moving parts of the kasper clan

I am so proud. =:) My first KDE CVS commit!

I happened to be on a date this evening with my lovely bride and my eldest beautiful daughter, and happened also to hear The River of Dreams by Billy Joel. I had forgotten how good he is. I think my favorite Billy Joel album is The Bridge. Probably partly because during my high school years, the girl that had captured my heart loved “This is the time” (and mentioned it in the yearbook (Hi Allison)), and partly because my Dad and I used to listen to the tape while we worked out, and partly because it is just a plain-old really-good album.

As I recall, EVERY song on the first side of the tape was really, REALLY good. As I’ve just bought the mp3’s again (the tape I still have doesn’t sound nearly as nice as 128K mp3’s) my favorites from it are “This is the time”, “A matter of trust”, “Modern woman”, and “Running on ice.”

Go buy it. =:)

Honestly, they really are. I LOVE them. My lovely bride thinks I’m nuts, and I irritate her to no ends when, on rare occasion, we sit down to watch TV together. Rather than skipping through all the commercials like my bride does, I will very often insist on watching some of them *gasp*.

Anyway, some of the most creative and enjoyable things you’ll see on TV are commercials. One of my favorites is the Office Max Rubberband Man commercials. During Christmas holiday, I went into Office Max and they had a DVD playing on one of their portable DVD players that had all of their Rubberband Man commercials (and the making of videos). It was hilarious! I watched them with my kiddos for a full 10 minutes at least, laughing all the while (and so were my kiddos). I’ve since tried to find this DVD, or even the MPEG/AVI files on the ‘net, but to no avail. So I guess I’ll have to make do with these flash files. =:)

Oh–I cropped up one of the freely-available wallpapers on the above-mentioned site to get the image to the left, so I’m sure it’s copyright Office Max, etc. </legal garbage>

I’ve finally broken down and purchased an Xbox. Circuit City had it combined with the DVD playback kit ($30 value) for $149.99, which seemed to be a good enough deal to fork over the money. I must say… it is REALLY nice. Microsoft has done an exceptional job at building, marketing, and “convincing” game-makers to adopt the wee beastie. The UI of the machine is very well thought-out, intuitive, and smooth.

I’ve ordered some PS2->Xbox converters from liksang.com so that I can use my custom-built arcade controllers with the xbox.

I’ve purchased 3 games for the xbox thus far: splinter cell (the first one), the two towers, and capcom versus snk.

And, I’ve had tons of fun with the xbox and my family thus far. Lynn and the kiddos have spent literally hours watching me play through splinter cell, even though Lynn and Ash and Jason complain that it makes them nauseous. =:) And the kids are just itching for me to let them play the two towers. And we’ve probably sunk a good couple of hours into playing capcom vs. snk.

See? Good clean fun.

Oh–also, I’ve taken back the $45 crappy GeForce MX 4000 video card to Media Play, and was all set to spend another $150 or so on a video card, but have decided to wait. As it is, I’m thinking that I can just insist that if there are games the kiddos want to buy and play, they will have to buy and play them on/for the Xbox. This is all well and good until the kids (or me) find a game (Enter the Matrix, for example) that is only for (or cheaper for) the PC. Then I’ll have to agonize over which card to get again.

But for the time being, I’m pretty impressed with the Xbox. And it’s not like I have tons of time to sink into playing games anyway. =:)

So, they snuck this one in on me. =:) I didn’t realize that 1.5 was released yet, but apparently, it was. I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded to a completely stock 1.5 installation, as well as cleaning up the directory structures a bit so that future upgrades are easier. This means that there will be tons of 404’s in my error_log, I’m sure, but so be it.

Like a friend said, this is just a hobby.

Like many other things, sound in Linux is not nearly as easy as it should be. Briefly, the problem is that many/most sound cards in computers these days do not do hardware sound mixing. This means that they are physically unable to handle 2 or more programs trying to ask it to play sound at the same time. Windows gets around this by having software mixing built into its sound card drivers (or kernel–who knows where it actually is). I imagine that Mac OS X does this too. And of course, for these 2 commercial (read: expensive) operating systems, this all Just Works without the user having to get involved. In fact, most Windows users no doubt have absolutely no clue about software mixing and hardware mixing. And so it should be, IMHO.

