Author Archives: Adam

Learning more Googling

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We all know Google is the best search engine and I use some of the advanced features quite a lot. My favourite trick is the site: search were you specify a website site to search. I noted on the Wolves LUG mailing list about 15 minutes ago that site: searches don’t like specified subdirectories like http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/ which I would like so I could search the Wolves LUG mailing list for specific things, which I do a lot.

Aq kindly pointed out that you can do this with inurl: searches which I hadn’t noticed before, so while I can do site:mailman.lug.org.uk wolves and still get a lot of non-Wolves LUG stuff, if I do inurl:mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/ [search term] then it will search the exact url for [search term]. I didn’t know this and as I told him, this has made my life complete 😀 Thanks Aq.

Now I must blush after telling a few people recently that they need to learn to search Google properly instead of asking obvious, easy to answer questions that are available at the end of a simple Google search. However, on that note, as I have previously ranted, if you learn to search Google, you will learn a lot more and also learn how to help yourself than if you just ask someone else for an easy answer.

The Pleasure and Pain of Gentoo

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Heh 😉 I’m gonna have to start thinking of another title for my Gentoo posts.

Well Gentoo is finally installed on my Sun Ultra 10 Sparc64 machine. It went ok really apart from that it has probably taken me 24 man hours or so in 3 sessions. The (Sparc64) Gentoo docs are very good and useful for non-Gentoo specific stuff that I didn’t know. I will be referring to them again. They could do with a few little tweaks, like explicitly stating that the sparc-sources kernel source package is preferable to gentoo-sources on Sparc machines. It’s not as obvious as it might seem as you can use either, but sparc-sources are tweaked for Sparc macines. Fortunately I have a sense of completeness that made me choose sparc-sources straight away, other people had problems with gentoo-sources on sparc.

I started this process again last night and emerged lshw and pciutils (for lspci) so I could work out what was in the box. This sucked in X.org as a dependency for some reason and meant I spent another night wearing earplugs as I was ssh-ed in again from my noisy PSU containing desktop. Meh.

All finished this morning so I decided to change the compilation optimisation from level 3 to level 2 to speed up compilation and reduce the size of the binaries. I then did some work on identifying the hardware, got the sparc kernel sources and cautiously did make-menuconfig.

It actually wasn’t all that bad as all of the sparc hardware options were already selected, I just removed all of the things I didn’t have. I did worry that I didn’t see options for ebus and a few other things but I built the kernel anyway and watched it fail on make modules. Fuck. Google. It turns out that kernel-2.4.29 (the latest version of sparc-sources in Gentoo) fails to build on sparc64 due to missing #defines in dmabuf.c where sound is enabled. Well I only enabled sound support because I hadn’t noticed before that the CS4231 sound card uses a separate low level driver in the kernel, not part of the regular sound system.

Cool. Turned off sound support. Compiled nicely. The rest went pretty much as per the instructions but it’s been one long journey. I still don’t have any nice end-user apps. On the hitlist is Gnome and maybe OpenOffice.org but they are gonna be looooooong compiles.

I think getting the X server to work will be interesting. I have an ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro 215GP (rev 5c) (thanks once again to a wholesale lspci quote…).

After leaving this post for an hour or two, getting Xorg working is awkward and manual, the configuration tools can’t detect the ATI card, the Sun mouse or Sun keyboard. After some not very helpful googling, and some shot in the dark guessing, I managed to correctly assume that the mouse protocol was busmouse and the device is /dev/sunmouse. Stealing sections of the xorg.conf file from here and here also helped. I just added ATI as the graphics driver and I can get an enormous resolution and moving mouse.

At the moment I can’t see an option to change the resolution in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and for now, Sun keyboards don’t work with Xorg6.8 – they require the deprecated (and apparently no longer supplied) keyboard driver and don’t work with the replacement kbd driver. Hmph.

Gentoo (on Sparc64): awkward and drawn out but thats the cost of doing everything manually and compiling it all yourself. The keyboard problem isn’t strictly a Gentoo thing, thats Xorg going through a transitional period. Next I have to work out how Gentoo startup scripts work so I can make ssh, X, gdm and other things in the future start at boot time. With few other options for my Sparc hardware (though I’m sure after all this installing Debian on it would be a breeze…), Gentoo’s pay off will be in the performance and in the learning I did going through the process.

