this girl drives a tank

I mentioned before that my desktop speakers have been on the fritz and I have been meaning to replace them. Now that I have an iPod I would like to kill two birds with one stone.

The Bose SoundDock has a very good sound (my brother has one) and I think is loud enough for my needs but I cannot use it as desktop speakers directly connected to my soundcard, and you cannot sync the iPod to iTunes while it is docked. I am told the next model Bose release might have these features but who knows for sure? I cannot find any information on upcoming product features at all. I suppose companies keep these things secret.

The iPod HiFi gets a much better review, supposedly really loud sound and naturally more iPodcentric features. I like that you can hook other devices to it and it has batteries and AC power, but it still isn't suitable as a desktop speaker replacement. Too bad the dock for he iPod is on the top, otherwise I could plonk my LCD monitor on top of it and have the music blast my head off :-) Because it's not a desktop speaker replacement, like the Bose, you cannot sync to iTunes either.

So both of these products are near misses in my book and I will continue to search around. Some other speakers worth looking into are the Audioengine5 and the Klipsh iFi (don't these iProduct names get ever increasingly annoying?).

PS: I found the playlistmag website with google, and the reviews seemed unbiased and comprehensive without being overly technical, if you know of a better audio review site please gmail me!

I brought my car over to my parents house this morning for a hand washing, usually I go to one of those brush-less car washes but occasionally my Dad insists on supervising a meticulous hand wash and detailing. This involves Dad laying out the steps involved to accomplish our goal, then instructions on who will do what and usually ends with me and Mom sitting on the porch watching, whilst, much to Mom's delight, I occasionally squirt Dad with the water hose to hurry him up. :-)

#665705
<LenaWarrior> Does Australia float around or is it stuck there
<KoreaPro> Are you serious?

I generally use firefox for my GUI browser but lately it has been segfaulting with the following error:

The program 'Gecko' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program. The error was 'BadShmSeg (invalid shared segment parameter)'. (Details: serial 27 error_code 170 request_code 148 minor_code 2) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.) zsh: exit 1 firefox

This is inconvenient and I don't even know if it is a firefox bug or an Xorg bug or something in between. The other major issue with firefox that I have is its scrolling , to me at least, is horrible. The memory use and CPU use soars and the everything seems to grind to a halt trying to scroll a web page. This may not be firebox's fault entirely, perhaps its bad markup doing this, but other browsers, like Opera for example can handle the same page with ease. For example try scrolling drawn.ca in firefox and then in opera (if you have both installed) or in safari and compare.

I generally like firefox, its features are pretty much all I need, it is Free Software and actively developed, and I don't like complaining about something someone has worked so hard to provide to me for free, but I worry that if firefox continues to lose the rendering war, it will lose users as fast as it collected them when the project really took of a couple of years ago. I hope its something the developers are aware of and can address.

I had noticed that my new desktop never really used 100% of the CPU, this bothers me for a couple of reasons, first off, if I am doing something CPU intensive like compiling bzflag, then please use all of the CPU, that's what it is there for. If there are other apps running, let the kernel decide how much you get.

Secondly, if you don't use as many cycles as you can get, building takes much much longer. Bzflag used to take, on my old desktop, about 6 mins to compile, now on the new desktop it was taking 20-30 mins. Yuck. This blog now takes about a half hour to build which is ridiculously long. So I headed to #linux on irc.arstechnica.com to investigate. At first the new 4GB of ram was thought to be a culprit but removing a stick had no effect. The command dd if=/dev/urandom | bzip2 > /dev/null was used as a pseudo benchmark, this command should spin up the CPU to 100% right away but mine would sit there at 50% or so. Next I turned off hyper-threading in the bios. This seemed to work, when I rebooted I reran the benchmark and got 100% CPU usage right away. Problem solved I thought. However with HT turned off the system was very poor at multitasking, compiling something and then checking irc or email was a chore as now my terminals kept refreshing all the time.

