Ted Carnahan

Well, I have to admit that I was blinded by love for my laptop. But when I said that 1920×1200 was working perfectly on my Inspiron 9400, I was wrong. I didn’t even really check - it just looked sooo good.

But then I went to take a screenshot of the next generation of SAGrader, running for the first time under Linux, and noticed a strangely… smaller screenshot than I expected. About 320 pixels smaller, horizontally speaking.

To make a long story short, to get 1920×1200 instead of 1600×1200, I needed to add a Modeline to X.org. Add this in your Monitor Section:

# 1920×1200 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 74.52 kHz; pclk: 193.16 MHz
Modeline “1920×1200″ 193.16 1920 2048 2256 2592 1200 1201 1204 1242 -HSync +Vsync

And make sure that your Screen section contains an entry for “1920×1200″. Then restart your X server - viola! - instant screen real estate.

Edit: I also needed the 915resolution package installed, but I didn’t have to edit any startup files.

Before this morning, I was uninitiated in the ways of tasty goat cheese. Then I combined a HyVee “everything” bagel (sadly unimpressive) with Herb Goat Cheese from Goatsbeard Farm at the Columbia Farmer’s Market. The results were quite excellent, but I think next time I’ll go for a tub (which is spready-er) instead of a round (which is crumbly-er).

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Missouri has got to be the dumbest insurance company on the planet. You see, my wife has asthma, and she has to take an inhaler twice a day in order to not die. Each inhaler has 60 doses and is intended for 30 days of use. We last filled this prescription on September 5. Today is October 5, i.e. 30 days later. But when we arrive at the pharmacy to get the inhaler, we find that the insurance company won’t pay until tomorrow.

I realize that the medicine is expensive, but do they really think that we’re taking the extra two doses and selling them on the black market? Can you imagine Jennifer hanging out in a dark alley with her inhaler, telling unwary hobos that the first hit is free? More realistically, what is she supposed to do when day 30 falls on a Saturday? Hold her breath until Monday?

So I’d better make a note - pick up the inhaler tomorrow (and I’d better not forget) so that Jennifer doesn’t keep me awake at nights with that annoying wheezing. Or die.

Nate turned me on to Defcon today, and I’m completely addicted. It’s a game about a global thermonuclear war, and it’s domain name sums up the game quite nicely: everybody dies. While on one hand it’s considerably less violent looking than your average first-person shooter, you aren’t having a good day unless you’ve killed in excess of 50 million people.

It’s a very sterile game - there aren’t any screams of agony, just quiet little “poofs” as millions are incinerated. But the combination of the military-looking vector graphics, the excellent soundtrack, and the occasional nervous cough of the other people in your underground bunker helping you orchestrate the end of days are enough to make this game very compelling.

As I don’t have any kind of modern Windows machine hanging around my house, I set out to get the demo running on my Ubuntu Dapper Drake laptop. It was very easy. After installing Wine, I downloaded the demo, ran the installer, and got the game going (although it was very choppy).

To improve performance, turn off the “smooth lines” feature in the graphics options (apparently this doesn’t work well under Wine). It might also help to run winecfg and set it to emulate a virtual desktop smaller than your screen if you’re having performace problems. The sound is somewhat jumpy, but those changes will get the graphics working pretty well.

I did have a few crashes, so be prepared to be patient with this one, but fortunately a Linux port is planned for the game, due in November. When that comes out, I’m buying it.

Edit: If you are having trouble with ALSA errors when you start, try creating the directory ~/.kde/socket-{YOUR HOSTNAME}, inserting your computer’s hostname, of course.

I’ve come across a little trick that isn’t complicated at all, but saves me a ton of time searching through CPAN. You can add a custom search shortcut that allows you to skip typing search.cpan.org, then typing your search term, replacing it with something as simple as p Search::Term in the address bar.

To do this, first do a search on the site you’re interested in and bookmark the results. Then open the Bookmark Manager and click properties for the new bookmark.

You’ll need to change two things. First, add the keyword that you want to use. In my case, I chose p to stand for perl, but you can pick any letter or phrase you want. Then replace your search term in the bookmarked address (highlighted) with %s. Save the bookmark, and enjoy your new shortcut!

It’s a small thing, but I’m listed in the acknowledgements for Test::Class, an excellent little xUnit-with-a-decisively-perl-twist module that we use at work. A star is born?

A few weeks ago I bought a new Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop after my three year old Dell died, 37 days out of warranty. I was running Dapper on that laptop, and I wanted to continue that with this new machine.

The good news: everything works. (Intel) Wireless, Bluetooth, CD/DVD burning, suspend, hibernate, touchpad, brightness dimming, all of the special buttons, USB. I haven’t tried the modem, but I don’t really care about it.

I picked the Intel 945 graphics, so I’m running the experimental xserver-xorg-air-core Xserver. That means that all of the shiny wobbly windows and compositing work well too. However, be sure to switch back to metacity (the default GNOME window manager) before attempting the Quit Gnome screen - the screen becomes active, but it doesn’t work with the compositing so you can never see it. Also, if you use the suspend or hibernate buttons with compiz, usually the system won’t come back - again, switch to metacity using compiz-manager before suspending or hibernating.

Graphics-wise, I was worried that I’d have trouble with the WUXGA screen (1920×1200) on this laptop, but that hasn’t been the case - it worked out of the box with Dapper.

The centrino CPU frequency scaling works well. I went for the Core 2 Duo, so I have independant control of frequencies and frequency governors on the two CPU cores. Thermal monitoring works, so I can get neat graphs.

Altogether, I definitely recommend this configuration to anyone who wants a capable Ubuntu laptop.