Yearly Archives: 2000

On IRC: <raph> UTF8 really is simple enough to do in your head <raph> assuming your brain has SHL and SHR instructions <jwz> you need help, raph The book I am tech reviewing must be almost finished.

I released a new version of dia on sunday. Didn't get everyone's patches in, but I thought it was important to get another release out because of how long ago the previous release was. Of course, after doing the release someone finds an XIM bug, I notice that the SVG CR has been put out (so the recommended namespace URI's have changed) and I didn't tell the translators about the release. So I will probably put out another release of dia soon with these fixed. Tomorrow (9th August) is my parents 25th wedding aniversary.

I should put out a new release of Dia soon. The next release will be the first release as an official part of the GNU project, which is pretty good. Lots of nice user interface improvements. Just one more feature before the release :) Over the weekend, we pulled through a few CAT5 cables in the house. By putting the cable through the wall cavity there is no coax running through the doorways anymore. This should also reduce the problems of trying to find out which computer's network card has gone crazy when the network stops working. The Sun open office source release should be interesting. Some of the details are still being thrashed out, but things look good. In a worst case senario, the code will be released under GPL, so we can grab all the good features and integrate them into existing apps :)

I got my new notebook, and installed Linux on it. It is mostly working. The only real problem I have had is with resuming from a hibernate when I was in X. With X in 32-bit mode, the display gets garbled. With 16-bit mode, the whole machine locks up. Changing to another VT before hibernation avoids the problem. I wonder if XFree86 4.0 would fix the problem? It is probably caused by the Compaq bios not saving enough of the state on the graphics card (enough for the windows drivers but not enough for XF86_Mach64) I was also upgrading another Linux box, and the installer caused an exception just after installing all the packages, so I had to set up the last few things by hand. A bit annoying but not too difficult to fix.

Heard from another guy who has a Sony NEWS workstation who gave some interesting info about the problem we were having with our machine (it doesn't boot). We had left the machine off for a while, and then it stopped booting. I had thought that the BIOS was dead or something, but it sounds like a NEWS box won't boot if the battery is dead also. Now I just have to find where the battery is in the system. There is no information about these machines on any of the sony web sites (they seem to be denying all knowledge of the machines). Now all I need to do is find where the battery is in the system -- they are built very solidly. Been thinking about what I need to do about setting up Linux on the notebook I ordered. I think I should be able to get most things up and running without trouble, but I am a bit unsure about hibernation. I guess I will wait and see what happens when I get the notebook.