[V]andemar.org

In an amazing show of literary genius, I managed to hammer out a three page paper that rambled on about a vague connection between the natural world, Titania, Oberon, and the changeling boy. Never before has such tripe been committed to paper. If nothing else, my TA may give me a couple points for making him laugh (although that’s unlikely after my comment in discussion today about the french being “cheese eating surrender monkeys”). Turns out he’s the one person in the world who doesn’t find the French funny. Great.

The day took an upward turn after coming back from the gym (amazing workout). Mike called me up and we headed to Clarke’s for dinner. While we were eating I noticed an old guy in a suit looking in, about to head through the door. He looked kind of shady so I gave him my best evil eye. He looked confusedly at me for a second before heading on in. He ended up standing behind me waiting for a table, and Mike took the opportunity to whisper “Don’t look now, but Ralph Nader is standing behind you.” In spite of Mike’s advice, I turned around, and sure enough this man was standing directly behind me:

Yes, the third part candidate who uttered such wisdom as the following was standing within striking distance:

“If they don’t close these [nuclear] reactors down, we’ll have civil war in five years.” — Ralph Nader in 1977

Jay Leno: “What do you do for fun?” Nader: “Strawberries” — The Tonight Show

Mike and I sat while the couple next to us sidled up to Nader and asked stupid questions until Nader gave them both business cards to get them to go away. What the hell would someone do with Nader’s business card? Call him for advice on how to sabotage the election for the party closest to your own views? I’ll pass, thanks. Nader then proceeded to his table and ordered a milkshake (Mike went to the bathroom on a little reconnaissance mission to find this out). How utterly boring. Mike and I were hoping he had ordered all natural tree juice or some such appropriately wacky thing (green party, ha… ha…). I decided to go on a little trip to the bathroom and stab a fork in Nader’s leg to liven things up a bit, but Mike managed to persuade me not to. I’m beginning to regret listening to him, since this would have been a much more interesting story if I hadn’t.

Since dinner I’ve been continuing my testing of Ubuntu, and I’m still very impressed by what it has to offer. It took almost no time to set up everything to my liking, complete with all the applications I use on a regular basis, and I have no stability issues, except one. My network card, as usual, is capable of singlehandedly wreaking havoc on the entire system. I have a Pentium 4 processor with hyperthreading, so a SMP enabled kernel would provide significant performance improvements, especially in multitasking scenarios. After a quick recompile of ndiswrapper (on a sidenote, it does in fact require gcc-3.4, as I suspected), I attempted to insert the module, when *BAM*, hardlock. Turns out that under a SMP system, through the ndiswrapper translation layer, my network card and its drivers are capable of instantly freezing a Linux system. Joy. Netgear, I hate you. Go drown yourself in a well. The world will be better off. In the end, I settled for the 686 kernel, and it’s been rock solid. The entire process, while not something I enjoyed doing, was made significantly less painful by Synaptic. A huge number of useful packages are available (especially if you edit sources.list to include the “universe” repositories), and they are well described, easy to install, and dependencies are handled supremely well. It also handles complex uninstalls very well, which made removing all traces of the SMP kernel from my system which interacted so poorly with my network card a process involving a couple of clicks.

Since getting everything up and stabilized, I’ve been watching episodes of Lost (using VLC, an astoundingly good crossplatform media player), securing this server (over 2000 remote SSH attacks already) over TightVNC, listening to music, and doing a wide variety of other day to day computing tasks. For the first time I am seriously considering completely switching over to Linux on my desktop machine. The only remaining application that does not exist under Linux is an apple lossless encoder so that I can stream music to the living room stereo system, but I can make do without it (and if necessary, write my own encoder, or run the command line encoder in WINE).

Here’s a picture of my current desktop (click for full size image):

Suse 10.0 is performing excellently in its server role, proving itself to be very stable and secure, while Ubuntu is turning out to be very functional, fast, and surprisingly, quite easy to use. Definitely two great Linux distributions worth looking into.

OpenSuse
Ubuntu

Check them out, you won’t regret it.

~ by Andrew on October 15, 2005.