Time for some clarification
A friend wrote this about a previous blog entry of mine:
I guess I feel that you quitting IRC is sending a very strong message to everyone that you’re not interested anymore, whether that’s the case or not. You said on your blog that it would show you who your true friends really are, in other words they are going to have to chase after you and they are going to have to put the extra effort in if they want to remain friends with you, but I don’t think putting all of the responsibility on them is very fair. I’m sure a lot of people really care about you even if they don’t talk to you much.
It appears I wasn’t very clear in my previous blog entry (it did ramble on quite a lot!). I haven’t quit IRC because I’m not interested in my friends anymore and I certainly do not expect others to put extra effort in to contacting me. The idea was that I would put the extra effort in to contact others and it would show me who were my closest friends, i.e. I’d contact those who I wanted to contact, rather than contact the whole of #tagsoc and get everybody listening.
I’ve come to the decision that IRC, or rather, #tagsoc, is detrimental to real friendship and rarely makes me happy. Tagsoc was created for a group of friends to organise ourselves and talk when we couldn’t be together. We were all in the same area, on campus, or in the city, and it made a lot of sense when we were always together. It no longer does. We’re spread out across the country. Without the regular meetings in person where we can be friends we’re just left with the shell - the IRC channel.
IRC’s multi-user “broadcast-to-all” nature means I’m not developing real friendship with anybody. Most of what is talked about is current events, internet memes, news items or arguments. I don’t get to actually talk to my friends about how they are and what they are up to. We see each other constantly online so we don’t stop to ask how each of us are. IRC makes it all too easy to be annoying, and it distorts who I really am to others. Then there is the age old “IRC” makes it easy to do things I’ve never say in any other medium and don’t really mean either.
I’m leaving IRC to actually try to improve my friendships. This has already worked with a few people. I intend to continue to reach out to my friends, either in person, or via e-mail, or via my telephone. In those mediums I can actually talk about things that matter. None of the other floating rubbish is there. I can talk to just those who I want to talk to.
So, this isn’t about burning my bridges. I want to improve the relationship with my friends. I hope to contact lots of you over the coming weeks and I plan to invite lots of people to have a proper social event in Southampton at some point. Not sure what it’d be or what we will do but I intend to do it! (?).
August 22nd, 2008 - Posted in Personal | | 1 Comments
Sound in Linux, and other things.
Linux on the desktop still has plenty of problems. They are basic problems with hardware most of the time:
- Most of the time suspend and hibernate don’t work. This is a must for laptops.
- Most of the time Sound is problematic, especially if you want software sound mixing and/or surround sound.
- Native 3D is still a problem although this is much less of a problem today.
- Lots of third-party bits of hardware don’t work although this is getting better. My bluetooth and webcam don’t work though.
Sound
Sound on Linux is nothing short of a gigantic mess. I personally don’t care about the high-end audio topics but I do want three things:
- Good sound quality
- Surround sound support
- Software (or hardware) sound stream mixing
In the dark days of early Linux the only sound solution was OSS (The Open Sound System) which turned out to not be as open as everybody hoped. OSS was very, very limited (I’m not even sure surround sound was possible). It played sounds though. Mixing of streams wasn’t possible. So software was built on top to do software mixing, much like Windows had added back in the earliest of Windows releases. There were multiple solutions including,
- ESD - GNOME picked this
- aRTS - KDE picked this
- JACK - Largely for professional audio purposes
Generally applications would use ESD, aRTS or good old OSS - each having a different API to use them. It wasn’t much fun.
Then, with the 2.6 kernel, ALSA arrived. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture grew out of the need to replace OSS since it was no longer being maintained. ALSA also promised support for hardware mixing of sound streams if the card supported it. Great. Most cards don’t support it.
ALSA is here to stay and is brilliant. It solves the surround sound problem and virtually all applications and frameworks now support it (and if they don’t they won’t be able to play sound…). The good news here is that we have a stable, long-term API that developers can target and know that it should work. Or should it?
