Assorted maunderings
With regard to this site on the female perspective on gun ownership,
dafydd came up with an excellent and insightful restatement of an old standard saying:
"The best defense is the ability to project a good offense."
More geekishly, my main workstation, babylon5, runs a custom Linux installation that has accumulated a huge amount of cruft and bit-rot (for those of you who know your Linux, it's based on Slackware 7.0), and I've been working on progressively overcoming obstacles to reinstalling it with a current Linux distribution (Gentoo 10.0). Having by now overcome the hardware obstacles, the remaining problem was to make sure all my "required" software was available; the one roadblock I ran into here was my preferred music player, DigitalDJ. I like it a lot, but it's long abandoned and doesn't even configure, let alone compile, on current Linux versions. I thought about trying to update it, but quickly realized I'd have to get Gnome all over my hands. I looked for substitutes, but couldn't find one that didn't suck. (For instance, xmms is dead; its intended replacement xmms2 suffers badly from second-system syndrome; its forked successor Audacious has a nervous breakdown when asked to play variable-bitrate MP3s; and the other project forked from it, Beep Music Player, appears to be at least semi-abandoned. Chaos alone knows how far back in the xmms revision tree the Audacious project had to go to find a version that couldn't cope with VBR.)
So, on Tuesday morning, I started writing a replacement for DigitalDJ in Perl, with a Tk GUI. Today, I'm using it.
PerlDJ doesn't have all of ddj's functionality yet; then again, a lot of what it doesn't have is either things I consider none of a music player's business (like editing MP3 tags), useless crap (like displaying images of CD covers), or features that weren't well implemented in the first place (like the playlist-generation filters, which never worked well). On the other hand, it does do, as built-ins, a lot of playlist management that I had to implement with external handlers with ddj (for instance, it has an atomic built-in command to let the currently-playing song finish, then stop playing and await further commands).
So now I can move forward with reinstalling babylon5 at last.
And just as a final footnote: We got a new PS2 game for the kids for Christmas, a four-player updated version of Gauntlet. At their insistence, I've been playing it with them quite a bit. It has become distressingly apparent that I need to get my eyes tested, get my glasses updated to my current prescription ... and start regularly using them when playing PS2 games on the TV. I'm having trouble clearly seeing some of the onscreen text. Bah.
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