wnd's weblog

Yet another rant about non-military service, HVSC, Ubuntu, PulseAudio, Cubble, and Nokia N810.

2⁶ (or 2**6 or 2^6) days to go

64 days to go. That’s about two months. Or taking my holidays in account, seven Mondays. Then I’m done with my non-military service for good. I have absolutely no regrets working here at University of Helsinki and I have no doubt I’ve been more useful to the society here than I would’ve been serving Finnish defence forces.

High Voltage SID Collection

I saw this coming. Not too long ago, I finished listening High Voltage SID Collection 44, and to some degree I tried to steer clear of newer release. Well, as expected, it didn’t work out. I now have some 2500 songs behind and another 4500 to go. Talking of which, can you recognise some of these songs? Your help is well appreciated. Chip-o-phobics beware.

Ubuntu

As you may have already figured out I’m not the biggest Ubuntu fan out there. I’m into Debian because I think those folks are doing things right™. Lately I have had trouble upgrading Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. Things go smoothly but there are several cases where package A depends on package B while both packages contain file C, which in turn makes packages unupgradeable. I know Ubuntu snatches most of their packages from Debian, but for whatever reason I haven’t had similar problems with Debian stable/unstable/experimental for ages. On the other hand, while I have 1850 packages installed, the Ubuntu system has 3300.

PulseAudio

If you ask me, PulseAudio is the source of all evil. Well, maybe not the source of all evil, but to me it has done more bad than good. Since this rant grew much longer than expected, I split it as [separate entry][pulseaudio]. Go ahead, it’s all there. :-)

Cubbli

We are making progress with Common UBuntu Based LInux (Cubbli). It’s already deployed on some 200 computers. There are some missing features still, and a few rough edges, but at least it has already been put in use. The biggest concern I have is this massive collection of packages installed. Sooner or later it’s going to get us in trouble. If only Ubuntu (i.e. not Debian) package maintainers did their job…

Nokia N810

My new Nokia N810 is behaving badly. Too often after waking up from idle state the hardware keys (among other things) stop functioning, and after awhile the system reboots. Interestingly enough while my old device has never done this, the new one did that almost right after I got it out the box. There exists a bug report about this but I suspect hardware issue. Obviously my device is still covered by warranty but the trick is in (reliably) reproducing the issue.