*click*

I figured since I'd finally gotten almost everything on my desktop working just how I'd like I'd provide screen shots. I've thought about doing a video so I can document the animations. But for now, just screenshots. I've got kde 3.5.8. Compiz/emerald. That's conky. I've been unable to get conky working transparent and not having the screen flicker and such. I'll work on that later. Can't wait for KDE 4.0. *nod*

... and another one bites the dust...

I can't believe it's time for another new years. It seems the harder life is going the faster it speeds by. I haven't posted much, in a year. I haven't accomplished much. I'm working. That's good. My offspring has been kept alive for another year. I've managed to get this laptop and all it's software running just how I want it in a year.

If the Mayans are right, things are about to change. 4 more years. Time for one more presidency. If this is to be the last, make it a good one. I know the Mayan's don't say the world is going to end. It means a change is coming. That in some fundamental way the world is going to shift. That what comes after 2012 will be different from all that preceded it in such a way that they could, wouldn't, or didn't want to compute it with the rest of the days they were recording.

Well, either way... here's to the next year of the 'usual'. Maybe spend some time thinking about what the next times will be like. How is it going to be different, it's obviously going to be important.

SabayonLinux 3.4f

I've been playing a lot with SL 3.4f. I'll have a detailed post about that in just a bit, maybe tomorrow, but for now... some screenshots.

If I thought Dubya would read it...

... I would have e-mailed this quote to him:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
-- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

settling

I always mean to keep this updated. Then my woman injures her neck and then can't work; I start school; the childrens get out of school for summer break. Things just get out of control... and I forget. Not that I don't have time, I clearly do. I've been so busy getting back up to speed on the world of Linux. Specifically Sabayon Linux. It's a Gentoo based LiveDVD distribution. You start with 3.4e's live DVD for your platform, either x86 or x86_64. Boot, and play with all the toys, and install if you choose.

I finally was able to get broadband going. We went with Clearwire. I know they're not that fast. We liked the lack of a physical install; the fact that we can take the box elsewhere and use it; and it was fast enough after two years of dial-up. We went and signed up at the mall, bought a prepaid visa from the customer service booth at the mall. We original bought the card for $25 on to cover the $24 and some change the initial payment was... and it wouldn't work. You need to have like $50 for it to work. They do a series of 'test charges' and it credits it right back. We took the box home, plugged it in, and were online in about... maybe 2 minutes. Piece of freakin' cake.

So I downloaded the Sabayon Linux 3.4e liveDVD for x86_64 and booted up this HP Pavillion DV9000z. It started right up, detected both cores, brought up the NVidia proprietary drivers to make sure the video was pretty, and nearly everything worked. The only real issues were the Bluetooth and, more horribly, the fan. I didn't initially notice the fan until later but I avoided any overheats... but I can see where some will miss it... so heads up. As of 3.4e and 2.6.23-rc2-git6 the fan does not seem to work in anyway I've been able to get working... I'll update that once I do.

I updated the installer via the link on the Desktop, and ran the installer. A quick install later, I didn't note the time, and I rebooted. I sync'd up the portage tree, updated the bluetooth pieces, and in like 10 minutes my mouse was all paired up and working. I have paired the media remote, but I haven't figured out the things I need to do to get the commands recognized in any media apps. But othter than that... absolutely everything worked and just bangingly. The compiz-fusion/kde setup is just bangin'. The 3d rotating cube is loverly. I'll post screenshots in a later post.

I tried the Gentoo 2007.0 liveCD and it failed to install... so I tried Sabayon... happiest find in a long time. Once I fix this fan problem I'll be extatic.

Vista still sucks.

I know, it's almost the running theme of everything I've posted here... and that's not the intention. It's just that as of late it's the most common thing that this computer reminds me of, unless you count my Father's birthday.



As is par for the course, Windows Vista sucks. I'm still constantly having the issue where all computers on the network that are routing through the Vista box can access the internet via the crappy dial-up connection, but the Vista box itself is confused and can not see a damn thing. Very frustrating to have to reboot... or worse yet wait till the shows you are trying to record to finish airing so you can reboot, especially if you've got 3 hours of HD content you want to capture durring Prime-Time.



I have several ripped movies I keep on the hard disk for mobile boredom prevention. They're all movies I ripped and own, honest. They're mostly divx, some xvid. For the most part, everything works fine. If you browse to the folder in explorer or some such the thumbnails get decoded and rendered just fine. If you click on them they fire up in Windows Media Player just fine. Now, if you so much as browse to my collection of videos in Windows Media Center's "Video Library" section it (WMC) falls to it's knees weeping and then restarts itself. It's just sad. The codec is clearly installed properly... could be a problem with the codec. I've tried experiments with both a single xvid and a single divx movie and WMC still comes with the crying, so it's probably not both codecs. If it is it's because MS did something non-standard with the way codecs are implemented in WMC.



The most recent update to my nVidia drivers has resulted in a 10-15% net increase in memory usage for all beefy video applications. Previously, WMC only took 56-60% of my 1G but now it takes 80-85%. Fun. I mean Vista itself with almost nothing running (Virus and FW protection, obviously,) takes 46% with the translucent bells and whistles off... so it wasn't so bad before. C&C Generals: Zero Hour has the same increase. If I had more graphic intensive stuff going on I'm sure I'd notice it with those too.