Ubuntu Jingle Update

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After getting annoyed with the frustratingly fiddly process of getting some kind of decent input from my microphone via my soundcard and trying Dynebolic on various machines which run out of RAM as it’s a live CD or stutter because the audacity project is running from a USB micro hard disk (ie slow read/write access) I have bought a new sound card. It takes so long to check this and that with such granularity that by the time I come to the conclusion that I need to mount the hard disk to put the files on and run it from there it’s either midnight and I have to abandon it and go to sleep or I have more important uni work to do. So it was just easier to buy a new soundcard for my main desktop as recommended by Ant in my comments for the original Ubuntu Jingle post.

So on his advice I now have a Creative Labs Soundblaster Live on it’s way. After a bit of research I believe it uses the emu10k module.

Hopefully this will be the end of my complaining and I can get this jingle finished. Either way, I was starting to have other problems with this sound card, I just never worried too much about them before. For example when playing music files the sound would rise and dip randomly. It really is obviously a crap soundcard.

As my cousin once said to me, unless you’re doing real sound work, the soundcard is the last thing anyone ever upgrades. And it is.

Windows is hard to use

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I’ve barely used Windows in the last few months and now I have my laptop back I’m stuck with Windows on it until I can sort the crap restore partition thingy out and install Linux.

It’s struck me how hard Windows is to maintain. The amount of calls I get when people explode their Windows installations definitely supports this theory. I have a fresh installation. First thing I do is head to Windows Update and install all of the updates and patches. Then I install Firefox, a firewall and anti-virus. Then I update them. Then I install Microsoft Office (I will be moving to OpenOffice.org on Windows when I am more comfortable with it. By this time I may have finished uni and won’t be using Windows at all). Then I update it.

Then I install all of the million apps you need to make Windows do anything useful. Real Player and it’s horrible ad laden bulkiness, Quick Time, Acrobat Reader and all of the other things I never use. An adware remover.

I think adware and spyware are the biggest threats to Windows users at the moment. I watched a video clip the other day that showed a malicious website installing such malware with no visible output to the user and certainly no asking the user if they wanted to install the software. The guy showed the Program Files directory before and after to show the new software installed. I don’t care if XP Service Pack 2 makes you have Automatic Updates turned on, in my experience people just tell it to fuck off when it tells them that there are updates to install. Just booting into Windows and getting prompted to check all these things for updates is a pain in the arse, so much so that I’d prefer not to use it and the rest of the world have no interest in learning about why they should care, let alone actually doing this, which is why my phone keeps ringing with people complaining that porn and adverts keep popping up and why I get emailed viruses all the time. I have tried explaining it to them…

Windows takes too much looking after and ordinary people are overwhelmed. Even I, as a techincally minded individual think Windows is a hideous, uncomfortable, over-complicated beast that drains me of energy to use. Linux, in my case Ubuntu is a case of hitting reload in Synaptic and then Mark All Updates then Apply or whatever. To install stuff, hit search, find your package and choose install. Imagine having all the Windows software you might possibly want to use in a searchable list with an install button next to each one and an update button to get the latest version of everything you have installed, all at once.

But people want Windows. I think this is mainly due to the PR thing. Like people saying they want a ‘Pentchinum 4’ because they’ve seen it on the the TV and their friends have one. I think if Linux were more able to play MP3’s, DVD movies, Real, Quicktime, DivX, XVid and so on multimedia formats out of the box, then the only real reason to use Windows would be for games. But if thats all you want a computer for then buy a console. But try explaing that to people…

I really must get around to testing Ubuntu on an innocent bystander.

Do you play Wolf-ET?

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Do you listen to LUG Radio? If so you should join in with clan.lugradio.org.

We play on Wednesday and Sunday nights from 8pm UK time. I’ve played for the last few weeks but the numbers are dropping. There were 3 of us this week and I had to bail early.

