Posts for May 2006
Google Open House
19th May, 2006
Tonight, Google held an Open House for people to go along to and help welcome in their new offices in Sydney. It was mainly a night of networking and getting to know people in Google Sydney offices.
It was a great night, and I must thank Google for opening up their doors and putting great food and drink, even if at times, it was a tad squishy :-)
I met some of the people behind Google Maps, as well as other projects, and was quite interesting to hear how passionate they are about their work. Some of the Google Desktop stuff, which I haven't played with, due to it being Windows centric mostly, looked rather impressive, and would be great if there could be Linux versions of it (However Beagle is trying to do something similar for the time being).
It is also worth noting, that it was mentioned that Google Maps now as of tonight (18th of May), has maps of Australia in it, not only satelite imagery. See this map of Sydney, for example. It doesn't yet let you do searches on landmarks tho. Coming soon I was told.
Having the ability there, to be able to quiz a Google employee on the work environment, and culture, was excellent, and really goes to prove how ultimately different the Google workplace is from elsewhere. I did also get to ask around about the news of the Google internships/university programs, and will be hoping to follow up contact with some people about that very soon.
At the end of the night, as we were leaving, everyone got a Google goodie bag, which contained, a Google flashing badge (as seen here), a pen, some advertising flyers for Jobs @ Google, a pad of Google Post-It notes. We also each got given a Google Open House T-Shirt.
So to recap:
- A fun night was had
- Met great people, google and non-google people
- Got some cool stuff
Hopefully someone will post up pictures of the night soon, and I can edit this article so have some relevant pictures ;-)
[Any typos, mistakes or things that don't make sense are because I was too-tired while typing this out :p]
Edit: I must say the shirts the google employees were wearing, were great! Basically it was the google logo, on black, with an image of a meat pie with peas, potato and gravy on it. As mentioned by one of the Google guys, it sure beats an image of a Kangaroo, Koala, Opera House or Harbour Bridge to represent Australia.
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Add CommentAcer Aspire 1694 and ACPI
So, 3 months in from purchasing my laptop, and I finally decided that i would have another shot at trying to fix ACPI problems with it. This being the fact the battery always reports dead by default, while this statement is conclusively not true (the laptop itself tells me it is full ;-)
So, to resolve this, it requires a custom DSDT file to be read in, and used instead of the vendor supplied one. To do this, required some gentoo patching, with the DSDT initrd patch. Basically this allows you to put a custom DSDT that is read on boot, from the initrd (or more so, the initramfs).
The kernel patching, and recompiling part wasn't overly hard, as the patch for my kernel applied cleanly to gentoo-sources. Recompiling to simply enable support for RAM disk and DSDT from initramfs was painless.
The hardest part in the task, was the creation of the initramfs image. While some other distributions seem to provide a mkinitramfs application, gentoo does not, only a mkinitrd. So this created some problems, with me trying to work out how to create a initramfs manually. In the end I found the solution by emerging media-gfx/splashutils, which contains a script called splash_geninitramfs, which gave me the answer on how to do it. For notes sake, here is how it is done.
Put all your files to be on the initramfs in a directory, for example ~/disk Then, while in directory of the files (~/disk), type the following command:
find . | cpio --quiet --dereference -o -H newc | gzip -9 > ../initramfs.img
From there, you will find your new initramfs image in the parent directory named initramfs.img.
After that, just copy initramfs.img to /boot, and add to your grub.conf
initrd /initramfs.img
And there, now I have a working Battery meter, so i know when the battery is going to go flat in future :-)
Note: These notes were how it would be done on gentoo, some distros might have a easier way of doing it (can it get much easier tho?! ;-)