Technology

While Touchpad and USB Mouse worked out of the box on my T61 running Ubuntu 8.04, I prefer the synaptics touchpad driver.  Installing it was a breeze, but it stopped my USB Mouse from working.

While there are a lot of fixes are on the internet, it took me a while to get it to work, mainly because my Kernel was too new.  Most fixes suggest to use the "AlwaysCore" Option in the "ServerLayout" section.  Eventually I found this link which suggests to use "SendCoreEvents" instead.  Now my xorg.conf looks like this:

Section "ServerLayout"
    ...
    InputDevice    "Touchpad0" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection
...
Section "InputDevice"
    ...
    Option         "SendCoreEvents" "true"
EndSection
...
Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier      "Touchpad0"
    Driver          "synaptics"
    Option          "CorePointer"
    Option          "SendCoreEvents" "true"
    ...
EndSection

Ich bin am umstrukturieren, daher sind in Moment ein paar Links kaputt. Das wird in den nächsten Tagen in Ordnung gebracht.

When I was in Japan, I loved the fact that there were QR-Codes all over the place - QR-Codes are two-dimensional bar codes that can be "scanned" (i.e. photographed) with any cell phone with camera. The camera would then decode the QR-Code and visit a URL, call a phone number, etc.

There are QR-Generators online, and the code shown here is for jastram.de. I found this on PDA Geek.

Are you worried about rogue content in Wikipedia?  Citizendium will try to be an alternative.  Or will it just be an elite Wikipedia...?

I was very close to dumping Ubuntu. This has so far been the best Desktop Linux distribution I ever worked with, and I really liked the ease of use. But one day, something broke. It didn't allow me to switch between keyboard layouts any more! As I often have to compose texts in German, this is a big deal, and quite a problem. I was exploring the various forums for months! I found quite a few people who had the same problem, but nobody with a solution that actually worked for me.

Time for checking out a new distribution - there has been a lot of noise about Ubuntu, so I gave it a try. So far I like it a lot - it is Gnome-based (vs. my KDE-based Suse 9.2 system), and Gnome definitely got much better! Many of my favorite tools (Gimp, Eclipse, Firefox) are Gnome-based, so I like the idea of running them in their native environment.

As I use the system on my IBM Thinkpad R52, I ran into the same problem I ran with Suse: The 1400x1050 screen could not be driven out of the box, and in order to fix this (as I already found out for Suse), I had to recompile X. Here are my notes on doing that.

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) pops up more and more often. Seems that Sun, after kicking its butt for not capitalizing more on Java, tries to respond better to SOA, as this Register Article explains.