My flight back from Tokyo was delayed by 17 hours, which I had to spend at the airport gate, where there's no restaurant. American Airlines didn't tell us the flight was delayed until the next day in time for us to book a hotel (they were all full), although they knew at least two hours earlier, since the pilot and crew had left, luggage and all. Other flights to the US took off after ours was canceled because of the typhoon, including at least one American Air flight with a similar aircraft. I value honesty very highly, and am not sure I want to continue flying with American Airlines, despite the extra room in economy and the laptop power outlet.

I'm thinking of offering a reward for anyone who can fix X11 (x11.org) with an ATI graphics card in a laptop so that it can switch to and from an external monitor without restarting X or rebooting, just like Windows 98 manages so well. Maybe I'll start by offering a pair of socks. Black ones. Argyle if you like. It's such a pain to speak at conferences and when you need to restart X in the break before your session the AV person sneers, "oh, a Linux user, they always have problems". It's a worse pain at workshops when you can't suddenly decide to project without losing all your windows. And XFree86 3.x used to manage to switch just fine on the same hardware.

Someone ordered a CD of some of my pictures scanned from old books so I'm finishing off the images they requested before sending off the CD. It's making me wonder if I could make the GIMP faster by hand-optimising the convolution filter code. But it's hard to believe it isn't already pretty well tweaked. A convolution filter on a 5,000 x 4,000 pixel image takes too long for my comfort!

Thinking about my Web site reminds me to say that after a couple of people requested copies of my Web server analysis scripts, I've registered a sourceforge place to distribute them and maybe let others hack at them too. I'll post details later. The scripts give both a more "holistic" overvew than most others, and also a more useful detailed view than others I've seen, and were designed to help build Web sites up from (say) a few hundred hits a day to a few thousand.

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A couple of specific responses:

haruspex, you can try in Linux to add net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time=300 to /etc/sysctl.conf -- this fixes a symptom in which the router forgets NAT associations after 15 minutesor so of idle time. Another common problem is with MTU, and setting that to 1400 with ifconfig may help.

raph, you are often in our thoughts.

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