I’ve been invited by some friends involved with the Openbox community to participate in a new “planet” project (a la Planets Ubuntu, Gentoo, or Gnome) called Planet Openbox in the name of our favorite window manager.

Why do I still use and love openbox? Because its XML-based configuration file affords me pretty amazing flexibility in my keyboard & mouse bindings. My favorites include the ability to roll the mouse wheel on the desktop to cycle virtual desktops or on a title bar to shade/unshade. I also use openbox to bind the forward/back thumby buttons on my Logitech MX518 to move me around my history in Firefox quickly.

It was a few days after I saw Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 5 featured on Digg that I realized I needed to try it out on my laptop, upgrading it from Breezy. Wow was that ever a good idea.

Now, not only does my laptop properly go into and out of suspend AND hibernate (where this would fail in Breezy), but I get to use the excellent Gnome 2.14 before it even comes out. (The final release is due out today, however.) Linux just keeps getting better.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas or whatever holiday you’d like to celebrate this time of year. Yesterday, we went to the aunt/uncle’s place for a family get-together of about 17 family members. As for loot, I got mostly just the cash and checks. The clear message this year is that people don’t know what to get me. But I pretty much expected this… which is why I’ve already upgraded the computer like a month ago. :)

In unrelated news, our amateur neighborhood wireless provider has proven that he has no idea how to manage an ISP. 1-2 days ago, he began blocking ALL except a select few outbound ports. This had the net effect of breaking my dnbradio streaming, quake playing, file sharing, and even email checking (imap) capabilities to name a few. He’s been faster to fix some than others. SSH tunneling allows me to use some services over an encrypted tunnel (using a 3rd host) but that doesn’t work for a lot of apps that are unpredictable as to which ports they’re going to use (quake, bittorrent, etc).

But anyway, he wants my dad and I to come over tomorrow and help set up a linux box as per my suggestion to handle the firewall rules and quality of service functions for his ISP. He’s clueless, but at least he’s willing to accept help.

Firefox 1.5 came out yesterday, and although I tried a beta some time ago and was impressed with the speed increase, I’ve held out upgrading for day-to-day use until the final release. This isn’t even so much because for the sake of a final release but also so the extensions I want would become available.

So, since I hear it might be some time before we see Firefox 1.5 backported to Ubuntu Breezy (let alone 64-bit packages!), I decided to just build it myself from source. Well, I had a tiny gotcha that I was able to solve, but now I’m lovin’ the Firefox!

It’s really cool:

1. It’s 20-30% faster than the old 1.0.x versions in most cases making it rival even Opera’s speed.
2. It caches pages so that when you go back/forward, the new page loads instantaneously. This is especially pleasing when I can use my mouse’s side thumby buttons to zip around in my history!
3. You can drag/drop tabs around to reorder them—even between windows!
4. It has lots of really nice extensions
5. There are friendlier error messages.
6. UI enhancements, particularly in the preferences.
7. Loads of other stuff.

Firefox has been a really great browser for quite some time now. Version 1.5 seems to be very well refined product that is fast, easy to use, and very flexible.

So I got video card #2 yesterday. This time it’s an eVGA (nVidia GeForce 6800GT) from newegg. I thought I could save some money by getting the video card from ebay, but the MSI one I got turned out to be fried (nasty snow & artifacts constantly all over the screen). Ebay/Paypal buyer protection to the rescue, though! I filed a complaint, and I just need to pay to ship the card back to the guy (who does NOT communicate to me), put the tracking number into a web page, and I get my refund. So not all is lost…

This machine seriously hauls ass. Everything is snappy as ever, and games run amazingly well. That means 1280×1024 at the highest details running solid well over 60fps with the latest games. I don’t mean to brag, but that just feels good. :)

I had some trouble getting Quake 4 to run on Ubuntu 64. Apparently Quake 4 depends on the 32bit version of libsdl. Since all my system libraries are compiled to 64bit binaries, Quake 4 simply complained that it couldn’t find the libsdl shared library. It turns out, that the fix is to put the 32bit libsdl (which I found in my Neverwinter Nights installation) in my quake4’s lib directory and prepend ”./lib” to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH exported in the launcher shell script.

I don’t usually like to attain software by dishonest means, but I just had to try this one out. You can bet I’ll be acquiring this title come this holiday season.

