Yarr! · There · be · penguins · on · the · horizon.

I have been in the world of windoze far too long.

I notice this mainly in my attitude towards systems. I see a system, and I see its flaws, and I see how complicated it is, and I immediately think, not that I should learn the system and see if I can fix it, but that I should re-implement my own system from the ground up, since that is the only way I could possibly understand anything.

I really should start poking my nose into the code more. I learnt binary space partitioning not my reading tutorials (I tried, many times, and always failed), but by reading the doom source code. I can learn x-windows the same way, maybe.

Although, while the ways of x teach me some valuable insights, and the way of apple shows me an alternative, I do believe that it would still be worthwhile attempting to forge a new path, with the separation of x, but with a modular extensible nature to create a unified, harmonized interface, in such a way as to still be unified and harmonized for applications that need new styles of interface and interaction not dreampt of at the original source. Of course such a prospect would require a total re-invention of the wheel, and a break with the past, but Apple have shown us that backwards comparability is really not very important, they've continually reinvented themselves and keep pushing new ideas, and they manage it in a closed proprietary environment that distributes only binaries.

I think perhaps this would be a good project should I ever make it to uni.

I have just spend a good few hours making my KDE linux system look and to some extent behave like osX.

I should probably be very worried by this.

( Large screenshot for those interested )

Baghira is however not just an osX clone, its a damned beautiful set of widgets, and in many ways surpasses those of osX itself (or maybe thats just cause you can poke at more options than you can on a mac). It even has this weird knack of making my non-qt apps feel less alien.

All that remains now is to build and install kxdocker, and find a nice little icon set to go with this new look. Oh, and then find a cheap (hah!) massive monitor to replace my twin 16" displays, so I can give up using xinerama, and start playing with composite rendering x-servers. Ah what fun that'll be, not that I'll ever afford a nice enough screen (I'm thinking 48" widescreen here folks. What? I can dream!).

Well, I have written my first Qt/KDE application, and its something of a Scooty-Puff Jr. but it was quite fun none the less, and explained some useful stuff. I cant help feeling however that Qt-Designer is some kind of bastard child of visual basic and macOS classic. Its just something about its interface, and the fact that it is very much like vb, or how vb should have been.

On the whole I think I'm goina like Qt, it seems to be both easy and powerful all at once, which is a rare thing. It also seems very much like vb, which I'm afraid to say makes me feel at home as I tended to use it far too much. I think perhaps I should go and pick up a good book on c++ with Qt. Any suggestions?

Oh, and in other news, juk looks to be quite nice, tho still lacking in many ways, its visual simplicity is a virtue and a welcome change from amaroK. It does the popup track announcements in a nicer way too, less pretty, but they actually sit still if you hover over them (something kopete developers could do well to implement) and they have track change buttons right there on the popup in case you don't like the song it decided to play.

Ok, thanks to this excellent howto, I now have the ivtv drivers for my hauppage pvr-250 installed, and I can cat random garbage from /dev/video0 so I assume its working, although I've yet to persuade any of my various media players to treat that as an mpeg stream and play it.

In somewhat related news, I've discovered that I cant install mythTV yet anyway, since all my drives are ext3 and it explicitly states it will have hideous problems on ext3, oh, and also I'm thinking of ditching the pvr-250 and going with an all dvb solution, taking the raw streams from the air and/or satellite, cutting out the analog step in between and doing away with the need for a complex hacked together interface between myth and the set top box(es). I highly doubt I can find a cable provider who'd allow me to use non-authorised hardware but satellite providers are more used to such things I hope, but that of course requires the extra expense of a dish and accompanying hardware... ho hum... decisions decisions...

