stay in the shallow end

I’ve spent the last two days building up Gentoo on my IBM Thinkpad T41 (2379-DJU). Because I was in a hurry, I did a Stage 3 install, which basically means that the base system is pre-compiled, in my case with Pentium 4 optimizations. After that finished, all that was left was configuring and compiling the kernel, and installing the user space.

That part was very easy. Out of the gate, I had no problems with the ethernet port and connecting to the net. Wireless just took an “emerge ipw2200” and a few tweaks to the net script. Installing the user apps was a pain in the ass, though. With all the good things I’d heard about Portage, I was expecting it to be at least as solid as ports on FreeBSD, and I was disappointed. I have a feeling that a lot of it may be that I wasn’t taking full advantage of USE flags, but “emerge sun-jdk” took several attempts and tweaks to get it to build.

The weird thing is that the tasks that I expected to be difficult were easy and vice versa. Configuring wireless and getting X to use the ATI Radeon drivers was trivially easy thanks to the Gentoo Documentation. Building and installing MySQL 4.1 which was in Portage but masked proved to be kinda painful. I found plenty of documentation referring to package.keywords and package.unmask and describing how to perform very specific tasks, but nothing that explained the big picture of what was going on.

After some emerging and unmerging, I have settled on a system which I think will be workable for the near future. I’m using X.org with the ATI Radeon drivers, which is performing well. I’ve chosen Enlightenment as my window manager and ROX as my desktop and session manager. I chose to avoid Gnome and KDE as they seem excessively bloated, and ROX does everything I want. Firefox and Thunderbird for my Internet suite, GAIM for instant messaging, and SciTE for text editing. I could use a new terminal application, as I find Eterm pretty annoying and ugly.

At some point I’ll have to discuss getting ACPI working, but at this point, I haven’t so I won’t.

Compared to FreeBSD, Gentoo just doesn’t demonstrate the same level of elegance and maturity. Of course I’ve only used FreeBSD as a server, so I don’t know what it would be like on a laptop, but I’ve installed it on several machines, and all the installations went off without a hitch, and ports have built out of the box. The ports have also been more up to date than on Gentoo.

And as a desktop, compared to OS X, Linux appears to be a joke. I can’t believe anybody would call it a viable replacement. Hell, even compared to Windows, every window manager and desktop I’ve looked at sucks. I guess I got brainwashed reading all the Slashdot comments.

Anyway, unless I come across something awesome, my laptop will be losing Linux as soon as I’m done with my current client.

I’ve been playing with Comic Life, a program by plasq that is like a RAD environment for making digital comics.

Here’s my first creation:

Of course, only on a Mac!

I’ve been puzzling over why organic milk has these ridiculous expiration dates. For example, we just bought a half gallon of Harris Teeter brand organic milk that doesn’t expire until June 7. That is nearly six freaking weeks away.

It turns out that it has nothing to do with being organic. It seems that most organic milks are ultrapasteurized, which greatly increases their shelf life. Ultrapasteurization brings milk to 280 degrees for 2 seconds as opposed to normal pasteurization which keeps it at 150 degrees for a half hour. It also partially cooks the milk, which gives it the sweet flavor that I actually prefer to regular milk.

Then I was curious as to why all the organic milk at the store is ultrapasteurized. I found this article at the Organic Consumers Association

When I asked a local dairyman about this he said the chief reason to
ultrapasteurize – a high-heat process that “kills the milk,” destroying its
enzymes and many of its vitamins – is so you can sell milk over long
distances. Arguably, ultrapasteurized organic milk is less nutritious than
conventionally pasteurized conventional milk. This dairyman also bent my ear
about Horizon’s “factory farms” out West, where thousands of cows that never
encounter a blade of grass spend their days confined to a fenced dry lot,
eating (certified organic) grain and tethered to milking machines three
times a day.

I read about the factory farms on Salon.com last week. Information like this just reinforces my skepticism in companies that claim to sell righteousness.

I’ll keep drinking the organic milk, though. It is tasty!

I created this lovely piece on the wall with her hair while taking a shower today. I’ve decided to call it the cowboy has forgotten his hat, and I honestly think it may be my finest work ever:

Sorry about the crappy pic. The weird contrast is a result of iPhoto’s automagical “Enhance” button, which was necessary to make the hair visible.

Despite what others may try and tell you, vinyl, hair and water is a difficult medium.

I finally remembered to grab these pictures off of the camera.

Let’s start with this airbrushed painting on the side of a truck we saw while standing in traffic in Knoxville on our way to Huntsville:

Jesus is wearing an American flag loincloth. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it means but to no avail. Why is Jesus wearing the American flag? Where did “Rob” think that Jesus got the American flag? Does it mean that Jesus died for America’s sins? Maybe it’s a post-9/11 statement, and the American flag symbolizes the victims of the terrorist attacks. If someone can enlighten me, I’d really appreciate it.

Next I found this gem in a gas station bathroom somewhere in southwest Virginia:

You have no idea how much I wish I had spent the 75 cents to buy one of these. I want to shake the hand of the ad wizard that came up with this one. I bet they were watching Fox News and saw that Congress just renamed french fries to freedom fries. Then the light bulb flips on, and all of a sudden gas stations all over the south are flooded with “Freedom Ticklers.” Personally, I think It’s the patriotic thing to do! is a weak motto. I’d have gone with, If you’re still using a French Tickler, the terrorists have won.

Edit 4/25: Steph points out that “Freedom Ticklers” are a “Product of Korea”. Just when you think it can’t get any better…

So this weekend all the grissomites sans Prerna (who was greatly missed) headed back to Huntsville for Madhu’s wedding. Most of the weekend was spent drinking in at my house slaving over that scrapbook. (You’d better like it, Madhu). Every morning I cleaned up all the bottles and snuck them out into the recycling bin. The last morning my mom asked me where I was taking the bottles, and I told her I was recycling them. I then found out that the curbside recycling in Huntsville doesn’t take bottles. Who knew? At that point, I had to bring the 30-40 bottles I had put outside inside. My mom later told us that we were binge drinkers, and my dad told me that it’s really bad for my health to drink this much all the time. One weekend, two Hallmark moments.

Our crowning achievement was spelling out Madhu’s name. Please note that Dave is for “d”. Other moments to remember include Dave getting belched on repeatedly at Waffle House, Stephanie being “so wasted” probably 9 times, George eating Indian food, Anit wanting to drink, and… oh yeah, Madhu got married.

So I’m giving this “blog” thing another go. Hopefully it’ll stick this time. In the unlikely event that any of you are interested in the three posts I had from two years ago, they are still available here.