December 2007

Its come to me more than a few times watching my kidlets play games on their Playstations that there is a sociology of what I’m seeing.  Perhaps this comes from my years of doing social science and believing in its mantras; but these games offer a viewpoint of life with its myriad competition, cooperation, conflict, winning.  But losing… Losing is a problem.  None of the games teach how to lose.  It seems to me that before you can excel at winning you gotta know what it means to lose.  My son accuses me of asking the “hard questions” some of the time. For a 16–year old these are the “why” questions.  My take is that by the time you reach 16, you should at least know the questions.  We seem to be seeing that the sociollogy of the online means that the new youth can bypass the questions and just want the answers.  I’ve heard my son more than once just say “I don’t want the questions dad; just tell me the answers”.  I then tell him, “you have not earned the answers yet”.  He gets mad and stomps back off to the game looking at me with betrayed eyes.  What he really wants I think is a pass.  Give him the game pass so he can circle the board a few times, land only on the good squares, and not deal.

Perhaps its my fault and the sociology of the game does not go far with me.  I see the games as a fading set of egotistical one upmanship that instead of hoping to see a few life lessons being taught there is incessant fantasy that awashes them and keeps them steeped in why questions and answers that don’t really have a bearing on what they ask me about.

So what it is about the games, I wonder.  What is the hook with the PSP, the PS3, the games?  Is it only escape?  Its the sociology of learning only one edge of the cube.  You can see the bestest, easiest, most wondrous.  But you never have to ask the questions.  They’re all assumed.  So, my son, I’m sorry.  You have not earned the answers and if you just get the answers then the questions don’t mean anything.  You have to strive, reach, want.

Perhaps fail.  Failing is like losing.  You tend to get better at it as time goes by.  And its a thing we all need to learn.  Because winning is fine and good and everyone feels good at the end of the day when they win.  Losing and failing though is the common condition. 

The other wierd condition that I’ve felt more than a few times is that I simply don’t belong.  Not in this house, with this family.  I’m a Heinlein Stange in a land of Strangers.  Its strange and the games don’t deliver me.  Its a condition of growing older and watching my steps change. 

And in the end; that’s what this blog is good for.  I can write about NFS and ACPI and Linux.  But I also can pen the paper with words and thoughts and wonders and even frustrations which I wonder over and feel better getting out.

Well, Christmas has come and gone by us for another year.  This year  we did something truly different.  We pulled out all the stops and bought the kids what they wanted.  It cost us; but I think it was worth it.  Seeing their greedy little faces opening up the plunder was worth it.  Unfortunately, my son opened all the games first for a gaming platform he did not have (yet) and believed that we had knocked him down and turned him around by buying the games but not the hardware.  Whammo!  Kablam!

He opened the right box and his eyes lit right up.  Then he kinda disappeared in a gust of Yugioh card wrappers, PS3 game stuff, and a few pieces of clothing that he never even looked at.

So now, we are past those things and on to other things.  I ended up buying myself a new computer which was a cute little microATX board, case, memory, and a handy 3ware 2 port SATA RAID controller which just works on Linux.  This time I went to Debian Lenny instead of Ubuntu and just have finished up a chroot 32bit Debian Sid install in the make believe environment I created to run a few things.  Then you install a little package dchroot which lets you run the applications in the chroot dynamically.  Kewlness!  Now it has mplayer, w32codecs to play media, java, etc.  And I have an icon on my gnomeish desktop.

I think I also figured out a good bit of the problems with Gutsy suspending, hibernating, and resuming.  My problems seemed to be with bad suspends and then equally bad resumes.  But I also had this problem where the laptop locked itself down solid after some bit of time with the screen blank.  Enter the culprit /etc/acpi/screenblank.sh and its cousins.  Basically, gnome and the X screensaver cause problems for the Radeon driver.

I think I am on the bright and light side of the problems now happily and the laptop seems to operate at a level that even my wife can use it.  Whoopee!

So that ended my Christmas off but work continues in its flawlessly beautiful and wondrous state.  Thanks Visa, Inc.  I owe ya one or even more.  You have made me a true believer that I deserve to be happy at work too.  Given the last jobs at troubled startups caused me a share of pain and torture, being at a company which understands support, infrastructure management, and then hands off whole parts of big projects is welcome.

