Radio Silence

I haven't posted for the past week, as we've been dealing with the insanities of moving. It's not quite over yet: we're in the new place, but everything's in boxes, and we still don't have a dial tone. (So we have to borrow net from someone's open wireless)

Anyways, things are slowly moving back to normal, and hopefully we'll be unpacked in the not too distant future. We now resume your normal posting schedule.

Watchmen movie

They've posted a trailer on the website. I'm trying to decide if it is possible for this movie to be really good, or if it will only be good if you haven't read the book. V for Vendetta already disappointed me, as I thought the movie was pretty good until I read the graphic novel, and then I found that the movie missed the point entirely. For Watchmen, I've already read and thoroughly enjoyed the graphic novel, so we'll see if the movie measures up. It seems harder for the movie industry to take on books like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, since they have much more complex stories than most superhero fare.

Debian releases etch-and-a-half

It looks like Debian's been impacted by the popularity of Ubuntu. They just released etch-and-a-half, which for the first time in Debian's history, is a update to a stable version of the distribution that includes new packages to support newer hardware. I am impressed. I'm not planning on going back to Debian for my laptop or desktop (the sauce Ubuntu adds to Debian is quite tasty), but it's a good step for Debian to make. (I remember having to build custom install disks to get Debian stable to boot on new hardware, it would be good never to have to do that again... =)

Take me out to the ball game

My sister and I went to see the A's play the Ranger's today. We had great seats, and they were free, since she won them in a raffle at her job. Either baseball has gotten more fun recently, or the more recent games I'd been too haven't been good, since I haven't had this much fun at a baseball game since I was a kid. I'm sure it helped that the weather was perfect, too. Sadly, the A's didn't win, but that didn't manage to get in the way of the fun. I think we're going to have to go back for more games in the future.

Here's the view we had:

Ubuntu Hardy Heron and audio

Recently, I started using Banshee to play music on my work laptop, which runs Ubuntu. However, I found that I had sound multiplexing issues: No other sounds would work when Banshee was playing (or even when it was paused). It looks like despite many other things seemingly sharing the sound device nicely, Banshee didn't play well with others. After some internet searching, I got a pointer to this thread on the Ubuntu Forums. I following the instructions there, except the whole patching SDL thing, I figured I'd only go there if I found that I had an SDL app that didn't work. So far, so good, and it seems like it even works in Wine (the post claims that it doesn't work with Wine), and without using padsp! We'll see if I run into any problems, but so far, I'm quite happy.

Anyways, just wanted to share in case someone else has the same problem. (I actually rather like Banshee. It definitely pwns Rhythmbox.)