On Guake and VTE bug

December 1st, 2012

I ran Fedora 18 Beta on my laptop for a few days. Thought i’d give Gnome3 another chance and maybe check the status of MATE in F18 beta. Interesting days. Let’s start with Gnome3. No. The development team is insane. I refuse to accept the “fact” that touchscreen is the future. Typing needs a keyboard, and the philosophy of all work should be done on touchscreen is just plain wrong. In addition to that, the development team has decided for all of us that you can’t change or tweak anything. At all. So it’s Gnome3 team’s way or the no-way. This machine has 10” display – most ot the setting windows are too big for this screen with its humble 1024×600 resolution. I grab the window with Alt.. And.. nothing. You can’t drag windows at all. So. No configuration of anything for me either. Worst thing is the philosophy of one window at the time. Image this. I’m on a couch after work, i hit play on Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix. I take comfortable  position and fire up DIYLC v3 on my laptop. I start drawing a layout. Now. I would normally like to see the schematic on another window, side by side with the DIYLC… No. You can’t do that. If you want to see two things at once, you’ll need a second display. Which is really handy for couch and a laptop. These features make Gnome3 just unusable for me.

So i installed MATE. Lots of packages are missing at the time of writing like mate-panel, mate-system-monitor, mdm to mention a few.. All dbus commands are currently lost in transit, so no suspend. It’s a raw, sour grape at the moment. It has a chance, but if you’re not a developer – don’t use it yet. F18 beta is missing so much functionality at the moment, that i can’t recommend it.  I had  fun with it for a couple of days, but it was time to start doing something else too than just play with semi-functional OS of tomorrow.

So i did what everyone wanting a fully working Linux should do. I installed CentOS 6.3. I needed to get Ralink wireless driver from Elrepo, but otherwise everything works like intended – which is pretty rare for any Linux. Gnome2.. Aaahhh. Everything works and developers didn’t think you were stupid back when it was made. Still the most painless desktop experience to date. EPEL has a package for Guake! Last time i installed C6 for my primary use, i had to build it. Grab it, but don’t open EPEL as a repo for general  use. That’s my opinion :)

Anyway. CentOS has VTE bug that drops apps using it to TERM=dumb. Meaning that while the terminal works correctly, it doesn’t know how to open any application inside the terminal.

echo -e “TERM=xterm\nexport TERM” >> ~/.bashrc

Do that with root and your user. And restart Guake.

 

 

DIY or DIE.

November 15th, 2012

It’s been pretty long since i last wrote to this blog. I guess should probably update the records list and do many many many other things. I would like to write up more howtos and why not some things about diy pedal building.

It’s been a year now since i got my very first guitar effect pedal construction set. I ordered it from general guitar gadgets. It was a clone of Dan Armstrong Green Ringer pseudo ring modulator. First build attempt, success. Needless to say, that “hobby” sucked me right in with that high of a new success. Since i’ve built 93 finished builds and i have a quite large shoe box filled with tested circuits just waiting to be boxed. I don’t think i will ever box all of them though. 9 units of that 93 are the FYAElectronics Apiformis Fuzztortion. You can check out my page at fyaelectronics.com for more info. I have a few more designs coming up too..

Main reason why i started writing to this blog today was; I’d like to share my own layouts. I’m not trying to compete with the masters like Mark or Harald. I just find it soothing to draw them as pedantically as i see fit. For now i’ve mainly done classic fuzzes because they are simple and to face the facts, no one can ever have too many fuzzes. There are two folders currently. One with the layouts i’ve built myself and other as “unverified”. If you build one of those, please let me know so that i can move them to verified folders…

I guess i could/should share some of my layouts here too.. The ones that are not too controversial.

Upgading PrestaShop

December 17th, 2011

I’ve done this already four times, though my friend’s shop has been up less than six months. There is auto-upgrade option in the menus, but it doesn’t work. Or at least hasn’t worked once yet. As you and i can read from official PrestaShop wiki, upgrading help is somewhat windows-based and requires lots of bandwidth upwards, if done the way official wiki suggests. Since you’re probably running Linux server if you’re reading this, you updating the version though terminal is more or less hassle free. If you use “my way”, think for a second what you’re doing. It’s basically same thing as in the wiki, but simpler and terminal orientated.

Prestashop is nice software indeed. It’s pretty straight forward to install, setup and use. My friends have small punk-record label, and i have set up PrestaShop for them. I have toyed around with other free/open e-commerce softwares too.. But this one is simple enough with lots of features. On this example, we don’t have any custom themes, since those cost relatively much compared to the business that the store draws in. At this point you have done off site backups from your database and files, right?