So, the new year beckons in some shape or other.  The other job possibility faded away with some degree of mutual indecision.  They did not really know what they wanted and could not define it.  I could not understand exactly their business model.  Its probably for the best for both of us.

Good morning to all and if you all have kids you know the drill…  Up before a certain time, excitement filling eyes.  If there is an inter-generational thing its parents going to bed late Christmas Eve finishing that last bit of preparation and then be awakened early.

I hope you all have the bestest of holidays and enjoy the warmth and cheer.  I tend to sink into a nameless oblivion after the kids and gifts and the little bit of cheer I partake of.  Last night it was a large can of Sapporo and chips.  I’ve been dieting now for 7 months and I’m within a few pounds of maintenance dieting.  Perhaps the best gift I gave myself is the diet and the health…

Have a great day and enjoy the family, the warmth, the happiness.

Its been rather light of late in the blogging here.  I’ve been more involved reading than writing and work has become more interesting by degrees.  I made a choice which I think is a wise one to stay where I’m at.  I was tempted to go in a different direction for awhile; but I really like Visa and the work I do there.  It helps to be given a major project which will see me through the rest of this year and until October of next.  The other offer was very challenging and I would have enjoyed it but a few things came long which made me re-consider.

I like the freedom of the job now.  The work freedom is excellent and I like how I touch technology these days but I don’t rush to the data center to reboot some misbehaving server like for a few years before.

Xmas this year was interesting too.  For one of the first times, we lets things go a bit for the kids.  They should be happy with what Santa did this year.  Its another year too just around the bend and I’ve given many things more thought than I ever thought I could.  I think that my present condition is a good one but I have questions about life in general and where I fit.  Perhaps that’s a necessity as one matures.

Anyways, a few things are gonna cool off next few days so I plan on writing a few blogposts around some interesting Ubuntu things and a really bad kernel upgrade if you mount NFS shares.  I also will be getting some new hardware here and there to go install Ubuntu on and I’m excited about that.  I may blog those things after I see how it goes.

I’ll be catching up some stuff tomorrow here and there so expect a post from me in a day or so.

Probably the newer generation does not remember him and even the news story only cites two commercial songs of his; but Dan Fogelberg was more. I grew listening to what I would term his “other music”. Music that lifted, moved, changed how I looked at things. Leader of the Band and “Same Auld Lang Syne” were the ones people tend to know. But his legacy before that was of a totally different type of music which carried social, technology, and other messages to us.

I’ll miss the beautiful soft voice, the messages of hope and despair. Some of the music made me think for some reason of “Into the Wild” and Eddie’s music. At one moment, it gives those “burrr bumps” of recognition but the voices are all together different.

Dan, you were more than most and I’ll liken you to another that was taken before his time; Harry Chapin. Everyone knows Harry for a few songs perhaps; but his legacy went beyond those to sets of songs that still bring me up or down. I cannot listen to some Chapin music to this day without becoming too emotional.

Its a shame of Dan’s passing that so many good people have been taken by a disease that does not know the difference. I’ve been touched by a friend’s departure and by people that only touched me at a distance. Dan’s website contains a memorial and news story.

Remember his music.

Yes its true.  My beloved and frustrating Treo 650 decided to do its final act and seized up solid.  Sprint Tech Support Could not revive it so I went for a new phone.  The Centro is pretty cool and it sync’s to Ubuntu Gutsy pretty easy.  At least easier than what I saw for Fedora 7.  All I had to do was insert the visor module into the running kernel and the phone sync’ed all its stuff to j-pilot and then installed a few things I had bought.

Its more of a consumerish phone but it ships with stuff that I wanted like an IM client, a version of VersaMail that appears to work, and more memory.  It comes with about 64mb which is good enough for what I use it for.

There are a few gotchas.  I don’t particularly like the phone message after a call ends but it only lasts for about 3 seconds or so.  The keyboard is smaller but I can text on it and write email.  My eyes are old so I reset the default fonts.

If this phone lasts 2 years, I will figure for 99.00 I got my $$ worth.  My Treo lasted that long but it cost about 5 times as much.

Man…

One of the things I always felt was lacking was a decent blogging client on Linux.  I tried a number of them including Scribefire and tonite decided to try on the latest codeweavers pro package and voila I got BlogJet working!  I even got the icon on my Xubuntu desktop.  I’m writing this blogpost in it now and I am so happy!!

