Why My Life Sucks

The more I play with a self hosted version of Wordpress, the more I like it. The update system rocks and it in general, after a very limited number of add ons are added does exactly what I want a blog software to do. If your self hosting your blog and your using any thing other than Wordpress, your working too hard.

Yesterday, while we attempted to get the car out of durance vile, my brother “Random Dafydd” and I started a conversation about what blogs we read. I told him I was going to post a list of ones that I read.

So, over there on the right hand side is the part one of 4 of daily blogs:
And here they are with out linky bits.
* A Day in the Life of Ambulance Driver
* A Gentleman’s C
* Adventures of GuitarGirl RN
* Ambulances, Boomsticks, Coffee
* Boobs Injuries and Dr Pepper
* Cranky Epistles
* Crass Pollination, an ER Blog
* Drug-Induced Hallucinations
* Emergiblog: The life and times of an ER Nures
* ER Stories – Shocking, Hilarious, Bizarre, and Sad Tales from the Emergency Room
* Expert Witness
* Guidons, Guidons, Guidons!
* i can has cheezburger
* Junior General
* Life In The ER a Nurse’s Perspective: ER Nurse Blog
* Lucrative Pain
* M.D.O.D.
* Mad Dog Medic
* madness: tales of an emergency room nurse
* March of the Platypi
* Meat in the Seat
* Musings of a Dinosaur
* Musings of a Highly Trained Monkey
* Scalpel or Sword?
* Second Shift: Stories from the ER
* Ten out of Ten
* The Dissident Frog Man
* The Law Dog
* The Lawdog Files
* WhiteCoats’s Call Room
* William The Coroner’s Forensic Files

Either later today or in the morning I’ll post part 2 of 4, or 2 of 5 if you count the comix I read each morning as blogs….

Firefox runs. Gimp 2.6.6 run. Open Office 3 runs. Second Life doesn’t run. The ATI Radeon drivers for Godzilla’s video (X1550 series card) don’t run. (This is why second life fails, FWIW) There is no way, or no obvious way, to show file extensions. Cygwin seems to work. ETA: Cygwin X windows stuff act very flaky, enough so as to render it not useable. MinTTY and the “normal” cygwin shell work just fine, or seem to.

Another irritating thing is it seems to keep losing the icon for Firefox. Just Firefox. Things that make you go “Hmmmm”. There is still a link in the tools folder I created, however it’s a generic icon, not the fox and globe icon. Odd.

I installed it on Godzilla.

1st report. It installed fairly fast and seems to have seen all my hardware right. It’s also pretty and makes nice noises.
It also, out of the box, doesn’t allow secondlife to run, plus trashes your MBR, which I more or less expected, despite being told it wouldn’t. This slightly changes my opinion on the non-Windows skills of one of the geeks at $WeSellUsedMacs. They may not be as good as he thinks they are.

I don’t deal well with kernel panics that lock up the machine and make the keyboard lights flash. I also don’t deal well with frame rates under what I know this machine can do in Second life. I really don’t deal well with lock ups in Second Life. The net result of all if this is that I’ve removed 9.04 and gone back to 8.04 Ubuntu LTS. Yeah, I know not cutting edge KDE 4.2, but I’ve given my opinion of KDE 4.x already and nothing I’ve seen on a machine that does real work has made me change my mind. It’s still to much flash for too little good. Plus I don’t like the basic UI. Yeah, It’s changeable, but I like the stock out of the box UI on KDE 3.5, so why dink around? 9.04 running the default gnome setup seems to run just fine on tinybox, but I don’t ask a lot out of that box. It runs badly and kernel panics on Godzilla when I put it under any stress. I’ll look at it later, maybe.

OK, 10.5.6 fixed a lot of the issues I have with, to the extent that my humping around mac has been converted to 10.5.6, KDE 3.5 running. Not quite as well as it did under 10.4.11, but Good Enough. The Big Mac isn’t, normally, it does has an external drive that can boot that way, but that’s it’s normal way.

But that’s not what I hear to talk about.

What I’m hear to talk about is the fact that OS X isn’t really Unix, it’s some sort mutant almost Unix.   Not quite like say, AIX, but close.

For example, it does use the various Apache text configure files.   However, if you make even one change “by hand”, you are fucked if you use the GUI to do any thing, in that it will, with out warning, nuke your changes. This really applies to SSL related configurations. That doesn’t effect most web sites, just, oh ones that need to get credit card numbers, like say $WeSellUsedMacs

Here is the thing that really chaps my buns about it, however.     If you poke around on something that really does need the GUI, like, for example,   the mail server (OK , yeah, I could go in a beat up on postfix’s main.cf, but life is to short for that),   at times, your web server control files get stomped on.

This is sub optimal.

It’s really sub optimal if your mail sever’s anti-spam/anti-virus thing has gone off the tracks and is eating 50-70% of the CPU time, resulting in a web server that seems to be running on a 386sx machine.

I did mention, some where that our mail server and our web server are the same physical machine right?

Any rate, after fixing the damn it’s a freaking pig in deep mud speed issue (Field fix.   Turn off the spam filter), I then get SSL related issues, because it (OS X’s GUI Server interface) mangled the Apache files.   Thank all the small gods for back up files.

Just started the whole “Linux from scratch” thing.   Using the 6.3 version, which is one back of cutting edge, but it does have the “book” and all the packages and patches on it.

Project target: Game master and game designer machine.

This means, on top of every thing else, I need lyx, Firefox, Gimp 2.6, the LAMP stack and Digikam installed.     There are a few other, Midnight commander, ssh client/server, plus space for data files.

I “Standard Build Unit” (i.e. how long binutils takes to build) is 12:08.   This is going to be a pig.   GCC is going to take some thing like an hour and 15 minutes to build.   Bleh.

I decided rather than fucking up my best machine, I’m going to first see how hard it is to build the debian based mostly from tarballs “perfect” system.

So godzilla isn’t going to be the test box,   The craptop is.     Currently have installed the real freaking basic debian etch from the debian net install cd.

Due to extream amount of time needed to compile stdlib and the compiler, I’m getting those via apt-get.   I also changed to “testing” instead of “etch” as my backup source of packages.

First tweak.   added vga=792 to the default   OS section of the “magic” section of grup’s menu.lst   Should make the screen look better.

I’ve decided not to do any “optimizing” on this test run system.

One reboot later, and yes, the screen does look better.

