bem’s blog

On my Thursday lunchtime run, I passed by The Maltese Falcon. It's even
more impressive in person than on the internets, so I took a picture. I
hear that it's going to be around for awhile, so if you happen to be
down by Fisherman's Wharf, it's worth taking a look.

I took these pictures a couple of weeks ago when visiting my wife's family in Lemoore, and haven't copied them off of my phone until now. This is what a morning run looks like when you run along the path next to the canal and out of the town.

While I ran this two weeks ago (October 10th), I forgot to go back and look up the official results until today. I'm on there as "Ben Jones-Bey", because they apparently decided that I must have made a typo in my name. Anyways, I did it in 47:58, which is about 7 minutes faster than my previous 10k time. Of course, it's a different course and all, but I'm still quite happy about that. I'm doing the Lafayette Reservoir Run this weekend, and we'll see how that compares.

This morning, I saw Orion standing next to a planet.

I just downloaded the Mega Man 9 demo on my PS3, and damn, is it good. Whenever I manage to get past the first level, Capcom so has my $10.

Penny Arcade has said it better than I ever could (And this is probably the best endorsement of a video game I have ever seen):

I just had to share my nostalgic joy. If you have a system that will play Mega Man 9, you should get it.

Google has posted a thorough explanation of the data that Google Chrome sends to Google and others and how to opt out of it. I give Google brownie points for this, but... where is my Chrome for Linux, yo? ;)

Seen while running out by DVC on Saturday.

A couple of nights ago, the flash plugin crashed yet again on me, and I decided to look into it. Here's the details of what I found, in the hopes that it may help others. This is a bit Ubuntu specific, but the information might be useful to those running other distributions.

I found ubuntu bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/192888 which describes what is happening in great detail.

For those that don't want to click on the link, the short of it is that the flash player has an interface so that you can write an library to make it support audio output libraries that it doesn't natively support. There is a bug in the flash player that makes the player very unstable when this interface is used. Modern Linuxes all tend to use this interface to support modern sound servers, since flashplayer doesn't have any support for sound services.

Apparently, flashplayer 10 does support the sound correctly, so I ended up following the instructions here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5587712&postcount=472 and that seems to work. We'll see how my milage fares.

Note that I tried installing the flashplayer manually from here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html. But I couldn't get the sound to work, so there is still something wrong with ubuntu's sound packages, and one really does need the backported packages from Intrepid to get player 10 to work.

For those of you not on Ubuntu, you can try removing libflashsupport and installing flash player 10, as that might work just fine for you.

This link here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4928900 is the manual steps that one can do to get the Ubuntu audio configuration to be sane (and also has instructions on how to install a wrapper for mozilla plugins so that when they crash, they don't take down the browser), but I couldn't get everything to work right with player 10 with those instructions, and I then noticed the link at the top which redirected me to the other forum post that I mentioned earlier.

Phew. Hope this helps.