December 16, 2009

Times Person of the Year

This morning, the first thing I heard when I got in the car was a report from NPR about Ben Bernanke being named as Time's Person of the Year. My immediate response was the same as when I had heard that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. "Really?"

As I sat, listening to the litany of blessings Mr. Bernanke has bestowed upon the whole of Western Civilization -- including navigating one of the most difficult financial eras in history. Okay, I'll admit that Poor Old Ben inherited something of a shit-storm, but in the same token, I don't think that the "landing" of this economy has been as well as it could have been. Moreover, the whole "bailout" is counter to everything we hold sacred as a free-market/enterprise society.

If I were the Bernanke, how would I have done it? From the bottom-up.

There are an estimated 308,000,000 people in America. Statistics have shown that only about a half of those are tax paying persons. So, if you took the $8.5 TRILLION dollars, and distributed it evenly among the 154,000,000 or so tax paying persons... we would have each received a check for $55k, roughly.

So, how is it that giving everyone a check for $55k would solve anything? Well, two points:
1) most people would be depositing that money into their bank accounts. This would bolster the balance sheets of the banks, thus fixing the "corporate paper market" issue.
2) most people would be spending that money straight-away. I don't think I'm unreasonable in speculating that a LOT of people would use said money for one of two purposes: to buy a home, or a car. Either of these would result in solving the problems with the housing and auto industries... except... not enough people would be buying American cars to sufficiently save GM and its various brands.

That brings me to the second half of my diatribe against Bernanke: government taking ownership of what was heretofore privately or publicly (as in stock-market, not Gov't) owned companies is just flat-out wrong. If the company sucks so bad that it can't survive without being on Federal Life-support, then it shouldn't be allowed to persist! Let it die and the void it leaves will be filled by new businesses that are better able to adapt to the changing world, provided that the niche left is genuine!

Long story short, Bernanke deserves the Person of the Year as much as Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize... not one damn bit. If you ask me, the Obama administration is using its media-savvy and clout to effectively buy these designations to bolster their image in the public eye and to gloss-over the fact that they have done basically nothing as we approach the one year anniversary of the administration.

December 15, 2009

console-kit-daemon

Periodically, I pop-open `htop` and see a slug of threads for `console-kit-daemon`. I've tried to find what the heck this thing does, and failing that I've tried removing the package... problem is, its required by everything I actually use. After reading an interesting bug report on console-kit, I've implemented a fix suggested there: created /usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon to contain simply:

#!/bin/sh
exit 0;


This has solved my console-kit-daemon glut, but has no appreciable impact otherwise. Oh well. I'm still trying to figure out why Ubuntu 9.10 is such a dog on this box -- UrT and a variety of other apps are just absurdly slow, for no apparent reason. :-(

November 23, 2009

Awesome WM

Its a well-known fact, among my friends, that I am a UI-bigot. That is, I think roughly 99% of user interfaces are pure garbage. Its not really a transcendent fault of user interfaces as a whole, but rather the awkward puberty they've gone through over the last twenty years. So, it may come as no surprise (to my friends) that I've found my forray into the Awesome Window Manager (heretoafter referred to as simply, "awesome") something of a blessing. Awesome, for those that don't know, is window manager for X11 that defies the conventional wisdom of window managers and forces all windows to one of a few fixed layouts.

Tiling window managers, such as awesome, started out as a joke. Some whit was flaming a news-group about a drug-induced coding frenzy in which the window manager was simply a distraction. Out of that satirical post rose a breed of window managers called "tiling wm's". They are more than a bit obtuse to the average user, and at first blush I think I was even put off by the superficial neanderthal-like clubbing Awesome did to my windows. Having now run Awesome for a week and some days, I have concluded that awesome is in fact probably my favorite window manager of all time.

