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Listening to This American Life episodes 365 and 366 about the financial meltdown. Still working on the first one, but so far it’s great. I highly recommend them if you have any interest in our current financial situation.

Update: Listening to 366 right now. Only acts 2 and 4 cover the economy.

I don’t have to subscribe to bugtraq to know when phpMyAdmin has a security issue. I just watch my logs:

/MYADMIN/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/MyAdmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/PHPMYADMIN/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/PHPmyadmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/PMA/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/db/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/myadmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/mysql/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/mysqladmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/mysqlmanager/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
...

No doubt it’s a handy tool, but do yourself a favor and slap an htaccess file on that sucker if you use it.

My laptop has an Intel 3945ABG mini-pci wireless card. Overall it seems to be a pretty good card, but there are some driver issues on Linux (as of 2.6.24). First wpa_supplicant has an annoying habbit of spewing out an error message (ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: Operation not supported) whenever I start up the network interface. It seems to work fine regardless, but the message annoys me. I silenced it by adding the following line to my /etc/conf.d/net:

wpa_supplicant_wlan0="-Dwext 2> /dev/null"

Another problem I had was that the card wasn’t properly powering itself up and down when I restarted the network interface. I took care of that with this little preup script which I also added to /etc/conf.d/net:

preup() {
  if [ ${IFACE} = "wlan0" ]; then
    echo 0 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl3945/*/rf_kill
    iwconfig wlan0 txpower on
  fi
}

Update: As of 2.6.25 the powerup issue seems to be resolved, but I still see the error message from wpa_supplicant.

If you want pontification on distraction go here. If you want a solution go here.

Despite its uselessness Capslock takes up some pretty prime realestate on the keyboard. Control, on the other hand, though extremely useful, languishes in the corners. To help fight this injustice I remap Capslock to Control.

For the console on Gentoo I put the following in /usr/share/keymap/i386/include/nocaps.map (I also gzip the file but you don’t have to):

keycode 58 = Control

and add the following to /etc/conf.d/keymaps:

EXTENDED_KEYMAPS="nocaps"

For X I add the following to my ~/.Xmodmap (which I load using xmodmap in my .xinitrc):

remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
add Control = Control_L

On Windows I use SysInternals excellent Ctrl2cap utility.

I’m not going to venture and opinion on the subject because I’m not terribly well informed about it, but I found this Ars Technica article on cable deregulation interesting.

I just setup CPU frequency scaling in Gentoo on my Thinkpad T61p (Intel Core 2 Duo). These are the steps I followed:

1. Enable relevant kernel modules/options:
   #
# CPU Frequency scaling
#
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_TABLE=m
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEBUG=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_STAT=m
# CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_STAT_DETAILS is not set
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_PERFORMANCE=y
# CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_USERSPACE is not set
# CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_ONDEMAND is not set
# CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_CONSERVATIVE is not set
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_PERFORMANCE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_POWERSAVE=m
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_USERSPACE=m
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_ONDEMAND=m
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_CONSERVATIVE=m

   #
   # CPUFreq processor drivers
   #
   CONFIG_X86_ACPI_CPUFREQ=m
   # CONFIG_X86_POWERNOW_K8 is not set
   # CONFIG_X86_SPEEDSTEP_CENTRINO is not set
   # CONFIG_X86_P4_CLOCKMOD is not set

   

2. Add the appropriate modules to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 so that they are loaded at boot time:
   # cpu frequency scaling
acpi-cpufreq
cpufreq_ondemand
3. Install cpufrequtils:
   emerge cpufrequtils
4. Set CPU frequency governor in /etc/conf.d/cpufrequtils:
   # /etc/conf.d/cpufrequtils: config file for /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils
# Which governor to use. Must be one of the governors listed in:
# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu?/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
#
GOVERNOR="ondemand"
5. Add cpufrequtils to boot runlevel:
   rc-update add cpufrequtils boot
6. Reboot (or start the stuff by hand) and enjoy a more efficient system.

Hold off on that upgrade for now. Ruby 1.8.7 is not a minor release + it breaks things.

In the interest of actually writing something I’ve installed Wordpress and I’m going to try to stick with it. It’s not my favorite piece of software in the world, but then again the alternatives aren’t that much better and I might actually, you know, use this, so here goes.