Doug Goldstein

Halloween is one of those weird holidays. For little kids it means candy and lots of it. For college kids it means alcohol and lots of it. For dentists, it means business and lots of it. Well, you get the picture, but this doesn’t make it a weird holiday, in fact over indulgence seems to be a common thread in most holidays. The part that makes this holiday unique is the fact that several unacceptable actions, outfits, etc are considered acceptable on Halloween. The glaring example is children taking candy from a stranger. But really Halloween or Hallowe’en or All Hallows Eve is more akin to Christmas Eve, it is the day before All Saints Day, which some say is an important holiday in the Christian world but I don’t even remember it from my Catholic school years.

In recent years though, Halloween has been evolving into a prank night. The night before Halloween is called Mischief Night and it’s common to see adolescents toilet papering trees and mailboxes. You’ll find smashed pumpkins in the streets. String in a can sprayed on bushes.

Jenn’s running around the apartment excited that we might get a trick or treater cause you can hear a bunch of kids outside our apartment in the area. Two glowing pumpkins outside… an orange construction paper pumpkin cutout on the door (where the hell did she get orange construction paper!?) But alas, no trick or treaters, I told her it was something she did to scare them away. Maybe I should sneak outside in my bedsheet and knock on the door…

Filed under: General
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I’m going to be taking some time away from Gentoo, not too sure how long. I haven’t been too productive lately because of outside issues. But I’ve been avoiding those issues and focusing on Gentoo to escape them maybe. But in the end it will hopefully be for the best because then I can resolve stuff and get better focused on my Gentoo tasks. I’ll spare everyone the details, if you do want to read a long, boring post, then keep reading.

I apologize for posting the whole LONG thing to the Gentoo Planet. The guys in #wordpress told me it shouldn’t do that only the lines above these as a summary.
(more…)

Filed under: General, Linux, Personal
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This is in response to the Slashdot story seen here.

We probably will see a bunch of shared sourced or open sourced Microsoft apps in the next few years but there are a couple of considerations that must first be evaluated. First Microsoft is a large corporate entity with a certain culture, that culture needs to be changed. We’re slowly seeing the changes today. You can see this when a guy at the bottom contributes to an open source project and his boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss goes on record with the media saying that “Open Source kills babies”. The evolution in their corporate culture is slowly happening but stills needs some time to trickle upwards. Right now the execs see open source as the new catch phrase and are trying to show off that they know what it is and they are catering to customers. (i.e. the hiring of Daniel Robbins, of Gentoo Linux fame, for Linux projects).

Secondly they need to go through a massive code review for two reasons primarily because the legal team knows Microsoft is everyone’s favorite (easiest??) target for a lawsuit (this doesn’t mean a victory… just to initiate). They need to know where every single line of code came from and what are their rights to that code before they can open the code up. Because you know the first thing the lawyers will do is try to find someway to sue them for stealing source code. They need to guard themselves against “SCO vs IBM” type lawsuits.

The other reason they need to complete this code review is because they need to track down and fix as many of the security holes in their software that they can do in a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise this code will be used to ferret out security holes and we will see a new wave of security issues like no one has seen before, because admit it, Microsoft products do run on the majority of machines today. The media will portray this as Microsoft handed the hackers the tools and Microsoft will see a lot of their business dry up because companies won’t know if they are safe if they go with Microsoft. Once they release this cleaned up code, they will be able to smuggly throw it in everyone’s face saying “See we’re not so bad after all.”

Addition:
I also posted this on Slashdot with the article, you can see that here and see people’s comments there.

Filed under: General, Linux
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Anyone have an ATI Radeon card in your laptop? Notice how when you shut the screen it really doesn’t turn off the screen. I never noticed this until just recently and after being an Nvidia card user for so long I find this kind of annoying. So here’s a quick fix for everyone.

Make sure your kernel has ACPI support and ACPI button support.

cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state

It should report as being opened. (duh!)

If you don’t have this then check your kernel config

grep 'CONFIG_ACPI_BUTTON' /usr/src/linux/.config

If this says it’s not enabled, then hop back into your kernel and find ACPI and turn it on.

Next make sure you have acpid turned on.

/etc/init.d/acpid status

If it doesn’t report as being on then flick it on.

rc-update add acpid default
/etc/init.d/acpid start

If you don’t have it then just emerge it. Also you will need the laptop-mode-tools ACPI events script.

emerge acpid laptop-mode-tools

And turn it on.

Now we’re going to need the tool to do the heavy lifting for us.

emerge radeontool

And finally edit the following file /etc/acpi/actions/lm_lid.sh and add

[[ $(</proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state) == *open ]] && \
/usr/bin/radeontool light on || \
/usr/bin/radeontool light off

And you should be set. Try closing your screen, you should notice the backlight go out.

For those of you that don’t use the external video output, it’s rumored that the following saves a little battery life.

radeontool dac off

Filed under: General, Linux, Modular X
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