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Viking

Viking ThreeBeards


Last Updated: 10/29/2009

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Gender: Male
Status: Single
Country: NZ

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Friday, November 13, 2009 

Current mood:  imaginative
Category: Music
We can make great adverts in New Zealand too, and here are two slices of how one of them was made. Here's part one, and here's part two. As you can imagine, there were certain technical obstacles that needed to be overcome, not the least of which included:
... the transmission of two thousand text messages within the space of forty seconds, to a very small space.
I don't personally think it'll become one of the most favourite adverts of all time, but it'll certainly pique the interest to see how it was made.
22:52 
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Thursday, November 05, 2009 

Category: Web, HTML, Tech
I updated my machine's copy of Ubuntu Linux a few days ago, to the latest version out - Karmic Koala. So far, I've been disappointed. My machine isn't totally in the doldrums, with a 2.8GHz Celeron, 512Mb of memory, and a Radeon 9550 with 128Mb of video memory. Not a dead slow machine, but certainly not the newest on the block.
Some of the new tweaks about Gnome, I like a lot. Others ... well, most OpenGL programs don't want to work for more than about thirty seconds before falling over on their respective digital noses, due to some funny drm error. Now I don't quite know what to do to fix it, unless of course I await a new kernel release. The problem with that is, that may not actually fix the problem that I'm having with DRI or DRM. For the uninitiated, DRM isn't (in this case) Digital Rights Management, but instead is another layer between a Linux kernel and a 3D card. So the rough chain goes:  kernel, card driver, drm layer, dri layer, Xorg. In my case, the drm layer keeps tripping up on something that is being sent through to it. As a result of it throwing its toys out with the bathwater, the OpenGL program stops dead, or indeed dies completely. What makes it worse is that not every program dies from this error. Just most of the ones I want to run.

Ah well, that's life in the computer lane... or as somebody else says:

I hate computers.

Thanks, John.


07:44 
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Saturday, October 10, 2009 

Current mood:  accomplished
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

See Emily Play

I'm just trying out Scribefire at the moment. It seems a bit slow to respond when I type stuff into the window, but in all other respects, it seems perfectly fine. For those of you who don't know, ScribeFire is a blogging client, written in JavaScript, that is a firefox plug in. And not a bad one, either. Yes, it has its small problems, but it seems to support more blogtypes than what I was last using: Windows Live Writer.  My only issue with writer is that it (gee!) only runs on the Windows platform. In comparison, this plugin runs anywhere that Firefox will run.

Careful with that axe, Eugene

I spotted ScribeFire in the list of available packages after having updated my Mandriva install up to the latest version, 2009.1. I did have a bit of an adventure getting everything set up and working, but my first problem was to get all the packages for the new release onto the system. As it was (at the time) sitting on 2009.0, I first had to change the urpmi configuration so it got the new stuff, not the old stuff I'd already been using. Did that (with the help of easyurpmi.zarb.org), and started upgrading packages piecemeal. Up until yesterday, I'd grabbed a batch of packages to update, then urpmi'd them into place.
Started with KDE, got most of that installed, tried rebooting the X server, only to find out I could no longer get KDE started. Shrugged it off, chose xfce instead. Upgraded gnome, then upgraded E17, adding some X server packages too. Tried booting E17, X server didn't want to know. Gave up on the X server as I'd obviously broken Xorg, went back to console for the moment. Thought about it a bit more, then said to hell with it. Upgrade them all at once.
urpmi --auto-select
Urpmi churned a bit, then asked me what library I wanted to provide for graphviz, then told me I'd lose several packages in the process as newer versions weren't available. I dealt with the occasional conflicts, installed all the packages I could (forcefully in two cases), then rebooted.

I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

I knew I was sort of in trouble when I looked at the screen after I hit .. on the Mandriva line, as the poor old grub had come up with the following output:
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=/dev nosplash video=radeonfb:1024x768-16@75 resume=/dev/sda2 vga=791
Cannot find file.
Error 16
Hit Enter to return to the menu
Once I took my third dried green frog pill, I looked more carefully at the input and output to see what had broken... it was then that I realised that grub wasn't even looking in the right place, as my setup has all my information on hd3,1. So, I corrected this, and corrected the root= parameter, changed the same thing for the initrd as well, crossed my fingers, and hit "b" (to boot what I'd saved). Thankfully, it loaded the kernel, and the initrd, and started my system up. Then I hit the next snag. avahi-daemon wouldn't start. it uttered a mournful [FAILED] to the screen, and my startup continued...until I hit haldaemon. The computer then (effectively) stopped dead in its tracks, waiting for I didn't know what. After a couple of resets, I finally found out that both haldaemon and avahi-daemon were dependent upon another service I'd forgotten about—messagebus. The Messagebus service starts up the dbus daemon, which handles all of the gobbledygook that seems to go on underneath the surface in a typical modern Mandriva distro. If it isn't running, then neither will anything else that depends upon it to be there. Think of it as another udev, but for messages instead of devices, although haldaemon also uses it.
So, it was back to the single-user boot. While I was there, I corrected /boot/grub/menu.lst at the same time so I wouldn't have to keep typing hd3, and pondered about dbus. I checked in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d again for a startup script with dbus in the name, but couldn't see one. Looked a bit further, and realised I was supposed to be looking for messagebus. Found THAT, as S99messagebus. Mandriva had got stuck on haldaemon, which was also at S99. As Mandriva runs through these alphabetically, I figured I needed to get messagebus to an earlier number. I checked the header of the file, and found that what was in there, didn't match the S99 level it had been set to initially. Then, I decided to check out the chkconfig man page. Thankfully there was a parameter I hadn't seen there before... resetpriorities.
What this does is: take a valid start (S level) and finish (K level) number, and change the symlinks filenames to match these numbers. For messagebus, I now had S53messagebus, and both avahi-daemon and haldaemon were one digit higher (S54). Time for the final test. Reboot - yet again, this time the kernel was booted, the scripting ran clean, and I was finally at a login: prompt. Whew. What a procedure.
Now, I just had to get X up and running, and hope that the massive package upgrade hadn't broken something else in the process. Thankfully, it hadn't, though E17 still doesn't want to start, and neither does nautilus. Those are things I can live without, or I can fix. But it goes without saying that I shouldn't have had to go to all of this trouble just to upgrade a system. Hell, Ubuntu handles upgrades better than this. Anyhow, that's my first post made with this blogging client, I hope it ends up being a stayer.
03:23 
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Thursday, October 01, 2009 

