October, admittedly, has been one of the busiest and all-around stressful months I have had. Things did not start off on a good foot, and the last day of this month will decide the fate of the next. Right now I’m really looking forward to Thanksgiving, and not necessarily for the festivities. By then at least one of the projects I’m working on will be complete, and the time off from school will be appreciated. For the last four weeks time seemed to be in short supply, but after this weekend the weekend excursion to the northern Minnesota wilderness will take a several month break until enough snow falls for snowmobiling (January-February time frame).
I really can’t wait for it to snow.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Back into the Gentoo partition this evening, and things are great. The ATI driver automagically began working again, after not working when reinstalling it after a run with the open-source driver. So I updated that to the latest, before I was only getting 50 – 100 FPS with glxgears, now I get about 500 to 600 FPS with glxgears on my Radeon 9600, talk about an improvement. Now only if October’s driver would come sooner so I can have Compiz fusion running with out XGL.
After fixing the graphics issues, I moved on to getting the shared printer on mtekktux to connect on my computer, that didn’t require much effort either. Just a quick configuration of CUPS, and updating HPLIP, setting the printer as default, and Kablam! printing works.
Now came the annoying sound issues. In particular, if alsasound is not started your previous gmixer settings get lost in Gnome (probably the same way with KDE). Fixing this is simple, just add alsasound to the default run level using rc-update add alsasound default. Now on boot alsasound will launch restoring settings from the previous session (that’s if it is configured to do so, which it is by default). As things have gone good so far, I plugged in my Logitech Music Anyware USB wireless audio device. Running cat /proc/asound/cards revealed:
1 [Tra ]: USB-Audio - Logitech Music Anywhere USB Tra
Logitech Logitech Music Anywhere USB Tra at usb-0000:00:1d.2-1, full speed
ALSA found it! So it was time to test to see if it works, and sure enough it does. The remote doesn’t work (yet), but that’s because Audacious doesn’t hook into the multimedia hotkey functions yet. For something that does not claim Linux support, having the major function of it work is success by any standard.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
It sounds like AMD will follow Intel’s lead in opening up their graphics processors for open source driver development. Today they released full specifications, no strings attached (in the form of NDAs that is). This comes after last week’s announcement that the new fglrx will offer a major improvement in performance for Linux users. As my computer has a obsolete Radeon 9600, I await the day when running Compiz Fusion is possible without the use of that ugly beast known as XGL. That date is set for October should I decide to stick with the fglrx driver. Hopefully by Christmas the open-source driver will be a truly viable option (I spent three days trying to get it to work with my 9600 with no luck).
On a side note, I received over a terabyte worth of hard drives plus other computer components. This time a good portion of the drives are 7200 RPM, and I now have a back-up motherboard (exact same model as my current). Ideally, I’ll add a 250GB hard drive to mtekktux to supplement it’s 80GB drive to turn it into a media and print server. Then I’ll replace my 160GB 5400 RPM hard drive with a 250 GB 7200RPM one for my XP drive, that should shorten the load times for maps in 2142.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
While on a flight out to Philadelphia this past Monday I began thinking about the age of my current Digital Audio Player, Creative’s Zen Micro. The player is nice, and it does what I need and has a removable battery, which is a life saver for longer trips. I have this habit, however, which causes me to get a new portable audio device every three years. At the end of September, I will have had the Zen Micro for two and a half years. It’s time to look for a replacement. Playing MP3′s is good, but sometimes having the ability to play video would be nice. Transcoding sucks and I refuse to transcode my media files. Thus, many solutions out there today will not even be considered. In the real world, size matters, I need something that is about the same size as my current DAP, but a bigger screen would be nice. As a runner, I would like to run with my DAP. Hard drive based players are not ideal for any high movement conditions. Previously, the Zen Vision:W caught my eye, however, it fills the ‘full sized’ market, too large for my tastes.
Creative has a new player now, the Zen (a recycled name). It is approximately the same size of my DAP, but at about half the thickness, which should be really nice (the Zen Micro should be about a quarter of an inch thinner to appeal to a larger market). Flash based, and available in 4GiB, 8GiB, and 16GiB versions, this would be perfect for running. The battery is not removable, sadly, however Creative is claiming over 25 hours of battery life when playing audio. An added bonus is the SD slot for expansion, even though my 5GB Zen Micro still has about 1GB free, storage expansion is always welcomed, especially if it is hot-swappable (in contrast to the Nomad II’s SmartMedia slot). I’ll probably get the 8GiB version since the 16GiB version is 100USD more expensive.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
You get the gist. I do not go over this bridge often, maybe once a year. Some who traveled the bridge more often claimed that it was wobbly and the deck was deteriorating, which has no affect on the underlying steel structure but may be a representation of the quality of upkeep of the rest of the bridge. Interestingly enough the current construction project on the bridge was fixing up the decking.
Contrary of many other regions of the United States, in Minnesota it is supposed to snow, and MNDOT loves to salt the roads heavily. This past year they employed a liquid pre-snow deicing agent which happens to be a corrosion agent. Whether or not this had an effect on this particular bridge who knows. Sadly, since MNDOT is responsible for the maintenance of this bridge, and thus the collapse is their fault, the entire thing will be covered up. Why? We are talking about the metropolitan area that has the second worst traffic problem in the nation just behind LA. MNDOT is filled with a bunch of incompetent fools that would never be able to create a successful transportation system in Sim City 4.
Worst of all, MNDOT is crying about funding now. This is what happens when the state diverts money away transportation and places it into social programs and education. In the past election cycle a referendum on alleviating the current misappropriation of tax dollars from transportation was passed. Sadly, the bill was flawed in forcing a minimum amount to go to mass transit, but no minimum for roads and bridges. Unlike the many idiots in the ‘great’ state of Minnesota, I did not vote for the flawed referendum. In the great way of all politicians, politicians are calling for tax increases to ‘pay’ for roads and bridges. As has happened in the past, these funds, if received will be diverted to further social programs.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
WordCamp NYC
