My obsession for GNU Emacs has grown over years to an extent where I managed to get a significant amount of users to adopt Emacs. In the past 10 years, I have learned a lot of nice tricks that I can do on Emacs to improve my productivity. So, I have decided to create a [...]
Yesterday, I upgraded my Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 beta 1 (Lucid Lynx). Lucid comes with Thunderbird 3. After upgrading, using Thunderbird 3 once and rebooting, Thunderbird started up with empty profile and showed the account creation window. When I looked into the home directory, I noticed that my .thunderbird is moved to .thunderbird.upstream and [...]
If you have ever wanted to get the command line options that were passed to a running Solaris process, you might have noticed that the output of command line arguments from ps is truncated to 80 characters. Looking into /usr/include/sys/procfs.h will reveal the reason why! This is because of the restriction in struct psinfo. Here [...]
I have a triple boot system with OpenSolaris, Ubuntu 9.10 and Microsoft Windows XP. I upgraded my Ubuntu 9.10 GRUB to GRUB 2 today. GRUB2 automatically added an entry for Microsoft Windows XP. However, it didn’t detect the OpenSolaris that was installed. I had to manually configure OpenSolaris chainloading in GRUB 2. If you are [...]
OpenSolaris was lacking virtual console for a while. This support was made available since build snv_124. However, due to various bugs, it is turned off by default. To enable virtual consoles, do the following.
$ pfexec svcadm enable vtdaemon
$ pfexec svcadm enable console-login:vt2
$ pfexec svcadm enable console-login:vt3
$ pfexec svcadm enable console-login:vt4
$ pfexec svcadm enable console-login:vt5
$ pfexec [...]
One of the key things that I try to do when I take portraits is to focus on the eye of the subject. This is a well documented technique and works very well. Also, each lens has a sweet spot aperture for which the picture is really crisp. I find that it is at f/2.8 [...]
Update 2009-11-07: This issue is fixed in OpenSolaris build snv_126.
OpenSolaris dev repository update snv_116 introduced an XOrg bug that caused the mouse cursor to jump to the top left corner of the screen very frequently. Apparently, there is some floating point math issue is involved using MMX/SSE2 instructions. I was living with the workaround posted [...]
My (ex-)manager David Carlton has decided to leave us to join Playdom. I learned a lot in the past two years working with him. We are going to miss him a lot! Playdom is fortunate to have such a talented individual on board. I am sure he will be bringing a multitude of perspectives into [...]
With the latest OpenSolaris 2009.06, maximizing windows managed by Metacity (GNOME) will maximize the windows across both screens. This is due to an issue that Metacity was trying to use a wrong Xinerama type. This issue is fixed in the mercurial repository. However, the fix was not on time to make it into the final [...]
OpenSolaris 2009.06 was announced yesterday. You can download the live CD image (ISO) from here. Here is the set of instructions to create a live USB stick from the live CD that you have downloaded.
Step 1. Install distro-construct.
$ pfexec pkg install SUNWdistro-const
Step 2. Generate the USB image from CD image.
$ pfexec usbgen osol-0906-x86.iso osol-0906-x86-usb.img /tmp/osol
Step [...]
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