tkh’s blog

Chernobyl

I’ve just seen a website of a woman who rode a motorcycle around Chernobyl area. The pictures tell how bad this catastrophic event was. People had to evacuate with nothing, even without money or photos. I was surprised that some people are still living in this dead zone. They refused to evacuate, or returned to their home after the meltdown. Human can’t inhabit in this area for at least 900 years. Nuclear catastrophy is the worst thing in the world.

udev

When I rebooted the athlon box running 2.6.4 kernel, X server failed to run. After checking the system for a while, I found that /dev/nvidia* device were not created. I edited the udev configuration files to create device files for the nvidia driver, but it doesn’t create device files. After reading a documentation file for udev, it turned out that kernel modules must support 2.6 kernel in order for appropriate device files to be created by udev. I thought that the nvidia driver supports 2.6 kernels, but it’s not fully complied with the 2.6 kernel module specification. A patch is available to provide information to sysfs so udev can create device files. Most people just modified a boot script to create the device files. I’ve chosen the latter option.

Kernel Upgrade

After I noticed that the udev package, the succssor to the devfsd for 2.4 kernels, is available on debian sid and sarge, I upgraded the kernel on my dual athlon box to 2.6.4. I had to modify XF86Config-4 to use /dev/input/mouse instead of /dev/psaux, and recompile the nvidia’s kernel driver after I rebooted into the 2.6.4 kernel. Other than that, the upgrade process was straightforward. Since the athlon box is a desktop workstation, I enabled preemptive scheduling option. The response is much better than on the 2.4.25 kernel. Now I’m testing the i8×0 sound driver that fleezes 2.4 kernels. So far it seems to be stable.

Joystick

Finally I’ve fixed the long standing latency issue in my GLUT joystick patch for Linux. The fix is very simple. When I read the joystick event queue with read() system call, I was reading each queue entry with a read() call until the queue is empty, but once I changed the code to read the entire queue with one read() call, the problem went away.

Xcode Tools 1.1

Finally I downloaded Xcode Tools 1.1 CD image from Apple and installed it. I had upgraded to Xcode 1.1 when Apple released the update, but it didn’t upgrade Interface Builder to 2.4.1. So I had to download this CD image. I don’t know how many people actually know about this, but it’s really confusing and Apple should put the Interface Builder patch into the Xcode update patch which can be installed onto existing Xcode 1.0 installation. Downloading a CD image is painful.

Guitar Repair

I’m thinking about adjusting and refining frets. There are two things you can do to frets. The first one is flattening so all frets will have the same height. Then you need to reshape each flattened fret so that its shape is like circle rather than rectangular when you look at frets from the side. This tuning is very important for getting good sound in high positions and for playability. You can do all these work with sandpapers. I went to Home Depot to buy them, but the problem I had there was that I didn’t know the gauging system in the US. It looked different from what I saw in Japan, and a little research on the web showed that I was correct. I’m looking for sandpapers around #1000, but HomeDepot doesn’t have that fine ones. Probably I need to go to a home craft shop.

BTW, here is my guitar. It’s Ibanez RG-550 made in Japan and I bought it in 1991.

Keyboard

Two days ago, I spilt coffee on the MS Natural keyboard. After I slept a couple of hours, I noticed that some of the keys were not working. So I opened the keyboard and wiped out coffee. When I had a look at the films that have electrical circuits printed on them, I noticed that several parts of the circuits had stain. I was afraid that it might prevent electrical current from reaching the keyboard controller, and I was right. I tried to remove stain by scratching it with a screw driver, and even with a sandpaper, but the printed circuit was so thin and it wiped out the circuit itself. At this time, I gave up fixing the keyboard and yesterday I bought a new MS Natural keyboard. I picked the same keyboard because I love it so much. The typing feeling is very good and the palm rest is very comfortable. I must admit that Microsoft manufactures really nice hardware. Here is the picture showing the old keyboard and the new one.

I’ve used the old one for six years. I think that’s long enough given that I’ve heavily used it. I should be very careful not to spilt liquid on the new keyboard.

Academy Award

I watched Academy Award until I got bored. I’m not interested in particular actor/actress getting the award, but it was fun to see the parodies from nominated movies. Also lots of people made ironic comments on the current situation in the US was really nice.

Ski

On Sunday, we went skiing at Santa Fe. It was sunny in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but snowing in the mountain. It was very cold, but we enjoyed powder snow. Since I haven’t gone skiing for two years, it took a while to remember how to ski, but by the time we left the mountain, I got it. I’d like to go there again.