2008

Sun, Apr 27

<23:21 EEST> This article found on Slashdot, titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, is about one of those ideas I find somehow obvious and familiar, yet they are rarely seen in mainstream media. It's related to my eternal rants against the traditional working society.

For example, my parents' generation seems to value work, as defined by relatively fixed hours and getting paid for it, as pretty much the only productive thing in the world. Doing something creative and constructive in your spare time is merely useless tinkering in that sense. It's also funny how often you see this situation: "I'm sorry I can't participate in the cooperation and charity tomorrow, I need to go to work (to earn some money for my personal enjoyment)." It's almost always accepted, even when the society portrays itself as valuing cooperation and charity, because work is valued somehow higher.

Getting back to the article, one of the main points there is that it's time people start spending less time watching TV, but instead of using that time for more work, do something more fun and constructive. It's easy to wish and speculate upon, but there are some intriguing historical explanations why this might actually happen.

Fri, Apr 25

<15:26 EEST> Linux 2.6.25 was released over a week ago, and the update has brought up a couple of interesting points. My initial concerns were with Tuxonice and the PHC undervolting patch. The latter was immensely more important, as I use it on both of my active machines, and the vanilla hibernation for the laptop is pretty usable. Since the PHC patch is yet to be updated, I ended up hacking the update myself on Sunday night. It was mainly a simple search/replace work; the per-CPU attributes are now stored differently. It's nice to know that there are now other people running my code in kernel space :-j

Another interesting fact with 2.6.25 is that the memory upgrade problem is slightly improved. I'm currently booted without the mem=2016 option with no problems. According to dmesg, the kernel works around it:

WARNING: BIOS bug: CPU MTRRs don't cover all of memory, losing 15MB of RAM.

So I'm not getting any more usable memory, but at least the system is usable without the extra boot option. It was hard enough to find for me, after nearly 9 years of Linux experience, so I'm sure this upgrade will help a lot of people.

Thu, Apr 17

<01:48 EEST> It's late, I've just watched a great Doctor Who episode (S04E02, The Fires of Pompeii), the premiere of Blindness is nearing. For once, I have the time and effort to whatsup on practically consecutive days :)

Maybe a little preaching to the choir, New Scientist has a nice interview of RMS that manages to summarize some key ideals of Freedom and democracy. It's not limited to software by any means, and doesn't even nag about the GNU/Linux nomenclature issue.

Tue, Apr 15

<23:34 EEST> Wondering about the real capabilities of my sound cards, I found Alsacap. It's nice to know that even my laptop's internal card, a basic Intel one, can handle 32 bits of depth. Though the AD/DA converters are probably limited to 16 bits.

Last weekend's Student Theatre Festival at Tampere went pretty smoothly, with the added excitement of me having organized the bus ride, and having the de facto premiere of Blindness (Kertomus sokeudesta). Lighting design by improvisation at Tampere Student Theatre was a nice hack, and for some reason I wasn't overly nervous with the play. Officially, it will premiere at Ilokivi this Thursday.

Sat, Apr 5

<23:53 EEST> Today I had fun at the local physics department; never imagined I'd say that ever! A rather blissful intellectual experience not unlike the nanoscience workshop, this was a coaching event for the Physics Olympiad candidates. I supervised/assisted in an experiment that aimed to measure Planck's constant, something pretty hc for secondary-school students. Both of today's groups did well, though with a little more time we could have done a proper uncertainty analysis ;) Most of the experiment dealt with calibration, or finding out the behavioral parameters of an LDR and a light bulb, in order to study the blackbody radiation curve.

Incidentally, I've found myself much more excited with teaching/studying than the student theatre. I've somehow got in the positions of lighting designer and treasurer mainly because there's nobody else to do the jobs, not because I'm particularly interested. Of course, there's the general motivation in contributing to a theatrical production, but I'd much rather do that in some other position. Then again, you can regard these managerial/support roles as enabling some real talents to flourish, which is not so much different from the teaching.

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Risto A. Paju