Update: Well, I've managed to set up the card with ivtvctl, tune it with ivtv-tune, and can capture video by redirecting a cat of /dev/video0 into a file. The quality is lovely, the bitrate is crazy, and there is no audio, which is most annoying and puzzling, but I can capture, just about.
Thus far all my efforts to get the audio out of it have failed, I shall forget about it for now until I can test with s-video (Andy, I'm goina need my nuon back and the loan of an s-video cable plz). I've also had problems getting any of the various app's I've tried to play it. xawtv I think is having odd issues with xinerama, but maybe its just me not being able to tell it what to do, I'll check that out later. kdetv is unable to detect the card it seems... ho hum... bed now methinks.

Well thats one thing done at least, Logjam (my LJ client) can now detect music from amaroK, even if I did have to use a script running in amaroK to write it out to a text file and then get LogJam to cat that file in order to work it out. Woo, Does this mean I'm attaining some small notion of the unix nature? Stringing small tools together to make big ones does seem much more practical now, although I still worry about how everything will sort its output.

Well what a surprise, two more id3 tools have failed the sanity check for being useful. Do any of these authors actually use their own software? Am I an exceptional edge case for wanting to embed album piccies in my mp3's? Has the concept of id3v2 actually penetrated the unix world at all?

A little command line tool called "id3v2" which you would think could edit id3v2 tags, seems only to be able to edit the same basic tags used in the id3v1 spec... what exactly its purpose is I'm not sure, but its sure as hell not designed for flexibility. Oh, sure, you can add any known tag, but how the hell do I paste the entire contents of an image file onto a command line, and why should I have to do it? EasyTAG seems to have a lot more potential. Its config dialog has a ton of options and it seems most of them do fairly sensible things. This led me to believe it would be a good tool, except its support for doing things to multiple files at once seems really flaky, with changes only infact being applied to the last file selected. Its picture support is nice however, in that it supports multiple pictures, and can extract them from the files again (but not into the same directory, its browser starts at home... why!? However, yet again it fails the sanity test of actually being able to batch import pics to an entire album at once. What is the point in these people even writing such software? He who goes to the point of adding pictures to mp3's is obviously someone who'd want to put the same picture on each track of an album, clearly.

I give up, I'll really have to write my own... which means learning qt, and infact picking up the ++ in C++ (and brushing up my C), and of course finding a library to interact with the files... but I think thats the easy part.

Thus far I must report my abject failure at getting an adequate id3 toolchain. All I want is way to mass fill out v2 tags, to copy from v1 to v2 and the inverse, and to mass-add embedded pictures, an album at a time. This should not be too much to ask, but it seems it is. I may end up writing my own tool one day, since I think there are libraries to do the actual tag reading and writing, so it shouldn't be too hard. I'm annoyed that I have to do this however since under windoze it only took me an afternoon to find a lovely little tool called "mp3tagtool" which did it all, and had a pretty nice interface (strongly recommended for those still on windoze).

In other news, I seem to now have a copy of wine installed which I think works nicely, I should probably go through the documentation properly and tie it into my dual boot windows registry, but that can wait (there's nothing installed on that copy of windows anyway yet). However, I've had problems running the only two programs I really wanted to run, paint shop pro issues an unhandled exception and crashes with a ton of debug info, and the aforementioned mp3tagtool issues four messages beginning with a most annoying "fixme:" and hangs.

Not an ideal situation then. I might see if I can replace the incomplete library with a real windows dll, but that too shall have to wait for another day.

Oh, and ktorrent (an otherwise rather nice bittorrent client) keeps crashing on me for no obvious reason.

Ok, so today my only real achievement towards the betterment of my environment was the setting up of my eBook toolchain, or part of it anyway. I can now use a lovely little tool called clit (no, really), to open microsoft .lit format ebooks and turn them to html. I would say I could then use html2text to convert them to text and never leave the command shell, except html2text insists on inserting line feeds at the 78 column boundary and seems not to have an option to turn that off. Instead I just copied the entire text from konqueror to kate via the clipboard, which stressed it out for a good 30 seconds curiously.

