Crooks and Liars brings us the video of Al Gore’s opening skit on SNL. Cheered me up.
Ubuntu: Sound on Gateway Laptop
This frustrated me for a while, until I found a solution on ubuntuforums.org right here.
Nothing I would have ever, ever figured out myself:
Right click on the volume icon in the top panel. Choose “Open Volume Control.”
In the Volume Control, select VIA 8237 if it’s not selected.
Select Edit/Preferences in the menu, and on the dialog that pops up, checkmark “External Amplifier.”
Now Volume Control should have a third tab, “Switches.” The only setting on that tab is “External Amplifier,” a checkbox. Uncheck the checkbox. Volia! Sound!
In a way this is classic Linux insanely-weird-solutions-to-simple-problems. But we are also in a new era. Notice that the fix, arcane and improbable as it is, is entirely gui-based. No configuration files were edited, no command line utilities were run. It was checkboxes and tabs. That’s all.
It’s a different world out there with Ubuntu. They’re taking the guification seriously — so seriously that even arcane freaky fixes to stupid hardware problems are guified.
That’s pretty cool.
Weird Spiral Storms
I’ve never seen anyting exactly like this before — Topher pointed me at it. It almost looks like a little Midwestern hurricane.
No Clearance For You!
CNN.com – Domestic spying inquiry killed – May 10, 2006
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers security clearance.
Let me get this straight. The Justice Dept needs the NSA’s permission to investigate whether they’re engaged in massive criminal behavior? And they said “no” so the Justice Dept. threw up its hands in despair and dropped the case?
Cripes.
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
Programming Quote of the Day
After using Ant to build Tomcat for a few months it became clear that Java property files are not sufficient to express complicated build instructions. Files needed to be checked out, copied, compiled, sent to another machine, and unit tested. In case of failure e-mails needed to be sent out to appropriate people. In case of success “Bad to the Bone” needed to be played at the highest possible volume. At the end of the track volume had to be restored to its original level. Yes, Java property files didn’t cut it anymore.