July 2005

You know what sucks?

Have you ever had one of those days when you realize that there are forces in the world that refuse to make things easy for you?

… Well I just had one.

I was called in earlier tonight to help get some work I did for Red Team earlier this term as we get ready to deploy and test our part of the system. I had my laptop sitting on the hood of the vehicle (a robotic Humvee) while I worked and I stepped away for a moment.

Just about then one of my teammates ran by to hop up on the robot to fix something and inadvertently knocked my laptop from off the hood about 5 feet to the hard concrete floor.

I have less than a week before my practicum project (effectively my masters thesis) must be completed.

The screen, as you can see, is absolutely destroyed. The lid is actually bent enough that it does not close without being forced.

But the machine boots and the disk checks cleanly. If that’s not a testament to the quality of IBM Thinkpads, I don’t know what is.

I’m not angry at the teammate who knocked it off. We all make mistakes. Insurance should cover its replacement (hopefully I’ll get a Powerbook out of the deal). Its just an extremely inopportune time to lose full use of my laptop.

Like horses in their stables

This past weekend I got the chance to go back to Michigan and race with some old (and new) friends on the Mumm 36 “Vanguard.”

Great race. Extremely fast and relatively uneventful besides a few dozen sail changes. Many a record was shattered this year. I beat my personal best by about 10 hours by finishing at 3AM on Monday morning.

I’ve set up a Flickr photoset with my photos from Boat Night and the island.

For most of the day yesterday JVDS was having issues with its DNS servers so you probably wouldn’t have been able to get to any of my sites once your local DNS cache expired.

The problem has been solved so hopefully it won’t be an issue anymore…

Number 80

Today I went over to the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix. I was volunteering at the Red Team booth but I also managed to take some snapshots of one of the races before the thunderstorm hit.

For the longest time I avoided using ACPI for power management on my Thinkpad X31 (instead I stuck with APM) because I could never get all the little hacks lined up properly. ACPI, since it is done primarily in hardware, requires a lot of tricks to get your machine to suspend and resume properly. Switching out of X, turning off LCD backlights, resetting graphics cards, etc etc. Its a real hassle.

However, if you’re fortunate enough to be running Debian Linux, you can install the “hibernate” package. Hibernate is basically sophisticated Bash script with pluggable options for all the most common ACPI hacks. I had ACPI up and running within minutes.

If you’ve got a Thinkpad X31 or similar machine, feel free to download my hibernate.conf and tweak it to your purposes. The only additions beyond a fairly standard hibernate configuration I had to make were adding hooks to turn the Radeon backlight on and off.