Granted, I may still be in the honey-moon phase with this thing, but let me tell you why Awesome is awesome:
  • No frilly window decorations cluttering my desktop
  • No wasted space for panels, widgets and whatsits
  • Configurable to a ridiculous degree (more on that in a moment)
  • FAST AS HELL
  • VERY light weight
Those benefits being what they are, Awesome is not without its foibles. Most notably, Awesome's configuration. There are two reasons Awesome's configuration sucks:
  1. the DEFAULT configuration file is over 300 lines.
  2. your configuration is written in LUA.
Taking each of those in turn...

No configuration file should be 300 lines. Honestly. Consider that you can configure MySQL, Apache, AND Postfix -- TOGETHER -- in fewer than 300 lines, it is a travesty that Awesome's config is so vast. Proponents of Awesome's configuration system say that its complexity is the price for its flexibility... while that may be, its still unnecessarily complex for anyone short of a supreme power-user.

Who has ever heard of LUA before? Certainly not I. LUA isn't even on the top 20 languages most programmed... more people have used SMALL than LUA. While LUA is fairly trivial to pickup (hell, I learned big chunks of it today) its still unreasonable to require a user to learn a whole programming language and various API's just to configure their window manager.

SO, that said, I think the good out-weighs the bad and Awesome is Awesome.

(P.S. I am afraid Awesome suffers the same plight as Enlightenment in that its principle author(s) are ego-maniacs with little concern for fixing bugs vs. adding features. Oh well, I used E for years despite Rasterman's obtuse and sporadic personality.)

November 04, 2009

Compiz + UrT == FAIL

Apparently, I'm not crazy. Shocking, I know, but I've found others who have experienced frustrations while running opengl apps on top of compiz. Let me back up a second... I play Urban Terror. A lot. I've noticed, lately, that my FPS (Frames Per Second) has been HIDEOUS -- like around 30-40. This is a big problem, because I am not accustomed to playing at such crappy rates. I had noticed, periodically, that my FPS would be MUCH better, and slowly I'd correlated this to times when compiz had died when I launched UrT. SO, now when I play, I launch UrT, launch a terminal, and use the terminal to `killall compiz` so I can get good FPS when I play.

If anyone else is having this issue and has come-up with a better solution, please let me know.

September 11, 2009

Remembering 9/11

I remember almost everything about 9/11. I was in Aurora, CO, at the Hampton Inn. I was in Denver for advanced training on the Cisco PIX. I was in the hotel lobby getting breakfast for my wife. I remember walking in to the area where breakfast was being served and was taken by the herd of people standing, silently, watching the television. I saw the first tower burning. I asked someone next to me, "what the hell happened?" He said, "a plane hit one of the Trade Center towers." As I stood there, I watched a second plane fly in to the second tower. I was stunned. I brought some breakfast up to Amanda and told her to turn on the television. I spent the next several hours at the training center with my classmates, trolling the web for information.

That night, Amanda and I took John with us to the 16th St. Mall to walk around and find some food. There were cops in riot gear. Cops in fatigues with machine-guns. Cop cars. Armored personnel carriers. It was surreal.

Now, eight years later, I watched some of the footage that's since become part of our cultural awareness, and had my kids watch it too. I think its important that we all remember that the preservation, and advancement, of Western Civilization is essential not only to ensuring we maintain our current place in the world, but also to ensure that we hand our children a bright future.

August 25, 2009

ESXi file transfer woes

SO, I recently built an ESXi server. Its nothing special, but she's got it where it counts. A comedy of errors has unfolded as I've tried to upload even a single ISO to the system. It shouldn't be this hard.

First, I tried upload images using the built-in function in vSphere. Unfortunately, VirtualBox OSE so grossly underperformed at this task that the uploads wouldn't complete, ever. For example, I began the 650MB upload of the OpenFiler virtual appliance at 2030, woke-up the next day and the session had STILL not completed. This is over my LAN, not the Internet. That's absurd!

Next, I enabled SSH and tried to use SFTP to upload. For some bizarre reason, I couldn't use the CLI sftp client, so I turned again to my VirtualBox XP install. WinSCP is a brilliant piece of code. It really is. And I suspect it would have worked marvelously if I weren't running it on the feable IP stack made available to it via VirtualBox. As it were, it couldn't maintain a session long enough to transfer even the 650MB virtual appliance for OpenFiler. :-(

At this point, I considered throwing in the towel on the whole network transfer gig and using DVD's to get my data up to the ESXi server, but that would've been too easy. SO, I enabled FTP on my ESXi server using the glorious instructions over at vm-help.com. Now, I can FTP files from my native Linux install, and its blazing fast, like it bloody should be!