All in all, I've given vista a fair try. It sucks, and it sucks much. Three months and only 1 slight improvement in video performance from an update... and that was the removal of a symptom they created, and it cost me 10-15% memory usage on affected applications. Bah.

TG Daily interview with AMD's CTO

I was reading this interview with AMD's CTO Phil Hester at TG Daily. I really liked how Mr. Hester pointed out that the convergence of GPU and CPU functions into a more tightly integrated platform would enable a lot of applications on a single stand alone machine that previously were limited to systems where multiple machines were handling the workload. He brought up facial recognition, physical interaction, physics modeling among others.

The TG Daily interviewer made the assertion that, "at least in the client space, 64-bit adoption has been almost non-existent and multi-core is also slow to make it's way into the general software space.", and that it would take a considerable length of time before people would actually utilize the technology to bring these tools to the single machine markets.

While this is true for Microsoft platforms there are a lot of users opting for Open Source solutions to bring the exact kind of applications he's talking about to the desktop. Once the Linux and BSD boxes get it, any apple user can use it... and if apple users use it enough then Microsoft has to play catch up.

That's the main reason I went with the AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-64. Fast as hell, and once I'm done, I'll be able to squeeze every single bit out of the 64-bit multi-core options. Linux lets me. Easily. Gentoo lets me make sure every application that can benefit from the progress of AMD's R&D department gets the opportunity to. Not to mention encoding my movies for mobile viewing gets to go as fast as possible. :)

I hate windows.

Well, Microsoft has pushed out another update to media center. They've solved the issue where On-Screen Display items screw up the display of the actual content... but now the damn thing crashes every single time I try to burn a DVD. It used to just fail to burn... now it crashes media center entirely. So much for QFE quality. Every single update has caused more trouble
than it's solved.

Maybe having a separate, lesser skilled, development team working on the QFE's isn't the way to go. Maybe the Windows Core development team could keep working on the product... so that quality doesn't have to start going downhill once the product's released to the public and the maintenance portion of the software development life-cycle kicks in. I just know the Windows Sustained Engineering team sure isn't doing their job.

KFC & Pepsi Co. can go suck a lemon...

Have any of you noticed the extremely annoying "Look at me" tone they've added to the most recent KFC TV ad campaign? It's irritating, right as the KFC bucket comes into view this loud piercing tone comes on. Running commercials louder than the content was annoying enough, this is just BS.

I, personally, am boycotting all Pepsi Co. products from this point forward... and I'll be honest, this geek ate a lot Taco Bell and KFC. So, I must say farewell to KFC and now Ezell's gets my chicken $'s... and to replace the crap that Taco Bell's been pushing, my local Tijuana Taco's going to get all my taco money!

Stop hiring shrinks to up your ad responses. New product, at a good value is whats going to get you customers. I went because of convenience, but your BS was enough to overcome my laziness.

They sure aren't looking after us, are they...

You know, it sounds great when you hear that congress is going to get off it's collective hind-ends and protect their citizens from spyware. But, when you actually look at Ed Foster's article at Infoworld about the new bill you suddenly remember... they don't work for us.

It protects us against spyware... unless it comes from just about any commercial entity.

So, according to this subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, my privacy is important... unless Paramount Pictures disagrees. This would give RiAA an excellent end-run around those pesky search warrants.

It's bovine fecal material like this right bloody here that makes me pause and attempt to come up with one new idea for a way to be able to afford to build, stock, infrastruct, and defend my own little slice of sovereign territory.

Pinky, are you thinking what I'm thinking?

ScribeFire

Just giving ScribeFire a quick try. Seems to be a great way to make it easy to comment on things that you've read. Caught it from a Linux.com article here. So far it seems like a nice option for keeping the blog right handy for posting.

Vista still sucks.

Every time that Windows Update tells me there's an update to Vista, I cringe.  Every single update has degraded performance in some way.  When the laptop first arrived the DVR thing worked great with windows Media Center and my Pinnacle HDTV USB Stick.  The video stayed smooth, even with the on screen info for volume or program info.  Now, if anything is on the screen the feed goes clunky.  It doesn't affect recording, thankfully, but still.  It used to work.  That changed on an update to video drivers from NVidia.  Updated SATA drivers from Microsoft themselves started causing bluescreening under heavy HDD usage.  Another update caused the network problems I mentioned bellow.  It's a nightmare... logic says things are supposed to get better.  So much for QFE quality.

Windows Vista Sucks

When I shopped around for the laptop I wanted... I settled on the HP dv9000z. So far, a nice machine. I dislike that even with the 64-bit amd processor they installed the 32-bit vista. But most of all I dislike that vista sucks so bloody much. Periodically some portion of the network layer becomes unglued. The shared dialup connection on the network still works. Other workstations get out just fine. The putty ssh session to the box running airodump and aircrack-ptw is still open... but trying to open a new session fails with permission denied. All sites come up unknown host in a browser. My active login session or whatever vista wants to call it has lost all rights to any network access. No amount of disabling and enabling the related devices or connections has any effect... but a reboot fixes it. I hate vista.

Once I get enough arp packets for the aircrack-ptw I'll be off dialup and then comes the gentoo install.

.-=Yup Yup=-.

... twodogs stumbles into the room, looks confusedly around then stumbles back out the way he came in.