IPCC Report - Game Over!

So, the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is out and it states that scientists are more than 90% certain that climate change is caused by our actions. Let’s think about that. That means that there is a 90% that taking no action now means we will continue to change the climate of the places where we live, change our rainfall, increase sea levels, cause more violent storms and have all the fun of summer temperatures that will make the heatwaves of 2003 seem pleasant in comparison. Most people take out household insurance despite the fact that there is only a much less than 1% chance of anything happening. If you went to the insurance companies and asked to be insured against climate change they wouldn’t do it.

So what are you waiting for? Take personal responsibility for your own actions now. Don’t wait for the politicians - they’re far more concerned about the next election than they are about what will happen in the next fifty years. Lets force the poliuticians to put in place the conditions to reduce global warming AND encourage investment in green technologies. It can be done, and all we have to do is actually think about our actions for a change.

Oh, and if you’re not sure if the science is certain, don’t listen to the media. Particularly not if you live in Washington D.C. Download the report and read it for yourself. It’s only 22, relatively accessible pages and can be downloaded from the BBC here.

Published by Paul on February 2nd, 2007 tagged Environment | Comment now »

An Inconvenient Truth

My wife and I just saw An Inconvenient Truth at the cinema.

If you have any questions about global warming, and want to actually get some facts on the issue rather than dumbed down “opinion”, go see “An Inconvenient Truth”.

The most shocking item for me: Out of hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific articles, zero question the science. Out of the popular press, 53% of the articles question the science. Why do people deny global warming? Because if they admit the truth of it, they would have to do something about it. Now.

For me, it seems that most people are so far from reality that it will take the Greenland ice sheet melting, or one of the Antarctic ice sheets melting, raising sea levels and displacing hundreds of millions of people before the majority start to do something about it. Sigh.

Myself, I’d rather we took action before London and the South-East of England is flooded.

Published by Paul on January 23rd, 2007 tagged Environment | Comment now »

The Sun - 27 ways to go green in 2007

I can’t believe it! I am writing in support of the Sun after all the bad things I usually say about that comic.

In The Sun Online - News: 27 ways to go green in 2007 they tell you 27 easy ways to be more environmentally friendly. Even I only manage 21 of them.

Published by Paul on January 2nd, 2007 tagged Environment, Practical | Comments Off

UK Govt covers up GM contamination

The Independent has an article about the UK government privately assuring UK supermarkets that it’s OK to continue selling rice from the USA that has been contaminated with Genetically Modified rice. So consumers in the UK can now secretly be forced to eat GM rice when they have chosen not to. All to please the American corporations…

Contrast this with the Swiss supermarkets who have withdrawn the rice in question and will not stock it again until the manufacturer puts in testing equipment to ensure this cannot happen again.

Market forces, in this case against GM food, can only work if the consumer (I prefer citizen) has sufficient information to make an informed choice. Hiding the GM status of food is the worst sort of fraud because it hits at individual citizens.

Published by Paul on September 17th, 2006 tagged Environment, Globalisation | Comments Off

Ban the bulbs!

banthebulb.org is a web site dedicated to banning incandescant bulbs. I got rid of all mine nine years ago. Saved money from day one. In those days it took more than a year to get the payback. These days it is more like a month or two. Please change those bulbs - you will love the reduction in your energy bill.

Published by Paul on February 7th, 2006 tagged Environment, Organisations, Practical | Comment now »

My new car - Toyota Prius

One of the coolest tech toys on the planet. The Hybrid Synergy Drive equipped Toyota Prius – half petrol – half electric powered – uses a combination of batteries, electrical motor/generator, and regenerative braking to drastically reduce fuel consumption in a full sized and fully equipped saloon car. My new car looks just like this. It appeals to the geek in me – driving utterly silently in electric-only mode at 130 km/h quietly enough that I can hear the power steering going round corners or just gliding silently round a car park. All this, 0-100km/h in 10.9 seconds and the fuel economy is better than most 1.0 litre small cars. I have never had so much fun being green and saving money :)

Published by Paul on June 5th, 2005 tagged Environment, Practical | Comment now »

The Hidden Connections

Fritjof Capra’s book The Hidden Connections talks about changing the value system underlying the global economy. I can honestly say this book is the most eye-opening book I have ever read.

Read it and you may not despair about mankind’s future.

The Hidden Connections

The Hidden Connections

Published by Paul on March 9th, 2005 tagged Books, Environment, Globalisation | Comment now »

Grahams Law

A special hello to my friend Graham Page who is the one responsible for first writing down “Graham’s Law”. Graham’s law simply states that

“Life gets more complicated”

A subtext added later makes the point that

“this is always true, regardless of how complicated your life already is”

Having moved to Paris, and had to fill out tax returns in French, I can definately vouch for the truth of these sayings. Especially as our next step was the French-Swiss border, where we now live in two currencies, and two tax systems.