The real beauty of all of this is that my foray into ESXi was prompted by my efforts to build a virtualized Hackint0sh. I had heard tell that it was possible using VMware Server, but I didn't have a whole lot of luck with that... so I used a Jedi mind-trick to convince myself that the logical choice was to build a full-out ESXi server. I think it was probably just an excuse.

Now that I'm finally able to upload to the box without serious difficulty, I know I'm not going to have the time to tackle the original Hackint0sh project because a friend sent me a pre-installed Hackint0sh! w00t!

August 21, 2009

...and this is why I'm Catholic

When I was looking for answers from the Methodist church about all the things I was wondering about as a teenager, I was dismayed to find that their official church doctrine (if you can call it that) would on one hand condemn a thing and on the other bless it. This was true of homosexuality, divorce, abortion, and more. That is what lead me to look elsewhere for spiritual direction... I sought something that was congruent, something consistent both with itself and nature.

When I looked at the Lutheran church and found it to be lacking in congruity, in very much the same way the Methodist church was. Now, the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) has formally acknowledged that homosexuality is not only fine, but its fine to have practicing homosexuals as clergy. This view is inconsistent with Scriputre, Tradition and Nature.

And this is why I'm Catholic -- because there is nothing in the Catholic Church that is in conflict with Scripture, Tradition or Nature.

August 08, 2009

Pulse Audio == Pure Fail

I don't know what future gains Canonical hopes to see from deploying Pulse Audio in Ubuntu, but I'll tell you this much: I've removed it and won't re-install it until every comment I see about it is positive. Pulse has been nothing but a pure pain in the ass for the last week. Finally, today, I removed every pulse-related package from my system and switched back to ALSA. `apt-get remove pulseaudio*` DO IT!

And what's more, lets write to Canonical and tell them that Pulse Audio is garbage.

July 29, 2009

Pulse Audio 'glitch-free' in Karmic

If you're running Ubuntu Karmic Koala (the up-coming 9.10 testing release) and you recently did a dist-upgrade, you may have noticed your sound is fubar. I did lastnight, and fairly quickly that all was not right with my sound.

I did the normal trouble-shooting things (going through sound properties, making sure the modules were loading, etc.) and nothing changed. SO, I did some googling and came-up empty-handed. As a last ditch, I joined #ubuntu+1 on Freenode and was instructed me to enable the 'glitch-free' setting in Pulse. This enables pulse to dynamically load modules as needed.

I made the change to 'glitch-free' and logged-off and back on again and sound worked for everything! w00t!

To enable 'glitch-free', you need to edit /etc/pulse/default.pa and search for the line that ends "tsched=0" and change the "0" to a "1".

One other note is that under the "Sound" dialog there is a new tab called "Applications" which allows you to adjust the volume levels PER APPLICATION! This is brilliant, but I believe the default mode is for applications to be muted. SO, if after enabling 'glitch-free' you're still having issues, try looking there and adjusting the volume levels for the app in question.

July 09, 2009

Three Cheers for Rep. Pete King!!!

I watched this video, and can't agree more with Rep. King. Michael Jackson was a dirt-bag, that he has been deified by the media is a true testament to the state of our society. What a lot of crap. To answer Rep. King's question, "would you leave your child or grandchild alone with Michael Jackson?" I have a resounding, "NO." The man was a pedo and a FREAK. In my opinion, we should have had a national day of celebration that he is no longer preying on the youth of our nation.

June 24, 2009

Taste of New York

Today, a couple co-workers and I went to Taste of New York (TNY) for lunch. Its a new pizza joint in down-town Sioux Falls. Ordinarily, such trips as this are not worthy of writing about, however today it was.

