Archive for the ‘Geeks at Work’ Category

Interviewed!

A couple of weeks ago the nice guys at Vodafone Lab interviewed me and my friend Lorenzo for the work we did for Montalbano.tv.

This is not the first time I write about Montalbano (as you can see from my previous drupal centered post), but last time I wrote because I wanted to show a clever approach to deploying Drupal, this time I just wanted to share with you a happy moment.

Joining Mikamai has proved itself to be one of the wisest decisions of my adult life, it gave me the opportunity to work with smart people on interesting projects.

If you’re a developer and are interested in working with us drop us a line, maybe we’ll find a way to do something fun together :)

Geeks at Work: Feisty Fawn and the missing window borders with Beryl

Welcome to the post with the longest title on A Tempest of Thoughts :)

Today I upgraded my linux development box tu Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn, mainly because I read it run Beryl out of the box. Unfortunately “out of the box” means “not your box, intinig”, and I had Beryl crashing on me and leaving me without window borders and unable to drag anything.

While trying to understand what was happening I opened a terminal window and it was blank. I was lucky I rememberd my previous post, and the fix worked even for the window borders.

As they say, “3D Desktop for teh win!!1!”, big kudos to Ubuntu for their unbelievable development pace.

Geeks at Work: fixing the Beryl blank window on Ubuntu

After going dual monitor on my Ubuntu box I tried to install Beryl, because I am a graphics whore.

I thought it all worked well until I opened my usual dozen of windows, and discovered that new windows were coming up without any content (black / blank / transparent).

A quick search on the wonderful ubuntu forums revealed this behavior as a known nVidia bug, with a quite easy solution: Beryl->Advanced Beryl options->Rendering Path->Copy.

I tried this solution and it works like a charm. Now my graphic whoreness is satisfied :)

Geeks at Work: TwinView Screen Recognization on Ubuntu

I am a mac user, I will never switch platform simply because I feel at home on Mac OS X. Nonetheless I really like Linux, and Ubuntu is the flavour of Linux I prefer.

Today I installed Ubuntu 6.10 to test a development environment and once again I forgot how to set up TwinView so it correctly recognizes my LCD display as primary monitor and the CRT display as secondary. The nVidia driver always recognizes the CRT display as the primary one, no matter what you tell it to do with the various options at your disposal.

I went into panic / google / forums / what-else mode for a few hours then I was able to find a solution to this widely spread problem.

Here’s the snippet that saved my life (taken from /etc/X11/xorg.conf):


Section "Device"
Identifier"nVidia GeForce 6600"
Driver"nvidia"
BusID"PCI:1:0:0"
Option "TwinView" "True"
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "True" Option "MetaModes" "DFP: 1440x900 +0+240, CRT: 1280x1024 +1440+0"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP,CRT"
EndSection

The most important option there is TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder and I hope I will never forget to set it in my future X.Org configurations :)