Published by Paul on November 11th, 2004 tagged Uncategorized | Comment now »

clik!

The IOMEGA Clik!/PocketZip PC Card Drive under Linux

Clik! Disk

What is the PC Card PocketZip Drive? 

It’s a 40M removable media drive in the shape of a PCMCIA type II
card.  For more information check out
IOMEGA’s web site, even
though they say it isn’t supported under Linux.  Note to readers from
iomega: you are perfectly welcome to contact me. It has recently been renamed
to PocketZip, and the price dropped to $99.

News

Iomega seem to have made a small change in their recent clik
drives which requires a small modification to the driver. If your new clik
drive is not recognised, even though the ide-floppy driver is running you need
to make the following change:

Find the line that says:

if strcmp(drive->id->model, “IOMEGA Clik! 40 CZ ATAPI”) == 0)
{

and change it to

if strncmp(drive->id->model, “IOMEGA Clik”, 11) == 0)
{

This should fix the problem.

Clik! and iPaq.
ipaq with clik!

Ross Reedstrom sent me this cool picture of his PocketZip drive working
in his Compaq iPaq running Linux. Apparently he did have to make a hardware
modification to the sleeve, but the driver “just worked”. However, unlike
laptops, the power supply of the iPaq does notice the drain of the clik!
drive.

Since kernel 2.2.18 I have been the official ide-floppy maintainer and
clik support has been included. If the procedures on this page work for you,
please send me an email. If they
don’t work, REALLY send me an email.

I have created a site at sourceforge for
bug reports etc. Feel free to drop things in there or just email me directly.

So how do I make it work under Linux?

First of all, you need to be running with
kernel version 2.2.14 or later.  Even
this isn’t enough for the drive to just work as there are some functions (like
eject lock) that simply didn’t fit into a drive only 5mm thick.  Then
follow the steps below:

Choose the version of ide-floppy to match your kernel.

ide-floppy.c for
2.2.14
ide-floppy.c for
2.2.15
ide-floppy.c for
2.2.16		 patch for
2.2.16
ide-floppy.c for
2.2.17*UPDATED		 patch for
2.2.17
included in official 2.2.18 onwards none needed
ide-floppy.c for
2.4.0-8 onwards		  
included in official 2.4.9 none needed

Download the ide-floppy.c file (if you take the patch you can work it
out) and copy it to your /usr/src/linux/drivers/block directory.
login as
root
Recompile the kernel including the 

 CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEFLOPPY=m 

option to enable IDE Floppy devices to run as a module.  Doing it
as a module saves the memory when you don’t hves the memory when you don’t have
the card inserted. 

To make life easier and to make it possible to exchange files with PCs
running other OS’s make sure you have VFAT support enabled in the kernel
too. 

Use your favourite kernel recompilation method.

To compile the driver type 

 make modules ; make modules_install

If neccessary, reboot

Make sure the PCMCIA card services package is running.  

 cardmgr

Go to a virtual console screen (i.e. not X, you can leave X running)

Insert the Clik! PC Card, with a disk inside it.
You should see
something like…

 ide1 at 0×180-0×187, 0×386 on irq 15   hdc: hdc4  
hdc: hdc4

This is great!  Now you just need to make a mount point and mount
the disk.  Notice that just like ZIP disks, IOMEGA use partion 4 (nobody
knows why this is so).  To make a mount point type

 mkdir /mnt/clik

or whatever you prefer as your mount  point.  Now you can
mount the disk by typing

 mount -t vfat /dev/hdc4 /mnt/clik

You should now be able to list the contents of the disk with

 ls -l /mnt/clik

Copying files etc should now all work too.

You should probably put the following line in /etc/fstab

 /dev/hdc4   /mnt/clik   
vfat     noauto, user  0 0

If you are using KDE you can download a
mount/unmount icon to put on your
desktop.  I have been sent a couple of icon files for
GNOME, a PNG
and an XPM. Thanks to Josh Jones and Giuseppe Castagna
for those.

Inserting/Removing Disks

Just like floppy disks there is no hardware protection against removing
a disk without unmounting it.  IF YOU DO THIS YOU WILL PROBABLY LOSE
DATA.  Always 

umount /mnt/clik

before removing a disk. Another way to handle DOS/Win disks is to use
the mtools package (type man mtools to find out more)

Caveats, Disclaimers, things to be aware of

ts, Disclaimers,
things to be aware of

The patches to the driver are free software, covered by the GPL. 
Use of this software may well void your warranty with IOMEGA.  Certainly I
make no claims about the perfomance of this software other than that it works
for me.  Use at your own risk. 

