Marginalia

My wife passed on a link to booklamp, which had the side effect of introducing me to pandora.com. I can only say… wow. Still a lot of great new music out there, if you don’t have to listen to commercial radio to get to it. Last night I was blown away by Blues From Down Here (Live), and this afternoon by Cold Irons Bound. OK, not exactly new, but new to me… I’d stopped tracking Dylan long ago…

Pandora’s explanations for why it is playing a particular tune aren’t very useful, though.

So, I’ve somehow slipped into the following horrendous cycle:

1. Get a cold
2. Have it turn into something that leaves me horribly congested (trip to the doctor #1)
3. Suffer for about a week of this, gasping my way through the night (in a humidified room if necessary). Cue sore throat from post-nasal drip as well.
4. Have it sink into my lungs; cough my way through the night and get no sleep. Get laryngitis as well.
5. Return to the doctor for powerful drugs that still the coughing (even codeine-based cough medicine doesn’t seem to touch it); gradually recover.

It’s a great diet plan (I think I’ve eaten about two meals in the whole period), but otherwise lacks appeal.

Enough of this. The doctor thinks it may be allergies creating the post-nasal drip that spreads the cold, so I’m on something for that now. But my new year’s resolution is definitively to stop getting sick from chest colds.

Of course, the 7950 that I bought to run Linux burned out. I gave up, put the old card in, and gave it to my daughter.

I built a few new boxes: one to run Vista (and play games) and one to run Ubuntu 7.10. Just finished the Linux box, the core of which is:

• GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L motherboard
• Q6600 quad-core
• SEASONIC|SS-550HT 550W
• LIAN-LI|PC-A05B
• Gigabyte GeForce 7300 GT (fanless)
• G. Skill F2-6400CL5D-2GBNQ memory (2 sticks, 1 gb apiece)

plus assorted sata drives, etc. So far, this combination works very well, and the video card is just powerful enough to drive my Dell 2407WFP (using the restricted nVidia driver) in its full 1920×1200 glory. For reasons unknown to me, Ubuntu reports it as running at 50 Hz vertical refresh, but the monitor itself reports 60 Hz (the norm), so I think all is well. Sound works fine (although the Alsa mixer’s levels start out at zero for some reason).

Glitches:

• The Ubuntu install disk won’t respond to usb keyboards. That’s widely reported, so I expected it, and the GA-P35-DS3L can use a PS/2 keyboard.
• My Epson Perfection V100 scanner doesn’t as yet work with Sane. I’ve tried recompiling from source (after installing a number of packages), but there is a problem with the symbol definitions. I’d use the RPM’s (converting them to debian packages with alien) except they can’t handle the x86_64 architecture. I suspect the compilation problems are related but will persevere.

Not really a glitch, but the case is a bit oddly configured and has questionable cooling. If I were running this as a gaming box I’d be worried, but I think it will be OK for a desktop linux box.

I’ll be adding another 2 gb now that I’m certain the G. Skill works (I had some lying around from another project). Overall I’m happy to make this my main desktop. I’ll stick the Vista box in the game room where it belongs.

I spent yesterday trying to work around a nasty black screen bug in Ubuntu. Install Feisty Fawn, reboot, see screen go black. Try text-mode install… same problem. Try command line install. That works, but as soon as I install the X pieces, the black screen returns. Aaaargh. I’ve tried numerous xorg.conf hacks, including the VESA driver. No go. I’ve tried various boot flags. Nope. Many hours later, I still don’t have a good solution (other than buying another video card). Thought, hmm, maybe I should buy a Mac. Went and looked at prices on the Mac Pro desktop, and thought “maybe not”.

It triggered all my memories of similar agonies with Linux. After 12 years of struggling, on and off, I’m more than a little tired of the hardware incompatibility dance. It really isn’t the Linux maintainer’s fault, but… A large part of the problem is my desire to dual boot, and my incessant desire to have a latest/greatest system that can play Windows games. Games-capable systems and Linux just don’t go together.

Postscript: Bought an NVidia 7950GT (about the fastest you can get for an older AGP motherboard)… and Ubuntu works flawlessly.

I spent a few hours playing with Python imaging this afternoon. For old times’ sake, I implemented Hopalong.

The emacs Python mode was helpful. I used the version that works in 21.

Stephen Ramsay has been writing about beautiful code.

I liked this a lot. I think it is hard to define what makes things beautiful; part of it is the cleverness of the idea, and part is the grace with which it is executed. Here’s a definition of “graceful” that fits what I have in mind:

characterized by beauty of movement, style, form, or execution

In that sense, I think grace usually implies a certain economy as well. It’s hard for verbose code to appear graceful, even if it is well-written. I suspect this points to the importance of clarity in beauty. The Haskell version of Quicksort (or 99 bottles of beer) is beautiful because it is so succinct, and reflects the algorithm so directly.

Folks are finally rebelling a bit against 37 signals: 37signals: Our way or the highway.

I’ll concede a certain amount of guilty pleasure. DHH irritates me. But it doesn’t really mean anything. They weren’t prophets yesterday and they aren’t idiots today. Most blogs have a tendency toward hyperbole.

I was inspired by Stephen Ramsay’s piece and installed Chicken Scheme last night. I haven’t played with C/C++ on my Windows box in a year or so, so I had to build the whole environment. Here are the steps:

1. Install Mingw and supporting pieces: specifically, after reading the Getting Started documentation,
   1. install MinGW-3.1.0-1.exe
   2. install MSYS-1.0.10.exe
   3. install msysDTK-1.0.1.exe
2. Then go install CMake, specifically cmake-2.4.6-win32-x86.exe
3. Then you have to download and build Chicken Scheme
   1. Download chicken-2.6.zip and unzip it to a temporary directory
   2. Read the INSTALL-CMake.txt file that is included and follow the instructions. You should end up with a working Chicken Scheme installation… it really was amazingly clean. Don’t forget to add Chicken Scheme to your path.
4. Then try it out — Scheme compiling to exes.

Very cool.

Today’s my last day as Education Manager at UT, and my last day as a member of ITS. I’ve been here a long, long time. I’m not leaving UT, but I am leaving ITS, after more than a decade of serving ITS and its forebears. It’s a funny feeling, part happy, part sad, part hopeful, part nostalgic.

Being Education Manager is a unique role — we hire prospects and turn them into programmers, over the course of a six month training program. It’s a hard job, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to serve in that role. It was an illuminating experience.

Luke Plant wrote a thought-provoking piece: Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer. Reminded me of learning Lisp. Ah, well.