Voder-Vocoder

Some segments of the Linux user community, which prefer to avoid the IP-encumbered ATI drivers due to ideological choices, still prefer the R200-based chips, as they are among the fastest modern video cards with stable open source drivers. (source)

My ATI RV280 Radeon 9200 works great with The new Compiz window manager that comes with Fedora Core 6. Using the desktop-effects program, you can replace the old window manager (Metacity) with Compiz. Compiz makes use of neat effects such as the spinning cube and the scaler plugin (similar to OSX’s exposé).

For once, something just works.

gconftool-2 --type bool \
  /apps/compiz/plugins/cube/screen0/options/in \
  --set true

Compiz has more options. It’s a bit of a kludge ot change them.

What all happened to my computer:

1) /dev/hda (formatted with ntfs and vfat for windows) died suddenly. Made loud clicking noises. Was many years old anyways. When were 30GB HDDs still sold? 2001?

2) I yanked /dev/hda from the box.

3) /dev/hdb would no longer boot, cause the MBR that contained Grub lived on /dev/hda. Used Knoppix and Fedora Rescue CD to access drive.

4) I tried to convence grub to install to /dev/hdb. I had no luck. With lilo that would have been easy. With grub, it’s a mystery. Spent lots of time stairing at the grub> prompt.

5) Gave up on /sbin/grub-install. Used dd. dd killed my partition table. Apparently, the MBR and the partition table live in the same sector. I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW THIS WORKS.

6) Recovered the partition table using gpart (Guess Partitions?) and some intelegent guesses.

7) Went to the store and bought a new 190 GiB (== 204 GB) hard disk. Formatted it with an NTFS partition so I can play World of Warcraft when the need takes me. Left a 142G vFAT partition for cross-OS file transfer and cross-device backups.

8) Installed XP. Installed basic software and patches.

9) Figured out that I could make a bootable Grub CD by with the /usr/share/grub/i386-redhat/stage2_eltorito file. CD boots and I get a grub> prompt. By typing

grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5 ro root=/dev/hdb2
grub> initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5.img
grub> boot

I can boot up the functional OS on /dev/hdb. There is much rejoicing! So much better than a liveCD.

10) I wait until FC6 comes out, then fire up bittorrent to get it.

11) I install FC6 on /dev/hdb. At the same time, FC6 installer writes wotking grub MBR to /dev/hda. All is well.

Review of FC6 to follow.

* * *

Thought: Hard disks tend to last long enough for something six times as big to replace them. By which time you won’t even miss them.

#!/bin/sh
#bin/amp#
#DTPD#
nohup "$@" 1> /dev/null 2>&1 &

Hard Drive A starts making loud clicking noises yesterday. I suspect it has finally died and I unplug it. Hard Drive B is newer, larger, and containes my day-to-day OS of choice. Tho only problem is that HDB contains no bootloader. So I need to install one. So I boot up knoppix from a CD and fool around trying to install grub. Then I figure I’ll just try this:

dd if=boot/grub/stage1 of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1

Of course what I should have done was:

dd if=boot/grub/stage1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=512 count=1

I managed to overwrite the partition table of my only working hard drive. Good thing my latest backup is only two weeks old, cause I’m not sure how to access any of the data on the drive.

Tommorrow is aparently Columbus Day, in honor of the city in Ohio.

To celebrate, I’ve been listening to Guns, Germs and Steel (ISBN 0393317552) and read the last couple of chapters of Card’s Redemption of Christopher Columbus (ISBN 0812508645).

What I’m watching on TV these days:

Lost
ABC / Wednesdays 9ET/8CT

I started watching this in the third season, after watching the first two seasons on DVD via Netflix. I’m not sure if the third season is going to be good or not. My favorite episodes is still the pilot.

My biggest issue with this type of series is that the writers set up mysteries that are so curious that a reasonable explanation is almost impossible. So they either remain unresolved or are resolved in an unsatisfying way.

