Matt's Blog

So my diminutive Acer Aspire One is now running Ubuntu Netbook Edition and seems to like it, although the initial two tries at installing it failed utterly. The second failure was the worst as the system seems to have gotten stuck in a swap storm. It had been installed but was running very slowly, and then had to rush off elsewhere --- on returning a couple of hours later it was writing to the SSD like mad and completely unresponsive. Only a magic SysRq key could give me my system back so I rebooted and only then remembered I had left it doing a software update --- oops, no kernel! How can an installer only a few days old be so out of date?

I had reused some existing partitions in the installer, but not their contents, so I have no idea what the difference was between the final successful install and the disaster immediately before it. Indeed, I expected the final install to be as bad as the others --- I can't remember what I hoped to achieve. Surprisingly the third time worked like a charm. Very odd.

Beforing putting debian on an Acer Aspire 1690 that I inherited, I decided to reflash the BIOS to the latest version (the new one dates March 1st 2006 --- whippee!) figuring that would give me the best chance of success in putting this thing to sleep and having it wake up again. I have never had a great deal of luck doing this but one can only hope.

To reflash the BIOS I downloaded a windows bios flash programme from the Acer web site that came with a whole raft of dire warnings but I plunged ahead anyhow. The reflash itself went painlessly complete with a back-up of the old BIOS and a compatibility check so I was reasonably happy that I wouldn't brick my computer but I hadn't reckoned on Windows freexing up solid not letting me shut down the machine. It was working as anice room heater and nightlight but little else. I started to sweat a little when holding down the power button did nothing at all --- this is a BIOS override of the OS and it wasn't doing anything at all!

So I downloaded the patches to get to 2.6.32.3 from my 2.6.31 set-up and ran make oldconfig --- it gave me the option to run devtmpfs and mount it on /dev before starting /sbin/init. Why not. So a short compile later and a reboot and debian lenny likes devtmpfs. Nice to know.

Woo Hoo. Happy days are here again.

Eat cake = Have cake

So this is just another post to see if I tickle the planet enough it will delete my old post. It is well past its prime.

It appears the only way to delete a planet post is to overwrite the original with a new post in its stead. I wrote a silly little thing to be up for a day, and expected it to disappear from the planet when I nuked the original post. But the planet doesn't work that way and preserves the old stuff in perpetuity unless you edit the original and push it out in your feed. OK. I know now. Don't post silly ephemeral posts as they will soon look ridiculous.

Yup, it installed easily and seems to work quite well. Supports the Aspire One hardware directly without configuration which is very nice, The moblin web browser isn't ready for use yet but firefox was easily installed through the moblin garage and it runs well (though it calls itself Shiretoko?). It is nice to finally be using an up to date browser on my AA1.

I haven't figured out the keyboard shortcuts yet, so I am mousing (or rather trackpadding) more than is comfortable.

So I sent in my email in response to the government's copyright consultation which in essence said please don't do anything!

Here is a very simple python function that requires no libraries, implements some of the deepest python magic and is still remarkably easy to understand:

def memoize_property(f):
    """A lightweight decorator that combines @property and memoization"""
    assert f.__name__
    class Memoize(object):
        # This class implements the non-data descriptor protocol
        # The computed value is memoized to the object instance thus
        # overriding the __get__ method on subsequent accesses
        def __get__(descriptor,instance,owner):
            value = f(instance)
            setattr(instance,f.__name__,value)
            return value
    return Memoize()

It was designed to be used a decorator anywhere you might find yourself creating recursive defintiions: