"...but why don´t you put things like this on your Stumbleupon account?"

My reaction to the comment below this article:

First of all, when you visit fuxoft.stumbleupon.com, by default, you only see the links I commented on, not all the links I rated "Thumbs up"! To see those, select "Pages I like" from the drop-down menu on that page or use this RSS feed.

Secondly, take a look at "My starred items" box at the right of this page (under "previous posts"). This is a feed from my Google Reader that has more items in it than my StumblUpon page (of course, this is also available as RSS).

However, neither StumbleUpon nor Google Reader quite satisfy my needs in their current implementation so there might be some changes in the near future...

Functional languages for everyone

If you ever tried programming in functional languages, you'll probably agree that there is a "barrier" that prevents "standard programmer" from understanding why the hell should he use such a convoluted syntax and what REAL benefits functional programming has.

There are two excellent (and fun) articles about this which I discovered, called "The Nature of Lisp" and "Functional Programming for the Rest of Us". In contrast to majority of functional programming materials, these are not academic and anyone with slight programming experience can understand them. Read them even if you are perfectly content with your little Java...

Metal Gear Albert

One of the users on Flickr alerted me to funny coincidence I didn't notice before. Because of a light reflection, one of the older photographs of Albert and Chucky looks like they are re-enacting the crucial scene from Metal Gear Solid game series. Albert is sneaking but his cover has just been blown by Chucky who discovered him! Look here and read the first comment under the photograph. Kryspin is also there, probably doing his "Revolver Ocelot" impression or whatever...

nVidia and MPlayer Don't Like Electric Sheep?

I am at loss once again. I have the latest Ubuntu Dapper Drake and I'm using its nVidia (binary) drivers with hardware acceleration ("nvidia", not "nv"). I have xscreensaver installed (not gnome-screensaver) and electricsheep screensaver (both of them from standard Ubuntu repositories).

Unfortunately, when electricsheep starts, it runs (e.g. it downloads new sheep generations) but does not produce any graphical output at all! The screen is black. The preview window in xscreensaver-demo is black. When I run electricsheep manually in a window, the windows decorations appear (the border and the toolbar) but the window itself is "see-through" (not black), the content is simply not there.

Another interesting observation: When I have mplayer running (it doesn't matter if it's paused and on which workspace it runs, but it must use hardware acceleration), electricsheep works like a charm - standalone or in the preview window! Also, when I reboot the computer (or just the xorg server), electricsheep WORKS but it stops working as soon as I close the MPlayer for the first time.

All other screensavers (3D or not) work without problems. When I change the video driver to non-accelerated one ("nv"), electricsheep also works without problems.

Any ideas? Some nvidia driver flags I could tweak? Or Mplayer? It doesn't seem to matter what Mplayer video driver I use...

Soccer Salami

I don't really care about international sporting events but some Czech butchers evidently do.

Ubuntu Linux USB Bluetooth Adapter Problems

Let's hope this post will be found by anyone having problems with USB Bluetooth dongle under Linux. I bought "Sweex LE000010" model which seems to identify itself as "Broadcom 2035" (lsusb id 0a5c:200a). I knew it probably won't be easy to work with it under Linux but I had more significant problem - I was not able to communicate with the device at all (allthough it was detected).

After several hours, when I was getting really desperate I found the solution: The dongle has to be plugged directly into the computer, not into the USB hub!!!!!! I have no idea why but it's true. When I plugged it directly into the PC, it immediately started working without me having to configure anything (btw: The defauld PID for synchronization with the PC is "1234").

Now for the second part of problem: Does anyone know how to configure Nokia 6681 to connect to the internet through my Bluetooth/enabled PC? (Not connecting my PC to the Internet through the Nokia - the other way around!)