Ed

I just got Suspend2 working on my Thinkpad. Mostly I followed the Gentoo Wiki instructions. Here's the only problem I had:

Symptom: System prints "Freezing Processes", then hangs forever.

Solution: add "hsf" to the RestartServices line in /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf :

    RestartServices hsf postfix alsasound

hsf is the Conexant HSF Softmodem.

The power button is not usable for suspend: it only triggers after a 3-second press, but after 5 seconds, it forces a poweroff. I can't see any way to make the button trigger after a light tap. So, plan B: use Fn+F12. To get acpid to recognize it, I followed the instructions at thinkwiki. The gist of it is:

    echo enabled,0xffff > /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkeys

...and write a custom /etc/acpi/actions/ibm/hotkey script which checks the key and runs hibernate.

Atheists are the most distrusted minority in America.

Kind of amusing, in a sad way. It seems likely that this is "trust" based on purely emotional and illogical terms, not based on observation and analysis. Perhaps my experience is atypical, but the biggest betrayals I've seen have always been from highly "devout" people. They are the ones who lie cheat and steal. They are also the most intolerant and hateful. The polluters and litterers. The most aggressive drivers. The ones who bomb buildings and kill people. What's wrong with this picture?

This doesn't mean that being religious implies being evil. But there is a strong correlation the other way: monstruous actions can often be attributed to "religious" people.

Brain damage, is all it is. It was a successful adaptation eons ago, but it's time we found a cure for religion.

There's a ringtail that comes to our bird feeder occasionally. He (she?) was out there just now. No way to take a photo, unfortunately: it's dark out, and opening a window/door would scare it off. But what a gorgeous animal.

Got Multihead X working today! Here were the two big problems:

   (II) NV(1): Mode "1600x1200" is larger than BIOS programmed panel size of 1 x 1.  Removing.
   (II) NV(1): Not using default mode "1600x1200" (unknown reason)

Solution: use the nvidia proprietary (closed) drivers. Bummer, but I couldn't find any other solution. This was Xorg 6.9.0 on Debian.

Second problem: the second monitor remained blank, no matter what. I could move the cursor "into it", that is, I could move the mouse off the edge of my primary screen... but nothing happened on the new screen 1. It was completely dark. I tried everything for a long time; lots of xorg.conf edits, even using nvidia-xconfig.

Solution: move the cursor into the new screen, press Ctl-Alt-KPminus! That was all! Somehow that activated things magically, and the display appeared. It has been working perfectly all day since then, even after more X restarts.

(Update: April 1. I'm heading out on vacation, so I lent the new monitor to a friend. With a Mac. What took hours on my system took seconds on hers. Plug it in, it works. Want to rearrange the layout? Drag some icons. Want to rotate the monitor? Just click on a Control Panel pulldown. Sheesh. Sometimes it sure is frustrating to be a Linux person.)

I tried to set up mailman on Gentoo, using Postfix. The Symptom: a bounce with this text:

    <listname@hostname>: Command died with status 2:
    "/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post everyone". Command output: Group
    mismatch error.  Mailman expected the mail wrapper script to be
    executed as group "mailman", but the system's mail server executed the
    mail script as group "nobody".  Try tweaking the mail server to run the
    script as group "mailman", or re-run configure,  providing the command
    line option -with-mail-gid=nobody'.

The solution:

Instead of adding mailman aliases to /etc/aliases, add them to /usr/local/mailman/data/aliases. Then modify /etc/postfix/main.cf:

  +alias_maps = hash:/etc/mail/aliases, hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/aliases
  +alias_database = hash:/etc/mail/aliases, hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/aliases

Yes, you need both lines.

Then make sure that /usr/local/mailman/data/aliases is owned by mailman.mailman, run newaliases, run 'postfix reload', and try again.

Well, not really. Just about a dozen flakes. It lasted for about two or three minutes... and stopped again. OAT is 38, so it's not like they'd stick or anything.

(Update) we had some blowing wet snow for a half-hour or so. A little bit stuck in the shady spots, but most melted on contact.

I've written an image plugin for nanoblogger. For a given input in brackets like this:

    [imgname]

...the plugin (1) looks for a file called 'images/*imgname*.(jpg|png)', (2) generates a thumbnail, (3) gets the width/height of the thumbnail, and (4) produces a linked inline image:

    <a href="/path/to/imgname"><img src="/path/to/thumbnail" alt="(comments from EXIF)" width="XX" height="XX" /></a>

It also converts *asterisk text* to boldface, indentations to <pre>

Put this into plugins/entry/body/some-name.sh :

    export BASE_URL
    tmp=$(echo "$NB_EntryBody" | /var/www/edsantiago/blog/plugins/esm.pl)
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
        if [ -n "$tmp" ]; then
            NB_EntryBody="$tmp"
        fi
    fi

...and download the actual plugin. Requires perl and the CPAN Image::Size module.

this should be a link to Google this should be bold and this should not

Bold at beginning... and at end