Man, what a craptacular holiday I had. Lots of stuff to blog about tho.

Broken car.
Say ain’t so! Yeah, it’s broken – making a CLACK CLACK CLACK from the engine. Regardless of the gear it’s in, rolling or not, or whether the clutch is in or out. Waited THREE hours on the freeway onramp where I stopped for a tow truck to haul me and the car to the dealer. It’s there now… my research on srtforums.com says it may be loose flywheel bolts. That’d be a lot better than a thrown rod or something. Hope to hear from the dealer today.

X Windows woes The problems continue – sort of. I’ve completely disabled all acceleration and haven’t seen any signs of the mousedeath OR the BadLength issues. I plan on running it like this for a while, and if the problem doesn’t occur, I think I’ll recompile the Mach64 kernel module with the OMG crusoe optimizations. We’ll see….

Hackergotchi Ken took about the only picture I could find of myself and made me a floating hacker head. We’ll see how it looks.

Hotswapping an IDE Optical drive on the FujiP Blogging this for the benefit of other FujiP owners. It’s possible to hotswap the optical drive for the extended battery - you just gotta have the right mojo. What I did was dig up an script called “idectl” on the web that uses some hdparm mojo to turn on and off the ide channels. It works well, assuming you are running a udev-enabled kernel to do this. I modfiied the script to tail the kernel log so you can see when the devices are added or removed from the /dev tree. Note that you have to wait a bit before re-inserting a previously ejected drive if you want it to have the same node in the tree (ie, /dev/hdc) - if I do it too quickly it gets /dev/hdd) – dunno why. Script posted in the Extended Entry field below.

#!/bin/sh HDPARM=/sbin/hdparm MAX_IDE_NR=1 IDE_IO_0=0x1f0 IDE_IO_1=0x170 USE_IDE_DEV_0=/dev/hdc USE_IDE_DEV_1=/dev/hda usage () { if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then echo $* >&2 echo fi echo “usage: $0 ide-channel-nr [off|on|rescan]” 2>&1 exit 1 } IDE_NR=$1 MODE=$2 do_register=0 do_unregister=0 if [ ! “$IDE_NR” ] || [ $IDE_NR -lt 0 ] || [ $IDE_NR -gt $MAX_IDE_NR ]; then usage “Unrecognized IDE-channel number” fi case “$MODE” in on ) do_register=1 ;; off ) do_unregister=1 ;; rescan ) do_unregister=1; do_register=1 ;; * ) usage “Unrecognized command” ;; esac eval “IDE_IO=$IDE_IO_$IDE_NR” eval “USE_IDE_DEV=$USE_IDE_DEV_$IDE_NR” [ $do_unregister -eq 1 ] && eval “$HDPARM -U $IDE_NR $USE_IDE_DEV > /dev/null” && sleep 3 && tail /var/log/syslog | grep udev [ $do_register -eq 1 ] && eval “$HDPARM -R $IDE_IO 0 0 $USE_IDE_DEV > /dev/null” && sleep 3 && tail /var/log/syslog | grep udev