If you listen to LUG Radio and play Wolf-ET, please join in.

A Perfect World?

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Is it the nature of being computer people that makes us frustrated by real world inanimate objects’ refusal to do what we ask of them and means we are also the only people in the world that actually know how to follow instructions and put things like furniture or toys together?

I know Jono feels like this. Ask him about having to move his cooker with the broken door that refused to stay closed when he was moving house.

Inanimate objects drive me to distraction. They’re sooooo fucking stupid. I think this might be to do with the fact that I spend all day interacting with an idealised abstraction of a real world environment which behaves in the same way all the time. You can’t drop something on the floor when you remove the item that was on top of it from the fridge when you’re using a computerised environment, that kind of clumsiness is already taken care of for you. If this were going to happen, you would probably get a nice little warning message asking if you really want to drop the chicken on the floor, or leave it in the fridge. I believe Jono calls such idiotic objects ‘infidels’.

I also thought over Christmas that I was the only person in my house that knows how to follow assembly instructions for new furniture or my neice’s toys. My mum just gives up at the point electricity becomes involved, especially when she has to unplug something to plug the new thing in. Not for her to follow cables to see where they go, no. My dad is pretty good at putting stuff together but he is easily misled. I seem to be the only one who can do stuff like this without getting confused. I wonder whether this is also to do with my computerised existence. I spend a lot of time reading howtos, man pages, walkthroughs and so on.

Are we living in an overly perfected world that makes real life frustrating?

The Art of Gentoo (on Sparc64)

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Further to my question over whether Gentoo was worth the effort, I decided to actually install it. Somewhat prompted by Ron‘s insistence a while back that Gentoo is great, a chat with a guy called Mark Welch from uni and also from Fizz‘s comments.

I got frustrated over Christmas that my degree doesn’t cover anything that doesn’t run in Windows and therefore on x86 hardware and so I bought an old iMac and a Sun Sparc Ultra 10 workstation. (Sidenote: man is CDE butt ugly).

Well I must have been well treated by Linux because I couldn’t work out how to turn the DHCP client on in Solaris 9 (never used Solaris before) and as we all know, computers are pretty fucking boring without a net connection these days. Yeah I could have figured it out in the end, but the management console was starting to fail to open and a few other things so I figured I’d never use Solaris for anything anyway and decided to install Linux on it. I think Sun are sending me a copy of Solaris 10 for entering some competition or other anyway.

It seems nobody really does a mainstream Sparc64 Linux anymore apart Debian and Gentoo. Debian is my distro of choice but I’m not really sure whats in the box so I need hardware detection and I can’t be arsed to wait 9 months or however long it’s going to take for Sarge to appear, I don’t think they’ve even gone into a freeze yet. So it’s Gentoo.

And well, it seems cool but not one you’d give to a beginner to install. I chose the stage 2 Live CD method as it offered the most control without having to know all my hardware.

Hmm I had to fudge some things. All of the hardware worked out of the box so far. I could probably do with tweaking the hard disk performance with hdparm but I’ll worry about that later when I’ve had time to learn whether my hdparm out was any good and how to tune it.

livecd root # hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing O_DIRECT cached reads: 716 MB in 2.00 seconds = 358.00 MB/sec
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 38 MB in 3.08 seconds = 12.34 MB/sec

livecd root # hdparm /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 38792/16/63, sectors = 20020396032, start = 0

I’ve never really bothered to compile stuff apart from my own kernels and a few things that weren’t packaged by Mandrake when I used it years ago, so I’ve never learned about compiler optimisations and whatnot. I opted for:

USE=”X gtk gnome alsa -kde -qt”
CHOST=”sparc-unknown-linux-gnu”
CFLAGS=”-mcpu=ultrasparc -O3 -pipe”
CXXFLAGS=”${CFLAGS}”
MAKEOPTS=”-j2″

I have no idea how good a choice I made (advice gratefully received) but ultimately when I know what I’m doing I’ll rebuild the entire system. I will use it mainly as a backup desktop machine running Gnome. I might use it as a home server later on.