I suppose I should really sit down and learn kates regular expression syntax too, for when I need to clean up more complicated documents, and of course install other useful tools like pdf2text, but that can wait for now. Oh, and it seems my compiler toolchain is working too, clit had to be compiled from source but worked nicely with the supplied makefiles. Its nice when things Just Work.

edit: I have also now put the mouse button remapping command into a kde startup script so hopefully it will remap the buttons all the time. I suspect it will not remap them in kdm which is annoying so I may have to find its startup scripts and see if there's something I can do about that. Also, it appears that under xinerama, my monitors are not plug and play. If they're not turned on when I boot up, they default to 640x480. I may want to remove the other resolutions from the conf file at some point.

Ok, so it always amuses me when a browser plugin gets the wrong end of the stick and tries to display something in totally the wrong way. The classic example was quicktime on windoze, which for some reason would always try to handle exe files and play them as videos. No matter how many times I uninstalled quicktime, it kept doing it just the same.

Linux plugin errors are however that little bit more cool, I just tried to view a video file, and instead of offering to let me download it, instead of opening in a media player so I could stream it, it opened in an embedded hex editor inside the browser.

Ok, so today it seems my main updates to the system have been in terms of p2p systems, I've now got KTorrent, which is lovely and seems quite polished. I've also got a DC++ client, which is extremely raggedy about the edges and just makes me think a big fat "wtf were they thinking?!"

Y'see, the story with DC++ is, that this company, presumably in the interregnum after the demise of napster, thought it'd be a good idea to hack together a p2p program in vb6, slap some adware on it, and proffit. For some strange reason this unwanted bastard child of the worst possible parents (vb6 and profit grabbing) was cloned by someone, using C++, to make DC++, which enhanced and improved upon the original to become the defacto standard on the network, cutting the original parent company off from its users and taking their creation away from them.

Alas, DC++ is windows only. Or rather, there are half a dozen abandoned and half dead linux projects trying to port it. The most successful one calls itself valknut, for reasons that have thus far escaped me. It's crude, its lacking any kind of real refinement or useful features in terms of usability. It does add one key feature missing in the "official" DC++ windows client however and that is multipoint downloads. However, the curious part of this tale is this:

It's a qt app, thus designed for kde, except its interface is a clone of its windows cousin. It has an MDI window structure, the child windows have the identical window menu that they would have in windows, the overall layout of the program is the same, in the trivial details, yet in the things that matter, like the ability to actually manage all the data a program like this presents, its all different. Instead of the transfer window, you have half a dozen tabs full of multi-column lists with no horizontal scrollbar... instead of one single tabstrip showing every window open, there is a tabstrip that shows the hubs connected, but then each hub has more tabs inside itself for the hub, and any private message windows you might have open, and there's no way to close those windows without exiting the whole hub.

It just makes you think *what the proverbial f***!?"

Still, it's downloading nicely so I guess I can get used to it, and maybe even take their source for the core and write a whole new front end to it... one day.

Can anyone explain to me why it has just taken about half an hour to move 5000 odd bits of spam from my spam folder into my wastebin?

Total program lockup, non-responsiveness for at least 20 minutes, more like half an hour. That just dosnt make sense to me. Sure it was a lot of mail, but it's not like it had to analyse it or anything, just move it from one mailbox to another. I've copied entire hard drives quicker.

I can understand it being slow while checking mail, since it has to run spamassassin, and before moving to the daemonised version it was taking an age to scan everything, but why on earth did it take this long to just move some mail?

It should not have taken this long to work out where to set up spamassassin to run daemonised. Perhaps its just me, but kubuntu's focus clearly is not on documentation. Then again, my general unfamiliarity with linux dosnt help, but I didn't have these problems starting services on my OpenBSD box (which has beautiful documentation btw).

Call the gods to answer me!
Hear me say "Oh, hear my pain!"
All the gods to answer me!
Moment of toil! Moment of toil!

