Workolog

Posted: 26 February 2003 at 18:29:00

Here I am at my in-laws' house waiting for my wife to meet me so we can go grab dinner. We do these mid-week rendezvous every once in a while to break up the week and so we don't miss each other so much.

Work has been very busy the last couple of weeks. I've been cranking out a lot of great code. I'm gratified I'm finally producing results for the company.

Meanwhile, Iodynamics is keeping busy too. The result is that I don't get much sleep at night. I gave myself an extra 30 minutes of sleep this morning because I felt if I didn't, I'd be a lot less productive. Yesterday was hard because I felt so groggy. I'm glad I gave myself that extra bit of sleep because I wasn't groggy today at all.

A couple weeks ago, Iodynamics published my article on optimizing Red Hat 8 for desktop use on our website. It has received a lot of attention on the Web. I don't know if the search engines have picked it up yet, but it seems word is getting out about it.

Yesterday, we launched a new article by David Baker called "Root 101". This is about the 'root' account on Unix systems and what it's used for. It's a great article and Dave does a good job of packing it fun of interesting metaphors and analogies for readers to think about as they learn the topic.

Speaking of David Baker, Dave was chatting with me the other day and mentioned he wanted to put a journal of some kind on his site. He was planning on just doing it by hand with static HTML files. I told him not to do that — to let me install my Fozzolog code on his website. He agreed, so now you can find another Fozzolog-powered blog over here.

I read on Slashdot today a German company has produced some information about what Microsoft's Windows Update feature sends to Microsoft. Alledgely, they are sending more than just information about their own software. Apparently, they're also sending information about other software installed on your computer. That could be a violation of privacy. It is clearly contrary to what Microsoft's Windows Update program states when it runs.

Advancing Linux

I've been trying to get a newer kernel on my computer at work so I can enable DMA mode transfers from my CD-ROM drive. Currently, it runs slow slow slow and there are all kinds of errors. I know it's because of the relatively new chipset (VIA 333) on the motherboard (MSI 6380E) and Red Hat's 2.4.18 kernel doesn't support it very well. I've read some stuff online that suggests 2.4.19 and 2.4.20 have better code for the newer VIA chipsets, so I was interested when I ran across the CCRMA project's 2.4.19 kernel RPMs for Red Hat 8.

The CCRMA project produces a collection of applications (and modified kernels) for musicians and electronic audio processing. The kernels they distribute are "low-latency" kernels which are optimized for real-time multimedia processing.

I installed their 2.4.19 low-latency kernel on my computer, but I could not get ALSA to work. Actually, the ALSA kernel modules installed just fine. It was the ALSA utils (alsactl) that segfaulted and would occasionally cause the system to freeze or panic.

Streaming MPEG video off a CD-ROM works well, though. So, I'm halfway there. I'm sure I can probably get ALSA stable. I just don't want to spend a whole lot of time monkeying around on this while I'm at work.