Category: Blogging

I can’t get no satisfaction

As you can tell, I’ve been fiddling with the look of this blogsite. I’m not satisfied with the result though, and I think that’s possibly because I don’t have a designer’s eye. Granted, I can select a background. I can select colours of text and make sure they don’t clash too much, but really, I’m not satisfied with my own results. The problem with this of course is: if I want better, I either go for a custom template from somewhere else and customise that to suit, or I learn design and interface properly. But there’s a problem with finding a custom template—I’m then limited to hijacking somebody else’s code and hacking it to suit the vagaries of whatever blogging system I’m on. This works only if they have given permission to use it like, wherever (Creative Commons licences are good for this.) The other problem is, I have to depend upon someone else’s quality of design, and the time that they’ve taken to learn it for themselves. I’d only be able to duplicate it if I learned what they had learned.
If I took the time to learn that, it would certainly pay off—I’d be happier with the look of the site, and others would be more willing to visit the place too. The problem is, sometimes excellent design is conspicious by what you don’t notice more than what you do notice. You know it’s great design when you don’t even think about what you’re looking at, it just looks great, and you know it. The problem is, I would have to take ages just learning what’s good from what’s great from what’s award-winningly excellent. And frankly that’s the bit I don’t yet know.

Second verse, same as the first

Quality of design has applications in other areas too, not just web design. However, I see it most when I’m online, and interacting (or trying to) with somebody else’s idea of what “good” design is, which may of course not actually be good. There have been a few good examples of design—the Apple iPod was one, if you could get used to its wheel. No doubt I could come up with other examples too.
Then, of course, there are the “imitators”, those companies who think they can produce it cheaper, faster, and more reliable... or can simply produce it for a far lower price so they can sell it for a far higher margin. They often do a passable job, and they occasionally do a better job, offering more features than the original. Which doesn't stop the originators continuing to innovate just to keep up, or to keep ahead, so there's always a battle between the leader and the hungry wolves following it.

So, needless to say, I have a bit of work to do on this blog and its general design.

02:04 
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Friday, September 25, 2009 

Current mood:  creative
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

Hello there, all

Hi there, I'm also known as The Viking. Presences on live.com, blogger.com, and quite a few other places too. I've got nearly everything under the sun except for this, until now.  I'm an "old fart". Yup. I'm probably 75% older than the average age on here, but I'm probably not the oldest person here. Just old enough to know better.
Anyhow, I live here in NZ, looking after my darling and me, with plenty of time to knock around on the computer. I guess that's enough of an introduction, after all, those who know me, know the important stuff.

Brand recognition

So, how come some places are so well known they've become new terms in the world at large: “I’ll just Google it”, and some fade into obscurity—who remembers gopher? If you do, you're older than I thought. If you also know what veronica was for, you’re one of less than every thousand. It's called brand recognition, and is the reason why some companies have survived (some for centuries, even) and some have died within a year of release. Category killers (usually), they've either become the best (and in some cases, the ONLY) entry in their chosen field, or they're pretty high up there. For Google, at least, they took over (or so it seems to me) from the all-powerful altavista.com, doing the job better than them. Now, who hears of altavista? Only old farts like me. Yes, it's still around. Yes, it still provides search results. Have I had a look at it in the past decade? Only once or twice, the last time to check that it was still up before I blogged about it. Google killed it off, or might as well have. Altavista list who they are on their website:
AltaVista, a business of Overture Services, Inc., is a leading provider of search services and technology.
and so on.
Okay, granted—there are literally hundreds of thousands of leading companies that I haven't heard of, but there certainly was a mass exodus to Google from Altavista. Something is said that the results from Google were way more relevant, and way more up to date. I'm not too sure, just that I jumped the bandwagon along with most of the Internet population of the time.
The funny thing is: their initial page is so dead simple! It's only when you start digging beneath the surface that you realise just how deeply embedded that the Google company has become. There have even been comments about how Google could be seen as another Microsoft. I can't verify that, nor deny it. But they're certainly big.

Just a short snippet from my brainbank...
03:00 
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