Hmm... I think I might submit this to the amaroK community for their feedback, I hope they dont take too much offence at it, none was intended, but devs and long time users often loose sight of the newbies perspective, and this is meant simply to point out what this newbie went through with amaroK, where I came from and how I use the player, everyone is different and it never hurts to have a fresh opinion.

( A VERY long rant/review of amaroK )

I meant to post this a week or more ago, but thus far the only person who has used my copy of Open Office has been a complete non-geek, who got on with it just fine, importing an ms word document and editing it nicely. The only problem that we encountered is that for some reason the file would not directly open from her usb storage device, and had to be copied to the desktop to stop OOo crashing on load, but, apart from that, everything went swimmingly, including the detection and mounting of said usb mass storage device, which was as easy as one would expect from a nice operating system (and would not get on a base install of any windoze I've used at length).

Ok, so I spent all day yesterday trying to find a media player that would fill my simple requirement of playing every format of video known to mankind, and I do believe I've found one, eventually. What is most annoying however, is that the one I found, is the one I started off being so frustrated with.

Kaffeine is a nice enough little player. It however is, like many unix apps, just a pretty frontend to another player, which is usually the awesome (yet imvho ugly) xine, but, for some absurd reason (free-ness I suspect), kubuntu ships without xine, and instead ships using kaffeine as its default player, but acting as a frontend for a weedy little gstreamer based player which cant do anything right.

Also, it should be noted for future reference, that all the cool (read: non-free) stuff lives in the "multiverse" section of the repositories, which does not even exist in the default sources list and must be manually edited in. "Universe", while existing in a commented out state, and being unsupported, seems not to have all the stuff I would want. Ho hum, now that both are in my sources list I've been able to get many things.

Oh, and that's another really annoying thing about kubuntu, it does not, it seems, come with a full dev system, sufficient enough to compile things in. I think I've managed to install all the right dev packages and libraries now however, but only time will tell (well, and the list of errors next time I try to build something).

In other news, I still haven't rebound my mouse buttons, I still haven't worked out why my mouse exposes four buttons to windoze but only 3 to linux, I've not yet set up spamassassin to run daemonised, I've not yet installed drivers for my zip drive (yes, I've got a zip internal, and a 5.25" floppy drive, no, I dont use either, but I like them anyway), I have not yet done much importing of my old data, I have not yet got wine running properly, I have not yet set up any kind of paint program that I'm comfortable using (I saw tho that someone had made a near perfect clone of MS Paint... WHY!?!) ummm... I'm sure I've many things I need to do still, but that'll do for now.

Well, yesterday (or was it the day before) I fixed xorg.conf and enabled xinerama (dual monitor support), which is very pretty (except, as with windows, very few screensavers are suitable for use with it). I'm really pleased with Matrox for providing linux drivers for their products, and keeping them updated (this version was released at the beginning of December but the card is at least 4 years old). The install instructions are easy enough and everything works nicely.

So, as I speak, on the other monitor KMail is downloading my backlogged mail, over 2000 bits of it when I last checked (yes, I get far too much spam, about 120-200 mails a day). Its taking it an age since its running spamassassin as a perl program in the background. I might try re-configuring it to use the daemonised version in future to save time. Out of the proverbial box it seems to be about 50% effective, but with training I hope to get it up to the point where this mailbox becomes usable again, as I'm really too lazy to switch right now.

Update: Looks like there was more mail than I thought:
3910 bits of mail, of which
2058 spamassassin thought were spam
1852 it passed, I'll add the actual spam numbers once I manually check everything (what fun that'll be)

Update: (at twenty to four am)
It looks like I had:
155 bits of real email, most of which was mailing lists and automated notices
3783 bits of spam... thats quite a worrying ratio.

Also, it seems I've been accepted onto the OpenBSD Sparc mailing list, which is odd since when I joined it (months ago) I could neither post nor receive messages. I forget now what I joined to ask about however. Ho hum, I'm sure I'll need some help with the server at some point, so its a useful thing to be connected to I guess.