First, lets see what needs to be done..

  1. Get the update package
  2. Unzip it
  3. Rename it
  4. Copy the essential files and folder to the new installation
  5.  Run the installer/updater
  6. Rename folders
  7. Rename Admin-folder
  8. Remove install-folder

Ok. So SSH to your server and cd yourself to the / of the shop. And simply:

wget {path_to_latest_release}.zip
unzip {latest_release}.zip
mv prestashop shop_new
cp -r shop/mails shop_new/
cp -r shop/img shop_new/
cp shop/modules/editorial shop_new/modules/
cp shop/config/settings.inc.php shop_new/config/
mv shop/ shop_old
mv shop_new/ shop
{Run the installer http://domain.tld/shop/install/}
mv shop/admin shop/admin{your_very_own_security_through_obscurity_number}
rm -rf shop/install
(rm -rf shop_old -  if you know what you're doing)

That should do it.

As appendix, here’s what we did – Repetitio mater studiorum est: Use wget to get update package straight away to the server. Unzip it and rename it as “shop_new”. Copy, or merge /mails, /img, static modules and main configuration file to the update folder. Rename old shop as old and new as shop. Run the installer. Rename shop/admin-folder, to your liking, remove shop/install-folder. Test everything before even thinking about removing shop_old-folder.

Weird.

September 22nd, 2011

Must say that i really like my co-workers. Stimulating conversations among work related things. Just recently we discussed about this modern plague (plague in my opinion), that everything is not matter anymore. You know, when you buy something, you’re not receiving the product, but usage restrictions. These are laid out in different EULAs across every piece of machinery you touch. May it be service or some physical thing, you should always read the fine print. Last spring there was an episode on South Park about Apple’s end user licence agreement. The restrictions are so complex, that reading thoughtfully through 50 pages of law text is just too hard for most. Well. Since you don’t know what you have agreed to, you don’t have much to say. Sony did just something absolutely intolerable. With latest PS3 update, you’ll have to agree not to participate in class action law suit against Sony. Decline will render your console unusable. Way to go guys. If i was to release commercial software, i would add 150 pages of legal mumble – and on the page 137 i would state, that: “By pressing “I Agree” -button on the bottom of the page, i, the end user, submit myself to be dragged out of the bed at night and shot under streetlights of any capital of any country by anyone affiliated with the company that offer this product for your convenience.” Then, by definition of law, i could drag any user out of the bed at night and shoot him/her in the head under any streetlight in Helsinki city area. I’d really like to test this in practice. What would the law be able to do? My company would have made the text bullet proof, of course. Well. I could not be tried for murder, now could i? This is just little over the head as an example. In Sony’s case, they have taken away the right of the user to sue the company, if something really bad would happen. If there would be another security breach at Sony, users couldn’t do practicvally anything about it. “Sorry, we lost 70 000 000 of your credit card details again, but this time we made sure that you can’t sue us about it!” Fair? Yes. I think it is. I’ve agreed to this. Not that i really have a choice with 350€ console and ongoing subscription to PSplus. Well. Class action suits are not in use where i live, and i’d really like to see European Union’s legal administration’s take on this. I guess it’s legal. But can you really use EULA to take away that kind of right? I’m not going to use brackets, but here we go: 1, 2, 3

There would so much to talk about again. I’m still angry and pissed. Almost started to write about common user agreements from the ISPs we have here where i live.. But i won’t. At least not today. While whole world seem to be slipping away, straight to hell, i’m going to grab a soda and enjoy another episode from TNG season 3.

Pulseaudio, M-Audio 2496 and Linux.

August 25th, 2011

I guess that most of you know about PulseAudio. Beautiful on paper, great in general, but nightmare for those who are not using out of the box supported devices. I for one, have pretty old, still pretty good M-Audio 24/96 in my home desktop. This card is performing well with Ardour and has everything one could ask for home demo recordings. Except of course for mic pre-amps, but those are relatively cheap as separate hardware..

Anyway. Since i switched over from windows back in ’05, this card and it’s “sisters” (1010 and others with ICE1712 chip) worked nicely and out of the box with current Alsas. But that was before PulseAudio. On those classic Alsa installs, the only real problem was that Flash-plugins from those days stole whole interface. Alsa needed killing before it could play anything else again.

