Archives

Categories

Autism vs Asperger Syndrome

Diagnostic Changes for Autism Spectrum Disorders

Currently Asperger Syndrome (AS) is one of a group of conditions that are grouped into the category Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD).

The American Psychiatric Association plans to merge “Asperger’s Disorder” into “Autism Spectrum Disorder” [1] in version 5 of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Apparently a primary reason […]

How to Choose a Free Software Mission

Jane McGoningal gave an interesting TED talk about how Online Gaming can Make a Better World [1]. One of her points is that there is no unemployment in games such as World of Warcraft, there is always a “world saving” mission available to you which is just within reach of your skill level – and […]

Hacker Spaces

When in California last year I visited the NoiseBridge [1] Hackerspace. I was very impressed with what I saw, good equipment and very friendly people. The general concept of a “HackerSpace” is that it is an environment to support random creative projects. The first picture is a sign near the door which is clearly visible […]

Bose vs Bauhn/Aldi Noise Canceling Headphones

Overview

The German supermarket chain Aldi has been running in Australia for 8 years now [1]. Their standard practice for a long time has been to offer regular special deals on a few items of consumer electronics every week, my chocolate fridge is one thing I bought from Aldi [2].

Today Aldi have started […]

Links March 2010

Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave an exciting demonstration of new augmented reality mapping software from Microsoft that combines video (including live video) with static mapping data and pictures [1]. This is a significant advance over current mapping systems such as Google Earth – but it’s not released yet either. It will be interesting to see […]

Citing Wikipedia

A meme that has been going around is that you can’t cite Wikipedia.

You can’t Cite Wikipedia Academically

Now it’s well known and generally agreed that you can’t cite Wikipedia for a scientific paper or other serious academic work. This makes sense firstly because Wikipedia changes, both in the short term (including vandalism) and in […]

Xen and Debian/Squeeze

Ben Hutchings announced that the Debian kernel team are now building Xen flavoured kernels for Debian/Unstable [1]. Thanks to Max Attems and the rest of the kernel team for this and all their other great work! Thanks Ben for announcing it. The same release included OpenVZ, updated DRM, and the kernel mode part of Nouveau […]

Maintaining Screen Output

In my post about getting started with KVM I noted the fact that I had problems keeping screen output after the program exits [1].

The following snippet of shell code demonstrates the solution I’ve discovered for this problem. It determines whether SCREEN is the parent process of the shell script and if so it sleeps […]

Starting with KVM

I’ve just bought a new Thinkpad that has hardware virtualisation support and I’ve got KVM running.

HugePages

The Linux-KVM site has some information on using hugetlbfs to allow the use of 2MB pages for KVM [1]. I put “vm.nr_hugepages = 1024” in /etc/sysctl.conf to reserve 2G of RAM for KVM use. The web page notes […]

Thinkpad T61

I’ve now had my new Thinkpad T61 [1] for almost a month. The letters on the keyboard are not even starting to wear off which is unusual, either this Thinkpad is built with harder plastic than the older ones or I’m typing more softly.

Memory

The first thing I did after receiving it was […]