Next up was to check the kernel, I had installed a stock debian kernel, linux-image-2.6.17-1-686, but didn't realize it came with SMP enabled. I decided to try compiling a new kernel the Debian Way™ so I installed fakeroot debhelper modutils kernel-package libncurses5-dev and then I did make menuconfig and removed the SMP support and followed that with make-kpkg clean and finally to actually build the kernel, sudo fakeroot make-kpkg --append_to_version -686 --initrd --revision=rev. 01 kernel_image and got a cup of tea, while I anxiously waited. The Debian Way™ is pretty nifty as it builds a .deb that is easily installed and makes a ramdisk and updates grub all in one shot, and can be removed like any other package. After rebooting I rebuilt bzflag in 4 mins, a considerable improvement. I thought I solved the problem but I had tested things by recompiling bzflag without doing a make clean so after a fresh checkout it took 40 minutes to build :( I don't know what the next move will be now, more poking around in the kernel I suppose.

(PS thank you Sophmore and johnf in #linux for the help)

(PPS building kernel's the Debian way.)

UPDATE: This morning I reverted to a 2.6.15 kernel but had the same results which led me to believe it might not even be kernel related at all, so on a hunch I removed 2 sticks of RAM and rebooted into the 2.6.17 kernel and everything was zippy and fast again. So it looks life 2GB of ram is the life for me. I can use the other 2GB elsewhere I suppose but its a shame it doesn't work with 4GB.

Do you listen to music whilst you code or study? If so what do you listen to the most? I have tried all sorts of genre's and settled on classical music. Classical music gives me a couple of advantages. Firstly, not counting Opera or Choral pieces, it has no lyrics, which might not sound like an advantage but for me it certainly is.

Lyrics, whether I like it or not, are interpreted by my brain, I am reading or typing but am conscious of a second stream of information flowing through my head. For example, there is a Smith's song that contains the stanza "I've seen this happen in other peoples lives and now its happening in mine", so there I am trying to read something about Lisp, atoms and symbols, and suddenly identifying with that particular chorus and invariably there goes my mind, wandering out the door, and it takes something like the song ending or a shake of my head to struggle back to the task at hand.

Secondly, Classical music for me is largely uncharted waters, sure there a few really famous compositions that I know and like, Prokofiev's "Lieutenant Kije" or Holst's "The Planets" but there are so many more wonderful compositions that I have hidden in /mp3/Classical waiting to be discovered, which could lead to the most sweetest of rewards - discovering beautiful music for the first time.

I have tried Electronica, a broad genre that can also be devoid of any lyrics but it tends to have to much of a good beat, this leads to the initial toe tapping, which invariably is followed by the head bobbing back and forward and/or swaying laterally and then its only a matter of time before the eyes close and you find your shoulders alternately thrusting back and forth, at this point you are pretty much dancing in your chair and not getting any work done.

I have also tried Country and Western, Bluegrass, Cajun and traditional Irish/Newfoundland music but with poor results. Last.fm seems to favor electronica in general and specifically Enigma but outside of that Google seems to turn up lots of forums with geeks posting personal favorite songs which would require a lot of effort to track down and evaluate.

There is of course another option of complete silence, and to be honest, I have no problem with that, its just sometimes I can spend the entire evening in front of my computer and that gets dull and lonely without some music.

Here are some songs in no particular order that consistently interfere with my studying:(they will be deleted in a couple of weeks) Death_From_Above_1979-Black_History_Month_Girl_on_Girl_Revision.mp3
Doves-Black_And_White_Town.mp3
Goldfrapp-Fly_Me_Away.mp3
Goldfrapp-Ooh_La_La.mp3
Groove Armada Fly Me To The Moon.mp3
Groove_Armada-Suntoucher.mp3
Jungle Brothers-Freakin' You.mp3
LemonJelly-75_aka_Stay_With_You.mp3(a dancing-in-the-chair-song)
The_Chemical_Brothers-Close_Your_Eyes.mp3
The_Chemical_Brothers-Hold_Tight_London.mp3
The_Magic_Numbers-Love_Me_Like_You.mp3

At lunch time I took a walk from my work to Bay Bloor Radio to look at ear-buds for my iPod. The ones Apple ships are tinny sounding, with horrible bass and even worse are uncomfortable in my addmittedly small ears.