ALSA largely didn’t solve the mixing problem. Consequently most distributions continued to use ESD and aRTS. Ubuntu has never stopped using a software mixing system for example. Then ALSA came up with “dmix” - software sound mixing for ALSA. Excellent! We can dump ESD and aRTS which are no longer being maintained anyway!
Except dmix doesn’t really work all that well. It apparently is switched on by default now, except it clearly isn’t. It also doesn’t work with surround sound. I can force dmix to be turned on and then Surround sound turns off. If I follow the advanced configuration guide to enable 6-channel dmix everything stops working. I shouldn’t have to do this anyway - it should just work.
Then Pulse Audio was announced which is a replacement for ESD. It is, however, more than that. It is in userspace and looks like another paper-over-the-cracks solution. It emulates OSS, ALSA, ESD and aRTS so all applications use PulseAudio. What I don’t get is that PulseAudio must in turn use ALSA but according to /dev/snd/ devices it doesn’t. Weird.
Anyway when I first tried Pulse in Ubuntu 8.04 I hated it (After looking forward to it for so long). It didn’t work. Surround sound didn’t work and worst of all mixing didn’t work. Flash didn’t work. I have, however, now got it working. I finally have an Ubuntu where sound works, mixing works and surround sound works.
Ubuntu did this by quickly adding plugins to everything to support pulse (where they were before using ALSA or ESD). I’ve now got it all working by enabling “Software sound mixing” in GNOME’s sound preferences (causes userspace pulse to start), enabling 6-channel in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and installing libflashsupport which forces Adobe Flash to support Pulse. Phew.
Oh, and having Pulse on my desktop and laptop is rather cool. I can play direct from my laptop to the desktop, or vice versa. Fun stuff 
August 21st, 2008 - Posted in Personal | | 0 Comments
Muse, Dublin and Home
I’ve spent the last week in Dublin on holiday with the primary goal of seeing a Muse gig at Marlay Park. For the first time ever I got right to the front of the concert (although not middle-front). For this reason alone it was the best gig I have ever been to and one of those “amazing” moments of my life. I only wish I could go back and see them again tomorrow. I should organise myself to go see some other bands live (although somehow I doubt they’ll be as good as Muse are live…).
I didn’t enjoy Dublin as much as I had hoped. This was pretty evident to all my friends although I didn’t come out and say it to them! On the other hand the events of the week taught me a lot about how my relationship with my “Tagsoc” friends has changed and how much of a different person I am since early University days. Whilst the week illustrated several things about what I want very clearly it also brought up several questions.
I am glad to be home and I am looking forward to getting back to work tomorrow. I’m treating today as a lazy day, so besides preparing myself for the coming week I’m not doing much of anything. I’m enjoying being in solitude since I didn’t really have any time to myself just to relax all week.
I’m also feeling pretty bored of IRC. I haven’t used it all week of course and it didn’t bother me. I think my love-affair with the medium is now at an end. I have no desire to really go anywhere near it today and I keep asking why I’m even signed into it. This might make staying in touch with my friends from University more difficult, but not impossible, and should illustrate whom are my real friends and who are not.
IRC, and “Tagsoc”, has a life of it’s own, and its mixed personality imposes itself on its members. It moulded me, in likes and dislikes, in events and socialising, as do all groups of friends. It is clear however that I have had time to re-evaluate “who I am” and “what I like to do” since I left University. I no longer feel bound by the group and I feel, in fact, different. Friends and family define us as much as our own likes and dislikes define us. There does, however, have to be a common enough set of shared interests. This basis is now falling away (largely because the first major interest was ‘University’). It is time now for me to say thank-you to what has come before and look forward to a new future.
August 17th, 2008 - Posted in Personal, TagSoc | | 0 Comments
Serves you right for buying legit DVDs
I have been bitten by a rather annoying bug. A laptop of mine has a particular, rare, DVD drive with hardware region locking that cannot be worked around. DVD Region Free even states:
NOTE: DVD-RAM, Matshita XX-8xxx, SW-9xxx series DVD drives, and Torisan DRD-Uxxx series DVD drives are not supported now, and there is no plan to support them. But you can watch and copy CSS encrypted DVD movies when the drive region and disc region is matched on these DVD drives.
