After spending total amount of several dozens hours of fighting with the infamous udev arbitrary device name assignment, I’ve finally won. Device name assignment is absolutely underdocumented and I was able to get it work only thanks to the kind people sharing their experience and knowledge on the net. For the record, after a lot…
Having finally an AMD64 system in my hands, I’m positively surprised by its performance. When I switched from a Duron 650 MHz to a Celeron 2.6 GHz a few years ago, the performance increased much less than I expected. This applied to Sempron 2400+ (~1.6 GHz?, Socket A) as well, it ran only slightly faster than the…
IIRC, I’ve been running Debian GNU/Linux on my primary workstation since summer 1995. All that time (almost 11 years!) the operating system ran without any single reinstallation, starting with the Debian 0.93R5 version and ending with mixed sarge-etch (post-3.1). I only performed upgrades, I’ve never reinstalled the system from scratch. None of the upgrades required…
There are many interesting artists in the area of Czech independent music. Some of them succeeded to get rather popular, Iva Bittová, Radůza, Psí vojáci, Už jsme doma, Tara Fuki are relatively well known today. Not that everyone here has ever heard about all of them, but probably none of them is unknown to anybody…
There is an interesting story by Petr Kaňovský at katolik.cz (in Czech). When facing the problems of our society caused by our sins we have to fight with additional temptations such as to give up, to join the crowd, to fall into hatred or to accept the thirty pieces of silver. We may be forced…
I’ve noticed that European Commission starts a new round of the Community Patent project that can lead to legalization of software patents in the European Union. E.U. citizens and companies have opportunity to fill-in a Commission questionnaire on the issue till the end of March. If you are concerned about the European patent system and/or…
I’ve been using Ekiga (formerly Gnomemeeting) for several years. Among free software phones it was exceptionally stable and well usable since about its 1.0 version. But it supported only the H.323 protocol which became a big problem during the time. H.323 is usually not supported by VoIP providers, it is poorly supported by the Asterisk…
There were old good times when one could install magicfilter on his GNU/Linux system and send a file to a printer and the printer printed the file as expected. Since I started to use CUPS a few years ago it’s no longer true. Whenever I send some PostScript or PDF file to my printer, I’m…
There has been an interesting discussion on comp.periphs.scanners recently about scanners, film grain, noise and aliasing. I wondered why my 2400dpi scanner produces very grainy scans in comparison with prints (and the scanned images are of much worse quality than pictures from my 2Mpix camera because of the grain) and why the grain is more…
Not having millions of dollars/euros on your account? Not backed up by dozens of lawyers? Not having guts to kill inovation and to blackmail your competitors? Never mind, you can still play the Software Patent Game!