Intoxication

I just tried Wine again for the first time in about twelve months (last attempt was with eTax, use­less IE-dependent thing that it is, last year. After a bit of con­fig­ging it worked but couldn’t sub­mit because of that depen­dency… it saved a data file I could sub­mit with Win­dows, though) and am astounded.

After zero-config, installers work mag­i­cally, 3d engines func­tion, and every­thing is gen­er­ally incred­i­ble. I read this on someone’s blog ear­lier today: “with that I was able to install the lat­est Wine (0.9.18 at the time of this writ­ing). This comes with bet­ter sup­port for HL2 and WoW.” and con­se­quently was afraid the ver­sion in non-backports Ubuntu would be ancient, etcetera, and gen­er­ally useless.

No, the author is cor­rect in say­ing “bet­ter support” — there is intrin­si­cally fan­tas­tic sup­port for pretty much every­thing. It’s incred­i­ble. Now I’ve just got to get some time in which to play var­i­ous games. Linux, appar­ently, is no longer a bar­rier to entry, and Loki Games (R.I.P.) would face an ever-diminishing chal­lenge as com­pata­bil­ity lay­ers keep grow­ing in their sheer brilliance.

I’ve yet to try pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions, but am con­tent with hav­ing ten­ta­tively embraced the gamer side of geek for one week­end. I’d love to give Dreamweaver a whirl, but am unlikely to be doing enough devel­op­ment work to jus­tify it for the next cou­ple of months. MS Office would be a pleas­ant addi­tion to the reper­toire, though OpenOf­fice is excel­lent for most appli­ca­tions. I’d never go back to using Word for prepar­ing real doc­u­ments, but per­haps for things requir­ing collaboration/versioning it’s the best choice. I’d prob­a­bly get MS Office for cre­at­ing Pow­er­point templates/editing other people’s work before I had any real need for it myself, so these things are still pretty unnec­es­sary. It’s just fan­tas­tic to think that it is, all of a sud­den, a possibility.

The irony of all this is that I’m wax­ing lyri­cal about closed-source apps when the actual intent of this post is to extoll the bril­liance of F/OSS’s progress. Purists would argue oth­er­wise… but they’re wrong :-)

# by Josh on September 10th, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

Friday, today, in a few hours time,

will be a pro­duc­tive day. I will wake up before 8, be dressed + have eaten break­fast + func­tional by 9, start ingest­ing video from TACKLES sleep­over last Sat­ur­day (NOT on a Linux com­puter, because even Ubuntu doesn’t play nice with Firewire cards, it seems), call a friend I’ve been mean­ing to call for too long and gen­er­ally stop pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on that front whilst the video thingy is at work (I bought a Firewire cable so will hope­fully never again have to cap­ture from ana­logue sources where I don’t absolutely need to), and call another friend accord­ingly, based upon the out­come of the first, prod the Matthias site a lit­tle bit (blog good­ness for those who are keen on it!), hope­fully return a video cam­era if Adam is home (oth­er­wise leave voice­mail and deal with it all later, I sup­pose), return home, email check (com­pul­sively, as if there were any other way), eat lunch, go to work, work, get home, con­tem­plate deal­ing with cap­tured video and decide it’s too hard with­out iMovie/Premiere/something less painful/more pow­er­ful than Win­dows Movie Maker/less gargantuan/buggy/UI-designed-by-primates than Cinel­erra, email com­pul­sively some more, chase some lights, put off til week­end (when every­where will be closed any­way), stay at home for once, sleep (before midnight).

Notic­ing a down­wards Getting-Stuff-Done trend. Meh. Lec­ture is can­celled tomor­row so I’ve got more time to try and be pro­duc­tive in. Now I’ve just got to not wake up too late… not even the 372 will save me if it’s not a going-to-uni day (haven’t had one of those in a while now, nice!)

# by Josh on August 18th, 2006 Tags: , , ,
| 3 Comments »

MacPro

It’s kinda nice and all, but seri­ously, so expen­sive. I’m sure the parts are all really high qual­ity, but that I can source pretty much all upgrade options offered for half the price or less — for exam­ple, adding a mea­gre two 512MB sticks costs an obscene $AU499, whilst even the most ridicu­lous gamer-marketed RAM (you know the stuff, it’s sup­pos­edly ‘tuned’ in pairs, etc.) can be had for $135 for two 512MB sticks (OCZ brand) — is rather telling about their hor­rific markup.

And yeah, I’m sure it’s all great qual­ity and mag­i­cally never crashes and all the rest of that mar­ket­ing crap. Good for you guys. I’m gonna wan­der back over the other side of the room here and install Win­dows on my equally-powerful sys­tem for, oh, about 40% of the cost. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of your mon­i­tors. I can pick up an equiv­a­lent Dell 30″ for $600 less than your offer­ing… and if I’m con­tent with a mea­gre 23″ then I can get a 24″ Dell for $400 less! Even the 20″ screens are $500 apart. Seri­ously, it’s com­pletely unjus­ti­fi­able and no-one in their right mind should be pre­pared to spend that much more for a brand.

Sigh.

I need to open a buy-a-new-computer account and start putting money into it. Well not really… I just need a new hard­drive and var­i­ous soft­ware licenses I guess. I think I’d miss Ubuntu too much (maybe)… I don’t even know why, nearly every­thing I can do here I can do in Win­dows (haha — does any­one else notice the beau­ti­ful inver­sion of that argu­ment? I actu­ally think I’ve been run­ning Linux for too many years now to have posted about it in any currently-stored online blog entries! Crazy) except any­thing requir­ing a ter­mi­nal. That’s almost def­i­nitely my great­est frus­tra­tion, but no mat­ter. I need soft­ware that doesn’t run in Linux and is too inten­sive to work well in vir­tu­al­ized con­di­tions. Best option for me would be to get a whole sep­a­rate com­puter, but then… well, this thing can feel flaky after being on for two weeks. Win­dows I’d prob­a­bly get that every two days or so, but at least I’d think to reboot. Here, I just kill processes and at worst logout. Ker­nel patches are the only thing tak­ing this down, basically.