So, there’s the crux of the problem: sound card makers have gotten away with making cheaper sound cards that can’t handle multiple inputs at the same time.

Linux has several answers to this problem, depending on how you want to handle it. And therein lies the second part of the problem–the user has to know about it and decide and configure it all to work.

There are several software sound mixers for Linux: aRts (which the K Desktop Environment uses), esound (which the GNOME desktop environment uses), the JACK sound daemon, and finally the alsa dmix plugin that is included in the Linux kernel itself. For an example of the confusion around just one of these layers (alsa), look here. And the biggest problem is that none of these solutions is 100% foolproof. All of them require that the programs that are trying to produce sound either know about these specific sound solutions, or require the user to run special commands that override the program’s sound API layer. And all it takes is for one program to not play nicely with this mish-mash, and you’ll find that none of the other programs are able to play sound (i.e. it will lock the sound card and not allow any other programs to access it).

Anyway, I have spent time this last weekend in getting rid of aRts (the KDE sound daemon) and now use the alsa dmix plugin entirely. It’s a thoroughly confusing process that, at the end thereof, I still don’t understand completely. Here’s my $HOME/.asoundrc file:

pcm.ossmix {
type dmix
ipc_key 1234
slave {
pcm “hw:0,0″
period_time 0
period_size 1024
# — vR — 2005-02-13 : lowered this from 4096 to 1024 to get rid of
# skipping and “ALSA: underrun, at least 0ms.” errors
buffer_size 1024 # buffer size < 6653, but pow(x, 2)
buffer_time 84000
rate 44100 # we want to play CDs only
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
}
pcm.duplex {
type asym
playback.pcm "ossmix"
capture.pcm "dsnoop"
}
# Everything shall be dmixed, so redefine "default":
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "duplex"
}
# OSS via aoss should d(mix)stroyed:
pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm "duplex"
}
ctl.mixer0 {
type hw
card 0
}

The above came mostly from the amaroK alsa/dmix wiki page. And things seem to be working fairly well. Below are my random thoughts and semi-rants on the whole thing then….

• I’m using amaroK for my music player. Congrats on the 1.2 release, guys!! amaroK is absolutely the best music player that I’ve seen for Linux so far, and I’m thrilled with it. I am using the xine plugin for amaroK. I very much wanted to use the gstreamer plugin, having heard so many good things about it, but it simply does not work for me and I don’t know why and neither did the folks in the #amarok irc channel. xine uses alsa correctly, and thus amarok uses alsa correctly.
• I have turned off the aRts sound server in KDE’s control center. I tried to get it to use alsa’s software mixing (dmix) so that it would not block my sound card (keep other programs from being able to access it), but I don’t think I was successful. At any rate, this was at the beginning of the experiment, so… I can’t recall whether I just ditched it to learn or ditched it because it didn’t work. I think I ditched it mainly after hearing that the aRts programmers were looking to get rid of aRts.
• I have configured knotify (the System Notifications in KDE’s control center) to use an external player, rather than using the aRts layer. I am using mplayer, which is set up to use alsa as it’s audio output, so that doesn’t block my sound card. This all means that all of KDE’s cute little sound notifications work just fine without having to have the KDE aRts sound server running.
• Apparently, the Flash browser plugin for Linux will only work if the GNOME esound sound server is running. Fortunately, esound (esd) plays nicely enough with alsa that this doesn’t block my sound card now. This is wonderful news, since previously (when I was using aRts as my sound server), I could never hear sounds from the Flash plugin. My only complaint is that esd seems to have some issues with alsa, like sound skipping, etc. But for the most part, most Flash sounds aren’t full-length Beethoven symphonies anyway, so this isn’t so bad.
• And then there’s vmware. I’m using the new workstation 5 beta, pretty happily, for those rare occasions when I have to use something that is only written for Windows. Quicken 2005 is the biggest offender for me. Vmware does not use alsa as an audio output (can you guys PLEASE fix this???), so it demands the use of /dev/dsp, which in my case is not possible, since that would not allow any other program to use it. Now, I’ve seen that there is a plugin for vmware that is supposed to allow this to work by getting vmware to use esd or aRts. I’ve tried getting this to work, but it does not, and my guess is that it’s because I’m using the newer workstation 5. Bummy. So, sound still does not work for me in vmware.