My friends on IRC responded with:
12:16 anon: hahah hax
12:17 anon: serves you right for buying legit DVDs
Which, stupidly, is true. I buy all my DVDs - I don’t pirate anything. Virtually everybody I know pirates things. I own lots of US-bought DVDs because I lived in the United States. Now they won’t work on my laptop DVD drive. If I had pirated the DVDs I would have been able to watch them on the laptop.
This is just stupid. It is as if industry woke up in the morning and decided to shoot themselves in the foot. Their own measures designed to prevent illegal copying makes me want to do illegal copying. Good job movie/tv industry!
August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 1 Comments
It never rains but it pours
I haven’t added any new entries to my blog in months. I’m starting to think of this year as one of those “turning-corners” years where everything is changing and the pace is very fast. I’ve settled down into my new job (I say new - I started in December 2007), I’ve moved out into my own flat in Southampton and I’ve changed my lifestyle and routine in a big way.
This past weekend has been rather eventful. In fact every weekend over the past two months has. This weekend has seen some horrid events. I’m not going to comment of them directly since this isn’t the place but I’m going to be feeling pretty blue for the next few days and weeks. I am confident however that all that I have done to make my life what I want it to be will keep me sane and happy.
I’ve been to the gym fourteen times now, every day except the first sunday over the past two weeks and one day. This makes me happy because I have not, until now, managed to keep up a daily exercise routine like that. Actually my last statement is not correct, I’ve been doing strength exercises every day for the past six months at home - just not cardio exercises.
This weekend I’m going to see the Dark Knight at the IMAX with lots of friends and then the following weekend I’m flying to Dublin with many of the same friends for a weeks holiday (and to see Muse live on stage for only the third time!). A few weeks ago I went out with friends from work for my manager’s pre-wedding celebrations which was a heck of a lot of fun.
Life is rather up and down. Just the way I like it.
July 28th, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 0 Comments
Now plastic bags cost 5 pence
Good work Mr Brown. You are fighting the good fight - to save the planet! Or are you? Without legislating the government has managed to force the nations supermarkets into charging for plastic bags. Putting aside the disgusting legal and ethical problems here of not using parliament to agree to legislation, this policy just won’t work.
An extra £1 or £2 will not impact people all that much at the supermarket. It will, of course, affect the poorer people in society who are going to lose out buying more bags. The richer folk who prefer the throw-away idea of plastic bags will carry on using them - especially when they’re only 5 pence.
It isn’t even as if plastic bags are the biggest problem to tackle. As many BBC “Have Your Say” readers rightly point out the packaging used for virtually everything we buy really is the problem and we can’t do much as consumers to change that. The government can. They have the power to mandate cross-industry standardised, reusable or recyclable containers and slowly ban the production and import of products which fail to use them. Of course, bans won’t be needed at first but perhaps high-taxes on manufacturers of non-standard types who sell in the United Kingdom.
It would be a difficult policy and it might even (gasp) damage our economy. It would however go a long way towards solving our waste problems, recycling (since most containers would become re-usable) problems andit would prevent us from spending millions on packaging which we do not need to produce. Since much of it is plastic it would reduce our demand on oil. There are so many good reasons for this sort of policy yet nobody has the balls to do it. It would really turn us into a nation that cares about the planet and stops using up resources we’re rapidly running out of.
May 18th, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 0 Comments
Solaris vs Linux
There are a few announcements and news articles about Sun Microsystems releasing the first fully supported release of OpenSolaris (although, I thought Solaris Express Developer was supported so I’m not sure that my statement there is accurate). Even so, this is one monumental release for many a reason. On the afore mentioned news articles there are the usual range of comments. One theme is “It is too late for Solaris. Linux rools.”. The inevitable response is a Solaris/Unix nerd responding with “Nevar! What about Zones! Dtrace! ZFS!”.
