the corner office

Well that's a bit obscure. The Wages of Sin, with Thee Spectres front-man Jesse James.

The Wages of Sin play traditional music for non-traditionalists. They mix Celtic with country with Appalachian with rockabilly with Tex-Mex with bluegrass, and follow the whole mess with a bracing shot of punk rock.

Demo mp3s. I'm tapping my feet as I type this, so I think I like it!

As if my endless tinkering with Gentoo isn't enough (well...), I decided to shuffle a few partitions around and install SuSE Personal 9.1 on my machine as well. This one-disk SuSE distro won over Fedora Core 2 since I didn't have enough spare CD-Rs to cut the four FC2 isos to disk.

I was mightily impressed with the SuSE installation - it went off without a hitch. I had only two gripes: first, the installer chose a fairly high screen resolution (my old 17" doesn't really like more than 1024x768, and SuSE did the install at 1280x1024. Not a biggie though.) The second was the fact that the system required a reboot during installation. Admittedly, I just sat back and didn't need to touch anything, and the reboot worked fine, but I had a bit of flutter wondering if I needed to remove the CD, whether GRUB would behave, etc. A prominent dialog saying "I'm rebooting, RELAX AND DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING" wouldn't have been amiss.

I booted into SuSE and mucked around a little. My main motivation, to be honest, was to compare the performance and general "cohesiveness" to what I've built up with Gentoo. Needless to say, it all feels a little more opaque and further from the wire than Gentoo, but SuSE's hardware recognition, self-configuration and resulting "feel" is superb - miles ahead of the last version of SuSE I played with 2 years ago. But if I stick with SuSE, will I be admitting defeat with my built-just-for-me Gentoo install? Hmmm.

I'll play around with both a little longer.

The majority of the weekend was spent playing with Gentoo. An emerge world saw a heap of updates to KDE and Gnome come down the line... many many many hours of compiling. Then I decided to try rolling my own Thunderbird. Not a good idea... that chugged away for hours. Then Eclipse... couple more hours, and finally OpenOffice which took nearly 13 hours to compile. The novelty of compiling my own stuff is wearing off. On the up side, apart from a looong list of things to tweak and sort out, I have a semi-usable system, and apart from minor details like mail and Notes access, I'm spending less and less time in Windows.

Very few other distractions over the weekend - we rented a DVD on Saturday (Big Fish - very good), and met Paula and Lee and Andrew at the Manhattan Grill on Sunday night. Speaking of Manhattan, Paula's leaving soon on her company's annual ra-ra. This year they're going to Cancun and New York. Bah.

It also turns out I missed a chance to meet up with Mr Blakey-Milner who was up to present at the Open Source Software Africa conference. It's only been, oh, 7 years since we last met up? :)

Thanks to Mr Vaughan, I have me a gmail account. Thanks Jonvon! :-)

Ronwen and I were off to Cresta for lunch, and decided to catch a movie while we were there. It's been months since we last went to movies (always too busy or lazy). We ended up watching Around The World In 80 Days. Some less than stellar bits but overall good clean fun. The fight scenes with JackieChan! are always good fun. A good few cameos... Arnie didn't do it for me, but Rob Schneider's part had us in stitches.

I ate too much though. Came home and spent the evening feeling sorry for myself on the couch and mooching around with Gentoo. R & I watched 'Coming To America' on SABC3. Still a damned funny movie - especially the various Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall characters. It's always a hoot to revisit or even rediscover the source of old gags and lines that are nowadays part of our common culture, 16 years later. As I said to Ronwen, it's painful to look back at the clothes and hair styles and music and think we grew up with that, but then again, if you're willing to re-embrace that 80s cheese, you can hook back into a lot of good memories.

On Thursday night I finished reading Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris. No, I have no pretensions of getting into game development, but let's be honest, it's the coolest part of the IT industry, and I bought the book for a bit of armchair tourism, if you will. The fact that it took me months to finish is perhaps indicative that I found it pretty slow going. If I hadn't coughed up so much for it, I'd probably have given up.

It's a fairly comprehensive treatment of games development - not much nitty-gritty technical stuff, but instead a detailed treatment of various aspects of the games making process - from the earliest design phases to the final goal of shipping a game. It is interesting and valuable in that it applies good old software development best practices and principles to the context of game development, and that obviously is still applicable to the boring work the rest of us do. Some of the principles almost seem heretical and counter to our images of what ubergeek game developers do - but that's the point the authors repeatedly make - games are BIG these days, and need a different set of rules now: the anarchic culture is actually holding the games industry back.

The book is well written and I kept coming across truisms and examples and observations that had me thinking 'hmm, I should make a note of this' - but in the end I just didn't find myself excited about reading it. I can't say why - some sections just seemed to go on forever, and in general, I guess what I should call the "resonance to noise ratio" just wan't that high for me. There's some really decent, insightful and useful content, but not enough for me to say I enjoyed the book.

An interesting bit of controversy in Linux-land. A disagreement between the author of driver code for a family of Philips webcams and a kernel maintainer has resulted in the driver author insisting that his code be removed from the Linux kernel.

