Much happened this weekend. Because many readers have fantastically short attention spans, I’ll break my report up into clearly marked sections.

Is my laptop hard drive defective?

My laptop has done this once before: after the laptop is switched on, the hard drive refuses to start. It’s usually very quiet, but definitely audible at startup. This weekend before we left for Belgium (more on this later) the laptop decided it was time for the “the hard drive can’t be bothered to start up” trick again. No amount of restarts, reboots, hard drive reseats (yes, I do mean “reseat”) and cursing seems to remedy this. When I returned today (i.e. after almost 4 days of rest and relaxation for both me and the hard drive) it started up without a hitch.

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As we all are aware of the frighteningly high editorial standards of freshmeat.net (ha ha), I have to wonder how MumabAs was accepted.

This MULTI-FUNCTION software is a GUI (graphical user interface) for, wait for it, “configuring which mailboxes mutt should watch for new mail”. Aaaaarrrggggghhhhh!!!

For those of you who don’t know, mutt is a MUA (mail user agent) with a text-based UI. Usually, “configuring which mailboxes mutt should watch for new mail” is a question of editing one (1) line in the config file. So, following this guy’s example, we’d have a different GUI program (each with its own freshmeat entry) for configuring each line in the mutt configuration file.

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I was going to write about some of my favourite things, but unfortunately I had to read the news first. This article came to my attention. In short, Tom Hurndall, a member of the International Solidarity Movement, was shot in the head by an Israeli when he tried to rescue a small child from gunfire. He died shortly after in a nearby hospital.

I have very little sympathy for the Israeli aggressors. The fact that they are funded and advised by the Americans does not improve this situation.

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Computer Professionals. IT Stylists. Computer Engineers. I don’t know what their preferred labels are, but many of these people need a serious attitude adjustment, preferably in the form of a large hammer to be administered regularly to the head and other soft parts of the body.

You know what I’m talking about: those people who work with computers yet think they’re somehow better than than the rest of us. Unskilled labourers who have made peace with the fact that they’re unskilled labourers are the most pleasant and genuine people you’ll find. These computer people however, have come to the ridiculous conclusion that they belong to the genus and species Homo Superior and have therefore deserved the right to live in a permanent haze of condescension towards others.

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My Radeon DRI resume patch has been integrated into XFree86 CVS by Kevin Martin. Yaaaaaay! Now it’s only a question of time before it’ll propagate into all other XFree86 branches and eventually even into operating system distributions.

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Urgh, radeon frame buffer support in 2.5.66-bk12 (that’s cutting edge with some extra blood on top) seems to be completely broken at least on my laptop. After a little searching, it seems these drivers also seem to be in the process of a complete redesign. That’s a shame, as I wanted to try and adapt Benjamin Herrenschmidt and ATI’s 2.4 kernel PowerMac power management and suspend/resume code to x86 ACPI support in 2.5.x.

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Andrew Carlssin claims to be a time-traveller from the year 2256. Just another crack-pot, except for the fact that he was able to turn $800 into $350 MILLION in 2 weeks on Wall Street. More detail here.

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Get them while they’re still fresh! Go here for more information. I’ve updated the DRI set of binaries with a resume-patched build of 20030405 CVS checkout of the DRI tree. These drivers have really improved over the last month or two!

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Ed has written a letter to Robin Cook, the British member of parliament who recently resigned as cabinet minister in protest over Britain’s handling of the whole fiasco. The letter is also an eloquent and concise summary of the terrifying plans of the American neo-conservatives to reshape the Middle East.

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Rudolph has also sent me a link to a much longer article in the Washington Monthly that discussues at length the deceit of these neo-conservatives. The author is not as critical as I would like him to be, but does a good job of examining this American deception from a more objective American perspective. Please take the time to read this!

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Last night, Ed, Frans and I went to the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam to see the opening performance of the Sisters of Mercy Smoke and Mirrors European tour. I’m afraid that I have to report that it was a dismal performance.

It might have been the acoustics, it might have been the sound engineers or it could just be that the SoM are past their prime. It could also be that live performances are just not their thing. During the performance, I moved around in the large hall to try and find an acoustic sweet spot, but to no avail. I also stood by the sound engineers to make sure that I heard the music as they were hearing it: it was still quite disappointing. The melody was not really distinguishable and Andrew Eldritch’s vocals were terribly weak, although there’s no mistaking that voice. In spite of having listened to most of their work more times than I can count, I sometimes had trouble identifying which song they were performing.

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