Moral of the story… some­thing like don’t waste your money on a shiny new Mac.

# by Josh on August 8th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| 9 Comments »

Anti-Ubuntu-user quote

I stum­bled across this on the web today sometime.

Ubuntu is an African word mean­ing “I can’t con­fig­ure Debian”.

It’s funny coz its true :) I got a new (new for me, it’s a Geforce 3 that has VIVO ports) graph­ics card today and am hav­ing a not-fun time try­ing to get TV-out work­ing for tomor­row evening (!). Ah well. Mostly just coz I’m rather seri­ously capped right now, hav­ing done about 18GB last time I checked (it didn’t start shap­ing until prob­a­bly 18.5 or 19GB, so def­i­nitely happy this month!)

It must be coz I had exams and was home more, or something.

# by Josh on June 28th, 2006 Tags:
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In light of exams this week

I’ve decided it was finally time to upgrade to the lat­est ver­sion of Ubuntu. This is *usu­ally* both eas­ier and quicker than most Win­dows upgrades, but the poten­tial for insa­tiable time-wasting is cer­tainly there. I’m mostly engag­ing in this mon­u­men­tal act of stu­pid­ity because (I claim) it is too late to study (but never too late to engage in IT-related stu­pid­ity… unfor­tu­nately not alcohol-directed — read on) and because I’m dri­ving to Dave Rodger’s house in an hour and a half or so — that is how long it should take me to install this thing and get every­thing back to nor­mal  — to watch Aus­tralia play Brazil… and prob­a­bly lose along the way. Cer­tainly not what I’m hop­ing for, but… actu­ally, who am I kid­ding? If we get knocked out of the World Cup there’ll be no excuses to stay up to stu­pid times of the morn­ing any­more in weeks lead­ing into exams. Hmm… but if we play again it’ll prob­a­bly be after my exams are over. Dilemma. Bah! Aussie Aussie Aussie!

So… yes. Here ends the blog post. I’m off to break my computer.

# by Josh on June 18th, 2006 Tags: , , , , ,
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Grey-outs, brown-outs, black-outs… out.

I think my desktop-of-three-years is about to give up on me. The DVD drive appears to have stopped work­ing, and the other day my 40GB vol­ume unex­pect­edly pow­ered down and the com­puter soft-reset, with the drive not work­ing until I rebooted properly.

Then my com­puter appar­ently turned itself off a day or two later, and I was slightly con­cerned. Being a well-trained tech-monkey, the first thing I did was check power. I’d kicked it out… just.

It was actu­ally still in the power socket, and look­ing loose enough that it’d prob­a­bly been moved out over a period of sev­eral days. So it occured to me that maybe it was actu­ally so close I could have nudged it that day my hard-drive failed and caused a brown out… which isn’t actu­ally that implau­si­ble, if a tad improbable.

Per­haps it’s not just about to die. Per­haps that’s what actu­ally hap­pened… perhaps.

Mean­while, the com­puter is still per­fectly fast (and would be faster if I gut­ted and rein­stalled Ubuntu) if a lit­tle shy on stor­age space. 40GB is becom­ing increas­ingly cramped (even with an addi­tional 10GB drive ded­i­cated to OS + appli­ca­tions), and hard dri­ves are SO CHEAP these days. I’ll prob­a­bly save up for a bit to get a 250GB drive and a DVD burner, and a new graph­ics card whilst I’m doing the com­puter shop­ping thing (there’s a com­puter fair at UNSW in two weeks but it was pretty mea­gre last time I went…).

The graph­ics card thing is mostly just so I’ve got video-out and a DVI con­nec­tion. I’m sick of my LCD’s pic­ture flickering/distorting because of the cheap VGA cable I’m using! Ah well. Some­time… I can never be both­ered buy­ing com­puter stuff any­more (unless it’s on eBay ;-)).

# by Josh on May 20th, 2006 Tags: ,
| 11 Comments »

Broken rake

Great. So I try and do things all properly-like, using migrate scripts to make the data­base and stuff, and it goes and dies on me.

josh@whisper:~/public_html/XX/db/migrate$ rake migrate
(in /home/josh/public_html/XX)
rake aborted!
You have an error in your SQL syntax.  Check the manual that corresponds
to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near
'desc varchar(255)) ENGINE=InnoDB' at line 1:
CREATE TABLE courses (id int(11) DEFAULT NULL auto_increment
PRIMARY KEY, name varchar(255), desc varchar(255)) ENGINE=InnoDB
./Rakefile:200

Nyaaaah. I think it’s coz I’m using the only ver­sion of Ruby that the Rails team don’t recommend:

We rec­om­mend Ruby 1.8.4 for use with Rails. Ruby 1.8.2 is fine too, but ver­sion 1.8.3 is not.

Hah. Yeah, I’m using 1.8.3. It’s Ubuntu’s fault! That’s just what hap­pened to be sit­ting in stu­pid apt repos­i­to­ries. So now I need to add back­ports to an otherwise-clean com­puter. *shud­ders* Well, I guess the alter­na­tive is com­pil­ing and try­ing to stay on top of all that… *Josh is seen hur­riedly run­ning to add back­ports sources*

Well, maybe not tonight. *wan­ders off to post on τρανσλιτερατιον before sleeping*

# by Josh on March 14th, 2006 Tags: , ,
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