Friday, September 11, 2009
Looking for new components for upgrade
Trying to find a nice new motherboard to go with a nice AMD Phenom II x4 is hard. I'd like to have one with NVIDIA SLI and DDR3 memory but no go. Any hints?
XP and proper drivers
I'm the fix-my-computer-please around here, and got to fix a friends XP on a laptop. Nothing special, after being quick enough to read the bluescreen that was displayed for under a second before rebooting... sigh. Anyway, a simple boot from XP CD, run chkdsk, reboot and it was ok again.
But then I just had to fix it a bit more because the person that had installed XP on it didn't install proper drivers for the display. And my friend had just wondered why her computer is so slow, for about half a year or so... nice going again M$, how about fixing your bundled drivers so people don't need to hunt around for stuff.
But then I just had to fix it a bit more because the person that had installed XP on it didn't install proper drivers for the display. And my friend had just wondered why her computer is so slow, for about half a year or so... nice going again M$, how about fixing your bundled drivers so people don't need to hunt around for stuff.
Friday, September 04, 2009
Mapper things
I've been working on a partial-rewrite/splitting of Mapper into libraries and components. Unfortunately it takes a bit more time than I have and delays releasing a Mapper 2.0, so I decided a couple of weeks ago to work a bit on the old Mapper branch instead and fix some of the most annoying bugs and add a couple of features to make it nicer to use.
A new release is already out, available at mapper.tal.org tablet repository. Sources can be there too for those who need them.
Oh, and I will probably release a new version today, fixing a couple of bugs in the above :)
A new release is already out, available at mapper.tal.org tablet repository. Sources can be there too for those who need them.
Oh, and I will probably release a new version today, fixing a couple of bugs in the above :)
Friday, August 28, 2009
N900 is out
And it looks really nice, I like. My good old N73 will be retired and I'll switch as soon as it's available. Release date seems to be October, but who knows when it is available in any stores around here.
Friday, June 05, 2009
Finding roads to map for OpenStreetMap
Even if there is still a lot of mapping to do here in Finland, we already have most of the major roads done. I at least are having a problem finding roads to map when I'm not driving just for mapping anymore.
For example, our family summer cottage is a 240km away from my home, and all the roads that it makes sense to drive trough have already been mapped. And it doesen't help that the fastest way is the E18, starting 100m from home and going almost straight to the summer cottage, with only about 7km of some smaller roads to drive so you tend to prefer that fastest route instead of smaller roads. Not that I personally don't like driving on them, it's the others in the car (read: girl friend :) that like to get there fast.
So I've been trying to find some way to get myself on smaller roads and I think I've found a nice way that also requires a GPS. And, you guessed it, it's geocaching! I try to look for caches in obscure places so that I need to drive on smaller roads. And the gf, not eager, but at least she likes geocaching and tags along.
For example, our family summer cottage is a 240km away from my home, and all the roads that it makes sense to drive trough have already been mapped. And it doesen't help that the fastest way is the E18, starting 100m from home and going almost straight to the summer cottage, with only about 7km of some smaller roads to drive so you tend to prefer that fastest route instead of smaller roads. Not that I personally don't like driving on them, it's the others in the car (read: girl friend :) that like to get there fast.
So I've been trying to find some way to get myself on smaller roads and I think I've found a nice way that also requires a GPS. And, you guessed it, it's geocaching! I try to look for caches in obscure places so that I need to drive on smaller roads. And the gf, not eager, but at least she likes geocaching and tags along.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Working around buggy ALi IDE on ultrasparc hardware
The Linux ALi IDE driver (at least 2.6.23) does not have a proper workaround for a hardware bug that makes DMA transfers sometimes produce garbage. The simple workaround to get these sparc up and running has been to boot with the "ide=nodma" kernel parameter. That is fine, but performance will really suck.
Anyway, I run my personal production mail, proxy, tunnel, build server on a Netra-AX and it has the buggy ALi IDE chipset. My first workaround was to just have the basic root system on a small IDE disk on the primary channel and all data disks on a SATA controller. This was alright for a while but on some heavy compilations and swapping made the system crawl. I had made the stupid mistake to put my swap on the no-dma disk, plus loading binaries and libraries from the nodma disk was slow. But what to do then ? The PROM will only boot from the internal IDE and I didn't like to move the system to another disk. Digging in my hardware stash I found a nice IDE-to-CF converter that can be plugged directly into the motherboard, plus a 32Mb CF card, just enough for a kernel or two. And the CF card is PIO only so the kernel handles it alright. So now I boot the system from the CF card and have the disk plugged into the external PCI IDE card.
Anyway, I run my personal production mail, proxy, tunnel, build server on a Netra-AX and it has the buggy ALi IDE chipset. My first workaround was to just have the basic root system on a small IDE disk on the primary channel and all data disks on a SATA controller. This was alright for a while but on some heavy compilations and swapping made the system crawl. I had made the stupid mistake to put my swap on the no-dma disk, plus loading binaries and libraries from the nodma disk was slow. But what to do then ? The PROM will only boot from the internal IDE and I didn't like to move the system to another disk. Digging in my hardware stash I found a nice IDE-to-CF converter that can be plugged directly into the motherboard, plus a 32Mb CF card, just enough for a kernel or two. And the CF card is PIO only so the kernel handles it alright. So now I boot the system from the CF card and have the disk plugged into the external PCI IDE card.
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