The Waxing and Waning of the Moon

It appears that fighting it is probably pointless. I have set up linux, apache, and at times wordpress and mysql on my own server at home, only to find that such endeavors are futile. 1. there just isn't enough traffic, and zero income coming in to make running the server worth the $100 or so that it takes to run it all year. 2. the performance is pretty sad.

there are smaller additional reasons, but hosting my own server probably isn't such a good thing. I have endeavored writing fiction in this market, and i have to say, i am quite jaded by the experience. i will say, however, that this blog will probably just prove to be another "thinking out loud" endeavor, as a way of organizing my thoughts and giving me something to do. i'm still going to finish my current work in progress "mirror test", but i'm not really sure how i will publish it, yet. what i want to do is make it accessible to friends, so that they can read it. the best way to do that may actually be email, now that i think about it...

Jiujitsu Revisited

going back to training Jiujitsu after a break of 2 years has taught me a few things. One, sitting in a chair is terrible for intercostal muscles. I trained with this older Japanese dude at the recreation center here in san francisco, along with two other kind hearted souls. The dude is ~61 years old, but a meaty 5'5", and when he had me in side control, and I was instructed to escape, I used intercostal muscles and strained cartilage that typically isn't strained on my body. In fact, the last time I strained it, was when I was taking Gracie BJJ in Long Beach, when a fellow of about 190 lbs, was trying to pass my guard while based on his feet. It doesn't feel as bad as the first time I aggravated the tissue, but there is still something definitely wrong with the area. I'll probably increase the ibuprofen, but now that I'm eating 1 meal a day, I don't really don't think it's very smart to exercise anymore than I already am. Anyway, all this having been said, I realized sitting in a chair, after noticing the slouching affect that occurs by depending on the back of the chair to provide back support, is terrible for intercostal muscle. chair without a back, now that would be something...in fact, I should probably move my notebook now, so that I can sit on the floor...I have to practice Jhana anyway...

Looking For Mayan Astrology or Horoscope?

Decode Your Birthdate with this Decoder on 13moon.com

What can i say, good luck on your search. If you want to continue your search, i have a site at http://fictionalphilosophy.org

ubuntu linux: microphone works on u305-s7448 notebook now

so i haven't had the built-in microphone working on my notebook in ubuntu for awhile. but i managed to follow this alsa how to (algorithm?) and it miraculously fixed the problem. of course as i waited for the driver, libraries, and utils to compile, i couldn't help but be floored with the amount of work it must have been to write the code. i mean, i'm used to code that compiles in like a second, and this stuff took like 10 or 15 minutes, which is probably paltry by linux kernel comparisons, but i still think it is pretty impressive. well, not impressive like flying without a flying machine, not superman impressive, but pretty damn impressive.

i'm kind of hoping i'll be able to start working on making some vlogs at some point, but until i figure out what software package to use to do this (to test out the built in webcam on this notebook) it will have to get relegated to the "to do list" file that i recently put together.

UPDATE: noticed sound in totem stopped working, but sound in flash worked fine. i tried removing pulseaudio, but that didn't fix the problem, so i reinstalled pulseaudio, and sound in totem came back, and i can still record using built in microphone :)

UPDATE: still having issues with sound. now all sound output doesn't work, or sound input. i'm actually writing this blogpost from a maverick 10.10 live usb. maverick is fine, but recording sound doesn't work in it either. what i am thinking of trying is building pulseaudio from source. that might fix the problem...not sure what else to try. already tried uninstalling pulseaudio, reinstalling pulseaudio, uninstalling gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio, reinstalling gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio...oh yeah, there is something i need to investigate on ~/.asoundconf or something. supposedly that fixed sound output for somebody, but i am still confused why recording doesn't work anymore. the audio driver and api situation in linux is complicated. how it all works is still a mystery.

