A Man and his Penguin

Is it just my misconception, or does NetworkManager suck arse?

Every so often when I start up, NetworkManager won’t connect. Rebooting does not help. Using the Networking panel manually doesn’t help either - the connection always fails.

I have to use the NetworkManager applet to switch to a different network, wait until it’s pretty much connected, and then switch to my actual network. It’s a major PITA. But this time that procedure didn’t work the first time, and I spend a good 20 minutes trying to fiddle with things to get it working.

I’ve heard good things about Wifi Radar - I might use that instead.

I’m not dissing the developers of NetworkManager, I just don’t think it’s in a ready state for use at least on my machine.

In other news, some dickhead wrote in to APC magazine and complained that Linux "is not ready for the desktop" because sound stutters when you try to use it within… SHOCK HORROR… Virtual PC. Cue lots of n00b ranting. What he fails to realise is that Microsoft has a vested interest in stopping Linux from working properly on Virtual PC, and they chose to have their virtualiser emulate a Soundblaster 16 because the drivers for it are not in the Linux 2.6 kernel.

"But I want to try Linux without wiping my Windows install!". Well then, why don’t you dual-boot, and that way you can see how Linux performs on a real computer without the overhead of Windows? Or you could use a half-decent virtualisation suite like Virtualbox (free download for Windows, supports Linux without any problems).

In fact, I’m going to add another item to my article "Mac OS X - Desktop Ready?", regarding this virtualisation thing. Because you cannot run Mac OS X under virtualisation from within Windows unless you download a hacked version of OS X.

I recently got a haircut. Usually when I get a haircut and I see my reflection in the mirror I think "Hey, I don’t look as bad as I usually think I look".

But this morning I looked in the mirror and really didn’t like what I saw. My face is the wrong shape and even if it was the right shape it wouldn’t be an attractive face.

I realistically don’t think I’ll find any girl who likes my face, or who can see past it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Whirlpool is the absolute worst supplier I have ever dealt with. Their DOA (Dead-On-Arrival) policy is "If the product has a fault when you take it out of the box, we will try to weasel out of our obligation to replace it".

I actually had one rodent from Whirlpool claim that the customer had called Whirlpool to report the fault 21 days after buying the product. The truth was that the customer had called the next business day after unboxing the product (the 7th day after buying it) to report the fault, but was immediately told to contact the service agent. One of the slightly more senior staff at "Customer Care" admitted that to me after I confronted her with it.

Whirlpool are supposedly a "preferred supplier" of our group, yet not only has our rep never come into the store, but he wasn’t even sure if he was our rep in the first place! Useless bastards!

"Guess who’s got some mouthes to feed,
Guess who’s got a Whirlpool?
Guess who’s got to wait for parts,
Guess who’s got a Whirlpool?"

Piece of shit products. That’s it, I’m not selling Whirlpool anymore.

On Thursday I had the idea to put a cheap cooking package on eBay, to capitalise on the success we’ve had with the Nobel dishwashers. After looking at pricing for Chef, Nobel and Emilia, we settled on the Emilia 60cm stainless steel pack because we can sell it for a brilliantly-low price of $899! It’s a fan-forced oven, a twin-motor slideout rangehood, and your choice of a gas or electric 4 burner cooktop. Italian-Made with 2 year warranty.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/NEW-Emilia-60cm-Stainless-Steel-Cooking-Package-899_W0QQitemZ270204782154QQihZ017QQcategoryZ20712QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

And then today someone came in with a Betta Electrical catalogue, wanting to buy a cordless phone they had advertised. Two things I noticed: Firstly, Betta are advertising fridges made by Hotpoint! Not only is Hotpoint not a brand name at all, but also who would want a fridge which advertises itself as being a *hot* point? :-P  Second thing I noticed was that exact same Emilia cooking pack, your choice of gas or electric cooktop, for the same price :-(   But hey, so few people see the Betta catalogues, I don’t think it will slow down our own sales.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a workaround to the Nvidia driver problem I was having where all the videos turn green.

I started by studying Gmplayer - what makes it different? While looking through the preferences, I notice that it used X11 as the output module. I changed it to "Xv" (which is what I would have expected it to be on) and I got the green video. Changing it back to X11 brought the video back to its colourful best.

I found a similar option in VLC (my favourite DVD player) and now that uses X11 with no problem.

And, to top things off, I found an option in Gconf-editor that tells Gstreamer to use it too. It’s a little bit obscure though: First go into gconf-editor, then open up the key "/system/gstreamer/0.10/default". Change the option "videosink" to the value "ximagesink".

If you want to change it back, the original value was "autovideosink".

So now all Gstreamer-based programs, like Elisa and Totem, will display video correctly!

Before you claim that "This means that Linux isn’t ready for the desktop", just remember that Nvidia (proprietary software) introduced the problem, and open-source frameworks gave me the workaround.

When I recently uploaded videos to Youtube, I thought that there was something wrong with the actual videos because they looked green on my computer. Today I discovered that all videos play like that.

My first thought was that it was something wrong with ffmpeg. My second thought was compiz. My third thought was the switch between libsdl-debian-all and libsdl-debian-alsa that I had done to get Kdenlive working.

