So I have a Dell Inspiron 5150. It has one of those P4 3.06Ghz CPUs. This is a desktop CPU, hence it eats quite a bit of power and can get really hot. The fan is variable, and hardly audible when the CPU is under 60 degrees C. Then it goes up 2 notches and becomes kind of annoying. Coming down it drops to semi-loud under 60 degrees, and then further down to normal under 55 or so.

My laptop used to stay in the quiet zone, in the low fifties. For a while now I couldn't get it lower than 59/60 C. I finally took some time this evening to find out why, and after a process of elimination I discovered that the usb-uhci module was the culprit - it must run in a tight loop or something that consumes quite a bit of CPU (though that doesn't really show in the CPU usage as linux reports it - for reasons I don't understand. This is on kernel 2.4.24, with the swsuspend patch (which works great, by the way!).

Luckily there is an alternative driver in the kernel, the module for which is simply called 'uhci'. It doesn't make my cpu run hot, and it works just as well. In other words, recommended.

I'll need to find out if compiling usb-uhci or uhci in the kernel as opposed to as a module makes a difference. And if a more recent kernel makes a difference.

Now if only my 5150 wouldn't whistle in such an annoying way under 2.6... I hope that by the time I replace it, the Thinkpads will have decent screen resolutions for a price I can afford - not sure I want another noisy laptop...

Meanwhile I also discovered that the CPU throttling actually works - I can just 'echo 4 > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling', and throttle it to half-speed. Which makes it a whole lot less noisy when running on battery (not the fan, but the crappy capacitors on the mainboard). Very cool.

Book

"Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions."He heard a gentle chiming in the air, above the hubbub of the market; and this he walked toward. This is from Neil Gaiman's Stardust :)

Went to see Othello tonight, in the Cutler Majestic Theatre in the Boston 'limo district' - aka the theatre district. This performance was part of "Shakespeare in American Communities, the largest tour of Shakespeare in U.S. history". It was excellent.

The playbill proudly mentioned that Mrs. Laura Bush and Jack Valenti - MPAA president and CEO - are honorary co-chairs of the tour.

Curiously enough, the playbill also described how Shakespeare based Othello on a collection of Renaissance 'novellas' dating back to 1565, by Giraldi Cinthio. The collection was entitled Hecatommithi. Shakespeare wrote Othello before 1606 - in other words, at most 50 years after Giraldi Cinthio created his work.

If Hecatommithi were to be written today, a future Shakespeare 50 years from now will not be able to use it - thanks to the latest extension (1998) of copyright duration, works are now locked up for the life of the author plus 70 years. Guess who was a great proponent of that extension, and continues to fight for expansion of copyright most vigorously? Guess who fought hard to deprive future great artists the building blocks for their works?

Of course, MPAA president and CEO, Jack Valenti.

Yet at the same time, still according to the playbill, the members of Mr. Valenti's organization have produced more than a dozen movies based on Othello. Of course, without payment of royalties no works will be allowed based on these movies for a long, long time...

Am I the only one who finds it slightly hypocritical that Mr. Valenti is now 'co-chairing' this tour of Shakespeare's great works?

Rolling your own Debian (net) install cd is not difficult. If you ever need to install Debian on a machine but need special drivers for some of its hardware (say, a raid controller or a network card), you can make your own install cd with custom kernel like this:

    mount -o loop bf2.4-3.0.23-mini.iso /cdrom
    mkdir /cd2; 
    cd /cd2
    (tar cvf - /cdrom/* /cdrom/.disk /cdrom/.xlp | tar xvf -)
    mv cdrom/* .
    mv cdrom/.disk .
    mv cdrom/.xlp .
    rmdir cdrom

    mount -o loop rescue.bin /floppy

    umount /floppy

 
 
 
 
 

    tar xzvf drivers.tgz

    tar cvzf modules.tgz /lib/modules/your-kernel

    rm drivers.tgz
    tar cvzf drivers.tgz install.sh modconf.tgz modcont modules.tgz pcmcia.tgz type.txt
    rm install.sh modconf.tgz modcont modules.tgz pcmcia.tgz type.txt

    cd /
    mkisofs -r -b boot/rescue.bin -c boot.catalog -o debian-bf24-2424.iso /cd2/

This guy is unbelievable (warning: broken English ahead):

  http://www.bartdesmet.net

I had no idea there are such Microsoft zealots.

Check out this blog entry particularly about Microsoft's shared source initiative:

   http://blogs.bartdesmet.net/bart/posts/162.aspx

This is my answer to that page:

Do you _really_ believe all this? That is most scary. I mean, great software, great vision on software? Using standards?

Microsoft abuses standards (XML, Java, HTML, ...) by taking them and changing them ever so slightly that things don't work unless you're on their proprietary operating system.

Great software? Well, except for all the blue screens, the inexplicable hangs, and the hundreds of serious security problems every year.

Great vision on software? Don't make me laugh - MS has no vision on software other than 'make more money'. Name one innovative software product that has originated from Redmond? Right; there aren't any - when other companies or people innovate, Microsoft imitates. When that is too hard it buys the competition.

And this one made me laugh hardest: "The danger to create two systems on 'almost the same engine' which are completely incompatible".

I'm so glad that this doesn't happen with Microsoft software because they control the source. I mean, imagine that you would be able to create an ordinary text document on MS Word XP and save it in the default file format, and then not be able to open it on, say, MS Word 97! That would be so bad.

This is just quite cool. It's also educational, and large, and an Mpeg movie about the travel of packets on the 'net. It plays very well with Mplayer on Linux. Haven't tried any other players.

An Atlas of Cyberspace

If you want to know more about how this whole internet is linked up, have a look at The Atlas.

Broken Music

Or rather, broken CDs. There are many lists of crippled, handicapped, 'copy-protected' CDs out there, but this one started by the renowned German CT magazine seems just a little more thorough than the average one. Deutsche Grundlichkeit, I suppose. In German, of course, but that shouldn't scare you as long as you click on the 'Datenbank abfragen' link.

Looking at this, it does feel good to boycot the music industry.