KPilot Mail Juxtaposition
T61, Suspend, and You
So, along with my glowing accolades of a few days ago, I'll offer a little painful reality.
The T61, as I said, is a heck of a nice little machine. Fast, smooth, quiet, and the works. However, there are a few things that have proven to be not so nice: most notably that which is absolutely necessary in a laptop: suspend and resume. I've spent far more time than I'd like searching the 'net for hints/suggestions/hints/etc., but I've not quite found any full, working solutions. It would seem that the problem stems from the fact that I'm using nvidia's binary driver (100.14.23)... or at least that's not helping. Also, it would appear that OpenSUSE 10.3, which I'm running on the T61, is using suspend version 0.69.9, which doesn't happen to know what to do with my T61 model (6549CT0).
Oh, another little gem: apparently using the nvidia driver also means that you can't adjust the backlight brightness (FN-Home/End) from within X either. Current workaround: switch to VT 1 - 6 and adjust the brightness from there. This is most certainly an nVidia driver problem, since it works just fine with the VESA driver.
Well, I would love to have a totally happy story with no such silliness, but such is life and such is choosing to run Linux. =:)
[[ Update: ]] Well, shimber me timbers! After yet another day of hacking at things, I still can't get suspend to disk to work on this T61, but I can get suspend to ram working (!!!!!) by putting:
3d Desktop : Does it make sense?
Okay, first off, the ScribeFire Firefox extension is pretty cool. It would be a good thing for some Open Usability folks to help out, but the extension itself seems pretty functional. One large thing, though, is that there is no "New" button for Posts. This functionality seems to be accomplished via the "Clear Content" button, which is very non-intuitive. "Clear Content" is typically associated with a destructive operation which removes something. "New" is a creative operation, which will also technically "clear the content" in the editing fields, but the mindset is a very different one. An interesting usability issue, to be sure. =:)
Secondly, this YouTube - 3d desktop video prompted an impromptu debate in #kde4-devel with zorg_the_false, which was the original impetus for this post (the "hey, dangit, I should be able to click a 'blog this' button somewhere was what caused the ScribeFire extension download...).
Don't get me wrong, I think the video is really cool and for eye-candy alone, it is slicker than hot butter on a bald monkey. But I think this comment says what I was thinking:
GMail Now Does IMAP!
Since I have several times been rather loud in my... we'll call it "encouragement"... for Google to provide IMAP access to their hosted GMail mail, it's only fair that I'm equally loud in my gratitude and accolades now that they've done just that!!
Truecrypt versus LUKS Speed Test
I did a small performance test yesterday and was very surprised by the results. I wanted to see which encrypted filesystem was faster betweeen Truecrypt and LUKS. I created 2 20-gig files, one with Truecrypt and the other with LUKS encryption. Then I mounted the encrypted files and copied a 180 meg file 10 times, synced, and then reported the time taken. Here's the results:
Thinkpad T61 and a Blond ‘fro
Technology had several glorious victories at my desk today. First, I was fortunate enough to get a very nice dual-head GeForce Nvidia card installed on my 4-way AMD 64-bit cpu server at work. It goes very nicely with the two beautiful 1600x1280 monitors that are now hooked up via twinview. This is by far the coolest working environment I've ever had (okay, ever seen).
VMware, Day 3
This place is SO amazingly, refreshingly, awesomely, mind-bogglingly, ground-breakingly (yes, that's a new word), life-changingly (write that one down), career rejuvenatingly, totally, totally cool.
Movin’ on Up (Sing it with me, Weezie!)
Today was my last day with my (before today) current employer. It has been a really, really, really bizarre and surreal day. 2 weeks for that matter. I caught myself several times shocked that I wasn't more overwhelmed by the huge transition that we're now embarking on again. And I think the fact that I wasn't more worked up about it was all the more jarring. Maybe it's because I just went through this whole thing only 2 years before, so now I'm a hardened expert. Or maybe it's because I'm just at peace with where God is moving us. Or maybe it's because I'm thrilled like I never have been before about my new job. Or maybe I'm just suffering from severe lack of sleep, allergies, and general numbness.
Using Gmail for mailto: links
Blame it on Seb, but I've been using Gmail's web interface lately. This is partly because I'm in the middle of another life-changing job transition (but this one I'm really excited about, aside from the great white sharks and the triangle of death), partly because I like change (and after having used nothing but kmail for a few years now, I'm ready for a change if for nothing other than to see how we in KDE PIM land can do things better), and partly because I'm trying to keep less personal data on my work laptop. I have been using Google's Apps For Your Domain for the last year or so, and I like it much good. However, one thing that Gmail lacks is any IMAP interface whatsoever, which means that I've had a really convoluted setup going on which uses GAFYD for my MX handling, and then involves a subdomain on my regular web host server which I forward all e-mail to and subsequently access via IMAP. Ick.
Great White Sharks And You
My darling daughter was quick to fill me in on a bit of news garnered by some educational television programming the other day: I'm apparently relocating my little brood to The Red Triangle. Oh good. And here I was, just saying to myself: "Boy, Self, this is REALLY cool! You finally get a chance to move back to California beaches again and can enjoy some good surf!" Hm. It's always nice to find out you're moving to a triangle of death.