Month: July 2008

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I don’t mean to be disparaging, but…

…then again, yes I do.

The latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, pseudo-hippy, tie-dyed, tree-hugging, clove-smoking vegetarian/vegan/macrobiotic, effete faux-intellectual, crybaby surrender monkey, “gimme, gimme,” anarcho-tyrannist, multi-culti dumbasses that make up the voters willing to support The Obamassiahs, Reids, and Pelosis of our country have convinced me that they are so stupid and ignorant that they couldn’t find their own @$$3$ with a mirror on a stick after having the location clearly defined with GPS and approach radar, while being talked through a “landing” by someone competent to find their own with no problem at all.

And that’s on their good day. (No, not “good days“) Assuming any of them ever have one.

But those idiots are not the ones that bring me almost to despair. No, that honor is reserved for the folks on the other side of the Uniparty invisible aisle who believe that Juan (“I wanna be a lapdog to a Mexican president too!”) Mexicain and his ilk are in any way, shape, fashion or form “conservatives”. *sigh*

Time to play Taps for America? Not quite yet; the Uniparty (fully enabled on by the vast mass of stupid and ignorant American voters) just hasn’t gotten around to finally pulling the plug yet.

(Please, don’t even mention the Libertarian Party as an alternative. Just saying: don’t go there. *sigh*)

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More Ubuntu 8.04/Linux/WINE Joys

Not. *sigh*

After (immediately after) a recent “update” of WINE, the primary reason I have for using WINE at all–running Encore (a Windows music transcription program that utterly and completely blows away any and all native Linux offerings) in Linux–has disappeared. Yep. Encore refuses to even run at all after the update. Loads and dies, that’s it.

*sigh* As soon as I have a few mins to think on this and do some poking around, I may (may) be able to either discover what’s going on… or downgrade to an earlier, working, version of WINE. (Yeh, yeh: bug report at WINHQ–eventually)

Oh. Joy.

Not.

(OTOH, everything else is working fine, after a weekend of ALL sound simply disappearing in Ubuntu–well after the issue with WINE/Encore had cropped up. Finally decided to simply try the ole Windows standby of simply rebooting and sound’s back, which is nice given my new lil [upscale from the ones they now churn out for Dell, but not high end] Altec Lansing speakers. And yeh, I know Altec-Lansing isn’t what it was back in the 70s when some old–even then–A7s introduced me to the company.)

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News, Schmews

I’ve continued my avoidance of Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind propaganda during The Obamassiah’s “I Wanna Be President of the World” tour, but I have taken time a couple of days to turn the sound on and CLICK through channels that carry Mass Media Podpeople Hivemin d propaganda. Funny how much more I saw The Obamassiah’s face than Juan MExicain’s face. And I don’t recall even once seeing Bob Barr’s face, as I flipped through the soundless propaganda channels (Not that Bob Barr’s face is that much more interesting than the other two politicians’ *spit* faces).

Just a micro-mini-data set.

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Don’t Even Think About It…

Reason could be seriously life-threatening. No, seriously. After all, some folks want to charge reasonable people with the “crime” of “global warming denial” don’t they? How far away can we really be from a new Inquisition by The Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming? Auto da fé, anyone? (Even if the Boston Glob has so far avoided viewing such as reasonable, The Goracle seems to be in line with the UNthinking on punishing opponents of his global warming scam.)

“Don’t you realize how badly you can damage a perfectly good preconception or assumption if you insist on thinking about it… “

Please! Whatever you do, do NOT let politicians *spit*, Mass Media Podpeople, Academia Nut Fruitcakes, members of The Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming or any other of that grab bag of babbling ninnes catch you thinking! Why! They’ll make Harrison Bergeron look like a lucky, lucky young man indeed when they’ve finished with you!

