The Debian issue I’ve had since at least June has been resolved. I am now back on testing (squeeze). See this report for more information. The real reason why I’m happy is because I was able to get myself off of ATi’s fglrx driver. I have a Mobility Radeon X1300 and Linux support for it dropped some time ago, leaving me stuck with the 2.6.28.9 Linux kernel, since that’s the last kernel the last drivers support. I’ve been trying for years to get the open source radeon drivers to work and I got them finally this past weekend. I had to compile everything basically from the ground up and build it into the kernel and it worked. Now, I get fewer FPS than I did with the proprietary driver, but it works. Compiz works wonderfully and I can now resize video without X crashing. There’s also no tearing and I can play video in VLC once again. So, yeah, as a result of this I can use the newest 2.6.31 kernel – with ext4 and grub2. I’ve been using reiserfs since the days of Woody and it’s time to move on. I don’t see a future in reiser4 so I see no point in holding out for it.

Some bad news is that the primary drive in my server may be dying. It’s an 80GB Hitachi Deathstar Deskstar that I pulled from a dumpster in 2003. Since 2004, it’s been making bizarre noises that are a mix between beeping and clicking. I guess it’s its own African clicking language or something, being a computer and all. Starting last week, the clicking has become more slow and frequent. I ran a SMART check on it back in 2006 and got back no problems. I’m running an extended test as I type this so I’m hoping things are okay. Just to be safe, though, I have a scheduled cron script to back up all the important files on it to the secondary drive. I don’t really want to buy a new hard drive so I hope everything is okay. I actually depend on this one for a lot of things.

I wish I had a bigger tank for Mossby and Trigby. They’ve gotten so big, but I can’t afford a larger tank right now and I don’t have the time to maintain anything larger than what I already have. I’ve promised them that when I’m finished with school I will get them a bigger one – one with a filter so I don’t have to constantly change the water from their nastiness. I should really clean my room up a bit. There are wads of paper everywhere from where I’ve been ripping pages out of spiral notebooks. Oh, I watched Watchmen this evening. What a let down.

Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech

I’m curious to know about how such information would be delivered. I’m going to assume either through 3G or WiFi, although having the option of choosing either would be desirable. I think that as broad-range Internet access becomes readily available (WiMAX) the room for technology such as this will increase, especially since a data plan for this sort of thing would operate on some sort of appendage-per-month payment plan (‘sup AT&T). The reason why I think this is ahead of its time is because broad-range Internet access is still underdeveloped (obviously). She did mention that a much better version is being anticipated on, so it’s likely that the situation will have been improved upon by then. I was expecting the price range to be extremely high, but $350 is very affordable for what it’s capable of doing. I think wearing it would make you look like a huge nerd, though.