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.
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 
When you have to display the latest global svn revision number in your application you face different options.
Using Subversion keywords, like $Revision$ or $Id$, sounds like the most natural approach. Unfortunately the keywords are updated only when you change and commit the corresponding file. In short: if you intend to grab the revision ID from a central header file, like version.h, this file has to be edited and committed whenever a svn commit on any file in your project takes place. So either you do that manually (“erm, no?” – right!), or you create a commit hook and bloat your repository.
Another approach is to fetch the latest number of the latest revision and update your version.h as part of your build. In short: whenever you trigger a build by calling make, ant or build your project in your IDE, you invoke a script that generates your header file (or .java, .cs, .rb … you name it). On Linux and Unix, you might use a script just like this:
Read more…
Microsoft added a new command line tool to Vista and Windows 7: clip.exe. This nifty little utility allows user to copy program output to the clipboard on the windows command line. Its usage is pretty straightforward:
dir | clip – copies the output of the dir command to the clipboard
clip < example.txt – copy the contents of the file example.txt to the clipboard
