A sample text widget

Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.

Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan. Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem, suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.

Using GMail to access websites (aka Federation)

As of right now, you can use your Google, Facebook, and Yahoo accounts (or any other OpenID provider account) to post comments on ianbmacdonald.com.   Most people will actually prefer using their day-to-day Google or Facebook credentials as it no longer requires remembering a new password, entering an email address or clicking on an [...]

Share

Avatar powered by Debian based Linux

A few nights ago I watched Avatar for the second time in 3-D, in an effort to qualify the difference between regular 3D and IMAX 3D. The difference was astounding, both in the picture quality due to the 10x resolution jump IMAX frames provide, the super-sound and the fact that many scenes seemed to [...]

Share

AMD-V issue using Virtualbox 3.1.x on Ubuntu Karmic

It seems that Virtualbox 3.1.x now implements a quick check to see if the hardware virtualization extensions are in use before launching AMD-V enabled guests. There seem to be two key issues with this change

Buggy BIOS’s that do not clear a VERR_SVM_IN_USE flag properly on boot KVM modules that set the VERR_SVM_IN_USE flag [...]

Share

Debian Based Cloud Computing

After mucking about with various combinations of grub2, xen and eucalyptus on Ubuntu Karmic and eventually Debian Squeeze I now have a working cloud computing sandbox using binaries entirely from debian packages.

The final configuration is a Debian Squeeze instance on my HP dv7z laptop running standard grub2, xen and eucalyptus packages. The kernel [...]

Share

HP Laptop Accelerometer

For some time now I have observed the Ubuntu dmesg line [ 10.799981] input: ST LIS3LV02DL Accelerometer as /devices/platform/lis3lv02d/input/input8 and wondered if this was (a) a properly recognized piece of hardware, (b) a feature of my laptop or my Seagate STxxxxxxxx hard disk and (c) what applications might take advantage of it, assuming I [...]

Share