*sigh*

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“Enormously Smaller”

I read the expression that makes up this post’s title in a snippet of dialog recently and it struck me that an apparent oxymoron (there’s another word for this specific kind of construction that slips my mind right now–any reminders?) can sometimes contain much, much more than a kernel of truth, often more easily than more accurate but also more cumbersome expressions might do. “Enormously smaller” is a silly expression on its face, but coupled with only minimal imagination is much more expressive (and more easily said) than “smaller by several orders of magnitude,” which does make more sense, but has much less emotional appeal, less punch.

One of the applications of “enormously smaller” that springs to mind is the “emormously smaller” intellects and moral fiber of those who eagerly lap up the poisons spewed out by faux liberals on both sides of the largely nonexistant political (non)divide between Dhimmicraps and Repugnican’ts such as Juan Mexicain and The Obamassiah. (The only real differences between Juan Mexicain and The Obamassiah I can see are very slight differences in the speed at which their affirmed positions would drive this country to ruin. Slight differences with no substantial wedge between Devil #1 and Devil #2. Vote for the Uniparty! *sigh*)

Of course, Juan Mexicain and The Obamassiah are only representative examples of their respective portions of The Uniparty, nowadays. “Fringe” elements who might actually believe the Constitution–no, not what some politicians *spit* or guys playing “Illuminatti Keno” in black robes say is the Constitution: the real thing–still has some real validity are just that: fringers.

*sigh*

No, it really does take people with “enormously smaller” (or “hugely tiny” *heh*) mental abilities and/or moral faculties to embrace the destrution of the republic simply because the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind tells them to.

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VMs Under Ubuntu 8.04

After several weeks of trying out different distros of Linux (heck, different “flavored” distros of Ubuntu 8.04, for that matter) and four different OSes under two three different virtual machine schemas, here’s a waypoint.

Settled on plain vanilla Ubuntu 8.04 as my OS on this machine.*

Under all of the Linux distros, Virtualbox provided the slickest, easiest install and the best implementation of some things (sound) and spotty implementation of others (USB). Does NOT allow 64-bit client machines on a 64-bit host. That killed it for me.

VMWare Player? So-so ease of installation (some command line stuff but notaproblem). Extremely kludgy getting network functionality on clients. Way too many hoops to jump through and flaky networking when it did work. DOA.

VMWare Server. Ahhh. Screwed up, overly-complex installation procedure, but aside from some peripherals and such, almost all essentials work in client machines, certainly enough for almost all my needs in the various Windows client machines (for some of the remote computing tools suitable for some clients, for example, a Windows XP/2000/98 VM session works “good enough”). “Good enough” is good enough for now. Works fine testing new-to-me or upgraded Windows programs, Windows updates sees no difference to ordinary Windows machines, etc. It just (mostly–still would like sound) works. Do note that each of the VMs is allocated no more than 256MiB memory and all seem to run a lot snappier than any similarly-configured Windows system. Nice. Heck, I wouldn’t even attempt to install a typical WinXP (32) on a real machine with only 256MiB of RAM.

[Update–for whoever cares. *heh* I had a Q via email. No, I haven’t yet tried out Xen. Gimme some time, ‘K? And next time, feel free to use the comments section here to ask. 🙂 ]

Note: “[T]esting new-to-me or upgraded Windows programs… ” Tried out the updated a-squared anti-malware in a fully-licensed, full-featured installation in a WinXPP 64-bit VM and… if you’re one of the folks I sent a “here’s a freebie” email to, you might want to toss that freebie in the Recycle Bin. Crashes the VM every time it scans. Methinks it needs a bit of work before being ready for prime time. (Of course, it may also have something to do with the fact that the a-squared product is a 32-bit app, and M$’s WoW implementation of 32-bit apps in XP64 isn’t absolutely perfect, so it may still be fine for 32-bit Windows. I guess I’ll try it one another installation as well, then.)

Other freebies like this one (a nice standalone defragger) and this one (for CD Burning) have seemed to be fine, causing no problems and working well.

N.B. The CD-burning program, CDBurnerXP, requires the .NET framework be installed. No biggie. If you don’t already have it installed, the program will lead you through getting it when you invoke its installation routine.