I tried several pairs while I was there, one pair cost more than an iPod iteslf, but sounded amazing, however I settled on a pair of Shure E2c's which where slightly over a hundred dollars but have a really warm, deep bass sound and best of all actually slide just inside the ear canal. They come with a clam-shell hard case and a bunch of different stlye and sized buds, the smallest of which fit perfectly in my ear with no discomfort. They actually seal the ear so it is difficult to hear any surrounding noise which makes the music that much louder. I had to turn my iPod's volume down otherwise they were too loud.

On my walk back I noticed a tallish, hipster looking guy heading towards me, also listening, presumably to an iPod. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt but stylish ones and clean, nice Doc Martens and glasses. He lookd like one of those guys you see in a Volkswagen commercial. Every time I looked up he was lookng at me. When we passed I shot him one of those semi embaressed, awkward smile-nods as if to convey "hey". I cannot speak for him but what I was thinking about was an overwhelming desire to know what he was listening to. Was it some hot new band I didn't know about? Was it something I totally would love? Was it, as fate would have you hope, the exact same song as me?! I will never know. But it did lead me to think about a line of digital t-shirts, maye with fiber optic fabric that could update a "Now Playing" banner on the shirt as your music changed. This occupied my thoughts for the rest of the walk back to my office.

It occured tome some time later in the afternoon that everytime he looked up, I was also looking at him.

My lunch in a nutshell, there you have it.

I think I have solved the video card problem by not doing anything, waiting a couple of days and trying a new install. This time I grabbed the newest kernel, headers and source in the archive and everything is thankfully back to normal.

When I install Debian I don't usually choose the Desktop system, as it installs both Gnome and KDE. I do not mind this, an if I were to run Sarge on my desktop I would happily have all kinds of window managers and desktop environments installed because you generally only update packages when a security patch comes along.

But because I seem to think I need the latest and greatest software, I try to install only what I use, as the updates in Sid come fast and furious. This is what I generally do once the system boots after an install:

fresh install:
change sources to unstable and update/upgrade
First root commands:
      apt-get install zsh-beta emacs-snapshot-gtk screen rsync ssh sudo rxvt-unicode
      chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh orchid
      visudo (add myself with NOPASSWD)
Desktop: 
       xfce4 gdm xorg
       To get all the plugins:
       apt-get install `apt-cache search xfce4 plugin | cut -d" " -f1`
Emacs Stuff: 
       w3m-el debian-el dictionary-el
Multimedia: 
       emms cdrecord mplayer acidrip
       transcode cplay grip k3b
Docs:
       diveintopython rubybook rutebook autobook elisp-manual ebook-dev-alp
       devhelp-books zsh-beta-doc gdb-doc autoconf-doc libtool-doc make-doc
       gcc-doc newbiedoc debian-reference emacs-lisp-intro glibc-doc
       apt-howto-en
Kernel:
       We need kernel sources and headers to build the nvidia driver
       apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.17-1-686 
       linux-source-2.6.17 linux-image-2.6.17-1-686
       cd /usr/src/linux && sudo tar -jxvf linux-source-2.6.17.tar.bz2
       sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.17 /usr/src/linux
       (now reboot into the new kernel)
Drivers: 
       nvidia-glx module-assistant
       run: m-a a-i nvidia to build the driver
       sudo modprope nvidia
       (I really should get a non nvidia card one day)
Games: 
       foobillard bzflag bzflag-server flightgear 
Programming:
       build-essential gdb manpages-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool flex
       bison gnu-standards make gcc debhelper cvs 
Utilities: 
       screen htop pciutils usbutils aspell dictd ntpdate wamerican-large
       dict-wn dict-moby-thesaurus dict-foldoc dict-gcide dict-jargon 
       spellutils unclutter mail-notification 
Chat:
       gaim irssi erc
Browsers:
       w3m firefox
Browser-Plugins:
       libflash-mozplugin mozilla-mplayer
Java:
       sun-java5-plugin sun-java5-jre sun-java5-fonts
       (agree to liscence without reading it)
Fonts: 
       msttcorefonts ttf-larabie-deco ttf-larabie-straight
       ttf-larabie-uncommon ttf-mikachan ttf-xfree86-nonfree ttf-bitstream-vera
       x-ttcidfont-conf ttf-dustin ttf-freefont ttf-gentium ttf-summersby
Graphics:
       imagemagick gimp 
Other:
       gftp evince bittorrent nanoblogger  

I have had some bad sectors on my root partiton for quite some time dmesg would say stuff like I/O error on dev/hda3 {unrecoverable} but the system would still boot. It's like dating a guy that picks his nose. You look away at first, pretend it didnt happen, I mean as long as the system boots who cares what dmesg says. But you know deep down inside somethings got to give, its creeping you out and ignoring the problem only prolongs the inevitable.

