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.