OK the mystery of the narcoleptic PowerBook has been solved. I searched high and low and I've tried every suggestion that I found to no avail. Finally I broke down and opened the PowerBook up to tinker around inside I noticed that the sleeping issue often happened when I applied some pressure on the right side of the keyboard, like right below the power button. This is the area that I'm talking about:



And a slightly closer pic:



This is one of the two ambient light sensors that is supposed to automatically adjust the backlit keyboard and screen brightness depending on the ambient light. Oh yeah, it also causes the laptop to spontaneously go to sleep at the absolute worst time. :-/



The sensor has these high density pins on the bottom:



I still don't know if it's just a defective sensor, or if it's losing its connection to the logic board sometimes and causing the system to freak out. All I know is my backlit keys stopped working a long time ago and I don't really miss it, and I like to max out my screen brightness so this sensor is now sitting on my desk at work until further notice. So far, removing it seems to have fixed the problem. The other thing I noticed that's changed is the strobing led on the lid button is now functioning again. I didn't even notice that it wasn't working before, but now when I close the lid and put the PowerBook to sleep the led strobes like it should be.

I've seen lots of posts on the Internet describing the same symptoms I have, but I have yet to read someone suggesting the ambient light sensor was the cause. I hope my case was not unique, and this can help someone else out there.

So this week I rolled out our YAM repository. This hosts all the .iso files for the different Linux distributions we use (currently I only have RHEL 4 i386 and EM64T versions) and it also logs into Red Hat Network and is able to download all the updated packages automatically (via cron). You can view the packages as files in Apache which is sort of ok if you already know what packages you're looking for.

I found repoview and saw that it took package browsing to another level. Repoview uses createrepo's XML-based metadata files generated from the RPM packages themselves. With repoview you can get more descriptive details on the packages and also view a partial changelog. I think the coolest feature repoview has is the ability to generate RSS feeds so if you point your RSS client at it you can keep track of all the new packages that get added to the repository.

I was watching Attack of the Show and they had Tom Green come on and plug his blog site. I watched 3-4 video blogs and was kind of disappointed. I mean, it's cool that he's doing this for himself, and it sounds like he's genuinely interested in communicating with his fans...but the content was rather boring. Maybe I just didn't watch the right ones. I'll check out a few more since I kind of enjoy Tom Green's comedy style...might as well give it a chance.

So today I decided to install AdvanceMAME on my PowerBook G4 running OS X Tiger. I downloaded the source from the AdvanceMAME site, then typed ./configure and waited for my first barf...which happened about 45 seconds later. It couldn't find the sdl libraries so I typed sudo port install libsdl and after the libraries were installed I tried the configure script again. This time it went through all the way. Then I typed make and after 20 minutes discovered that this was going to take awhile so I went to watch 24. I came back an hour later and it was done. I received a whole bunch o' ROMs from my friend Rom (no kidding) but to my disappointment I couldn't get the half dozen that I tried to work in Advance MAME. He included the emulators along with the ROMs so I guess they are written in a different format. I had to play them on my XP box instead. Oh well...time to find some ROMs that will play I s'pose.

So a few days ago my Treo 700W stopped ringing when I received phone calls. I thought I looked everywhere, and did everything that seemed logical, but the problem ended up being the side buttons. I found a post on TreoCentral.com that mentioned turning the volume all the way down using the side button, then all the way up might fix the problem. Sure enough, that done did it.

OK, just a quick post to say the PMU reset didn't work. I tried a few other things that people have suggested, to no avail. The laptop still sleeps randomly and loves to cycle (sleep-wake-sleep-wake-nevermore-nevermore)...so I'm taking it to the professionals tomorrow. I'll post back results.

Sometime this week my G4 PowerBook started acting up. It would go to sleep spontaneously, and sometimes when I "woke" it up it would go right back to sleep. It started happening around the same time I applied an OS X update, so I feared that that was the culprit. Then a co-worker sent me this Apple article which describes how to reset the Power Management Unit (PMU). It was such an easy procedure that I immediately gave it a try even though I was in the middle of several things...these narcoleptic episodes were hurting my productivity. So I powered down, removed the battery, held down the power button for 5 seconds (mississippicized of course) then I popped the battery back in and booted up. That was about 7 hours ago and so far so good.

So today I discovered that Red Hat Linux (at least RHEL 4) includes the online ext2 resize support feature in the kernel. This is probably really old news, but it's news to me. This is incredibly useful (as long as it's safe, which I'm sure it is if Red Hat is including it by default). We've been using reiserfs on all our boxes that have LVM configured since support for online resizes for ext2 filesystems seemed like it involved more work than necessary. The syntax is similar to resize_reiserfs too.

ext2online -v /dev/VG01/LV01

This will extend the filesystem to fill the partition (by default, but you can specify a size if you wanted). I tested it out and it appears to handle large resizing just as easily as smaller resizing. I ran a dd command to write blocks to the partition while it was resizing and it had absolutely no visible difference. I'm stoked!

ThermalTake MiniFridge Mod

"So with all the focus on making a cold computer case, I decided to make a case into a drink dispensing refrigerator just in honor of the hard core overclockers." Via Makezine.

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Tonight I watched King Kong (2005) for the first time. Don't laugh. I don't really go out to the movie theaters a lot. It's expensive, most of the movies aren't worth $10, and I usually end up sitting in front of the seat-kicker twins. I built a home theater to enjoy a movie in a controlled environment...but this is one of those movies that I really wish I had seen on the silver screen.

In true Peter Jackson fashion, the computer-enhanced special effects were breathtaking. Breathtaking is actually understating it. My heart was pounding from beginning to end. It was a three hour roller coaster ride that was a bit reminiscent of Jurassic Park, but kept with the original screenplay most of the way. The biggest thing that set this movie apart from Jurassic Park was that the actors were believable. You actually cared about most of them. If you were a sap like me and missed this movie when it came out, go get the DVD now...you won't regret it.