I always chuckle when a die-hard Solaris fan pimps Solaris 10 or Open Solaris next to Linux. They don’t mention any of the old-school reasons for using Solaris or any of the reasons I could possibly care about. Instead they mention the cool buzzwords without realising they give Solaris virtually no advantage next to Linux.
- Dtrace - Who cares? The Linux crowd barely used strace, let alone caring about a primarily developer tool. DTrace is nice. I just can’t think why I’d use it. I suspect next to nobody in the Linux community really wants it on Linux.
- Zones - Who cares? There are many other techniques on Linux. There is Xen, KVM, Lguest, Linux V-Server, OpenVZ and User Mode Linux. This list does not include all the commercial solutions available on Linux. Really, Sun should stop talking about Zones as some killer technology. They’re not.
- ZFS - Yes, ZFS is very cool. There are also many horror stories and basic missing features. Like growing the underlying hardware arrays. There are other solutions which might not be as “super-cool” as ZFS but offer the solutions people wanted before. Linux MD raid and LVM volume management is “good enough” and excels in areas ZFS does not. If ZFS is so good why has takeup been so slow? Where is the revolution? Instead we see other filesystems, like btrfs from Oracle, which is more likely to be the revolution.
Here are some features I like to mention when Solaris comes up:
- Service Management Facility - A fantastic replacement for System V init. SMF makes managing complex unix systems much easier. It makes adding daemons and services to systems much easier.
Hrm, I appear to have run out of “cool features”. There is a lot to get excited about in Open Solaris 2008.05. My previous review (blog entry) detailed a lot of the fun things. I especially like the Image Packaging System. I am however fed up with reading about “DTrace, Zones, ZFS” and listening to fan boys spout them off without realising that very few care about those features. I think somebody in Sun realises this though hence all the work to make Open Solaris 2008.05 more about copying Ubuntu than pimping ZFS, Zones or DTrace. Which makes sense.
May 6th, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 0 Comments
Ubuntu 8 is rather broken
I installed a new, clean release of Ubuntu 8.04 today. It has some nice new features but there are lots of flaws, bugs and totally broken bits. I expected a bit more from a LTS release. Firefox 3 crashes constantly. I get a blue hue over all my videos. The window decoration shadow is pink. I think I can fix those last two via installing the NVIDIA driver manually and not using the one which ships in Ubuntu. I’ve fixed Firefox by installing Firefox 2. I hate PolicyKit. Way to make life harder. Good job.
I’ll post a more detailed conclusion later but so far I hate it.
May 3rd, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 1 Comments
Sigh
I’ve hated the Labour administration for as long as I can remember. I don’ think that the Conservatives would (will?) be any better. I would have preferred a mixed bag of results with lots of no-overall-control areas. A hung parliament would be awesome. Coalitions. They actually mean people have to find the right solution. It means that party politics are less important.
This won’t happen though. People want “change” so they all vote Tory. Except they won’t actually get change. If what happened after 1997 isn’t proof then I don’t know what is. Oh, and now Boris looks like he’ll be mayor of London. We’ll have a homophobic, right-wing, semi-racist twat representing one of the most diverse and vibrant capitals of the world.
I can’t wait until another foreign politician mocks him by accident in public.
May 2nd, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 1 Comments
Debian on SPARC64
I haven’t had to do this sort of installation for a while. I’ve been asked to install Linux on a Sun Ultra 5 with a 360Mhz Ultra SPARC and 128MB of RAM. There is a long, complicated reason for this but I stepped in when they were trying to install Gentoo on the system. You know, the Gentoo where you compile most of it yourself. On an Ultra 5. It wouldn’t work anyway even after a full installation. I know that Debian works very well on Ultra 5’s so I get to what I haven’t done to a Sun system in ages… infect it with a copy of GNU/Linux 
It’s all rather amusing. My Linux box is a Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz with 2GB of RAM, two disks and a GeForce or Quadro thing. This box is decidedly underpowered next to that I suspect though that Debian will still boot faster than Red Hat does, even if Red Hat has a much more powerful system!
May 2nd, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 0 Comments
