The time of day when providing a service is secondary to billing for it also drifts a little. Their technical support’s best advice? Turn the modem off then on again at the time that’s least disruptive so the daily dropout hurts less when it happens every 24 hours (plus drift) after that.

I’ve finished the twelve-month term for which I signed up so now I’m shopping for a new ISP. And I know one question I’ll be asking the next one.

The previous title was from a comment by Shakespeare about the effectiveness of blogs, but this time the title comes from playing with reading a domain name. To retrofit a quotation, I’m reduced to ruining and taking out of context a well-known line from A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H. W. Fowler:

Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth – greater indeed; http://inasmuch.as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners.

Maybe it’s this innate netizen-of-the-worldliness that prompts many kind people to offer to share their inheritances with me.  Though I do worry about my health, since there must be a reason why I also receive offers for so many different pharmaceuticals.

The netbook form-factor was important to me long before the term “netbook” was a twinkle in a marketing person’s eye, and the P1120 did sterling work on Irish trains, Belgian buses, and numerous economy-class air journeys where a larger computer would be more of a hindrance than a help.  The P1630 continues the tradition, though even it was nearly defeated by the minuscule space between seats on Ryanair last week.

By the benchmark that’s most important to me — the time to compile xmlroff — the P1630 is about seven times faster than the P1120.  Though I still call it takai, you do mostly get what you pay for (at least, that is, until Moore’s law makes a mockery of any price/performance ratio).  I haven’t compiled xmlroff on a netbook to benchmark it, but I was working on Xcruciate last week side-by-side with someone using an EeePC netbook, and the P1630 was comfortably faster on the same tasks (though sadly not to the same proportion as their respective sales prices).

I can’t report on the other useful benchmark — the number and size of the Emacs frames that can fit on the screen — since it seems that Ubuntu and/or X.Org doesn’t yet handle the P1630′s Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500HD.  When I use the “intel” driver, the screen just flashes different colours, and when I use the “vesa” driver, I can’t get the full 1,280 x 768 pixel resolution.

Other quibbles are that the touchscreen doesn’t work out of the box with Ubuntu (and I’ve yet to try to make it work) and that Skype doesn’t work with the microphone (either internal or external).

Electronic communication is usually seen (or hyped) as happening at the speed of light.  Some scientists research ways to slow the speed of light through different materials — the current speed record being 38 miles per hour — with an eye to eventual commercial application in lower power networks.  The researchers should look no further than their nearest bank: an electronic transfer last week from England to Ireland took four days.  Banking is of course the fundamental application of commerce, but if that’s moving at the speed of light, then the light was a lot slower than 38 miles per hour, and as for a low power, I had no power over it at all.

At four days to transfer money between the UK and Ireland, I could walk to Newry carrying cash faster than a bank would transfer the same amount, but the real issue is that I was waiting on the payment from the UK before I wired money to the USA to buy a new laptop.  The first transfer was initiated last Thursday, I first saw that money on Tuesday, I wired the money for the laptop the same day, and the company in the USA won’t see the money until this Friday, or they would if they weren’t on holiday over Thanksgiving.  Between turkeys and tardiness, the seemingly simple act of two wire transfers is taking over a week, or more than the time for light in a vacuum to travel 112,492,800,000 miles.

It is an impressive body of work that the JLTF has been working on for a while.  This is the current iteration of the document for which I went to a meeting in Tokyo last September, and I went to the W3C Technical Plenary in Mandelieu this week specifically for the JLTF meeting  reviewing the working draft.

The task force is looking for feedback (to www-i18n-comments@w3.org) by 15 November 2008.

The bad news is that hibernate is broken: the laptop hibernates only until you close the lid. The workaround is to hibernate the laptop, then close and reopen the lid, and press the power switch to turn the power off while the laptop is still at the BIOS password screen.

The good news is that the touchscreen works properly. I had used the joytouch utility program with Xubuntu 7.04, but with Xubuntu 8.04, I was able to install the evtouch module (which I’d had to manually build and install back when I was running JDS 3 and hadn’t seen since). The packaged evtouch is still a work in progress: a bug that I hit about the location of the empty_cursor.xbm file for the calibrate.sh utility was fixed in SVN a couple of days ago. Plus there’s plenty of advice in Ubuntu forums and the like about how to get it running. About all that I did that was remotely original was add a line in 69-touchscreen.rules for my particular touchscreen panel:

# Fujitsu Takamisawa USB Touch Panel

KERNEL=="event*", SUBSYSTEM=="input", ATTRS{name}=="Fujitsu Takamisawa USB Touch Panel", SYMLINK+="input/evtouch_event"

And I did that by following instructions.

Now all I need to do is reinvent the GNUS window layout and button buffer setup that I used to use so I could navigate by touchscreen when reading email.

Cf. Wiki, Vidi, Veni (Place or event reviewed on a collaborative site, I saw, I came)