Older blog entries for Iain (starting at number 289)

What does anyone want but to feel a little more free

So yesterday I watched Roger and "G" playing guitar and drums, and got depressed (hence yesterday's "happy happy joy joy" entry...) Roger is a total genius on the guitar, and no matter how much I try, I just cannot do what he does. "G" is a total genius on the drums, and even though I have no pretense of being able to play the drums (I can keep a simple beat, but no more) it always depresses me to watch/hear them play, because I know I'll never make sounds as nice as they can make.

Used this depression to go look for online guitar tutorials and spent an hour practicing simple scales. Even though I've been playing guitar for 5years, and I'm pretty good at playing stuff, I just cannot make up my own tunes or improvise or anything, and as I taught myself by having a book showing all the chords and a book of simple church choruses and hymns, I'd never learned scales or styles or techniques or anything fancy. So today I learned A Major, and A Minor Pentonic, to go with A Blues that I already picked up somewhere.

And already I'm impressed by what I'm doing with it. Also came to the conclusion that I need a new amp. My old amp is lying broken in the cupboard and I'm currently using my sister's 10W bass amp, which for a lead guitar sounds crap. Been told (by Roger: Guitar Genius) that I shouldn't get more than 40W because thats what he has and it's too loud to play in the house. Good job I never got the 100W one I wanted years ago.

Over the weekend I got fed up with running out of disk space as I'm compiling things, and ordered a new hard drive as 4gig obviously wasn't enough. Went looking and discovered that the smallest drives generally available were ~40GB. When did this happen? Last I looked everyone was wowing over 10GB, and 20GB if you really were being silly. I still remember the times when 40MB drives were coming on the market. . . Eurghhhh getting too old.

I had to get a UDMA100 card so this would work, so if anyone knows any problems with Linux and Abit Hotrod 100Pro, contact me, as the order is waiting for the drive to be ordered from IBM, so could take a few days/weeks/months/years, and then I can cancel it if they won't work. I'm running 2.4.0-prewhatever, but the website for the card says it works with that Gentoo thing Asus made, which is just a normal linux distro isn't it?

Made a tshirt design for the GYBE! list. It is ICI and I'm quite impressed with how well I did with the GIMP, cos generally I can't do anything with it.

Remember kids: No matter how good you are, there's always someone better than you.

W . A . S . T . E .

M E D I O C R E

Stick 'em up Motherfucker

Lots has happened since last entry I think.

lilo: Sorry I made you bring up bad memories. I obviously don't remember the 60's, and I'm actually glad that I don't, cos I think I'd have hated them. The reason the MTV crap annoyed me so, was (I think) because had it been the other way around and be a revolution to get rid of a person that the "west" liked, and install someone else, then there wouldn't have been any meantion of it at all, even if the people were still thinking for themselves, and had decided that it was what they wanted. I also didn't like that MTV had managed to make a revolution into an advertising gimic: "MTV supported the people of Serbia". And finally, MTV isn't really the bastion of "Free Thinking" normally is it. "Oh, you liked this boyband? Well, you also like this one, this one, and also this one."

So, In my evolution fun hacking, I've rewritten the services code, because Michael said it sucked. Now it works much nicer. Is much cleaner, uses more CORBA/Bonobo concepts that I didn't know/forgot about the first time.

WVDial wise, things are kicking major butt. I can now query a running connection to find out things like init strings, what modem it's using, the phone number it dialed, the password prompt, and loads more stuff. Actually, everything in the configuration section I can read and change while wvdial is running. Should be pretty good when I get it to stop crashing when it tries to reconnect on disconnection. The only problem is this only happens once every 2 hours for me, so the change code/recompile/retry/wait to see if it worked cycle is 2 hours, which kinda sucks.

Tekken 2 wise I am also kicking ass. Could have had Kerny tonight, but he chickened out and played pool.

Some interesting comments on a certain bands 4th album, plus a Kid A to Zzzzzz, which is quite funny.

Rumour has it that the most evil corporation ever are using Low's version of The Little Drummer Boy for one of their adverts. DIE DIE DIEDIEDIEDIEFORNICATE

And Yard Of Blonde Girls is still the sexiest song ever. All I need now is a distortion pedal so I can play it like it should sound.