In an effort to avoid the painfully unnecessary details that preceded the events that ultimately transpired, I'll give you two key pieces of detail that are relevant: Brian's cheese pizza was burnt, and I was in the restroom when the first offensive was launched.

Picking-up with me returning from the bathroom, the mood at the table had clearly changed since I had left. I asked what was up, and Gochal said that he'd explain later, that he just wanted to leave. SO, we all got up, and started to the door.

As I approached the counter to settle our tab, the manager called out to Brian, who was leaving the building peacefully at this point, and said, "The next time you want a free lunch, go to the food pantry!"

I was stunned. Totally didn't see any of this coming.

Brian, understandably upset, shot back, "are you f'ing kidding me?" Which was all the manager needed to launch into another salvo of back-and-forth with Brian. Ultimately, Brian left saying, "good luck with your next job, 'cause you won't be here long."

Having not yet paid, I was waiting awkwardly with Brock while the manager fumbled with my card. This was the point at which things got VERY uncomfortable for me.

Brock asked if she had any tooth-picks, she did not, and was very quick (and rude) to tell him. At this point, Brock says nothing.

As she continued to ring-up our bill, and riff against Brian to Brock and I.

"Your friend has a problem," she said at one point.

After several of her salvos, Brock finally pipes-up and says, "I think two people may have acted inappropriately today." He said this in a very non-confrontational tone, the kind of tone you use when you're trying to correct your grandmother about how old you are.

She proceeded to riff against Brian and Brock, at which point Brock and I simultaneously turned to each other and said, "maybe only one person."

She finished taking our money and promptly asked both Brock and I to leave.

I have never, in all my life, witnessed customer service like this. Not only did she alienate a customer who had a legitimate grievance, but proceeded to alienate two paying customers who had DONE NOTHING WHATSOEVER.

I will never be back there again.

June 22, 2009

Notify ODS command-line utility

Linux has this nifty little notification system that is grossly under utilized. According the the folks over at Canonical, they're working to make most applications support this handy little interface called Notify OSD. I wanted to leverage this facility to notify me when snort had triggered on something, so I wrote a pynotify -- small python script to allow me to interface with Notify OSD, from the command-line and/or scripts.

The potential here is enormous. If you have scripts that run in the background, but that you need to know when they're done, you can just call this little puppy and get notified in an ultra cool way. Feel free to mangle this into other things. It should be pretty straight-forward.

wajig

I recently came-across wajig while looking for a way to show the suggested packages for an installed package. The short story on wajig is that it is basically an abstraction layer for various apt and dpkg utilities... and its works very similar to apt-get except has additional directives that allow you to do things like install the suggested packages for a package, or install the recommended packages, or install both the recommended and suggested packages, or find out what package a file belongs to, etc. Its very slick, check it out!

June 15, 2009

TrueCrypt -- OpenSource File Encryption Goodness

I've been working with a number of customers on data security needs lately, and it occurred to me that I haven't been practicing what I preach about data encryption. SO, today I jumped in with both feet and installed TrueCrypt, an open-source file cryptography utility that will help me keep my data safe should my laptop be lost or stolen.

June 08, 2009

D-Day & Patriotism

You may have noticed on Saturday that there were a lot of flags being flown. You may have even known why they were out. In case you didn't, Saturday was the 65th anniversary of D-Day -- the day that Allied forces landed on the European main land to re-take the continent from Germany. Today I saw an interview with Arthur Seltzer, who was one of the thousands of brave men who landed at Normandy. Arthur's story is compelling beyond words. No words I could write-here would do it justice. Please watch the Interview with Mr. Seltzer here.

When you're done watching, have your kids watch it. Have your parents watch it. Have all your friends watch it. Show it to complete strangers.

We - as a nation - fail, too often, to appreciate the profundity of the sacrifices made for our Freedom. And while I'm seldom the gushing patriotic type I'm damn proud to be an American. For all our cultural foibles and political faults, this is still the greatest nation on the planet. God Bless America!

May 13, 2009

OH NOES!!!11 CREDIT FRAUD!!!