UPDATE 10/13/2010: just noticed that recording does work in maverick. fascinating. i might have to install maverick and be done with it tomorrow. it won't help me figure out how sound works in detail, but i'm not sure i have time for all that. ah, i just rebooted into karmic (9.10) and sound is working on all fronts. i have no idea why. it's a miracle! i'll probably hold off on installing maverick now though.

compiz standalone, ubuntu resource usage, and the fictional philosophy website

so i was working on a project to see if i could get ubuntu to run faster. the first thing i tried was fluxbox, but once i realized color inversion wouldn't work, i had to move on to different things. i found this compiz standalone how to and tried implementing it. apparently compiz is a window manager in its own right, and since it has the color inversion capability, thought i'd give it a go. unfortunately, when i did the instructions listed on the how to, i still ended up with a gnome desktop O_o. having absolutely no clue where to go from there, i have since put the project on the shelf in the back of my own mind.

interestingly, however, the reason why i think that this is even worth investigating is because i thought that ubuntu was using way too much ram. a clean boot of gnome was stating 900MB of ram were being used in top. i realize i may not understand how top calculates memory usage, tried investigating this but once i heard it gets it from /proc i stopped my investigation. one interesting thing i discovered, however, was that the shockwave flash plugin was using 380MB in chrome. i noticed this after the audio in flash stopped working. i am thinking there might be something related here. i guess something like flash could cache first to swap or a temp file on the hard disk, then cache to ram. from the looks of it, this is probably not happening. of course, i have no idea how to fix it. even if shockwave flash were open source, i still couldn't address the issue in the source code. but, i guess being aware of this is better than not being aware of it.

on an unrelated note, i was working on getting my website hosted on my notebook using apache. this has worked in the past, but because i've been moving around so damn much (between my mom/aunt's house and a friend's) i've had to pick up and take my notebook. the idea is to host the site on my notebook, and leave the notebook running where i'm living now. unfortunately, it looks like i'm going to have to find a different solution, since it looks like timewarner is blocking port 80 now, which is truly a shame, because i'm pretty sure i couldn't find a decent hosting company for less than electricity costs to run my notebook. ah well, back to the drawing board, maybe i can find a VPS that's cheap enough to justify putting the site up, i guess in the mean time i'll just work from http://localhost.

"upgrading" to fluxbox

so i want to "upgrade" to fluxbox. i currently am using gnome, but after reading around, i think i need to move on to something more light weight, and then configure it as much as possible to hopefully get something like google chrome OS...i'm speaking figuratively here. what i mean is, i want the operating system to take as little resources as possible, just to stay in the background and stay out of my way so i can work with applications...such as gimp, gedit, chrome. that's about it really. the problem is, it really is interesting to see what has become "the operating system". I mean, an operating system isn't just a kernel. it's at least a kernel and a terminal...and then there are a whole slew of other programs that most windows users consider a part of the operating system. i'm pretty sure most people put a barrier up if you try to say the web browser is part of the operating system, but what about something like sound? surely the configuration of the sound device is part of sound, but what about the programs that play the sound? i don't know. it may prove interesting during this exploratory phase of fluxbox.

so, yeah when i boot into fluxbox my system is using 400MB of ram, and when i boot into gnome it is using 900MB, just from a boot! i think this is sad. i mean, gnome doesn't look *that much* better than like windows 98, and it uses up that much ram? something is fishy here. i did a preliminary check, to try and kill the plethora of programs running listed in "ps aux", but after killing about 4 or 5 processes, i killed something that i apparently needed, because gdm kicked me back to the login screen without any mouse support. so figuring out processes i need and don't need is going to be a painstaking task. i'll have to be more methodical with it. according to top, that's 172 processes that i'm going to have to work through. well, it's something to do anyway.

i made a list of sorts of what i need to get working on fluxbox: color scheme | suspend | sound. basically, i need to have a color scheme that won't make me want to gouge my eyes out while i'm working with it. i mean, seriously, who can stand these high intensity color schemes on their computers? white background with black text? it is insane to me. i've been currently using the invert colors ability of compiz /w gnome to get the color scheme the way i want it, but i know this isn't an optimal solution. unfortunately, the color scheme of software really isn't something that is configurable all the time (as became obvious when i booted fluxbox and couldn't configure the terminator terminal app).

at any rate, after the color scheme, i'll move to figuring out how to suspend-to-ram (s3), then move to getting sound working.

as far as sound, i'm figuring that it is working already (i mean the driver is definitely going to be loaded), but i did check sound in youtube, and it wasn't working. i guess it's time to get back to it.

Adding and Removing PPAs in ubuntu

if you're trying to remove a ppa after using add-ppa-repository, it looks like you don't need the ppa-purge deb package.

i just installed a ppa from wikigames, and when sudo apt-get update didn't work after sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wikigames/ppa, i downloaded the ppa-purge .deb from here and it didn't work to remove the ppa. Found out all i had to do was

cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d and sudo rm wikigames.list.