Last night, i was trying to launch VirtualBox on my home machine running Fedora 15. With KDE4.5 – If you’re wondering, read my older post. Seemed that i had not installed all  the needed modules, though i had ran it earlier. Tried to modprobe and so forth. With no success. Then i tried yum udate. This is where everything went straight to hell. I wasn’t aware that Fedora can and will change kernel in release. 38 changed to 40…

Reboot wouldn’t start it up. I used older kernel to get things going, and google’d the problem. With no real results. Since i’m not a big fan of KDE and even smaller fan of Gnome3, i did what i was thinking earlier. When everything fails – CentOS 6. Install was smooth. As can be expected.

Few things “negative” on CentOS 6 are: No latest, shiny features ore packages. Some basic tools need to be built, like Guake. On positive side, it features Gnome 2.28.2 and offers rock solid stability. First thing after the install you’ll probably want to:

yum install gconf-editor nano

to get rid of spatial file browsing and nano is still “the easy” editor. (I never understood the spatial file browsing…) Once i got everything mostly set up (setting repos for elrepo, rpmforge/repoforge, epel – installing kmod-nvidia, groupinstalled “Development Tools”, google-chrome-beta, falsh-plugin, jre and so on.), there was no sound. Surprise surprise. Since PulseAudio came along, no distribution (with gnome) has ever worked out of the box with ICE1712 cards. KDE’s Phonon has no problem with these cards. Sounds work straight away with latest Kubuntus and Fedora 15 with KDE. Of course. Since it’s using Phonon Instead PulseAudio. So i can safely assume, that the real problem is with Pulse.

I started looking for permanent fix sometime in 2007. There are still bug reports open on PulseAudio project for this chip. After hours of googling and trying different things out, the following (bubblegummy) three step solution is probably the easiest way to get sounds working with M-Audio 24/96 and/or ICE1712 on PulseAudio.

Step one – Edit /lib/udev/rules.d/90-pulseaudio.rules:

nano /lib/udev/rules.d/90-pulseaudio.rules

Append following:

SUBSYSTEMS=="pci", ATTRS{vendor}=="0x1412", ATTRS{device}=="0x1712", ATTRS{subsystem_vendor}=="0x1412", ATTRS{subsystem_device}=="0xd634", ENV{PULSE_PROFILE_SET}="m_audio-audiophile-2496.conf"

Step two – create/edit alsamixer-sets for ICE1712:

nano /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/m_audio-audiophile-2496.conf

Append following:

Profile 1


# This file is part of PulseAudio.
#
# PulseAudio is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
# published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the
# License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
# PulseAudio is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
# WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
# along with PulseAudio; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
# Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.

; M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496
;
; This card, based on the Via ICE1712 chipset, has two stereo audio channels
; (1 in and 1 out) and a separate S/PDIF digital stereo channel. Like with
; all ICE1712-based cards, this is exposed by ALSA as a single 10-channel
; device with some of the channels not connected.
;
; See default.conf for an explanation on the directives used here.

[General]
auto-profiles = no

[Mapping analog-stereo-in]
description = Analog Stereo Input
device-strings = hw:%f,0
channel-map = front-left,front-right,aux0,aux1,aux2,aux3,aux4,aux5,aux6,aux7,aux8,aux9
direction = input

[Mapping analog-stereo-out]
description = Analog Stereo Output
device-strings = hw:%f,0
channel-map = front-left,front-right,aux0,aux1,aux2,aux3,aux4,aux5,aux6,aux7
direction = output

[Mapping analog-digital-stereo-out]
description = Analog/Digital Stereo Output
device-strings = hw:%f,0
channel-map = front-left,front-right,aux0,aux1,aux2,aux3,aux4,aux5,front-left,front-right
direction = output

[Mapping digital-stereo-out]
description = Digital Stereo Output
device-strings = hw:%f,0
channel-map = aux0,aux1,aux2,aux3,aux4,aux5,aux6,aux7,front-left,front-right
direction = output

[Mapping digital-stereo-in]
description = Digital Stereo Input
device-strings = hw:%f,0
channel-map = front-left,front-right,front-left,front-right,front-left,front-right,front-left,front-right,front-left,front-right,front-left,front-right
direction = input

[Mapping digital-stereo]
description = Digital Stereo Input/Output
#device-strings = hw:%f,1
device-strings = iec958:%f
channel-map = left,right
direction = any

[Profile output:stereo]
description = Analog Stereo Output
output-mappings = analog-stereo-out
input-mappings =
priority = 80
skip-probe = yes

[Profile output:stereo-da+input:stereo-analog]
description = Analog Stereo Input/Output
output-mappings = analog-stereo-out
input-mappings = analog-stereo-in
priority = 100
skip-probe = yes

[Profile output:stereo-da+input:stereo-analog]
description = Analog Stereo Input/Output, Digital Stereo Output
output-mappings = analog-digital-stereo-out
input-mappings = analog-stereo-in
priority = 90
skip-probe = yes