1. Need a text based web browser – lynx
   1. Needs curses
   2. first fuck up.   Nuked the directory before I ran sudo make install.   Wrote script to do ./configure && make && sudo make install
2. Should have gotten links, which does tables and frames.   Getting it now.
   1. It needs openssl.   Which my magic mymake script doesn’t work on.
3. Next ssh client and server
   1. Another one that my script fails on.   Need to make it check for config vs configure.   Ah, maybe it does not.   Just realized I did the open SSL package.   Opps.   It doesn’t break the file.   Still need to fix ‘mymake’ “RSN”â„¢
   2. Needs zlib
4. First big one Midnight Commander
   1. Needs pkg-config
   2. Need glib
      1. Needs gettext, which takes a long time to compile..
5. ncftp pain free
6. X11     Pain starts now.     Fuck this.   apt-get install xorg xorg-dev
7. Starting to get XFCE4 running,using their graphical installer
   1. gtk+
      1. atk
      2. pango
         1. cairo
            1. libpng
            2. pixman (needed to get later version)
            3. freetype
            4. fontconfig
               1. libxml
            5. libtiff
            6. libjpeg (breaks script.   Also must do make install-libs)
            7. libjasper.     Cheated apt-get install libjasper-dev libjasper-runtime.   Could not find a good tar ball

   Fuck it.   Starting over with Linux from scratch, eat the whole drive no wierd layouts on a non 64 bit machine.

PDF files are, with out a doubt, one of the more common “read only” type of files you run across on the Internet.

All the versions of Acrobat Reader, since version 7, IMAO, have sucked very large things very hard, and they want WAY to much money for their PDF creation tools, at least from my point of view.   Well, I’m hear to save the day <cue Underdog music>.

On OS X, in theory, “Preview.app” should “just work”.   In actual use, it’s a dog and has other issues, plus is, shall we say, feature poor.     For a while I was doing the magic FTP hand wave and getting version 7 of the “real” Acrobat Reader, which was better than the current version, but still has issues.     Looking for other readers, particular ones that weren’t X11 apps “ported” to OS X wasn’t going well.   Then I found Skim. This, is as the cool kid say, is the shiznitz.   OK, maybe they don’t say that, but it is the best PDF reader for OS 10.4 or 10.5 I’ve found.   Among other things “Full screen mode” mean exactly that, which wasn’t something I thought you could really do on a Mac.

On the Windows side of life (assuming Windows 2000 or better)   There is Foxit reader.   This freaking rocks.   Has damn close to the version 7 UI, so the learning curve is, for me at least, damn near dead flat, and it’s freaking god like fast, even on marginal machines.   This does go on any Windows machine I have to deal with for more than an hour.   It might go on before FireFox, on some machines. (i.e ones that has Internet Explorer 7 installed, which I can tolerate for small amounts of time).

Mac OS X types, of course, don’t have to big of a problem creating PDF files, it’s more or less built into the OS, and it’s right there on the print popup.   Windows folks have a slightly harder time.     This does not have to be the case.     PDF Creater will fix that.     Makes any thing that can print into a PDF creater   Highly recommenced.   It’s damn near one of the first things I put on a Windows box after Firefox.

Either I’ve totally lost it, or there is something very very wrong with it.   Works great, all test work fine, right up until you do the final grub stuff.

You reboot, it starts to reboot, then dies attempting to mount root, which sounds dirter than it is.   Kernel panic, complete with blinking keyborad LEDs.   The fact that I’m trying this on what is in theory a 64 bit machine, with the 32 bit code base may or may not have any thing to do with it.     I’ll dink later once I have another drive installed in Godzilla.

Any rate, Godzilla is running the Elyssa version of Mint Linux (XFCE sub version) and most of my tools are back on it.   Which is good, becuase when ever I sit down at the machine Elyssa shows up in the corner, reminding me why I should try to get my shit together.

Something went very very wrong, so I’m starting over from ground zero.   Other than the Windows chunk on that drive, it’s a whole new layout.   I suspect that the some what simple minded version of GRUB’s menu.lst file I was using had some issues with /boot and / not really being on the same chunk of hard-drive.     Any rate, it’s the week end project.   That and getting the rear tire fixed.

Sort of had to start over, but not quite as bad as it could have been.   I’ve gotten up to the final build of glibc and gcc (again, I think, hard to say), both of which take a while to run.   Current system has me ssh’ing into the machine from Silver Tabby, reading the LFS hand book via Konqueror, so I can cut and paste commands via highlight and middle click (i.e. X11’s way).     Building GCC and Glibc takes a freaking long ass time, and LFS has you do it like 3 times, boot strapping you into a system.   Hopefully more later to night, but I’ve taken my night time meds, so I suspsect that I’m going to fall asleep watching gcc run sanity tests or some such like.

Linux From Scratch (or LFS) is for people that think Gentoo is too hand holding.

Oddly, I find it to be exactly what I’m looking for, despite the terminal lack of hand holding.   It assumes you can read, and have some Linux experience, enough to know what to do with say a general statement like “it is important to unpack each package as the lfs user and cd to the build directory.   Commands listed here assume a bash shell”.     It expect you to know when to say ‘tar xfvj’ vs ‘tar xfvz’ and to know how to clean up a whole directory in one swoop.   (rm -rfv DIRNAME).   The hand book is clean and to the point,   assuming the last few sentences parsed as something like English to you.     I, however am going to have to think real hard about doing package management of some sort once it’s up and running.   I suspect I’m going to fall back on having a tab on my iGoogle page with links the RSS feeds of my current packages so if I see one that looks like needs to be re-done I can just do it by hand.   This is more or less what they expect you to do.   I really don’t want to have to recompile glibc and/or gcc any more often than I must.   Each one of those takes about an hour, plus or minus to do.

Speaking of which, I just finished the first “live glibc” build.   No errors in the test phase wOOt! I am 1337!

Would I recommend this to say, any other member of my extended friend and family?     Other than maybe Uncle Jerry or Uncle Ron, no.   Timbert could do it, but tends to shy away from that level of bit twiddling, at least now.

Do I think it’s the coolest thing ever?   Yes.   More, of course, as it comes along.

Because, as many of my friends and family can tell you, I’m a bit touched in the head, and because no freaking distro out there does exactly what I want, I’m going to bit the big freaking bullet and do the “Linux for Scratch” project on Godzilla.

All the “data” on it was sucked over from smallbox any way, and, push come to shove, I’ve proved I can get a fully functional Mint 5 or 6 system up on it in less than 20 minutes, an hour if you really want to do the various updates.   The data should be safe any way, it’s on it’s own partion, but, again, the only thing that would be lost if it died would be the time needed to either SCP it over, or mount the extrnal drive, either way, I’ve got a machine with grunt and video grunt to spare, and, by all that is lawful good am going to get this thing doing exactly what I freaking want.   Not close to it, but exactly.   I’ve got small box, the crap top and Big Silver Tabby as a back up, so it’s not like I’m going to be net less.     Plus, like I said with the whole craptop experiment, I Need Projects.     Failure to have projects makes my brain mush.

The machine needs to let me blog (which means one of Firefox, Sea Monkey or Opera), work on photos (which means Gimp 2.6, all it’s plug ins), either dcraw, ufraw or rawstudio, and digiKam.

Bash shell, c/c++ compiler, wget, linkes, Midnight Commander are assumed.     I suspect it will end up with Apache2, MySql 5 and PHP5 just because.