Wow, I really need a vacation. And, curiously enough, I am now on one, thank God. Just in the nick of time, I think.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday were not at all restful, for a variety of reasons. Not at all.

Sunday was starting to look restful, and I had a nice little meander through the Camp Hill mall with my lovely brood and friends. Stopped by the E.B. therein and found what I thought was a pretty good deal on a really cool Lord of the Rings, Return of the King game. $9.99 for a DVD version of this game seemed like a right nice price to pay. So, thrilled at the thought of abandoning all cares of work, taxes, grown-up life, etc., and looking forward to immersing myself in the game, I hurried home to get started.

I should know better by now.

After the quick setup and hungry consummation of large amounts of disk space, I eagerly clicked the “play” button… and was informed that the video card that I had was not muscular enough to handle my shiney new $9.99 video game. Now, granted, computer housing said cheap VIA video chip is a 2 year-old WalMart Microtel machine. And that I’ve spent $200 for a computer that is still a pretty decent machine (1.6 G Duron, 768 megs of RAM) 2 years later is impressive. But it was one mother of a killjoy. And, in retrospect, what I should have done at that exact moment was to return the $9.99 game, assuming E.B. would allow it. And if they would not allow it, I should have put the game on the shelf and chalked it up to a silly impulse buy.

But did I accept defeat like a sane human being? Certainly not! After all, I’m a MAN! And a GEEK MAN at that!!

I spent 2 hours running from store to local store in search of a cheap video card that would work for the game. At the conclusion of this trek, I found this card, a GeForce MX 4000 for $45. And, as anyone who knows anything about video cards would be saying to themselves right now, that wasn’t a very good card to buy. It plays the game, sort of. It’s really slow and sluggish in the most important parts. And while Halo runs on it (I finally beat the Silent Cartographer in the demo!!!), it runs slow and sluggish in the most important parts too. Dang. So, as I type this, my current plan is to take back the $45 video card and find a decent/doesn’t-suck video card that will likely run me around $100.

Let’s review for a moment. This game will have cost me $110. Doesn’t seem like such a bargain anymore, now does it? No.

But I’ll be darned if I’m going to spend $45 on a crappy video card and regret it for the next year. I’ll show that silly $9.99 video game who’s boss, yes I will!! I shall spend $100 instead!! Muah hah! Now who’s smarter, eh?!!!

Now, half-way through this conquest comes the other side of my brain (that side which tries so very hard to be helpful in these matters, but which only serves to confuse things even more), with such thoughts as these: maybe I should just call it quits with the upgrade-the-PC game and buy an Xbox finally. I do definitely want one to be able to play Street Fighter Anniversary Collection when it comes out on the 22nd of this month. And despite my friend’s dire warnings that such a path will only lead to undesirable results, I’m strongly considering it.

Any thoughts? Any recommendations on the right low-priced card to get if I do get a new PC video card? Should I go for the Xbox?

Doldrums.

I’ve got them.

I get them more often than I’d like.

Now what to do with them….

I ran across this article that discusses a total Mac newbie’s first impressions with Mac OS X. It’s pretty light and entertaining reading. And what it’s done more than anything has been to whet my appetite for a Mac OS X box myself. Truth be told, I’ve always loved the Mac OS, and Apple machines in general.

I’d love to be able to buy a 17″ powerbook.

But, I don’t have that kind of money, and I’m pretty sure that if I ever did, there would be something far more important (or meaningful) that would need it to be spent on.

For where your treasure is…