Category: Uncategorized

Another sign of kids needing to get off my lawn post-haste

The goa mix [1] is 20 years old. I was more ska/jazz/CMJ at the time but this mix was my gateway into the world of electronica. It was a seed that didn’t really sprout for another decade but that fact left me in a place where I could follow the trajectory backward and also launch fully into where various scenes were going.

Trance is, ultimately, okay for me. My preferences run more IDM/cliq-hop/whatever-the-hell box you want to use to contain Richard James. I also like more chill/ambient noise stuff. The goa mix is at the edge of where I want to be in terms of what I’d call a ‘clubby’ feel. It’s also beautifully flawed in a way that a derivative DJ would never allow. BPM is all over the place. Key changes are sometimes abrupt. Yet every transition feels organic and as a whole it stands up against anything put out today.

And if you want to hear it without the commentary (because, frankly, Mr. Oakenfold sounds a bit addled throughout) you can grab that here [2].

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01nkgbd
[2] https://soundcloud.com/pauloakenfold/paul-oakenfold-radio-1-1

Support site hell

  1. Go to Microsoft’s support page regarding VisualStudio 2013 Update 3
  2. Look for a link to download VisualStudio 2013 Update 3
  3. In lieu of finding said link, find a link “Download the latest Visual Studio 2013 update package now”
  4. Click that link
  5. Find yourself looking at the download page for VisualStudio 2013 Update 4
  6. Pray to the higher power of one’s choice that someone else managed to grab Update 3 and stash it somewhere
  7. Rejoice bemusedly when that proves to be the case
  8. Continue on with the rabbiting away in the Cube Farm unphased because this obviates crawling through Microsoft’s support site’s labyrinth of automated page generation hell with URLs that are impossible to game. This is the best possible outcome one can expect and is the harbinger of a good day.

Does not scale

I’m going through the 2+ years of photos and videos I finally offloaded from my phone and came across this one from May 27 of this year. Not sure why I took the picture. I guess I was demonstrating that our toaster’s production capacity does not scale well and we might experience shortages under load.

Insufficient throughput under heavy toasting load.
Insufficient throughput under heavy toasting load.

Fail-state = FAIL

Using Ubuntu 14.04 which is the current LTS release I was able to install Gnome-Do [1] and basically rock it. Gnome-Do is a port/clone of the Quicksilver app for Macs. It’s a launcher but so much more. It follows a subject/predicate/[object] syntax activated by a key combination. It’s also scriptable. Suddenly the mouse/touchpad becomes an optional device on the Mac. Which is a good thing, by the way.

Executive summary: If you’re on MacOSX[foo] and you’re not using Quicksilver [2], then you’re wrong and you probably won’t have any viable progeny.

With that out of the way, you can see how one would find a port/clone of this app on a *nix box to be a good thing too. I mean, there is always a terminal window open and any .bashrc file worth its salt will have shortcuts galore which mirrors the launching half of what Quicksilver provides. But the scripting? Again, you can predict much of that and stuff that into your .bashrc (you are using bash, right?) but when it comes to on-the-fly scriptability, Gnome-Do was tops.

Until I upgraded anyway. The move from 14.04 to 14.10 may not have been wholly advisable–after all there isn’t much new in 14.10 and certainly nothing I needed. But the upshot being, I did the in-place upgrade and that absolutely killed Gnome-Do. In fact, it killed Gnome. It killed everything Gnome related. No Unity, no Gnome-shell, no Cinnamon, no MATE. Nothing.

Luckily I’d installed Fluxbox because it’s never lost its old-school charm. Sometimes you want a windowing system that is lightweight and not loaded with geegaws. At any rate, Fluxbox –> Terminal –> apt-get purge and everything was cleaned up in regards to that.

Of course, I ended up re-partioning and pulling my /home/nhansen across on an untouched partition anyway because the upgrade also blew up all of the gnome-related sound processing during video playback…and that problem wasn’t so easily solved.

So how did you spend your vacation days in November, Nick? Troubleshooting an in-place upgrade and ultimately Un/re-installing a base operating system on my primary workstation. Hooray for fun times!

At any rate, in the process I have a more robust partitioning scheme, a fresh 14.10 install, and a newfound respect for the Mint distro’s [3] folks fear of in-place upgrade installs.

Oh, and so the funny thing? I got everything fixed and then tonight apt-get installed gnome-do again. Before reinstalling Fluxbox. Why? I wish I had a good answer to that. Anyway, thank the higher power that Ctrl-Alt-F[2 -6] brings up a terminal windows from which I could apt-get purge that little fucker.

Never again, Gnome-Do! Do you hear me? Never fucking again! Bastard.

[1] http://do.cooperteam.net/
[2] http://qsapp.com/
[3] http://linuxmint.com/