Archive for the 'Rants' Category

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ATI drivers suck

Published on December 9, 2006 in Rants. Closed

I am still trying to get the ATI drivers to work properly with my X1600 Mobility card.

And things are only getting worse.

I still cannot get the crt1 output to work, although the driver detects the VGA monitor connected to it. Enabling both lvds and crt1 doesn’t cut it. No, really, it doesn’t fucking work. No signal, no nothing.

But now I am getting segfaults every time I try to use a multimedia player, be it vlc or xine, even when explicitely using a good old x11 video output (ie, no XVideo), and the machine won’t resume anymore after a suspend to ram when fglrx is loaded.

Gee, instead of releasing such crappy drivers, can’t you just release the specs ?

Moreover they won’t accept bug reports from me because the machine is a laptop.

Morons.

{X,}Emacs and PHP : I’m tired.

Published on November 11, 2005 in Rants. Closed

I’m getting increasingly tired and frustrated by the inability of {X,}Emacs’ php-mode to properly indent a mixture of PHP and HTML.

Mixing HTML and code inline was, like, a feature of PHP. And the fucking mode can’t deal with it. Tired of that shit.

Found mmm-mode and HtmlDeluxeMode on the Emacs wiki. Sort of worked in XEmacs, but the cure is worse than the disease. Doesn’t work at all in Emacs. (on a Sarge system)

Still looking for a solution. At that point, using another editor is an acceptable solution, but it must not require X. If you’ve got any suggestions to share, do not hesitate to mail me. Vi vs. Emacs trolls don’t count ! :-)

DHL sucks

Published on May 8, 2005 in Rants. Closed

Well, it seems DHL can’t get its acts together worldwide, or at least DHL USA are fucking morons.

I have a tracking number for a package sent from the USA, but DHL France (and, from what I’ve been told, all of DHL except DHL USA) can’t use this tracking number; it’s an 11-digit number, and the rest of DHL in the world uses a 10-digit number. And no, the DHL website can’t give me the corresponding 10-digit number.

The DHL guy I talked to on the phone on Saturday got angry to me once I mentioned DHL USA, which really didn’t help.

Thanks DHL, but I’ll be going with UPS from now on.

Update (2005-05-09): The package will finally be delivered tomorrow. It turns out that the guy I spoke to on Saturday isn’t working for DHL, but for another company which handles the customer service on Saturday; so the above must be taken with care.

IBM/Hitachi HDD reliability … or lack thereof

Published on May 8, 2005 in Rants and Tech. Closed


May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: hde: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x20
May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: hde: DMA timeout retry
May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: PDC202XX: Primary channel reset.
May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: hde: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }

This is the second Hitachi HDD that breaks this year. The first one was a 6-month old 120 GB SATA drive, this one is a 2-year old 120 GB PATA drive.

Oddly enough, I have a couple of 60GXP and 75GXP drives that are still running fine with the updated firmware.

This drive should still be under warranty, but the Hitachi website tells me the warranty expired in Feb. 2004… given that the disk was manufactured on Dec. 2002 and that there’s a 3-year warranty, I’m going to phone them and get my RMA.

If only they could focus a little bit more on reliability instead of capacity … my 10-year old 342 MB IBM drive, my very first hard drive, is still running happily. That really doesn’t match the definition of evolution in my book :-(

Thanks to the Linux software RAID for keeping the server running.