Assorted maunderings

[unixronin]

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.

Comments

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Audacious here works perfectly with VBRs. How were you using it? Send me an input file you have that doesn't work for you?

[unixronin]

Wasn't working for me. It would display song play times that were WILDLY off (high by as much as a factor of 10), and playback stuttered badly and sometimes just stopped for as much as a minute at a time. I don't have it installed right now, but I could reinstall it and verify a specific example.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Tell me what version of audacious, -plugins and libmad you have when you do.

[ithildae]

I understand about the vision thing. I was in lab a couple of years back. One week I could read the part numbers just fine. Two weeks later, I had to remove my glasses to make out any kind of part number. That upgrade in my glasses was very expensive. My prescription had not changed in over two decades before that. It was quite distressing.

I have been doing significant computer work here. Right now, I am working on getting some of my Amiga's on the local net. Not as easy as I would like to believe. I am also doing away with a guest login for the network, ensuring that everyone has a private area to keep their files. (This is at the request of Squirrel, who's name was the guest login.) Ensuring that the backup works, and keeps things private has been a significant learning experience in do admin tasks.

Have fun converting your main system. I am contemplating that on mine. I am thinking of doing a reinstall of the gentoo system into a 64 bit version. Doing all that recompiling makes me unhappy, but I know I want it done. (A drawback is that the gentoo 10.1 livecd hangs on boot loading some random driver. A different one each time, near as I can tell.) I don't think I will be quite as content with a different distribution. (The family likes kubuntu. I find enabling the server services to be very annoying. Why can't I login as root? I spend most of my time doing 'sudo bash'.)

[unixronin]

Hint: "sudo -s" is your friend.

But yeah, ubuntu's constant "DON'T TOUCH THAT! DON'T TOUCH THAT!" attitude makes me want to whack it across the knuckles with a steel ruler hard enough to draw blood. "SHUT UP. This is MY computer, and I, NOT YOU, will decide what anyone is permitted to do on it."

[ithildae]

You can say that again, louder.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

wizard needs glasses badly

#

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Indeed. :p

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Some of the text is blurry to me too. I think it's the TV/game combo instead of just your eyes. I have a major problem reading the Rockband lyrics.

[nephthys510.livejournal.com]

"The best defense is the ability to project a good offense."

Indeed.

[lizzibabe.livejournal.com]

I entirely agree.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

And perspicuity wins the comments challenge with the most context-appropriate comment of the last day of 2009. (btw, just how were you sober enough to come up with that at 9:30pm on NYE?)