The madness starts now.

Well, because digiKam, my base line photo tool of choice wasn’t playing nice with Flickr, my current time sink.

Found out why.     Seems that unbutu 8.10 is sort maybe based on KDE 4 (see other rants about that).   digiKam of version less than <0.10 are more or less KDE3 apps.     The shipped version of Konqueror is based on the KDE4 version, and digiKam is looking for the KDE3 version.

Fix?   Go back one level and use Mint 5, which, oddly enough, is based on 8.04, which is what the smallbox uses.   Also it’s a “Long Term Support” which means they will be doing bug fixes and security fixes on it for longer than on Mint 6.

I don’t understand the people that run linux distro’s any more.

I’m in the process of downloading the XFCE version of Mint 5 as we speak.

Plus, I really should have started with it.   It’s code name is Elyssa.   That should be a major hint I should be using it.   I just hope that the X11 drivers are some where near current so Second Life runs at something like normal speeds.   Hate to have to keep bouncing back and forth between Linux and Windows.

Over all, good package.   The current Gnomish version is what I plan on using as my base line install on any machines I update/upgrade in the near term. Being as it is just a slight re branding of Unbutu, however there are some issues.   Hardware detection (at least vs the xfce4 based version of   ubuntu 8.10) seems to work better.   It id’s the sound and video stuff on Godzilla (which is a mutant home built box first made by a moron, and no not me) rather well.

Some important points.

1. Avoid installing any of the “basic” windows manager packages with the term -extras attached
   1. kde-extras is really bad.   Kills networking, at least on Godzilla.   That being said, see item 6 below
   2. gnome-extras hangs the install because it conflicts with mint-gnome-artwork.
2. If you are a geek, turn off the auto check for updated packages.
3. If your not a geek, for all that is   lawful good, leave that turned on and pay attention to it!
4. Make a separate   /home partition.     If you are a geek and plan on doing cutting edge stuff make a $user_data directory and make make a symlink to it from the normal ~/ directory.   That way when you do step 1 (twice) you can just nuke the /home/$USER and not have to worry about damn dot files that have issues.   If your not a geek, just make a separate /home partition so your data doesn’t get lost when your pet geek re-installs the OS, for what ever reason.
5. Trivial bitch, /usr/sbin/update-grub is installed with out the execute bit set on.     /sbin/update-grub requires this.     This matters if you are updating releases on a regular basis.   The bitch is that this doesn’t get flag as an error during they update, so it will cheerfully download the current version, modify the package database as to which version you have, then assume that the older header files can be removed.   And will in fact tell you to do so.   Problem.   Grub didn’t make the new version a boot option.     Again, if this matters to you, you should be wearing your big geek pants and either 1) turn off the magic stuff in grub’s menu.lst file (bad idea) or issue a chmod +x /usr/sbin/update-grub command right after your first apt-get dist-upgrade command.     If none of that made sense to you, you don’t need to worry about it.       I’m sure it will get fixed soonish.   I’m going to file a bug report, just because.
6. If you are going to play cutting edge, remove the gnome network manager, It works great for out of the box dhcp automatic stuff, fails at fix ip stuff. Install a rational   /etc/network/interface file by hand.   Also install a rational   /etc/resolv.conf but that goes with out saying.

Yeah, 2 and 3 sound like they conflict, but they don’t.   If you’re comfortable with editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file to enable the cutteing edge, then do so from the jump.   However if you do that, it’s sort of like Gentoo, it assume your are wearing your big boy pants and will bite you in the ass if you do some thing dumb.   If you have no idea what that means, let the machine handle it for you.   Mixing the two will bite you in the ass and kill the machine.

According to their blog, they are not doing a KDE 4.1 version of the system, an idea I approve of, because it doesn’t feel ready for prime time, at least to me (among other thing the version of digikam I want to run will not work on it), so that they are waiting on KDE 4.2 to become stable before the release a version of it.     The XFCE4 version should be out later this month, which means I will be just living with their basic gnome version for a week or two.   Well, gnome plus my normal tools.   This is the first distro that I’ve decided to make a primary work station that doesn’t have Midnight Commander as a core install.   No big, I’ll just add it to my apt-get install list.

I’ve also decide that on re-branded systems, as long as they are also using the bases systems repositories to avoid meta packages.   Using them results in Bad Things.     So I’ll just go turn on the cutting edge repos and use apt-get/synaptic “by hand”, like a good little geek.

I think once the Xfce version (or flux box) comes out, I’m going to try it on Craptop, and of, course, get Xfce for Godzilla.   I’m not going to try either until they release it however.

I also suspect that the weird ass machine at the office that I’m supposed to make into a sell-able object is going to the the KDE 4.2 version, just because it is very pretty, and more or less looks like Vista.   It’s also unstable as hell, as far as I can tell (KDE 4.1).

There seems to be a trend here.     Windows XP, post service pack 2, stable, predictable, could be made into a usable machine with minimal pain.   OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) Possibly the best OS ever done.   KDE 3.5.   My desk top of choice.   Rock solid, easy to use and fairly fast.

All of these have been “Upgraded” by version that are, no question asked, prettier than the one before them.   Vista, Leopard, KDE 4.   All require huge upgrades in the processing power of the machines they run on and all of them are broken out of the box.     I’ve just about come to the conclusion that if a major visual effect, out of the box, is a “mirror like” dock, the OS has issues.   If your base line UI requires 3D acceratede graphics to run, you are putting your efforts in the wrong place.

I’m revamping my work flow system.   Godzilla, not the rapidly falling apart lap top is going to be my primary machine for stuff not done at $WeSellUsedMacsAndNewWiis

Because I can’t leave well the fuck enough alone, I changed the OS on the Linux side of Godzilla, yet again.   I’m using “Mint Linux 6“.   It’s pretty much a very thing plastic disguise over the Gnome version of Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, so it’s pretty good to start with.   For what it’s worth, it’s live CD found and configured Godzilla’s weird ass on board sound card, which the Xbuntu 8.10 live CD did not.     I’m not surprised at that, it seems that the [K|X]buntu version seem to have a little more issues with hard ware.   Install seems to be a snap.     I’ve turned on the “3rd party drivers” to see what difference, if any it makes in second life.   glxgears indicates I should see some improvement.   More on that later.

I normally don’t like Gnome based desk tops, but this one feels more like KDE 3.x than any thing else, so I might not change.   I will be installing xfce4 and kde3.5, just incase.

When I go up north and fix Random Dafydd machine this will be the one I use. Why? First one to install a modern version of flash play for Firefox right out of the box. This is good.

Well, I’m of to check FPS and other geek-a-zoid things. Be back later.

My brother, Random Dafydd, is of course a Wikipedia admin. This gives him a more than a few geek points. While I don’t have the time to put in to it that he does, I do use it a lot.   Tons.   It’s damn near my goto source for non technical stuff, right after Google.   And they need money. Don’t we all.

