Hi Debian! Just to briefly introduce myself, I'm Vincent ([email protected], vincent_c on OFTC/Freenode) and I'm a recent graduate of the NM process, having attained DD-ship (is that even a word?) about a month ago in January. Before that, I was a DM since mid-2012, and just another contributor for a few years prior to that. Most of my contributions to the Project are related to packaging, especially packages maintained within the Debian Games Team. Outside of Debian, well, I'm just another 20-year-old, 3rd-year undergrad student studying at the University of British Columbia, working towards a major in …

Pelican (the static site generator that I'm using to generate this blog) doesn't seem to generate a sitemap on its own, so I spent a bit of time today searching for a way to do so that's easily integrated with Pelican; surely someone must have already solved this problem, right? Well, it turns out that indeed, there's already a plugin for it in the pelican-plugins repository, and it's really easy to use!

pelicanconf.py:

PLUGIN_PATHS = ['/path/to/cloned/pelican-plugins/repo']
PLUGINS = ['sitemap']

SITEMAP = {
    'format': 'xml',
    'priorities': {
        'articles': 0.5,
        'indexes': 0.5,
        'pages': 0.5
    },
    'changefreqs': {
        'articles': 'monthly',
        'indexes': 'daily' …

I've finally taken the plunge and migrated from my old Wordpress.com site to my new and (hopefully) improved Pelican-built site! If you're reading this, you probably have two questions: "why?" and "how?"...so let's tackle them in that order.

Why? A lot of it comes down to the advantages that static site generators like Pelican have over the dynamic CMS that is Wordpress. Wordpress is without doubt a very powerful CMS, and it has a thriving, large community around it that adds on even more value to Wordpress through its huge collection of plugins. It's also really easy …

I actually bought my very first SSD last year during Black Friday, but I never got around to swapping out my hard drive until after exams, and to blog about it until now, heh. It's a 180GB Intel 330, snagged from Newegg for roughly $0.58/GB, which in late 2012 was considered a pretty good deal (although I expect SSD prices to dip even further this year). I've heard from friends previously that I should consider purchasing a SSD, but I never really gave it serious thought until after another hard drive failure.

So long story short, I got …

Now that I've finished with all my 2nd year CPSC courses, I guess it's a good idea to write down my review before I forget about it, especially since I'm now on a co-op work position. So, without further ado, I present to you my overall thoughts and comments on both CPSC 213 and CPSC 221 (taken in 2012W1).

CPSC 213:

In a nutshell:

Language: C, Java, Assembly (SM213)

Toolset: Text editor of your choice + gcc (GNU C compiler) + debugging tools (gdb for C, Simple Machine for SM213 assembly)

Prereqs: CPSC 121, 210

Website/resources: CPSC 213 website, SM213 ISA …

It turns out that after thoroughly testing the new laptop I got a few months back for hardware compatibility issues with Linux, there was one thing I forgot to check: the built-in SD card reader slot. And of course, it happens to be the one thing that doesn't work out of the box (aside from Nvidia's Optimus, but I'll save my rant on that topic for another day). However, it turns out that Realtek does distribute source code for their out-of-tree rts5229 kernel module, which is used by my laptop's SD card reader, so luckily enough it didn't take me …

Since I've spent a few hours of my time tracking the source and potential workarounds for this annoying bug, I figured that I may as well document my findings here. The latest Linux kernel (i.e. 3.6.0 at the time of writing) has a bug whereby if you play any audio file in VLC and try to change the volume, you'll hear a very annoying amount of audio distortion/noise. However, neither mplayer nor gstreamer-based players (Rhythmbox, Totem, etc.) seem to be affected (at least, not for me). More details available on the LKML. I don't seem to …

It's back to school season again, and I've decided to splurge some money on a new laptop a week or two ago. And of course, a new laptop means that I have to make sure that all the hardware components inside work with Linux, which is never a sure thing...

First things first, exactly what type of laptop was I looking for? Here's what I had after a quick brainstorming session:

• Something within a $500-$1000 CAD/USD price range. Optimally somewhere in the middle.
• Screen size 15"-16". (15.6" widescreen is preferred, minimum resolution I want is 1366x768 …