Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'

Wordpress-mu upgrade

A shiny new version  of wordpress-mu now adorns this site.  Yay!   Maybe, now that it can upgrade itself, I’ll be more proactive about upgrading, rather than falling 4 (yes 4) major versions behind…

Hopefully all my old posts don’t show up as new on the planet.  If they do, I apologize.

Pulseaudio merged volume considered harmful

I’ve been playing with Fedora a bit recently, and it has that pulseaudio merged volume thing that I read about recently. Basically, the volume keys on your laptop move the “main” pulseaudio volume, which is a composite of Master and PCM. Half the “main” range is Master, half is PCM. This is a great idea, theoretically. It gives you twice the volume resolution range, since the volume of those two are additive.
However, in yet another case of pulseaudio fail on common hardware (intel-hda), if *either* Master or PCM goes to zero, the volume output is muted. Thus, if my main volume ever goes below half, there’s no sound. Simple solution: never make either go to zero unless “main” goes to zero.
In other volume problem news, something about Fedora has caused my volume to not be properly saved on reboot. When it comes up, it’s just below half, and therefore muted. When Is start rhythmbox, no sound. Changing the main volume has no effect (maybe it’s the other one that’s muted? beats me). If I open the volume slider in *rhythmbox* (which is most of the way down after boot) the volume suddenly jumps to maximum, and blows my ears out. Fortunately, I know that now, and I take off my earphones before doing this… I can then use the volume keys to lower it to just above half, which is a decent volume. Good think I don’t want it quiet, tho, as that’s not possible without opening the ALSA mixer directly…
So, partial fail to pulseaudio, partial fail to fedora, it seems. If all the fail goes to one, I apologize to the other.

Sound issues aside, Fedora has been fairly decent, on the whole. And, in all honesty, sound has never worked properly for me on anything but Gentoo…

No more rewrite?

Supposedly, thanks to Steve, I should have WP no longer messing with my text!  Let’s see:

find . --name "*.c" -exec grep -H "dang rules!" {} \;

Did it work?

Deaf but good range?

Train Horns

Created by Train Horns

In spite of the fact that I cannot hear quiet sounds well, I apparently can hear a good range.  Wonderful.  Only sounds most people can’t hear bother me.

G1 tether

posted from my n810 tethered to my G1.  It’s slow, but rocks!

Closest Book Meme

Okay, the meme has finally reached Planet Gentoo, so here’s my entry.

  • Grab the nearest book.
  • Open it to page 56.
  • Find the fifth sentence.
  • Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
  • Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Now, there’s some question as to what constitutes a “book”.  Do the ebooks on my n810 in my pocket count?  If so, what’s a “page”?  And which one is “closest”?  How about the ISO spec sitting next to me?  Does that count?  I’m going to go with “no” for all of those, and go for the closest bound, published book.  Since I’m at work, this is a technical book.

(Note: this is page 57, as 56 is blank)

The address conversion functions convert between a text representation of an address and the binary value that goes into a socket address structure.

This is from “UNIX Network Programming” by Stevens.

Bravo, Nokia!

My Nokia n810 had been having screen issues for a couple of months now.  Specifically, the touchscreen had been flakey.  Usually, this means that taps went to places other than where I tapped, and I had to constantly re-calibrate the touchscreen.  Quite annoying, to say the least.  However, occasionally, and increasingly frequently, the touchscreen had just stopped accepting taps.  Some combination of opening and closing the screen, pressing on spots, and sometimes even powering off and on would eventually fix it.

Notice all the past tense there.  Since my n810 was bought end of November in 2007, it’s still in it’s 1-year warranty.  Since the end of that warranty was approaching fast, I decided to bite the bullet, and RMA it.  In about a week, I have a nice, fixed n810.  No hassle, no fuss.  Thanks, Nokia!

Android not open?

Robert:

I just read the license agreement for the Android SDK 1.0 release 1.  It’s definitely not open, by any definition of open I can come up with.

1. I can only use it to develop for Android.  At the moment, I don’t have an Android device, and therefore couldn’t care less about Android.  I do have an n810, and would love to play with it there.

2. I ” may not copy (except for backup purposes), modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK or any part of the SDK”.  This means no porting Android to another device, or modifying it in any way.

3.  I “may not load any part of the SDK onto a mobile handset or any other hardware device except a personal computer”.  This is the oddest restriction of all.  I can’t use it to develop software for an android phone?  At any rate, no porting for me.

Okay, none of this applies to open source licensed components.  Lets see what I can actually use:

1. The kernel (woo hoo!  I can get the kernel elsewhere)

2. webkit.  I have this on my laptop already.

3. An android emulator.  That’s something, I guess.

4. An eclipse plugin.  I don’t use eclipse.

Until enough of Android is release open source to be useful, you can hardly claim that Android is “open”.  I’m still holding out hope.  I honestly hope that Android is released.  But until it is, I can’t in good conscience get an Android phone.

What I would really like to see is a port of Android (or at least it’s UI) to the Nokia internet tablets.  Too bad that’s not possible.

Epic Fail, again

 D&D 4 is coming out, and it’s supposed to be a huge change from previous versions.  I love D&D, so I’m curious.

The Penny Arcade guys teamed up with the PvP guy to play the new version and chronical the game in comics and a podcast.  I love Penny Arcade, so this interests me.

So, I go to the site (hosted at Wizard’s of the Coast).  Guess what?  You need an account to view the set.  Fail.  I have to sign up and give personal information (at least a working email address, and I don’t know what else, more later) to view what amounts to advertising for D&D 4?

Okay, so I finally decide to bite the bullet and fork over an address to get an account.  What am I greated with?

Epic Fail

Epic Fail.  Guess I don’t get to see them afterall, and I’m slightly less likely to care about D&D 4.

Full, Redux

Well, I bought a new HD for my laptop yesterday.  250G.  I’d forgotten how long it takes to stream 110G of data across a network. :P

The surprising thing is how much faster everything is.  I guess it was fragmented into oblivion (hardly surprising, since it was full…)  Booting is about 1/3 the time.

Now, back to kvm/uml…