I let mirrorselect choose my mirrors for me and the performance was dismal. For some reason, all my mirrors were in the Netherlands (apparently Holland is only part of the Netherlands and it annoys the hell out the Dutch that people think the country is called Holland) but all my downloads were coming from Korean and Taiwanese mirrors which took 3 minutes to time out, which they did a lot. After 50 minutes I had about 12 packages so ‘control-C’ed emerge and manually added the British Blueyonder mirror to /etc/make.conf and the whole lot came down in about 20 minutes. (Note to self: bash filename auto-completion doesn’t work in a web browser window ;)). I use Blueyonder as my Debian apt source and know I can get a sustained 59KB/s transfer on a 512Kb ADSL link.

I left it compiling overnight as it was about 2am when I started and it was all done when I woke up. I stupidly forgot to log out of the SSH session on my desktop machine with the loud PSU and run emerge system locally on my Sun box. I had to wear earplugs overnight…

But it all went fine. Now I’m at the Configuration File Protection and Configuring the Kernel stage but I just don’t have time to absorb all of this reading and sit there and set it all up. I still don’t really know whats in the box, lsmod only lists ext3, jdb and openpromfs so everything else must be compiled in to the kernel image (doh, must remember to use lspci…). I did note from dmesg that I have a Sun Happy Meal ethernet card 🙂 That made me smile, I’ve seen that in the kernel source over the last few years and thought it was a cute name for a network card 😉 I wonder if Sun or McDonalds came up with it first.

So I now have a half complete Gentoo installation, I just have to do the reading and finish it off before, I assume, installing all the apps that I want and worrying about booloaders and stuff. I think that will be a(nother) weekend job…

I bumped into Fizz last night actually, we were both pretty drunk and he asked me if I’d read his comments. I think we mumbled to each other for a few seconds about Gentoo. I think he was more interested in the girl I was with to be honest but it was still good to see him and exchange drunkitudes 😀

Blogging is bad for your academic productivity

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Trust me I know. My performance has nosedived since I started reading blogs. Admittedly I am far more interested in what I am picking up from blogs than I am in writing right outer joins in Oracle’s not completely ANSI standard SQL dialect or the economic impact of IT globalisation and offshoring. There is no Linux on my degree. There is on the years that follow mine, my year was the last of the old degree scheme. Isn’t that really weird? In an era such as this my only academic contact with a non-Windows operating system is telnetting a Solaris server to use Oracle.

I’m a Linux guy and blogging is far more interesting. Just don’t tell my lecturers…

Novell produce another crucial open source app

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Not content with vying with Canonical for hiring some of the best and coolest open source hackers out there, Novell has offered yet another gift to the open source community by anouncing the Hula Project.

Hula is a web based calendaring and email server somewhat akin to Microsoft Exchange Server, a system that has been lacking in the open source world for years. Although many projects have claimed to offer similar features to Exchange, none have yet to offer a clean implementation or crucially, the shared calendar functionality. They have their eyes on some really cool features like viewing via rss feed and interacting with it via your mobile phone. It is worth noting that Hula is still in the planning stage and has as yet made no releases.

A lot of people were worried when Novell bought Ximian and SuSE, including myself, thinking that they would just get swallowed up in corporate bullshit and slowly die a quiet death. It appears not to be the case.

I’ll try to refain from saying stuff here that I have been intending to use in an article entitled “Why Linux is Good News for Everybody” (feel free to hire me to write this for your publication, email to drinky76 at yahoo dot com ;)), but a large part of this revolves around why Linux is so important to people like Novell, IBM, Sun, HP, Intel and Oracle. They all have products in a shrinking market with one main competitor.

Novell realised they were dying and pretty soon they wouldn’t exist. Novell network and directory services ran on Novell Netware and Windows, but nobody used them on Windows any more and people weren’t buying Novell Netware. People were buying Windows and a few people were buying Unix, but Unix vendors were painting themselves into a corner. But a hell of a lot of people were looking at Linux as the new cool Unix, a possible investment and oen to watch as a future competitor to Windows if not the future of the operating system market. What to do?

