04/29/06
Before I start let me make it perfectly clear, I love Linux but it can be so infuriating at times.
We use Linux at Interactive Sports Technologies and it has proven to be rock solid and reliable and we have have no problem with the Soundblaster audio drivers that we use in our flagship product. We have introduced Linux to our digital media guys and they love it too but they had one problem, the audio didn't work on the Dell machines with the built in sound chip installed in the motherboard. All the drivers loaded OK but no sound came out and when I tried to open the mixer I received an unhelpful error message.
Warning Linux Geek section begins!!! Reading this section may make your eyes glaze over. Scroll down to skip over.
Off to the internet I went to search for information on what to do to resolve it. I didn't find the smoking gun but I did garner enough clues that it might be kernel related so I decided to update the kernel to the lastest revision. Rebooted with the new kernel and X whined, complained and barfed when it started evetually started up with the generic SVGA driver. I had forgotten the Nvidia drivers needed to be reinstalled because they were compiled against the kernel. Sigh. Then realized that I couldn't reinstall the Nvidia drivers because I hadn't installed the kernel source. Double Sigh. Downloaded and installed the kernel source, reinstalled the Nvidia drivers, got X up and running as before, popped a CD in the drive, Gnome CD player automatically started and ..... no sound. Checked with a test sound, everthing sounded OK. Remembered that in the past I had used alsaplayer because the CD player to sound card audio connection wouldn't work.
Even though ALSA drivers and tools are installed, alsaplayer isn't included in the distro. Choices, download, compile or install alsaplayer or find a precompiled binary for my distro. Decided to go the precompiled route so I ran a quick Google search and found that the Dries RPM repository had what I needed. So I updated yum.conf, got it to fetch alsaplayer and the dependant packages I needed but they wouldn't install because I had forgotten to import the GPG key for Dries. Sigh. Off to the Dries website again, get the key install it, install alsaplayer, pop in the CD and ....... success! Stop alsaplayer, push the eject button so I can eject the CD and go home and ....... nothing. CD drawer stays firmly closed. No disk icon on the desktop for me to right click on the eject the disk. Run the disk management tool, it tells me there are mounted filesystems I can unmount. Open a shell prompt, try to unmount the cdrom, mount tells me the filesystem isn't in fstab.
Off to Google again, find out about the eject command. Try it, cryptic error message. Su to root, try eject command again, CD drawer opens. Mutter to myself, what kind of an OS lets me put a CD in the drive but won't let me take it out? A little more Google research and I find out about PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules). Fiddle with /etc/security/console.perms, add the user into the disk group, think it worked on one machine but doesn't seem to work on another. Finally lose patience, set the sticky bit on the eject program and call it a day.
Linux Geek section ends
Like I said at the beginning I love Linux but some days it can be like the old dog who sits beside your easy chair who you reach down to pet every so often. The one day you reach down to pet him and he bites you.
I know what you are going to say, I should have used another distro, there is a much easier way to do what I did..... My main point is that it really shouldn't be this hard. Many people would have reached either for the screwdriver or the Windows CD.
BTW the picture above is from Lazy Daisy Log, I've asked her for permission to use it I hope she says yes.
04/23/06
I just discovered Google video and here are some videos that I thought were neat.
Check it out yourself at http://video.google.com/
If you find one you like add a link to it below.
While you are at it check out the Brokeback Mountain parody in 30 seconds with bunnies .
04/19/06
A bit late but today's entry is about Easter.
On Easter Sunday I got up at 5:45 so that I could attend the CBC's Easter Sunrise Gospel chorale concert that was held at CBC headquarters in downtown Toronto. I made it downtown by 6.45, availed myself of some of the free coffee, juice and muffins and headed in to find a seat in the Barbara Frum atrium. The nice thing about going to a live radio concert is that you know it will start on time. By the time I got there most of the seating on the main floor was taken but since none of my family had decided to join me I managed to find a seat and sit down near the back of the room.
The four choirs which performed were the Nathanial Dett Chorale, Sharon Riley and Faith Chorale, Spirit of Joy and the Toronto Mass Choir. The choirs sang both together and seperately, the audince got to sing along on a few numbers too. The complete concert program can be seen at http://www.cbc.ca/radioshows/CHORAL_CONCERT/20060416.shtml .