For those of y’all running 64-bit OSes, I continue to like Opera browser. The 64-bit Internet Expploder 7 is really no improvement over IE7 32-bit; Forefox has too many extensions and plugins that aren’t 64-bit compatible to be competitive with Opera, either, IMO.

Of course, any more, since the primary face of any OS for me is the Web Browser (with email client a close second), having a stable, secure, capable browser that looks and acts the same (and has the same plugin/extension/widget behavior) in all OSes is a big plus for me. Hmmm… wonder what it’d take to install Mac OSX in a virtual machine? Never really thought about it since I don’t have an installation DVD for it sitting around and the thought of shelling out some $$ just to buy a copy and try to find out doesn’t appeal to me much. *heh*

Next? Need to see about installing a BSD in a VM. Just some more fun, cos I know NO ONE who’d need any help with something like PCBSD, the thing is so easy to install/use.

Time to stop rambling on? Mayb…

*“this machine”=AMD 2X64 5200+, 4GiB RAM, 400GiB primary hard drive, etc.

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Voodoo “Science”

One of the problems that the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming (and its newly christened scientifictional dogma of anthropogenic global changism) keeps on running into time and again is that its predictions always fail. Always. What the “chuch” seems to have forgotten is some basic principles of experimental demonstration of theories, specifically,

‘The best scale for an experiment is ten millimeters to the centimeter!’

*heh*

Instead, the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming tends to rely on pretty pictures and graphs generated by whoo-whoo computer models that defy common protocols of scientific practice, common sense and simple honesty.

No wonder its predictions, like other wackos who have been foretelling doom since the founding of the human race, have been crackers from the start.

(Now sitting in my office “enjoying” the first truly seasonal temperatures of the year–s’all right. I’m quite comfy with simply an old AS400 cooling fan turned on me. 🙂 It’s 86 degrees Fahrenheit outside, right now–that’s 30 degrees Celsius for you Europeans out there–just a wee tad milder than the third week in July usually is in these parts. Simply reflects a major global cooling trend that’s been happening for the past eighteen months. “Global warming” my hinky &^%$ @$$.)

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Who Needs Mass Media Podpeople?

Question: Who needs television “news” programs, major newspapers and the like?

Answer: politicians *spit* and any other class of people seeking to control the thinking of sheeple.

Recently (h.t. LGF) I ran across a Pew Research online poll that was dipping a toe into the ignorance of online folks. It had one seriously malformed question I debated my answer to for some time (I chose to answer what it seemed to be implying and missed that one), but in general seemed to be a reasonably well-designed instrument to give a snapshot of current events awareness.

Yes, I missed the one question. I knew both answers to it *heh* but chose the narrower one. Still, my 91st percentile ranking might have told the Pew Research folks something had they asked a couple f qualifying questions the survey did not: “What major news publications do you read?” (None) “What news programs/channels do you watch?” (None)

Yep. 91st percentile–even with the one malformed question–and I do not watch network (any network) news nor do I read any major news outlet’s regurgitation of the latest views of the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind.

Heck, I avoid all but the weather on the local joke “news” programs, and I mostly avoid even that with a weather widget that has up-to-date weather info for my locale. (I do scan the local weekly rag about twice monthly. It’s not quite as bad as my all time fav lowbrow read–a rag called “The Weekly Eagle” but referred to by most of its readers as “The Weekly Buzzard”–but it’s close. I enjoy circling all the grammatical, spelling and usage errors. Red pencils get use up quickly when I read the thing, so I try to limit myself to every other week. *heh*)

So, at least in my case, exposure to no news programs, no major news outlets of any kind, results in me being better-informed than 91% of respondents.

Maybe that says something about the quality of Mass Media Podpeople “news” as well as about the electorate–or at least the online portion of the electorate interested in news, polls, etc.–you think?

