Many Things
The accomplishment for the last few days is definitely getting the EngFrosh site up and running. I've gotten great feedback on it, and best of all, it's completely valid HTML 4.01 Transitional. The validation was what was causing me all the grief earlier, but it's really nice to have it. Also, it is my first serious web design done without the use of any commercial tools.

Work today was slow, I'm having huge troubles working around Debian's X packaging. The day was uninteresting until I got a call that my long-awaited Keytronic USB keyboard came in. It's black, but otherwise identical to the one I got in 1991 that died two years ago (except it has 104 keys). It has a totally awesome feel to it.

As soon as I got the keyboard, my hand started using the lacking-from-laptop keypad, and my biggest Linux annoyance resurfaced: Shift+NumPadKey causes digits to be entered. So, I decided to fix the keymap. I soon realized that Gnome has a setting for exactly this preference. Then I went the whole way and set my keyboard up so that I can easily enter any Polish characters, and other Latin-based ones are easy to get at too. Now UTF-8 is actually useful.

At home, we watched The Pianist once again. That is one amazing movie.

After the movie, I wanted to get software suspension going. Upon applying the kernel patches and testing, I fully expected something to go terribly wrong. But nothing did. In fact, to my complete surprise, I don't even have to reload the sound or network modules, only the USB (ehci). However, a big problem is that X crashes if I have the commercial ATI DRI module loaded. Besides that, the only hitch is that it doesn't actually shut itself down automatically after writing all the data: apparent ACPI S5 doesn't work on this unit. In time, these things will all be worked out... as it is, it is still much, much faster than rebooting.

The next project is to get GTK Celestia up to speed. It really needs work, especially after I discovered that there is a callback mechanism built right into the core. This should solve all the synchronization issues between the GUI and the Core. Hopefully I can hack on that tomorrow, as the next release is imminent.

A thought recently crossed my mind about how to embed my inverter into the car. I was thinking of hiding it somewhere and running the output cable down the middle of the car, and outputting it in the rear ashtray (built into the hand-brake island). That would be nice. Still very preliminary...