I got an email today from Bank of America saying they had detected fraudulent activity on a credit card I have with them. I deleted it. I got THREE MORE. I decided to check in to it. Being the paranoid android that I am, I didn't dare follow any of the links in the emails (all of which went to some subdomain at bankofamerica.com) and instead went directly to the BoA website, logged in, and was greeted with a message that my account couldn't be viewed because it was currently locked. They provided a number to call. I called...

They wanted my social security number, right off the bat. After considerable jockeying (because I wouldn't give them my account number or SSN), we authenticated one another and they informed me that someone had tried to place a $1500 order at mypolicestore.com using my card (the not so subtle irony of fraud at a store for cops is not lost on me.) Fortunately, BoA rejected the transaction, and triggered the current status.

Now, this incident -- alone -- wouldnt' typically be enough to scare me, but earlier today I had gotten a statement for my corporate AmEx card. The problem there is that I don't have a corporate AmEx card. TWO incidents in one day? Uh oh. SO, I promptly went to the Big Three and initiated credit freezes on my credit profile. I've also put a notice in with my other credit card vendors.

I'm worried that my ID may have been jacked. That would suck. This is the last thing I need to be dealing with right now.

May 12, 2009

Karmic Koala

Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) is only a couple of weeks old, and already I'm on to Karmic Koala (9.10). I upgraded, initially, because the goons rolling kernels in 9.04 managed to release TWO kernel packages within two weeks, both of which broke sound from when I was running 9.04-pre-release... so, I was hoping Karmic would have the new 2.6.30 kernel so I could have sound again. This morning, I saw that some kind soul had committed 2.6.30 to the Karmic tree, and my path was set. This has not been an effort for the faint of heart.

After accidentally interrupting an `apt-get dist-upgrade`, I had to hand-salvage my apt-get database by hand removing most of KDE (which is fine, it was there mostly as a novelty anyways). Once that was done, a quick reboot followed by an `apt-get dist-upgrade` brought the system back to a working state, including the new 2.6.30 kernel. w00t! And do you know what? Sound works. Holy crap.

Now, the real crux of my entry today is to document (for myself and others) how to prevent rouge kernel upgrades from fubaring their system. SO, what I've done is mangled /etc/apt/preferences to include the following lines:

Package: linux-image*
Pin: version 2.6.30-2.3
Pin-Priority: 1001


With those in place, no careless kernel commit is going to trash my box. Admittedly, upgrading my kernel will now be a much more manual process, but honestly, how often does that NEED to be done?

April 27, 2009

Slow Open/Save Dialogs in GTK

I've been running Jaunty (beta and RC's) for several weeks. A couple of weeks ago the open and save dialogs began loading VERY slowly. I've been researching this particular issue and have come across some interesting issues related to the 'tracker' package and corrupted tracker databases. To remedy, I have uninstalled tracker via

sudo apt-get remove tracker --purge

and whacked my local tracker database via

rm -rf ~/.local/share/tracker


This seems to have helped some. It'd be nice if part of the install scripts of this package would remove and rebuild the tracker cache so this crap doesn't happen.

April 04, 2009

Home-built DVR

On Friday, the cable guys were out to install our cable service. This is part of our on-going effort to cut costs around the house. The numbers are pretty clear: spend $175 to buy a tuner card, remote and cable modem while cutting the $9/mo for DVR service, $30/mo. extra that Dish cost, and the $5/mo. charge for "renting" a cable modem... Basically a four to five month ROI, with a first year savings of about $310. That's pretty impressive. To accomplish this I used my IBM ThinkCenter S50, a Hauppauge PVR-150, Anywhere GP-IR02BK MCE remote, new 160gb hard disk, and Yahoo! Go TV. This setup is SLICK. The hardware is solid (as near as my limited experience can tell) and the software is easy enough my Mom could use it!!! The best part is, is going to save me big dollars over the next two years.

March 31, 2009

Strawberries, shrimp and beans, these are just a few of my favorite things...

