Crazy Days

War is over

I should start saying how sad I was to miss this most important moment of our lives, and our country, due to unavoidable circumstances. We're expatriate employees, live in SL in our hearts. I have received thousands of articles, explaining every single moment of the war, criticizing Europian attitude towards the final days of war, and the western influence over this issue. Basically we're counting the days with the rest of the Sri Lankans.

The reality is, now the war is over.... then what. For the longest time everyone blamed war for the lack of progress in our country.... true, it was one of the main reasons. In my belief it was not the only reason. I'm hoping things would change for the better... this is just the tip of the iceberg!!! end... I suppose we start counting again... from what number.... that should be the concern.

Too spooky to be alone in the universe

Recently I came across this website listing photos of UFO sightings... yes Unidentified Flying Objects. Amazingly these images look quite realistic and there were hundreds of recent cases. And some of the cases were quite impressive, specially the ones caught in orbiting weather satellites.

While going through the images, some thing popped up to my mind... some of these (at least few of these) images could be real:

1. Which ones are the real ones.
2. Since most of the sightings vastly differ from each other, it's clear we've been visited by more than one alien species. Or they come here to show off their latest spaceship models.
   
3. After all these visits, no one ever contacted any of these aliens. Or they're wise enough not to do that.

Considering the drake equation we've not heard enough UFO encounters. Anyway the final question boil downs to are we alone... or not. I believe we're not.

Brain Damage?

Nearly after two and half years I was looking at a script I wrote (one of the very first ones), and it felt like it was not written by me. According to the script... that script suppose to be one of my own scripts.

May be my experience with Perl has changed so much, I do not recognize my old coding pattern any more!!!

The best part is... I still think my old coding style is much cooler... which confuse me even more!!!

Debian Aspire One

After the long wait (actually waiting for a Eee 904 :(), I managed to buy a Acer Aspire One, well this is the only UMPC available in the region. There is nothing to complain about the looks, although I do not like the shiny skin in general, but overall I was "one happy customer"... except for the OS.

Aspire One A110, comes with Linpus Linux lite preinstalled... some what a user environment...like Windows, but I really like to run a proper operating system on the unit. Since this is my personal laptop (that implies I have the privilege of ruining and messing with it anyway I like) the OS by choice was Linux, Debian Lenny.

The whole process was much easier than I initially imagined it to be, thanks to this page. But the USB installation had problems with the boot image not matching the ISO. Finally managed to install 4.0r3 with a external USB CD.

By default many things were broken. Madwifi worked beautifully, after compiling the module. With the mentioned tips, managed to extend the SDHC storage expansion to mount a 4GB SDHC card (class 4 :(), as the home directory. ALSA worked as described... but the biggest problem was... idle battery life runs out in less than two minutes.

Suspend messed up the whole machine, specially the storage expansion, therefore could not use suspend to memory since I changed to Debian. Alsa crashes as explained in the Debian wiki page after a suspend and some times MadWifi too.

It was clear that the kernel carrying too much rubbish, hogging most of the resources. Boot time also annoyingly longer than what it used to be compared to the original user env (less than 10s). So there began the kernel recompilation.

Using the .config file available on the recovery DVD (which was 2.6.23.9), I tried to compile the latest, which is 2.6.27.4. By copying the config file on to the new kernel root, ended up in a disaster...Kernel Panic... Something related to SMP PREEMTION. Chasing that problem seemed to be hopeless business, therefore straightaway started configuring the "mrproper" config according to the Orginal config file. This was painful enough... yet the result was sweet... the new kernel boots, little bit slower though, I compiled with FB support, and the bare minimum requirement built in to the kernel. With the help of "powertop", managed to do the final bits of tweaking and I suppose this the best we can get out of this box.

In the kernel config, under Device Drivers->MMC/SD Card Support->Allow Unsafe Resume required to prevent wakeup from re-detecting the MMC/SD device. The rest follows the Debian Wiki.

Adele 19
Recently I stumbled upon this beautiful album from an amazing singer, from Nothern UK (find more). After long time I'm listening to some music where an artist living inside the work of art. Anyway I love jazz / blues stuff.

File System Trap

One of the biggest problems we have with the file systems is that we do not have a proper open file system, where we supported across different platforms.

On Linux, we have several, but none of them are supported on Mac OS X nor Windows. But Linux does support HPFS from Mac, Windows doesn't. Fat-32 is supported in all three platforms, but can only have files smaller than 2Gb. NTFS readable under Mac and Linux, Linux supports NTFS writing, but Mac does not.

Final out come, there is no way that I can find a file system, which supports Large files and cross compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac.

FLAC Rox

Recently I was interested in the CD quality (or higher, SACD) music sources on the internet and, from the FLAC site I found that most of the artists move towards distributing their music through Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC). For most of the artist, MP3 with 320Kb/s and FLAC are the main choices.

I noticed couple things while purchasing music in these audio formats.

1. MP3 320 Kb/s is much cheaper, as MP3 is more compressed (and lossy) even at 320 Kb/s than FLAC. Therefore most of the sites charge higher price. But unlike MP3, FLAC is a direct source compression where audio loss is minimal (or most of the cases nil).
2. Still most of the music players do not support FLAC files natively, even though they're supported, size of a FLAC is nearly 2 to 3 times the MP3 counterpart. Therefore the distribution sites advice to chose MP3 if you have no idea about FLAC.
   

Checkout the FLAC site for list of artist who sell their music in FLAC format.