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Below are the 13 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Richard Kettlewell" journal:

December 10th, 2009
11:22 pm [Link]	Why does gnome-panel use 290MB? I noticed, on my 64-bit Linux system, that `gnome-panel` was apparently using an awful lot of virtual memory. PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 3734 rjk 20 0 290m 16m 6668 S 0 0.8 3:22.05 gnome-panel Virtual memory’s pretty cheap, so that’s not hugely problematic, but it seemed a huge amount for a glorified toolbar. I looked in `/proc/3734/maps` and found that about 260MB of that space belonged to shared libraries. Now, `gnome-panel` does use a lot of library, 82 to be precise, but 3MB per library sounded a lot, and the biggest of them is only 4MB. Looking closer I noticed that an awful lot of the libraries had 2MB (0x200000) non-executable mappings associated with them. As an example here are the mappings for GTK+ (with the size in hex added at the start for convenience): 3c7000 7f967efd6000-7f967f39d000 r-xp 00000000 fe:00 3111259 /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1200.12 200000 7f967f39d000-7f967f59d000 ---p 003c7000 fe:00 3111259 /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1200.12 a000 7f967f59d000-7f967f5a7000 rw-p 003c7000 fe:00 3111259 /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1200.12 The first line is the code segment and the last the data segment. But what’s the strange 0x200000 (2MB) mapping in the middle? The answer took me a while to figure out. Tags: answers, geek, questions (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
December 4th, 2009
06:39 pm [Link]	How big a stocking? I'm actually more interested in how I keep them out. Tags: giveaway, nonsense, questions (7 comments \| Leave a comment)
October 23rd, 2009
09:05 pm [Link]	Ice, oh, one hundred! Poll #1475390 Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 63 The consonant in the middle of “ISO” is: View Answers [s] 56 (88.9%) [z] 4 (6.3%) Something else 3 (4.8%) Tags: polls, questions (4 comments \| Leave a comment)
September 17th, 2009
02:22 pm [Link]	Laptop trackball Can anyone recommend for/against trackballs suitable for use with a laptop? I'm looking for something that's: fairly small won't lose the ball if slung in a laptop bag ideally, uses bluetooth (though usb might be ok) ideally, that could be clipped to the side of the laptop Tags: geek, questions (3 comments \| Leave a comment)
August 16th, 2009
10:49 pm [Link]	We've been here before I've been offline since Tuesday. (Yes, again.) Has anything important happened? Tags: life, questions (5 comments \| Leave a comment)
August 9th, 2009
07:19 pm [Link]	Back in Cambridge I've been offline since Tuesday evening. Has anything important happened? Tags: life, questions (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
April 28th, 2009
11:45 am [Link]	Two questions 1) What is the best thing since sliced bread (which apparently dates back to 1928)? 2) What was the best thing before sliced bread? Tags: nonsense, questions (17 comments \| Leave a comment)
October 25th, 2008
08:55 pm [Link]	“Appears on the IMDB top 250” is not the answer How old does a film have to be before you can definitely say it's a classic? Tags: films, questions (5 comments \| Leave a comment)
July 20th, 2008
09:30 pm [Link]	Boot Camp font question This image raises two issues: Why does the Mac disk get an anti-aliased font and the Windows one a pixelated one? Just how many fonts does a boot loader actually need? Tags: geek, leopard, mac, questions, windows (7 comments \| Leave a comment)
May 20th, 2008
10:55 am [Link]	Does this exist? I fairly often need to mount a CD image and install software from it. Generally speaking the images are retrieved from a web server. Currently my script downloads the image and deletes it when it's done, but it would be nice to eliminate even that step and mount it directly over HTTP. The obvious answer is a network block device server that uses HTTP byte range requests to access the CD image. Does this exist already? Tags: geek, questions (3 comments \| Leave a comment)
March 5th, 2007
04:28 pm [Link]	Questions from beckyc ( Answers ) Tags: answers, questions (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
April 18th, 2006
03:55 pm [Link]	The lyrics aren't supposed to mean that much Don Juan by the Pet Shop Boys begins thusly: The man who's escorting Don Juan to his bride Knows he is courting an impudent pride Think of his jealousy, oh, where will he hide? The man who's escorting Don Juan to his bride The man who will cover for Don Juan's old soothsayer Films for a Warner brother or Mister Goldwyn-Mayer Think of his starlet, how much will he pay her? The man who will cover for Don Juan's old soothsayer Seems reasonably descriptive. The chorus: An impasse has been reached with the teacher of the rich To quit would be discreet and swift But you know that I can't do that It would be a disaster It would be a disaster I've got this sinking feeling, I'm not dreaming We'll be sorry soon Could be the thoughts of the man escorting Don Juan, assuming he's not entirely hypothetical, though I'm not sure about the first line. Finally: At the end of the day, when everyone's resigned To the heart of the matter and the measures in mind King Zog's back from holiday, Mary Lupescu's grey And King Alexander is dead in Marseilles King Zog was the King of Albania; his holiday could be his jet-setting before settling in France (perhaps). Mary Lupescu is probably Magda Lupescu, mistress of the King of Romania and King Alexander was Yugoslavia and was assassinated by a Macedonian nationalist in Marseille in 1934. So this seems to be setting the place to the Balkans and the time to the end of the monarchies there (i.e. after the communist takeover of eastern europe). But what's this got to do with the foregoing? So anyone got any more definite ideas? Tags: music, questions (Leave a comment)
February 5th, 2006
12:15 pm [Link]	Fifth Man In this image (#7 in this set) five people are shown on the poster: George Bush, Tony Blair, Kofi Anan, Vladimir Putin and someone in black and white. Can anyone tell who the fifth person is? naath points out that they've got the US flag the wrong way round. Tags: comment, politics, questions (9 comments \| Leave a comment)

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