I added a new category, –verbose, which will cover unexpected bits of communication between my system and me.

While configuring gstreamer v.0.8.9, it told me the following:

configure: WARNING: Sissy ! By asking to not build the tests known to fail, you hereby waive your right to customer support. If you do not agree with this EULA, please press Ctrl-C before the next line is printed. By allowing the next line to be printed, you expressly acknowledge your acceptance of this EULA.

Yeah, right. You expect me to keep track of ./configure’s output while it takes place and then abort it? Nice try. This is no 8086 running here. Btw, I never cared much about EULAs. Did anyone, anytime, anywhere? Now this is how it looks if developers want to sneak away from the responsibility to support their product.. calling me a sissy

One of the things that gives me the creeps every now and then is audio-output on a linux-system, that is, at least on my system. Seems that I’m not alone with this. Eugenia from osnews.com posted a rant to the alsa-devel mailinglist some time ago and she surely had some valid points. Anyhow, I don’t want to complain, what’s following is just my own perception; your mileage may vary.

It’s not like basic audio output itself, no matter if using OSS (anyone still using it with a current kernel? OK, who cares about it beeing depriciated.. ) or ALSA, is difficult to set-up. It’s the “exotic”(!?) stuff you never thought about when using other operating systems. Maybe other distributions provide solutions that work out-of-the-box but getting multiple applications to output to a non-h/w-mixing capable sounddevice can be a real pain on the local Debian installation. And before some smart person comes up with it: no, there’s simply no space left in my XPC to put in a cheap Soundblaster with h/w-mixing capabilities. Long story short: this is about watching videos without having to quit my audio player using the hardware at hand.

Read the rest of this entry »

While digging through my ~, I stumbled over a little python script I wrote some time ago. Nothing fancy, it just lets you display the song currently played by amarok in your active xchat-channel. Download and more info.

Nice! I’ve just received the confirmation that I’ve been accepted to make my advanced technical college entrance qualification. After nearly ten years at Tally(Genicom) where I’ve learned communication and information technology and worked for technical support afterwards, I finally managed to get myself up to, well, just to do something different..

“So you want to be a Hero, err, Leader?”. That is, of course, for the Debian community only. /. mentions a ZDNet article covering the candidate’s comments, proposals and promises. Debian’s (in)famous release cycle seems to be one of the favoured topics. Faster definitely _is_ something you want to have - or better: have to have in your showroom. Well, welcome to the wonderful world of politics.

I have a proposal myself, of course not thought through well, short sighted and maybe simply stupid but simple nonetheless (which is perfectly ok, for I’m not running for any leaderships ):
Let there be a security repository for testing (IIRC that has been announced already) and promote it as the desktop-branch with ’stable’ beeing the choice for production environments and ‘unstable’ for the rest. But of course, it can’t be that simple. Anyway, I’ve been running SID on my desktop for some years now and found it to be equally or even more stable and consistent than any other major desktop distribution. Maybe the real problem is labeling? If you don’t know what you’re dealing with, you probably don’t want to run something called ‘testing’ or even ‘unstable’.

And btw, the good thing about /. is not the news but the discussion, isn’t it?