A Computer Pentagramors Infernal Nightmare

Hi All,

As a way to celebrate the efforts of all of us during the Hardy Heron release cycle we’ll be gathering at the Goose Island Brew Pub (1800 N. Clyborn, Chicago, Illinois) this coming Saturday, April 26th.  The release party will start at 2pm, and we have the room reserved until 6pm (one hour later than previously indicated).  You do not have to be 21 to part-ay at this part-ay.  It will be a family-friendly affair unless someone brings a bunch of skateboards and large boomboxes. Note: very likely to happen. Although at that point, fiasco is more likely to be the applicable word than part-ay.

Please come hungry.  :)  We will be able to order food from Goose Island’s bounteous menu, and may also request and consume one or more of Goose Island’s ‘ultimate drinkability’ beers or finely crafted sodas.  This is good stuff.  Charlie Trotter comes here for tips on how to make good Buffalo Burgers and Wolfgang Puck has been known to inquire about how they make their vegetarian chili.  That is what I’ve been told.

For those individuals who may be using pre-civilization technology (i.e., something other than a Hardy Heron release - ha ha . . .  I kid, I kid . . .), We’ll also have a set of K/X/Ubuntu Hardy Heron CD’s available to help upgrade your laptops to the latest 8.04 release of 8.04 awesomeness.  (Just please be sure to back up your data beforehand if you wish to upgrade your machine at the partay.  Upgrades and beer/soda don’t always go well together.)

Some folks are RSVP’ing on the wiki (thanks!) but if you don’t have a wiki account, just let us know and I’ll add your name to the list for you.  For others, the wiki is here:  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ChicagoTeam/Meetings As my mom used to say, RSVP yourself before you wreck yourself. ubuntu-us-chicago@lists.ubuntu.com

The Hardy Heron development cycle has been a good one, so let’s celebrate our efforts!  I look forward to seeing everyone there.

-Eddie Martinez via Jim Campbell’s announcement to the Mailing List and a blatant copy and paste…

“I don’t even know where I’m staying tonight. I might be crashin’ with Jorge Castro, I’m not sure yet. We might even spoon, who knows?!

…

and don’t go bloggin’ this, I’ll kick you off the planet”

-Richard Johnson aka nixternal

“That’s going to happen anyway, there is a policy against offensive content.”
-Eddie Martinez aka posingaspopular aka eddieftw

I know Richard will kill me for this, but this was by far, the funniest thing I’ve heard all day.

Happy Birthday to Freddy Martinez as well as myself for turning 21. Awesome!

history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head

125 clear
55 ls
51 ssh
47 sudo
47 exit
40 cd
11 tar
9 man
8 killall
8 cat

As you can see, i use ‘clear’ alot. It’s easier than using ctrl+L because I most of the times that I want to do Ctrl+L, I have to look down at the keyboard, and that is just.not. cool. Does anyone else get bothered if their terminal is completly covered with text?

ls -lash is my preferred command, but ls works just fine.

Wicked,

eddie m.

For those of you that don’t read Slashdot, which is probably a relatively small number. There is an article, linking to this Wired Blog about notetaking in class. I’ll let you decide how you feel about this on your own, but I am as equally troubled by the profiting off of students who are too lazy to go to class. Yes, it is a good market, but college is expensive enough as is, and I fail to see how this long drawn out argument will directly help students learn.

-Eddie

I’ve been busy as of alot, so I haven’t much time to quickly and foolishly throw up my ideas regarding the world. Also, I’ve tried to cut back on any blogging that has political conotations because, quite simply, I dont feel this is the best avenue to do so. However, I’m going to skip my own self-checks for this one.

“Plants” with “leaves” no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous “bacteria” could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the “gray goo problem.” Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray goo” emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.

Reference

Okay, first of all, let’s get all this bullshit out of the way. Are people honestly arguing, that through advances in SCIENCE, humans will create viruses and animals and organisms that will DESTROY the world?!? I use caps in the previous sentence for two reasons. One is to highlight the hysteria and fantasy of people who see such destructive actions as being inevitable. More importantely, I want to show how this is not true. I don’t honestly believe that Darwin is going to get ate by a killer mutant virus in the near future that will destroy the entire Earth. It should be obvious by now, that I am being condensending and dimissive of these claims, because they are as equally irrational as the utopian idea that machines will free humans to a point where work and leisure will be mixed, and there will only be a need for a four hour work day. This last idea was advanced near the Industrial Revolution and it didn’t happen. Science destroying Science? In a micro sense, I can understand the appeal of us vs. them survivalism, but this is not the scope on which the article is talking about, thus speaking about the idea as an inevitable conclusion is reckless at best.

