console-kit-daemon

Periodically, I pop-open `htop` and see a slug of threads for `console-kit-daemon`. I've tried to find what the heck this thing does, and failing that I've tried removing the package... problem is, its required by everything I actually use. After reading an interesting bug report on console-kit, I've implemented a fix suggested there: created /usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon to contain simply:

#!/bin/sh
exit 0;

This has solved my console-kit-daemon glut, but has no appreciable impact otherwise. Oh well. I'm still trying to figure out why Ubuntu 9.10 is such a dog on this box -- UrT and a variety of other apps are just absurdly slow, for no apparent reason. :-(

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Awesome WM

Its a well-known fact, among my friends, that I am a UI-bigot. That is, I think roughly 99% of user interfaces are pure garbage. Its not really a transcendent fault of user interfaces as a whole, but rather the awkward puberty they've gone through over the last twenty years. So, it may come as no surprise (to my friends) that I've found my forray into the Awesome Window Manager (heretoafter referred to as simply, "awesome") something of a blessing. Awesome, for those that don't know, is window manager for X11 that defies the conventional wisdom of window managers and forces all windows to one of a few fixed layouts.

Tiling window managers, such as awesome, started out as a joke. Some whit was flaming a news-group about a drug-induced coding frenzy in which the window manager was simply a distraction. Out of that satirical post rose a breed of window managers called "tiling wm's". They are more than a bit obtuse to the average user, and at first blush I think I was even put off by the superficial neanderthal-like clubbing Awesome did to my windows. Having now run Awesome for a week and some days, I have concluded that awesome is in fact probably my favorite window manager of all time.

Granted, I may still be in the honey-moon phase with this thing, but let me tell you why Awesome is awesome:

• No frilly window decorations cluttering my desktop
• No wasted space for panels, widgets and whatsits
• Configurable to a ridiculous degree (more on that in a moment)
• FAST AS HELL
• VERY light weight

Those benefits being what they are, Awesome is not without its foibles. Most notably, Awesome's configuration. There are two reasons Awesome's configuration sucks:

1. the DEFAULT configuration file is over 300 lines.
2. your configuration is written in LUA.

Taking each of those in turn...

No configuration file should be 300 lines. Honestly. Consider that you can configure MySQL, Apache, AND Postfix -- TOGETHER -- in fewer than 300 lines, it is a travesty that Awesome's config is so vast. Proponents of Awesome's configuration system say that its complexity is the price for its flexibility... while that may be, its still unnecessarily complex for anyone short of a supreme power-user.

Who has ever heard of LUA before? Certainly not I. LUA isn't even on the top 20 languages most programmed... more people have used SMALL than LUA. While LUA is fairly trivial to pickup (hell, I learned big chunks of it today) its still unreasonable to require a user to learn a whole programming language and various API's just to configure their window manager.

SO, that said, I think the good out-weighs the bad and Awesome is Awesome.

(P.S. I am afraid Awesome suffers the same plight as Enlightenment in that its principle author(s) are ego-maniacs with little concern for fixing bugs vs. adding features. Oh well, I used E for years despite Rasterman's obtuse and sporadic personality.)

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Compiz + UrT == FAIL

Apparently, I'm not crazy. Shocking, I know, but I've found others who have experienced frustrations while running opengl apps on top of compiz. Let me back up a second... I play Urban Terror. A lot. I've noticed, lately, that my FPS (Frames Per Second) has been HIDEOUS -- like around 30-40. This is a big problem, because I am not accustomed to playing at such crappy rates. I had noticed, periodically, that my FPS would be MUCH better, and slowly I'd correlated this to times when compiz had died when I launched UrT. SO, now when I play, I launch UrT, launch a terminal, and use the terminal to `killall compiz` so I can get good FPS when I play.

If anyone else is having this issue and has come-up with a better solution, please let me know.