However, as it happens, I   have check for a bet a made about the US election coming. The bet was that it would happen at all,not who would win.   It’s a damn good thing I won, because I would have owed him about what I made this year.   It was a 1:1000 odds.   I have faith in the US system, at least for now.

This bet was made on Bofhnet (we still don’t talk about chickens here, much less waving them).Thinking about it, I decide the geek thing to do was to support a geek cause with the money.   A.T, I hope this meets with your approval.

This is a list of things that Ice-rocket found for my site in the last 3 weeks or so.   Not all of them, of course.   Some of my replies are snark, some are advice, some is deadly serious.   I leave it to the reader to figure out which is which.   Spelling and punctuation to the left of the : marks are from Ice-rock.   Errors to the right of the : are mine.

Leading off the pack, once you get past all the various versions of “[why] my life sucks”   is

1. Bristol Stool Charts:   Color me a surprised shade of brown.
2. lunesta drinkin:   Dude, just don’t.   It’s a waste of a drink.   You’ll get about half to 2/3 down and pass out.
3. cannot rotate dell displays d600:   Not with build in software.   However this will fix it.   Get it.
4. winterborn acoustic:   I’ve come to like that version better than the electric. Cool song Either way
5. what is shelf life of midrin:   Don’t know.   Mine are pushing 2 years old and still work.
6. lunesta redhead:   Odd mix.     Don’t think it works as a date rape drug, so that just makes it weird.
7. firefox 3.05 sucks: Some one else aiming for a ban I see.
8. why does my life suck and what can i do about i:   Find a medical professional that you know and trust.   Listen to what he or she says.   You are not alone, even when it feels like you are.
9. why is the phone taking over my life:   There is that “off” switch.   Even land lines have a switch to turn off the ringer.   Rember, the phone is for you, not the rest of the world.
10. rants about how life suck:   You may or may not have come to the right place.
11. “classic+traveller”:     Check out Mongoose’s version.   They have cleaned up some of the oddness of CT, but it feels like CT, not TW:2000 ins space.
12. my life sucks without him in it:   This is a bad sign.
13. How stool in there life pictures of them:   I am going to assume this was a Britol Stool Chart search.   Yes, they have pictures.   Not to gross, but enough to get the idea across.
14. why does tulsa suck:   Because it can.
15. Is there anyway i can make:   What?   Seem to be missing a final word or phrase there.
16. install gsl c++ express:   I know what the GSL is.   I know what c++ express is.   I don’t know what they have in common, unless GSL doesn’t expand to what I think it is, which means I couldn’t help any way.
17. Amidrine is it good:   If you freaking need it, yes, it’s God like.   If not, it will make you feel like crap.   It will make you feel like crap even if you need it, but it beat the hell out of the migraine.
18. leopard 10.5.5 vs 10.4.11: Dude, just don’t do it.   Not worth the pain for the pretty mirror effects.   And it’s 10.5.6 now any way.
19. g5 drivers sucks:   Pretty much.
20. dungeons and dragons fourth edition sucks and D&D sucks:   Two folks aiming for banning.
21. classic traveller vs mongoose:   Hard call. I’d go with Mongoose today.   Ask me tommorow I might have changed my minds.     Both are available if you know where to look (legal copies), but Mongoose is puttting out new stuff.   Just ignore the weapons in the last 10 pages or so of Mongoose Mercenary or your head will explode.
22. why life start at 40:   You might want to talk to a right to lifer about that.   Hell, even pro choice people assume that once your out of the host body, your alive.
23. tehran sucks   and khomeini sucks:   Why, yes, it does.   Course he’s dead, but he still sucks.
24. michael kors suck:   Must Not Post Gay Joke.   But he seems so nice on Project Runway.
25. upgrading from 10.4 server to 10.5 serve:   Unless you really like pain, don’t do it.
26. author of why my life sucks: J. Michael.   That’s about as much as I’m going to give out.   Real geeks could find out fast enough, but if you don’t know how, I’m not going to tell you.
27. nambla suck:   Must Not Post Gay Joke.   And, yeah, they do.   Not the good way either.
28. don’t know who to contact at ft bliss:   The offical page is here Of course you have to play silly games with getting their SSL cert approved by your browser. Why all the browser people suddenly started to not trust .mil SSL certs is a question I’d like an answer to. Starting to chap my buns.
29. 10.5.5 trying to login into 10.4 server:   Assuming you mean the remote server admin tool that used to be so cool?   They broke it.
30. lunesta and two beer: equals a long nap.
31. macports vs fink vs gentoo.   Em.   I haven’t play with Gentoo on a PPC, but I have spent way to much time with on x86/x86_64 boxes.   If you got a working Mac,   I’d go with 10.4.11 and fink.   It’s my standard for mac machines.
32. moving Mail 10.5.5 to 10.4:   Oh, dude, I feel you pain.   I think the tool you need is mailbfr
33. damn small linux sata_via sata_via sata_via:   Why the sata_via three times?   I think it works with it.

In all cases below, I’m using the factory default setting for the video drivers unless other wise stated, and have installed “today” non-beta version of Second life.

Right now, with the current downloads of PivitPro, on the DellBookPro system. (that would be the one that is a lap top with a badly busted hinge that I used normally in Portrait mode, SecondLife dies in a messy way if i don’t put it in Landscape. It also, as of this version (Second Life 1.21.6 (99587) Oct 14 2008 17:42:25 (Second Life Release)) tells me that my video sucks. I know that. I set the video to recommenced levels. Set it run in a 1024×768 window, I set it to my standard mode, which is turn on bump maps and shiny, use avatar impostors, local lights, and high terrain details. All other are left at what it thinks it should use. Standing on my porch (harbourne 3,124,48) looking out over the water, I get a frame rate of around 20 when it has focus, around 10 when it does not.

We don’t talk about the Linux mode on this machine with regard to Second Life.   Radeon Mobility 9000 are just barely good enough with windows drivers.   With Linux X11 divers?   I don’t think so.   I’ll test it with current drivers and SL software.   Barf. 3.00 FPS.   That really does suck.   Plus I looked like shit, with parts of my avatar being invisible.   General badness.

On Godzilla, in Linux mode, same settings I get 30 FPS when it has focus and about 12 when it doesn’t, when in landscape mode (i.e. xrandr -o normal). Issuing an xrandr -o right makes it claim it’s getting the same FPS, but it’s smoking crack. Second life might think it’s do that, but the real FPS is like 3 to 5. It works, however. In full screen mode (1280×1024) I get 25-26 FPS). This i can deal with. This is on a DVI connected monitor, with the “open source” version of the ATI X11 driver. The closed source version of the driver has issues with my card, as of now. The linux box is also acting as an Apache2/PHP5/MySQL5 server, I’ll grant with zero load, but they are running.   [edit:   It just hit my.   My screen refresh rate is 60 hz on this monitior.   That means those 30-32 number I was just seeing are really as good as it gets.   w00t and all that.   Don't make me go into my "more than half the refresh rate of the montior" is wasted rant....]