[Profile output:spdif]
description = Digital Stereo Output (Analog Disabled)
output-mappings = digital-stereo-out
input-mappings =
priority = 60
skip-probe = yes

[Profile output:spdif+input:spdif]
description = Digital Stereo Input/Output (Analog Disabled)
output-mappings = digital-stereo-out
input-mappings = digital-stereo-in
priority = 70
skip-probe = yes

Third step – Set another foolproof profile:

nano /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/via-ice1712.conf:

Append following:
Profile 2

; Via ICE1712 multi-channel audio chipset

[General]
auto-profiles = no

[Mapping analog-mch-in]
description = Analog Multi-Channel Main Input
device-strings = hw:%f,0
channel-map = front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,front-center,lfe,side-left,side-right,aux0,aux1,aux2,aux3
direction = input

[Mapping analog-mch-out]
description = Analog Multi-Channel Main Output
device-strings = hw:%f,0
channel-map = front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,front-center,lfe,side-left,side-right,aux0,aux1
direction = output

[Mapping digital-stereo]
description = Digital Stereo Input/Output
#device-strings = hw:%f,1
device-strings = iec958:%f
channel-map = left,right
direction = any

[Mapping analog-system-out]
description = Analog Stereo System-Out
device-strings = hw:%f,2
channel-map = left,right
direction = output

[Profile output:mch]
description = Multi-Channel Output Active (Digital Disabled)
output-mappings = analog-mch-out analog-system-out
input-mappings =
priority = 90
skip-probe = yes

[Profile output:mch+input:mch]
description = Multi-Channel Input/Output (Digital Disabled)
output-mappings = analog-mch-out analog-system-out
input-mappings = analog-mch-in
priority = 100
skip-probe = yes

[Profile output:spdif]
description = Digital Output (Multi-Channel Disabled)
output-mappings = digital-stereo analog-system-out
input-mappings =
priority = 80
skip-probe = yes

[Profile output:spdif+input:spdif]
description = Digital Input/Output (Multi-Channel Disabled)
output-mappings = digital-stereo analog-system-out
input-mappings = digital-stereo
priority = 90
skip-probe = yes

[Profile output:system]
description = System Output Only
output-mappings = analog-system-out
input-mappings =
priority = 60
skip-probe = yes

Restarting Pulse with “pulseaudio -k” should be enough to get things going. Reboot will do the same. And logout/login should also do the same.

There are many ways to get this working, but this is the one way that i have done this on several distributions – including Ubuntu Karmic -> Ubuntu Natty, Fedora 13/14/15 and now CentOS6.

Please note, that these files may be overwritten in case of pulseaudio’s update. And probably another note worthy point is that i’m runnin x86_64 systems. Don’t see any reason why this should not work on i686 systems also.

Almost forgot. You’ll want to install alsa-utils package. That provides envy24control – the gui for setting your channels to something else than default. Which is mute.

New black light.

July 28th, 2011

Don’t mean to sound too gloomy, but i’m lowering my current life expectancy from original 65 to 55. So no pension for me then. The way world seems to be going there is no chance in hell i want to live past that point.

On interfaces.