And thanks to davej I have a modern version of EFM running, so "NAH!" to all you E Hacker people. I'm rather impressed by it, although some of it's UI could be improved. But hey it's good. Just wish it didn't have the same problem that I remember in all other file managers that don't have icon bars. . . how the heck do you move to an upper directory? Sigh. Still, I like it, and it makes a pretty mp3 directory listing :)

W . A . S . T . E .

<person>E-Hackers</person>: Sorry, when I said "E Hackers" I was including users/testers/documenters as they always say they are as important...blah blah blah. But still, I think some of the main developers have attitude problems too.

<blink>WARNING: POLITICALLY INCORRECT SPEECH FOLLOWS. Advogato nor Iain take any responsibility for offense caused. You have been warned</blink>

The Daily Express today had a headline "Free Fruit For School Pupils" and underneath had a large photo of a grinning Elton John. I found it funny. But apparently the two things were completely unrelated. Hoohum

I watched TV tonight and finally was offended and disgusted by one thing. MTV Europe giving Serbia an award for "Free Thinking" because they had a revolution to overthrow a dictator. Quite frankly I was sickened. I bet the Serbians who died's families (what a lot of plurals:) are thinking "Oh well, it was worth it all now, we've got an MTV:Europe Music Award for Free Thinking". And to top it all, after showing pictures of the "revolution", Wyclef Jean came on and said something to the effect of "See, those are the real revolutionaries, not these people you see on TV. You should all be thinking for yourselves.". Fuck off MTV!

You will not be able to stay home brother
you will not be able to plug in, turn on and drop out
you will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip
skip out for beer during commercials
Because the revolution will not be televised
the revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
in 4 parts without commercial interruption
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary
The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner because The revolution will not be televised brother
There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mays
pushing that cart down the block on the dead run
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance
NBC will not be able to predict the winner at 8:32
or the count from 29 districts
The revolution will not be televised
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay
There will be no pictures of young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process
there will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a red, black and
green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
for just the right occasion
Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day
The revolution will not be televised
there will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Engelbert Humperdinck or The Rare Earth
The revolution will not be televised
The revolution will not be right back after a message
about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people
You will not have to worry about a germ in your
bedroom, the tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight germs that can cause bad breath
The revolution WILL put you in the driver's seat
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run brothers
The revolution will be live!

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Gil Scott Heron (1975)

Pity that the chances are, the revolution won't just be televised, it'll be televised, serialised, re-run, made into a movie, sold as a novel, a LTD edition widescreen digitally remastered (with extra footage not seen before) video in a gold box, and a soundtrack album featuring "Revolutionary" songs such as "Wannabe", "Because I Want To" and "I Did It My Way" and sold on Think Shit with a Penguin superimposed over the top.

Or just maybe, they really will miss it. . .

W . A . S . T . E .

mazeone: I wasn't asking for support, I was asking where you could download it, as I wanted to compare it and my semi-working copy of Nautilus, especially as Evas had impressed me so much.

But hey, it reminded me why I left #e in the first place. E hackers have a really bad/elitest attitude. And yes, it is worse than other large channels.

So do you know anywhere to download it? Someone must have a tarball somewhere :)

I went to see Low tonight.

I'd like to say they rocked, but they didn't so much rock as pleased. They were really good, if minimal. They had one guitar, one effects pedal, one bass guitar, one cymbal, one snare drum, and one of the big round ones that sits beside the bass drum if there was a bass drum (which there wasn't). They played for about 70minutes, apologised for the cost of the ticket (8pounds: Very cheap), and played lovely songs

Glad I went

Other News:

Went looking for EFM. Apparently it never existed, and it was all a figment of people's imagination. Lesson of the day: People in #E are not very nice. I vaguely remembered this lesson from when I used to hang out there, but I had forgotten it, or hoped that maybe they had changed. Naivity rules.

W.A.S.T.E.

DIGITAL HARDCORE

Okay, somewhere along the lines the blue turned into purple. Apparently I am now a Master. Why? It's puzzling me.

Started to rewrite that "lovely" interface cos Mr Meeks told me it sucked and was too complicated (internally). Basically, I think it's problem was it was trying to rewrite a whole load of stuff that Bonobo already has, and it was doing it poorly. Michael also showed me what it should be done like, and he's right. It is a lot simpler to use the pre-written stuff Bonobo has. Although I think some of the simplicity has been removed from writing a summary module (I hate calling them services, cos thats so generic).