Godzilla in Windows and Portrait mode, supplied by the ATI driver, no second party tweaks. With the “recommenced mode” set (which, BTW makes water look worse than it does on the othe versions done above) I get 19 fps, in land scape, I get 23 or so, or roughly what I get in linux mode, but with, in theory better graphics, but I don’t think so, water in particuler looks like crap.   Turning on the same setting as above test I get 28 FPS, and water doesn’t look like a white mist.

Turning on all the flags I get around 15 FPS and it looks freaking great.

Upgrading the drivers to the latest version for the X1550 card from Saphire, the OEM of the the card in question, added maybe 1 FPS, after all the building loaded.   In “bells, whistles and gongs mode”   (i.e. all the flags turned on), it’s getting 16 FPS, and it does look pretty.   Well, the next door building that’s all in default plywood mode is a bit of an eye sore, but that’s not the drivers fault.

On the 17″ G4 Power book, in “bells, whistles and gongs mode”   (i.e. all the flags turned on), it gets roughly 0.5 FPS.   This obviously   is not usable.   It’s odd that it let me set those.   On the other limited graphics boxes they would not let me try that moronic setting.   At recommended settings, I get 17 or so FPS.   At my normal settings I get 15 fps.   Meh.   Apple G4 laptops are not known for being gaming machines.   Those values, are WITH X11 running, they are slightly lower if it’s not.   This makes no sense, but I’ve given up expecting rational behavior from OS X and X11

Short version. Looks like my second life stuff is going to be done on Godzilla, normally in Linux, in landscape mode.

Gentoo is just to weird for me.

Godzilla is running “Mint” Linux, which is ubuntu in a VERY thin plastic disguise. Xcfe4 desktop, with all the standard document and image tools, running in portrait mode most of the time. Once i have the 70 bucks or so, I’m going to get one of those holder that let you rotate the LCD, so when I really need the extra speed, I can put it in land scale. GLxgears gives me 30 fps in portrait mode and 2300 FPS in landscape. I suspect I need to look deeper into my xrandr settings and spend some quality time tweaking my xorg.conf file.

Any hints would be nice.

First, can not say enough good things about Wordpress 2.7.     Rapidly becoming a member of the “Classic software of all time” list, at least my version. Recommenced.

PivotPro.     This is a must have if you work on portrait   documents.   Another one for the classic software of all time list.   If you   need it, you need it freaking bad.   Good test period, and it’s not to obnoxious during the test, and $40.00 for a single user copy is dirt cheap.     Recommended.

Which brings me up to the DellBookProDocumentPortiableStation-D600,   If you are very cleaver you will notice that the screen is 90 degrees from normal.     With an pay for copy of PivitPro, it now does what I want to, and i get to use the normal key board.   Sill working on the real support system, as it stands, 2 old speakers and CD-ROM 100 count spindle seem to work.     I went pricing portrait mode moderators.   Doing this is   way cheapest, and I may go ahead and do it with the next laptop with video grunt.   The DellBookPro (so named for the camouflage   Apple sticker on the back) is dual boot XP pro/Uubuta 8.x   Aside from the for crap hinges and the plastic they attach to, I’ve been happy with this machine, once I changed to the A6 BIOS firmware.   Versions over that don’t deal well with chip sets running over 120 deg Farengight, which given it’s rated to 212, something is off.

Godzilla: This is going to be may main station. Dual boot window and some flavor of Linux. Gentoo is the current attempt. Seems to have some issues with HAL and X, which I’m playing with.   Ojbective is to tget it to run in portate mode a a FPS slightly over 4   Hard to say what it;s doing now, because I’m currently testing in the brain dead X mode. (i.e 3 not very good xterms and xclock in a high fashion sea-foam green and white.   Also needs to be rebooted when it leaves X mode.   This is, while not good, should not be a problem once I get my mutant mix of Xfce4 and KDE 3.5 installed.

The whole freaking shooting match.   The J. Michael work area/time sink. Yeah, I need a bigger desk, but I have no freaking idea where to put it. In theory I could get a single bigger desk to replace the white desk and tower of bad things about to happen, but you know, that’s a time+money issue, neither one is great supply right now.

Smallbox, AKA the house of crazy NOC. It’s also the standard machine for normal personal use. Got a 512 GB external drive attached to it, which is going to be replace “real soon now” with a TB sizied drive and the 512 go into Godzilla. I might just put the TB drive in Godzilla and make it the primary storage drive for the nextwork. Got to think about that. I do know that I’m not going to make it NTFS drive either way.

Images in this post from http://whymylifesucks.com/ The pictures shown on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. It means you can use the pictures freely as long as you attribute your source (i.e. http://whymylifesuckss.com/) and you may distribute the resulting work under a license identical to this one. Please click the link above for the detail

[edit] I freaking hate to use tables for layout, but this one stumped me. I wanted each paragraph about each image to start at the image, but no version of clear:all or clear:left seemed to work. I suspect it has something to do with the theme I’m using, which I’m also rather fond of. I can deal with a table every once and a while if that’s what it takes.[/edit]

Because the damn out of the box version of the ATI Radeon X11 driver doesn’t support xrandr, at least not on current release of ubuntu, I’m going to attempt to get Godzilla working with the stuff I need on it via Gentoo.   Stand by for something like a live geek blog.   Granted, even with this box, I don’t expect Godzilla to be a working box for at least a week, working being defined as “I can read a US Army supplied .DOC file, Read a PDF, Write a pdf, (ideally from Lyx) run DigiKam and Gimp 2.6, ssh into other machines, and run Firefox 3.x, all in portrait mode, with out going nuts on how freaking slow the video driver is.     Displaying a flash animation with sound is optional.   Also must be able to boot in to windows.     Being able to read/write   the NTFS partition would also be nice.

Just got the stage 3 tar ball down.     The fun starts now.
Because I need another test flash file, and well, because it’s Godzilla I’m working on:

First edit 10:18

This is not a good sign.   It takes over an hour to download and untar the stage 3 and portage tarballs?   Gack.

I’m going to live on the edge, mainly because I want Gimp 2.6, so I’ve turned on the ~x86 keyword, in a global fashion.   Done before any compiles or what not, so it should, repeat, should work OK.

Chrooted and about to type emerge –sync   It’s 10:25

It seems to be deleting an whole lot of freaking files, like if I didn’t know better, I would say all of them in the metadata/cache directory, which is what took a ghod damn hour to un tar.

And now it’s putting them back.     You would think something called “current snapshot” would in fact be the current snapshot.   This does not seem to be the case.   Sigh of heaviness.

Finished at 11:03, then wanted to emege it’s self.   Which fail.   My error.     It seems gcc 4.1.2 doesn’t know what a Core2 arch is.   Got to go fix that.   OK, set to noccona for now, and emerge portage went fine.

