Dial-up Speeds Under Linux

I was not happy with the dial-up speeds I was getting under Linux compared to Windows and finding no simple way of improving it, I just changed the modem initialisation string from "ATZ" to "ATZ0&K3%C3+MS=12,1,33600,56000;" after reading its manual.

This has had an amazingly good effect on the speed - it is not a placebo effect as my wife initially claimed since I could prove it using kppp speed graphs. For the curious, it says "initialise to the default modem profile (Z0), use hardware flow control (&K3), use all compression (%C3), use V.90 (56k) with automode turned on to negotiate the best speeds and only accept a minimum speed of 33600bps and a maximum of 56000bps (+MS=12,1,33600,56000;)".

However, as a user I shouldn't have to tweak things like this - they should automatically have been taken care of in the first place!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

glibc 2.3.4

On my machine, glibc 2.3.4 compiled rather painlessly with GCC 3.4.3 and using Linux kernel 2.6.10 headers. It installed nicely and has been running quite smoothly with all the installed applications that I checked it with. The only "application" that has shown problems with it is the (binary-only) "nvidia" X11 driver. Fortunately, the alternative "nv" driver does work properly, so I'll stick to it till Nvidia updates its driver to work properly with NPTL and 2.6.x kernels.

So why do people bitch so much about glibc?

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Miscellaneous

Returning from my vacation (Goa!), I found that my Hotmail account was thankfully still there despite the deluge of spam that it was being subjected to in the last couple of weeks. Of course, it had exceeded its quota quite early on, so even some genuine messages must have bounced.

Nokia mobile phone users might find this information useful.

glibc 2.3.4 was finally released yesterday. Time to mess with my machine's happiness. ;-)

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

GCC Wiki

Daniel Berlin's GCC Wiki is now officially hosted on GCC's web site. As soon as I came to know of it, I vandalised it with a stub article for GCJ. Others will hopefully add more material to it and make it actually usable by GCJ newbies.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Spam

My Hotmail account with its tiny 2MB of storage is getting spammed real hard these days by some idiot peddling male organ enhancement pills. The situation is so bad that my account exceeds its storage limit overnight and leads to bounced genuine messages!

The messages are routed through different SMTP servers (most likely compromised boxes) and have different "From" and "To" headers. They do however have the same "Subject" and message body on a given day. This makes it well nigh impossible for me to create any filter to weed these out.

I don't know what will happen as I proceed on a week long vacation. :-(
If you wish to reach me, please use my Gmail account instead of the Hotmail account.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)