I’m not crazy about their names or color schemes, but Ubuntu linux seriously has the whole linux usability thing figured out. I upgraded my Hoary laptop to Breezy last Wednesday, and just yesterday switched my desktop that has been running Gentoo for 5-6 years now over to Breezy. Why did I do that, you ask? Well even if you didn’t, it’s because qt failed to compile, and rather than figure it out like I always have to, I said to hell with it. Gentoo is awesome, but things often take more time and research than they should.

The new Gnome 2.12 is so frickin smooth. Nautilus doesn’t crash like it did in 2.10, and there are new usability features that really make it a comfy environment. Hooray for linux on the desktop! \o/

I’ve ordered a pile of Breezy discs from shipit.ubuntu.com. So I’ll be passing those out to anyone who’s interested.

So I’ve been on the Mixxx mailing list for a little while now, exchanging messages to and fro its developers/users regarding getting my Sound Blaster Live’s two pairs of outputs to work independently with Mixxx so I can actually have a proper dj headphone cue to hear the song before I bring it in.

Well, the list wasn’t able to pinpoint my problem. It was only after some web research that I found that the problem is that the alsa driver in my 2.6.11-gentoo-r6 didn’t have the special output channel listed in /proc/asound/devices as described in this thread. So, by removing all alsa components from my kernel, rebuilding, and then emerging alsa-driver 1.0.9rc2, I was able to attain the additional input line. And by launching jackd like so…

$ jackd -v -d alsa -P hw:0,3 -C hw:0,2 -S

I was able to see not two, not four, but SIXTEEN inputs AND outputs for my sound card in qjackctl. By routing the first pair to master out in mixxx, and the second pair to headphone, I was able to achieve ALMOST what I wanted. Unfortunately, the headphone routing in Mixxx 1.4.2 doesn’t work the way anybody would want. (Toggling on headphone for a channel meant that will never be heard in the “final mix” channels, so you’d have to turn off the headphone cue before you xfade into it—almost worthless.) So… I built the CVS version of Mixxx.

And today, I properly finished installing the realtime kernel module so my user can run jackd in realtime priority. So now, I don’t have any of the nasty skips in the audio like I had before. Word up to DJing in Linux!!

Wow, I never thought I’d really even bother trying. But somehow, I happened to put together a 55 minute set of hard drum ‘n bass that will make you want to bust out and kill peeps. Seriously, though, I’m surprised how much fun it is to “be a dj” and spin tunes you like. Maybe I’ll try another one of smoother, easier dnb sometime. Anyway, I’ve posted teh torrent (dead) for those interested. Just set up this BNBT bittorrent tracker/php management thingy. Seems nice. I have a few fixed seeders on the torrent, so it should give you good speed…. but if you must, here’s a direct link.

Here’s the tracklist:

1. Thread – Altogether Pancho
2. Concord Dawn – Morning Light
3. Loxy & B Key – Battlescars
4. Commix – Tychoon
5. Rawthang – Dreadnaught
6. DJ Hidden – Ghost Story
7. The Enemy & Kid Kryptic – Malice Afterthought
8. The Upbeats – The Gospel
9. Dataset – Disco Beat
10. Unicron – Orion’s Five
11. Fatal – Torn
12. K.O.T.P. – Krypton Factor
13. Gridlock & Echo – Structure
14. Gridlock – V_Ger
15. Eminem Vs. Rareform & Spirit – Yes I Am (Mix 1)
16. Dom vs Calx – Pneumatic (Sledgehammer)
17. Imagination D – Electroc
18. Hive – Krush
19. Mr. L Feat. Super Fly Seven – Back to your Roots
20. Random Movement – Lifegiver

Oh, and I suppose I must credit the excellent Mixxx DJ software. It’s not quite as good as Traktor, but it’s for Linux!

Update Tues Apr 26: They played this set on dnbradio.com tonight in place of the mighty Decompression Sessions, which was cancelled. Now I’m famous!! ;) Anyway, the mix was actually pretty poor having listened to it another couple times… on the other hand, I did do it without any headphone cue.