Strawberries. I like strawberries. I also like shrimp. Beans are most tastey, even the frozen variety. In addition to being things that I like, these disparate foods have something else in common... they found themselves floating in my toilet tonight. How? Let me tell you.

This strange stew of frozen goods, along with pop cicles, bratwurst, porkchops, bread, frozen peas, and a variety of other things was discovered, by me, while making dinner. The Queen had asked for frozen corn to be the vegetable for dinner tonight, and my search for said corn lead me to the chest freezer on our landing, which in turn lead to the discovery that our freezer had been off for several day.

There is nothing in life -- not even children -- that can prepare you to handle a discovery such as this. The combination of smells, sights, and sounds is enough to make even Chuck Norris sick to his stomach. Suffice to say, I did not relish the job of removing the contents, but I knew my wife wouldn't/couldn't, so I did the right thing and cleaned it out.

I pray that none of you ever experience such a thing as this.

March 23, 2009

Transformational Thinking

Over the weekend I was talking with Dad about technology. The conversation started with a simple question about my Blackberry, "Is it a phone with the Internet, or the Internet with a phone?" Seems simple enough, and at first blush maybe even a bit trite, banal and irrelevant. However, I would posit that it is a highly relevant question.

Consider it like this: if its the Internet with a phone, who holds control? The people. If its a phone with the Internet, who holds the control? The service providers.

The transformational question is simply this: what would it take to shift the paradigm away from cell phones to truly pocket computers with sip capabilities? The answer, incidentally, is fairly short: a nation-wide wireless network.

How hard would it be to build a nation-wide wireless network? Lets run some simple numbers with some basic assertions. Lets assume that the whole country is flat and that buildings aren't an issue. Lets also assume we'd be building this network on existing technology -- lets use a basic ProCurve 530AP as an example. We have an effective radius of 100m. The effective coverage of a single access-point then is Ï€*100², or 31416m² or 31km². Figuring that the continental US is 8,080,464.25 km²... you'd need about 260,000 access-points. Which, incidentally would only require about $91,000,000 to purchase, but now you've got to get towers, power, and internet connectivity to every one of these guys... figure you can get power to them for $5/mo and Internet for $45/mo, and now we're talking about a monthly cost of $13,000,000... $100 million to setup, $157 million/year to run, and that says nothing about maintenance costs, or the fact that many areas would need more than 1 AP for service. I think a conservative estimate would put this project at the $5 billion mark with little trouble -- we all know how the government can screw up even the simplest projects.

SO, if every man, woman and child kicked in about $15 we could pay for this thing... and everyone would have free broadband... wtf? WHY HAVEN'T WE DONE THIS YET? Imagine everyone having free access to the Internet... everywhere... most smartphones that I've seen are SIP capable (on a blackberry, you can see that it is by dialling ##000000 and scrolling down). I'll tell you why this won't happen: corporate greed.

Its amazing to me that a few pigdogs can halt progress because they want to be richer...

March 12, 2009

Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit on an HP nx9420

I had been delaying loading a 64-bit disto on my nx9420 since I wasn't entirely sure it would be kosher, but yesterday I had some time on my hands, so I threw caution to the wind and gave it a whirl. The 64-bit version of 8.10 isn't as solid as the 32-bit version; I say that because I had a couple of issues: 1) NetworkManager is still broken garbage, 2) getting the supplicant drivers to work for wireless encryption was not automatic, 3) goofy issues with xul and firefox, 4) the menu.

I've contributed a couple of posts to my loathing of NetworkManager, so I won't go in to that any further. I'll simply leave it at: INSTALL WICD FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY.

The supplicant drivers not working out of the box really threw me for a loop. It'd been YEARS since I had to manually mangle those, so I'd mostly forgotten. Fortunately, `man` steered me right. The crux of it is that the wpasupplicant package doesn't create the /etc/default/wpasupplicant file. I hand created the file and put in only one line: ENABLE=0 After this, you're 'supposed' to be able to do a `/etc/init.d/dbus restart` and have things work, but I'd suggest you just reboot -- because if you restart dbus, your X session is going to go away anyways (unless you're using something like openbox). Once you've rebooted, just make sure wicd is using the wext supplicant driver (its under preferences) and you should be golden.

