Monkey Blog

when you grab and miss the branch

My friends went to Berlin...

February 10th, 2008

… and all I got was this tiny T-shirt.

This once again shows that sizes “S”, “M”, “L”, “XL” are relative sizes, the absolute measures depending on the intended market. This T-shirt is supposedly size “M”. I generally fit in U,S. “M” and sometimes in Dutch “M”. However, this seems to be manufactured in France or Italy, where “M” seems to stand for “Midget”.

Never mind though, Elisabetta was very happy with it. :-)

Playing with Plagiarism

December 5th, 2007

Ok, so this is only funny to Dutch speaking people who happen to work at AMS-IX:

The image is inspired by my colleague Ariën Vijn and the world-renowned Nijntje (also known as Miffy in most of the rest of the world).

I scanned one of the original Nijntje pictures, loaded it in Inkscape and drew over the lines with Bézier curves and ellipses. After that, I exported it to PNG format and used the GIMP to fill in the colours and save as PNG.

Suspend on Dell XPS M1210 (2.6.18-rc4 + Suspend2)

August 27th, 2006

Got a Dell XPS M1210, dual core 2.17GHz processor.

Compiled 2.6.18-rc4 with Suspend2 patches. Hibernate works fine, as well as suspend-to-ram… That is, as long as I don’t use the nVIDIA proprietary driver. With the “nv” driver it works fine, although the cursor does weird things.

It’s pretty clear that the nVIDIA driver is causing this. The issue is that nVIDIA drivers are unreliable when used on a laptop where suspending (and subsequent resuming) is quite an important feature.

Some (that would be nVIDIA) say the binary blob driver relies very closely on the ABI of the kernel and is thus very sensitive to bugs or subtle changes of the ABI from one kernel version to the other.

I say it’s a weak argument. This dependency can easily be circumvented by releasing proper open source drivers, or writing a more robust wrapper around the blob. Either that, or speed up the updates, guys! I currently have to choose between using TwinView and 3D acceleration on one hand, and the ability to suspend and resume on the other. It’s tough… :-(

SBLive! Mic recording solved.

August 18th, 2006

Found it! AC97 needs to be turned on. I missed in the graphical mixer due to preference settings.

Mind you, most SBLive! controls are still mysterious.

SBLive! Value + Alsa = no mic recording

August 16th, 2006

Urgh. Used to work, now it doesn’t. Hail to the penguin.

Microphone plugged into SBLive! card. Turn microphone on. Use Gnome audio mixer to turn mic on. Can hear my own voice amplified over the speakers. Now try to record using Rosegarden, Ardour, or Audacity. Foggedaboudit.

Possible answer?

http://forum.skype.com/viewtopic.php?t=4174

Another handy link:

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=SBliveMixerControls

And maybe:

Anyway, here I was thinking that ALSA drivers are well-documented things. Turns out most of the cards are reverse-engineered, so even though the Alsa mixer controls have names, their meaning is not always clear…

Will try tomorrow.