Many moons ago, when I got my first paycheck infact, I went to a computer shop with the intention of buying something nice and shiny. I ended up getting an extremely overpriced Logitech Trackman Marble FX, a lovely little trackball which has served me faithfully ever since. It has four buttons, massive ball, and no scroll wheel. It also ships with a really ugly button mapping, in which the left button is pressed with the side of ones thumb. Fortunately, its windoze driver has a nice option to remap the buttons, and to map them to all kinds of functions, it even has a nice little picture of the device in question with the buttons numbered so you can see whats going on.

Linux does not have an easy way to configure such things. Instead I have to edit the X.org config file, which wouldn't be that bad except that unix has all these weird, universally understood but never documented traditions about which buttons do what, and of course X is a many layered beast which still eludes even my most basic attempts to understand it. I think I have worked out the basics of remapping buttons, so I can make button 2 (middle) become button 1 (left), but I have yet to understand how X handles (or doesn't) scroll-wheels, emulated scroll-wheels, or, infact, why my fourth button also maps onto button 2, and why remapping button 2 also remaps button 4. It seems from google that other people dont have that problem, and in windows I never had it, the two buttons are quite separate there, so whats going on?

Answers on a postcard please, I could use some help on this one.

Oh, and thats another annoying thing, KMix, KDE's volume control app, has a "master" channel, which it seems is connected to nothing, as the "headphone" is infact the one which affects things, something else I've got to find a way to remap, what fun!

After playing about with hard drives, changing jumpers (my b*stard of a bios wont let the system boot if a controller has a slave but no master on it), and reinstalling everything, I'm now sat at a kde3.5 desktop. The install was pretty straightforward, once I decided to put windoze on first, with only one drive in at the time, then add the other drive and put linux on (I really should test that dual boot, grub detected it but I dunno if windoze will actually boot). Upgrading kubuntu 5.10 to the newer kde was fairly simple, as was adding in mp3 support (again, not tested yet). Why must linux vendors not ship with mpeg support? yeah, I know, its not totally free, but its so universal and free enough, many newbies would be scared off by the lack of it. I guess the next step is to find the matrox drivers and set up my card, and X, for dualhead, then have a look at the windoze partition, drop some tools into it (like motherboard and monitor drivers) and get it up and running too.

Well now this has been an unproductive morning. I swapped over my drives, so I've got my old 40 gig drive in as primary master, optical drive as primary slave, and a nice 250 gig one as secondary master. The plan being that most of the linux filesystem can sit on the 40gig, and have a massive /home partition on the 250, as well as a small fat32 partition for windoze to live on so I can dual boot when required.

So I install kubuntu with that scheme in mind, the installer is lovely and lets me set up all my partitions at once, format them, and specify mount points. Once its done I end up with a nice system which has auto detected my graphics card (even if it is only using one of its two outputs) and network, and all was pretty.

So then I try to put windoze on the other partition. The installer gives me a nice view of the drives, full of unknown's for all the ext3 partitions, so I tell it to install on the fat32 partition I've provided for it. It throws up an error that it needs a non-unknown partition on the first drive, so I figure, wtf, I can wipe it off again afterwards, so I delete the kubuntu partition and create a new fat32 partition, just so it can put the boot loader down... it then tries to start installing on that partition, since it can only format one partition at a time. So I reboot it and install on the partition I want it on, it installs, and then ends up with a system running 640x480, with just 16 colours, and no network with which to download the right drivers. More importantly, it installed itself onto the right drive, but called that drive D:, which now means if I delete the original partition and install grub, I'll be screwed because all the paths will be wrong.

End result, I've gotta do the whole thing again, and start off by removing the primary drive and installing windoze first, on just one drive, what fun...

Partition Magic is, without question, the single greatest tool ever created for any task.

My machine is now exactly as it was at the beginning of the process, except it is all on one physical drive. Now it is time for bed. Yes, I did set my timezone correctly, and it is, infact, a quarter to one in the afternoon, I'm still going to go to bed.