Told it I’m a ‘mercan that speaks lish and I live in fly over country and we are about to suck down the kernel source.   It’s 11:15.

Didn’t take as long to snarf and barf as I thought.   It’s 11:28.   Now the fun starts for real. Making a kernel.   Oh Joy.

First, of course, get and compile the genkernel tool.

At 11:52 the compile starts.   I did turn on a freaking ton of modules, but then again, that’s why I used genkernel to start with.

That was fairly quick It’s only 12:07 and it’s done?   OK then.

Going to load up vi now, just because I hate nano.

Did the other tools (cron, etc) and grub.   Grub seems to have problems with the lack of a floppy drive

OK, 1:00 exactly and it dual boots.   Granted the Linux side is useless, but that will do for now.   Just short of 3 hours to get the bare bones installed.   Now the real stuff.

Start with X.   It’s 1:31.   Just started to attempt first compile of X11   That’s 101 things it has to download and compile.   Of course, ran into a circular dependency based on having the HAL turned on.     That’s Hardware Abstraction Layer, not some thing that says “Dave” a lot.

Going to bed.   Will launch Xfce4’s emerge in the morning before going to work.

It sucked.   Really, truly totally sucked.

Other than the afternoon of Dec 11.   That was pretty nice.   The rest of the week?   Sucked.

I don’t think my meds are working any more.     At least the mood stabilizers don’t seem to be.   I don’t know.   I’m seeing the doctor later this week, but yeah, it sucked.

I thought I could write a semi-funny account of it, but I can’t.   Multiple meltdowns aren’t funny.

A double dose of Adderall in the morning is not a good idea.   Did that yesterday.   Some random notes about why this is not a good idea.

1. I think I was talking as fast as Redheaded Girl reads.   Maybe faster.   For those that don’t know her, she reads faster than I do.   I read some where around 3 or 4 pages a minuted (pages being defined as standard paperback pages)   Back in school I read faster the the fastest speed on the SRI reading speed testers that they used at Patrick Henry Elementary school,   back when it was the beta test school for that sort of stuff.
   

   Side note, all 3 of my siblings went there as well, and we all do ridiculously well on standardized test.     We should, we’ve been taking them from kindergarten on.   It’s like we have been trained to take them or something.

2. Sleep does not come easy after doing that, which is weird, because I normally take the same amount, granted spread out over the day.   Normal dose is 10mg, then 5 and 5 later in the day.
3. My eyes still feel like I was in a desert.   Very freaking dry and some what irritating
4. When you listen to “Through the Fire and Flames” by Dragon Force and think that a speed metal version would be cool, your speeding just a hair.

I like it.

Got rid of a lot of the “Features” I didn’t like about Word Press 2.5 and seems to have it’s shit together on doing auto-updates.   Had a little trouble with a plug in I wasn’t using (wp-sitcky) causing fatal errors, but once that was removed, clean sailing.     I also turned off the kitchen sink WYSIWYG editor, just using the basic one now.   It will do.

Survey says “Good Upgrade, even if the did dink up the UI” .

Actually the current UI makes more sense than the old own, so it’s really is a win all around.   Thumbs up!

Only done side is that the tag feature I used a lot went away.   I’ll wait until after the full release and the massive pluggin update swarm that follows it to fix that, however the suggested work around plug in does just fine.

I seem to have lost my “I am your Ghod, fear me” effect with Windows computers.   The Windows side of Godzilla decided to start rebooting when selected.   In what is unquestionably a related note, don’t point the c_drive pseudo drive of the current release of Linux wine at your real C drive.         Also, don’t attempt to run the second life windows client under wine, unless you REALLY like a bad acid trip screen.

However, I am it’s Ghod, it should have feared me, because I found my XP Pro SP2 disk, the one that I have a legit 20+ install key for.     The Windows XP Home version installed by a moron is being removed even as I speak.   I have no freaking idea what drugs he was on when he installed it.   And, no, it wasn’t me.

The good news is that the default XP OEM disk has some idea what sort of network card I have.     That means every thing else is just driver down loads and dinking about.   However, that does bring up an older rant. I’ve always had an issue with the Microsoft IP Address widget.     It’s not quite smart enough to do what it thinks it’s doing and the fact that tab does the wrong thing in it is a pain in the ass.   Because I haven’t been dinking with IP setup on XP machines for awhile, I had some what forgotten about how fucked it is.   I used to rant about it damn near daily when I was working for $WeMakeEmailServers.

Important safety note.   If you are downloading “important documents” via Ktorrent, stop it when you start downloading things for other machines.   Eats your band width just a hair it does.

Fairly painless install, as windows installs go.   First up, get Firefox installed, then SP3, SecondLife and Daz Studio/Poser 7.   May or may not install open office on the windows side.     The whole reason for the Windows side is to run Second life and Daz Studio.   Maybe Never Winter Nights, even though I really don’t need yet another time sink.   Every thing else on the box will be Linux based.     “Game OS” indeed.

Good thing it’s painless, need to do it again.   Should have formatted the drive.   All sorts of cruft left on.     When Microsoft says “deleting the /Windows Directory, they lie.     Oddly, it installs a hell of lot faster after doing a format.

Just downloaded and installed the video drivers.     Damn the generic svga driver sucks.   Now starting the the Microsoft update cycle.   “We think our customers are thieves”, of course, goes on first.     Didn’t want a reboot after it decided that I am, after all, a MSDN user.     SP3 going on.   I’m going to bite the bullet and put some sort of C++ on this box, I suspect the current Express version.   And cygwin, forgot how much the command prompt is XT sucks.   No sense in doing andLinux however.

Of course, the SP3 download just failed.   Starting over.   And the graphics driver wants .net to work 100%.         Don’t forget, this is a more or less pain free install of windows.   Bleh.   Just found out why it failed.   It was doing auto updates at the same freaking time and it can’t quite deal with the idea of telling the manual update it’s working, please try again later.     On debian based systems apt can and does do that.   I’ll grant the Gentoo’s emerge will cheerfully let you shoot your self in the foot with multiply copies running, but Gentoo does assume you know what you are doing.

Ah, fuck.   Just looked at what it auto-downloaded.   Still going to have to put service pack 3 on, and I suspect find a copy of dot freaking net to install.   Bleh is right.   Still, the pain level is under what doing this to Smallbox was like.       Granted having XP see the network from the jump was a HUGH help.

First mandatory reboot.   Video Driver wanted one, but would let me put it off.

Odd.   It wanted to download and install SP3, but when I said do it, it just started to install it.   Something strange in the neighborhood…

Finished doing that,   and yes, had to reboot.

And it “found new hard ware”.   Audio thingy, which it did not find a driver for.     Will deal with that if and when I get speaker for this machine that work.

