The Day For 10.04

2010/04/29 — isecore

Today is the 29th of April, 2010. To most people it’s just another day, but to us nerds it’s the day of release for the latest Ubuntu-version. In this case it’s 10.04 aka Lucid Lynx.

So far the official Ubuntu-site hasn’t been updated, and my update-manager hasn’t started squealing about this yet, but I’m guessing it’ll happen in a few hours. I’m going to hold off on upgrading until the weekend (or possibly later even) to make sure that the load on Ubuntus servers lighten.

Lucid seems promising. I’m not completely excited about it, but it takes more steps in the right direction. I’m a little ambiguous about the new default theme – it’s pretty and it’s nice to see Ubuntu move away from the dominant brown colors, but at the same time it might be confusing to newbies. None the less, I don’t really care about it in the long run, since I’ve been running the same theme for almost two years now and won’t change it just because Lucid rolls around.

No, my biggest hope is that they’ve finally fixed the disk I/O bug. Or whatever it is. It’s been a problem for me since the days of 8.04 (aka Hardy Heron) and it’s become progressively worse. According to most sources it’s a problem with some kind of driver-regression in the kernel, but I have yet to get a straight answer, much less get a fix for it. In fact, whenever I’ve submitted a bug-report it’s been quashed and deleted. Often times I felt as if I was taking crazy-pills – it’s here and I’m not the only one affected by it, but the people in charge seemingly choose to ignore it.

So, that’s my biggest hope. Other than that, I see 10.04 as more simply more Free goodness.

Posted in Computers, Linux/UNIX. 5 Comments »

Out of Touch-Politicians

2010/04/27 — isecore

Matt Bors surprisingly often amuse me with his satirical comic strip “Idiot Box” and now he does it again. There are many things that annoy me about the world today, and one of the bigger annoyances is politicians who are completely oblivious about the things they’re acting on.

Politicians deciding things about the Internet are very high up on that list of annoyances, since they all decide things about the Internet without having even the slightest clue as to what it is, how it works, or why they should keep their corrupt hands off of it.

Posted in Humor, Politics. No Comments »

Groaning About “2½ Men”

2010/04/19 — isecore

Since I live alone I don’t always enjoy the luxury of humanoid company (my cat really doesn’t give two hoots about when or what I eat) when eating dinner. Being the borderline white trash that I am, I’ve thusly taken up the habit of watching shows when I eat in solitude. Mostly I follow the usual garbage such as Lost, V, Flashforward and all that jazz. I tend to prefer light-hearted entertainment though, stuff that doesn’t require me to think and doesn’t smack my head if I briefly let my attention focus on transporting nourishment from the plate to my mouth.

So for a while I plowed through things like Friends, Scrubs and similar. Right now I’m mowing through the 7th season of the Charlie Sheen hell-ride known as “2½ Men”.

Now, when this show first started appearing in this country a few years back I thought it was slightly better than most other fast-food type american sitcoms, and I occasionally did let a laugh or to slip out when watching it.

These days though I wonder why in the name of bejesus they keep producing the crap.

It’s just the same old stale sitcom-humor. There’s nothing original or funny about it, and while it serves it’s purpose as junkfood for my brain while I shove slightly more healthy food into my mouth, it just boggles my mind why this turd keeps rolling around on television.

The show is basically about Charlie Sheen playing himself. The humor (or lack thereof) is dated, american (not on a good way) and it’s staler and lamer than a week-old dead duck. Supposedly each episode costs a shitload of money to produce as well, since Charlie Sheen apparently won’t show up unless someone waves a fat wad of cash or a transsexual prostitute holding a bag of cocaine in front of him.

But, what do I find the most despicable about this elephant-dung of a sitcom? The opening sequence.

You know, where the two and a half men lip-sync to some loopy jazz-type bullshit for about twenty seconds before gazing into the camera like three zombies on crystal meth. Recently, since the half man is growing into his teens they’ve bolted on this god-awful cheesy morphing sequence where he for a second or two morphs from his preteeny self into the teeny self.

Why can’t they take some of the twohundred bazillion gajillion dollars each episode supposedly costs and simply reshoot the opening sequence with the current incarnation of Angus T. Jones rather than slapping some half-assed morphing into it?

It really grinds my gears.

Of course, I could go on pissing and moaning about this televised IQ-drowner. But I’m not going to, instead I’m simply going to do what I should’ve done before starting to watch it, and not watch it any more.

Posted in Television. 6 Comments »

Movie Thoughts: “Cargo”

2010/04/18 — isecore

Last night I watched a movie. It was a swiss german-speaking independent scifi-flick called “Cargo” and up until discovering this movie I hadn’t heard a single word spoken about it. I figured I’d give it a go, and for some reason I’m still pondering it.

Plus, it’s an independent production from outside the Hollywood-circus, and it needs to be mentioned. Plus, it also shows how incredibly stale Hollywood has become in much of it’s productions, only going into safe and cute territory.

