It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

I built a home media PC last October using an Asus Pundit-R "booksize" computer and Ubuntu Linux. You can read about the saga in my home media PC category.

Where we last left our story, there were two remaining items on my "less than ideal" list: the system was noiser than I'd like and hibernation wasn't working.

I have some better understanding—no progress—to report on the noise issue. The system is still louder than I'd like. It's not as loud as, say, a Sony Playstation 2, but it's still annoying to me. After all, people typically don't try to play André Segovia classical guitar music on a PS2.

I may be stuck and I suspect the CPU may be the culprit. I built the system with an Intel Celeron D 335 (2.8GHz) Prescott processor. It seems the Prescott architecture is notorious for heat and power issues. I wish I could swap it out for a Celeron M (Dothan) processor. The "M" stands for mobile (as in built for laptops), and they sound like great processors: zippy on the MIPs and stingy on the watts. (My Dell Inspiron 600m laptop uses a Pentium M and it kicks butt relative to its clock speed.) Unfortunately, it appears even though the Celeron D and Celeron M processors are both "Socket 478" packages, they are not plug compatible. (I've seen the notation "Socket 478M" to distinguish the latter.)

It's times like this I wish I had a good tweaking motherboard—not to overclock the processor but rather to underclock it and slow down the power burn.

Now, on to the good news: I got hibernation to work. Actually, the system would hibernate correctly—the problem was with resume. The system would resume alright into text mode, but would hang when it tried to enable graphics. My dilemma was that the ATI proprietary fglrx driver doesn't support hibernation, but the open source ati driver doesn't support the TV output.

The solution I found was to use the dumb vesa frame buffer driver. That gives me a display without video acceleration, but I really don't need it for typical use. The only thing remotely graphically involved I do is visualizations for the music player, and that continues to work fine on the vesa framebuffer.

Here are the steps I performed to make this work:

• Make a backup copy of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
• Run sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
• When asked to "autodetect video hardware" select "no".
• Select "vesa" driver.
• Pretty much take the defaults. The only place I didn't was when asked whether to use the "kernel framebuffer device interface". The default was "no" but I selected "yes".
• When asked for "video modes you would like the X server to use" I selected 800x600 and 640x480 (i.e. turned off 1024x768).
• I selected the "medium" option for "selecting your monitor characteristics".
• Then, I selected an "800x600 @ 60Hz" monitor.

With the configuration complete I restarted X and verified that the TV-out was still working correctly. Then I ran sudo /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh and watched the machine hibernate. When I rebooted the machine it found the suspend image, loaded it up, and brought me right back to where I was.

The results are great. Now, when I want to listen to music, it takes just 35 seconds for the computer to return from hibernation. The cold boot, by comparison, takes about 1:40—that's about 60 seconds to boot Linux and 40 seconds to start the KDE desktop. This is a significant improvement.

"[H] Consumer" has an interesting article on the computer buying experience at various national electronics stores. It's especially interesting in that the visits happened here in Austin.

The article on the following pages represents a snapshot of our buying experiences at each location. We simply visited each retail store and documented the experience we were presented with. [...] We’re simply offering up our real shopping scenarios along with our thoughts on how anyone searching for a computer to fit their needs should navigate the somewhat treacherous waters of a local retailer.

They seemed to get the best service at the store where the tech staff was filling in for the normal sales folks. Hmmm...didn't I see that in a movie recently?

Read the full article.

Earlier this week I posted a blog entry about the strength of lobbyists in the Texas capital. I also implied a connection to the Telecom Deregulation bill that passed during last year's "school finance" special session.

Turns out the San Antonio Express News followed up the next day with the explicit point that SBC more or less bought their way into telecom reform. The article discusses how SBC (now AT&T) swarmed the capitol and got their way.

During the 2005 session, AT&T spent more than any other San Antonio-based entity to lobby state lawmakers. It dished out between $3.4 million and $7 million on contracts with 112 lobbyists, according to Texas Ethics Commission records.

There are 31 members of the Texas Senate and 150 of the House of Representatives, meaning lobbyists for AT&T and other SB 5 supporters — among them, fellow telecom Verizon Communications — nearly had a one-to-one ratio with legislators.

The thing is, it doesn't stop in Texas. AT&T is now going to the other statehouses and the federal government saying, "Look what Texas has done." That's a heck of a lot of bang for their lobbying investement.

The full article is here.

It's been three weeks since I released the Force Preview plug-in for the Movable Type blog system. I blogged about it upon release. Thought I'd give a brief update.

First, the good news: it's been completely effective at stopping comment spam. I've found that the moment the plug-in is enable for a blog, comment spam ceases. My girlfriend reported a single spam, probably hand entered, during the past three-week period. Besides that, nada.

Now the bad news: it's kind of a pain in the butt. You need to modify a minimum of two templates (your individual archive entry template and comment preview template), and more if you use the (now deprecated) comment pop-up. The instructions are pretty explicit, so it shouldn't be difficult if you've only got one blog. It's might annoying, however, if you have several. I had four blogs that needed protection, and only today did I get around to dealing with the last of them.

More bad news: I tried to register the plug-in with Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, but they won't let me without signing up for Type Key.

My other concern is that trackback spam continues to be a problem, but it's not nearly at the level of the comment spam.

So, I recommend that people with existing Movable Type blogs who are frustrated with comment spam consider trying it.