Big Fat Ostrich

I don’t know how it happened, but I got totally obsessed with fonts and typesetting this weekend. There I was, writing some documentation, when I remembered the LaTex system of formatting text. Back in college, I was completely confused by LaTex because the whole idea seemed more like a concept than anything.

Now that I’m all grown up, I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND A DAMN THING ABOUT IT.

So I installed the whole package on my Ubuntu machine like so. Just to see what would happen:

sudo apt-get install texlive-metapost

Yep, after letting that command rip, 209M of vague and obscure packages are now installed on my system, and you know what? It made absolutely no difference in my life, or yours. I will still be writing the same documents, without the benefit of TeX or Metafont(s)??. Yep. With TeX installed, preparing documents has never been more like it ever was. At least for me.

But man, there were a lot of packages. The Metapost and Metafont drawing packages in particular, are extensive.

For example, there’s:

metauml, which is a MetaPost typesetting library for UML diagrams.
mp3d, for 3D animations.
piechartmp, which uses MetaPost to draw pie-charts. And everybody likes pie.
garrigues: These are MetaPost macros to reproduce Garrigues’ Easter nomogram. I was actually really happy about this one, cause like, you know, Garrigues!
bbcard: Bullshit bingo, calendar and baseball-score cards.

I kid you not. That was a direct quote from the package listing. Does anyone remember Bullshit Bingo? This isn’t like your traditional bingo. Bullshit Bingo is also referred to as Buzzword Bingo, which is a game that fellow colleagues used to (maybe still do) play at insufferable meetings. This is how you play: You make up a bingo style card. Populate it with buzzwords and catchphrases. Then, you check them off as the words are spoken by the buzzword spewing buffoon, aka, the meeting presenter/your boss/a colleague/Al Gore.

So now that I’ve gone through the exercise of installing TeXlive, here’s how to remove it:

sudo apt-get remove texlive-metapost –purge

And that’s how you use LaTex.

Nice going Pidgin. Seriously, what the hell?

When I logged into my MSN profile from Pidgin, I got this:

Unable to validate certificate

Looked like an SSL error, which I confirmed with Goggles. I mean Googles. I mean Google.

Here’s how to fix it:
1. Open Pidgin. Go to Tools / Certificates and you should see omega.contacts.msn.com. Delete it.
2. Then go to https://omega.contacts.msn.com . You’ll get an error on the page, but don’t worry. Just double click on the certificate icon and export the file to your Desktop or wherever.
3. Then go back into Pidgin and go to Tools / Certificates and Add it via the Certificate Manager.

It should work now. Yay.

Anyway, it’s a known bug and you can find it here: http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/12906

I’ve been wanting to write about my last upgrade for weeks and weeks, but we got all freaky with a bunch of Bobbipins posts instead!

So finally, after weeks of anticipation, here it is: My extensive review about upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat.

It went real smooth.

Seriously. That’s all I got. Each subsequent upgrade with Ubuntu becomes easier and easier, which really translates into boringer and boringer! I don’t know…it’s like the whole OS is so stable at this point, it just makes me want to yawn. Maybe I need to install Beryl or Compiz or something.

Anyway. Don’t you feel like punting that meerkat up there?

You know how it is with music. Sometimes the more you hear about a band, the more you want to hear less about them. After Arcade Fire‘s Funeral, I had reached my saturation point. But after staying away from them for a bit, I came back and gave them an unbiased ear, and yeah, still like them. Neon Bible did less for me, but The Suburbs is working out just fine.

Ok, so the whole point of this post is to tie in some Linuxing with Arcade Fire. Can I do it? Hell yeah.

Thing is, they put out an interactive video for We Used To Wait. You need to go to thewildernessdowntown.com, type in the address where you grew up, and BANG, personalized video. I think this works really well as streets from your upbringing are integrated into the video. Not like I got sentimental and cried or anything, but it just worked nicely.

Ok, fine! I cried, ok? I got all weepy and pathetic and I fucking cried my ass off.

Anyway.

The interactive video at thewildernessdowntown.com is an html5 + Google Chrome experiment. Maybe the first of its kind. So for the full effect, you need to install Chrome. And if you’re using Ubuntu, here’s how to do it.

Sidenote: Don’t do like I did and try to run it on Chromium. Chrome and Chromium are two different forks. Chromium is the development package, where Chrome is your friendly Google browser. If you’re not sure, just check the help/about menu. Don’t be like me and spend 20 minutes waiting for the bar to go past 91%!

So yeah, of course you can download and install directly from the Chrome website, but who does that? This is how I did it for my amd64:

sudo wget -q -O – https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add -
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

And that’s it. You’re done.

Now launch Chrome, go to thewildernessdowntown.com, and plug in the address where you grew up. Enjoy.

But if you REALLY can’t be bothered to do it (you lazy bastard), you can have the non-personalized experience by watching someone else’s memories:

Hey, remember that big Amarok vs Songbird showdown that I wrote about last year? Well you know what? It was all bullshit! There I was, trying to find THE best goddamn music player, to just PLAY MUSIC. So what happened, you ask?