Make Novell stuff run on Linux. How to do that? Hire the right people, buy a Linux distributor with the right profile and buy another Linux company that look like they are pushing Linux in the right way. Red Hat are too big to be bought, you can’t buy Debian, what about SuSE? SuSE are about the right size, have a sizeable market and have the right kind of corporate profile. What about hiring the right people? Well, Ximian are doing some really cool things and have some of the best most focused hackers out there – Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman and so on.

And they did. But they also realised something important that a lot of the big guns miss. You can’t win with Linux by just doing your own Linux and go at it will all corporate marketing and PR guns blazing. The community won’t give a fuck about you and you won’t get anywhere without them. You have to do it right and you have to get the community on side. How to do that? Well, if you have read anything about the open source community, it is characterised in part by the concept that if we all give something to a project (code, patches, money etc), we all get something greater and more valuable back as a whole system. Novell spotted this and decided that the only way to win with Linux was to give the community what it wanted. Open source several high profile and highly desired applications (Ximian Connector, YaST), pay people to work on what love (Mono, beagle and so on) and pay people to work on what was sorely needed (an Exhange replacement among other things). All these things add up to more and more pieces of the jig-saw dropping into place for an open source equivalent to every app in every bedroom/office/server room.

To win in the corprate field, they also realised that they needed to offer Linux services that very few have might to provide. Software support and training support. These are big things in the professional world. The thing that scares people most about deploying Linux is that they need somebody to call when things go wrong and someone to take responsibility for it. For Linux to take off, there also needs to be a groundswell of Linux expertise. Linux has always been a bedroom hacker’s system, but how can you prove that a bedroom hacker is skillful enough to run your IT infrastructure? Training and qualifications. Novell offer all of this. Wow.

There are big things happening in the open source world at the moment and the future is exciting, damn, I can’t wait to see what we have in the next 12 months. Gnome looks like the future of the desktop to me and I’ve only been using it for 3 weeks. Stuff like Beagle, Xgl and iFolder look like great apps and show clear, ahead of the game, thinking outside of the box. Windows users won’t see this kind of stuff for maybe 2 years. I wonder how many more of them will be using Linux by then. Novell and Canonical (via Ubuntu) are really pushing Linux where it needs to be heading and Novell are paying for a lot of the core pieces of software to be developed.

Bravo Novell, although I still think Ubuntu is the one true way forward, I might try the Novell Linux Desktop at some point.

The Point of Gentoo

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Is… Umm…

Well a few of Wolves LUG are using Gentoo and think it’s great, the main draw seems to be the package management system. I have to be honest, I’ve been using Debian for a few years (and Ubuntu more recently) and am in the Debian way of thinking. Package management is pretty core to how I evaluate a distro these days. Apt is just the business. So Gentoo uses Portage. The idea being you get your package source repositries and build the packages from source in an efficient, well managed way. It’s a great idea, but whats the point? Why build everything from source?

Well every package is compiled on your own hardware and therefore is optmised for your own machine. Great. But it takes ages. I was told that on a very fast modern system, building all of the packages to make a fresh install takes a weekend. You can expect stuff like Open Office.org, KDE, Gnome or X to take around 8 hours each. Phew.

The point of this post is the argument about precompiled packages versus locally compiled optimised packages and whether the performance boost is worth the time lost compiling. While your software is optimised for the machine it was built on and hence runs a lot faster than any pre-compiled packages, is the gain in resposiveness worth the time lost to compiling? Sure you can still use the machine while you compile, but still, what you lose in compile time will you get back in response time? In a desktop environment, you can probably compile and continue to work, everything will just take longer, but what about a server?

I can see the point in an environment where the software must run fully optimised for the hardware, but what do you do at update time? Take the performance hit of compiling new updates? Won’t that throw off the whole performance thing? Sure, it was said that where this is the case you have a backup machine which runs while such updates are going on. But isn’t this a sidestep? What is more expensive? 2 machines or 1 better machine?

It’s a fantastic idea if you like to know your software is running as fast as it can, but is it worth the hit at compile time? I don’t think the speedup you make is greater than the time you lost compiling.

