I'm definitely having too much fun with HDR (first two photos). Link to album.

Link to album

As I said in my previous post, I'm going to a lot of concerts recently, and taking a lot of photos once there. Here is a small selection of them.

I'll be stopping taking such pictures for a while, as I would like to be able to enjoy the music without having to lug around the DSLR bag. I'm also sure people will like not having my frame blocking their view when I'm shooting.

I'm now working at Plemi a start-up that is going to offer services for concert gigs organization, mainly for emerging artists.

It does fit better in my current lifestyle as recently I've started going to a lot of concerts and otherwise going out and meeting a lot of interesting people. I'm also working part-time and (soon) telecommuting so I'll have a lot more free time on my hands. Paris is a great city for concert going, I really regret not enjoying more of that aspect in the previous years I've been living there.

For the technical part, I am the lead developer of the symfony applications we are going to use for the launch of the services. As you may have noticed, I'm a big fan of symfony, being at the core of my previous works, so I'm glad I'll be able to use it again and also able to contribute more to the project itself.

  The rest of the pictures are here.

But I had an issue with the eeePC, the battery life during standby is atrocious: compared to the laptops I used before, putting the eeePC in standby will drain the battery in less than 24h. It's not a software issue but an hardware one (that may be corrected in the future with a bios update). As I have a very on and off utilization of the eeePC, it wasn't very practical to either shut it down if I didn't plan on using it in the next few hours or letting the battery drain in my bag. There is a simple way to correct that: using suspend to disk (also called hibernate).

Under hibernation, the content of the RAM will be written to disk and restored upon wake up. The issue is that the default system for hibernation for the 2.6 linux kernel needs to have a swap partition that is bigger than the total RAM installed.On a system with a 4GB SSD, with the default install of eeeXubuntu already taking more than 2GB, I had some reticences repartitioning the SSD just for hibernation purposes.

As the swap space would not be used for swap anyways as it seems that using swap on a SSD is apparently not a good idea (there is an ongoing debate on whether modern SSD like the one used in the eee can take the abuse).Anyway that's enough introduction, here is a simple way to use hibernation on the eee without having to create a swap partition. The only thing you need is to create a swap file that's half the size of the installed RAM in the eeePC. It actually works better for me compared to suspend to ram as I had some issues with the graphic controller not waking up sometimes. Click below for the howto.

UPDATE: a similar but more clever way of achieving the same goal: Hibernate fix on the eee-ubuntu wiki.

How-to

First, create a swap file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1024k count=256mkswap /swap

256MB for the 512MB eeePC.Add this to /etc/fstab:

/swap	swap	swap	defaults	0	0

Then, tell the kernel to not use the swap file for swapping:

sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1

Modify the last line of /etc/sysctl.conf so it sticks:

vm.swappiness=1

You can now activate the swap file:

swapon /swap

And now the magic ingredient: µswsusp, an alternative suspend method for the linux kernel that can use swap file instead of swap partition and also support other neat features like compression and encryption.Install it:

aptitude install uswsusp

(don't forget to enable memory compression).To test it:

s2disk

It will write the content of the RAM to the swap file and shutdown the eee.Press the power button on the eee to wake it up.To enable this method as the default system for hibernation, edit the following file: /usr/lib/hal/linux/scripts/hal-system-power-hibernateThere is a bug in this script, it will look for s2disk in the wrong place, you'll have to edit it so it looks like this:

/sbin/s2disk

As this script is part of the HAL package, it means that it WILL break if this package is updated, you'll have to reedit the above file if hibernate doesn't work after an update.

Caveats

The console is apparently completely fubared, not a big loss for me.

References

Fixing software suspend / hibernate with uswsusp in Ubuntu Feisty (and Edgy)