A view from the hill

"Even the greatest stars discover themselves in the looking glass."
-- Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Hall of Mirrors"

Well, if that's so, Sun should probably take a second look at their new 3D desktop, Looking Glass. As they even provide packages for Debian and Ubuntu, getting the stuff installed was a quite easy journey. But unfortunately, the target wasn't really worth it -- Looking Glass is not really ready for prime time (i.e., daily usage), it's more a technology study. Sometimes it's the details that make the difference, e.g. blurry background and fonts, missing keyboard shortcuts to switch between virtual desktops etc. But this time, it's not only the details: I didn't manage to get the 3d file manager to display correctly (i.e. in front) after moving it out of the way, for instance, and I got a hanging desktop altogether very quickly (after about five minutes usage). Most of the apps that you'll get with Looking Glass were non-functional either. Looking Glass is also really slow, even Gnome or KDE are light-weight by comparison. I'll have a second look next year. Or make that 2008.

No, I'm not talking about the lasershow Tool were playing their music to.

Yesterday, I finally got my new printer, a Lexmark E240. I was pretty certain that it would work, as the E120n is known to work as a Generic PCL6 printer and Lexmarks specs for the E240 claimed it understood PCL6 as well. So I just tried the driver (pxlmono) that's recommended for the E120n and it worked right out of the box (the entry for the E240 is from me). I believe that the E240d(n) as well as the E340 series are likely to be the same as the documentation coming with the E240 applies at least in part to those as well.

Lexmark does provide it's own set of drivers, btw. They ship (at least on the supplied CDROM) as RPMs, although they claim to support Debian. It looks like they provide some administration tool, and from a quick sketch in the documentation, I think they mainly provide a wrapper around the usual printing tools. But I haven't tried this stuff at all. Speaking of documentation, the Unix docs ship as HTML, and at least in part they are broken. I.e., the main navigation frame links to some HowDoI.html file, but on the CDROM there's only howdoi.html. Let's hope the hardware engineers paid a tiny bit more attention to what they were doing.

Yesterday, I voted for Tool as the best live band, although I hadn't seen them yet, as the concert was tonight. Well, they didn't let me down, they easily did win the price as the best live band this year [1]. The concert hall, Mannheim's Maimarkthalle, was a particular disappointment. Or in fact it wasn't, it was just the horrible surrounding I've expected it to be.

The warm-up band, Mastodon, was also a nightmare. Usually, I don't care about bad warm-up bands, but this time the sound was so loud you couldn't ignore them. The loudness was really a problem. Sometimes I felt it was just too loud although I brought and used a pack of ear protectors. Apart from that, Tool were great, especially the light show was the best what I've seen so far.

[1] It was only the fourth concert for me this year. Tomte has been great, Til Brönner (my first Jazz concert ever) was very nice, too, and The Horror The Horror, this years' best newcomer in my opinion, played a nice concert, too (although they had to fight a rather tiny location, Freiburg's Jos Fritz cafe and its ridiculous time table). But Tool was way more exciting.

Jahrespoll auf plattentests.de. Lauft los und versucht Euch ein Paket CDs zu sichern.

After about sechs years of XMMS usage, I think I'm finally done with it. Playlist handling is a major pain. And I usually just shuffle my way through my collection. But don't even try to find a song in that long, long way down south ... sorry, down the playlist.

I've tried Rhythmbox, but as it is to closely bound to Gnome (and gstreamer, in particular) it doesn't work for me (I'm using WindowMaker without Gnome on my workstation at home). And no, I don't have any KDE libraries installed and yes, I like it that way -- although I've heard quite a lot good things about amarok.

Dear Lazyweb, please what kind of audio player might fit my needs? I just need a little more functionality than XMMS. Selection by album, artist and/or genre would be nice.

A recent apt-get broke CMUCL again:

Reinstalling for cmucl
Recompiling Common Lisp Controller for cmucl
Installing Common Lisp Controller in CMU CL ...
Error in batch processing:

Error in function UNIX::SIGSEGV-HANDLER: Segmentation Violation at #x10044F88.
FAILED

Hooray.