The whole xulrunner and firefox pissing match is probably my fault. I was doing an `apt-get dist-upgrade` and I think half the packages were installed but the finish-up scripts hadn't run. SO, when I ran firefox, it crashed because of a suitable GRE interpretor. I was able to get around this by manually running `xulrunner --register-global` before apt-get had finished its thing. So this was really a fairly small issue.

The main menu in Ubuntu is heinous. Really, its the stallwart Windows 95 Start button... but we're 14 years on from that particular 'innovation', so why haven't we made any real progress? Vista -- and dont' get me started on this -- has a fairly good Start Button (except that its painfully slow because its an eye-candy resource hog!) Linux Mint, and several other distros, has an EXCELLENT start button that is very much like Vista's. This is the 'slab' or 'uslab' start-menu. Unfortunately, I don't want to use Mint -- they've over branded the hell out of it, and I find it particularly annoying. (I just stopped myself from raging about Mint, so...) The beauty is, of course, that Mint's menu (a.k.a. mintmenu) is a DEB, so I just downloaded it and installed... added it to the panel, and BOOM! Instant goodness! I had tried a couple of other slab-esque start menus, but they all sucked and weren't as refined as Mint's. The MAJOR downside of this is that mintmenu has a 'dependancy' on two other mint packages, which in turn are dependant on other packages, etc... so if you let apt-get do its thing, you'll basically end-up upgrading to Mint. That's a problem. SO, I hand installed mintmenu. Now, apt-get barfs about unmet dependancies every time I try to do anything. I'm working on a solution to this.

One *MAJOR* bit of niceness about 64-bit ver of 8.10 is that suspend to RAM worked OUT OF THE BOX! I didn't even have to apply the patch from Stephan! W00t!

Anywho, all said and done, I'm very happy with my 64-bit install. There were some bumps in the road, but overall I don't think any of them are sufficiently bad to warrant abandoning the effort.

FC10 on iMac == FAIL

I struck out on getting FC10 on my iMac. Not that it couldn't be done, but I can't be arsed with that kind of effort for something that is basically just a hobby box. SO, I cut my losses and installed OS X 10.3. :-( Oh well, its still a pretty sweet little rig, all things considered.

March 05, 2009

FC10 on G3 iMac

I did something rash today: I installed Fedora Core 10 on a G3 iMac. This was not accomplished without some difficulty -- and as near as I can tell, a substantial bit of luck. I hit a number of snags:
  • FC10's anaconda installer wouldn't run in graphical mode
  • There isn't a documented way to launch the text mode
  • Seven CD installation
  • Missing `xterm` package
  • botched X autodetection and FB install
That anaconda wouldn't run in graphical mode isn't shocking -- its a bit disappointing, but not too shocking. Getting in to text mode though, that should've been well documented.

Okay, about the seven CD's. Yes, I know FC10 is available on DVD. Really, I do. However, my decrepid iMac only has a CD-ROM. SO, here's a thought: ship a base install that will get you a functional desktop without having to swap CD's like floppies of old. Holy crap.

My first attempts to fire-up X were thwarted by a missing xterm package. After carefully scouring each of the SEVEN discs, I discovered the xterm package was no where to be found. I downloaded it and installed it by hand. Not a big deal.

Unfortunately, missing xterm wasn't the biggest issue I've got with getting X going. The biggest issue is that the fbdev and ati driver do NOT work well with this chipset. I still have no graphical love. This is not so good. I've got ideas how to sort it out, but I can't get to those until I have more time.

Requiescat en pacem, Maria Louise Meyer

I remember the first day I met Louise: it was the fall of '02 and I was walking home from the grocery store, alone. I suspect most people remember the first day they met Louise. On Friday, February 27th, Louise was killed in a car accident.

I found out about the accident Friday afternoon, while driving home from a client site in Iowa -- Amanda, called and told me. I was stunned. The more I think about it, the more tragic her passing is. The thing that hits me the hardest is her two boys: August and
Leonard. I can't help but think about them even now.