June 23rd, 2011

I’ve just spent two days fiddling around with Fedora 15 and Gnome3. And it wasn’t pleasant. At first, everything seemed nice and shiny. There were great expectations filling the air. I remember sitting around at our friends’ and i was stoked about early adopter’s version of KDE4. I guess that was back in ’08 or something. It looked really sleek, shiny and nearly beautiful. It dazzled me. But o’ boy was it unusable. It was like early alpha of something that wasn’t even meant to be used by anyone. Nothing worked, and it crashed all the time. I remember giving it a spin with kubuntu (which is even today soooo far away from other distributions’ build of KDE) and OpenSuse, it was still horrible. Didn’t matter who built it. I periodically gave it a chance everytime there was an upgrade available. I stopped at 4.2.2 – no fruit is good raw. Let the sun do it’s bidding and try again. In a month or so. Reason this failed user experience with KDE came up is that the situation with Gnome3 is at the time of this writing, at least parallel. Or i wish it was.Let me mumble on about KDE a bit more. Way back in the day i just loved KDE 3.5 series over everything else. It just made sense. It didn’t take long to understand how the structure inside .kde was established and what one could do with those files. It became easy to configure within months – and that was when linux in general was considered to have very steep learning curve. It really made things fun and i did learn a lot. When 4.0 came officiall out, i wasn’t happy. That meant the death of 3.5 series. Eventually. No self-respecting distribution was going to build 3.5 binaries any more, and once that happened, noone was interested in making 3.5 better – hence no distribution were building it on new releases. Sad to say, but 3.5 died too young. And was replaced by bastard child, that only now is getting to the age where you can really do things with her. And that, of course, meant that there were no usable KDE version around for few years. What was i to do? Fall back to Gnome2. At first it elt sad, but i learned, and even had fun with it. About a year ago i posted on fb as my status: “KDE looks good, but there is no way that i’m going to do my work with it. No way. I’ll stick to gnome.” Well after three distributions later, i thought it would be good to install Fedora 15 woth Gnome3 on my workstation. That was very bad idea. It looked new, shiny, nice and almost beatiful. But nothing worked. Setting up network printer with it’s new configuration tools (which by the way is sooooo stolen from osx) wasn’t possible. I had to open “printing” from Applications menu, which opened the same add dialog that is still present in CentOS 5. That worked. Of course it did. This thing with opening all windows maximized and using new instance of virtual desktops to parade them is just ridiculous. You’ll get more exercise for your wrist. In addition that nothing really works. Oh. And you’ll have assistive technologies nailed to your panel (which by the way isn’t a panel) with 5 inch nails. And everything else is modifiable by css. After two days of smile and joy that turned into horror i simply told my terminal emulator this to yum groupinstall kde. Then i added these two lines with nano /etc/sysconfig/desktop: DESKTOP=”KDE” and DISPLAYMANAGER=”KDE”. Quick reboot and slow cigarette on my balcony with classical guitar. Lovelock’s KDE login was waiting for me. Totally missed my point. Again. I was supposed to ramble on about how KDE did save the parts that were usefull and known to be good. Of course it meant that someone had to write network manager from the scratch but kicker stayed the same. It had major facelift, but everyone knows what to do with it. After two days, i still can’t get my hands around why all windows are meant to be maximized and what the fuck is “Activities”. That maximized thing could (and probably will) work just great with <10” tablets. On my other desk i have 20” wide display and at work i have two 24” fullhd displays side by side. Neither of those situations really need new android-like interface since these are not touchscreens. But Gnome seems to believe in the future. And future could be like that. I think i’ll write about this topic again when KDE goes 5. New out-of-the-box thinking is a good thing. That’s how things evolve. In my humble, but honest, opinion – Gnome3 is garbage at the moment and i can’t really do my work on that, but KDE 4.6 seems sufficient. For now.

When you just think you have too much on your hands…

June 7th, 2011

…you’ll get bored. It’s summer and it’s hot. After work and early evening. Last few months i’ve been wotking on this, this and this. Now i find myself in weird situation. There is just PS3 running and i’m not in a rush doing anything. Few work related things are mildly urgent, but nothing too fast paced at the moment. I guess i should just relax a bit. Try to finnish Wipeout HD. Water is still too cold for swimming, so that’s not really an option. Soda, cigarettes and Wipeout HD. Probably should get new washing machine. No one is waiting for me to get something done. Maybe i should clean up a bit. Maybe later. Dead calm is boring. We don’t even have gigs untill august. We should record our second full lenght. We had set dates for end of february, but some confusing stuff came along. We had set recordings for second of may, but yet again some confusing stuff came along. We really should set those dates again. What would you do if you won the lottery? Do you daydream about it all the time? Does your life pass by because of this? How many people do you know that are stuck in jobs they hate, just waiting for saturdays numbers to hit? I think i used to be one of those people. If you just lay back and wait for those seven magic numbers, you will miss out on everything that is going around you. I really don’t hate my job. I think i’m competent. I have hobbies that i love. And best of all, many good people by my side. I just love the early mornings when temperature is already up and moist is almost gone. The taste of morning’s first cup of coffee. The third cigarette of the morning before starting to do anything remotely productive. Air conditioning in server rooms. Chill of supermarket’s frozen food pools. What i would do if i won? Live i do now. Try to enjoy little things. Put more time to music. I wouldn’t need to boost up my lifestyle. In berlin they burn those SUVs. I would probably get nice small, but roomy car. Something we could tour with. I still wouldn’t make my hobbies a work. Some people need to be somewhere at eight o’ clock in the morning. It keeps them going. I think part of me is that kind of people. And it doesn’t bother me at all. I think i’ll get some ice to my soda from the freezer and get back to Wipeout HD. This weekend we should check out grounds for upcoming punk soccer tournament and maybe to go see this. But there are still few days of everyday wonders ahead. Mostly everything, except game consoles are shit. But just not today.

