July 4th dumbasses

Today is July 4th. Today, it seems that the fucking morons who live in fire-prone SoCal have already forgotten last year's wildfires. They are carrying out their patriotic duty, celebrating the birth of this great nation by blowing shit up with their illegal fireworks, fire hazards be damned.

Office 2007 is a steaming pile of dog shit

Microsoft Office 2007 is the biggest pile of dog shit software that I've had the misfortune to ever use. All style, no substance. You need to learn how to code fucking XML to customize the interface? WTF? I can't believe that this is supposed to be an improvement.

green laser pointer part deux

Green laser pointers are tres cool but have a serious drawback; they suck current out of AAA batteries like a two bit hooker AND NiMH rechargables do not have enough voltage to drive the laser. I have to reconsider whether they are a good choice for everyday use.

Green laser pointers!!!one111~

I just got a green laser pointer. This thing is insanely bright. I wimped out though and got the 5 mW version. What I should have splurged for is the military grade 120 mW version, which can light match heads on fire and burn through plastic! That would be a neat gadget to have in a lecture hall...

Goddamn pandas

We went to the San Diego zoo last weekend. There was a line of people waiting to see the Great Pandas. Once we got into the panda enclosure, there were zoo volunteers who were shushing the excited tourists. "Shh! Don't disturb the pandas!". We were also not allowed to linger as there was a line of people waiting about 100 ft. long.

We also went to the reptile exhibit. Here, there was a poisonous Bermudan snake that is critically endangered; it's natural habitat has been reduced to 10 sq. mi. due to deforestation and development of tropical resorts. The only people looking at the snake were a bunch of punk kids banging on the glass of the poor snake's aquarium. There were no zoo personnel to been nearby.

OK, so pandas are endangered. But (speaking as a biologist) these things have pretty much evolved themselves into a dead end. They don't have much to blame for their endangered status except for their own evolutionary stupidity. The Bahaman snakes, however, can attribute the eminent demise to unabashed capitalistic human greed. I suppose I understand that pandas are much fuzzier and cuter than snakes, but I can't help but think: goddamn pandas.

cancer

A of colleague of mine, who has been working in our department for almost 30 years and had only missed 2 days of work (EVER), is finally succumbing to cancer. You could tell that over the last few months it has been harder and harder for him to come to work . He was clearly losing weight, and often limped. The really amazing thing about him is that he has been toughing it out for so long. If I was diagnosed with terminal cancer I probably would have given up the ghost long ago, and spent my final days blowing my life savings doing lines of coke off of a hooker's ass in Vegas.

It's a real testament to his love of teaching and his intestinal fortitude. I salute you, sir!

stupid shit I had to do to get Linux working

I decided to try to put Linux on my old laptop to see if it had progressed beyond the useless mess it was several years ago when I first tried it. In theory, open source software (OSS) is a wonderful idea; in practice, Linux is just to much of a hassle for a workhorse computer; stuff just doesn't work out of the box. The hardware is an old Delll 4100 Inspiron 1GHz laptop with 1GB of RAM. I chose to try Gentoo Linux because of its minimalist approach; when I tried RedHat Linux many moons ago, it installed a bunch of garbage that I had no idea what it did. I figured that a minimalist "emerge only what you need" approach might be informative. Below is a partial list of the things I had to struggle with:

1. Gentoo portage giving the message "xx config files in /etc need to be updated". Running "etc-update" nuked the KDE setup of my first install into oblivion.

2. Multiple recompiles of the kernel to get support of my hardware just right.

3. Getting the X-server to recognize my Synaptics touchpad. I had to add the module "evdev" to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 to get the damn evdev driver (whatever *that* is) to load during boot, else the X server would crash back into kdm whenever I tried to login. Also, I had to hand edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to set Device "Touchpad" as "CorePointer" (in other words, the "main mouse") to get it to work.

4. Wheel mice are not enabled by default. Had to hand edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to contain the line "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" Under Section "Input Device" to get wheel mouse functionality. This is probably the most unforgivable mistake. Wheel mice are so ubiquitous that it is almost standard hardware.

5. Getting a Centrino wireless card to work was sheer hell. The HOWTO guide on wiki.gentoo.com was completely wrong. wpa_supplicant has nothing to do with it. I noticed that /etc/init.d/net.eth0 (the init script that brings up the eth0 interface, which is the internal network card) is symlinked to a script /etc/init.d/net.lo. I have no idea what this script does. I symlinked net.eth1 to this script, did "rc-update add net.eth1 default", and lo and behold, wireless networking worked (well, I also had to futz with other config files as well).

6. KDE system sounds worked for awhile, then something happened that made them FUBAR. Finally, an article somewhere suggested that I give up on the internal KDE sound system to play system notification sounds; there is an option to use an external player, which I did. Now it works, although this really feels like a half-assed solution.

7. Getting font smoothing in the X server was a major pain. Had to recompile X and a whole crapload of font packages. It still doesn't look as visually pleasing as MS ClearType.

All that said, it's fun to play around with Linux. You do get a better feel for what your machine is doing. And I do like the idea of only installing software that you will use, instead of having the OS vendor decide what needs to go on your system. No Emacs or Vi for me; nano all the way, baby!