All right, off doing the 4 fixes post SP3 that it did not have, Media Player 11, because I’m stupid like that and both 1.1 and 2.x .net frameworks.   Assuming no other Microsoft updates, time to install real stuff.   Fortunately, I’ve been chunking most of the the install packages off on Smallbox’s external data drive, which Godzilla can get to with ease.

And reboot.   Still looking for the damn sound card stuff.   Sigh.   May need to deal with that now.   Check for updates.   Need to install 7 more.   Ok, that’s the 24 it autodown loaded, SP 3, 8 right after SP 3 and this set of 7.     That’s 40 updates.   Granted it’s from a rather old CD, but three of the last 7 were for Media Player 11.   Ah, why not roll those into the base down load of the application?   This is almost, but not quite, as bad as Java on OS X 10.4 (which, granted, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but it’s still a pain in the ass)

Small hyper dog wants, no, needs to go out and chase tree rats.   I’m going to take small calm dog out as well.   She will not be happy about that.

And reboot.   Oh, look, new audio device.   Still can’t find drivers.     Need to do that now.   Damn that’s a big freaking file, with a slow server pipe.   This is the longest single stage in the whole damn thing, including the format and install fresh copy of XP, and I’ve still got 20 minutes to go.   I’m going to publish this now and update as needed.

I’m going to let both hyper and calm small dogs back in.     They are happy doggies now, eating their post go out side cookies.   Keeni, my Russian Blue is helping me deal with Godzilla by holding down my lap top case.   And no, she can not has cheezeburger

Of course doing an XP install nails the MBR, so I’m going to have to make a GRUB install CD or just re-install xunbutu.   I may do the second because I got a bit carried away with stuff on it, so the Linux side is a bit crufty as well.

Because it’s Saturday and I really don’t have enough to do (sarcasm tags implied) I may go ahead and update the various blogs, other than RedHeaded Girl’s to Wordpress 2.7 RC 1, just to make the damn things stop whining at me.   Of course the actual release is Dec 10, so I may wait for that.   Depends on how Godzilla goes.

Just finished the driver download install.   Reboot, of course.   Seems happy now.

Installing real stuff now.

1. Of course Firefox, done way up there.   Also install DownThemAll, Adblock ,Adblock Filter Set G, the Google tool bar and Webdevloper tool set for Firefox
2. Gimp 2.6
3. Foxit Reader
4. ACDSee Classic
5. Cygwin (Just doing a core set, plus mc and bash completaion to start with, have other things to do, and I know this one takes some time to run)
6. PDFCreator
7. UFRaw
8. ISORecorder
9. Clone Cleaner ‘Lite’
10. SeaMonkey.   (OK, so I like the Mozilla composer to do quick HTML Pages.   Sue me.) (which wanted to upgrade as soon as I installed.   Whatever)
11. WSFTPle
12. Palm desktop
13. Putty
14. SmartlistToGo, desktop side
15. Servage Web Drive, just because
16. Second Life Windows Client.   Of course, this seems to have issues.       Of course.
17. OpenOffice

OK, now to fix and/or repair the Linux side, due to the mentioned MBR trashing that Windows did to me.

1. Boot CD.
2. Tell it I’m an American that speaks English
3. Tell it I’m Central Time Zone.
4. Tell it manual partition.
5. Tell it nuke the old ext3 partition.
6. Tell it computer name, my name and a pass word.
7. Tell it to import my windows account
8. Watch install bar go across screen
9. Open front door of Godzilla because it’s about to eject CD
10. Click “Restart”
11. Remove CD
12. Press Enter
13. Close Front door of Godzilla
14. log in (it’ rebooted all on it’s on)
15. Open terminal window, issue sudo apt-get update
16. Issue sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
17. Note that I, in theory, didn’t have to do that, because it told me I have software to install.
18. Watch it take 5 minutes to download and update system.   While it’s doing that I check what is installed.     This is the XFCE4 based version, so it’s a little light, but it will do for now.
19. While waiting on the update, I tweaked the grub menu.lst to give me 30 seconds to select OS.     Trivial, but first thing that required any geek skills, assuming you used the automated update system.
20. Issued sudo apt-get install mc ncftp arj xpdf
21. reboot, just to make sure I can get into windows.   And I can.   More or less done for now.

Spent about 20 minutes poking about with Synaptic to find what I wanted installed.   It’s a little crufty, but It’s not bad.   Basicly grabbed all the image processing tools and the KDE development stuff, plus a good size amount of PHP/MySQL/Apache2 stuff.     It’s installing now.   I think I’m going to declare victory and start reading Jane’s.

Other machines:

• Craptop is my game master machine.     Doesn’t do much else.   Lives in my briefcase now.   Need to load it up with d20 Modern stuff today.
• MacCraptop (yes, even worse than yours Art Dude).   Currently has OS 9.2.1 installed.   I think I can get it up to OS 10.3, but getting GCC for that species of OS X might be hard, which means no fink.   OS X with out fink is bad.
• Smallbox.   Rocking away as the household primary machine.   Need to upgrade the external drive “Real Soon Now”.     Most likely after Christmas.   When I do that, however, I’m making it an EXT3 drive, the whole mounting an NTFS drive read/write is starting to be a pain, in that I can’t copy files over to it via Midnight Commander with out turning off the “save settings” flag.     I want that on most of the time, so I can’t just disable it.   Minor bitch.   As it happens, small box is making an ISO of the disk I just used on Godzilla even as I type.
• DellBookPro.     See my post about turning the machine on it side.   As a side note, it may or may not be important to know that standard duct tape is exactly the right width to fit over the hinges of a D600.   The fact that I know this should tell you something about the design of the screen hinges of a D600.   The fact that the default color of a the machine is damn near the same as a normal duct tape tells me something.   Of course Dell is a Texas company, and duct tape is a primary part of the redneck tool kit, so this may or may not be by design.
• Tektux.   My webmaster box, currently living on my desk at $WeSellUsedMacsAndNewWii.   With random free shipping.   Need to spend some quality time on why that is happening.
• Smallmac and Bigmac.   (not really mine, but might as well be.)   A G4 laptop (yes, that one Art Dude) and a G5 iMac.   Both have OS X 10.4.11 Server version install, and the full KDE 3.5 via fink X11 suite.   Nice boxes.   I’m going to try and get Bigmac to really be mine if and when I stop working at $WeSellUsedMacsAndNewWii.   Once I got the fan issue resolved on that box, it’s turned into my favorite computer of all time.     More or less.

I spend a lot of my time either editing or reading documents made for “normal” paper lay out.   As it happens, the area of my primary machine (The Darling Wifell D600, aka DellBookPro aka Duct Tape Box [more on that later]) lcd screen is with in 10% of the area of a normal piece of paper.     Only problem, it’s freaking sideways.   Now for reading PDF files, and some other things, I can make the software rotate the data, then put it self in full screen mode, which just fine, once I turn the lap top 90 degrees, (i.e open like a book).     Down side, of course is that unless I hold my mouse sideways, it’s a real pain to deal with.

