The draft specification is available under a royalty-free license in accordance with an xHCI contributor agreement. This should help promote the success of the new standard, and we should be seeing USB 3.0 devices within a year or two.

Intel’s press release is available here.

Something Batman Begins had that The Dark Knight is missing is sufficient character development. I understand that the sheer number of action scenes in the movie makes it difficult to completely flesh out each major character, but I feel that the movie might not have needed so much action. As such, The Dark Knight presents a moment frozen in time. To have a thorough understanding of the story, one must have additional information and processing time. There were scenes in the movie that exposed the workings of human nature quite well, and I would have liked to see more.

The Dark Knight had huge ambitions; for a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie, I think it made the best of its tight time budget. Nonetheless, I felt the movie was worth watching, and the IMAX presentation does it justice; so instead of exposing its details, I’d recommend interested readers to watch the movie personally.

Get it while it’s hot! Packages are already available for various distributions such as Kubuntu.

The performance issues with NVidia’s proprietary driver still exist, however. Engineers at NVidia are aware of this problem, but they have not yet issued a fix.

KDE 4.1.1 is due on September 3rd, and KDE 4.2 will arrive at the end of January next year.

The commands required to checkout, patch, build, and install the driver are rather simple. I’m posting it here both as a note to myself and for public benefit.

First, we need to checkout the new driver from svn:

svn checkout http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/branches/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/ madwifi-hal
pushd madwifi-hal

Injection support is optional. It’s very simple to achieve with the Aircrack-ng patch, however:

wget http://patches.aircrack-ng.org/madwifi-ng-r3745.patch -O ../madwifi-ng.patch
patch -Np1 -i ../madwifi-ng.patch

Now the driver needs to be built. This requires that we have the kernel headers installed. On Ubuntu, it’s a simple matter of installing build-essential and linux-headers-generic (or whichever corresponds to the kernel in use). Then:

make clean
make

Before we install the new driver, it’s best if we stop the wireless device first and unload the current driver:

sudo ifconfig ath0 down
sudo ifconfig wifi0 down
sudo ./scripts/madwifi-unload

Now we can install the driver, which should start working without a reboot:

sudo make install
sudo depmod -ae
sudo modprobe ath_pci
popd

… and we’re done. The files can be removed now, but it’s best that they be kept — the driver will need to be rebuilt and reinstalled whenever a new kernel is installed, like so:

pushd madwifi-hal
make clean
make
sudo make install
sudo depmod -ae
sudo modprobe ath_pci
popd

I hope this guide was useful. For more information about this driver, please refer to this MadWifi support ticket. For more information about Aircrack-ng, please refer to its website.

Apparently, the BIOS had two sets of DSDT tables. The BIOS actively checked for the presence of a Linux kernel and fed it incorrect data, while giving functional data to Windows operating systems. TheAlmightyCthulhu subsequently patched his BIOS so that the correct DSDT was given to Linux systems, and the ACPI problems magically disappeared.

The problem and solution were reported to Foxconn, but the response was that “the motherboard only supported Windows Vista” and that it was ACPI-compliant. ACPI is not an OS-dependent standard, however, making Foxconn appear to be making fraudulent claims. Complaints against this issue have been filed at several organizations. Details of the situation have also appeared on Wikipedia.

More likely than not, this appears to be an issue with miscommunication. A representative of Foxconn has since posted on Ubuntu Forums (within 24 hours) promising a BIOS update within a week.

Originally, the script generated one thumbnail per image. The result loaded quite slowly, and the thumbnails appeared out of order in the browser. After I switched to using CSS sprites, the thumbnails loaded much faster and were displayed all at the same time. The first time an album is viewed, a strip of thumbnails is generated for it and cached. After that, the cached version is sent to the browser (there’s an option to regenerate the thumbnail should the album change). I was worried that clustering all the thumbnails into one long strip would be too much for PHP to handle, but it turned out to be pretty fast even for an album with a couple of hundred images.

During the project, I encountered Lytebox, an excellent lightbox implementation that does not depend on any of the bulky libraries the way the other implementations did. After minifying and gzipping, the script weighed in at only 5.7kb. I left the CSS alone for an additional 5.7kb, but it would have been about 1kb gzipped.

The disposable device is designed to be clipped to the wearer's thumbnail. Pressing the tip of the nail would activate a luminescent time display.

[via: CNET] [winners] [nail watch]

SQLite is a wonderful flatfile database system that’s just gaining exposure in the PHP-programming population. For moderately-sized databases, SQLite offers speed and performance gains over even MySQL. The native object-oriented interface is also very easy to use.

Because SQLite is a relatively new player in the PHP arena, there is currently a serious shortage of good administration tools targeting it. While MySQL has phpMyAdmin and a bunch of other tools, SQLite is left on the side.

phpLiterAdmin is a new opensource PHP-SQLite administration tool that shows great promise. Although its author currently has more experience with MySQL, he is a skilled PHP developer who is capable of undertaking substantial projects. This project’s on my watch-list.

Have a look at these smooth themes, and stop complaining that Firefox is too GTK-like:
[Oxygen] [Kde4 + Firefox3]