Saturday, September 29th

Gutsy

The Gutsy Gibbon beta release of Ubuntu Linux has just been posted. The final release is due for late October.

Being the curious person I am, I upgraded to the Gutsy beta on my Dell D600 laptop. Afterwards, X would not start correctly. After some screwing around, I disabled Xgl and the normal 2D desktop came up OK. Apparently Gutsy enables the compiz OpenGL desktop by default. It was using Xgl, though my ATI Radeon driver supports AIGLX. After some more screwing around with xorg.conf, and compiz I finally got the OpenGL desktop running.

I hope that a clean install would have gone smoother. It took me about three hours of screwing around and googling to get it working. Your average user would have given up long before that.

Other than that glitch, Gutsy looks slightly more polished than the previous release. I like the file finder/indexer called Tracker better than its predecessor Beagle. And the compiz/AIGLX combination looks more stable than the compiz/Xgl combination I had been using before.

But I'll wait until the final release before upgrading my main work machine.
Jim on 09.29.07 @ 06:47 PM ET [link]


Friday, September 14th

Another silly tune

I couldn't resist playing around with the GarageBand program some more, and I needed to share one more completely amateurish piece of music that I just wrote. It sounds like the kind of crap that might be the background music for a hotel cable channel describing their room service and pool facilities. High class stuff it's not.

Here's JimTest7.mp3. It only goes on for about a minute and a half.

But it's a lot of fun to do and I'm actually getting better, little by little.
Jim on 09.14.07 @ 11:23 PM ET [link]


Sunday, September 9th

Dark

(via slashdot) - Excellent article from the New Yorker on light pollution and the loss of nighttime skies.
Jim on 09.09.07 @ 10:18 AM ET [link]


Saturday, September 1st

GarageBand

I played around with Apple's GarageBand for a few hours this weekend. It's a consumer grade music editing/composing program that came with Barb's Mac Mini. The Apple user interfaces always throw me for a loop, but eventually I can figure it out.

I made several small amateurish pieces of music, mainly by combining some canned rhythm tracks that GarageBand provides, then adding my own improvisation on top. I don't have a MIDI keyboard, and their on-screen piano keyboard is impossible to use with a mouse, so the alternative was their mapping of the piano keyboard to selected keys on the computer keyboard. You then play by typing. It was a bit weird, but for short passages within an octave or so it worked OK.

Here's a silly little sample: JimTest2.mp3
And here's Darth Vader's theme with a backbeat: Darth.mp3

It's a lot of fun, but I could see where you could run into a wall if you were doing anything really serious.
Jim on 09.01.07 @ 07:56 PM ET [link]



Email: jim@jimandbarb.DELETETHISPART.net
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