Present Perfect

Sometimes I get annoyed about a simple problem and want to fix it the right way and have it fixed forever. Right now is such a time.

Middle click stopped working. Not sure when - maybe on my last update or reboot ?

I know what's wrong - xev tells me that clicking that middle mouse button tells me it thinks it's button 6 when it should probably think it's button 3.

Now, in the Old Days you'd tweak xorg.conf and add a funky option.

In the New Days Xorg is trying to be all about not needing xorg.conf and I support that vision. But, what is now the proper way to fix these issues ?

a) is this a bug, and should some hal file provide enough info for this mouse type to do the remapping ?

b) can evdev be configured on the fly and/or permanently to fix this mapping ?

c) which part of the stack is getting it wrong ?

If it helps, this particular machine is on Fedora 12, and the mouse is a simple Dell mouse with two buttons, a scroll wheel (the 'third button') and two up/down buttons.

Sometimes I get annoyed about a simple problem and want to fix it the right way and have it fixed forever. Right now is such a time. Middle click stopped...

Six years ago, we did the first large scale Ogg Theora stream from the 2004 GUADEC conference.

It was a dime on its side to get things ready for this year. I purposely removed myself from the organization, because for various reasons I'm not going to GUADEC this year, but I was hoping the rest of the company would do their part to get this working, and I just provided the necessary prodding along the way. I've been told one of the organisers in charge of this got ill at some point and communication went a bit south during that period, so I had some complaints from our support guys that they had to do last-minute rushing.

But the streams are live today, and a few developers here are giddily running around looking at the stream, the image, working on some typical bugs you get when you're doing stuff like this for the first time (the artifacts on keyframes the encoder seems to have remind me a lot of the Theora bugs we had to squash back in the day, and obviously they are worse on still images, like, say, an empty conference room...)

Go check out the stream and make sure you have a WebM-enabled browser, like the Firefox 4.0 beta or latest Opera.

Congratulations to our intrepid hackers like Zaheer and Andoni for their hard work a few weeks ago on WebM, and I've been told Marc-André actually went to Holland just to deliver the encoders :)

Six years ago, we did the first large scale Ogg Theora stream from the 2004 GUADEC conference. It was a dime on its side to get things ready for this...

Dear intarweb,

I've been searching all over for data on what these fancy Dell R815 servers (which can house 4 12-core Opteron CPU's for a total of 48 cores in 2U) draw in terms of power.

This handy capacity planner from Dell doesn't have this machine listed yet.

Anyone out there know where I can find this info, or have one of these babies actually running ?

Dear intarweb, I've been searching all over for data on what these fancy Dell R815 servers (which can house 4 12-core Opteron CPU's for a total of 48 cores in...

For work, I'm re-reviewing servers and systems with the simple-but-not-easy goal of lowering the basic monthly cost per core. The world of racks, servers, CPU's and cores is a more complicated place than it was a few years ago, since in a few U's you can put anything from a bunch of small cheap servers up to monster boards with four CPU sockets and 12 core CPU's for a total of 48 CPU's in a 2U space. And a look at a Blade system still makes me drool, although I'm still not sure in what case a Blade really makes sense.

In any case, I tried to do a little comparison (which is hard, because you end up comparing apples and oranges) using Dell's online configurator.

On the one hand, filling racks with Poweredge R810, 4 x 8 core 1.86 GHz, Intel XeonL7555 machines, gets the price down 26 euro per core per month. Doing the same with Opterons, which surely aren't as powerful as the Intel ones, I can get a Poweredge R815, 48 cores quad Opteron 2.2 GHz, 6174, for 48 cores total, at 9.53 euro per core per month.

And then I thought a Blade would be an even better deal, but it turns out that it isn't really. The cost per core, with similar CPU's, really did come out pretty much the same as the R810 based solution. Probably not that surprising in the end since if you fill a machine with cores, the CPU cost will start dominating. But somehow I thought that Blades would end up being cheaper for maximum core power.

Maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way ? If the main concern is cost per core in a datacenter, how would you go about selecting systems ?

For work, I'm re-reviewing servers and systems with the simple-but-not-easy goal of lowering the basic monthly cost per core. The world of racks, servers, CPU's and cores is a more...

A bunch of good things happened to me recently, in quick succession. Today was particularly satisfying, so a quick list lest I forget that I am born lucky.

• I spent the past weekend in Amsterdam, Groningen, Midwolda, and Amsterdam, for Sofie and Mariette's wedding. A great time was had by all, and groups of friends mixed into one for a weekend of celebration. Life can be beautiful sometimes.
• The first night in Amsterdam I went to a milonga all by myself for the first time and finally got round to asking complete strangers to dance. Win.
• The last day in Amsterdam I spent with Africa and Alex, and among other things we had a great Kobe steak that really is worth the extra price - it melts like butter in your mouth.
• Last night out of the blue one of my uncles called because he had heard 'the news' and wanted to check in on me and see how I was doing. I'm guessing he was surprised I was doing pretty much fine considering, but it was a good feeling to know someone out there in my family cares enough to call. It made the distance that much shorter for a little while.
• Also last night, I familiarized myself with one of work's projects that needed a patch which I'd been asking to be made since Thursday because of a customer problem (which ran like a red thread, sadly, throughout the wedding weekend). I spent five hours trying to get a first unit test written and running into that project (there were none before), then ten minutes patching the code and writing the code to show that my patch works. Today, that patch got deployed and attacked with six different use cases, and it all held up. This is on code I've never seen before, so win.
• Today, I exchanged a work favour for a home favour with Fernando, and he immediately agreed to come home with me and help me set up the big IKEA closet. On the way we stopped at Angel's to pick up these double bench chairs I've been dreaming about getting ever since he showed them to me:

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  We took them home on our heads, and I cleaned them. They need some more cleaning, but I love them already. I got these specifically because someone old and wise recently pointed out to me that Barcelona has individual benches, and she was sad and angry at that little fact. So these twin seat benches are a raised fist against Barcelona's soltero benches.

• And, as usual, Angel didn't let us go without at least a full glass of wine, and a bag with a huge chunk of tortillas and some freshly cooked gambas. Thank God for people with a passion for what they do.
• After helping me put the closet together (we made it half way through, this particular IKEA set needs a power drill and a saw to put together!), Fernando took me to the Diseny Hub Barcelona because a good friend of him works there. Turns out they have a MakerBot there, he's printing parts for a RepRap, and he's willing to print my parts. So after being sidelined in my attempts to get one in Belgium, it turns out I will now be able to make one just ten minutes from my current living place!

  Also, the place seems awesome, has real industrial 3D printers and etchers and 3D scanners, offers workshops, and it looks like people can actually come in and use things. I have a feeling I'm going to be dropping by there...

It's a big enough list of things to be cheerful about in a really short time, and I've left out some less practical more private things, so summer is looking good so far...

A bunch of good things happened to me recently, in quick succession. Today was particularly satisfying, so a quick list lest I forget that I am born lucky. I spent...