Cargo follows a young woman in her 20s named Laura Portmann. In an unspecified future where Earth has been deemed incapable of sustaining life and where humanity subsides on enormous space-stations in orbit around the supposedly lifeless earth, she enrolls as medical officer aboard a freighter. She needs money in order to visit her sister on Rhea, an earth-like planet in another solar system. Rhea is heavily restricted and you need to pay your way to it. Lauras sister was lucky and won her passage in a lottery, and in video-messages sent between the two Laura long to join her sister.

On the cargo-ship most of the skeleton crew takes turns doing 8-month completely solitary watches while the others spend their time in cryosleep on the four-year journey to Station 42. Supposedly the ship carries equipment for Station 42, but when strange occurences start happening on the ship it’s revealed that things might not be as clear-cut as Laura first thought when she signed on…

Yeah, I know. My writeup here sounds like the setting for a bad space-horror type film that heavily rips off Alien. The movie in fact is nothing like it. It’s a slow-moving and thoughtful piece which borrows heavily from classics such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” as well as adding a few turns of it’s own.

Overall it was a bit strange watching a scifi-flick where everyone speaks german, but after a while you tend to forget it. Visually the film is very impressive, and even though it borrows many concepts quite openly from “2001″ it does it without ripping it off. It would seem that the movie-makers tried to ground their movie in reality rather than Star Wars-type fantasy, and mostly this seems to hold. Of course, there’s some incongruous behavior (such as the constantly firing engines of the ship) but overall this is a subdued and sober affair.

So, production-wise there’s not a lot to complain about. It’s a polished and visually pretty movie as well as having good sound.

The problems come in the heavy borrowing of themes from other movies. Too much of the movie is essentially a bunch of scifi-staples thrown together to form a movie, and while these themes are always interesting this movie doesn’t really add anything new to them. It’s also a bit hindered by the slow tempo which means there isn’t enough time to explore these themes without making the movie too long. As it stands it introduces the themes and then has to rush ahead to finish the film. A good number of plot-devices are also rather hastily ended and could’ve used a lot more exposition to make them seem more fully realized, but I understand that there’s a lot of compromise being done. A minor subplot is also quite annoyingly left completely ignored, even though the outcome of that subplot isn’t essential to the whole ending.

The acting is a bit wooden, but I suppose that goes well with a movie where one of the primary themes is the dehumanization and isolation in a cold and unforgiving future. Thus I don’t really know if the wooden acting is intentional or simply something that couldn’t be avoided. In the end it somehow works in the movies favor.

Overall I guess you could do worse, and it’s decent enough entertainment provided you don’t expect the typical Hollywood-fare. This movie is a lot more subdued and slow-moving, which might not be something the twitchy teens might like.

Posted in Movies, Science Fiction. 5 Comments »

Lickable: Tesla Model S

2010/04/16 — isecore

One of my lovely aunts recently bought a hybrid. She’s quite pleased with it, and it’s a pretty car. I don’t know the make or model, and I can’t identify it from the photo she has posted.

I’m all for environmentally-friendly cars. Sure, I do love a big V8 in some american iron from the late ’60s, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that cars need to evolve and change. Fossil-fuel is looking more and more like a dead-end since oil doesn’t last forever and it also creates heavy pollution. Plus, internal combustion engines are amazingly wasteful.

The only problem is that most environmentally friendly cars are incredibly lame. The Toyota Prius for example, or Chevys Volt concept. Lame. Sure, they’re green and will do nicely for transporting grandma to bingo and back, but they have all the style and flavor of a glass of water.

Thus, I’m saying this: if I was in the market for a brand-new car I would without a doubt buy a Tesla Model S. It’s 100% electric, it looks great and it’s also quite practical. Four-door sedan for the whole family, and plenty of torque for when you feel the need to lay rubber.

It’s a win for the gearhead and a win for the environment.

The only problem is that Tesla is a small manufacturer, and even though the Model S is (in my opinion) extremely competitively priced compared to similar-looking and similar-equipped cars from more established automaker it’s still a problem buying one. Demand for them far outstrips availability, and the closest Tesla-dealer in europe is in the UK.

I hope this will change soon and we’ll see more Teslas on the road.

And I mean, just look at the damn thing! Gets me all worked up just looking at it!

Posted in Cars, Technology. No Comments »

AMD/ATI: Please Get Your Ass In Gear!

2010/04/15 — isecore

(Warning, this entry contains foul language)

Recently I made some changes to my computer setup. One of those changes consisted of buying an ATI instead of Nvidia graphics card. I’ve been doing a lot of changes to my basic principles lately, and foregoing Nvidia in favor of ATI was a big one.

I’ve been buying Nvidia-based cards for the last decade. Mostly out of lazy habit, I’ll gladly admit. I’ve justified it with a feeling that Nvidia provided slightly better bang for the buck in the mid-segment where I usually buy graphics cards. This was also a traditionalist thing, since back in the days Nvidia and AMD had a close thing going what with the first Nforce-chipsets and so on. I’ve also been a long-time AMD customer, and have bought nothing but AMD-based platforms for the last decade.

But a few years back this changed when AMD coughed up the dough and bought ATI outright. Alliances changed and now it generally makes more sense to buy ATI if you’ve got a computer with a cpu from AMD. So, since I was (for a change) buying something in the high-end segment I went for ATI. It also made sense since my motherboard has Crossfire, and it would be nice to later down the road add a second card when prices start dropping.

