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Monthly Archives: December 2005

Irrelevant musings…

While debugging an especially insidious slideshow jerkiness (which only manifests itself on a single type of Toshiba laptop, and only with the most recent JDS builds — i.e. prolly exposed by that particular combination of NVidia chip and Xorg nv driver), I found relief (and distraction) in reading one of ESR’s inspiring texts: The Tao of Unix Programming (Chapter 1 — Philosophy got me straightened out again).

Which in turn got me (somehow) looking for keithp’s article about X11 network performance, which in turn referenced xcap, which in turn pointed me to the thing that possibly goes wrong in the setup above: after every bitmap operation, OOo seems to scan the X11 queue for GraphicsExpose events, and generates paint events from that — even if there’s nothing that’s been exposed, or needs repaint. I guess that needs a change.

Some progress on multimonitor support for Impress slideshow

After quite some time & discussion, it appears that issue 12719 is finally getting somewhere (see the wiki-ized spec for even more details). David has started work on the VCL innards, to provide means to actually query and select a monitor to display a slideshow window.
Still, the hardest part (and the area where there’s the most to gain, productivity-wise) is the presenter view functionality in Impress (quickly navigating, previewing, even modifying slides) – any volunteers?

Sun on Sun on Sun…

Coherent with all the CoolThreads and Eco computing fuzz, this amazing pun occurred to me today: The Sun powers my Sun running Sun Solaris – cute, ain’t it? And even more so, as both that old box and the new T1000 will probably be content with the ~100 Watts my solar generator was producing today (yeah, t’was a rather darkish winter day here in Hamburg) – the Niagara chip is purported to sip only ~70 Watts.

Datalogger & non-Windows platforms

Had my datalogging facility from the solar step-up converter finished & connected today – unfortunately, the data aquisition software comes only for Windows. D’oh. But on the plus side of things is this: Fronius, the converter manufacturer, actually publish the protocol specs!

So, time for some low-level RS232 hacking! This has to work on my brave SparcStation10, being my home comms hub & usually up 24/7.

And on a related note: this is why I’m so in favor of Open Standards.

Solar generator connected to power grid – now!

After some delays (a few parts for my switching cabinet were missing, and took quite some time to order – I’m always surprised how fast things are ‘discontinued’ from manufacturing), we’re now online with my photovoltaic generator!

Notwithstanding low sun and part of the solar modules in shadow, the generator produced an impressing ~1000 watts today at noon. Admittedly, it was a bright, sunny winter day in Hamburg, though.

So, things are mostly done there, with basically only the data logging facility missing (for which I’m really longing for – as it offers oh so many ways to script and analyze data).