jmoiron.net

After my disastrous experience with Oneiric left me with an ugly and half-working xfce/compiz amalgam, I promised myself that when the next version of Linux Mint shipped with the erstwhile Gnome2 fork "Mate", I'd give it a go.

Shit. Utter unusable shit.

Upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 did not go quite as planned tonight; software all downloaded, installed, and checked out, and when it came time to reboot, the rebooting failed.

I've tried writing this 5 different times and each time I've gotten caught up in the Unix philosophy, command line interfaces, Janis Joplin, and linguistics. Clearly, I should have let this one sit.

Setting up a new linux software raid tonight I noticed some new behavior from mdadm that I thought I might share quickly. It looks like, as of around version 2.6.4, mdadm has started creating new raid devices in auto-read-only mode. In this mode, the array flips to read/write after the first write attempt.

Or, using the distribution upgrade for Ubuntu to move from 7/10 to 8/4. I've tried on 2.5 machines so far. The full install, if you are using Ubuntu and have already downloaded the ~1GiB of package data, can still take around 45 minutes to an hour, and stopping halfway could seriously bork things beyond what a journeyman could repair.

Just "finished" hacking together some code that started out as a small desire and has ended up an obsession of sorts. Initially, it was just going to be a smart, specialized file renamer. It has ballooned into a poorly written (but fairly solid) beast of a program with crc checking and unrar/zipfile support. When I say it's poorly written, I mean it's not beautiful like my xdccq module is, for instance. It isn't elegant in the least, does things in a way that is acknowledged as poor design decisions, and the main dispatch is a giant ugly conditional mess. But it works pretty well!

I bought this new machine, part by part. The Antec case is nice, but there are a few things I wish it had (removable motherboard tray, a more easily removable front) and a few things I wish it lacked (2 bright LED's on the front, an optical drive door).

Since most every other part of this website is a hastily cobbled together piece of crap, I see no reason for the title I've selected not to fail. If it doesn't, let it be known that its due to no merit of my own. My site has shown the capacity to display Unicode Japanese (日本語) characters in the past, so perhaps this won't be any different.

Perfectionists may never let Linux be ready for the desktop. I don't think its quite there yet, although projects like Ubuntu have me a little hopeful. Still, what projects like Ubuntu and SuSE and the like do are iron out all of the irritating inconsistencies with their own set of standards. It usually works alright, but patches sit around for a long time, even in central packages to important projects:

For those of you possibly uninterested, this is going to almost entirely dwell on esoteric computer usability discussion.

Been using ViM for a while, and decided to use the X version (gViM) for my Java class. The X version comes with a fairly gorgeous color theme, and I wanted it to actually come up every time I used it. I searched quickly for some way to do this in the GUI, but since its Vim I figured (rightly) that most things were done through the RC file. A little research on the Vim irc wiki got me a few options that I've wanted for a while, so I figured I'd share them:

Courtesy of OS Galaxy blog syndication came a link about Mockup, which is actually a bit hard to explain; or at least, its relations to the rest of my thoughts on the subject of desktop Linux (which I feel is still somewhat of an oxymoron.) The Register gave some light play at this Linux desktop perdicament today, and I mostly agree with their take on the freak mainstream and linux's preparation thereof.

For about a week now, I've had a problem. Linux just wasn't cutting it for two of my devices; "my" 802.11b card (which I conveniently stole from Krause) and my Canon Digital IXUS 400. Both hardware's I knew were in working condition, and both were discovered and utilized through some manner of hotplug system, but both simply did not work. It was a major headache; in part because I knew that both of them had been working and I was happy in my "linux is great" little world.

Let us suppose that you were me. You just got finished with a day in which you got 3 hours of sleep, went to all your classes, went to work and accomplished great things, did well on two tests absolutely necessary for graduation, and get most of the presentation that is due the next day done. At around 9:00, you're ready to pass out. So what do you do?

And of course, general gripes. I can't really figure out how to get USB working in linux. I mean, with my own compiled kernel. Because Patrick's works just fine, but any I compile myself (ex. 2.6.x) don't see to work for shit. It's one of the reasons I keep the stock slackware 9.1 kernel on my laptop, and one of the reasons that if I get enough of a headache with something, I just try and do it on there instead. If worse comes to worse, I could always try it on windows, or my mac.

I'm currently sitting in my Thursday night cs765 "Aspects of System Administration" class. I probably shouldn't be writing this, as the class is really quite good and I'm the only one in here who is looking at a laptop instead of what is going on. I'm sure that I probably have far more work to catch up on than the other people in the class, but that's just self importance that stems from everyone thinking they have it worse than everyone else.

I installed a release candidate for gnome tonight. First, a short history.

I've been trying out a few console only programs in the past week; a few programs that I had been meaning to try for some time. One of them was swaret, the SlackWARE Tool, and the other is Screen, the UNIX tool.

Gnome 2.4 came out yesterday, and although I compiled it myself, I found out today that it had been compiled by a Patrick volderking a few hours prior to me finishing. Either or, I have been using 2.4 for a day now, and its time to write a short expose here about the ways that it both flows like a gentle river and pounds your skull to dust like niagra falls. Without shit like this, my life: meaningless.

Its no secret that things around here have changed, and I suppose you wouldn't know how much they've changed. I can't blame you though, as I've had a fairly poor record for updating this month. Hopefully that can all change.

It seems as my newest creation, this site is broken in MSIE; that is, it doesn't react nicely with the object tag. Its not like I should care about it at this point, since the whole page is broken due to unwise decisions with automatic HTML insertion upon updating. But I have some interesting ideas about how to fix this entire mess that will be posted to the news soon.

At work today it occured to me (through my discovery of various rsync related things) that Rsync combined with some daemon that ran on a directory could in essence create an automatic uploading situation through an ssh pipe (that can be opened and closed as needed) for any directory that I want. This has its obvious benefits, but in my current situation, they are numerous.

Although Paul asked me to make a porn site; nay, pleaded with me, I probably won't be doing it. Porn sites are probably a lot of work. I told him I could host Linux packages, but he said it'd take up too much bandwidth. I wonder if theres something wrong with that sentiment.

There is a progressive news talk show called Democracy now featuring the fairly well known (in the underground scene) Amy goodman. For a while now I've been catching the early morning show on my satellite dish, but anyone who wants can listen on 99.5 pacifica radio. Today's headlines included the proliferation of government materials that suggest the united states and UK government planted bugs on UN security council members in an attempt to garner support for their new resolution, the "code pink" march on Washington DC this past weekend (where Goodman was arrested for filming the protesters), and the issue of MSNBC firing Donahue in favor of more conservative talk show hosts in an attempt to seem like "less of a hotbed for the antiwar movement".

I've recently (tonight) installed a special slackware "thang" called dropline gnome. Its a gnome/gtk 2.0 install that uses slackware's installpkg to give me some sugary sweet looking desktop candy. All of my fonts are antialiased now, like windows XP only they look clean. I kind of like it.. finaly GTK app's don't look like ass, and it even comes with a version of Mozilla 1.21 that is hacked to use antialiased fonts. Its pretty sweet if you run slackware. I'm going to test it out on JaySlack, or whatever the hell I'll name my silly little slackware cd.

Because a man does not have a webchat, does not make said man less of a man. In fact, since said man is me, I definitely am not lesser for it. Of course, I've wanted to code for a few day's now and have been unable to do so, but I am enjoying myself in my Linux console (mostly because I just broke my KDE install.. but thats another story). In fact, the Linux console is so powerful, that I'm actually amazed. Sit closer, son, and listen to my story.