[Computer] 101 days without rebooting my laptop

It's now 101 days since my last booting the laptop. It may be not surprising for a server to run continuously for several hundred days, but it is rare for a workstation. Windows users have the habit of shutting down the computer when they finish working with it and reboot it again the next time. Even though Windows 95 or 98 had the capability of hibernating, saving the running state to hard disk and resuming late, that method was rarely used, even with laptop users. No sure how many Windows XP or Vista users would keep hibernating their computers.

I'm a Debian GNU/Linux user and find it annoying to have to reboot the computer. The save-to-disk feature is great. Besides saving a few seconds rebooting, it also means I can resume work at wherever I stop last time. I don't have to relaunch some applications, reopen some files, and so on.

I've used the save-to-disk feature for quite some time. Except upgrading to new kernel versions, I don't have to reboot. On rare cases running Stell Bank Common Lisp may lead to memory swap that forced me unplug the power and thus reboot, but that's my own fault: my Common Lisp programs were not frugal with memory (trying to solve Project Euler problems) and my laptop was endowed with just 1 GB memory.

Keeping a desktop system running for so long does pose a grave test to the OS and the applications. For instance, I sometimes have to exit from GNU Emacs so that the system can hibernate successfully. After about three months running, I also noticed a bit performance hit when resuming. It takes more time switching applications after resuming than before. Konqueror and Kontact, in particular, will consume a lot of memory after running for so long. I guess 2 GB memory will eliminate the annoyance to a large extent. The delay is generally tolerable. If not, I can always exit and relaunch the specific application.

[Computer] Revert back to KDE3 from KDE4.1 beta

After almost two weeks working with KDE 4.1beta, I decided to revert back to KDE3. There are certainly some problems to be expected for the beta release, including occasional crash of some applications. And I can make do with that.

The determinant is that I found myself often cannot use s2disk to save the current session for later resumption. That's very disheartening to me.I usually will not reboot my Debian GNU/Linux for months until I install a new kernel and want to run with it. That saves me a lot time rebooting the computer and bring all the applications up to their last state.

I'd keep using KDE 4.1beta if I reboot every day (if not each time I come to the front of my computer), as many users do.

[Computer] Seven days' experience with KDE4

Following Ana's howto I successfully upgraded to KDE 4.0.80 and have used it for 7 days now.

I was upgrading from Debian unstable. There were some conflicts preventing me from upgrading. I could only go ahead after some trial-and-errors. That is, trying to resolve the conflicts by manually adding package names to apt-get.

Overall, KDE4 is prettier than its predecessors. The best thing I find with KDE4 is the new package okular for viewing PDF and other format files. The review facility enables me to add highlight to some texts and comments. And those reviews can be copied to share with others or to be used on my other computers.

I've come across a few application crashes, and that's understandable as beta software. I'd say KDE 4 is quite usable and stable enough to me.

If you are interested in Okular, you can also just install Okular. That will remove package kdebase-bin-kde3. I'm not sure whether that will pose problems to me or not. So far I haven't rebooted or restarted KDE and everything seems fine.

Thanks

Thanks to the upcoming Olympic Games, access to blogspot.com from within China seems to have been made possible again. From this change alone I do not support boycotting the Games.

blogpsot not accessible

What an unfortunate situation! I just created this blog and posted the first blog but the site blogspot.com cannot be accessible in Beijing. I can still post new blogs because the site blogger.com is still acccessible, but this situation is really not so agreeable. Why the domain name is not accessible is beyond me. I just want to post some technical posts, anyway.

Project Euler

From Ingvar Matsson's Nov. 8, 2007 blog I learned about the Project Euler and started working on the problems. There are 176 problems this week and new problems are added every one or two weeks. The site is so popular that the host service provider cut off database access last weekend that forced the author eliminate more dynamic features.

I decided to use Common Lisp as the programming language of choice, though otherwise I've been using Objective Caml more often in the last five years.

So far I've solved 74 out of 176 problems (42%). I use SBCL and SLIME and I'd say Common Lisp and SBCL in particular is quite efficient at the task. Most of the solved problems take no more than a few seconds to finish at the interactive Read-Evaluate-Print-L oop environment.

I chose Common Lisp over Objective Caml mainly because Objective Caml does not provide automatic bignum support, which renders number crunching cumbersome.