Now the basic display mode of the D600 is 1400×1050.     1050×1400 would be ideal for me.   That would make 120 dpi more or less life size for paper.     In theory, the chip set on the box has a rotate option.   Of course, like most things ported from the desktop world to lap tops, if fails.

Enter my newest toy.   Pivot ® software Fools Windows into having a 1050×1400 mode and moves every thing around, and can be easily turned on or off.     Happiness and joy is found in my life once again.   it has a 30 trial version, which I’m running now.   The second I get my next check deposited I’m buying this sucker.   40 bucks is cheap, and damn, it does EXACTLY what I want.     I’ll be damned if I’m even going to look for a crack for it.

I tried to like it, but to use my youngest brother’s expression, it is in fact made of fail and poo. The geek in me feels that this should be a good idea, however, as it is currently set up, it’s a freaking failure.   Doing any thing like a full install takes days, if not weeks.   It fails in _weird_ ways, and can’t quite get over the idea of circular dependency.   It’s not that hard.   If a needs b, and b needs c and c needs a, install a,b and c if the user asks for any of a,b or c.   I can understand barfing and giving up when the user ask for X and Y, where only one of X or Y can be installed, but the other case is just lame.

And, when you get down to it, it’s not any better than Debian or Ubuntu about installing just what you want to have installed.   It still pulls down the whole freaking universe if you not very fucking careful.

So, the Craptop is running, for now any way, Debian “testing”.   Smallbox and the DellBookPro are running as dual boot Windows XP Pro/ Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.   Godzilla is dual boot XP Home and Ubuntu 8.10, and tektux runs Damn Small Linux I need to put some more memory in the pig.

I learned alot about kernels and compile time options when I was dinking with Gentoo, but as of now, I don’t think it’s ready for any thing but toy status.

[Update]     tektux is running Debian, not Damn Small Linux.     I tend to forget that DSL is, in fact, Woody Debian once you do a hard drive install, so I decided to just go ahead and make it an Etch Debian box.   Not going to make it testing, just stock out of the box stable, unless I run into something that needs bleeding edge.   In which case, I need to talk to the shrink again, because tektux isn’t going to run bleeding edge on a freaking bet.   Normal smallish version of Linux have enough trouble, and will until I can get some RAM in to the box.

There is a lot of “Change” going around nowadays.   And I’m not talking about Washington DC.

There are a lot of changes to software are being done for no reason other than to make changes. This all may be a side effect of my age, but I don’t like this.   No, that’s not really right, I fucking hate it.   I can more or less understand why for sale for profit products make changes, but I am at a loss as to why “free” products that are not open source sort of things feel they have to make changes to the product.     I really don’t understand changes that seem to do nothing but dink with the user interface.

Case one:   Adobe Reader.   Version 7, rocks and rocks hard.   Versions 8 and 9, no changes, at least that I can see, to functionality, but massive changes to the user interface.   Both suck and not in a good way.   On the Windows running PC this isn’t so bad, because there is Foxit reader, which is close enough the the look and feel of version 7 as to not be that big of a deal, and is screaming fast.     No non-beta version for Linux or OS X, however. xpdf and kpdf (both of which can be made to run on Linux and OS X) come close, but they still have issues.   If you know the magic you can get to the older versions of the “offical” reader, but it’s still a pain in the butt.

Case two: Google and Gmail.   Stop dinking with the user interface, if your not going to add functionality to go along with it.   The more I deal with the side based tabs, the less happy I get.

Case three: Wordpress.   MySQL based revision control isn’t a good idea.   Stop it.   At least make it so that you can turn it off via something like a normal method.   Dinking with config.php isn’t a normal method.     Un-documented dinking with config.php is even worse.     Doing “push” ‘You need to update’ messages, with out saying if it a bug fix, security patch or UI dink is also bad form.   I’d be just as happy if I didn’t have to deal with checking in with Wordpress HQ every time I fire up the admin tools for the blog, thank you very much.   That includes your freaking RSS feed on the start page.   Oh, wait, we call those “dashboards” now.   grrrrrr.

Case four: Mac OS X 10.5   Just say no.

Case 5: Windows Vista.   Just say no thank you.

Case 6: KDE 4.   Less flashy bits, more functionality, please.     A major point of running Linux is that you can run on machines with less “grunt” than you need for Windows et. al.   KDE 4 takes that away, at least stock out of the box.

Don’t get me wrong, there is some new software out there I really like.     Ubuntu 8.x, major upgrade over any other version of Linux. Quite possibly the best desktop operating system ever done.   Can and will recommend to any one using an Intel processor.   Firefox 3.x Possibly the best browser ever made.     The Gimp and digiKam seem to just get better with each release.   What’s important about all these releases is that are functionality upgrades, with out near useless tweaks to the user interface.   Changes to the UI are minor, and are made to support real functionally upgrades, not just going with what ever the current fad is on buttons and icons.

Let’s start with my car.   Well, the battery.   It’s dead.   Need to get that fixed ASAP.   dur.   Should have done it this weekend.

Which brings us to “I feel like shit.”   More or less literally, given that I’m taking a crap about once every 45 minutes or so.   For the last 3 days.   “Lots of that virus going around” the doctor says.   My crapping eating habits, due to the various anti-freak out meds I take may also have something to do with it.

Then there is my VoIP provider.   I’ve got 2 routers, and two number, one one each router.   Each router has two phone ports.   I wanted to add a 3rd number to the second phone port of the first router.   This should be simple.   It wasn’t.   6 (six) calls, average time 40 minutes each, and 2 (two) supervisor level personages.   This did not make me a happy camper.   There service if first rate, assuming you don’t have to change any thing.

The Craptop’s hard drive died.   However, I have a cunning plan, and the fact that I know what to do with Gentoo now should make it an faster rebuild.   Bonus, the cunning plan will make the hard drive bigger.   Score all around!

Got a Doctor’s appointment later this week.   Need to tweak my Cymalta I think.   Current load doesn’t seem to be working quite right.

$WeSellUsedMacs is becoming more and more surreal.   Average life span of a tech working there seems to be about 3 weeks. When I’m the most knowledgeable person about Mac hardware/Software in the building they have problems.

Google.   Go back to the way iGoogle was before you fucked it up.   It fails to read RSS titles about 70% of the time and each freaking tab has it’s own settings.   This does not make me a happy camper.   Actually, just fix the RSS feed issue and give and option to apply setting and theams to all tabs and that would fix it.     I may need to go look at my Google Lab stuff, this might be a side effect of those.   More later.

Spammers.   “Comment Spammers” in particular.   Please use software to comment spam that at least tries to make it look like a real comment. The “comment” on the top of the Spam Karma reject pile is ‘22gy2zo5g0a0f8lg paucyh yhtrg’. This, of course, is really a link to really random web sites, but, come on, what happened to “This is very interesting web site. I will be back later” comment spam?

Well, off to see if the Jump Buddy has enough juice yet.