The story is well covered at Kerneltrap. Two things strike me though. The first is that Linus Torvalds insisted that the kernel maintainers do the right thing and respect this person's wishes to have his code removed from the kernel, even though as GPL'd software, they'd be legally entitled to keep using the code. Not an easy decision (see below), but it's nice to see people being honourable instead of hiding behind the legalities, for their own benefit.

The other issue is that this is a case where the "rules" (this rule being that no special-purpose hooks are allowed in the kernel for non-open-source modules) actually appear to be hurting people, ie everyday Linux users. Many of them invested in these webcams because they were supported under Linux, and that's no longer the case. The argument is often raised that some kernel developers are unreasonably zealous in their refusal to deal with proprietary modules in the Linux kernel. The pragmatic angle though, is that these people spend a large part of their lives working with, understanding and debugging the Linux kernel. When proprietary modules come along, the process of debugging falls apart because there is then potentially broken code which the kernel developers can't see. Hence the rules. That's hardly unreasonable, but shouldn't these rules be fudged occasionally, perhaps, in order to make it easier to spread the Linux gospel? Tough call...

My pet hate when it comes to technical forums: people who genuinely or otherwise think they're being helpful by firing of the most obvious possible solution to a problem. The etiquette of technical forums is such that people are inclined to think you're an absolute twat if you stare a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm not so sure whether every horse is worth having.

Case in point, is me trawling the Gentoo forums for various pointers to the problem of a slow/juddery/sluggish/lagging/uneven/choppy/not smooth mouse when working in X (yes, the IT world needs a single canonical term for 'juddery' to simplify searches.) There are a host of reasons why my machine could be so slow and I'm trying my best to find and work through them. Almost every single posting on this topic, though, has at least one version of the most helpful "make sure DMA is enabled." This is the most obvious thing to check on a slow system, but by 2004 it must also be the statistically least likely problem with modern hardware and distributions.

As I said, netiquette says you should be grateful for someone taking the time to throw back this answer, but that's exactly the problem: the person replying is *not* really taking time. They're firing off a half-hearted response that took zero effort to think think up, write and post. This is not really helping anyone (except in a few cases) - this is just someone on the wrong end of a sense of self-importance who likes to see their name on-screen.

What you end up with is a person asking a question and a back and forth of emails or posts on a discussion board that are an absolute waste of time:

"my mouse is choppy"
"have you enabled DMA"
"yes, I have"
"try x"
"already done that, thanks"
"have you done y?"
"tried that, no luck."
"what about z?"
"did that already"
"sorry, then I'm stumped too"

Aaaargh! This is not how I define "help", I'm sorry. By the time every member of the peanut gallery has thrown their "try x" thoughtlet into the pot, the knowledge/sludge ratio of the thread is dreadful. A rare gem is the person who takes the time to reply with a list of steps, or perhaps a more in-depth exploration of possible causes and solutions. Now that is a person deserving of gratitude and kudos. But under no circumstances is "have you enabled DMA" a worthwhile use of frigging bandwidth and time.

Not that your average question-asker is off the hook either. One should know how to ask questions the smart way. By stating what trouble-shooting steps you've already taken, you allow would-be helpers to get on your wavelength as quickly as possible. Plenty people don't bother doing this.

Poorly stated questions tend to get jumped on fairly quickly though, so there's enough pressure out there pushing question-askers in the right direction. The problem is that this interminable politeness because somebody is supposedly "taking the time" to help others, means that there's next to no pressure on question-answerers to get their act together.

Senkwe just mentioned a new wireless player in South Africa: iBurst, who should be going live by the end of 2004. Pretty cool, although yet again, our side of Northcliff hill probably won't be covered, and as Senkwe hints, there's no guarantee that they'll be any good, as much as one hopes they will be.

What is heartening though is that Sentech, despite the many issues their service has had, has nudged open the floodgates. A great many new players will probably start stepping into the market to meet the pent-up demand for first-world connectivity. I'm sure that wireless is going to be *big* in South Africa, precisely because of Telkom's monopoly on terrestrial infrastructure. Hopefully that will also force Telkom to make its broadband more competitive to avoid being sidelined by the wireless operators.

I remember this being on the telly weeks back. An old man dies, a so-called prophet says he will rise again, and so the family refuse to bury the body and wait for a magical day that keeps getting postponed. Now the cops have said enough is enough:

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African authorities will bury a 77-year-old man who has been dead seven weeks despite his family saying a "prophet" had promised them he would be resurrected, police said on Tuesday.

Paul Meintjes's body was returned to his family late last week after the local mortuary refused to store it any longer. The body was kept in his widow's bedroom at their Free State home for three days before officials said it was a health risk and ordered it taken to the state morgue.

"The body is OK -- it is still recognizable," police spokesman Sam Makhele told Reuters by telephone from Bloemfontein. "But after a few days out of the fridge the smell was not OK."

At the time I had one of my "bah religion" tirades which usually end with the missus saying "Colin. Shut up already." I just can't help but wonder what the family would have done if the fuzz hadn't stepped in. At what point do one's nostrils override one's faith?

(via Gauteng Blog)