There is a bit of strangeness selecting categories for blogs; but the editor and tools seem to work.  Lets see how it goes now.

I decided to delete the last rant about Ubuntu and its problems with suspend and most notably with resume.  Its not like its fixed or that I believe after reading a few posts that I could believe it actually works.  I have tried this supposed Howto to see how it goes.  I don’t think I can just run Windows these days.  There is something about it that’s well…

Inferior

At some level, it seems to just work but you really step down to a level of really not owning the solution (or even the problem; however, I think you really do own the problem but Microsoft wants to borrow it and then return it unfixed sometimes).  I do have to say the few times I’ve called any “tech support pit” that I’ve been less than thrilled.  I’ve implemented more than a few of them from the ground up and integrated services into them.  Its difficult.  There is a magical amount of reason, need, insanity, and alcoholic beverages required.

So, now I am trying yet another magical mix of ingredients including:

uswsusp - but not the uswsusp from Gutsy.  I’m using one with s2ram in it instead which is packaged by Debian Lenny.

acpi-support - this package has a bewildering array of scripts and event handlers that I’m not sure even the developer understand.  But, hey… They gotta know more about ACPI, right?

hal script hacking foo - I’ve hacked up the hal suspend and hibernate scripts a bit and removed all the guts and glory and only included calls to s2ram and s2disk for suspend and hibernate.  We’ll see where that goes.

/etc/default/acpi-support - I changed things in this file per the Howto.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf - I changed things here too per the Howto.

Now, the test is does it make a difference?  I’m inclined to bet it really doesn’t.  So I’ll probably go the kernel compiling route next.  I don’t really do kernels any more since I ran pure Debian.

The Gentoo non-way

Yes I tried the Gentoo way for fun and profit.  None of either.  Gnome will not compile, GTK wants the X11 included. Cairo is not happy either.  This distribution seems a lot of work to me and I’m lazy.  Everything on Gentoo takes “time”.  Time to do this and that.  I could get the later stage installer I guess; but that takes time too.  Perhaps in the end I would have a better thing.  I just get impatient.  I did compile a kernel on it though.  Woot!!

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Remember when you used to go roller skating as a kid?  I’m reading this book called Bridge of Sighs by Russo which made me think of a whole bunch of stuff growing up.  Its one of those tender, warm, yet somehow disturbing works that gives you a glimpse into a generation of people and families.  I started reading it thinking that I’d just put it down after a few pages.  But the characters and their stories and the boy becoming a man grabbed onto me.  Now the late evenings and early mornings are filled with the story of Lucy and Noonan and the families and the connections. 

Perhaps reading at its best is meant to make you wander a path.  I’ve seen movies recently like Into the Wild which have done that and now this book makes me remember a dim past event.  Way back when, I used to go rollerskating every Friday and Saturday night.  In the stone-age past of my youth, it was a place that was almost acceptable by the adults; but us kids knew that young women went there.  When the lights dimmed and the wheel of light came on, everyone would skate and touch and feel and feel the shattered pieces of puberty alight in their lower regions.  Pants got wet, people felt liberated, and the worries of the other lives never dawned on us.  But the most amazing part was the social distancing I had not remembered until reading the book and Russo’s characterization of life separated by stress, wealth, property, desire.  There at the roller rink, there was an invisible line drawn down the middle almost.  The line represented the same division of wealth and status but also it separated a social class from another.  But as the lights went down, we all mixed.  First it was rather slowly and hesitantly.  Kids want to meet, get to know, see what other kids feel and do; but to break the barriers that perhaps the adults in their well-meaning yet shattered worlds cast on us is difficult.  Perhaps impossible?

Well, not really.  The roller rink then was a destiny agent and I remember friendships were struck and renewed.  There was the fight every so often as a boundary line crossed over but they were rare events.  Most of the time was spent investigating our youth, our urges, our desires.  The few adults were too busy trying to police up the rink to watch us all.  And we were too inexperienced, tender, wanting more to understand that the human body is a complex thing and that we were just beginning to understand its needs.

