Just a recipe for dual head on Xorg/Linux with the GMA 3100 included with my G31 chipset in case I forget.

1) Obtain “intel” xorg driver version 2.1.1 or later. Build/install.
2) Configure i915 kernel driver, load
3) Configure xorg with the following unusual parts: Monitor Identifiers should match these options under the video card Device block.

Code:

One monitor should have an

Code:

Finally, under screens you should use a Virtual parameter to tell the driver to allocate the appropriate buffer size.

Code:

One caveat- If your “virtual” desktop extends past 2048x2048 you can’t use DRI yet. Research indicates that this is a hardware limitation of the older chipsets only and should be overcome soon, but still the driver should be able to map “top to left” in any case, though it doesn’t yet. So if you want DRI you have to have vertically stacked monitors for now which is just not intuitive.

See also Wikipedia on GMA and Intel / Linux Docs for these chips.

Today I passed my Technician class Amateur Radio exam, qualifying me for a license to transmit on a number of frequencies and get more involved in an area that has long interested me. I tried the General class exam too and came within a few points of passing it, but I will have to try again in a few months after some study.

I earned a few dollars when I was a kid installing antennas, fixing minor problems with radios, and helping people in the Citizen’s Band community.

I even tracked down a guy who enjoyed antagonizing other folks on the air once by putting my magnet mount antenna on the back bumper of my car to make it directional and driving the car around while he chattered away. My hunt took me out of town, and soon I verified that he was living in a little “suburb” area and I pulled up in front of his house, and asked him to look outside. He was very surprised, but invited me in to see his rig. I was a little hesitant, but this older gentleman turned out to be a pretty decent guy who was just lonely and living with his sick mother and we enjoyed talking about radios for awhile as he smoked an aromatic pipe of Captain Black. He said I would make a good ham someday in parting, since I was clever enough to use my car in this way.

It’s a great way to make new friends, radio, and I look forward to getting back on the air.

On the occasions that I am called upon to connect someone’s shopping cart to a payment provider I always have to go to the payment provider, download their API document, read pretty much the whole thing to learn how they pass information around, and then go into implementation.

I think it is high time that all of the “express checkout” providers as well as the “direct connect” merchant gateways get together and publish common standards for their checkout processes just as the w3c does for web pages.

After all, 90% of the calls include the same style of information, and the flow of payments is nearly always the same.

1- Encode cart info into XML or a query string
2- Feed to gateway
3- Get answer, parse for conditions
4- Process on cart

With the new “express checkout” types (Google Checkout and Paypal are all that I have worked on) the flow is similar though more information comes back in the responses.

Were they all using a common protocol this would save Visa / Mastercard / Discover etc merchants a lot of money paying for all of the extra code in their sites to handle the diverse protocols involved.

“But Matt, wouldn’t all of this efficiency cut into your bottom line?” you might ask. It might, but at least my customers would have some funds to spend on other more directly profitable features and enhancements. I’ve never been afraid of “solving my way out of a job” because there’s always a bigger and better problem out there waiting for a solution.

My days spent in those little streams of Story City are some of the fondest memories I have. But even in that little stretch of watery paradise the Great Dark Tunnel was always threatening with the gurgling calls of drowning children.

I started my maritime adventures catching crawdads with my little friend Aaron in his back yard section of the crick. I’m not sure who gave us the idea but I now suspect somebody in the nearby adult world wanted some free fishing bait. We spent many a muddy afternoon in those waters in our first few years of school.

After all, there was really nothing else. We had a crick or a fairly spartan playground at the elementary school by today’s standards, a swimming pool during the hottest days of the summer and bicycles. We all had many friends though. Ryan, Travis, and Donald were all in the neighborhood, along with Alicia whos parent’s eggplants I once used as short lived basketballs and the crazy kid who once threatened us with a stabbing if we didn’t get off his sidewalk.

The crick was a place of adventure for most of us. We all knew that it could sweep us up whenever God told it to and carry us off to the Skunk River to be drowned. What greater thrill could it be then to stand in the water and defy nature in those years where our little selves could deny no authority of any kind!

We would launch small armadas of paper boats down the gentle currents, following their progress and watching them sink on the slightest of rapids.

If we were really lucky we could follow our well made paper boats all the way to the end of the earth, at the Great Dark Tunnel. This monstrosity was a gaping mouth in the side of a wall of earth much taller than any of us at the time, into which we could peer and see only blackness and shadows. Nothing that entered it ever escaped. It was certain that if God did stir up the waters, this would be the last place we would ever see the light of day.

So we decided that the solution to the menace of the Great Dark Tunnel was to dam the crick and save any errant soul, or paper boat at least, from being sucked down into its serrated maw.

