Project: Ego Deflation, mission accomplished.Children will teach you never to think too highly of yourself. I was goofing around while doing the dishes, while the kids cleaned up the family room. This is necessary because otherwise Mommy and Daddy come down after bedtime wondering how terrorists managed to detonate a roadside IED in our house without our knowing it. So anyway, I was singing a little ditty I made up on the spot, sung to the tune of XTC’s Sgt. Rock: Sgt. Mommy’s going to help me Evie looked at me very seriously and said, “Daddy, is that a real song?” “Yes, honey, it is,” I replied, “only I changed the words because I thought it was funny.” Sayeth the girl not yet five years of age, “Well, I don’t think it’s very funny, because I wasn’t laughing at it very much.” |
Need… more… newspaper.Apparently Google employees had a whale of a good time with a rather large order of Silly Putty. I have to admit I’m a big fan of putty too, but I get mine from Crazy Aaron’s. Anyone want to go in for a few pounds? |
One small step for this man.Last night after a mini-marathon fueled by a slice of my mom’s derby pie*, I finally got package building working in Fedora Docs for the example-tutorial. Once we get the Makefile rules moved into the common one, and everyone starts converting their docs to use the new “rpm-info” DTD, we should have a fairly robust platform for releasing docs into Fedora Extras for community consumption. Happy New Year! *Note this may not be the recipe my mom uses. She’s actually from Kentucky and I hear people have been shot over recipes thereabouts. |
My ardour for Linux.Every once in a while it’s good to write a check you can’t cash, metaphorically speaking of course. I volunteered to help out on the upcoming Fedora marketing blast by doing some audio recording for screencasts. I’ve often heard the audio for these, and it’s generally pretty bad, usually recorded with someone’s laptop microphone or a built-in sound card. Since I have all this good audio equipment here, I thought, why not help out? Then I remembered — I usually do all my recording with Windows-based software, and it’s been a long time since I checked into any of the Linux solutions. The philosophical problem this presents is that to market free software, we should be using free software. So I set to work, picking up JACK and Ardour. But that wasn’t enough, nosirreebob, because I still had to get my audio interface working. Fortunately, the ALSA Project came through. Turns out they’ve had Echo interace support for some time, thanks to the kind people at Echo putting their generic source under the GPL. I recompiled the newest ALSA for my system, dropped in the firmware, and POW, instant happiness. (OK, it wasn’t quite that easy… but a lot of that was simply because I had no idea what I was doing until I did it wrong a few times.) After negotiating my way around the unfamiliar Ardour interface for a few hours this evening, and using the echomixer utility in the alsa-tools package, I can now record straight to hard disk in Linux! Now to go figure out what yummy plugin support they have under the hood. |
Dreary, yet cheery.Merry Christmas! The weather outside is… well, if not frightful, maybe just off-putting, but we had a nice morning anyway. Got a haul of nice clothes, the collected Bone, aftershave from the kids (don’t laugh, I asked for it — literally), and a business card folio. We presented the kids with all sorts of fun goodies, and a few clothes too. “Mommy” got lots of baking paraphernalia and Auntie Mame on DVD. This afternoon we’re off to my sister’s house for dinner (prime rib, yum!) and more gift exchanging. Then I can take a holiday from the holidays starting tomorrow, although I have an assigned book to read. |
Disco!I finally figured out the KDE documentation procedure, which means I can get FDP work packaged for both GNOME and KDE. This was very important to me because I didn’t want to help perpetuate the perception that hard-core Fedorans don’t like KDE. I googled far and wide and found only the barest hints as to how to accomplish this, so I’m pretty proud of myself. (The guidance may be out there, and maybe I couldn’t find it, but that doesn’t make the accomplishment less significant to me.) Basically, the procedure runs like this:
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Please, God, rest ye merry gentlemen.Christmas music playing in the office today, and I have only one thing to say: Die, Mannheim Steamroller, DIE. |
Superswank.Linux super-artist and Red Hatter Diana Fong has created a bitchin new desktop invocation of the Fedora logo. Check it out! UPDATE: Helped contribute some images to the tour page. |
Wake up America!Greg writes an interesting bit about the discrepancy between telco and cable regulation and what it means — or at least what Lawrence Lessig thinks it means — to the future of information flow and open content on the Internet. The same spirit of innovation that fueled the Internet revolution now faces the very real threat of complete strangulation by the companies that benefitted largely from the hard work and investment (in time and dollars) by academics and the U.S. government. Of course, Joe and Suzy Public don’t have any idea whence their online shopping experience arose, so as long as they can still visit WalMart.com, does anyone care? How do we wake up the Ignorant Masses? |
A beautiful day for a drive.Today I am taking the whole family down to Charlottesville for a Christmas supper party with some close friends. I normally love driving down Route 20 through Montpelier and Barboursville, but today I am looking forward to it even more. Because today I have a new companion for the drive, aside from my always lovely wife and kids. That companion is Sufjan Stevens, who may just be the world’s greatest living musical genius working in the popular idiom. Plus, he plays the banjo. I came to this conclusion without much difficulty after hearing the first eight tracks of Illinois (or, if you prefer the more whimsical cover title, Come On, Feel the Illinoise), which is the second and most recent in Stevens’ ambitious project to release an album for each of the fifty states in the union. Just the very first track — saddled, as are the other songs on the record, with a title too long to bother reproducing here — is so strong in melody and arrangement, so beyond anything I’ve ever heard in the last several years, that I’m glad I listened to it in the car because otherwise I would have had to sit down. When the revenant came down, And that’s before you get to John Wayne Gacy, Jr. — yes, it’s about the killer — at which I probably would have cried, had I not been driving. Just a guitar and a piano and a song that somehow gives you a split-second of a glimpse at the humanity of someone positively inhuman. And keep in mind this is coming from a hard case who would probably volunteer to pull the switch on someone like that. And in my best behavior His command of hooks and the pop idiom doesn’t get in the way of delivering sonic marvels you’ve never heard before. The music is immersive, somehow very familiar but completely new at the same time — like walking down a crowded street and catching a glimpse, out of the very corner of your eye, of a long-lost friend. His lyrics are straightforward and unfettered by the self-conscious preen affected by many of the “new folkie” songwriters, retaining the poetry of a well-turned phrase without the air of superiority that is often a consequence. Spin called him “Elliott Smith after ten years of Sunday school,” which I think is pretty apt given that he weaves his personal religious thoughts into his songs at times without letting them obscure the craft of songwriting. Sufjan Stevens is a miracle. Oh, did I mention we went to see King Kong? A great film, and well worth the approximately fifty bucks it cost us, between the babysitter, tickets, and popcorn. |
