Kyle’s Weblog

I know, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated this site.  In fact, it looks like my last posts were made when I graduated from K-State for my undergrad.

Well, to say the least, my life has changed significantly since then: I’ve nearly finish graduate school, I’ve gotten a new job… and I got married.

Yeah, seems like a lot when I just put it there in single paragraph, huh?  So now I live in the Kansas City area, I work at Garmin, I attend K-State via distance education, and I’m married to my wife Kim.  I feel like I’ve settled into a pretty solid routine now: I go to work, I work on school, I spend time with Kim, I sleep and then I repeat.

In short, I hope to update this site a little more regularly, and I hope to get some content updated.

Stay tuned…

Thanks to darthanubis, I realized that I was hosting an out-of-date version of my Mythexport script. I’ve not used it in quite some time, since I no longer maintain a MythTv box. However, if some people are finding it to be useful, I’ll keep it around.

So, I hope this version works better for you.

Also, I guess someone decided to make a different Mythexport and include it in the Ubuntu repositories. After a bit a research it looks like this is a GSoC project. For the record: I am not affiliated with MythTV or Nuvexport. This is just a simple shell script that I wrote a long time ago. Sorry if I disappointed anyone.

That is all.

I installed Ubuntu 7.10, “Gutsy Gibbon”, last week when it was officially released. I have to say, that this is the most impressive Linux distro that I’ve ever worked with. While it has its rough spots, like any OS, I have not booted back into Windows since the install. I’ve been using Ubuntu off-and-on since Dapper Drake in mid-2005. I would end up using it for a few days on my laptop, but then I’d simply end up booting back into Windows because something simply didn’t work the way I wanted. Back then, I had a hard time getting WPA, Standby, Hibernation, and other power management features working properly. However, with Gutsy, I’ve finally been able to solve my power management dilemmas and I’ve not looked back.

When I first booted to the live install CD and started the (very quick) install process, I was amazed at how much better WPA support was in Gutsy. I was able to see my wireless network and connect: No problems. So, during the 10 minute install process, I was able to browse Slashdot in Firefox. I’m pretty sure your mind would explode if you tried to do something like that with the Windows installer.

My power management problems, however, were a little harder to take care of. It turns out that my weird standby and hibernation issues could be traced to two things: the Nvidia binary driver, and my lack of a swap partition. The Nvidia driver sucks when it comes to ACPI. I found a few lines in /etc/default/acpi-defaults.conf that I had to comment out and…presto! Standby worked! Ubuntu could finally be a viable Windows replacement. Then, after trolling trough the Ubuntu forums for about an hour, I discovered that I was a little too quick to dismiss the installer’s dialog that insisted: “You NEED a swap partition, dummy!” I thought, it’s 2007, I’ve got 2GB of RAM, why would I need a swap partition? Oh, what’s that? That’s where your memory contents get dumped on hibernation? Oops, I can see why it didn’t work. I simply created a new partition with Gpartd on the handy live CD, and upon reboot hibernation worked flawlessly.

I’m pretty happy about Ubuntu as my new OS, but I still have a few gripes:

• Battery life just isn’t as long. After running powertop and disabling a whole bunch of services, I still can’t get the same battery life as I got in Windows. Progress has been made, but my laptop is still a little fireball while running Linux.
• I can’t seem to get Azureus to work. I read some comments about having to use gcj instead of the Java JRE. I’ll get it working, but it was just something that I wanted to work out of the box.

• Copying files between to SMB servers using Gnome’s VFS is sloooooooow and it just eats CPU power. I’m not sure why this is the case.

Well, there’s my two cents.

I used to like reading Digg. However, as of late, whenever I peruse the site, all I see are a bunch of stories written by 13-year old kids about Global Warming and why the iPhone is the best invention ever. So, instead, I opt to read the source of most of the interesting articles that end up on Digg: Slashdot, Ars Technica, Engadget, and others.

I’ve come up with a general rule-of-thumb for measuring the quality of a news source: The quality of a new source is inversely proportional to the number of exclamation points that can be found on the front page.

For example, reading the front page of these sites nets the following number of exclamation points:

• Ars Technica: 1
• Slashdot: 3
• Google News: 0
• BBC: 0
• Digg: 24