Microtouch Touchscreen configuration and calibration

Since i had to deal with a few touchscreens at work, i'd like to summarize my experiences with linux' touchscreen capabilities, or better yet Xorg's touchpad support.
The latest touchscreen i got my hands on was integrated into a terminal-pc of the company ict, which is a german company that is specialized on these kinds of terminals. All i could tell from the looking inside the machine's designer case was that it's touchscreen was connected vie RS232 on Com2 and that the touchscreen's manifacturer was propably Microtouch Systems, a company that (at least by now) belongs to 3M. Since the terminal came with Windows 2000 preinstalled and preconfigured, i was able to check further information on the touchscreen form its Windows driver. The Touchscreen was indeed a serially connected Microtouch device with firmware version 6.0. Another quite important fact was the serial port configutation for the touchscreen, namely the baudrate of 19200.

Enabling the internal microphone of a Lenovo Thinkpad T61

This time i'm going to talk about something that bugged me for quite some time. Since i got my new shiny ThinkPad T61 and installed a fresh Debian unstable (or sidux, but who cares, really?!) on it, i never got to make the internal microphone to work. This is especially bugging, since lately i'm "forced" to use skype a lot, and skype is not much fun if your communocation partner can't hear you while you hear him loud and clear. Since shouting at the two little microphone holes on the T61 palm rest didn't help either, i decided to take a deeper look into it. At first i was trying to fiddle around in the skype settings, because my naivity let me think that it has to be the fault of the evil closed-source software. Despite skype neing crappy in a lot of ways, this particular problem was not caused by skype.
The T61 has an Intel ICH8 HD Audio device, which is suported by alsa's snd-hda-intel module. So maybe other notebooks with the same sound device might have the same problem. Googling around for a bit i found out that some T60 users report the same problem. So it was either a driver problem or some misconfiguration from me.

Splashy faulting with Error -3, wtf?!

If have a long running Debian installation and once get bored with its, well lets call it conservative, looking boot process, you might, just like me, decide that you definitly need a nice splash animation for the boot process. In Debian world, this basically comes down to two alternatives: usplash and splashy. The latter being the more modern choice, a decision was made and installed pretty fast:

aptitude install splashy splashy-themes

Alright, so now i just needed to set a variable in /etc/defaults/splashy:

ENABLE_INITRAMFS=1

Blogspot vs. blogging framework on own web server

After trying out a few blogging frameworks on my own webserver, i got tired of constantly reading about security issues of basically any blogging framework. So i decided to let google host my blog. Basically, i'm here out of laziness.