Perks of the job...

So today I came in to work and checked my email, only to learn that my buddy at work "had his last day on Friday". I have a suspicion that very few people knew it was his last day on Friday... it didn't appear to be a planned thing.
Just more motivation for me to get the hell out. So today I felt similar to the way I did back in December when the last of the old crowd left. I think its time for me to move on.

Peet's

So I turned in my application to Peet's today. I'm hoping that will make me happier.

Snazzy title here

I am not sure if such a program exists, but I'll describe what I'm hoping for and see if any of you know of such a thing.
I have a desktop box, running Linux, with lots of music on it (about 17GB or so I've ripped off my CDs). This desktop has a nice set of speakers attached to it, and so I like to use it as a music server/stereo. I would like to be able to control the music playback using iTunes on my laptop, as well as using a controller on my desktop (I'm ok with the desktop controller being something like a commandline thing).
The simplest thing I can think of is basically turning iTunes into an mpd client. I'm not sure if that's been done already, or if its really hard to do.
And if a mpd client interface isn't possible, then I'm open to other suggestions on how to get my music listed into iTunes, but the actual playback occurs on my "server" end, so the actual music still comes out of my desktop speakers rather than the laptop speakers.
Let me know if you know of any way this might be done.

Now playing: Jim Brickman - Blessings

Blog Memes strike again

Okay so I finally figured out what a blog meme is. Davyd has posted a "screenshot & upload your desktop now" meme, and in my wanna-be-in-with-the-
planet.gnome.org-crowd, I shall do the same. Its a small image because there's nothing really exciting to see. Move along.

Arch Linux Noise

Eugenia published a nice marketing plug for our favorite distro, and I would like to make a few comments. All in all, I do like her article. Its nice to see some noise getting created about Arch Linux, but like all good distros, with noise comes more users, and with more users comes cruft (think Gentoo pre-1.0).

Gentoo supports eBuilds (similar to Arch's makepkg/ABS philosophy) however usually the most common option available is compilation from source.

Gentoo's package format is ebuilds. Ebuilds are build scripts (just like PKGBUILDs) that tell the package installer how to install the package. Portage builds the package, and instead of taring it up into a tarball, it dumps it right into the filesystem; pacman creates a tarball for distribution. Gentoo has an option to install from binary packages, but its default option is to install from source. Arch is the oposite. srcpac (no mention of it in the article) provides users a portage-like way of managing packages. srcpac will download, compile and install packages directly. makepkg is designed not as a package manager, but a package builder. Its designed to make packages for distribution, not install packages locally built from source.

Despite what you might think though, Arch is not perfect and no matter what Archers might advocate to you in the forums or IRC, Arch is not for newbies.

From Arch Linux's about page "Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution targeted at competent linux users (read: not afraid of the commandline)". I've not heard a regular Arch Linux user claim its easy to use or for newbies. In fact, I see a lot of newbies trying to use Arch Linux, when in fact they'd be better off on Debian or Fedora.

Makepkg is definetely not as convenient, at least for ex-Slackware users.

See my above comment about makepkg. Its not meant to be a package manager. Its a package builder. srcpac is the source-based package manager.
No mention of Arch Linux's heavy usage of /opt either. One of its best features, in my opinion. Getting used to having lots of packages in /opt takes time, but its great once you adjust.

Desktop Environment Woes

Oh woe is me. I'm starting to get rather tired of a desktop environment that doesn't work very well. All in all, I'd say GNOME is really nice, but lately some things are starting to really bug me. Metacity finally has a feature where newly created windows don't pop up and steal keyboard focus. That feature is nice, and I like the improvements to it in the latest 2.10 release. However, some of the newer technologies that GNOME now relies on are not the greatest; HAL being the application I am thinking of at the moment. In all the months I've used it since GNOME started "requiring" it, HAL has very rarely guessed my CD drive configuration correctly. I have nothing out of the ordinary, just a CD-RW and a DVD-RW, both IDE, plugged into IDE1. The CD-RW is master and the DVD-RW is slave. HAL sees my devices and makes the correct icons in "Computer", but it won't actually mount the devices when I have CD/DVDs in. I can manually mount them, and when I do Nautilus goes "oh hey one of these devices is mounted" and changes the HAL -created devices to appear mounted. So all in all I get 2 devices entered in "Computer" for each mounted optical disk.
All that being said, I'm starting to ponder going back to a distribution like Ubuntu. That distribution seems to be one of the few that can make GNOME appear to "Just Work".
Another possibility I've considered is reverting down to a more minimalist window manager. Or possibly a light-weight desktop environment like XFce. Though XFce has its own set of quirks and blemishes, as well as a few abominations (*cough cough* xffm). I've even thought about trying WindowMaker/GNUStep (*gasp*). I'm not sure how long this ever-so-slight growing annoyance with GNOME will go on. Or what the end result will be. I hope its not that I abandon GNOME; I'll feel lost without it.

Now playing: Jakub Steiner - chillout

Corporate Death Grip

Corporations are greedy, ignorant, arrogant, selfish, and inhuman. And that is what makes the world go 'round. We're all doomed.
Now why the hell would I want to work for one again...?