dev.

The hardware keys for adjusting brightness on a Samsung NC10 aren’t working in an out-of-the-box Kubuntu 10.04. The brightness slider in the Power Management tray application isn’t working as designed as well.

Fortunately, you can set the display brightness using the hardware keys in GRUB, the bootloader that let’s you choose what OS and/or Kernel you want to start.

Settings are lost on reboot, and you still can’t change the brightness at runtime, but it’s better than nothing.

Update:
Actually, there is a way to enable the brightness keys. And you don’t even have to edit your X.org conf manually. Just head over to ubuntu-tweak.com and install samsung-brightness

It’s forgotten all too often:

Search is a way to harvest demand, not to create it.

(Drew Houston, co-founder & CEO of Dropbox, about Google AdWords in his “Startup Lessons Learned” presentation).

via Jeff Barr.

As part of his Effective Concurrency column, Herb Sutter describes the Active Object Pattern this month.
It’s not just a C++ thing, but usable in C# and Java as well.

Suggested reading