12 Dec 2006 ncm   » (Master)

I dist-upgraded my brother's Toshiba laptop to Ubuntu Edgy, and now it can't find open wireless hubs any more. In particular, the waproamd daemon won't even run any more; libc insists it's passing the wrong number of arguments to some apparently undocumented system call. The web (but not the package system!) is plastered with warnings that waproamd is obsolete and buggy. However, waproamd always worked perfectly for my brother, where wpa_supplicant doesn't (yet?). Furthermore, iftab no longer works reliably across ACPI suspensions to give the wireless interface a stable name. This upgrade was a decided downgrade, for him; his computer is entirely unusable until I can get anonymous wireless networking going again. On the good side, the PCMCIA slot works now, as does DMA on the DVD drive.

I just fixed a problem in my mother-in-law's Firefox 2 on Ubuntu: the bodies of her Yahoo mail messages showed up blank. The NoScript plug-in turned out to be at fault, and the workaround turned out to be clicking the checkbox in its configuration that caused it to display all domain names, not just 2nd-level, allowing them to be turned on and off individually. I didn't actually need to turn any on or off; just displaying them sufficed. That was another downgrade; one wouldn't say 1.5 "worked fine" (*cough* memory leaks! *cough*) but...

Hibernating this Dell Latitude D620 with swsuspend2 seems to work OK except that the "snd_hda_intel" driver for the mixer (variously identified as a SigmaTel STAC9200, Intel ICH7 82801G, and Intel HDA) gets very confused, and ultimately unable to produce audio. I don't know who to tell about it, so here you-all get to hear about it.

Zaitcev: How curious that the chart omits G.W. Bush. I suppose it's not clear yet whether he will ultimately achieve placement in the 1M+ group. It seems worth noting that Hitler, unlike most others in the list, was legally elected. (Others: Ataturk? Mussolini?)

bi: I created the Orkut group "Libertarians Make Me Laugh" some years ago. Still the silliest thing posted there was a (real!) quote from Eric Raymond insisting that markets weren't invented, but were rather a natural phenomenon, spontaneously discovered: "the free market isn't a 'device' any more than love or gravity or sunshine are devices". Big-"L" Libertarianism is best understood not as a political philosophy, but rather as a religion, closely akin to Scientology and Marxism, and also, curiously, (under the name Objectivism) a sexual perversion. (I'll bet you thought those didn't exist any more!)

elanthis: Years ago I was driving behind a Dodge pickup truck that rear-ended a little Mazda Miata. The front of the Dodge truck was all stove in, a real mess. The Miata came away looking barely touched -- a couple of minor scratches on the bumper that might already have been there. My major professor used to boast of the number of Volvos he had totalled with the backside of his VW Rabbit. 28 years ago I stove in the front of a Rabbit, myself, on the back of a Datsun pickup with no bumper, also left undamaged.

[Update:] Zaitcev: Collars are both a Victorian fetish, and currently popular among cross-dressers to obscure their protruding Adam's-apple. (Cf. Tootsie) I don't know how those tie into anime, but fetishism seems inextricable with the genre. I just saw Nausicaa, and the protagonist's omission of a certain often-fetishized article of clothing must have been meant as a sly dig at genre fans.

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