On wednesday the system wouldn't boot at all, I back up ~/ every night so that wasn't a problem, and most of the important system files like xorg.conf, the kernel config, and exim config are also backed up, but I don't have any backup plan to restore the actual system instead of reinstalling. I put in a new drive but had to wait untill thursday to reinstall. When I came home, as is my habit, I first turned on the PC and then the air conditioner, right away the breaker blew and for some reason my UPS didn't kick in so during the boot up the system crashed.

When I tried to reboot it, the bios seemed all screwd up, first of all it displayed the Asus logo which I remeber having turned off, then it wouldn't boot from the cdrom, as it turned out, it had lost that setting. So I thought, easy enough, I go into the bios and reset everything to the way things were and reboot, but this time it forgets the settings again, the bois refused to store any settings at all. So I figured I have broken my motherboard.

I called up my friend Debbie who gave me the hardware and she met me on friday with a new motherboard, an Asus P5VDX-MX, its a cheaper one than the original Asus P4P800SE, but she said it should work with my CPU, and to make sure, she also gave me a P4 3GHz CPU, and for good measure, tossed in two 1GB sticks of ram, as she said, "just in case". So once again I owe her big time. She also suggested changing the battery in the old motherboard which of course I forgot to do untll after I had replaced the motherboard.

With the new motherboard, a fresh install went without incident, I did note however that with the iPod plugged in, the partitioner in the installer recognizes the device and makes it available during the install. I was tempted to mount /usr there :-)

Today I had some time, so I wanted to get X up and running, I got the nvidia packages with moudule assistant, it compiled the binary without a hitch but modprobe reported:NVRM: No NVIDIA adaptor found! so I cannot load the nvidia driver. I am not sure why the system thinks it has no video card, and not sure how to go about making it see the video card so it seems to me a rather serious problem exists. The motherboard supports AGP 4/8X so that shouldn't be a problem. So the next step is to basically wonder what the next step is.

StatCVS is a nice package to generate statistical HTML reports for a given project. Here is a look at the Bzflag project where you can see a huge jump in activity around July of 2003. I think in July 2003 there was work on a new branch 1.8 that got reverted eventually and caused the activity spike, also some new devs, Brlcad and Tupone and Trepan all got commit access around that time. In the authors page you can even see my paltry 320 lines of code, although I do hope sometime soon I can increase that number.

Several people have written me concerning some recent topics I have blogged about, on the topic of Ubuntu Sean Hammond writes:

The release number 6.06 refers to 2006, the 06th month (the previous
release was 5.10 in October 2005). It's actually the fourth release of
Ubuntu.
Aside from the 'desktop CD' which boots into a live session and lets you
install from there, you can actually download text-mode install CDs
separately (it's called the 'Server install CD' version, or just the
'server' version).

Amaya wrote to tell me about the recent easter egg in the aptitude program, it turns out it is from a book called The Little Prince(pop-up warning!) by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Also Bamf and Krhis helped me with some iPod tips and as a result I have solved most of my iPod problems. I even managed to get Debian to recognize the device but so far neither Banshee or Amarok work out of the box, Debian's Banshee package for one thing isn't built with iPod support and after rebuilding it, the program seems to see only an empty iPod. I didn't really have any time to look into it so hopefully I can fix it. There also seems to be quite a few iPod programs listed in an apt-cache search and I am confident sooner or later I will not have to boot my backup desktop into Windows XP just to use iTunes.

I left my birthday gift (from my boyfriend), a 30GB iPod at his house on the night of my birthday as we went out to dinner, and after a day or so had passed he informed me that he had already loaded it up with songs and was making full use of it. Finally after two weeks of whining I managed to get it back home.