Tuned my guitar to GABDEG to learn to play some Sonic Youth stuff. Started with Teen Age Riot. Pretty easy, and a nice song.

Inspired by Teen Age Riot, I decided to download some Atari Teenage Riot. :) Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rawk! Pretty good. Have to buy a CD sometime.

The music companies have heard of my "No CDs till Christmas/December" plan, so they're releasing a whole load of good stuff: Lo Fidelity Allstars, . . .Trail of Dead, and other stuff that I've forgotten. Bastards.

And still I can't find John Kettley is a Weatherman on Napster. *sigh*

Should probably go to bed now. . . Can't think of anything else.

W . A . S . T . E .

I wanted to know the exact dimensions of Hell

Libwvdial is coming along nicely. I've got most of the wvdialer class wrapped, execpt for the parts that need other classes wrapped, and wvdial-c.c now does the same stuff as wvdial.cc, execpt it crashes on auto-reconnect (for some unknown reason. . . must investigate), and it doesn't do the logging nicely or handle options. Hey, it's pretty good for the amount of time I've spent on it.

Found libmpeg3. Which looks much better than smpeg, partly because it's in C :) and partly because it doesn't have the SDL limitation. It doesn't have any output renderer, but I might use it in my Nautilus MPEG player. It also handles mpg files, so maybe it could be used in the MPG player nautilus has as well. . . *shrug*

Learned an important lesson today: Commit big changes before Michael Meeks changes all IDL method names. :)

Even though I made it months ago, I've finally updated and uploaded my CD list. Look at it if you're bored and laugh at all the really bad CDs I bought before I got musical taste.

Oh, it doesn't have Kid A on it yet. Oppps.

My panel has decided to stick itself in the middle of my screen, and I've got too many things happening to try to fix it. and I have a scary feeling that Sawmill is going to remember the position it was at and put it there everytime. ARGH!

W . A . S . T . E .

Life is in the mix; cut it up

For some strange reason I learned to play "Time of Your Life" by Greenday. I don't even like Greenday, although Time of Your Life is alright.

The Godspeed You Black Emporer! list isn't as bad as the RHML, but it's still quite bad. They keep meantioning an FTP site that you can download loads of bootlegs but I can't find it. ARGH! I can't ask as I'll look like a clueless newbie (which I am. . . but hey).

Got Xen Cuts back. Still pretty cool.

Slept till 1:30pm today. Really really shouldn't have. But it was the fact that I was up for about 21hours yesterday and got up at 7am again today. So hopefully I'm all slept out and can get up at a reasonable time tomorrow.

Room is still tidy. I need to find some Christmas lights to hang around the place. Just for ambiance and stuff.

Now for bed.

W . A . S . T . E .

WHER I END ND YU BEGIN

In a strange mood I signed up for a GBYE! mailing list. Maybe, just maybe it won't end up like the Radiohead one with me screaming at stupid Americans who just refused to even go anywhere near the point of what anyone else said. And maybe there won't be 100teenyboppers who decided to be "different" and support an "indie" band, and then proceeded to claim they wanted Thom's babies.

Libwvdial.so works! I am currently connected using my amazing 4 line C program.

int main (int argc, char **argv) {
WVDial *dial = wv_dial_new ("/etc/wvdial.conf", 0600, FALSE);
wv_dial_dial (dial);
while (1){ wv_dial_select (dial, 100, -1, -1, -1);
wv_dial_execute (dial);	}
}

Kick ass! Maybe I'll get round to wrapping other things, so that it can do the proper logging and stuff. (But I'll do that when I come up against things that need it. Muhahahaha global takeover here I come!)

Tomorrow is Monday, means everything starts all over again.

I've got a free house Wednesday (I had to correct how I spelled that. . .), Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoon, so if anyone wants to come round, you're welcome. Although I'll be out Wednesday (Got it first time this time. . .) night, and Thursday night.

Have decided that I'm not going to buy anymore CDs till at least December.

Eep. Typing in mozilla makes the scrolling title on my xmms all jerky. Something wrong with that surely.

Leg thing is still driving me crazy.

W . A . S . T . E .