1234, 11, 12 and 14

May 28th, 2011

After sleeping for fourteen hours. I’m wide awake. most of the coughing’s past. I don’t feel feverish anymore.

It’s been very rough two weeks. I think i have developed allergy for the birch. Had same symptoms last year at the approximately same time. Thought it was just ordinary flu with few exceptions. When i have high fever and “normal” flu, i can’t listen to records or try to drink that bad feeling away. Last year and these past two weeks i haven’t been struggling with “normal” flu. Rum, hot water and honey helps a lot. So does my latest record purchases. Which reminds me. I’ve put back up my recently updated record list. The link is on the right side of this post. Before few last minute adds, the count of my physical record shelf was 1234. Soothing, isn’t it? Back to the earlier topic. When drinking away the symptoms of “the flu”, any kind of flu, few of those rums and 12 beers. No more. Actually, i must say that i’m wide awake for the first time for few weeks. Bad sleep, bad flu, bad coffee and too much sugar have kept me going. And let’s not forget pizzas. Way too many of those. I’m starting to look like jabba. Not that i was was into star wars. I’m not. More of a trekkie. Heh. Also i made my personal best this week. In configuring machines for deployment. 11 machines.

Anyway. After 11 configurations, 14 hours of sleep, 12 beers waiting in the kitchen and more than 1234 records on the shelf i’m really wondering if i should go out tonight.

The day that Sony died.

April 27th, 2011

I’m outraged. I think i’ve been a good customer over the years. Just before last christmas i bought SE Xperia X10 Mini Pro phone to replace my, only three year old c702 construction worker phone. Last autumn i got PS3. Just loved it’s features for streaming media from my desktop and psn etc. I even bought ps+ service. Today.. Oh boy. Today Sony has announced that (besides all the other shit they have done for normal consumers) some hacker has his/her hands on all user information from PSN. Read more from ArsTechnica.

On the same day i read this – “Update on X10″ on SE’s blog… So no updates coming to my phone that i paid good money for.

Sony. You suck. Instead of trying to keep your loyal customers, you screw them over and over. If you can’t build hacker proof database for your customer information containing credit card information, you’re simply in the wrong business.

I won’t stop using my ps3, but strongly reconsider using psn ever again. And what comes to phones.. HTC will get my hard earned pennies from now on.

Thank you for fucking nothing.

Assume the position.

April 21st, 2011

I’ve written about assuming before. At my job i see certain situations on daily basis. These include finding reasonable compromise between cost efficiency and finding the right diagnosis. It’s always easy to find hardware problems, and decide that some problem is coused by faulty hardware. I’ve taken one advice as my main lifeline. If it isn’t visible hardware problem (like exploded resistor or leaking condenser) i can’t announce hardware failure under five minutes. Reason could be almost anything. If there is new hardware in setup, you can’t really be sure if this revision of the chipset is supperted by the os. Or even if you can make it work. Assuming something is the worst. Assuming is the quickest way to make an ass out of yourself. I remember one sketch from Benny Hill show. School teacher writes on the chalkboard; ASSUME. Continues by saying, “Don’t you ever assume boy! When you assume it makes (draws circles over corresponding letters) ass (ASS) out of you (U) and me (ME)!” This is disturbingly true. When dealing with computers, you’ll end up changing multiple components if you refuse to look for the fault from software. No OS is perfect and will never be. No software of any kind will ever be 100 per cent faultless. In conclusion, if you can’t find problem with hardware in first five minutes – look for something else. I confess to changing perfectly good motherboard and perfectly good memory sticks at least once. Just because i assumed wrong.

Post tour stress disorder.

April 11th, 2011

It’s not your average mental disorder. I mean in no way to downplay people who suffer from real PTSD. But i think anyone of you touring with band know what i mean.

You spent few days or weeks doing the thing you love. Drinking beer, sleeping in hotels, laugh at stupid jokes and deal with idiots ans well as with cool people organizing gigs. You are obliged, no, expected to do what you’re supposed to do on tour. Keep yourself together, keep an eye on your gear and take care of yourself and your band. It’s fun and stressful. At the worst it just sucks a little, but at the best.. It’s just amazing.

I always want it to last for just few more days. My head could probably take it for few months with ease. I never want to go, but once on the road.. I don’t want it to stop.

The effect of this kind of PTSD hits you when you step out of the car and start walking to your front door. Suddenly, your loved ones expect you to act normally. You’ll need to go back to work the next morning. You’ll need to start thinking about everyday things. What makes this so hard?