This of course is just an opinion and I do aim to take a look at Gentoo sometime soon…

Laptop Update

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So, regular readers (heh ;)) will know about my Tiny laptop saga. Well despite their 7-10 working day return time, 4 weeks from the day theI logged the fault call, I got my laptop back. And well, it’s great. Nice new keyboard and the processor fan doesn’t make the whirring, clipping sound it did the last time they changed it, so, all cool.

Except that after twice phoning me and telling me Windows needed to be replaced at the cost of ~£60 which I refused, they installed Windows XP Home anyway. Weird. It hasn’t shown up on my invoice or bank statement so it looks like they just did it anyway. We like free stuff :D. The fact that it’s Windows makes it less pleasurable, but well it now means I have a spare Windows license to put on something, which isn’t such a great thing, but at least I have it if I really need to.

When I logged the fault call they asked me for my Windows license key and I said I didn’t know because I had to wipe it. I forgot that the Windows sticker was on the underside so they must have just banged a new copy on and used my old license key. Why didn’t they just do this before instead of trying to charge me for it? Bastards.

Well, anyway, so now I’m back to square one. I have a copy of Windows on my laptop and want to put Linux, more specifically Ubuntu on it. I still need Windows to do some uni work and would prefer to use the copy already on there. So I’m back to this irretrievable partition problem. I think I’ll just set up the Windows installation how I want it, then Ghost the partition and use it to write the partition back after I wipe the disk and repartition.

Let the day soon be that I no longer need Windows…

Linux at the forefront of a desktop graphics revolution?

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Wow. Look at this post from Nat Friedman.

Xgl is a new X server using GL 3d acceleration. I think Nat’s blog explains it all better than I can.

I don’t know a great deal about graphics subsystems, but I think this kind of idea is just the kind of great thinking that will make Windows and Mac OS X users sit up and take notice. I know Microsoft have a lot of new graphics stuff in mind for Longhorn, but surely people will be using this first and this will probably far more powerful. OS X looks great but I’m not sure how far their graphics subsystem goes. Could it do stuff like this? I don’t think so.

Eye candy rules in desktop world. If I could demo the possibilities of this to my dad he’d want it and that means a lot to me, I want everyone to want Linux.

I meant to write something a little more profound than this, but just like Nat, I’m really tired – it’s late and my thoughts are just starting to slow down.

Just go look at it.

Wow, I’m popular

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I set up my website http://www.drinky.org.uk/ a long time ago. I started in Microsoft Frontpage Express (this was before I knew what Linux was). As everyone that ever used it will know, Frontpage Express was utter crap, but I didn’t know any better. Today the same basic design exists as I’ve never had the time to rewrite the whole thing, though I’ve been meaning to move it over to some kind of CMS for some time. I basically use it as a dumping ground and as portal for when people ask me stuff. It’s a terrible, disorganised, ugly mess.

Because it’s so poorly put together I’ve never really pimped it and having been living under illusion that nobody ever really reads it for around 4 years. Until today.

I have this workshop to do for a uni module. It basically involves checking the Apache server logs on the uni webserver and grepping the output for your own site. Until about a week ago, my entire website was hosted on the uni server with DNS forwarding to point at the relevent place. So I expected some kind of logs. What I didn’t expect was todays logs to scroll off the terminal for a few minutes. On a busy site maybe, but not for my pathetic effort. How wrong I have been.

It seems that the Big Snake (not suitable if you are squeamish) is popular with the employees of Samsung in Korea and quite a few other people. Why I don’t know. I’d forgotten all about it. It’s a verbatim copy and paste of an email I received about 2 or 3 years back, complete with annoying caps-lock on text. All I can assume is that someone must have come across it and emailed a link to a few friends who then forwarded it on and on and on, it must be doing the rounds in Korea at the moment. Bizarre. But aside from that, my site has been getting a regular hammering from all over the world. I’m really surprised. I didn’t think anyone read my site at all.

So, having moved my hosting over to the account kindly provided by Sparkes, I decided to check the logs for my new hosting and my blog subdomain. Wow. Obviously not as prolific as the old one, it’s only been up for a few days, but still busy. And then I noticed something really cool.