This roller rink was also a life station and a place that I remember now with fondness.  Most likely its gone as most of the places there from my youth.  Those places disappeared to make way for convenience stores, bookshops, and strip malls.  Those are the new stations of life; but too often the malls are places not of life unfortunately.  Somehow we’ve changed out that innocent skate down a hardly lit wooden floor for guns blazing in malls.

What’s happened to us?  Perhaps none of us remember the roller rinks of our youth; what we did and wanted to do there.  I want to go back to it, to its place and see if it still exists.  But in sadness, I know.  It would never be the same.  Nothing ever is.  You simply cannot ever go back even in movies with Michael J. Fox.  The dichotomy and paradox of the space and time continuum is demanding yet patently false as Edward Abbey once noticed about reality.    So perhaps one day I’ll wander back to the Antelope Valley as a visitor and look up the place on division street it lived.  Yes…

Just like in Sighs.  It was division street.  It not only divided east and west but it also marked the joining of both. 

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It seems we have a plethora of power management tools; yet judging by the Ubuntuforums, none of them seem to really do what we all want. By default one gets acpi-support, gnome-power-manager, acpid. All of these live in some unholy trinity on a laptop I would gather. Yet it seems that Gutsy has problems with most portable systems with waking up. Not suspending. Suspending here works really good. My T40 and T43 suspend each and every time. Its the waking up part.

So, I am always interested in finding new things. Enter this debian package called pm-utils. Of course, I have to give it a go. With this package, you depend on HAL to do the right thing and I gather that g-p-m and acpi don’t really like each other too much either. So, I removed acpi-support with all those strange scripts and decided to give it a go. So far, the suspends and wakeups seem okay but the laptop does not wake up when the lid is re-opened. You have to plonk the power button. I bet I can write a hook or something to make it do that.

But here is the thing in a nutshell… Power management has just got to work on portable systems. People want to use Linux on laptops. Its nice on laptops overall; but this whole thing about acpi, suspending, resuming, hibernating, and then troubleshooting things is a bit much.

I’m gonna give pm-utils a try and also figure out what it does with lid suspends and opens. Perhaps a simple little scriptlet or hook will take care of it. If not, I’m sure that another package will make its way out or I’ll just live with a solution which works some percentage of the time.

Other News Fit to Blog…

I just noticed that Technorati got a facelift. I think I’ve ventured beyond what it provides or perhaps I’ve simplified. When I first look at it, it seems that the “blog monster” has been released and there is a glut of information on the pages and it seems dressed up in windows and borders and pretty things. My question is more basic. Is it still relevant? Do we need enterprising startup services and institutions around blogging? Is blogging a social institution comprised of millions and millions of “hubs” of editing in some strange order?

Sociology would say that our institutions arise to meet needs. But why? Why do they? What is it about blogging that we believe needs an institution? My take is that blogging extends and enhances and unpacks my terribly cluttered mind sometimes. Facts, lies, half truths, even some evil can come out. But are we held to a higher order? I doubt it. I also don’t really know anymore what Technorati’s core value is. The site is confusing and I don’t get what its trying to tell me. But, I have to give full disclosure. I am a terrible judge of websites for the most part. I don’t know what works and why with a website. My judgements are on whether it does some to me or for me. Unfortunately, technorati does neither. I think perhaps they should take the word of the bard and “simplify”. Make it easier to find the information and remove the clutter.

In the end I’d ask what its core value is and what it intends on delivering. What are bloggers wanting their service providers to do these days? Search and report? Not sure. I don’t write for those reasons. I gave up the idea of getting reasonable links to and from awhile ago. I figure if someone types in a URL the wrong way and ends up here, they may read yet another blog ™ and then travel on. There are better bloggers to read out there like Doc and others. I’m just a weed that kicks up in the wind or a piece of flotsam that may travel a literary tidal pool. But I ain’t in search of readership or linkership. Not anymore. Its the mere act of doing it.

Its also why I could never maintain multiple weblogs each with its own little cast of characters; yet I applaud those like Dan York that seem able to. I have enough silliness and pedantry for just one and sometimes this one suffers and I can feel it boiling it up inside me. Then it comes doodling out with chicken scratches on virtual papers. I say congrats to Dan because he is prolific and can maintain it. To Technorati, I say sorry. I know you are trying to tell me something; but I don’t know what it is any longer. Perhaps its my fault.

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