Saw it last night.  I was completely disappointed.  Just another freak-of-the-week episode and some weird Mulder/Scully relationship stuff.

I think I'm going to start watching the series again to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

As a follow up to this post, here are the top (5) trance hits of all time (IMO, of course), listed in arbitrary order:

Above & Beyond - Good For Me (Radio Edit):

Paul van Dyk - Nothing But You:

Paul van Dyk - La Dolce Vita:

Marc Marberg with Kyau & Alber - Megashira:

Nitrous Oxide - Red Moon Slide:

Somewhat boring waveforms (left channel only), but great trance!

Before I forget about this, I should list some of the places I ate at while staying in Charleston, last week:

• Poogan's Porch (Dinner)
• Jack's Cosmic Dogs (Lunch)
• Virginia's on King (Dinner)
• Five Guys (Lunch)
• EVO Pizzza (Dinner)

The atomic dogs at Jack's were great…

Did I mention I'm now on a diet?

I've been toying with some Xorg eyecandy today, for some reason (trying to make my pseudo-transparent aterms act like OS X's Terminal.app).  I started with the Xorg/Transparency guide on the Gentoo Wiki that directed me to enable the Composite Extension and then run some X11 applications to show off its capabilities.

I first added the following to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
     Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Then I added the following to the Device section for my nVidia video card:

Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"

Then I restarted X11.  Unfortunately, it seemed that all of those options have been enabled for awhile now, so I took them out, and it appeared that the composite extension was still running.  Oh well, no harm done.

I then started playing with xcompmgr, a utility that provides some basic compositing effects, and transset[-df], a utility that toggles the opacity of arbitrary windows:

Unfortunately, I felt an instant performance hit when the composite manager was running.  Windows would redraw slightly slower than before, and this could be seen when switching desktops.

I then added compositing support to Xfwm4, and played with the options available with that:

There weren't many options that I liked (almost liked the "opacity of inactive windows"), so I just enabled the compositor and left everything disabled.  transset[-df] still worked, and I set some keybindings to increase/decrease opacity of arbitrary windows via a couple keyboard shortcuts.

All of this was nice (bleh, slow, but nice), but my initial goal was not achieved.  I just want my terminal backgrounds to be 25% transparent - not pseudo-transparent.  Apparently this functionality has not been built into aterm yet.  However, it has been added to GNOME Terminal, I soon found out.

I configured a custom profile in GNOME Terminal, and told it to be 25% transparent.  It seemed to work!  Unfortunately, any window resize, movement, or focus change (switching workspaces) incurs a 800-1200ms delay where everything X-related locks up.  No good.

So, if I knew anything about Xlib-related programming, I would add the following to Aterm:

• Unicode support
• Composite support

So, I'm back where I started.  Compositing disabled, for now.

Warning: lots of hyperbole and sarcasm below

It's dead, Jim.  Why do I think so?  Several reasons:

CFLAGS and Ricing

Ricey CFLAGS were neat a couple years ago, since back then there weren't any other popular source-based GNU/Linux distributions.  NO, Slackware is not a source-based distribution (common misconception, though).  Everyone believed that their system would be 100x faster if X, glibc, the kernel, etc. were all compiled with processor-dependent -march flags, -O3, and other things.  Does it really make a difference for web-browsing, email, IRC, AIM, etc?  NO.  Will it make a difference for 3D rendering, video encoding, and MPI applications?  Sure.  But folks who really care about the speed of such applications should compile them separately, anyway.  No need to have Firefox and Qt compiled with the same insane CFLAGS.

What I'm trying to say is the days of "ooh, my laptop pwns your laptop because I compiled cat and perl with -O8" are over.

Deprecation

Gentoo seems to go through portage utilities and arguments like most people go through underwear.  They always seem to change, and once you're used to the operation of one, it's deprecated in favor of another.

Portage

It just sucks.  Actually, it always has, but it's much worse, now.

Portage has never done proper reverse dependency checking.  What happens if I want to remove libmcs, but audacious depends on it?  Portage will let it be removed anyway, w/out any warnings.  How hard is this?  All other package management systems will easily let you know what will break.

It's awfully slow.  Even on very high-end hardware, it can take minutes for equery to finish a given task.  Lately, I've noticed that the compilation process of certain applications takes half as long as portage takes to calculate dependencies.  This, however, was not always the case.  When I first started using Gentoo back in 2003 (I think), portage was on-par with apt and dpkg.  Creeping featurism might be to blame, I suppose (like crazy colors?).

So-called blockers will come up during an emerge world, mostly because (from what I can tell) emerge won't automatically remove conflicting/obsolete packages.  So you have to do this yourself.  Not a big deal, but… why?

There are so many stupid little scripts floating around that appear to work around portage's deficiencies.  Since won't rebuild applications that have runtime dependencies on whatever's being rebuilt (say, libssl), an additional requirement is to use a hacky script called revdep-rebuild.  If that doesn't work, then you're forced to search around for some script that's specific to the library you're rebuilding, like fix_libtool_files.sh and python-updater.

USE flags

They were a great idea, until they got out of hand.  I think the original goal was to enable or disable a couple USE flags (like -gui) in your /etc/make.conf so all applications would be built to your standards.  Now, there are hundreds of USE flags, most of which only pertain to two or three programs.  Why not just show a pretty blue screen like FreeBSD's ports tree does during a make config?

Additionally, things that should be included as USE flags surpriginsly aren't.  For example: projectm support in audacious-plugins.  Sure, it's crashy, that's why it should be left off by default, not REMOVED completely.  How about composite support in gnome-terminal?

Profiles

Who cares about these?  The only time I see them is when my profile has been obsoleted, and I need to update it.

Modularity

It's a sickness, I think.  Gentoo is trying so hard to be modular that it's adding more and more bloat.  I remember when installing XFree86 involved one or two ebuilds.  Now it's a couple dozen ebuilds, and doesn't even include the core included apps like xlogo!

It's not green

If I were an environmentalists, I'd hate Gentoo.  Burning up the power lines with redundant compute cycles dedicated to compiling ordinary applications like xterm ought to be a crime!

No more XMMS

Back in 2006, XMMS was removed from Gentoo's portage.  This annoyed me because at the time, there wasn't an alternative for it.  Audacious was listed as an alternative, but at the time it lacked the stability and speed that XMMS sported.  This led to everyone trying to switch to Audacious, pissing off the lead developer, and causing a huge flamewar on IRC and Bugzilla.  I, for one, would have used XMMS for the next 10 years (I'm old-school that way).  Only now, two years later, can Audacious finally load my whole music library w/out crashing.

Conclusion

I have 2x personal computers and 1x work computer that run Gentoo.  Next time they are reinstalled, they're getting Debian.

I should be packing, since I leave for vacation in about an hour!

(also, just fixed jabberd on dax, apparently the 2.2.0 version causes c2s, s2s, and sm to segfault upon invoking some sasl function.  had to downgrade to 2.1.24.1 to fix it)

I saw this car about two years ago in the Stonecrest Harris Teeter parking lot.  Saw it again on Monday, and snapped a shot of it:

Whoever you are (soccer/baseball mom, I guess?), everyone in South Charlotte agrees with you.  I-485 is the pits!

It might just be me, but I've been noticing a whole lot more emergency vehicles (mostly ambulances and fire trucks) in the Charlotte area, in the past year.  Are more buildings burning down, or is this a case of more false alarms?  I'm thinking the latter.