David Baron's weblog: September 2004

A few (technical) thoughts (00:48 -0700)

• My 1GB DIMM arrived Monday, and it works fine. With memory prices these days, getting that is much easier than worrying about fixing a bad memory slot.
• CSS error reporting is now enabled in trunk Mozilla builds. Check out the “Javascript Console”.
• I compiled a custom Linux kernel Tuesday to try to get suspend and resume working on my laptop, but it didn't help. My display still doesn't wake up on resume. And perhaps other things don't either. It's a little hard to tell. (The patches were the first patch and the second variant of the second patch on a page about Linux on the Dell D600. I have a Dell Inspiron 5150, but the video card is the same). I'll probably continue trying to get it working another time.
• I wish GNU ld's --gc-sections option worked for shared libraries. (Even working when shared libraries are visible within five miles would be nice!) The main thing this would help Mozilla with is getting rid of unneeded copies of constructors and destructors that gcc's C++ compiler emits. And probably also some unneeded vtables. And maybe a good bit of other stuff. (gcc could probably be a little better, but it's really a job for the linker.)

Bad memory (12:14 -0700)

So this morning I was getting annoyed at the small amount of RAM in my laptop. Since I recently (after having the laptop for over a year) got Linux to use my CPU at full speed instead of half speed (by adding DEVICE="acpi" to /etc/cpuspeed.conf), memory has really seemed to be the limiting factor. (Well, it has a slow disk too.) I've also been doing some things that use a lot of memory lately. I wondered why I only got 256 MiB of RAM in the first place—that didn't seem like something I'd do. So, with the thought of buying more RAM in mind, I pulled out the folder that had the receipt for my laptop to see whether I had an empty memory slot or 2 128 MiB DIMMs.

And the receipt said I had ordered 512 MiB of memory. But free says I have 256 MiB, and the BIOS agrees. And I don't really ever remember this machine having 512 MiB. So I opened up the laptop, and, lo and behold, there were 2 256 MiB DIMMs in there. A few experiments showed that one of the two memory slots was bad. And the machine is already out of warranty (since I got a short warranty, which for me is usually a better deal, especially since I'm never sure whether Dell will honor the warranty after I've installed Linux).

I really need a better memory of what I ordered. Or better memory. Or something. But maybe I'll at least remember not to order laptops from Dell again.