Older blog entries for Adrian (starting at number 19)

Just to reiterate a few points other folks have made.

Go buy King Crimson cds. Go to The DGM Diaries. An interesting perspective on the whole "stealing somebody elses music is or is not part of my human rights" debate.

However, I dont think pointing to King Crimson's "Club" releases as a model of an alternative business model for musicians is particularly realistic. King Crimson have an extremely loyal "cult" following. Not everybody can have half a dozen top notch world class virtuosos and 30 years of recording and touring before they expect to be able to survive.

Todays cd recomendation: "Audio" by Blue Man Group. Nice cd. Lots of invented instruments, included some detail on what the instruments look like and how they are constructed. See About the music for some online info about the cd.

The Scott McCloud books are extremely good. Just recently purchases and read "Understanding Comics" again. The first time I read it I just happened to pick up a friends copy, and continued to skip two classes to finish it in one sitting on first read. Good book. "Reinventing Comics" seems to be equally as good. And this from someone who does not read comics or anime.

Oh my. Worlds colliding. What fun.

Been using xml-rpc alot in some projects recently, so I've been trying to make a habit of checking out Scripting.com on occasion. I check today, and what do I see but a article about advogato.

It was only a matter of time before the advogato's, the webloggers, and the wiki bunch met head on.

I suspect very interesting things to come out of this. Neat.

Oh well, nothing interesting to say. Some projects at work are finally starting to come together, and should be quite cool when ready.

So raph, when do we get the xml-rpc interface to advogato? Time for me to check out mod_virgule again I suppose.

So, one thing I learned after doing tech support for a while is that not many people know how to tune linux based servers. The info out there on the net is hard to find (though there are some excellent resources once you find them...). And people tend to result to repeating random bits of info that may or may not be useful.

So, I finally got around to writing up some of the info I've picked up over the years. Much of it has come from picking the brains of ThoseThatMakeThingsFast (hey zab).

Hopefully, this Linux System Tuning will prove useful to someone.

It's not complete, there are probably errors in it, it has a painful lack of real numbers to back up the claims, and some of it is soon to be outdated. But then, whats new?

And note, most of this is geared towards getting good benchmark numbers, or for helping the occasional ExtremeNetworking case you encounter in the real world. A lot of it isnt really geared for your run of the mill overpowered underbandwidth'ed webserver serving up a few thousand measly hits a day.

btw: Doom on my camera now has sound support as well.Whee!

I do not have a cell phone.
I do not have a pager.
I do not have a palm pilot.

I do however, have a digital camera I can play Doom on.

So who wants to write a mp3 decoder for it?

I'm not at OLS. I suck.

Ho hum. Nothing exciting going on.

Hit the used book store over the weekend. Picked up Messaging and Queuing Using the MQI Hi Keith. As well as a copy of Complete Book of Underground Houses, The Evolution of Useful Things, and the new King Crimson cd "The Construkction of Light". Nice cd. Good music to build a underground bunker to.

Flame wars are such fun. I cant seem to escape them recently. And none even particularly entertaining. If you are going to flame, at least be entertaining.

Oooh, look. Other folks here interested in wacky ways to build houses. Been reading up on this alot recently. Having a co-worker that spent some time building Earthships professionally doesnt hurt any either. Somehow I dont think I can convince Red Hat to build our next office out of straw bales however. Living in an apartment in North Carolina isnt exactly the best place to try building a earth shelter home either. Sigh.

Speaking of which, anyone know of any cool modern buildings in North Carolina? Or any earthworks for that matter? Looking for an excuse to abuse the dc-290 ;->

Nothing interesting is going on. Just figured I'd fill the internet with yet more completely useless drivel. The kind that proves that computers should be hard to use.

It seems HA software has become the gtk irc client of the last few months. No idea if that is good or bad.

Linux installfests have become almost completely pointless. Well, the _install_ part anyway. The last 8 or ten I've been to were more like hackonrandomstufffests. And then eventually playing quake. Which I suppose if possibly more useful than installing yet another machine.

I seem to have had two different people named Adrian ask me if they could take over my account named "adrian" at various sites within the last day. Weird.

Current Reading

• The Straw Bale House
• Modern Architecture Since 1900
• A lame NDS book to rename nameless

Current Listening

Home
• Steve Hackett: Watcher of the Skies
• Michael Hedges: The Best of
• Tool: Aenima
Car
• Fugazi: Repeater + 3
• Trans Am: Futureworld
• Adrian Belew: Desire of the Rhino King
• Allan Holdsworth: Metal Fatigue
• Bozzio Levin Stevens: Black Light Symphony

I told you it was a useless post.

Stop with the free/open source software essays already. No one cares.

Stop talking about contributing to free/open software, and start contributing to free/open software. Or dont contribute. Just stop freaking writing about it.

Hmm. Much griping on gimp-developer about the www.gimp.org web site. Perhaps it's because no one has really webmaster'ed it in just about three years.

All the old folks who used to try to keep it up to date, myself included, are no longer interested. I have pretty much no interest in web "stuff" anymore. Particularly where "stuff" is markup, scripting, database setup, learning the new web language of the week, doing graphics, and other fluff. When did websites become such a chore?

The interesting thing is the sheer number of people who have promised help, but never delivered even a single typo fix, or even a suggestion for a link. It's enough to make you completely distrust any offers for help that arent backed up with immediate indications of sincerity. Just something simple like, "heres this web page I made of gimp links."

So, as far as I'm concerned, www.gimp.org site is dead, and has been for at least two years. Despite several requests for help, no one has ever really done any significant amount of work to fix it. Lots of offers to make it "php based" and dynamic, and easily editible, and autoupdating, etc etc, none ever come through though. I havent really considered myself the webmaster for at least two years. But seeing as known else has taken over the webmaster title, I guess it's still me.

I suspect a lot of it has to do with the original rather large intended scope of the site. It was going to be The Resource for gimp related stuff, and was for a short time period. But even at its peak, only maybe %30 of the content "scoped out" was ever completed. So the task of migrating what is there, and potentially having to come up with the rest is somewhat intimidating.

The weird thing is, despite the vast majority of the content on the site being between 2 and 3 years old, no one has really created a better site. Not to mention maintain a better site. It seems even odder given the fact that the gimp is probabaly used in the creation of many web sites, the site for the tool itself languishes. I dont quite get it.

And the fun part is all the griping about the lack of content/reaction from gimp.org webmasters, stems from a thread starting with a positive comment about a tutorial I wrote about a gimp feature I added. Nothing quite like having a nice comment about a contribution you made being turned into a gripefest about your webmastering skills. Oh well, such are the travails of gimp-developer and why we enjoy it so much.

So, the good news is that at the moment, there is at least one person with demonstrated web skills at least contemplating the next version of the site. Anyone else interested?

And please, no comments about how it should be easy to edit my lots of folks, and we can host it at sourceforge, and php is really cool, and *sql rules, wikiwikithisorthat, etc. I know already.