OpenSUSE 11.1 – B^3

B^3  ::= Buggy Beyond Belief

I was playing with MythTV under openSUSE 11.0 a few days ago and it kept ASSERTing in the X11 subsystem.  A bit of googling later and I concluded that perhaps I should upgrade to 11.1 after all (I’d been resisting).

The desktop is now at openSUSE 11.1.  It is beautiful but oh-so troublesome.  I prefer KDE over Gnome but I’m now using the later because the only KDE option available under openSUSE 11.1 is the newer 4.1.  How this got beyond KDE 4.0-alpha (a whole increment past it!) is beyond me.  Bug after bug after bug in only a few hours of use.  Reminds me of the whole package management fiasco a few rev.s ago.

I can’t recall them all, but here are a few I do:

Added the “Dictionary” widget to the desktop using drag-n-drop from the “Add Widgets” menu.  I could resize it once and that was it.  While the widget itself still works I cannot move it nor resize it, nor will the controls bar auto-hide.

Ah, cool!  I see that “System Tray” is a widget.  Wouldn’t it be neat to have this as an unpanelled item on my desktop?  I drag it to a corner of my screen and voila!  There is is.  All shrivelled up to a point.  And no controls.  No way to resize it, move it, anything.

Downstairs to get a cup of tea and I’m back.  Funny, my desktop is locked.  Didn’t I go into desktop settings and disable that?  Hmm.  Enter the password to unlock, go to desktop settings.  Yup, I did disable that!  Ugh.  So now what do I do, enable it and disable it again?  I try that, wait a bit and my desktop locks again.  Oh well.

I open up a couple of windows and head on over to Virtual Desktop 2 to open a few more.  What?  There is no panel along the bottom of the window.  So now what?  Back to VD 1 and there is the panel at the bottom.  Back to VD 2, 3, and 4: no panel.  Argh.

Logout / restart X11, login.  OK, now the panel is on all VDs.  Dictonary still won’t resize and System Tray is still a non-responsive grain in the corner.  Time to start over again afresh (I do an “init 3″ to shut everything down, login at a terminal console as root and blow away the “.kde4″ directory in my user home area, then init 5 to start X back up again).

This time I try the Picture Frame widget.  It works.  Nice!

I try the Quick Access widget.  Looks good.  I start to add a few more icons to it, things resize nicely.  Two for two!  So I add a Quick Access folder and designate my “Documents” area as its folder.  Logout/login.  My Quick Access folder as shrunk to a minuscule size.  I enlarge it, logout/login and it is again shrunk down to nothing.

Great.  Do the blow-away .kde4 again.  When the login screen presents itself I enter my password, go down to the corner and select Session->Gnome.  That has been working pretty well.

Oh, right!  I almost forgot: try going to “Computer” in the kickoff menu and select “Install Software” or “”YaST”.  You get kdesu asking for the root password but it won’t accept it, even though it is 100% correct.  The way I now run YaST is I open a console, do an “su -” (using the very same password that kdesu rejects), and then start yast2 as root.  That works.

Traveler’s Checks in Taiwan

Just a quick note to anyone considering purchasing American Express traveler’s checks for a trip to Taiwan.  Read this and you might want to reconsider.

My wife and I arrived in Kaoshiung to find that American Express no longer has offices in Taiwan, apparently they sold the division to a local bank.  Cashing AMEX traveler’s checks now incurs a 2-3% fee, is limited to $1,000, and is a very long and involved process (25 minutes after we got the dedicated attention of a bank employee).

Next time we are bringing cash.  Won’t leave home without it!

Tethering a cell phone to openSUSE 11.0

Tethering my WM6.1 based cell phone to openSUSE 11.0 turned out to be very easy.  Here are the steps:

Ensure that development packages are installed. I usually select Patterns->Kernel Development and in this way get all of the development tools plus the kernel sources (handy if it is necessary to compile ones own modules).

su -
cd /usr/src
svn co http://synce.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/synce/trunk/usb-rndis-lite
cd usb-rndis-lite
make
./clean.sh
make install

After completing the above simply start internet connection sharing using PC USB connection.  Plug in the cell phone to the computer via the USB cable and you are good to go!

First post, the brain, time, et al.

I was thinking about the brain again this morning and the perception of time. I was a young lad when my father told me his theory about why time seems to speed up as you get older. He suspected that one measured time based on how long one had lived. Therefore as you got older time appeared to go by faster.

Going from photography to computers gave me a different insight on this and I came to believe it was due to the clock speed of the brain slowing as one aged. If you are a computer geek imagine your brain as a processor. As you increase the clock rate of the processor you can process more events within any given period of time, thus your awareness rate increases. If you are a camera buff imagine recording the second hand sweep of a clock with a movie camera. When you play this back on a standard projector one second passes in one second. But now go back and slow down the rate of the movie camera. When this new film is projected the clock shows seconds flying by at an increased rate of more than one second per real time second, making time appear to go by faster.

Similarly the brain has an awareness rate, a clock-speed at which it takes a single sample of reality, a kind of “synapse-shot”. As we age this synapeshot rate slows making everything about us appear to go by faster. The question then is what influences this slowing? Is it an actual slowing of the brain? Is it because there are more pathways to traverse and so it just takes longer to go from point A to B in the brain? Perhaps we develop restraints and checks that bog down our thought rate (kind of like programming in safer languages like Java instead of the raw machine code)? Or is it a combo? It would be interesting to develop experiments to try to figure this out. Can one also measure how fast a person’s brain is based on their perception of time? Is it related to mental age, A kind of IQ? Can one quantify a synapseshot rate? Questions, questions.

Then there is the rather limited input rate to the brain. We humans are kind of slow, but I’d imagine that the synapseshot rate and the information gathering rate are related. Perhaps it could be measured by how fast we can gather information? Hmm .. now we start getting into memory, a sticky issue.

And speaking of memory: interesting to think about changing computers to not separate memory and processing. When an animal regains conscienceness it does not require rebooting. No memory has to be reloaded, it just picks up near where it left off. Programming divides a task into creating functions that take certain input and produce one or more outputs. The function is given its stimulus and produces a value, thus each function is a producer. Memory is just one of these producers, sometimes it is stimulated to store something, sometimes it is stimulated to retrieve what it was last given. It would be kind of cool to make a system of producers and a way of saying “here, I have these inputs .. what can you produce out of them?”. Or similarly, “I have this thing I want .. got any way of producing it?” Or various permutations thereof. This is probably what neural networks is about. I should get off my duff and read about that.