iSOblog

this weekend i was at the skiweekend of PMI AG in Laax. the weather wasn’t too bad and i really enjoyed snowboarding.

simon and me took some pictures (sadly only using our mobile phones, as you will notice by the quality of the images). you may find them in my gallery.

woah, I believe I could stay in bed forever during the week

i just managed to get compiz to work with my ati radeon x600 chip used in my notebook. nothing new, you think, but it works without having to use the proprietary fglrx driver that breaks suspend to ram in the newest version of ubuntu.

it seems to be possible for a while, but i didn’t know that it works that nice. to make it short, this is the way to achieve it (assuming you had compiz running with fglrx):

1. remove fglrx and _reinstall libgl1-mesa-dri_, as it seems to get overwritten by the fglrx installer/deb
2. change your xorg.conf to use radeon or ati driver instead of fglrx
3. after you restarted you X server (ctrl-alt-backspace if you need it immediately), don’t run compiz yet!
4. edit your /usr/bin/compiz and comment out the line that blacklists the ati x600 chip (look at the comments inside of the file)
5. run compiz

this way seems to work quite nice, i believe the performance is a little bit worse than using fglrx, however, you save memory because you don’t need Xgl, and it’s better as it uses the opengl extension GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap instead of a software.

more information: http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/122754/?highlight=composite+extension+available and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

i got some results for the last semester in school and for the first certificate test i did in december

click on the pictures to get them in full size

once again, the 4 digit number on the calendar has incremented. i wish everyone a happy new year 2008!

today I want to post about something less specific, but way more important (not that my other posts would be meaningless, but they are sometimes really specific) than I usually do; it’s the energy consumption of all the devices around us that we use often.
my topic in this context has of course something to do with computers, but I also want to write about other important aspects that allow us to save some power ant take care of our environment.

about computer energy consumption
like a lot of technical equipment, computers need way more energy nowadays than they did let’s say 5 years ago. why has this to be this way? cpu’s today need around twice the power they did then. you can see this on this power dissipation page on wikipedia. let’s compare an intel core 2 duo e6600 (which is the cpu i’m using in my pc right now) and a pentium III with 1.266ghz. the energy-consumption raised by factor 2.
“but a core 2 duo is way faster than a pentium III” you may think. that’s true of course, but when we compare a pentium 4 with a core 2 duo, we can see that more performance can be done and still power can be saved.
what is way more extreme than the raising power-hunger of CPUs is the consumption of graphics cards. while graphics cards which were high-end 3 years ago did only need the power they got via agp they now have two extra pci-express-power-connectors and they dissipate around 100 watts in idle because the chip has a huge amount of transistors built into it. this xbit-article lists the consumption of of geforce 7 and radeon x1900 chips. here’s a newer article by tomshardware about this topic. as we can see, the newest cards need way more power than the ones in the xbit-article.
the question is: do we really need the newest hardcore gaming hardware, and maybe if we do, can’t we use another machine for the easier jobs like web browsing, receiving e-mail and so on?
I do it like that, my gaming machine (core 2 duo e6600, geforce 8800gts) is only used for gaming and video transcoding and so on. chatting, surfing and things like this are done on my notebook, which uses around 24 watts when I do the usual stuff.

about cars and public transport
with cars it’s not much different than with computers, except that a car needs way more power, so the effect on the environment is stronger. also, the energy a car uses is mostly (talking about gas and fuel) more “dirty” than the power the computers use. however the evolution of cars isn’t that different from the ones of computers (in the aspect of power consumption, of course).
nowadays we can build an engine with a given power way more energy-efficient than in the past. but is this done? no. people do rather want bigger cars, like tanks that need way more fuel and pollute the air stronger.
and what’s even worse: they don’t even care. that’s where politic fails today. cars that are unnecessary big and heavy need to be more expensive. it would probably be the best to raise the costs of fuel and put this money into environment protection, as it is intended with the co2 fee (german). this way it would be possible to charge the ones who are responsive for the CO2 production and not anybody or people who do already take care of this. and it would also motivate people to use means of transport that are less destructive for the nature.
another point where we see that political influence in environment protection isn’t strong enough is the following: 1.3 million trucks drive trough switzerland each year (german), most of them trough the gotthard tunnel. why? because it is cheaper than the transport on rails. but it needs way more oil and energy to drive a truck trough switzerland than to drive a train the same route. as we can see, oil-related goods are still not expensive enough.

about blogactionday
even if I wanted to write about the problem with our environment for a long time, I always forgot about it or didn’t take the time to do so. now there’s a really nice project (my girlfriend told me about) called the Blog Action Day that encourages bloggers to write about the environment on a given date. I think it is a really nice idea, and so I participated.

a friend from school told me about the application BlueProximity. it’s a small utility that locks your screen when you walk away from your computer and unlocks it when you return.
it measures the distance of a bluetooth device (for example your mobile phone) to do so.
a really nice idea i think!

i found a website for swiss people who are interested to see where they politically stand;
smartvote.ch
there you have to answer questions which were also asked to the politicians. in the end your answers are compared to the politician’s and you can see who fits your opinion the most.