All was not happy though. I’m primarily a Linux-user, and a far distant second Windows/gamer. I spend maybe 90% of my time in Linux, and I knew it was a gamble to go for ATI over Nvidia here, since I’ve read that ATI is lagging behind in support for proper operating systems.

I went for it anyways, and even though I’ve worked out most of the kinks it’s quite true: despite lofty quotes and claims from AMD the support for non-legacy operating systems is quite poor compared to what Nvidia offers.

Essentially I feel as if the binary driver for Linux that AMD/ATI offers is of dubious beta-quality. Of course, they claim it’s production, but it’s so littered with strange bugs and occurences that I can only assume it’s unfinished. It’s also quite primitive compared to Nvidia, and doesn’t offer nice things such as alpha-blend compositing.

But it’s the bugs and annoyances that are the worst! Having to log out and then log back in again simply because the driver suddenly decided that the screen should go black while changing desktops. Or that wheen performing a desktop-zoom it should become inverted.

Not to mention that the driver insists on running the fan at an ear-shattering 50% (approx 2500 rpm) by default. Admittedly it does the same in Windows, but at least in Windows the Catalyst Control Center has an easily accessible option of manually overriding this. In Linux you’re forced to figure out the commandline aticonfig command – which as far as I can tell doesn’t even document the switches needed! I had to google myself to them on some forum, because nowhere in the driver documentation or on AMDs website are they listed!

For fucks sake! AMD, get your shit together and stop mucking about. If you’re serious about supporting Linux, open-source and the like then either release a PROPER driver, or release the specs and all the requirements so the community can write a driver. As it stands, it’s like partial circumcision.

Otherwise I’ll be force to go back to Nvidia when I next upgrade my computer. Which will also mean that I’ll leave the AMD-platform that I’ve been loyal to for a decade and start buying Intel-chips instead. I’m tired of this bullshit.

However, I will give props for making the driver easier to install on Ubuntu than Nvidia does. But of course you didn’t document how to do it, instead I had to find it on Ubuntus wiki. So I guess it’s a half-win for you, and it doesn’t make up for the poor performance and quality of your binary drivers.

Posted in Computers, Hardware, Linux/UNIX. No Comments »

I Knew It!

2010/04/08 — isecore

Today, while doing my usual daily routing (reading sites, checking email, reading comics, reading the newspapers) I find out that Victor Muller, the president of SAAB wants to build a retro-styled version of the classic SAAB 92. He explicitly names the new Fiat 500 and the retrostyled VW Beetle as inspirations for this opinion.

All I can say is, you heard it here first, folks. I was the one who suggested they do this.

Posted in Cars. No Comments »

History Repeats Itself

2010/04/04 — isecore

Almost ten years ago I bought my first wireless mouse and keyboard. I loved it, it was great not having any cables to worry about. Of course, the downside of it was having to every now and then change batteries in them – but it was a small price to pay to be freed from the prison of the cables.

Over time these accessories developed further. I replaced the mouse after a while with another cordless mouse, but this one had an optical sensor instead of the ball-wheel type mouse previously. It also showed how much technology develops, because earlier me and all my friends had written off an optical cordless mouse as completely impossible. We felt that it would gobble batteries like a meth-addict going on a bender.

Well, we were proven wrong and indeed there started existing cordless optical mousen. I still kept my original keyboard, but a while down the road I replaced the mouse with yet another cordless optical mouse. This one had the improvement of faster response and precision, something the previous mouse suffered from. Now the cordless mousen was on par with their corded brethren, and I was quite happy with this mouse. It also had the benefit of being able to recharge its own batteries when placed in the cradle provided with it.

I used that mouse for a while, until I replaced it with yet another upgrade a year or two later. This new addition was cordless, and instead of an infrared optical mouse it used a LASER to sense movement. It also had the same features as its predecessor, with some added niceties such as a indicator of battery-charge for easy assessment, and a built-in battery providing much better power and longer usage.

This seemed to be the ultimate in mousing, and I was very happy with it. So happy in fact that I kept using it for more than five years.

During this period, however, I replaced the keyboard with a new corded thing. The old cordless keyboard had been badly abused through the years, and after about eight years it needed replacing. Since I felt that cordlessness wasn’t a high priority on a keyboard (you don’t tend to move them around a lot) I accepted a corded keyboard and felt perfectly fine with it.

But alas, my trusty mouse started to give up on me after more than five years of loyal service. I felt very reluctant to replace it, since none of the proposed replacements seemed to suit my needs. They were either button-infested monsters with a million features I wasn’t interested in, or they were aimed squarely at gamers and could be adjusted with weights, had gaudy colorschemes and other trinkets that didn’t appeal to me – or, lastly, they were cheap crap that no self-respecting computer user should use.

So, I bit the bullet, re-assessed my needs and bought a corded mouse. Which I’m quite happy with, except for the occasionall annoyance of having the cable catch in something on my desk.

But it’s interesting how I’ve now come full circle after almost a decade. Going from hating cables to a cordless fascist and then back again to the feeling that, who cares about cables really?