Having said that I will be happy to accept
comments from users of this
driver. 

APM support

Everything seems to work fine. As of 2.2.17b you no longer need to leave
the disk in the drive

Battery life

I did not notice any real change in battery life by having the drive
inserted, even with a disk mounted.  The power saving circuitry in the
drive seems to work fine.

FIXED from 2.2.17b Booting, Returning from
hibernation or standby with the drive in but no disk gives a problem for
now.  The way to fix it is to do a cardctl eject n  where n is
the PCMCIA slot your card is in, insert a disk, then do a cardctl insert n
to have the system recognise the disk. The same thing happens when you
insert the card without a disk inside.

Toshiba Libretto 100/110 CT

The drive only works in slot 0, the bottom PCMCIA slot. I guess this is
something to do with the Cardbus stuff in slot 1.

Things to do

Acknowledgements

I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.  This would
not have been possible without the excellent (and readable) code from Andre
Hedrick (the Linux IDE Guy) and Gadi Oxman (the former Linux IDE Floppy
guy).  Thanks also go to Grant Stockly, a FreeBSD guy who got the parallel port version
of the Clik! working under *BSD and gave me the confidence to buy my drive, and
Avi Freedman and Jeff Clement who were brave enough to test Alpha version
drivers from a guy they’d never met.

Thanks also to all the people who
emailed me saying that it worked for them.

Good Luck!
 

Paul Bristow
 

Published by Paul on February 24th, 2002 tagged Linux, Open Source | Comments Off

IDE Floppy

The IDE-Floppy Driver Documentation for Linux

Who am I and what is this all about?

My name is Paul Bristow and I am/was (no new ATAPI devices for a while now) the maintainer of the ide-floppy driver for the linux kernel. Please note that for me, this is very much a part-time effort and often I am travelling so it may sometimes be a few days before you get a response. My portable linux development system is the reason I got into this driver stuff - the Clik! drive didn’t work when I got it. If you want to know more about me click on the “about me” link at the top of this page.

You will find the up to date version of this document at http://paulbristow.net/linux/idefloppy.html

Here you will find documentation about the ide-floppy driver in the linux kernel. Not much at the moment, but hang in there. This driver does not deal with USB drives, parallel port drives or SCSI drives, only ATAPI drives that plug in to your IDE controller.

What’s New

Not a lot. There are no recent new ATAPI floppy devices.

Kernels 2.2.18 and up, 2.4.9 and up, and all useable 2.6.x versions include click! support.

Which drives does it support?

Note to manufacturers - if you have a new device and it works please let me know. Likewise if it doesn’t work feel free to contact me for advice.

Handy Links

Frequently Asked Questions

I can’t mount a ZIP/Clik!/PocketZip disk

the syntax for mounting a windows-formatted (or new) Zip disk is

mount -t vfat /dev/hdc4 /mnt/zip

where hdc is the device your drive is found as,
and /mnt/zip is where you normally mount zip disks
the 4 above is really important as ZIP disks are formatted as partition 4.

I can’t mount an LS-120 disk

the syntax for mounting a windows-formatted (or new) LS-120 disk is

mount -t vfat /dev/hdc /mnt/floppy

where hdc is the device your drive is found as, and /mnt/floppy is where you normally mount ls120 disks. Note that superdisks use the entire device by default and not a partition (unlike Zip drives above).

Using a CD-RW and an IDE Floppy device simultaneously

I have seen in some newsgroups the advice that you simply cannot run an ide-floppy device and the ide-scsi emulation needed to make CD-RW drives writeable at the same time. This is not (generally) true. What you need to do depends on your booting method, but basically, in either /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst where you append the line

hdx=ide-scsi

add the command

hdy=ide-floppy

as well.

I can’t compile your ide-floppy.c files

If you are running a kernel from 2.2.14 to 2.2.17 that was supplied from your distribution (RedHat, Slackware etc) and you get lots of errors when you run make compiling ide-floppy.c, you need to find the line in ide-floppy.c that says

#include "ide.h"

and change it to

#include "linux/ide.h"

or vice versa.

Why do I need an updated version?

Most people don’t. Only if you have hardware for which support is under development do you need to download any source code. Currently the only drive which I know some people need new code is the Iomega Clik! drive

How Can I Help?

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be an expert programmer to help make Linux better. One of the things that I can’t do is to test the ide-floppy driver in lots of different hardware configurations, but you can! Telling me of things that do or don’t work can really help. As I learn what sort of things people have problems with I can create documentation that is actually useful.

On the other hand, if you already have some documentation for the ide-floppy driver, and don’t mind it being incorporated in an official HOWTO, with credits, then feel free to send it to me.

Regards,

Paul Bristow

Published by Paul on February 2nd, 2002 tagged Linux, Open Source | Comments Off