* * *

Battlestar Galactica
SciFi / Fridays 9ET/8CT

Going into the third season, a lot has changed in the show, preventing the writers from writing the sort of formulaic episodes that are the norm in most space operas. Maybe they’ve jumped the shark, but probably they’ve succeeded in sustaining the feeling of hopelessness and defeat that has defined the series since the Cylons launched a nuclear attack on the Twelve Colonies.

* * *

The Venture Bros.
Adult Swim / Sundays 10:30ET/9:30CT

Adult Swim cartoons range from mind-numbing to somewhat entertaining, with a few exceptions. The Venture Bros is one that I consistently download if I miss an episode. As I’ve mentioned before, this is a show that I should dislike, since there isn’t a single character I admire. The shows main theme, failure, does tend to resonate:

Perhaps more telling, however, is the sense of societal failure. All around the Venture Compound one sees the artifacts of the Jet / Space Age — supersonic nuclear-powered jets, fantastic inventions and gleaming science. But, forty years later, those Jet Age relics are breaking down, and their promises (as well as the paradise that science and technology were to have ushered in) have all been broken. There is perhaps no better symbol of this than Gargantua One, a gigantic space station built by Doctor Jonas Venture, who dubbed it “the ninth wonder of the world”. Intended to be a beacon of scientific advancement and hope for the future, by the present day the station has become completely abandoned except for two astronauts, a sex-starved Romanian woman with a disfigured face and an emasculated, middle-aged virgin. The station has fallen into disrepair, breaking down from only minor complications, and eventually crashes into Earth and explodes (ironically killing numerous members of Al Qaeda; the station’s only success was a result of its being a failure). [source]

* * *

This:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
 content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>2006-10-07</title></head><body>
<div style="width:400px; margin:auto;">

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing
elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et
dolore magna aliqua.</p>

<blockquote style="border-left:solid 4px #ddd;
 border-right:solid 4px #ddd"><p>
Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation
ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo
consequat.
</p></blockquote>

<p>Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate
velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.</p>

<blockquote style="border-left:solid 4px #ddd;
 border-right:solid 4px #ddd;
 border-bottom:solid 4px #ddd;
 border-top:solid 4px #ddd"><p>
Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt
in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est
laborum.
</p></blockquote>

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing
elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et
dolore magna aliqua.</p>

</div></body></html>

renders as:

The act of simply adding a border-top and border-bottom to an element’s style will radically change the distance between it and the preceding and following blocks. This is why I’ve stopped using border-top and border-bottom. See collapsing margins

How to install the Fedora Core 4 version of the default Clearlooks theme on Fedora Core 5 and later:

Begin by going to http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/ and find a mirror. Navigate to the directory core/4/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/ to download the two rpm packages we need: gnome-themes-x.xx.x-x.xxx.rpm and gtk2-engines-x.x.x-x.xxxx.rpm

mkdir workingfolder
cd workingfolder
rpm2cpio [PATH]/gnome-themes-2.10.1-2.i386.rpm | cpio -id
rpm2cpio [PATH]/gtk2-engines-2.6.3-2.i386.rpm | cpio -id
cp -a usr/share/themes/Clearlooks Clearlooks_FC4

Now we need to edit the files in the Clearlooks_FC4 directory to give this theme a new name so the Theme Manager doesn’t get confused. Edit the file Clearlooks_FC4/index.theme:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Clearlooks_FC4
Type=X-GNOME-Metatheme
Comment=Attractive Usability
Encoding=UTF-8

[X-GNOME-Metatheme]
GtkTheme=Clearlooks_FC4
MetacityTheme=Clearlooks_FC4
IconTheme=Clearlooks

Edit the file Clearlooks_FC4/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml and change one line:

<name>Clearlooks_FC4</name>

Now let’s wrap this up:

mkdir -p ~/.themes
mv Clearlooks_FC4 ~/.themes
cd ..
rm -r workingfolder
gnome-theme-manager &

Or you could just download my copy of Clearlooks_FC4.tar.gz.

mkdir -p ~/.themes
tar xzf Clearlooks_FC4.tar.gz -C ~/.themes/
gnome-theme-manager &