At some point in the past I read a plot summary for Moon and it immediately tickled my fancy. I added it to our Netflix queue and promptly forgot about it until Nigel was raving about it at work on Friday.

I watched the trailer and was immediately sold on it.

I caught it today with Matt. Absolutely fantastic. I don't want to try and describe it very much because I'll just give too much away. A definite must see if you like Sci Fi of the Kubrick variety. I have no idea why this film is having such a limited release.

Courtesy of a wonky prerm script in a package I'm working on, I just learned that when you dpkg-reconfigure a package, it runs more than just the package's config script. I guess subconsciously, I'd always expected it to run the postinst again as well, but I did not realise the prerm script was also run.

So having now peeked at the innards of dpkg-reconfigure, it runs the prerm with upgrade version, the config with reconfigure version and the postinst with configure version, in that order.

I'm very excited that Debian is dabbling with GeoDNS.

I look forward to the day when one can point at their sources.list at ftp.debian.org (or the generic equivalent) regardless of their location and get a fast local mirror. One less question to answer when installing Debian.

I bought a HDHomeRun at some point in the past. It works ridiculously well with MythTV and helps add to the distributed network that is our home.

Recently, the power supply seemed to give up the ghost. The little red light on it was flickering on and off, and the unit became unresponsive. On the weekend, I finally got around to filing a ticket with SiliconDust to enquire if I could purchase a replacement, because I figured the entire unit was out of warranty by now (I said as much in the ticket).

To my surprise, I received a reply telling me that based on my device ID, I had a known-bad power supply, and I was directed to fill out an online form to get a replacement one shipped to me at no cost to me.

Nicely handled, even if the website was littered with spelling mistakes.

My new laptop that I ordered a while ago finally arrived on Tuesday.

I wasted no time excising Windows Vista Basic that came with it and installed Debian 5.0 (Lenny)

The installation went fine, and the laptop is running well.

I'm running the 2.6.29 kernel from backports.org, because without it the WiFi doesn't work. The in-kernel HDAPS support doesn't seem to work with this kernel, and I'm having some problems building the tp-smapi kernel module, which I haven't looked into too much yet. The fingerprint reader is currently unsupported, so no biometric shenanigans just yet.

The biggest annoyance is that I didn't actually compare the resolution of the display with the resolution of my old laptop (the D610). The display is only 900 pixels high, compared with 1050, so I can't get a 2 x 2 tiling of Gnome Terminal windows at the default font size, which is somewhat irritating, as that's how I'm used to working. Maybe the solution is to start using more virtual desktops. Or use Alt+Tab more. I'm pretty sure the X301 had the same display resolution, so I'm feeling somewhat vindicated in my decision to not spend twice as much money on the X301, as that would have just made me even more annoyed with myself.

The default minimalist X.org configuration file was having X default to using the VESA driver instead of the Intel one. This was producing only a 16-bit colour depth, and resuming from suspending to RAM wouldn't turn the backlight back on. It took me a few days to figure out that the VESA driver was in use, and as soon as I swapped to the Intel driver, the backlight problems went away as well, so that was a win. I haven't bothered to try and get Compiz working yet.

Aside from that, everything's working well. The camera worked out of the box. It resumes from being suspended to RAM ridiculously quickly. The hard drive is super quiet. I've nearly finished moving out of the D610. Oh, and most importantly, it runs so much cooler than the D610.

Because this laptop is now the gruntiest machine in the house, I'm going to stop doing all my package builds on caesar and do them on this laptop instead, so I've set up pbuilder and schroot and whatnot. The CPU has the VMX extensions, so I can have a play with KVM as well.

I've always prided myself in the fact that I didn't have any fillings. That's about to change, sadly.

One of the teeth at the back, top right of my mouth has a deep valley, which makes it hard to get at with a toothbrush, and there's a small cavity at the bottom of that.

Dentist trips for me have always just involved the cleaning and scaling and an exam. Aside from having my wisdom teeth out (which I had done under general anaesthesia) I've never had a dental procedure before. Eeek.

I've had a few enquiries from my blog post about trying to control dumb USB-powered lights.

I thought I'd just write something up to save myself replying to any more emails.

Yes, it's doable. Finding a USB hub that will do it is another story. From my own research, I found someone else who was doing something with USB-powered devices (I can't remember what now), and he had been using a what is now a Linksys ProConnect USB 4-Port Hub USB 2.0

I'd first tried a couple of random cheap hubs from Fry's with no success (fortunately I was able to return them) before I determined that the Linksys one would definitely work. The downside of the Linksys hub is it requires external power. It was also one of the more expensive USB hubs on the market.

One of my co-workers, who is an Electrical Engineer by education, said that the USB spec requires the functionality that I wanted, but most chip manufacturers had cut a corner in the interests of cost saving. The Linksys hub uses an NEC chipset. Every other hub that I could get my hands on had a Genesys Logic chipset, and did not work. You can tell if you've got a winner by the output of lsusb -v. If the hub characteristics include "Per-port power switching", you're in business.

To do the actual port powering on and off, I'm using a setuid-root hub-ctrl, wrapped with a small shell script, which has the USB ID of the hub and the port number the lights are plugged into hard-coded in it.

In my searching, I found also that it may be possible to do with Python, but I did not invest the time trying to find out.