2006-11-15

You must be kidding me.. Part 1

from the manpage of diskseekd (1):
Several people have noticed that Linux has a bad tendency of killing floppy drives. These failures remained completely mysterious, until somebody noticed that they were due to huge layers of dust accumulating in the floppy drives. This cannot happen under Messy Dos, because this excuse for an operating system is so unstable that it crashes roughly every 20 minutes (actually less if you are running Windows). When rebooting, the BIOS seeks the drive, and by doing this, it shakes the dust out of the drive mechanism. diskseekd simulates this effect by seeking the drive periodically. If it is called as diskseek, the drive is seeked only once.

2006-11-02

Shooting Super-16mm On A Low Budget

Excellent intro to shooting on 16mm. Covers minimum costs for a short production.

2006-11-01

The linux-gate.so & VDSO story

If you ever wondered why linux-gate.so keeps appearing on your ldd

$ ldd /bin/ls 
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
librt.so.1 => /lib/tls/librt.so.1 (0xb7f39000)
libacl.so.1 => /lib/libacl.so.1 (0xb7f30000)
libselinux.so.1 => /lib/libselinux.so.1 (0xb7f1b000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0xb7de3000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7dd1000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f55000)
libattr.so.1 => /lib/libattr.so.1 (0xb7dcc000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/libdl.so.2 (0xb7dc8000)
libsepol.so.1 => /lib/libsepol.so.1 (0xb7d87000)

then this blogpost is for you. It also says a few things about Virtual Dynamic Shared Objects (vdso's) and the sysenter instruction found on modern x86 cpu's.