Mindstab.net

I’m growing increasingly distressed with Ubuntu. I cannot get video to work with firefox. Even going way out of my way to use super unsupported apt repositories I’m getting dependency errors. And this stuff is super unsupported. Gentoo’s portage had a whole lot of stuff in it, and it was all technically supported. I’ve been seriously thinking about switching back. Except Gnome 2.10 is still hardmasked and things like evince are not in portage at all. So it seems like I want too much. I know so much good stuff is out there and am burning to have it already. And I’m frustrated that I don’t. I have also considered Linux From Scratch, but thats not really the answer. It really bothers me that gstreamer seems unusable in Ubuntu. That xcompmgr has outstanding issues. That integration is just not that great. And Gnome, come on, not being able to edit menus. Disappointing year. I was really expecting 2005 to be the year desktop Linux took off, but now I know it’s totally not. It’ll be just another year it gets better… Hopefully.

I’m starting to feel the way I did about Enlightenment 0.17. There is wicked cool stuff in that, but it’s just not materializing in a usable form. We’ve had composite in X.Org for about a year now, and lately I’ve seen super killer things in dev blogs, like totally GL accelerated x servers with incredible effects. And here I am, one year after composite hit XOrg and I’m still using an xserver that isn’t even double buffered. I’m still seeing tearing. GTK is getting a cario backend. Correction, has a cairo backend. But again, when will we, the users, get to see it? This is all really shitty.

I really hope Gnome shapes up for 2.12 and Ubuntu shapes up for 5.10. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with myself till then.

The last day of classes was yesterday. It’s nice to have those all done with. Just finals looming in the next two weeks remain. Then a short break and summer school. But it’s a light load, chemistry and psyc.

So last night I installed Ubuntu’s new release (5.04: Hoary) on my desktop. Was not really impressed. Doesn’t really seem to have any benefits over the last release. I was expecting, for instance, XOrg to work well and have composite working, as I did like 9 months ago on Gentoo, but alas it was all disabled by default, and even when I ran xcompmgr from the console, the desktop was initially covered in video garbage, and though it worked decently, it had show stopping issues like the logout dialog would never appear. Not very polished at all. Gstreamer still fails to even be able to handle dvds, so I’m still stuck with good old reliable xine. It also had wierd audio lag and played videos in a rather jerky fashion. Gnome has upgraded to a new menu spec. Fine, so who cares. Well, menu’s have now regressed to a non editable state. It’s 2005 and I can’t even edit my menu. Also, no head way has been made on the pick a default sound card front. I spent an hour online trying to figure out how to make Ubuntu not use the motherboard’s soundcard as default. I finally went with a hack method of putting the soundblaster module in /etc/modules so it was loaded first when the computer starts. Not very smooth or intuitive for anyone who doesn’t know a bunch about Linux already. Not very noob friendly. Had a hassle getting the right kernel source or header package so that I could compile my webcam’s driver. And once that was done, only gqcam seemed to be able to use it. Gnomemeeting seemed unable to get video from my webcam. Evolution has some new “feature” where the toolbar sits at the top of the screen glued to the panel’s bottom. Really annoying and I couldn’t figure out how to place it back in the main window so I had to turn it off entirely.

That’s mostly it for now, but I was kind of hoping for something a little more polished so I could push this on a bunch of my windows using friends, but this was still decently issue-tastic and still not using a lot of the cool features it could be (composite). I might wait and see how the 05.10 release looks. At least will should run better since a bunch of the GNOME dev’s are on a memory reducing quest. Hopefully over the next few months they’ll also make menu’s editable again, and Ubuntu will sort it self out.

I’m kind of disappointed in this release but I guess that’s what I get for getting my hopes up. I know there is a lot of cool tech and code out there and I wish it was more accesible to non developers. In summery, getting media to a usable state (from configureing video card to finding something to play everything) is still a bitch. Everything else could use a little more polish too.

I’ve been thinknig about it a little now on and off for about half a year. We have billions of command line text editors, but no command line spread sheet packages. I sort of passed it off as a crazy idea, but then I saw this:

Quatro Pro running under dos box care of planet KDE thanks to the april fools planet gnome and planet kde reverse.

And it reminded me of the good old days of dos. There totally were command line spread sheet packages. Now I really either want to find one for linux, or try my hand at writing a simple one. Spread sheets are handy, and if I could ssh to my home box and work on them as well as all text and code, it’d be that much cooler.

Well, I decided I really want to go ahead with mpm peruser (child of mpm child and sibling(/child?) of mpm mutex) for security reasons, and so I created a second instance of apache that users mpm prefork to handle ssl all by itself. This will work for the interum I think.

Now I’m starting to learn about wordpress theme hacking. I suspect I’ll be setting up several instances of it in the not so distant future so had I better be good at customizing it soon.

Then onto probably wordpress plugin hacking so I can make one big wordpress/gallery site for myself. Unless I need something else for code holding. Haven’t decided quite yet.

As for projects I’m thinking about working on:

• VM 2: The remake
  A new ideally better and faster version of my first toy VM I wrote last fall.
• Shitty physics toys:
  I want to grab some simple equipment and putter about with it, insipered by my physics class. Ideally I ‘d like to build some kind of solinoid magnetic accelerator thingy ala a tiny railgun
• Presence stuff:
  Carrying part of your online presense on a usb stick and having a central online site with the rest of it. Thebon might be interested in this for his ‘learn everything you didn’t want to know about me’ project. ;)
• Verious wordpress related things:
  A proper working spell check plugin for instance ;). Also, look at LJ interoperability. Those are two biggies. Also, investigate wheather wordpress is suitable for hosting other non new content via it’s pages like hosting pagelets on various projects I’m running + code, or for SpaZ, hosting music.
• Hacking on Tomboy:
  I want to see if I can add html export to Tomboy, because it would be cool.

Well, the hosting side of this operation seems to be taking form. biz.mindstab.net is up and running. I may have borrowed a few pieces… But yeah. Go forth and purchase web space! From me…

I’m really pleased with how well the site turned out. It’s coded in sweet and simple xhtml 1.0 strict. And CSS. 100% valid all of it. It rocks. And I was pleasantly surprised that I only had to make one fix when porting it to IE from Firebox. Apparently in IE things like unordered lists and ordered lists can’t have margins. Who knows why not. Didn’t matter. I just moved the margin to the list items them selves, and volia. Perfect site in Firefox and IE. Yeah for standards that keep it simple and yet flexible. I find there’s something quite alluring about nice crisp looking simplicity in a site.

Also, I created the image myself. It’s mix of the results from google image searching for water and neurons. Apply a few Gimp filters, and volia, a logo. I think it adds a nice splash of color to the page. :)

Welcome to the new mindstab.net. It’s got a long ways to go, but I’m starting to get dug in. The server is up and preforming well. I still have some issues to work out, but I can now start focusing more of my attention on developing for the web, rather than configuring servers. I’m reasonably impressed with wordpress, so here is my wordpress blog. It also seems decently extensible so I might just end up writing a plugin or two for it as time goes on.