Cyber turkey
I had a relatively calm and happy four-day weekend. It started well with a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner at
laurellady's parents' place in darkest Riverside County. During the drive out there we introduced
madelineusher to the cheesy glory that is the musical Chess. We're not sure whether our car works if people inside aren't singing along enthusiastically with loud music; it's never been tried.
The remainder of the weekend mostly involved catching up on sleep and working on various computer projects, with a commando shopping raid on Westside Pavillion on Saturday for variety. During the many hours I spent in front of my monitor, I got mostly caught up on various OTO updates and fixes, solved a lingering sound card driver issue on my new PC, and spent an inordinate amount of time puttering around in Second Life, enjoying the enhanced environmental rendering provided by the new "Windlight" client.
As a result of that puttering, the Cathedral of St. William Blake in the Isles is ready for visitors; it's not done by any means, but it's close enough to be presentable. If you have Second Life installed properly, clicking this link will take you to a web page from which you can click another link which will open your Second Life client and present you with the opportunity to teleport there. You'll arrive just west of the Cathedral, on the next small island over, so you can see the whole facade. There's no bridge to the Cathedral; you'll have to get virtually wet (or fly) to reach the Cathedral steps.
The other big software news is disappointing: I'm over Ubuntu. All was going reasonably well with it until last Wednesday night; I'd had some disturbing signs of instability, but nothing bad enough to put me off. Then I was offered the chance to install a boatload of automatic updates, and naturally took it...and the update process froze in the middle, completely locking up my computer. I finally had to power-cycle it, and when Ubuntu tried to start affter that, I got a screen full of random video with a half-off-the-screen warning box saying something about "operating in low video mode". I tried booting in recovery mode, and it still didn't work correctly. Finally, after a lot of reading and a couple of questions posted to the Ubuntu forums, and with great trepidation, I decided to try a from-scratch reinstall of ubuntu. I booted from the Live CD, then started the install tool, where I planned to either revert to a single Windows partition as a fresh starting point, or figure out how to reuse the existing partitions. But I needn't have worried about that decision, since the installer locked the entire system solid at the 33% loaded mark.
Sorry,
rodneyorpheus, but I just don't think Ubuntu is ready for prime time; it seems like more effort has gone into UI eye candy than system plumbing. Reading commentary on the web, I find I'm not the only one to reach this conclusion; here's one pithy example. I think began to lose faith when I discovered that gcc comes preinstalled, but you need to apt-get a separate package to get the standard C headers. There's no coherence to this system, no architectural vision; it's a bunch of very interesting pieces thrown together with little thought to the whole. If anyone can recommend a more coherent Linux distro, I may give it a try.
Meanwhile, my next task is to figure out how to safely uninstall the debris of Ubuntu, recovering the partition and removing the dual boot controller. The latter will be the trickier task of the two. I'm thinking of it as a distorted echo of my favorite line from "Battlestar Galactica: Razor", which we watched on Saturday night: "Get that thing off my boot sector."
laurellady's parents' place in darkest Riverside County. During the drive out there we introduced
madelineusher to the cheesy glory that is the musical Chess. We're not sure whether our car works if people inside aren't singing along enthusiastically with loud music; it's never been tried.
The remainder of the weekend mostly involved catching up on sleep and working on various computer projects, with a commando shopping raid on Westside Pavillion on Saturday for variety. During the many hours I spent in front of my monitor, I got mostly caught up on various OTO updates and fixes, solved a lingering sound card driver issue on my new PC, and spent an inordinate amount of time puttering around in Second Life, enjoying the enhanced environmental rendering provided by the new "Windlight" client.
As a result of that puttering, the Cathedral of St. William Blake in the Isles is ready for visitors; it's not done by any means, but it's close enough to be presentable. If you have Second Life installed properly, clicking this link will take you to a web page from which you can click another link which will open your Second Life client and present you with the opportunity to teleport there. You'll arrive just west of the Cathedral, on the next small island over, so you can see the whole facade. There's no bridge to the Cathedral; you'll have to get virtually wet (or fly) to reach the Cathedral steps.
The other big software news is disappointing: I'm over Ubuntu. All was going reasonably well with it until last Wednesday night; I'd had some disturbing signs of instability, but nothing bad enough to put me off. Then I was offered the chance to install a boatload of automatic updates, and naturally took it...and the update process froze in the middle, completely locking up my computer. I finally had to power-cycle it, and when Ubuntu tried to start affter that, I got a screen full of random video with a half-off-the-screen warning box saying something about "operating in low video mode". I tried booting in recovery mode, and it still didn't work correctly. Finally, after a lot of reading and a couple of questions posted to the Ubuntu forums, and with great trepidation, I decided to try a from-scratch reinstall of ubuntu. I booted from the Live CD, then started the install tool, where I planned to either revert to a single Windows partition as a fresh starting point, or figure out how to reuse the existing partitions. But I needn't have worried about that decision, since the installer locked the entire system solid at the 33% loaded mark.
Sorry,
rodneyorpheus, but I just don't think Ubuntu is ready for prime time; it seems like more effort has gone into UI eye candy than system plumbing. Reading commentary on the web, I find I'm not the only one to reach this conclusion; here's one pithy example. I think began to lose faith when I discovered that gcc comes preinstalled, but you need to apt-get a separate package to get the standard C headers. There's no coherence to this system, no architectural vision; it's a bunch of very interesting pieces thrown together with little thought to the whole. If anyone can recommend a more coherent Linux distro, I may give it a try.
Meanwhile, my next task is to figure out how to safely uninstall the debris of Ubuntu, recovering the partition and removing the dual boot controller. The latter will be the trickier task of the two. I'm thinking of it as a distorted echo of my favorite line from "Battlestar Galactica: Razor", which we watched on Saturday night: "Get that thing off my boot sector."