It is hot out, so watch this video of Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street. The last three minutes are the best in my music listening opinion.
Stephanie watched it with me, so that she could see that shows for kids were a damn sight cooler than Dragon Tales.
Last Sunday I installed Ubuntu Desktop 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on my old Dell Dimension. It was time to wipe off Fedora Core 3, which was getting a bit crufty as I modified a setting here and a setting there over the past year or so. Entropy eventually creeps into an operating system, and there is nothing you can do but nuke it and start over.
Ubuntu was a very easy install (once I got my stupid old computer with a pre-2000 BIOS to boot from CD). I’m going to use this as my main desktop computer since D. took over Firefox on the Windows XP computer.
Running Linux is always vaguely frustrating, even though so far this is the smoothest it has been. I’ve never worked with Debian, only RedHat and spinoffs, and I am really impressed with the package management. I tried to install Flash8 by myself, and gave up in frustration. Then I just used sudo apt-get and it was done in one command line.
Of course I installed MAME on it, and this is what I mean by Linux being always vaguely frustrating: I installed kxmame (forgot that Ubuntu uses Gnome — duh) and it wasn’t running very well and looking for ROMs in the wrong place. Eventually I uninstalled kxmame and installed gxmame, which ran fine. But when I went to start Pacman in full screen mode. The right side of the screen was on the left and the left side was on the right. And the sound was extremely distorted.
I figured that the sound distortion was just a problem with the PCM input being turned all the way up in the sound mixer. But it took me 15 minutes to figure out to run alsamixer to adjust this.
As for the video problem, I wasn’t even sure what to type into a Google(TM) brand web search to investigate the problem. I tried [split screen xmame], [pacman split xmame] (which brought up a Wikipedia article about the fabled 256th screen), [xmame ubuntu fullscreen problem], and so on.
Eventually I started investigating the video driver. Through some very helpful forum postings, I was able to get off of the nv open source driver and onto the nvidia driver. This shifted the display on my computer to the right for about 1/2 inch. (This led to a tangential investigation: tried to run xvidtune, but got some confusing error; disabled glx, but every test I tried with xvidtune complained that it wasn’t a possible configuration for my monitor; tried hacking Modelines in xorg.conf, and eventually X wouldn’t start; gave up.)
Then I ran Pacman in fullscreen mode, and this time the background was completely transparent. So I read through the xmame command line arguments and found a -notransulcency option that didn’t do anything. Then I tried to run a DVD with the new video driver and it was very jerky. So I went back to the nv video driver, which is a shame because I can’t run gnome-window-decorator and compiz, which were very cool.
I was resigned to having to play Pacman in a window instead of full screen mode when I read the xmame arguments yet again and noticed the -effect argument. For some reason adding -ef 1 worked, and I could get Pacman to work in fullscreen mode. The cool raster lines that make it look like a real video game were gone, but it worked.
Then I sat back and wallowed in my vaguely annoyed state. Then I thought hard about being 39 years old and wanting to play Pacman so badly and what that might tell me about myself. Then I called the kids into the room and introduced them to the glory of Pacman.
(By the way, I had my PowerBook on the couch later that day and wanted some Pacman. So I downloaded MacMAME, scped over the ROM, and I was up and running in about 15 minutes. Not to knock on Linux, but I’m just saying.)
Sunday was spent re-organizing the garage so that the kids can have a play area out there. Not that it wouldn’t be fatal right now in this heat to play in the garage, let alone re-organize it. We lost a lot of momentum when D. and I found a whole bunch of rat turds on a shelf behind some Christmas wrapping paper. D. came inside to search the Internet for rat turds to verify our find.
More operating system news in our house: I spent several hours trying to speed up our Windows XP machine. It just gets slower and slower. So I went through and (1) uninstalled every program that we didn’t use, (2) cleaned the local disks, (3) deleted old TV shows we recorded and didn’t watch, (4) ran scan disk on the local disks, (5) deleted all favorite network places or whatever they are called — basically some links to a webdav folder I was dinking around with, (6) ran Autoruns (funny name if you are in 7th grade) and turned off or deleted most of the start up programs that have installed themselves, (7) turned off all services that looked suspicious or unnecessary, and (8) ran AdAware. Then I rebooted. It rebooted several times and scanned the disks each time. It seems to be running much faster now, but I haven’t run anything besides Firefox and iTunes on it so far.
It will be nice to go to work tomorrow and spend some time with my computers there for a change.
Hats off to The Economist for putting Syd Barrett as the obituary. They even dropped some lyrics from Astronomy Domine that I forgot about. I used to play stuff from Ummagumma when I would do the 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. shift.
Then in their lead editorial, the first paragraph says that the current war in the Middle East must be stopped immediately. Fair enough. But the last paragraph says that the kidnapped soldiers must be returned. Fair enough, too. But isn’t that the whole point? Is The Economist working on a secret plan to get them back? If so, then they are allowed to run around saying “must” in their WWIII editorials. And how can Lexington go on vacation? He’s a pen name.
Here is the way that I read The Economist, which I am recording for both posterity and common sense: First I read the obituary. Well, actually first I read the two summary emails that come on Thursday when The Economist is printed. But when I get my physical copy, I read the obituary first. Then I read the articles in the arts section backwards. Then the science section. Then if the academic economics article isn’t too hard for me, I’ll read it. Then I read the United States articles and Lexington. Then I flip through the Americas section, mainly to read the captions and to read about scandals. Then I read the intersting war articles in the Middle East/Africa section. Then I thumb through the Britain and Europe sections. I almost never read these articles, especially the zillion articles about Turkey joining the EU. Then I read the business articles, especially if they are about (1) unions, (2) high tech, or (3) scandals. By this time the next Economist has arrived, so I quit reading it.
This weekend The Economist (or is it the The Economist) didn’t come until Saturday. So Saturday morning, I had some reading time and nothing to read. This meant that I had to select a book, bring it to the couch, open it at the beginning (no sections in most books), and read. These were the books that I thumbed, but eventually didn’t start reading:
The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade by Cecil Woodham-Smith (gift from Sparkles that I am always meaning to read)
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer (leant to my by a friend who is a professor of philosophy — seemed timely to read, current events and all, y’know. Also, a time management book I read once had a quote from Hoffer, which struck me as odd.)
Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt (work stuff, I was interested in the SEO chapter especially to see what a “textbook” would say about it versus what I’ve picked up on the mean streets.)
The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition (I visited my alma mater, Purdue, a few weeks ago, and I remembered that I never really learned anything about Thermodynamics and that I forgot everything I learned about semiconductors. I thumbed through the chapters but realized that I wasn’t going to absorb anything with the kids blasting their music.)
American Mavericks: Musical Visionaries, Pioneers, Iconoclasts by Susan Key and Larry Rothe (gift from D. that I am always meaning to read. We just unpacked it, and it reminds me of our life pre-kids when we had tickets to the SF Symphony.)
I read through a few pages of each, but I felt like I couldn’t really commit to any of these books. So I put them down. One day I will retire, and it will be a big reading festival in my house or at the cafe that I will need to go to for enough quiet that I can concentrate.
If you read this far then you need a break. Watch this video of Tom Waits on Fernwood Tonight. The interview is a bit scripted, but who cares — everyone’s high and having fun.
Cripes! It’s midnight, and I need to wash the sweat and spider webs off of me and go to bed. I’ll proofread this and make it organized tomorrow. Until then, sorry.