Jerome, Louise's husband, is understandably devastated. I can't even fathom what he's going through. As selfish as it may sound, I think trying to empathize with Jerome is what really tore me up: the thought of losing my wife, my Queen, coupled with the thought of having to
raise the kids without her love and support is just incomprehensible to me.

I went over to see Jerome this morning, and to express my condolences and found myself surrounded by Louise's friends and family -- I was staggered to see so many people from so many different places and ways of life, all bound by their kinship or friendship with Louise, were
there.

I've never lost a friend like this, and though I know she won't be the last, I'll always remember her and how her passing affected me on a personal level.

Requiescat en pacem, Maria Louise Meyer.

February 11, 2009

GNOME Network Manager STILL 100% FAIL

Almost a year ago I wrote about WICD for the first time. Mostly out of frustration for how badly Network Manager SUCKED. Well, nine months later I'm writing about WICD again, and again its due to Network Manager FAIL. My office uses an WPA+TKIP access point... this is pretty standard stuff... but Network Manager COULD NOT ASSOCIATE ME TO THE AP!!!! O-M-F-G!? So long as that hunk of shit is the default network manager in Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, etc., Linux will not gain widespread acceptance. WICD FTW!!!!!!!!!!

February 09, 2009

A trip to the library...

Amanda (The Queen) shared with me an interesting statistic she had read: that homeschoolers are responsible for approximately 40% of the books checked-out from libraries. HOLY CRAP! 40% I didn't believe her...until today, when we went to the library.

The boys are studying medieval times in school along with the military lessons I've been working with them on (to my shame, I've been doing a poor job of that!) SO, Amanda located the correct section at the library and, as near as I can tell, checked-out every book on the subject.

I kid you not, we must've checked out just shy of 50 books today. Its staggering. Those kids will know about the medieval times! If not through simple osmoses...

February 07, 2009

So long Vista, and thanks for all the...fish?

I installed Vista Enterprise about four months ago in an attempt to familiarize myself with it for work... though no one intentionally sends me out to do Windows support anymore, it does happen on occasion. As such, I felt I needed to be familiar enough with Vista to actually support it. That said, the last four months have been a living hell. Between the `explorer.exe` hangs, hideous performance, and learning-curve, I've come to loath Vista even more than most. SO, last night I installed Linux Mint 6. Oh the joy.

This install was on my HP Compaq nx9420, which I've had for a couple of years. Its a great box and has served me very well. Unfortunately, the nx9420 still isn't an install and go platform. There are issues you have to address that I've documented in the Ubuntu Wiki page for the nx9420. The most glaring issue is, of course, that suspend to ram doesn't work out of the box. From a support perspective, everything else seems to be dandy, you just can't suspend.

Unfortunately, Stephan Graber has changed his website and as a result there is a broken link in my wiki entry for his hp-s2ram.patch. SO, I had to do a fair bit of digging to find it. :-\ I have found it, and it can be downloaded here, as well as a mirror I've put up on my site, here.

Other than having to fix suspend, everything seems to work dandy. Any other nx9420 owners out there that would like to contribute their tips are free to contact me at coreyjsteele_a.t_gmail.com.

January 03, 2009

PG2 on Vista

I had a bugger of a time getting PeerGuardian2 to work under Vista. SO, I figured I'd document my solution for others so they don't have to experience what I experienced. The biggest problem is that there are like twenty-thousand people out there that THINK they can show you how to use PG2, but most of the time they're completely wrong. That said, here's how I did it:
  1. Uninstall any instances of PG and/or PG2 that you presently have installed.
  2. Make sure the "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2" directory is COMPLETELY empty.
  3. Download and install PG2-RC1 from PhoenixLabs.
  4. Go through the on-screen dialog
  5. Create a batch-file that includes the following:
del /Q "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\cache.p2b"
del /Q "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\history.db"
del /Q "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\lists\*"
start "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\pg2.exe"


...the batch file is how you will launch PG2, not by any other means. That's it. It works like a champ.