Some of the biggest referrers are Planet Gnome, Planet Ubuntu and Planet Debian. Holy crap. People on some of the coolest blog syndicates are reading *my* blog. In the last 24 hours. Jeee-zus.

So off I went to Bloglines to have a look as I’m subscibed to all of those planets. Planet Gnome first as it was the biggest referrer. It seems that Jeff Waugh has linked to my Ubuntu Jingle post. That really freaked me out. Nobody really knows I’ve got a blog yet, apart from the LUG Radio guys. Jeff was interviewed at some ungodly hour of the morning by the LUG Radio team, the day after Australia day and still managed to be intelligent and entertaining.

So. Shit. I’ve been linked to by one of the coolest guys in the open source world. That really made my day 😀 Guess I have to finish my jingle now…

I’m watching the Brit Awards…

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I’m going out in a minute but I’m watching the Brit Awards (the British music awards).

Best British Rock Band…

Surely I can’t be the only person in the world that is able to recognise the fact that Franz Ferdinand are shit.

Can I?

At least it wasn’t The Darkness. Ugh.

Ubuntu Jingle

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I decided to do an Ubuntu jingle for LUG Radio. If you don’t already know, LUG Radio is a Linux radio discussion show that goes some way to recreating the loud, opinionated and very funny nature of our Wolves LUG meetings.

The jingle was to be based on a running joke from LUG Radio and our LUG meetings, where Aq would sing Ubuntu to the Um Bongo theme tune. Um Bongo is a kids fruit juice drink with the coolest advert ever, available when we were kids and judging by the site, it’s still available now.

So, I set about making a proper version for a jingle. As a test case, I was determined to use open source software, in this case the Hydrogen drum machine software for Linux to make the drum track (thanks to Mr Ben’s reply on the LUG Radio forums) and the Eastern Hip-Hop drumkit.

After having trouble getting the JACK server to start, I had to abandon Rosegarden and Ardour, so I decided to use Audacity instead. It’s not that complex a project to require serious multi-tracking anyway.

So, export the drum track as a .wav out of hydrogen, create a click track in Audacity and import the .wav. All cool. Plug in my crappy PC mic into the mic slot of my soundcard, try to record my hideous tribal “Ubuntu Ubuntu” chanting. Play it back. Umph. Sounds like a crap, crackly mess with heavy breathing and unintelligable, slightly out of time words. You can’t really tell I’m talking at all. Try another 2 crap PC mics and get the same result. Double check Gnome sound controls, no problem there. Try Dynebolic Linux, a Linux sound recording Live CD, same problem but less out of time (probably to do with the low latency patches that help with sound recording issues under Linux). Try Audacity under Windows, even worse (ie no recorded sound at all).

So, I dig out my ‘proper’ mic from my musician days and buy an adapter to connect the quarter inch jack to a 3.5 mm soundcard input. Same problem. Shit.

So there lies my problem. I think this jingle would be really cool, I even had plans to make a version to submit to Ubuntu as a sound test wav file or something. No go. I think the latency problems with Linux sound recording can be overcome by using Dynebolic, but I think the main problem is my crap Via VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (to quote lspci ;)).

So my fantastic project is on hold for now, until I can work out how to record a decent vocal track. I could maybe dig out my old 4-track tape recorder and use my mic through that and into the line-in or mic socket, but thats a major ball-ache.

Linux Sound Recording (with reservations) 1 – 0 Crap Hardware.

UPDATE 17/02/2005:

Dynebolic can’t play the file back without significant stutter on my laptop. It will boot on my dad’s machine but can’t recognise his bog standard Creative PCI 16 soundcard which I vaguely recall uses one of the ensoniq modules. Modprobing either ensoniq module supplied with dynebolic produces an error about depending on a PCMICIA module which blah blah… Audacity under Windows works great with my microphone on my dad’s machine. This means the problem with my machine is the soundcard.

I’m running out of machines. Don’t make me use Windows…

UPDATE 21/02/2005:

The latest developments are in another post.

What do you do?

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You know when you ask people what they like doing and they list their hobbies and interests? And they say stuff like browsing the Internet, watching TV, listening to music, playing the XBox/Playstation/Game Cube and so on. I’m thinking, “Shit. Don’t you do anything productive?”

