I just spent the better part of my afternoon figuring out what the hell was wrong with my girlfriend's Creative ZEN V Plus MP3 player. It froze yesterday and hasn't been able to connect to our computers since. Everytime she turned it on, it said Rebuilding Library, but it normally only does that during the boot immediately after it froze and has to be manually reset. It wouldn't connect in Linux, and in Windows the obnoxious balloon tips would report "MTP device found" again and again. In the Device Manager, it reported "Code 10: Device cannot start." Well, we finally found a fix.
I've been involved with X.Org for a few months now. I want to increase my involvement, and at the same time learn the ropes. I also need something to do this summer–and that's why I've applied to the Google Summer of Code.
My current desktop has served me quite well for nearly four years. Its Sempron 2800+ certainly doesn't compete with Phenoms or Core 2's in terms of performance, but what really bothered me about it was its lack of power management support. By some arbitrary decision, AMD chose to disable Cool'n'Quiet on Semprons <3000+. I've been vaguely interested in upgrading the processor for a while, but options are rather limited. It's not worth it to upgrade to a faster Sempron. Socket 754 Athlon 64s use quite a bit more power and mobile Athlon 64s still cost well over one hundred dollars. Socket 754 Turions exist, but I couldn't find any mention of compatibility with my ABIT NV8. I figured for eight dollars it was well worth the gamble, and bought a mobile Turion ML-34 on eBay to give it a try and to give my desktop a final upgrade.
As I was testing Radeon Kernel Mode-setting on Alpha, I casually started a conversation with Jesse Barnes, an Intel Graphics developer. I recalled that he was an ex-SGI employee, and being interested in SGI computers myself decided to ask him a question or two. What I learned about SGI absolutely floored me.