March 7, 2006

M-Audio Oxygen (O2) Midi Controller

As I mentioned previously, I picked up a midi controller. I’ve recently gotten midi on my sound card to work. now I want to get this beast of a keyboard working before I chuck it out the window. Here’s my current setup: Running Gentoo Running 2.6.15-r1 kernel from gentoo-sources using alsa drivers that came with the kernel all other alsa packages are 1.0.10 using http://alsa.opensrc.org/USBMidiDevices as a guide using version 1.

March 6, 2006

Painless.

I caught a security notice about wordpress and decided to take the plunge and upgrade to 2.0.1. After the crap with midi I put up with this weekend, I wasn’t too fond of messing with anything. I bit the bullet and went through with it tho, and the result was painless. I’m using webapp-config and virtual hosts, so there was a bit of an extra step: emerge –ask –oneshot –verbose “>=www-apps/wordpress-2.

March 6, 2006

Teh Win: Linux Midi

Well, right before I ran out the door for work this morning, I managed to capture the ever-elusive “win”. not just any win, but “Teh Win.” morgajel@draccus ~ $ aconnect -o client 64: 'Audigy MPU-401 (UART)' [type=kernel] 0 'Audigy MPU-401 (UART)' 32 'Audigy MPU-401 #2' client 65: 'Emu10k1 WaveTable' [type=kernel] 0 'Emu10k1 Port 0 ' 1 'Emu10k1 Port 1 ' 2 'Emu10k1 Port 2 ' 3 'Emu10k1 Port 3 ' While there are 6 devices listed, the important one is “Emu10k1 Port 0”, otherwise known as 65:0

March 5, 2006

This Week’s 10 Minutes of Hate: Linux Midi

Midi- oh, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways… I’ve never liked midi, it’s fabricated, boring, hollow existence bothers me whenever I hear it, yet I am currently at it’s mercy. Linux may be ahead of other operating systems in many respects, but for some reason, midi support seems to have been completely passed over. One of my side projects right now is writing a CD. a useful tool for writing a CD is a Piano.

March 2, 2006

Useful Utility: chmod

Chmod is a utility used for changing permissions. It is fairly well known, and doesn’t have a lot of obscure flags, which makes it an odd choice for this series. I’m including it because it seems like the most logical way to touch on linux file permissions, which can be the bane of new linux user. Let me cover permissions first, then we’ll move on to chmod. Simple Permissions (I’m only touching on “simple” permissions because they’re difficult enough to grasp without throwing in super user and stickey bits, or attributes like immutable.

February 28, 2006

Bittorrent is Evil, Remember?

Got an interesting call today. ———— guy on phone: Hi, I’m with thje intrusion detection team- we had a wolverine alert that your machine set off, I was wondering if you could enable your machine so I could remote in and check it out and make sure you’re not infected. me: Which machine was it? guy on phone: *reads off a machine number* me: Ah. ok, you won’t be able to- that’s my laptop, and it’s not running windows, it’s running linux.

February 28, 2006

DnD Character

Fark has a great link for a DnD character personality test. Here’s what I came up with for me. Neutral Good Half-Elf Ranger Alignment: Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered ‘normal’. Race: Half-Elves are a cross between a human and an elf.

February 27, 2006

Useful Utility: ls

With the exception of maybe cd (which is boring), ls is probably the command you’ll use the most if you do a fair amount of work at the command line. ls lists files. It’s simple enough concept, but there’s a lot of information about those files that you can list as well. ls by itself will list the contents of all regular files and directories in the current directory. you can provide with with a target such as ls /foo or with multiple targets like ls /mnt /opt or ls foo.

February 26, 2006

Setting up my Garden

Well, it’s Feb. 26th and it’s still nice out. it’s only 34, but it’s bright and sunshiney. It was 60 last week, and it’s been decent most of the winter. My brain is starting to activate and come out of winter hibernation, so that means it’s time to start planting. Since I live in an apartment, I don’t get a real garden, so we have a bunch of pots and windowboxes and such.

February 26, 2006

Kiss my Ass, Linksys (pt. 2)

I’ve apparently become either very brave, or very stupid in my old age. Last night at 10pm I reset my router and flashed it’s firmware with an open source alternative. A few years back, some Linksys tech realized the usefulness of some open source components and implemented them in the firmware of their routers- they just forgot to follow the license agreement of the software they used and didn’t tell anyone or release the source code and the changes they made.