Peter's blog

The datasheet of Toshiba R830-10P mentions that the maximum memory capacity is 8GB. See it  here . But Intel says that the i7-2620M supports up to 16GB of RAM. See it here . I have asked for help on Toshiba Forums. Nothing useful from there. See it here . I was curious as I have a very particular need for 16GB of RAM. Today I decided to give it a try. I bought two Patriot PSD38G13332S (8GB PC3 - 10600 1333MHz CL9 SoDimm) and installed it on the notebook. It just worked. So if you have the need for 16GB of RAM and a similar notebook from Toshiba, you can install 16GB of RAM.

Coccinellery is a gallery of semantic patches made to inspire users of Coccinelle. Currently the semantic patches comes from patches we have submitted to the Linux Kernel. We are working on improving Coccinellery and your suggestions and contributions are welcome. http://coccinellery.org/ "Coccinelle is a program matching and transformation engine which provides the language SmPL (Semantic Patch Language) for specifying desired matches and transformations in C code. Coccinelle was initially targeted towards performing collateral evolutions in Linux. Such evolutions comprise the changes that are needed in client code in response to evolutions in library APIs, and may include modifications such as renaming a function, adding a function argument whose value is somehow context-dependent, and reorganizing a data structure. Beyond collateral evolutions, Coccinelle is successfully used (by us and others) for finding and fixing bugs in systems code." From: http://coc...

Fly by wire  is a book written by William Langewiesche that has, as a central history, the successful landing of Airbus A320 on the Hudson river on January 15 2009 . But this is only the central history of the book. The author has a very funny way of writing, and shares details about many people involved, like bird strikes specialists, air traffic controllers, Airbus engineers and test pilots. There is a very interesting analysis about impact of Airbus fly by wire system and how turbulent, and boring, can be the career of commercial pilots. If you are considering becoming a pilot, read this book first. It can direct you to the right kind of pilot, or convince you that there are better ways of living.

I'm on France and decided to give Free Mobile a try. They offer good pack of service for € 20 / month. See:  http://mobile.free.fr/ One important feature for me is having Internet at home, and the "Accès FreeWiFi illimité", or unlimited access to FreeWifi was what I was expecting to use at home. The problem is that I bought my cell phone in Brazil and it was not working with FreeWifi. This is related to how the connection works. See the links: http://code.google.com/p/seek-for-android/wiki/EapSimAka http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1639437 http://www.freenews.fr/spip.php?article12150 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmQ-TvlJlw9-dHQtQjdCUFVWSnY5T2xMeXBvRGx1Z1E But you may not need to do anything by hand on your phone. Just try FreeWifiConfig app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.bubuabu.freewificonfig It will automatically configure your phone for connecting on FreeWifi_secure. BUT: 1 - Requires Free Mo...

Today Amazon sent the Winter of the World by Ken Follett to my Kindle! I think I'll not sleep for some nights. :-D

Both Kingston and SanDisk 16GB pendrive has the same price range. I was curious for comparing them. The overall performance is poor, but is a bit better than Kingston DT101. Write performance: 4.2 MB/s ReWrite performance: 3.5 MB/s Read performance: 24.5 MB/s Random Seeks: 657.4 / sec Comparing to Samsung S2 Portable 500GB USB 2.0 External HD: 8.2 times slower for write 4.9 times slower for rewrite 1.8 times slower for reading 5.3 times more seeks / sec Full performance output: [root@ace ~]# bonnie++ -n 0 -u 0 -r 7000 -f -b -d /mnt Using uid:0, gid:0. Writing intelligently...done Rewriting...done Reading intelligently...done start 'em...done...done...done...done...done... Version 1.96 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random- Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP ace.home 14G 4265 0   ...

I was curious about Kingston USB flash performance. The overall performance is poor. Write performance: 3.7 MB/s ReWrite performance: 3.0 MB/s Read performance: 22.5 MB/s Random Seeks: 4.3 / sec Comparing to Samsung S2 Portable 500GB USB 2.0 External HD: 9.4 times slower for write 5.7 times slower for rewrite 2.0 times slower for reading 28.79 times less seeks / sec Full performance output: [root@ace ~]# bonnie++ -n 0 -u 0 -r 7000 -f -b -d /mnt Using uid:0, gid:0. Writing intelligently...done Rewriting...done Reading intelligently...done start 'em...done...done...done...done...done... Version  1.96       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random- Concurrency   1     -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP ace.home        14G            3...