Rondebosch Village Shopping Centre is in the process of building a new parking deck to double their parking capacity. As a result, the Rondebosch Pick ‘n Pay has put up several copies of this sign:
(click for full size)
A “poster” to drive any… “English Teacher” MAD
March 27th, 2008Graduation
December 6th, 2007This is my annual look-at-me post.
On this coming Wednesday (the 12th) I will graduate from UCT with a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics. I will receive the degree with distinctions in Computer Science and Mathematics, and with a distinction in the degree overall; I will also be on the Dean’s Merit List. My final marks for this year are:
| CSC3002F | Computer Science IIIA | 91% |
| CSC3003S | Computer Science IIIB | 94% |
| MAM3000W | Mathematics III | 90% |
| MAM3004Z | Mathematics 304 | 81% |
It actually feels quite weird, to have finally reached this point. For the last three years, I’ve worked away at my courses, but I’ve never really had a feeling that I was actually approaching an endpoint. Now, suddenly, it hits me: I have finished my undergraduate studies. Wow. It’s actually quite a big deal.
Of course, I’m returning to UCT for Honours next year, so it’s not as if what I do with my day is actually going to significantly change (although I will have a much heavier workload). But still. Wow. In a week’s time I’ll be able to style myself Mr. Adrian Frith, B.Sc. (Cape Town). (Although it would be rather pretentious to do that outside of a formal academic setting.)
XRandR – finally, simple monitor configuration for Linux
December 6th, 2007The most recent Linux distribution releases – Ubuntu 7.10, Fedora 8 and so on – are now shipping with version 1.2 of the XRandR extension for the X server. This allows the user to dynamically change resolutions, refresh rates, and – this is the really impressive thing – switch monitors on and off on the fly. All of this, without ever having to edit xorg.conf, or restart the X server, or reboot. This was one of the major things that the Linux desktop lacked compared to other major operating systems.
Until very recently, using my external monitor with my laptop required several irritating customisations – you can see the details in my earlier post:
- To have it switch on, and run in Xinerama mode along with my laptop panel, required fiddling with MetaModes and other fiddly settings of the
radeondriver. - To drive it at its native resoution (1440×900) i had to add a custom modeline to
xorg.conf(except on Fedora, for some reason). - If the X server originally started without the external monitor attached, then it would have to be restarted to detect the monitor once it was attached. And restarting X means having to log out and lose all my application state.
XRandR 1.2 has removed all three of these irritations. It requires (almost) no preconfiguration, autodetects all resolutions correctly, and detects monitors when they are plugged in without a restart.
Let’s take a brief look at some of what XRandR can do: this is basically what I do with it daily. Note that at the moment graphical tools to control XRandR are still under development and none are really at a releaseable state (in my opinion); but now that the infrastructure exists in the X server and the drivers, tools to control it will come soon. What I use here is the command-line tool, sensibly named xrandr. Read the rest of this entry »
Blog revamp
November 26th, 2007I’ve upgraded the blog to the latest version of wordpress (2.3.1, I think) and changed the theme. I’ve also added the WP-OpenID plugin so you can now provide an OpenID identity while commenting, or associate an OpenID identity with your account and use it to log on. Also, the theme has changed.
In the process I (through my own stupidity) lost the images that should appear in some of the posts. I think I have a backup at home, so they may or may not reappear later.
SCO is bankrupt
September 17th, 2007Well, not quite. Remember what I (along with half of the world – I’m not claiming any particular brilliance on my part) predicted a month ago? That SCO would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection? Well, it’s happened. Hopefully we will soon be seeing the last gasps of SCO.
In other news: Microsoft loses anti-trust appeal. All in all, a bad day for IP trolls and monopolists.
SCO share price
August 14th, 2007With regard to the SCO v. Novell ruling, I think this says it all:
SCO lost two-thirds of its value over the weekend after the ruling. It might not be long before they file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, I imagine.
Cape Town drivers…
July 27th, 2007So, I take my drivers license test next week Friday. I’ve been learning to drive for a year now, and for the last month I’ve been driving to and from university almost every day (with a qualified driver in the car, of course). And this has been through the rush-hour Mowbray traffic. So I’m used to most of the odd and dangerous things that Capetonian drivers do. What happened this morning, however, still has me amazed five hours later.
On the way to UCT from Pinelands, I was on Raapenberg Road where it joins Klipfontein Road. (OpenStreetMap plug: here). I was the first in the queue, stopped at the lights and waiting to turn right onto Klipfontein. Because the lights at Liesbeeck Parkway (here) were out, the traffic was really clogged up. Indeed, when the lights changed to green for me, there was no space to turn into on Klipfontein Road because the whole intersection was full of cars going straight on Klipfontein that had entered the intersection without being able to clear it. So, naturally, I didn’t move into the intersection because I was waiting for some space to appear to turn into.
This, apparently, was not good enough for the idiot in the Mercedes behind me, who was clearly in too much of a hurry to actually think. He decided that if I wasn’t going to go, he was going to just pull around me and enter the intersection. When he did this, of course, there was absolutely no space for him to go, so he ended up stopping in the middle of the intersection.
Now, of course, the lights change, and Mr Merc is blocking both lanes of traffic going the other way on Klipfontein. And, as is the way of such things, a space didn’t open for him until the lights were about to change back again – and enough space opened up that I could go across as well, ending up right behind him. So, ultimately, for the sake of getting exactly one car ahead, he blocked two lanes of traffic for a whole traffic light cycle.
Hmm. Maybe a diagram would explain things more clearly:
(click for full version)
What is even more disturbing is that the traffic turning left from Klipfontein onto Raapenberg (left lane of yellow cars in the diagram) get a green arrow when the light would otherwise be red for them. So, by pulling out into the opposite lane, Mr Merc could quite easily have hit an oncoming turning car; and if he had they would no doubt have crashed into me.
Aargh, blogspam!
July 16th, 2007Until last week I’ve been very lucky with this blog – I managed to avoid blogspam completely. But no longer. In the last few days I’ve had seven spam comments, all advertising either pr0n or medication. This isn’t exactly a flood, and since I’ve always had moderation on they haven’t been visible to the public. But nonetheless it’s irritating. I got all excited with the “you have n comments waiting for moderation” emails, so to discover it was spammers trying to sell things that were either illegal, morally dubious or just disgusting, was disappointing to say the least.
It hasn’t reached the point where I’m willing to put in the effort to implement more complex comment filtering systems, but if they keep up at the current rate I’ll probably have to.
CLUG in LinuxFormat!
July 5th, 2007This is actually quite old news, but I’ve only got around to blogging it now. CLUG, my local Linux Users Group, was featured as “Overseas LUG of the month” in Linux Format magazine’s May issue:
(click to expand)
Cape Town FM radio frequencies
July 1st, 2007My cellphone has a built-in FM radio; it has an interface where you type in the exact frequency to tune to. In Cape Town some radio stations can be broadcast on as many as eight different towers and eight different frequencies. Not all the stations publish the exact frequencies that they are transmitted on on each tower; instead they just give a frequency range. This is fine if you have a radio with an analog knob with which you can scan the range; but it’s quite irritating with one of the aforementioned cellphone radios.
To solve this problem, I have created a little website which allows you to look up radio stations and radio towers in the Cape Town area. It uses TurboGears (a Python web framework). Apart from serving a useful purpose, it also served as a project I could use to learn TurboGears.
Anyway, if you have any comments or if there are any errors in the data, please leave a reply here or send me an email.