Update Thu Mar 30, 2005: This file was deleted due to low hdd space. It wasn’t a very good mix anyway. :)

So I just got my new laptop the other day. It’s sooo sweet. This small & light Inspiron 700m has a Pentium M 725 1.6 GHz (faster than it sounds when compared to regular P4s), 512M ram, 40G hdd, cdrw/dvd combo drive, integrated intel 2200 wireless, 8 cell (~5 hr) battery, and 12.1” WXGA (1280×768) screen. After seeing the bundled winxp home start up with all its preinstalled systray/desktop icons, I immediately plopped in the Ubuntu Hoary CD and began peeling off the “powered by windoze” sticker. Ubuntu seems to be working quite nicely with the laptop as mostly everything was automatically configured. I did have to set it up to run this patch on bootup that somehow fixes my video driver so I actually get the right resolution. But as I read in some reviews, the glassy screen is very nice indeed. Oh, and I’m too lazy to take a bunch of pictures of it, so I’ll just rely on other people. Update: Wow this was so cool I had to post it. gtkwifi allows me to configure my wireless card for different networks with the convenience of a gnome panel applet. I even discovered 4 different wireless networks from my dorm room!

So after about a year and a half, and after sitting on basically the final release for about an extra week, we’ve finally done the last part and actually posted the link to the new version. Of course, if you were following the kmp development in svn, you’d have had most these improvements for quite a while. Anyway, visit the KMP page and get your copy today!

So I usually post a bunch of cool stuff when I go to shows, but last night’s house party show wasn’t quite everything I was hoping for. My friend Matt and I got there way early, so we did a lot of hanging around and meeting of the people before the music even got kicking. There was quite an unexpected lineup of breaks DJ’s that spun before Scottfro’s “12:00” show came on at about 2:30. Unfortunately, Matt and I were exhausted by then, and only stayed for about 30 mins of Scott’s set before it came to my attention that I had a parking ticket. Oh nice.

Some of the breaks were pretty good, but I was really there to hear Scott & Chris’s set. The main disappointment was how long it took for them to get on. And when they did, technical difficulties made getting started a challange… But anyway, alongside Scott, Chris had a laptop and some midi controllers sync’d up with Scott’s. (They use Ableton Live!) Chris also used a turntable to spin some beats and do some scratching over Scott’s sound. It was pretty neat to see some live collaboration from those guys.

In other news, I’m planning to go to The World of DNB II in Chicago on April 1 with my good friend Aren and his girl. Looks like a dope lineup… can’t wait to hear the sounds.

In yet other news, because I feel like it, I’m going to post a screenshot today. It’s the fresh gnome 2.10 (man, those nautilus windows pop up faster than ever now) with the torsmo system monitor. It’s pretty neat… I just know you wanted to see it.

(Yes, I’m running dual screens, but I cropped out the other one since you don’t need to see it. Also, a neat script lets me see what’s playing in mpd in the torsmo. In this case, it’s the almighty dnbradio.com! whOOt!)

Update, Noon on Monday: Well, the ticket only cost me $7. I paid it on the phone… better luck next time…

Nick Triantos, director of OpenGL software (writes and supervises the writing of drivers) at nVidia gave a fast paced and high content presentation about the architecture of GPU’s and how some people and organizations are working on getting them to do things besides graphics, primarily complex scientific simulations that require lots of parallel floating point operations. It was a very interesting talk with lots of technical explanations.

After the presentation, I followed him outside the lecture hall to ask him why Doom 3 runs at 15-20 fps in linux when it goes well over 50 or 60 fps in windows (800×600, low detail). He told me that he had called up “John” (Caramack) and asked why the performance was so poor in the linux port. Caramack said that the Doom3 engine has some programmable something or other, don’t remember what it was now, that wasn’t properly implemented in the linux port. Anyway, after I had several answers from several different sources, Nick was able to tell me that the issue would be solved in a patch update to the Doom3 lin bins. Now at least I know what I’m waiting for. =)

Update: I think it was “programmable pixel shaders”..

UPDATE Nov 23: It was 2 days ago now that I tried out the latest nVidia drivers, 1.0.6629, which were apparently released earlier this month. Much to my surprise, my Doom performance jumped from like 10-20 fps to a smooth-enough 30-50 fps. This is at 800×600 high detail. I’m betting it was a combination between the newer Doom 3 linux binaries and the new nVidia drivers. I guess they figured some stuff out. Now I can play my Doom 3 in linux! Yay!