Technobabble

The rumors have finally come true - Google Talk , Google's IM service is here. Since it's based on Jabber XMPP , a variety of Jabber-capable IM clients can be used to connect to the network. Google has provided instructions on how to connect to their server using some clients . I did manage to connect to their server via Kopete version 0.10.3 which is the IM client that's part of KDE 3.4.2. Here are the step-by-step instructions for configuring Kopete to connect to the Google Talk network: Go to Settings | Configure Kopete . Click New to setup a new account. At Step One,choose the Jabber messaging service. At Step Two, in the Basic Setup tab, enter your GMail address (including the @gmail.com part) for Jabber ID . Optionally, check the Remember password checkbox and enter your password if you want Kopete to remember it via KWallet , the KDE Wallet Manager. In the Connection tab, make sure that the Use protocol encryption (SSL) checkbox is checked. Check t...

Here are the instructions to make a 128 MB USB flash drive from Edge Tech Corp work under Linux (using kernel 2.6.11.7): Compile and install the usb-storage module. This option is under "Device Drivers" -> "USB Support" -> "USB Mass Storage Support" in the kernel configuration options. Load the module using modprobe usb-storage . Look at /var/log/messages ; you should see messages like this: Jul 1 21:10:15 trinity Initializing USB Mass Storage driver... Jul 1 21:10:15 trinity usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage Jul 1 21:10:15 trinity USB Mass Storage support registered. Plug in the flash drive and look at the messages in /var/log/messages again. This will help you identify what SCSI device the flash drive was simulated as. Here are some sample message from the log: Jul 1 21:10:45 trinity usb 3-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4 Jul 1 21:10:45 trinity scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices J...

Here are a couple of ways to tweak the performance of a Gentoo Linux install: Prelinking : This improves load times of shared libraries. It is especially useful for application suites that use a large number of shared libraries like KDE. Using NPTL : The Native Posix Thread Library (NPTL) improves the performance of multi-threaded applications. The performance of Java based applications like Tomcat , Orion and Azureus have visibly improved with NPTL.

To access the Sony Ericsson T616 phone test mode, use the sequence > * < < * < * where < and > refer to joystick movements to the left and right respectively.

I have finally made the switch from XFree86 to X.org . On Gentoo I pretty much followed the instructions posted on the Gentoo forums . After setting up the font directories correctly i.e., switch from /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts to /usr/share/fonts , KDE was working as usual. There were two problems however: Direct Rendering was disabled on my ATI Radeon 7200 . For some reason all the Mozilla apps (Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) would crash as soon as they started rendering a page The first problem was unrelated to the X.org upgrade and was just something that I noticed now. It was easily solved by following this email thread . Essentially I had to make sure that the agpgart module was loaded before the radeon module. I have a VIA KLE133 AGP chipset and so in /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 , I have the modules specified in this order: agpgart via-agp radeon With this setup, dmesg should report detection of the AGP chipset first (e.g.: agpgart: Detected VIA KLE13...

At the annual Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lecture at the Stanford Physics department, this year's speaker was Professor Carl Weiman from the University of Colorado. Prof. Weiman was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 for his work on achieving and studying the Bose Einstein condensate - a condensate of atoms formed at temperatures of around 10 -7 Kelvin, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1924. Prof. Weiman's method for achieving the condensate at such low temperatures involves first slowing down Rubidium-85 atoms by bombarding them with lasers and then further cooling down the atoms using magnetic fields to form an envelope around the lowest energy atoms. Prof. Weiman was able to describe all this in simple physics and keep the hour long lecture very interesting. The Q&A session was also pretty enlightening, especially because of the insightful questions that some members of the audience came up with. There were other Nobel laureates among the audience inc...

This is the user agent reported by the T616 browser: SonyEricssonT616/R201 Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 UP.Link/5.1.2.9 .