In the words of Lance Armstrong, 5 time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor, “People ask me what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike 6 hours a day. What are YOU on?”

I couldn’t imagine not having some kind of output. I’d go crazy. Maybe I’m just blessed with an inquisitive mind and time to use it. I couldn’t just go to work, come home and then watch TV, I’d feel like I was rotting away.

What do you do?

Lethargy

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I feel tired and fuzzy all the time. I have often wondered whether it is normal to feel so rough all the time and obviously the answer is no. I compare my state of energy to other people and often ask myself if they are feeling the same. Jono seems to have more energy for doing things than I could ever imagine. He is on the go all the time, I don’t know how he does it.

So I was interested to read that Steve Kemp has a similar problem. While he thinks his problems might be an undiagnosed condition, mine are most probably not.

I have long thought it might be a result of some illness that has gone unnoticed, like diabetes (I drink a lot of fluid and react strangely to lots of sugar), or thyroid problems (some days I feel ok, some days I can’t get out of bed) or even as a result of the oxygen starvation I suffered during the multiple cardiac arrests I had when I was a newborn (the doctors thought I would be brain-damaged). I have asked my doctor and also analysed my lifestyle myself. My doctor’s answer was to eat more dark green vegetables. This would help, but my diet isn’t that bad, though it could be better.

To be honest, my problem is most likely that I am under-motivated and find it easy to slip into a pattern of ‘late to bed, late up’ when I have a workload, or nothing better to do. I am in this phase at the moment. I am going to bed at 4am. Going to bed earlier means staring at the ceiling for hours. Consequently I can’t get up before midday, frequently more like 2pm. As a result I feel awful all day. The only answer is to force myself out of bed at some early, yet do-able time, like say, 10am, then force myself to stay up all day and go to bed tired at maybe 12am and then try to get up at say 9am, which is perfectly reasonable when you don’t have to get up and again stay up all day until perhaps 11pm or 12am.

The problem is that if I get up early as I did yesterday (11am *blush*), I feel so tired all day that I can’t keep my eyes open and by 3pm I have to take a nap in a bid to rescue some kind of productivity from the day, so I am able to do some work later on.

I have 4 alarm clocks. I can sleep through 3 of them. The other one I get out of bed and turn off without remembering, while I am barely conscious.

This is a pathetic state of affairs. It’s my own under-motivation that is the problem, but I’m sure if everybody else felt as awful as I do, then they would get up late or take a nap as I have to. I have to sort this out as it’s costing me my degree. I got some lousy grades last semester as a result of not being able to work in the daytime and having to work late at night.

When will someone invent human ACPI? I hear the army train you to fall asleep at will and then wake up again when you need to without feeling tired. Perhaps I need a boot camp.

Incompatibility Issues…

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So, it seems that my parents are separating. This has all happened in 48 hours. I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or not, but it will certainly do the rest of the world a favour. Sometimes I thought they think they might shrivel up and die if they weren’t able to blame the ills of the rest of the world on each other. I stopped listening to them arguing and complaining about each other around 10 years ago. Now, I just don’t care.

It’s not always as bad as it is now but it’s always been there. I’m 28 and can’t ever remember them being happily married. I don’t know why they didn’t do it sooner. At this very moment it’s weird because we are all still in the same house.

On a selfish point, this all kinda leaves me high and dry. I have 6 months of uni left and they have mentioned selling the house. I moved out about 4 years back and had to move back again about 18 months ago because my own housing contract ran out, the guys I was living with and I had had enough of living together (mostly due to the immeasurable pressure of living with someone with a mental illness) and I couldn’t afford to live alone. I now can’t afford to move back out as my student loan won’t cover it (I have a reduced loan as I live my parents – catch 22).

Sure, they probably won’t sell the house before the end of uni and my mum says I can live with her when she moves out (my dad is probably staying here until the sale), but given the circumstances, I don’t really want to live with either of them.

Guess I’ll just have to stick it out until the end of my degree…

Times, they are a-changin’.