Estonian e-election… and penguins
Today I overcame my paranoia (where and how is my vote stored? Who has access to it?) and decided to vote electronically.
Unmounting external USB drives in Ubuntu 9.04
UPDATE root issue discussed below was fixed in Ubuntu 9.10 – unmounting and spinning down the drive works just fine from GUI
As some people know there are problems with correct unplugging of external USB hard drives on linux, Ubuntu in particular. The problem is that none of graphical managers support drive spindown when unmounting/ejecting the external hard drive. This can cause severe damage to HDD.
There’s an old bug in LP for that. The summary is that you can use a script by Clem-Vangelis and Dave Rosky to do the work. Later someone posted a link to scipt by Yan Li, which does even some more stuff.
But since Ubuntu 9.04 those scripts have stopped working – the drive kept spinning. Googling around I found a similar problem and found out the problem was in udev rules. There was a manul solution in comments of LP bug #388506 mentioning udev rules editing: in ubuntu 9.04 I needed to copy the 60-persistent-storage.rules file, modify ACTION!="add|change" to ACTION!="add". This way the scripts worked. Somehow when this rule is present my home partition couldn’t be mounted. So this rules file must be removed after external drive unmount.
To make things easier I merged the scripts by Clem-Vangelis, Dave Rosky and Yan Li, updated it with udev rules workaround and done some other things. The script is as follows:
С Новым Годом!
Булгаков писал: “разруха не в клозетах, а в головах”. Кризис не в экономике, а в головах.
Diploma thesis
I’m proud to announce my diploma thesis completion. Diploma topic was „Developing automated functional tests for a new Intercollege Study Information System using Selenium framework“. I chose a codename for the work – “bloody November sleeplessness”. The codename completely describes what writing was (wasn’t?) about.
Ubuntu 8.10 on HP Compaq nx6310
The specs
CPU: Intel CeleronM works out of the box
Chipset: Intel 945GM works out of the box
Video: Intel GMA 950 works out of the box DualHead included (yay! finally)
VGA (D-Sub) / DualHead: DualHead works out of the box. External dispaly on/off (Fn+F4) doesn’t work.
Optical drive: Matushita DVD-RAM UJ-840S works out of the box
Lan: Broadcom BCM4401-B0 works out of the box
WiFi: Broadcom 4311 doesn’t work out of the box. Need’s to fetch a firmware from the Internet
PCMCIA: Texas Instruments ( 8039 ?) not tested
Firewire: Texas Instruments ( 803a?) not tested
USB 2.0: works out of the box
Laptop lid indicator: doesn’t work at all
bug in Nokia 3120 Classic’s alarm
There’s a bug in my Nokia 3120 Classic, firmware v 07.16 27-05-08 RM-364.
Steps to reproduce:
1 Enable ‘Active Stand By’ Update 05.10.2008: after all this doesn’t affect the issue
2 Put the phone on charge (eg for a night while you sleep)
3 Put your alarm on
4 Alarm turns on in the morning.
Expected result: you click ‘Snoose’ and dream for 10 more minutes.
Actual result: there’s no ‘Snooze’ button. ‘Menu’ is instead. Keypad seems to be unlocked. Pressing any key switches alarm off and failes you on getting right on time. Later, the phone blinks after hanging off a.k.a. pressing the “red phone button”
Solution: after charging your phone turn it off and then turn it on again (a.k.a restart it) OR disable the active stand by
Nokia 3120 classic and Ubuntu 8.04 linux (updated)
In this post I’ll try to sum up the friendship 
between Nokia’s 3120 classic mobile phone and Ubuntu 8.04 aka Hardy Heron linux.
Ubuntu 8.04 on HP Compaq nx6310
The specs
CPU: Intel CeleronM works out of the box
Chipset: Intel 945GM works out of the box
Video: Intel GMA 950 works out of the box (needs tweaking if you want DualHead)
VGA (D-Sub) / DualHead: external dispaly on/off (Fn+F4) doesn’t work out of the box. Need’s tweaking if you want DualHead. Though, it broke later anyway. External monitor works just fine.
Optical drive: Matushita DVD-RAM UJ-840S works out of the box
Lan: Broadcom BCM4401-B0 works out of the box
WiFi: Broadcom 4311 doesn’t work out of the box; easily configurable
PCMCIA: Texas Instruments ( 8039 ?) not tested
Firewire: Texas Instruments ( 803a?) not tested
USB 2.0: works out of the box
Laptop lid indicator: doesn’t work at all
moved (back) from blogger
I’ve moved (back) three old posts from my blogspot.com. The posts, comments and the counter are moved back to wordpress.com.
At the moment, the counter stats are as follows: wordpress.com – 291 hits, blogspot.com – 5335 visits (hits?).
The sole purpose of blogger account was the AdSense, but that failed miserably (5$ in two years (that one get suspendedtoo)). And given how “much” even a 100$ here in Europe is, it’s a total no-go.
Moreover, I find ads disturbing. Though, I wouldn’t mind if wordpress.com had ads to make the damn thing work faster… But free (as in free speech) content matters more than speed for me
jhead EXIF editor
I’ve been to a great eurotrip with my friends lately. We got lots of great pictures taken on two digicams. But…
