The One Laptop Per Child project is something that I think is a seriously cool idea. The idea is to come up with a sub-$100US laptop for use by poverty stricken countries as educational tools. Local-mesh wireless setups, low power processor, flash memory so there’s no moving parts, some of them will be designed to be crank-powered so they don’t need local power infrastructure - hell, I wouldn’t mind paying a semi-normal retail price for one or two for my own use if it’s going to get me one of them and help the education of some kids 🙂 They’re being based on a free operating system as well - Fedora Core 5 is the current development environment, which is seriously cool!

Symantec’s info on w32.Hoots. When internet fads get WAY out of hand, this is what happens. The virus sends print jobs to a bunch of different hard-coded printer addresses with a picture of the ORLY owl! It seems to have been designed to spam someone in particular’s network, but it’s funny nonetheless.

Here’s two of my “keepers” from the morning of 08/06/06. I was finishing work at 5am that morning, so I took my camera to work and went across to the story bridge and up to Kangaroo Point to take some sunrise photos. Pity it was a bit overcast as usual lately.

This was a separate page on the site, now it’s just a blog post. Here it is:

Ok, so there’s a bit of a dearth of real information on real topics on the Internet, and I try to fix that where I can, here’s how to get (at the moment anyway) dual monitors working in Ubuntu Dapper on an Nvidia video card.

Getting access to the packages

Ubuntu plays nice as far as non-open-source programs and so forth goes, so you’re going to have to activate the Multiverse and Universe repositories in Synaptic.

Download the files from rpm.pbone.net - there’s other places, but there are multiple mirrors on pbone. The files are linked as part of the console commands.

Install the XMMS libraries lib-mad from the external sources…

From a console:

rpm -i mad-0.15.1B-32.1.i586.rpm
rpm -i xmms-lib-1.2.10-103.pm.1.i586.rpm

Or browse to where you downloaded them and use the package manager from your desktop environment. KDE allows you to right click on the .rpm file and open an install program.

I’m really an AMD fan at heart - who wouldn’t be - they are cheap, fast and these days they are stable as well. Intel‘s been behind in most desktop chip related matters since they released the Pentium 4, with its long pipeline and surface-of-the-sun temperatures.

I’ve been using a P4 based system as my linux desktop because in 2004 when I set it up, the support for NForce2 chipset related gubbins wasn’t that good, and there wasn’t a high performance/quality motherboard with anything else for AMD processors. It was an ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe WiFi Edition, with a couple of SATA controllers, onboard raid, fast chip and four memory slots - a great board all round. The 2.8Ghz “C” chip that was in it was a good speed for the money, and it’d worked well as my desktop workhorse since I bought it, but lately I’d been feeling the need for speed.

I got linked to a cool little game that’ll break your mind - Check out 3D Logic on Newgrounds here. So far I’ve gotten to level 28 (the last level) and I’m determined to finish it before I finish work 🙂

Pity you can’t save the game or get a generated password to go back to where you were up to in the game. 🙁

Boy do I love randoms, how they amuse me.

Ok, that sounds lame, but it’s appropriate. I was driving to work on Monday night, got to the end of my street and saw a small shape on the other side of the road. My brain said “Echidna” and then my eyes caught up and agreed, so I slowed down just in case it was - I didn’t want to run it over. Just as I’d slowed all the way down the crazy thing ran and hid under the middle of my car!

I seems that Google labs have found that nearly all established simple binary search algorithms are broken. Sometimes being bigger IS better 🙂