Knowing that getting this to work in linux might involve some hoops, and me jumping through them, I decided to load it with my music in Windows XP (on my roommate's computer).

First though the iTunes software would not run from the cdrom so I had to download it. Then I had to set up samba set up for her computer as all my music lives on a linux box. It took a few tries with the windows configuration wizards to get it to see the music but eventually I prevailed.

Adding the music however was really slow as it was coming over the network and ended up with me going to bed and leaving it downstairs loading overnight. I then got up and went to the gym, and when I got home my roommate had taken the iPod to work with her! :-) So finally this evening all is well and I got a chance to actually use it.

The iPod itself lives up to its famous billing, it feels sleek but sturdy, not a cheap plastic product. The click wheel thingy is reasonably intuitive and the menu's don't take long to get used to. The sound is good although I am not sure what the proper way to wear the ear-buds are. (they hurt my ears a little, I guess I am not used to it) I would like more volume though. I have everything maxed out and it doesn't seem all that loud. I am not sure if this is to do with the music or what, because movie trailer are really loud!

A few things still need clarification. I cannot skip through a song, when a song is playing I can only adjust the volume or skip to the next song, not advance into the current song to determine if its something I want to hear at that moment.

Also I can't seem to browse whilst playing. I loaded about 6000 songs, and the first time I turned it on it was on song 60 or something (My roommate had it all day) so I press next and it plays song 61, this means it will play all the music in the order I loaded them, or I am guessing in the order they last appeared in iTunes. So no one usually listens to music like this and I looked for a way to rearrange the music on the fly, but it appears all I can do is shuffle the music randomly. It would be nice to be able to see whats coming next and preempt it with something else, or to simple browse for something else while listening to the current song. Hopefully some of these wrinkles will be ironed out when I actually read the manual.

I was impressed with the video quality, and if I had to spend a long time in some waiting room or even on a plane or bus, I could easily watch a full movie on this. Podcast's now make sense to me, something to kill time with when your not at home, I grabbed some really good ones from the CBC.

So all in all I am very happy and now have to look into either running iTunes in linux with wine, or finding a native linux alternative like gtkpod or banshee or hoping that apple release a linux version. (google did after all come through for me with google earth, so now it apple's turn to step up and make me a happy little camper.)

You might remember some fun I had earlier with aptitude and its hidden Easter egg. I asked, nay, begged a friend in irc to tell me what that diagram meant but he refused, only to say it was from a really good book.

A couple of days ago, I saw a thread on the debian-user mailing list about a Package of The Day website, and the author of said site must have seen my blog in my mailing list sig and read about the previous aptitude Easter egg post. It turns out all I needed to do was add another v to my command...

[orchid@morcheeba:~]% aptitude -vvvvv moo 
All right, you win.




                               /----\
                       -------/      \
                      /               \
                     /                |
   -----------------/                  --------\
   ----------------------------------------------
[orchid@morcheeba:~]% aptitude -vvvvvv moo
What is it?  It's an elephant being eaten by a snake, of course.

Ok, so now I know what the picture is, but I am still in the dark as to what book it is from and what kind of snake could possibly eat an elephant.

Tomorrow we will discuss why 14 days after being given a 30GB video iPod for my birthday, I have still yet to listen to a single song on it.

I spent the weekend in beautiful Elora attending the wedding of a friend. I was a Low Level Bridesmaid, meaning not much short of showing up was expected of me and this was fine, I could relax and not really experience the stress that is now part and parcel of a wedding.

The girl getting married lives close to me and is an avid cyclist, she has a nifty high tech mountain bike and has on numerous occasion tried to drag me along with her. I much prefer running however as it rare that I fall down while running and highly likely that I would ride into a tree or get thrown from my bike if I cycled regularly.

Cycling was the product of an American "fad", along with such fads as miniature golf, danceathons, roller skating, Ouija boards and the like. In the early years however, because of its popularity amongst women, the Georgia Journal Of Medicine and Surgery announced that cycling was an activity unfit for women. Apparently the act of riding a bike would bestir "Feelings hitherto unrealized by the young maiden"