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Remembering 9/11

I remember almost everything about 9/11. I was in Aurora, CO, at the Hampton Inn. I was in Denver for advanced training on the Cisco PIX. I was in the hotel lobby getting breakfast for my wife. I remember walking in to the area where breakfast was being served and was taken by the herd of people standing, silently, watching the television. I saw the first tower burning. I asked someone next to me, "what the hell happened?" He said, "a plane hit one of the Trade Center towers." As I stood there, I watched a second plane fly in to the second tower. I was stunned. I brought some breakfast up to Amanda and told her to turn on the television. I spent the next several hours at the training center with my classmates, trolling the web for information.

That night, Amanda and I took John with us to the 16th St. Mall to walk around and find some food. There were cops in riot gear. Cops in fatigues with machine-guns. Cop cars. Armored personnel carriers. It was surreal.

Now, eight years later, I watched some of the footage that's since become part of our cultural awareness, and had my kids watch it too. I think its important that we all remember that the preservation, and advancement, of Western Civilization is essential not only to ensuring we maintain our current place in the world, but also to ensure that we hand our children a bright future.

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ESXi file transfer woes

SO, I recently built an ESXi server. Its nothing special, but she's got it where it counts. A comedy of errors has unfolded as I've tried to upload even a single ISO to the system. It shouldn't be this hard.

First, I tried upload images using the built-in function in vSphere. Unfortunately, VirtualBox OSE so grossly underperformed at this task that the uploads wouldn't complete, ever. For example, I began the 650MB upload of the OpenFiler virtual appliance at 2030, woke-up the next day and the session had STILL not completed. This is over my LAN, not the Internet. That's absurd!

Next, I enabled SSH and tried to use SFTP to upload. For some bizarre reason, I couldn't use the CLI sftp client, so I turned again to my VirtualBox XP install. WinSCP is a brilliant piece of code. It really is. And I suspect it would have worked marvelously if I weren't running it on the feable IP stack made available to it via VirtualBox. As it were, it couldn't maintain a session long enough to transfer even the 650MB virtual appliance for OpenFiler. :-(

At this point, I considered throwing in the towel on the whole network transfer gig and using DVD's to get my data up to the ESXi server, but that would've been too easy. SO, I enabled FTP on my ESXi server using the glorious instructions over at vm-help.com. Now, I can FTP files from my native Linux install, and its blazing fast, like it bloody should be!

The real beauty of all of this is that my foray into ESXi was prompted by my efforts to build a virtualized Hackint0sh. I had heard tell that it was possible using VMware Server, but I didn't have a whole lot of luck with that... so I used a Jedi mind-trick to convince myself that the logical choice was to build a full-out ESXi server. I think it was probably just an excuse.

Now that I'm finally able to upload to the box without serious difficulty, I know I'm not going to have the time to tackle the original Hackint0sh project because a friend sent me a pre-installed Hackint0sh! w00t!

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...and this is why I'm Catholic

When I was looking for answers from the Methodist church about all the things I was wondering about as a teenager, I was dismayed to find that their official church doctrine (if you can call it that) would on one hand condemn a thing and on the other bless it. This was true of homosexuality, divorce, abortion, and more. That is what lead me to look elsewhere for spiritual direction... I sought something that was congruent, something consistent both with itself and nature.

When I looked at the Lutheran church and found it to be lacking in congruity, in very much the same way the Methodist church was. Now, the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) has formally acknowledged that homosexuality is not only fine, but its fine to have practicing homosexuals as clergy. This view is inconsistent with Scriputre, Tradition and Nature.

And this is why I'm Catholic -- because there is nothing in the Catholic Church that is in conflict with Scripture, Tradition or Nature.

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Pulse Audio == Pure Fail

I don't know what future gains Canonical hopes to see from deploying Pulse Audio in Ubuntu, but I'll tell you this much: I've removed it and won't re-install it until every comment I see about it is positive. Pulse has been nothing but a pure pain in the ass for the last week. Finally, today, I removed every pulse-related package from my system and switched back to ALSA. `apt-get remove pulseaudio*` DO IT!

And what's more, lets write to Canonical and tell them that Pulse Audio is garbage.

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