It was not a small project. We had practiced damming the crick in smaller areas many times before, with some temporary success. But this was big.

We came to the park every afternoon and worked the edges of the crick finding the largest stones, carrying them down to a shallower area by the Great Dark Tunnel, stacking them up in a U shape because somebody had seen a picture of the hoover dam and it looked like that. Of course, their memory was a little skewed and we had built the dam inverted. But that was no matter, it still began to grow and water started to run over and through the big rocks, silt filling them in as it went.

After many afternoons of rock hauling and careful engineering meetings, finally the reservoir we had created in the crick was deeper than we were tall. We had done it, we had stopped most of the flow of the crick into the Great Dark Tunnel. It seemed to sneer at us from its drying mouth, but we then sneered back as the conquerors that we were. Lords of the Elements.

We naturally slapped the dirt off our hands, hopped on our bikes and went home to our dinners most satisfied with our victory against the tides of God and nature.

The next morning it was in the paper. “City park becomes City Lake,” was the headline more or less.

Other than to a hopefully forgiving God in our prayers at night, we never mentioned it again.

When I was a long haired kid in 1994 or so, I had one run-in with the law that quickly adjusted my impression of “the land of the free” and landed me in a big room with a half dozen drunks in varying states eying me behind bars.

Two uniformed thugs from DPS accosted me while I was smoking a rare cigarette on the terrace of the Iowa State University Memorial Union. I was 19 years old but the officers demanded some ID. I told them I was not breaking any law and that I thought the police needed a warrant or probable cause to interfere with a citizen who was no danger to others. After some disagreement on that point, I acquiesced to get my ID from my nearby car and walked with the officers hands digging into each of my arms with an angry grip toward the staircase down to my car. As I turned to step down the first stair, one officer grabbed my hair and slammed my head down onto the concrete. The other jumped on me and I felt blows about my body for what seemed like a very long time. I was far too shocked to fight back but the officers kept after me.

Finally they must have burned up their fuel and they stuck cuffs on me and dragged me to their waiting patrol car. I shouted to my companions that I would be back in no time and that they should wait for me, not realizing what was in store for me.

I think I must have had my head hit fairly solidly because I remember feeling somewhat dizzy and everything around me seemed surreal. I was kept in the ISU Campus DPS office for awhile, and then I was transported to the Ames City Jail.

The next thing I knew I was having my fingerprints taken at the check-in of drunk and disorderly hotel, and thrown in with the drunks.

I remember very well that they had a camera pointed at the only urinal, which was just across the room from the series of green inch-thin mattresses on concrete that served as “sleep it off” beds. There were huge globs of spit all over the floor and the inhabitants all appeared to be extremely inebriated and rough looking.

By this time I was unable to keep my eyes open from all the stress of the event and I slept fitfully until morning.

I was then cuffed and dragged out with a number of drunks, drug users, and a few felons of various types to wait in line to plea to the judge.

“How do you plead to the offense of ‘Interfering with official acts’ Mr. Steven?” said the judge. “Not guilty, your honor”

So that must be what they charge people with that didn’t break the law I thought. How convenient.

Needless to say, I had my day in court and thanks to a good friend who was a witness to the whole affair out on the Memorial Union terrace it was a quick not-guilty result and the officers were scolded for their misbehavior and I was told that I should be more respectful to law enforcement.

I didn’t really understand the concept of respecting the armed thugs that had so mishandled me, but I did understand the fear that I learned from the experience.

So back to the present.

I related this experience to President Geofferey of ISU when he was taking public comments on the arming of campus security officers. He was sympathetic but my story didn’t dissuade him from going through with adding guns to the arse nal.

And when I watched the young man at the University of Florida getting electrocuted after he was already under the boots of 5-6 officers it did remind me of this experience in my life. I can only imagine the fun those two who assaulted me would have had with a Taser.

So last week I emailed two officers, one the head of the campus DPS and one the Chief of Police for Ames. I requested their “Use of Force” policy documents and asked that they be published on their respective websites. What I got surprised me.

The DPS head, Jerry Stewart, responded with a very professional use of force document that was very good in terms of thoroughness and clarity.

Chief Cychosz of Ames on the other hand was a bit defensive about answering this request, I think he may have been a little unsure of my motivations for asking so I summed up my history as recounted here and he then sent me a document on the APD’s policy for the use of the Taser. On follow-up when I requested a more general use of force document he provided it.

It is still my hope that these men of public responsibility will step up and commit to making their rules public on their web sites. I think that it is important for them to make a strong effort to show that they are serious about protecting the people from officers who misuse their power.

Especially young people who all too often are singled out as easy targets for aggressive police because of their naivety and usually their lack of financial resources to defend against legal action.