Yosemite vally Grocery store

They valley has a surprisingly large and fully stocked grocery store. It's maybe 1/6 the size of a regular grocery, but has at least one of just about everything you could want, from meat, to veggies, to dry goods. The prices are higher than in the Fresno area, but not hugely so - maybe by 25%? In any case, you can't beat the location, and the selection is sufficient to make just about any American dish you want.

Yosemite Lodge (at the Falls)

You can't beat the location. Lots of great hikes just outside your room's door.

The rooms are mid-sized; there is just enough room to walk around the beds, but no more. You wouldn't want to sleep more than 2 people to a room.  The rooms are clean and the beds nice and firm. There is no coffeemaker in the room, but you can get a free ticket for a complementary coffee in the food Court (1/day/person). The rooms do not come with fridges, but they can be requested. The fridges are about as small as a mini-fridge can get, and could hold about 3 2-liter soft-drink containers.

They advertise free Internet, but only people near the main lodge can access it from their rooms - the wireless doesn't reach far enough. To log into the wireless you call the front desk and get a 6 letter code that you enter into your web browser. I had to retry this process several times before it worked, but from thereon my machine was recognised immediately whenever I turned it on.Once I did get logged in, however, the speed was fine - certainly higher than dialup, but a little slower than typical DSL. Your other option is to pay 25 cents a minute to use an Internet terminal in the main lodge.

One gotcha: my room only had 2-prong outlets, so I couldn't plug my laptop in. A call to the front desk located a power strip that would do the conversion.

ATI radeon 9600se drivers that work

ATI suggests that you download the 9.3.1 drivers for the 9600 series (the 9600 is now on legacy support, so little to no new drivers are planned for release, and 9.3.1 is already a bit old). Unfortunately, at least under Win2k3, these drivers do not work with the 9600. Changing almost any setting leads to an immediate crash.

ATI does not maintain a repository of older drivers that I could find, but oldapps.com does, and according to

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/oldapps.com, they haven't added mal-ware to the downloads (though some of their downloads (e-donkey, etc) could be considered malware in their own right).

I tried ATI Catalyst 6.9, released in 2006. The default install set the 'hardware acceleration' (advanced button in display properties) to one stop above zero, which prevented any of the advanced catalyst controls from working, but after setting hardware acceleration to full and rebooting the full set of controls were enabled. The color-correction controls were a bit less advanced than those offered by comparable NVIDIA drivers, however (see screen shot). Most notably missing is the ability to control saturation for the desktop (as opposed to the overlay control, where saturation controls are available). On the other hand, the ATI seemed a bit more saturated than the GForceMX2 two card I replaced, where it was necessary to turn up the saturation in order to get realistic flesh tones. No such adjustment appeared necessary on the 9600.

Next I tried ATI Catalyst 7.9. Here too, I had to set 'hardware acceleration' to full before all the driver features were enabled. This driver did work OK, but didn't add any additional color controls (it did add some more fancy 3D quality settings, however). Disappointingly, however, the video preview stopped working when adjusting overlay color correction. Overlay video still worked fine in other programs however, and looked slightly better color-wise than it had under 6.9, I thought (this was very subjective, however). DxDiag revealed that Direct3d did not work with this driver.

Finally, I tried 8.9. This didn't add any new features, but all the features worked: video preview in the catalyst control center, and dxdiag passed all tests.

Google Chrome now supports spell-check in blogger posts

I've been using Google Chrome for a while, and on the whole it's a nice web browser. Given that the main job of a web browser is just to render webpages, how much value added can there really be? In truth, not that much, but Chrome does a very nice job of handling tabs, wastes less screen space than any other browser, and is quite fast. It also uses less RAM than IE and Firefox, if you run it in single process mode, though that does eliminate one of its nicest features: if the browser crashes, it only kills the current tab, and all others remain running.

There was just one nagging little problem, up to version 2.0.172.28. Though chrome has a built-in spell checker (not the very best, but it does a good enough job at making suggestions for most people), it only works on a subset of web forms. Most notably, it never worked properly in Blogger. Now, however, it does. Just right click in the form, and select Spellchecker options to enable it.

Avoid www.dollarsavingsdirect.com! What a pain...

It turns out that www.dollarsavingsdirect.com doesn't support ACH pulls from other banks, and they make it rather difficult to link other outside accounts. You can only link 2 outside accounts - the one you initially funded the account with, and then one other Checking account (savings accounts are not allowed).  Plus, with the checking account linkage you have to send them a voided check before it becomes active. Give that other banks have more competitive rates and better customer service, I'm kind of sad I ever signed up with www.dollarsavingsdirect.com (Emigrant bank). 

Making Advance Wars work With EZ-FLASH IV cart

Advance Wars does not work with the standard EZ-Flash loader. You need to use GBATA instead. The link below explains the steps requred.  To summarize: use GBATA's SRAM patcher on the .GBA file first, and then use the EZ-Flash loader to copy the .gba file, taking care to un-check the patch save box. 

http://ezflash.sosuke.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=13261&hilit=advance+wars

Download GBATA: http://gbatemp.net/index.php?download=224

The question this raises: is there ever a time where you should use GBATA first? I don't know yet. 

Turning off over commit in the Linux kernel

Linux Malloc's never fails (or at least not until you request more than 150% of the available RAM). This is because the Kernel is optimistic - even if you ask for a lot of memory, maybe you won't use it. Seems like a bad bet, but as long as it's true, everything will run fine. As soon as it's false, the kernel starts killing processes randomly. Yuck.

This is because the swap partition does not grow. If you ask for more RAM than your actual ram PLUS your swap partition, Linux will happily "give" it to you, but has no recourse in the situation that you actually touch all those pages.

In the case that you want Malloc to fail if there's not enough available RAM (such as in embedded code), what to do?

The solution is to modify the kernel, or use syscntrl at run-time. I prefer the permanent solution, so here's how to do it.

In mm/mmap.c, about one page down are two variables which control the "over commit" strategy. Starting around line 80:

int sysctl_overcommit_memory = OVERCOMMIT_NEVER;

/* default = OVERCOMMIT_GUESS; heuristic overcommit */

int sysctl_overcommit_ratio = 0;

/* default is 50% */

Postscript: doing this often results in mallocs failing even when there is clearly lots of RAM remaining. It seems that Linux makes the general assumption that over commit is on, and kind of breaks if it's turned off. A better strategy may be to allow the default (default = OVERCOMMIT_GUESS; heuristic overcommit), and modify the code to be slightly more conservative. I find that heuristic overcommit tends to guess that there is about 2% more RAM available than really is. This would probably vary between machines/kernels/apps running a bit, though I haven't tested it.