Author: Ed That Goes Ping

Daring Fireball: Plugging Leaks

Daring Fireball: Plugging Leaks: “You may disagree with Apple’s vigorous pursuit of leakers, but this is not a case of big bad Apple putting the screws to a little guy.”

Well, yes, it is. This is the kind of crap which reminds me that Apple is a big evil corporation like the rest, and which makes me appreciate Linux despite its blemishes and frustrations.

If you’ve been in the Linux world for a while and come to the Mac world, it’s nice to have all these things that Just Work, but the obsequious squealing with glee at the glorious secrets Steve is about to reveal to us all gets kind of nauseating. I don’t know who I can stand less, slavering Apple-haters, or spineless Apple-suckups.

(Via mph.)

Stylin’

If you’re one of those people who live at internet speed and therefore devour this site exclusively through a blog reader this is irrelevant to you. Stop reading. Hit space bar. Move along.

But if you’re an old-fashioned sort of person who actually loads web pages to read them, you may be noticing a nice new style, and loving or hating it. If you’re hating it, check out the spiffy style switcher in the side menu. Got it here and added that spiffy “darkfire” style from here.. Probably add some more styles from that site too. If you hate all those styles, then figure out how to override site style sheets with a user style sheet in your browser, or else go read a book, or something.

And There Goes Sound.

UPDATE: Boy is my face red. Sound was fine the whole time. While I was moving the computer I unplugged the speakers. When I plugged them back in, I plugged in the wrong set of speakers. I recently got a new set of speakers (thanks Mom) and the old ones were still nearby and unplugged, and the cord looks exactly like the one from the new set… and I plugged in the old set. Which were not plugged into the power outlet. So sound was working perfectly and was being piped to inert speakers. As for the wireless, I’m going to theorize that the connection was poor cause it was too far away. It got bad when I moved the base station significantly far away. It’s wired now and I’m not worrying about it.
Overall, I retract my frustration about Linux sound. This had nothing to do with Linux, it was just me being a dork. Sound in the 2.6 kernels seems pretty smooth. I must apologize to Linux, and thank my anonymous commenter for keeping the faith.

I hate Linux sound. It’s a gigantic mess.

Mysteriously, the sound on my Ubuntu system started working a while back.

Mysteriously, it doesn’t work now.

I have no idea how to begin to debug it.

No idea.

I don’t have that kind of time in my life.

Maybe I should try the newer, more bleeding edge version of Ubuntu. I dunno.

I just don’t know.

UPDATE: I know it would be a bit much to ask, but my old USB external CDR/W doesn’t seem to work either. All the unix cd burning utilities still depend on the hideously archaic “pretend any CD burner is a SCSI device” technique, and apparently Ubuntu isn’t hip to that. I know it was asking a lot to want my old external USB CDR/W to work, but… it would have been nice.

UPDATE: did I mention that wireless connectivity using ndiswrapper periodically flakes out too? Just plain doesn’t work sometimes, even though it reports having a good signal? Disappointing. Disappointing.

A lot of things *do* work on it, but the networking is a real problem, the sound is really annoying, and the usb burner — well, that’s just a minor disappointment. It’s got really pretty screensavers though.