2 things happened:

a) Amarok turned into Amarok 2, which was a giant digital turd. End of story
b) Songbird turned into Songbird for Windows with no more Linux support. That’s right: NO MO!
c) Songbird for Linux became Nightingale (which hasn’t really gone anywhere yet)

Fine, so that was 3 things.

Anyway, all this time something was right under my nose, and that something was Rhythmbox. And yes, Rhythmbox comes installed on Lucid Lynx by default. Also, you know what it goddamn does? It goddamn detects my iPod. And you know what else? It plays music right off my iPod! That means that I can take my iPod to any computer that has Rhythmbox installed and it will play my collection. Without me having to do any stupid synching or anything.

I know I know. Someone’s going to tell me that this existed in the 1620′s or something, but I don’t care! It’s news to me!

Also, in the last version of Songbird I couldn’t get the guitar tabs to work in 64-bit Lucid Lynx. If you want to use them in Rhythmbox, do this:

1. $ sudo apt-get install python-lxml
2. $ tar -xvzf tabsearch-0.1.tar.gz
3. $ cp -r tabsearch/ $HOME/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/<—create the folder if it doesn’t exist!
4. Launch Rhythmbox and activate the plugin

OMFG and Double You Tee Eff, the people at Songbird announced that they’ll no longer be developing my favorite music playin’ application for Linux anymore. That’s right.

No mo.

Which kind of sucks since it’s so lightweight and basically does just what I need it to: play music. Yeah, go ahead and read about why I liked it so much over here in an earlier post.

But why? WHY INDEED. Let’s just say that the people over at Pioneers of the Inevitable have decided to focus on Songbird for Windows and Mac OS only. At least that’s what’s stated over in the Songbird Wikipedia entry. Songbird will actually still be available for Linux, just no longer supported.

But there’s a silver lining because some Songbird community members are going trying to continue developing an open source music player under the guise of Nightingale, which will basically be a branch of Songbird 1.8.

That’s all I really have to say about it. I mean, what else is there to say? I’ll still use Songbird on Ubuntu 10.04, and when Nightingale becomes available, I”ll test it out. I’m not desperate enough to go back to Amarok 2. I’m definitely never going there again. Never!

Yeah, I did it. I finally did it! I bought a laptop. A Dell Inspiron Core i3 64 bit 15 inch thing to be exact. It came preloaded with Windows 7 and the usual Dell crap and McAfee, which has a generous 10 day free trial. Wow guys. That was awesomely generous indeed!

So after about a week of tweaking this thing, checking out that thing, and generally yawning over the whole Windows 7 experience, I took the next plunge: INSTALL UBUNTU 10.04 LTS!

It worked out stellarly.

I’m glad I waited the week. I was going to install Karmic on it, but then I read that Karmic doesn’t support i3 processors. Lucid Lynx does, and the install was smooooth. In fact, this release is all about change. No longer can we refer to Ubuntu as “Brownbuntu”. That’s right. They’ve removed that hideous brown theme and went with a purpley splash screen. It’s a little sleeker than the last release, and maybe even edging a little closer to Mac OS in style. Still, it feels like Linux and performs great.

Everything works. Video, audio, and the integrated wireless card. It’s kind of ridiculous for me to call it an integrated wireless card in this day and age, isn’t it? It’s a laptop! Everything is integrated!

So, after the install, I installed VirtualBox OSE and installed Windows 7 as a VM. That’s where Windows 7 will live. Forever. And with the VM running, you can really feel that you’re getting your value out of those 4 gigs of RAM. You don’t even feel it, even with Compiz running which is on by default. I may tweak Lynx to use less memory, but for now I’m enjoying the fact that there is no lag whatsoever, no matter what I do!

Now. About the D-Link 615 piece of crap router that I bought from  Dell with my order. I’m about to break the thing in half and go back to my wired router. Wireless is fine. Wired is fine. Browsing anywhere on the ‘ternets? Fine! How about ssh from my laptop back to my wired server? It doesn’t fucking work. I can reach my wired network from my wired machine. But the router seems to be blocking ssh and port 443 just from the wireless network. I’m 100% sure that this has nothing to do with my Dell Inspiron I3.

And yeah, I forwarded ports 443 and 22. Don’t think I didn’t, cause I did.

I’ll let you know how it all works out!

Upgrading to 5.1 should do it.

It’s that simple.

After upgrading Google Earth (a fresh install works fine) on Ubuntu Karmic Koala, you may see this at the end of your install:

Installing desktop icon…
./googleearth-bin: ./libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9′ not found (required by ./libgoogleearth_lib.so)
./googleearth-bin: ./libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9′ not found (required by ./libbase.so)

Google Earth will not launch at all, but here’s how to fix it. You need to remove the 2 library files that Google Earth is complaining about. Here’s how:

Move out or copy the following 2 files from your Google Earth installation directory like so:

google-earth$ mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.bak
google-earth$ mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.bak

Google Earth should then launch.

So there you have it. Another half-assed tech note. Hopefully we’ll get some new gaming reviews when Dan finally takes a break from playing Demon’s Souls and drooling.