Scott's Blog

I noticed in one game, "neverball" that my mouse wasn't working properly. Yesterday I installed another game "criticalmass" and I noticed that basically the mouse was stuck to the right. This kinda thing doesn't happen in Windows! It turns out it's the SDL library that some games use. I just put: SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE to "0". in my /etc/profile and the problem disappears. Looks like I also solved my sound problems. Turns out when I edited my esd.conf file I left out a bracket when I copied and pasted some information from the Internet.

I don't feel completely at home on my Linux box yet. I'm still installing and playing with different programs and tools. I think I'll finally feel at home after I stop adding new things all the time and start developing in Python again. Things that worked well: Writing to a CD was very easy and intuitive. Printing was a no brainer. USB devices work flawlessly, it even recognized my digital camera and asked to download the pictures. Maximize, really maximizes. The only thing you see is the menu. Unfortunately, the first time I pressed the key sequence I didn't know what I did and didn't know how to get out of maximized mode, which is probably why you don't see this feature in Windows. Things that I'm still having problems with: I'm a little less impressed with my sound problems. Some games work, others don't. Some work, but only if I run them from the command line. There appears to be 3 basic sound systems for Linux. Old, newer and newest (OSS...

From the ever relevant The Long Tail site Ray Lawton argues that not only is piracy inevitable, but it is actually beneficial. ...I was chatting with a former Microsoft manager the other day and he revealed that after much analysis Microsoft had realized that some piracy is not only inevitable, but could actually be economically optimal. The reason is counterintuitive, but intriguing. The usual price-setting method is to look at the entire potential market, from the many at the economic lower end to the few at the top, and set a price somewhere in between the top and bottom that will maximize total revenues. But if you cede the bottom to piracy, you can set a price between the top and the middle . The result: higher revenues per copy, and potentially higher revenues overall. ...piracy helps seed technology markets, and can be a net benefit. Especially in fast-developing countries such as China and India, the ubiquity of pirated Windows and Office have made them de-facto national stand...

At slashdot they mentioned that Windows 95 was launched 10 years ago. I remember life before Windows 95 and struggling with Windows 3.11. As a programmer, Windows NT and later Windows 95 really were a real blessing. The first computer I ever used was the Apple II circa 1980. I remember devouring their programming in BASIC book. I also remember playing with Linux version 0.95 on floppy disks around 1995. My 486 didn't like X windows so I installed just the command line part of Linux. And now I'm running on Ubuntu Linux. I would say that on Linux, things have improved far more than they have on Windows!

I've been playing with a few of the (easy) math challenges at mathschallenge.net and Python makes some of them very easy to do since it can handle large numbers. For example, challenge 16 reads: 2 15 = 32768 and the sum of its digits is 3 + 2 + 7 + 6 + 8 = 26. What is the sum of the digits of the number 2 1000 ? This becomes a few lines of python code: strX = str(2**1000) listNums = [int(x) for x in list(strX)] print "Sum of %s is %d" % (strX, sum(listNums)) >>> Sum of 10715086071862673209484250490600018105614048117055336074437503883703510511249361224931983788156958581275946729175531468251871452856923140435984577574698574803934567774824230985421074605062371141877954182153046474983581941267398767559165543946077062914571196477686542167660429831652624386837205668069376 is 1366 I don't even have to include a library to do this, it's all native.

Today at lunch I was playing with getting accents working in Ubuntu. I went to the obvious place and lo and behold there it was. I wanted to have the ' key used as an accent key instead of, say, a compose key or a completely different layout. The nomenclature that they used was a bit different (they call it a dead key), but sure enough it all three ways of doing accents, were there. One thing that Gnome was missing, however, is a button to put the current keyboard layout in panel for you. Help, didn't help much (although it did mention the Keyboard Layout Changer) and after some googling I found out that you can as Gnome to insert an Applet and one of the default applets is a keyboard layout changer. Here are some problems: My two keyboard layouts are USA and USA with dead keys (or some such), but the status just shows USA for both of them, and there's no easy way that I could see to change the text. If I hover the mouse over the text it tells me the full name, however...

When I first installed Ubuntu Linux I really wanted it to be cool and different than Windows. The first day I spent all my time searching the web for backgrounds and ideas looking at other users' cool desktops. Unfortunately, it didn't happen right away. The first reason is because there is too much to learn, too many toys and tools to install. You read about these cool desktops, but they are cool for these people because they are, very bare - and thus fast. In my case my machine is fast with a good graphics card, I don't need bare or simple. The second reason that it didn't happen right away is that gDesklets in Ubuntu has the samples desklets out of date with the gDesklets program. This caused various examples not to work. Even worse is the examples aren't the best examples that the gDesklet community has to offer. I figured out my problem and now I have the gDesklets program itself downloading the desklets directly over the web. Now we're cooking with gas, th...