Well. You’ve busted out few hotel rooms, get wasted in good crowd, you meant something to people in the audience. I don’t mean that you don’t mean anything at home. Of course you do. Closest people need you and want to be with you, but it’s just so different. Even though nobody really give a fuck about you, you still feel like million dollars. That’s what it feels to be a rock star. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Getting back from tour routines to normal life is just fucking consuming.

Art of being wrong.

April 7th, 2011

Humility. Small word with huge effect. That’s the fine line between raging fundamentalist and people like me. Fundamentalist doesn’t question his/her opinions. I’d rather admit that i’m wrong than try to prove you are. Decisions made hastily often lead to something i’d like to call first-error. This happens, when someone doesn’t think their arguments trough.

As much as you believe you are right, someone else thinks you’re wrong. And vice versa. Harder someone thinks or believes he/she is right, you think he/she is wrong just as hard.

Being wrong is best way to learn and understand things going around us. We just need to be open for getting our knowledge right. It needs to be based on facts and common sense.

I’ll be turning to anarchism and nihilism completely. Any day now.

Cars and Parties.

April 4th, 2011

Even though title of this post is loaned from one of the greatest artists in whole world, Edith Frost, i’m not going to talk much about parties.

Let’s see. I’m driving Opel Meriva at the moment. My first car was also Opel. Kadett (1) from 1982. There were so many holes in it that i paid triple the amount for welding than the car itself. It was a piece of junk, but still cheap. I traded it up for Opel Ascona (2), white, with that little bit more powerful engine than the basic model. Drove it for five years or so. Couldn’t find anyone to weld it back together, when bottom started to fall off. That was build in west-germany in 1987. My uncle bought me my next car. Small Volvo 340 (3), built the same year as that Ascona. Volvo’s engineering with cheaper Renault engine. That was probably the worst thing i’ve ever had. something was broken all the time. But it was coupé and didn’t look that bad. It broke beyond repair, and my parents’ neighbour had just bought a new Volvo. He didn’t know what to do with his old Saab 900 (4). I got it cheap. 1985 Saab 900. 2.0 litre engine and pleasure of driving it was just unbelievable. I got hooked. This was the first car i felt in love with. It broke my heart with broken/malfunctioning gas pump and surprise surprise, trough-rusted bottom. I drove it to the end. 330000 km mileage. Stylish and comfortable – i sometimes still miss that car. Some good welder could have been able to fix it, but i didn’t know anyone. Neither do i know anyone now. Had to let it go. I got some money from retailer for that Saab when i bought Peugeot 405 (5). Red, sporty, used to belong to some very handy man. It smelled like gasoline, which was because that someone had committed a fix from hell. Plus he had screwed the mileometer few hundred thousand lower than reality. It was horrible to drive. Built in 1993, and it didn’t even have power steering. Traded it (with notable amount of cash) for Fiat Marea (6) from 1999. It was easy to drive, but every service cost a lot. Had few faults, but decent car in all. Don’t miss it, but sometimes can’t help to think that i should have kept it longer. But those faults were always something high tech and very costly. No. Sorry. I don’t miss it at all. My love for Saabs took over. I tried to look for newer 900 for the price i got for Marea. There was one available, but had few (not-so-)minor faults in it. Somehow i got fooled in to buing a 1994 Saab 9000 CDE (7). Well. It was my own foolishness. Loved that car almost as much as i did that old 900. But the faults were piling up, and now the Fiat seemed like cheap to keep up. Air conditioning failed, anti-locking brake system failed, gas pump failed, radiator fan’s engine… Should i go on? No. I shouldn’t. It was awesome to drive. Looked mean and you could fit anything inside with ease. When one of the belt streerers broke (don’t quite know what those metallic things are called in real life) it was time to go for this mean machine. If i could get that same car for zero mileage today, i probably would. My sister’s husband’s parents just bought a new car and i got their old one dirty cheap. It was a piece of s**t, but got me where i needed to go. It was Nissan Sunny (8) from 1993. Small, uncomfortable, low powered, and died on me about two months after purchase. Charger died and it wouldn’t cost too much to fix that, but bottom was rusted through. Yes. What a surprise. I was looking for a car with nearly zero budget after that. There was Lada at one used car yard available. Made in 2001, mileage 60 000km and everything seemed ok on paper. Until i tried it. On that same yard, the seller got me interested about 1994 Opel Astra (9). Reasonable mileage, 1.8 litre engine, etc. It was good. Nice and steady drive. Liked it a lot. Had it for six weeks, until i ran over a deer on christmas eve. To fix it would have cost more than the car did.