At the end of the concert they announced that selected audience members who found a post card taped to the underside of their chairs had won a CD. The couple who sat beside me found a card but for some unstated reason decided to give it to me. The woman said that it was because I sang so heartily during the sing along portion of the program. I wished them both a Happy Easter and headed off to get my CD from the CBC girl in the red T-shirt. The concert started at 7 a.m. so it could be broadcast live the the east coast, so I got to catch part of the second half of it as I drove back home to attend the Easter breakfast at my church.
Though at times when the band was accomapnying the choirs it could be difficult to understand exactly what they were saying what I heard in the car didn't match the emotional impact of being there. It was worth getting up early for.
04/14/06
I wrote this when someone asked in a class I was in about the Bible Code. I checked The Bible Code out of the library, did some internet research and this is what came out.
Throughout history there has been interest in uncovering the “secrets†of the Bible. In 1997 Michael Drosnin published The Bible Code which explores biblical prophesy based on a coding method called Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS). In an ELS code a text has all punctuation and space removed to form one long unbroken string of letters. The coded message can be found by selecting letters based on a fixed spacing which is often referred to as a skip number. The underlined letters in this sentence form an ELS that encodes the word safest with a skip of -4.[1] Words can be encoded in either the forward or reverse direction.
Drosnin based his book on the work of Dr. Eliyahu Rips an Israeli mathematician who along with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenburg published a paper in Statistical Science in 1994 which described an experiment where they searched for the name of 32 prominent Rabbinic personalities along with the dates of their birth or death in the Hebrew text of Genesis. They then measured how close together the names and dates were found and compared these results with control texts. They concluded that “the proximity of ELS’s with related meaning is not due to chanceâ€.[2] In searching for these messages the letters were arrayed in a grid so that words of related meaning can be searched for. An example from Gen. 26:5-10 (KJV) is shown in the figure. [3] The grid is formed by dividing the text into lines 33 characters long. The word code has a skip of -36, bible a skip of -100. Drosnin's book illustrates multiple examples of these interlocking words found in the Old Testament written in Hebrew. Drosnin suggests the sealed book referred to in Isaiah is the bible code.[4] He also believes that the stories of Joseph and Daniel contain references to the Bible Code.[5] In Drosnin’s book Rips states very low probability estimations of these interlocking words occurring by chance without ever explaining the mathematical basis for his estimates.[6] Not to be outdone Christian's have undertaken Bible Code research. One well known group runs a website called Bible Code Digest,[7] This site purports to present “compelling empirical evidence that the Bible was written by an intelligence far beyond the abilities of manâ€. There are a number of scholars who have challenged both the original research by Rips et.al. and Drosnin's findings. One is Brendan MacKay, an Australian mathematician. In 1999 he and Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai published a refutation of Rips’ article in Statistical Science. They offer explanations other than the hand of God which explain the original results. MacKay also maintains that no one has been able to find coded messages in the Bible that cannot be easily explained by random chance.[8] One statement of Drosnin's that has caused much disagreement is “Consistently, the Bible code brings together interlocking words that reveal related information ... In experiment after experiment, the crossword puzzles were found only in the Bible. Not in War and Peace, not in any other book, and not in ten million computer generated casesâ€.[9] Thomas have found interlocking words in War and Peace, Moby Dick and Drosnin's own works.[10] Price has also generated a collection of coded contradictions found in Genesis.[11] MacKay has replied to Drosnin's assertion that MacKay's examples from books other than the Bible don't follow Rips' rule of minimal skip. Minimal skip is an important factor in Bible Code research as shorter words will appear many times in any text. Witztum, Rips and Rosenburg applied an arbitrary rule that words are only valid when they have the minimum skip that occurs in the text under study.[12] MacKay maintains that Drosnin does not always follow this rule in the diagrams in his book and that MacKay's examples are as valid as Drosnin's.[13] It is clear that hidden words can be found in any text. The question is whether those found in the Bible are the work of God or are a result of the same rules of chance that produce the messages found in secular works. Jeffrey Tigay has suggested that the convoluted path the Hebrew texts have followed make the preservation of any ancient code extremely unlikely.[14] Drosnin maintains that these code words were placed to warn of impending problems and disasters. In the end whether one believes in coded messages in the Bible or not is a matter of faith. These coded messages discovered in the Bible do not prove the existence of God any more than the rising and setting of the sun proves that God exists. Attempting to use these “messages†as an interpretive short cut is as valid as saying the locusts in Revelation are helicopter gunships. Biblical interpretation is not as easy as sitting down at your computer and typing in a few search terms and seeing what pops up.
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