mark mazurek

After I figured that HAL is setting permissions now in Rawhide (a subject of a separate blog entry maybe), the volume slider started working, but all other audio applications still fail. Oh, that’s right: we drove the stake through the black heart of EsounD. Bravo! No, wait…

[zaitcev@niphredil ~]$ strace aplay arc/morse/uk3dba.au
open(”/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p”, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = -1 EBUSY (Device or resource busy)

[root@niphredil zaitcev]# lsof | grep pcm
pulseaudi 2601 zaitcev mem CHR 116,6 2903 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
pulseaudi 2601 zaitcev mem CHR 116,7 2908 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c
pulseaudi 2601 zaitcev 20u CHR 116,6 2903 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
pulseaudi 2601 zaitcev 30u CHR 116,7 2908 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c
[root@niphredil zaitcev]#

I understand the desire to replace EsounD with something better, but at least EsounD did not hog the audio device. Why is PulseAudio hogging it? My Intel soundcard with ALSA is perfectly capable of playing several streams at once. My message to PulseAudio: stop hogging my sound card.

Now I have to figure out how GNOME starts the blasted thing. Nothing obvious jumps out of gconf-editor so far. The next step is to look at pulseaudio’s RPM scriptlets, they must be registering it somewhere. Meh, it feels like Windows.

UPDATE: OMG. I killed it and it disappeared (not starting on next login). Probably our break-up was too unnerving for the poor daemon. I would be comforted if not for a sneaking suspicion that it is plotting my demise while hiding in the depth of GNOME somewhere.

If one posts something to Mugshot and then looks at server logs, two things become apparent:
- A very low proportion of users react immediately (90% is outside of 3 hours, or other made-up number like that). It seems to indicate that Mugshot is used as a web service like Myspace, and nearly nobody uses its client.
- Mugshot severily undercounts visits, several times at least.

I wasn’t there to laugh this year, but a friend worked as a paramedic and he responded to the hung guy. Wire services reported that the guy’s friends let him hung for two hours thinking that he was doing an art piece. My friend says that the story is untrue. The dead burner had no friends in the camp, nobody knew him. He hung through a Yoga class; the instructor and students thought that he was a mannekin. I suppose that the kind of clueless people who can think something like that too. Who else would buy a ticket to Burning Man?

… is there a way to kill off in-text ads and popups by help of a Firefox extension? I don’t mind reasonable advertising, but these underscored words are just bad. Adblock does not seem to work on them, from its description.

Here’s what one well-respected publication wrote today (in a subscription-only article [No, it’s an open article — ed.]):

We are very aware of the fine line that must be walked here. The last thing we (or our advertisers) want to do is to annoy our loyal readers, so we are proceeding cautiously. The latest advertising technique we are trying is “in-text advertising”. The idea is to serve ads that are relevant to keywords in an article by highlighting those words and popping up an ad when a reader rolls over the word with their mouse.

I am wondering if they typed the above with the straight face.

The concept is bad even when it does not involve pop-ups. had this feature for years and the confusion between real and inserted links is very annoying.

So, it seems that a new round of selective disablement of Javascript should be coming down the pike in the nearest future.