Actually, nVidia are probably at the same level of dickishness when it comes to flaws in their Linux drivers, but the fact I'm running DRI, AIGLX and multi-monitors on a £40 nVidia card a couple of hours after installing it has a lot going for them. ATI meanwhile broke multi-monitors in their drivers several versions ago (at least for my card), are a nightmare to get direct rendering running on, don't support AIGLX at all and, when I asked them about the multi-monitor thing just replied their drivers were “as is”.

Well, they weren't ising much at all so I'm taking my money elsewhere.

As requested, a Nucleus plugin which links things like {{alienheadtransplant}} to Myspace.

http://www.auzsoft.net/code/NP_MySpaceLink/NP_MySpaceLink.txt

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Whilst applying for jobs (some stuff going on - nothing definite yet) I've continued something I started just prior to getting teh s4ck: reloading my Choonserver with Gentoo. I did have it running with Ubuntu, but the latest version, Edgy Eft, had an annoying bug whereby it randomly dropped the wireless connection at least once a day. Moreover, running Gentoo would allow me to set up Amarok to use the same MySQL db for the tunes, so if I played a song on the big PC it would get counted as a play the same as if I played it on the Choonserver. Which is now what's happening

A while back I mentioned Cacti as something cool I found. Well, now it's been superseded by Munin on the coolometer. It produces just as many useful graphs of system info (and more, such as the one below), but works in a client/server way to gather all the data from many servers in one place far more easily than Cacti did.

Since I installed Gentoo its been bugging me that if I scrolled too quickly through a web page, it'd switch from “scrolling the page” to “next page” and flip to the page I'd used the back button to get away from. For a while I thought it was a Firefox thang, but I finally discovered that my mouse was giving different “button” messages depending how quickly I scrolled it. Normal, slow, scrolling was sending buttons “4” or “5” to the system, but quick scrolling sent buttons “6” or “7”.

A quick check of the xorg.conf file showed the mouse configuration looked like:

Section “InputDevice”
        Identifier  “Mouse0”
        Driver      “mouse”
        Option      “Protocol” “IMPS/2”
        Option      “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
        Option      “ZAxisMapping” “4 5 6 7”
EndSection

Reducing that ZAxisMapping option to just “4 5” seems to have cured things.

“You can select columns, rows, or blocks of cells in HTML tables in Firefox (or any Gecko-powered browser) by holding down "Control" and selecting with the mouse. Handy for copy pasting data from tables in websites.”

Selecting Columns and Rows in HTML Tables with Firefox | Acts of Volition

One of the very few things I've managed to get my largely non-techy family members to grok is that “thou shalt always run anti-virus and firewall programs”, so when my brother's copy of ZoneAlarm started bitching about his Windows ME no longer being supported I was naturally the “go-to guy”.

Luckily I had a spare copy of XP lying around, so I gave that to him, along with a slipstreamed XP SP2 CD. Unfortunately, he ran into some issues and I ended up popping over for a visit to do the install for him.

As it turned out, the slipstreamed disc was buggered, so I upgraded from the official XP disc... which was bad because:

1. The upgrade from ME to XP unbeknownst to me switched off the virus checker and the firewall
2. There are evil people out there just waiting to pounce on fresh XP installs as soon as the connect to the Internets

By the time I'd got the Windows update page up there were thirteen Messenger spams (most suggesting the registry was corrupt and I should buy their product) up and an extra winiogon process running. By the time I killed that and disconnected, it was too late and some 200 executables were infected.

I've took his PC home to fix; I've copied all the data files onto CDs and reformatted. As a way of apology, I've stuck in a spare CD-R drive I had around, as well as some extra memory and an ethernet card.

But... damn, the speed that the PC was fucked was brutal. I've been running security systems on machines I've owned since I had an Amiga, so I guess I've missed out on the experience until now.

This is a pretty cool program that displays how much space files on your computer are taking up as a kind of exploded pie-chart. I found it very useful for finding stuff that was just taking up space. Not available for Windows though... natch. (via)