On my laptop (Pentium M, 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM) it takes exactly 68 seconds from the time I press Enter in the GDM login screen, until the GNOME desktop is completely loaded (the last applets appear and the disk activity stops). This is GNOME 2.16.1 from Ubuntu Edgy.

This is after a fresh reboot (so, nothing in disk cache, except for what Ubuntu's readahead loads). The startup process is not interfering (I waited until the disk activity stopped before I logged in).

What does GNOME load? A large wallpaper (2304x1280 -- I use dual-head), xcompmgr, Tomboy, Network Manager applet, a bunch of GNOME applets on three panels (netspeed, gweather, battery, sound volume, two clocks, window switcher, workspace switcher, two window lists, two system managers, CPU frequency, trashcan, 7 launchers). And the usual GNOME processes (nautilus, gnome-settings-daemon, etc.).

Still, 68 seconds is too much. I ought to figure out how to hook bootchart to this thing and start filing bugs.

My gift to everyone: customizable key controls in PySpaceWar.

Our server's gift to us:

From: mdadm monitoring 
To: root@...
Subject: Fail event on /dev/md2:...
Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2006 03:27:30 +0000 (GMT)

This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm
running on ...

A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md2.

Faithfully yours, etc.

Nice timing.

A coworker made me a USB power injector for my Nokia 770 (I'm useless with a soldering iron). Here it is in all its glory, next to the tiny USB keyboard I plan to use it with:

Five days later I discover that it doesn't work any more. Actually, it works, but the battery is dead. I left the battery connected to the voltage regulator, and that was enough to drain it.

Wikipedia says that carbon-zinc 9V batteries have a typical capacity of 400 mAh. ThoughtFix measured the circuit power readings at 4.62 mA with both USB ports disconnected. That's enough to drain a 400 mAh battery in 86 hours or 3.6 days. And here I thought it would last for months...

Time to buy a new battery. And this time I'll keep it disconnected when I'm not using it.

Ed Leafe asked me to change the licence of profilehooks.py (see this post for an introduction), so that he could include it with MIT-licenced Dabo. This was a perfect opportunity to release profilehooks.py version 1.0.

News: a @timecall decorator, an option to print results immediately, and the licencing change (GPL ➝ MIT).

After I upgraded to Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy), I went looking for eye candy again. My Thinkpad's lowly Radeon Mobility M6 is capable enough (with the open-source 'radeon' driver) to give me Compiz with its rotating cubes and wobbly windows, but only if I disable the blur plugin and give up dual-head support. I suppose 32 megs of video memory is not enough for Compiz on a 2304x1024 desktop.

I found xcompmgr instead. It doesn't use OpenGL for its somewhat-less-spectacular effects, but I get window shadows, truly translucent windows, and smooth redraws while dragging windows. And I can keep my dual-head setup.

xcompmgr has a few bugs and doesn't seem to be actively maintained, but I like it nevertheless. It is amazing how much more pleasant your desktop experience gets when you have window shadows.

Click on the image for a full-sized desktop screenshot (well, the left monitor).

I did need to edit my /etc/X11/xorg.conf to get it running reasonably fast: I added the following line to Section "Device":

  Option  "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"  "true"

Then I added xcompmgr -cC -t-5 -l-6 -r5 to my GNOME session (-cC to enable pretty shadows, the rest to make them somewhat smaller).

You can change the translucency of any window by running transset .6 and then clicking on the window. The opacity value goes from 0 (completely invisible) to 1 (fully opaque). Note that rounded window corners are not drawn correctly on translucent windows, that's one of the bugs I mentioned.