Where the Heck is Christopher?

REM sleep is an hot, warm, rush. Your body is hugely noisy, with patchy waves of sharp, hot tingles racing through your body like sunspots. At first notice, it is painful, but then you realize it’s wonderful. Your whole body is completely paralyzed. You could no more lift your eyelids than push over a grown redwood, even as the static roars through your body like a thousand freight trains.

Your body is flushed, and hot, like a tremendous fever, or the edge before the peak. You can hear with perfect clarity, but the sound weave into the tapestry of imagination with artful ingenuity.

The light, if any, beats through your closed eyelids with tremendous force, bright and heavy. Your eyes move strongly, sharply, as if having a will of their own.

And then it fades, into the warmer darkness of dreams, inspired by memory and later, imagination.

The Novatel U727 is a dual-mode device. You plug it in, and Ubuntu sees it as a read-only mass storage device (containing Win32 drivers for the device). While cute, this behavior becomes obnoxious when one realizes that once the mass storage device driver claims the device, the serial device driver doesn’t care.

The key, of course, is to tell the mass storage device driver to GTFA. Ergo, ‘eject /dev/sr0′. However, this is not acceptable behavior for a ‘plug-n-play’ solution that will be used by possible techno-phobes.

Enter /etc/udev/rules.d! Create a file called 99-novatel.rules, with the following line:

ATTRS{manufacturer}=="Novatel Wireless Inc.", RUN+="/usr/bin/eject /dev/%k"

Unplug, plug, unplug, plug. Watch dmesg, and bask in the glory of your newfound sense of peace and relaxation. EVDO is indeed all it is cracked up to be.

(Use udevinfo -a -p /dev/sr0 to tweak the udev rule if needed…)

(There are other udev rules for this device on the Internet.  Those did not work with my client’s machine.  This one did, but it may not work on yours.  Also, Ubuntu 8.04 uses airprime to talk to the device.  Sublime!)

Change an element’s parent

ewParent.appendChild(el);

Clear the document selection

function clearSelection() {
   var sel ;
   if(document.selection && document.selection.empty){
     document.selection.empty() ;
   } else if(window.getSelection) {
     sel=window.getSelection();
     if(sel && sel.removeAllRanges)
       sel.removeAllRanges() ;
   }
}