Singapore Navy Show

I'm not a fan of military, so I was not that excited to see the show. Anyhow just wanted to go there to take some photos. I haven't used my 18-200 VR lens for a long time, because I have bought two new lens in the last two month, which have much bigger apertures. Now I most often use my new 105 micro lens to take photos of everyday life, especially bugs, flowers, and human beings. I am fond of macro photography as you don't need to ask for permission to take photos of those little guys, and there are a lot of things that you can shoot. I strayed a bit far. As to the navy show, I have fun to take the tour in the transport, which looks the same as the one in civilization. The tour is about 30 minutes. If it is longer than that, I'm afraid I would feel seasickness again. Luckily, It finished soon enough. In the afternoon, a celebrity of Singapore came to perform on the stage, who is an idol of my friend. A lot of photographers went to the front to take pictures, so was I. Here is one

Copy VCD under FreeBSD

First, scsi device support should be enabled by adding atapicam_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf, then do a cdrdao scanbus to get the device number, followed by cdrdao read-cd --device 1,0,0 --driver generic-mmc -v 3 v to copy the vcd file to data.bin. A lot of options are available in the manual page of cdrdao, just read it to choose the relevant options. The options I have used is from http://www.k4ml.com/node/76, with a device number modification, which works for me.

Gnucash slowness solved

After some trial and error, I finally solved the Gnucash startup slow problem. For FreeBSD system, the devel/libltdl15 port should be built with the environment variable libltdl_cv_sys_dlopen_deplibs=yes. Now my Gnucash can be ready within 10 seconds, which is reasonable.

Working with two monitors

Got dual monitors work simultaneously on my system. As my thinkpad has a radeon 7500 card (or 7000? not sure), I can use MergedFB option in controlling the two monitors with xorg. The result is quite good. My xorg.conf is

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/webfonts/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
FontPath "/usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/5.2/SystemFiles/Fonts/Type1/"
FontPath "/usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/5.2/SystemFiles/Fonts/BDF/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "extmod"
Load "glx"
# Load "dri"
Load "dbe"
Load "record"
Load "xtrap"
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
Load "radeon"
Load "drm"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "keyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection


Section "Monitor"
Identifier "MonitorLCD"
VendorName "IBM"
ModelName "Thinkpad"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "MonitorCRT"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
EndSection


Section "Device"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "yes"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "yes"
Option "DDCMode" "yes"
Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS,CRT"
Option "MergedFB" "True"
Option "CRT2Position" "Rightof"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Radeon Mobility M6 LY"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Screen 0
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card1"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Radeon Mobility M6 LY"
BusID "PCI:1:0:1"
Screen 1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "MonitorLCD"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen1"
Device "Card1"
Monitor "MonitorCRT"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
EndSection

some of the lines may not necessary. As it works, I don't bother to remove those trivial lines.