This is the exact same hysteria I see in the present day arguments about global warming. I will not go into the scientific ideas behind global warming, but I will say that I do believe global warming does exist. What I do have a problem with is people running up to me and telling me that my life is in immidiate danger because of global warming. Worst of all, polar bears are drowning! I’ve seen polar bears before. They are big. They can take care of themselves. And if they cant, well then that’s okay too. No, seriously. It’s okay. If any animal is having trouble surviving, that’s not on me. They can adapt, or they can become extinct. I will not rush to defend polar bears because I feel bad about their drownings (read: that is a logical fallacy), and go out of my want to mess with Darwin. That’s illogical. If you accept global warming as real, then you most likely see it as a threat to the ecosystems of the planet. However, most people who talk to me about global warming fail to see that other organisms will step in and fill this void. This is how SCIENCE works. If you think otherwsie (such as the earth being 6000 years old, or global warming being a byproduct of an upcoming alien invasion), then I can’t help you.

There is more to this idea however. Nobody who campaigns against global warming, or is worried about the future robotic overlords, is denying that these technological advancements are inheretly bad. In fact, most if not all (spray on pancakes vs chesse in a can being a good example), of the people out in the world will consider that they are better off now than they were 4 years ago. Of course this is a complicated and loaded question which cant be answered in one sentence and guided by skill sets, the economy, life in general. But technology is a great enabler and offers so many useful and helpful benefits, that it simply pisses me off when I hear simplistic and irrational arguments which fail to see the larger picture of the impact of technology on the world.

-Eddie

Note: the author of the Wired article above is a great fan of technology and hugely important in the development of modern computing, more so than I could ever be. With this consideration in mind, I still disagree with his article.

My sound broke. There is a good reason why my sound shouldn’t break. I upgraded Xubutnu Gutsy to Kubuntu Gutsy (apt-get install kubuntu-desktop) and then Kubuntu Hardy (apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade) and now my sound won’t work. I can’t see any reason why this would happen. Specs:

Under System Settings-> Sound System I have the ‘enable the sound system’ button clicked (sidenote, why is this even an *option*?)
Audio Device configured to Autodetect my audio device.
Running alsamixer in a konsole, I see that all my sound is enabled
I don’t have the mute button enable.
This is true for movies, music, etc.
When I open up kmix, instead of the slide button being blue (it is all the way up), it is grey.
When I try to play a song in Amarok, the amarok slide button is grey, instead of blue. This is the button that leads you skip to a certain section of a song, etc.
Restarting HAL doesn’t fix the issue

Any/all ideas are appreciated.

-Eddie M.

After talking to Steve Langasek in #ubuntu-devel, he came up with this fix. Thanks alot Steve! We did a check on the python-gobject:

chagas@morphea:~$ apt-cache policy python-gobject
python-gobject:
Installed: 2.14.1-2ubuntu1
Candidate: 2.14.1-2ubuntu1
Version table:
*** 2.14.1-2ubuntu1 0
500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
chagas@morphea:~$

Here is what is important. This is the check on the python-gobject package after updating to 2.14.1-2ubuntu1. So if you are having trouble running Pyroom and getting the same errors that I was getting on my previous blog entry, try updating the package.

-Eddie M.

Hey all, I have an interesting bug report to show off. I gave up on trying to run JDarkRoom for a while and tried to run PyRoom instead. It runs perfect in my Kubuntu Gutsy machine. The only problem is that I run Kubuntu Hardy on my laptop which is my everyday machine, since I’m never home for Gutsy action. This bug is in HARDY, as installing the ubuntu-desktop will still cause the same behavior. Updating from Gutsy to Hardy will not change the way Pyroom behaves and thus the bug can not be replicated this way, in Pyroom 0.1 and 0.2

hagas@morphea:~/0.2$ ./pyroom.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “./pyroom.py”, line 28, in
import gobject
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/gtk-2.0/gobject/__init__.py”, line 30, in
from gobject.constants import *
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/gtk-2.0/gobject/constants.py”, line 22, in
from _gobject import type_from_name
ImportError: /var/lib/python-support/python2.5/gtk-2.0/gobject/_gobject.so: undefined symbol: PySignal_SetWakeupFd
chagas@morphea:~/0.2$

Let’s try some magic!

chagas@morphea:~/0.2$ python
Python 2.5.2a0 (r251:54863, Jan 3 2008, 17:52:29)
[GCC 4.2.3 20071223 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.2.2-4ubuntu3)] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import gobject
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/gtk-2.0/gobject/__init__.py”, line 30, in
from gobject.constants import *
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/gtk-2.0/gobject/constants.py”, line 22, in
from _gobject import type_from_name
ImportError: /var/lib/python-support/python2.5/gtk-2.0/gobject/_gobject.so: undefined symbol: PySignal_SetWakeupFd
>>>

Let’s hit these files.

__init.py___ line 30 asks for an import from constants.py

from gobject.constants import *

Of course, there is more

from _gobject import type_from_name

There seems to be an error in the way the _gobject.so file is being imported and breaking my attempts to run pyroom. Amazing. ps, if there are any gtk/python people out there in the world who can fix this, I would be deeply appreciative.

-Eddie m.