Next i got my Opel Meriva (10) for loan from my sister. It was our grandfather’s car, and he really wanted us to have it. He made the paperwork to my sister’s name when he was still in good shape. Earlier, i used to drive 220 kilometers up there every week to help him out in cooking and cleaning and keeping company. That was back when i was unemployed. I spent almost every monday and tuesday of those weeks there. I can safely say, that he wanted my sister and me to have the car.
After the initial loan grew to four months, we made a deal. I’d pay my half of the car’s value to my sister. I’ve driven that nice small spacious car for 16 months.

Can’t fall in love with it. It’s just not “manly” enough. But it works. And it’s new enough so i don’t feel ashamed using it for visiting customers at work.

Almost missed my point. This is my tenth car i’ve had since i got my license. All other nine have had H4 light bulbs. I spent over an hour changing that one bulb that had burned out. I needed to remove bolts from lamp’s vacuum box (you guys know what i mean – i just don’t know the word for it), pull it few centimeters away so i could fit my hand in between some hose and that vacuum box. When i finally got the stem open, i noticed that i don’t do s**t with H4 lamps that i’ve bought. This uses H7 bulbs for near lights. Decided that i’m not going to stop here. I’ve wasted already half an hour to get the fu**ing bulb off. Drove to nearest store, and noticed where they make their profits. 10 euros for a fu**ing bulb. One bulb. Wanted to get it over with and bought it. Used snake-like skills tos get the stem back in with new bulb. No. I didn’t touch the glass. Bolted the vacuum box back tight and checked if they worked. They did. Phew. Now off to shower and get some food.

Moral to this story? Don’t be an idiot and assume that your car’s lightbulbs are the same as they were on nine of your earlier cars.

Oh. If i someday say “it’s better to let car service to change that bulb” – Just shoot me. I never try to prove my manhood with stupid s**t. Let this be the anomaly that defines the rule.

grammar.

March 29th, 2011

I pretty much know that my English is not even remotely perfect. I’ve tried to practice my Finnish though. I write a lot at my work in both, English and Finnish. One of my co-workers usually corrects my grammar for both languages. His knowledge in grammar can only be beaten by his knowledge in mathematics. Usually his advice is priceless, since i’m open to learn more as i go. But that’s not the reason i started to write today.

As some of you might know, we have elections coming up in few months here in finland. I find it disturbing that language used in ads and writings are just horrible. I used two different election web tools, and use of our native language is just wrong, regardless of party. Please wake up people. This is Finland for the next four years. Not facebook or suomi24.fi forums. Even the Open Office offers decent spelling aids to get your shit right. It’s not perfect, but beats the hell out of what these candidates are capable to do.

My recent blog was about books and records, just small reviews, nothing fancy, in Finnish. My goal was just to practise my use of Finnish. Once it wasn’t updated for more than six months, i deleted it. My sister, who happens to be school teacher, used to read my posts – yes, i needed to make her – and sometimes she found something that needed correction. Not often. But sometimes. You don’t need to know everything about grammar. Just enough to avoid biggest and ugliest mistakes. Do a small test. Log in to facebook. See your recent news. Count how many ugly instances of grammar you can see on that one page. None? You’re in good crowd! One to five? Reasonable. Six to eternity? You better start checking your friend list…

I could say i’m outraged. It’s not too long ago, when papers used to talk about how everyone in Finland can read and write. Haven’t heard that for a while. I’d really like to see YLE Ffinnish national broadcasting inc.) doing a piece on this. Even for the radio. Decline is so severe that even i am concerned.

Worst thing about this wide-spread-disease is that it encourages people to think that it is OK to use this kind of grammar. Someone, please do something. I’m surrounded by morons.

Yeah. Now you can probably inform authorities about my genocidal view to this issue.

*

March 24th, 2011

I still need to work with colors. This theme is good, but colors are too perky.

 

..and done. Now we’ll just have wait until i have something to say.

-

March 24th, 2011

This ain’t my first blog, and surely won’t be the last. From time to time i delete everything. This same phenomenon is going to happen to this particular blog sooner or later. Big plans run through my head again. if i could keep my most flammable ideas and opinions to myself and concentrate on sharing every little “note-to-self” that i need at my work and home everyday, this blog might turn out usefull. Yet again, don’t think so. But we’ll see. I’m an owner of M-Audio 2496. And i’m running Gnu/Linux for sixth year as only operating system. I’m working with cross platform software too.

My english won’t be better than this. I’m going to write “i” in small caps (unless the sentence starts with it, of course). This is more of a statement than typo.

So. It’s my blog and i tend to do what i want with it. You don’t have to read it. I’m not writing it for you. I’m writing it for myself to remember stuff i always forget. So it’s about computing, music, tv and other shit.