I tried it all. I still got green video.

Then I remembered: The videos looked green on-screen, but even after editing and re-encoding, once they got to Youtube they were fine. Could it be the graphics card drivers (which would explain the recent appearance of the problem, since I upgraded the drivers recently)?

I used the Screens And Graphics control panel to change the driver back to the open-source NV, and restarted X. Then I remembered that Screens And Graphics actually doesn’t do A DAMNED THING, and so I edited Xorg.conf manually. Restarted X. My videos looked fine again.

Playing with the settings in the Nvidia control panel hasn’t helped so far.

I have three choices: Suffer kernel panics with the old driver, suffer green video with the new driver, or suffer no 3D acceleration at all with the open-source driver.

Why the fuck do people say that the Nvidia drivers are better than the ATI ones? They really aren’t! Sure, I had to run XGL on my old computer, and for a while there the drivers used to crash whenever you logged-out or changed VT. But at least I never got random kernel panics or green video.

As a result, I am seriously considering that in future computers I build, I will use ATI cards or motherboards with integrated Intel graphics. If I don’t find a solution to this mess soon, I might yank the 8600 out of my computer and replace it with an ATI.

I’ve bitten the bullet and started heavily playing Return To Castle Wolfenstein again.

Only thing is, I’m currently using cheat codes. I like to think that I’d be able to get through most of it unassisted, but there were one or two bits which became quite difficult with the lack of ammo And I couldn’t figure out how to get into one particular part of a level without raising the alarm, so I skipped the level.

One problem: I occasionally get game engine errors. Not sure if that’s to do with the cheating or not. But they return me to the title screen, which sucks arse. Luckily I save often.

Another thing about that game that sucks arse is the crypt levels and the whole "paranormal division" storyline. I can describe for you what you do in the crypt levels:

1. Find a switch. It’s on the other end of a corridor.
2. Walk through the corridor and flick the switch.
3. Monsters start breaking out of the walls of the corridor you just walked through. You now have no space to maneuver.
4. You start shooting, but the monsters have a damn shield that they raise that manages to perfectly deflect your bullets back to you. You’re now taking damage from your own bullets.
5. You decide to switch away from the rifle to your MP-40, which you recently picked up some ammo for after being completely out. Unfortunately, the move of the mousewheel takes you through the silenced Sten gun, so the precious ammo is all loaded into the Sten. The Sten overheats after about 4 shots.
6. You finally manage to kill the baddies, and you have 36% health left and only ammo for your rifle and pistol. You walk around for a minute before spying a switch at the end of a corridor…

I also hated the booby traps at the end of the last crypt level. It just makes the game feel unprofessional.

But I’m now past the crypt, and I’m enjoying the game again.

Starting from today, Asus is opening the distribution of the EeePC to all major electrical retailers, including Retravision (which includes us). So yes, our shop can order the EeePC!

Now I know why Myer prices it at $499 - they really couldn’t put it any lower in price.

With my work discount, I’m now starting to think about getting one. But I still can’t justify it, especially since I don’t get a heck of a lot of money off something this cheap. I’d rather get one of the Samsung video cameras that should be coming in some time this week. Then I can put all sorts of useless crap onto Youtube

Reposted from the Blacklight project page on Sourceforge.net:

Thanks for using Blacklight! I hope your Walkmans are still giving you hours of enjoyment.

You can download the new version of Blacklight from http://sourceforge.net/projects/blacklight/

If you need a version of ffmpeg that can encode to MPEG-4/AAC-LC, add the Medibuntu repo.

The first version of the Debian package that I uploaded was faulty, but the new version is up now. Some dependency names have changed between Feisty and Gutsy, and this new package will work with either version of Ubuntu. Non-Ubuntu users can extract the package as if it was a tarball and place the files in the filesystem.

My family sat down and watched Hairspray on DVD - even my father! He genuinely enjoyed it - we can tell because he didn’t fall asleep during it, and about ten minutes in he stopped fiddling with his model railway and actually sat down and watched for the rest of the movie. I also noticed him tapping his toes

I didn’t notice this at the movies, but the retro animation during Come So Far (Got So Far To Go) is really well done and as visually spectacular as the actual movie. Whoever animated that section should be congratulated.

And, of course, Amanda looks nice, especially during the final scene

—–

I downloaded a Linux media centre project called Entertainer. It’s heavily in development - so much so that there’s not even a bugtracker for it yet as "there would be too many bugs right now to track". Looks nice. But I can’t get it to run - it complains about not being able to run a GLX function and then crashes with a floating point error. The source code is so modular I’m slightly too intimidated to try and debug it myself :-)  But maybe I’ll do it another day, or try a later development version when one comes out.

Or I could use one of a dozen excellent media centres?

As soon as I got out of work I went to Kmart and bought the single-disc edition of Hairspray. I haven’t watched it yet; I’ll try and get my parents to watch it with me.

When I got home I went to my computer, and the wireless connection to the ADSL was very very slow. I tried rebooting the computer and the router, but it didn’t actually work. I did some fiddling around and now everything is going. Is wireless really ready for the desktop?