 donated by a friend I also, finally, got my Gentoo system back into a usable state. It feels really good to be back in Fluxbox after having been away for more than two years living in evil desktop land.

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21 Sep 06 Just my POV

Using Internet Explorer to browse the web is like walking through an art gallery with shades on, utterly disrespectful to the artists behind the works on display.

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04 Sep 06 ATI XPRESS 200M and the HP mess

Everyone that knows me know about the troubles I’ve had with my HP Pavilion zv6148EA laptop and the built-in ATI XPRESS 200M GPU. The chipset has 128MB dedicated RAM but you can configure it to use up to 128MB of system RAM for a total of 256MB RAM. The first issue with this scheme is that there is a problem with either the GPU, the BIOS or the Video BIOS because the device always reports that it has 256MB RAM. The HP-branded ATI drivers that came with the Windows install seems to handle this just fine but when you use ATIs drivers on Linux (you can’t use the official ATI drivers on Windows as they refuse to install) the machine will deadlock unless you assign the GPU 128MB of system RAM so it actually totals 256MB. My assumption here being that HP modified ATIs drivers to properly detect the actual amount of RAM rather than fixing this damn bug properly. I have no use whatsoever for 256MB of video RAM so throwing away 128MB of valuable system RAM sucks big time.
I recently found this blog created by someone with the exact same problem as me which not only confirmed some of my fears but also asserts that this is not an ATI driver problem but rather a video BIOS bug.

Filed in Hardware, Personal, Software with 11 Comments

19 Jul 06 Spam spam, wonderful ham

I received this hilarious spam at work the other day. When you have to resort to spam to sell railroad tracks you are clearly not in the right business. At first I thought there would be a trojan or something like that embedded in the e-mail and that the body was just filler but I couldn’t find anything suspicious in the mail, well, except for the message itself that is.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. ^^

Dear Sir/Madam,

RE: USED RAILS (R50-R65) FOR SALE

Our company is the direct selling mandates to Burkina Faso Railway Corporation and have in stock up to 1.4 Million Metric Tons of Used Rails (R50-R65) for clearance sale, at very reasonable prices. the available rails are located in five different Rail Yards in the country.

This clearance sale is necessitated by the impending privatization of the Corporation and the need to decongest our rail yards in preparation for the privatization.

Prices are negotiable on FOB, CNF and CIF basis. Site inspection, physical verification and confirmation of product quality and quantity are allowed before signing of contract. Offers are invited from serious end buyers or Agents that has access to serious potential end users/buyers

Sincerely,

Dr.BABIYA TRAORE
SOCIMEX-BURKINA
01 BP 1506 OUAGA 01
BURKINA FASO.

_________________________________________________________________
MSN Hotmail sur i-mode™ : envoyez et recevez des e-mails depuis votre téléphone portable !

Figures it went through one of microsoft’s services. Only their users could be this .. informed ..

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13 Aug 05 I regret to announce this is the end. I am going now. I bid you all a very fond farewell.

I admit the title sounds a bit gloom and I sincerely hope that it is an exaggeration. So what is this all about? Well, I’m moving tomorrow and I’m moving quite far this time, 300 kilometers give or take, and to top it all off I’m not going to have (broadband) Internet access right away. To make things worse it is mostly out of my hands to arrange a connection and the person in charge does not seem to realize the importance of having it. If the gods are smiling on me I’ll be back in a week or two, if not, then it might take quite a bit longer.

On a small side note, I have a policy that if I link to a planet in my blogroll and I have a user listed there which is also available on the planet I will only keep the link to the planet. I cleaned out my list recently due to this policy so if you noticed that I no longer link to you even though I used to, don’t despair, I still love you!

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19 Jul 05 …As The Future Repeats Today

- Good morning, how may I ruin your life today?
- How about messing with my ATA-drives like you did a month ago?
- Hang on to your suspenders, here we go!

hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
...
hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
ide0: reset: success
EXT3-fs error (device hdb1): ext3_free_blocks_sb: bit already cleared for block 2045422
Aborting journal on device hdb1.
ext3_abort called.
EXT3-fs error (device hdb1): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal
Remounting filesystem read-only
EXT3-fs error (device hdb1) in ext3_free_blocks_sb: Journal has aborted
...
EXT3-fs error (device hdb1) in ext3_free_blocks_sb: Journal has aborted
EXT3-fs error (device hdb1) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted
EXT3-fs error (device hdb1) in ext3_truncate: Journal has aborted
EXT3-fs error (device hdb1) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted
EXT3-fs error (device hdb1) in ext3_orphan_del: Journal has aborted
EXT3-fs error (device hdb1) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted
__journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_committed_data

As it seems I simply just cannot catch a break with ATA-drives recently. This scenario happened to my brand new Maxtor drive today, although I highly suspect the IDE-controller on the motherboard is the culprit in this case.
The partitions on the drive were suddenly remounted read-only by the kernel. After I rebooted my system parted wouldn’t even read the partition table and gpart appeared to hang while scanning the drive. I decided to upgrade my 2.6.11 kernel to 2.6.12 just in case it was a driver problem, although I very much doubted it as the motherboard has an Intel 801 controller which is a quite mature chipset. After the reboot I was presented with the kernel output shown above, strangely it would now read the partition table. Thanks to this I was able to run fsck on both the partitions on that drive (/home and /public), it did find a lot of problems but most of them were probably just created by files which had only been in part created when the read-only remount took place.
So far I haven’t found any corrupted files on the drive and I consider myself lucky. I’m going to spend the rest of the day burning DVDs. Luckily it’s raining outside so it’s not like my spirits were high to begin with.

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