Bank holiday ponderings

In the French-dubbed version of Tomorrow Never Dies, the on-board computer in James Bond's BMW speaks with a German accent.

I'm sure that there's some fundamental truth about European politics there, but it escapes me.

Recent CDs (2)

• Explosions in the Sky's All of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
• Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain
• Blonde Redhead's 23
• The Young Knives' Voices of Animals & Men
• My Brightest Diamond's Bring me the workhorse
• Ratatat's Classics

I had high expectations for the new Blonde Redhead album (not just because of its name) and I'm somewhat disappointed especially in comparison to their previous album Misery is a Butterfly...

Snap popups considered stupid

Funny statistic: 100% of the web users I polled hate Snap popups with a vengeance. (You can turn them off via a cookie.)

How to create Xinerama-friendly desktop backgrounds

I recently started using a new machine with two 20" flat panels used as one giant desktop with Xinerama. It's very nice and comfortable, but X isn't yet smart enough to manage the backgrounds of the two screens separately, and wants one image stretched across the whole desktop.

So here's how to turn two 1680x1050 images such as these into one 3360x1050 image with ImageMagick:

$ montage -size 3360x1050 -geometry +0+0 left-image.jpg right-image.jpg result.jpg

It's much easier than assembling the images manually in The Gimp.

Recent movies (3)

• The Fountain: 5/5. Powerful. Heart-breaking. Ethereal. Mystical. Above all, beautiful.
• The Prestige: 2/5. Somewhat predictable, not earth-shattering.

emacs-snapshot: now with amd64

Just a quick note: amd64 binary packages of emacs-snapshot are now available on emacs.orebokech.com.

(In related news, it seems that emacs22 packages have been uploaded to experimental so I'll move emacs-snapshot back to the trunk soon.)

Blog spam: still waiting for it

More than two months have passed since I created this blog on Blogger and I haven't had a single spam comment. Yay.

Hard drive shock resistance specs

The label on one of my new hard drives says the following:

Caution. Product warranty is void if any seal or label is removed, or if the drive experiences shock in excess of 350 Gs.

This piqued my curiosity, so I checked the specifications (extra click needed because of Javascript) and it turns out that the drive supports "nonoperative shocks" up to 300 Gs.

Does anybody know how that translates into real-world measures? In my experience, hard drives are pretty fragile even when they're powered down...

Non

(via rion)

Xen security (or lack thereof)

Interesting paper by Tavis Ormandy (of Gentoo/Google fame) about the security of various virtualization products; one of the conclusions is that Xen is secure as long as hardware virtualization is not used: Xen's HVM mode uses a QEMU-based emulator to provide emulated devices, and is thus probably vulnerable to QEMU's many security flaws... To make matters worse, this emulator (xen-ioemu) runs in dom0 with ring0 privileges.

I don't use Xen's HVM mode even on hardware that supports it but if I did, I'd be migrating my domains away from it right now. And since QEMU is used in quite a few similar products (KVM, anyone?), this is probably just the start of a long series of headaches.

Emacs guided tour

Phil Sung's A guided tour of Emacs is now up on the Emacs homepage at gnu.org. It's a nice introduction to the many faces of Emacs and it also shows off several new features in Emacs 22.

By the way, if you were wondering why emacs-snapshot isn't being updated in sid anymore, it's because it's now maintained outside Debian; I asked for its removal from the archive a while ago.