Mmmmmm, could be…

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Creeping Down Memory Web…

I was a johnnie-come-lately to the internet, back in the day. Sure, by 1993 I had an email account with MCI, online accounts with account with Delphi, Compuserve and another with AOL (where I spent most of my AOL time in the “no minutes charged” MHM forum *heh*), and I’d enjoyed participating in several BBS, notably as a lurker on the Percussion BBS maintained by the Percussive Arts Society (the ACDA didn’t have a BBS as far as I knew in those days or I’d have been “on” it quite a bit as well).

But then 1993 hit and Mosaic and Cello opened up a world beyond internet searches with ARCHIE and VERONICA searches for academic articles, etc. My addiction to the web was born.

Once I was able to ditch my various online services for one ISP, I was in hog heaven.

Fifteen years after that latecomer’s training wheels intro to more than simple article searches using the powerful but now anachronistic Archie and Veronica and the gang, the addiction’s just as powerful if not mre so.

Now, in these days of $4/gallon gasoline, what would I (want to–*heh*) do without VNC (and other solutions for less technically savvy folks) allowing me access to remote clients’ computers? Heck, more basic, what would I do w/o my VOIP phone? My monthly phone bill would climb back into the $500 range again, and I’d have to cut waaay back on beer, books and blondes. (OK, not the blondes. My Wonder Woman’s all the “blondes” I need or can cope with, for that matter. I just needed another “b” for the alliteration. :-))

The internet. God bless us every one. And protect us from politicians. Amen.

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Oh. Joy. *sigh*

Another silly puzzle that’s remotely Ubuntu-related: Sound in WinXP under VMWare Server.

So, all’s mostly well in Ubuntu 8.04. Graphics stable and as I want them. Check.

Sound. Check. (some rare niggling, inconsistent midi issues but not bad)

Video/play DVDs/CDs. Check.

All USB drives, peripherals, SD cards, etc., fully accessible, no problems. Check.

Flash player in browsers. Half a check. Have sound but not video. Weird. I’ll track it down eventually, but meanwhile YouTube and other vids play fine when downloaded (using a small python script) as flv files. [Seems the fix was locating and installing the not-well-advertised (as in “not at all”) Flash 10 Beta2 for Linux. Works like a charm now.]

Apps installed and working. Semi-check. Everything’s fine except for sound in Windows XP Pro64-bit running under VMWare Server 1.06 and two niggling problems remaining with Encore 4.2.1 running in Ubuntu under WINE.

The no sound in WinXP I can live with, more or less, until I can find a fix. It’s just an annoyance. The problems in Encore may drive me to set up a Windows-only machine just for Encore use. *sigh* Midi keyboard input for score transcription is almost as bad as the bad old days with early Finale score input, you know: “Play score, wait for note to show up. Go make a pot of coffee and a coffee cake. Call up friends to come over and help drink the coffee and eat the cake. Build ark. Load animals two-by-two. Go back and wait for notes played to show on score… ”

OK, not even the early versions of Finale running on a 286 were quite that bad, but sometimes it sure seemed like it. *heh* Encore, OTOH, has always–even in its early years, seemed much more responsive and fast. I may try a midi-to-USB cable and see if that helps.

The second Encore issue is more troubling. Sometimes files do not save. At all. Sometimes Encore tells me the file didn’t save but it did. Sometimes the files thus saved work when reopened and sometimes not.

Just sometimes. Not all the time. Can’t seem to duplicate a failure at will.

Strange. Thought at first of checking file/folder permissions. Nope. No common issue there. Cogitating on this one for a while…

But WinXP Pro running on just one CPU under VMWare Server? Muuuuch more responsive than under VirtualBox or VMWare Player. Very nice, even for WinXP. Even with only 256MiB of memory allocated for its use–an ammount I’d never recommend for normal XP machines. Of course, full screen mode sucks dead bunnies through a straw. Corrupted my nVidia driver and forced a reinstall of the nVidia driver. That’ll teach me. Did. Now I run XP in a lil 800X600 box inside my normal 1024X768 resolution. Still large enough to do good work on this 19″ screen. In fact, it’s what I’m using to write this post.