One idiot's blog

Scandinavia-ia

It seems like the whole classical world is going heavily in for Scandinavian music lately. On the radio, Ive heard all- or almost-all-Scandinavian concerts conducted by Osmo Vänskä and Essa Pekka Salonen in the last week, and elsewhere we seem to be getting more than the usual share of Grieg. Is it, like, Scandinavia's 500 millionth anniversary or something?

Anyway, a few months ago I went to UMCP's Concerto Competition finals, where I heard Sibelius's Violin Concerto for the first time. A number of things impressed me about this. First, it was being performed by a juicy hot Korean young thang; if I had been a judge, I would have voted for her just to get another chance to see her juicy (did I already say that?) bod up on stage again.

Second, I was surprised by how much I liked the concerto. I don't on the whole like Sibelius too much. I love the Valse Triste, and I like the Mahler's-1st-style parts of the 3rd Symphony, but so much of his symphonic oeuvre is just incomprehensible, dark, drawn-out, nothing to grab on to. But this is quite listenable, light in parts, meaty in others.

I think I was going to say something else about this first encounter with the Sibelius concerto, but maybe the other interesting things don't apply to this event. Anyway, last night I heard it for what AFAIK is the third time total in my life, yet it seems totally familiar. The second movement, in particular, sounded familiar, and if I had heard it in isolation, I would definitely have taken it for Debussy; the opening has a very Afternoon of a Faun feel. I must have heard this a lot more than I realize.

I woke up this morning with a couple of parts of the last movement in my head. Again, weird for such limited exposure.

Other iBook Linux Fixes

Continuing on my Day o' Fixes theme (I've gotta learn how to make my entries shorter)...

I upgraded my kernel to Gentoo's latest, 2.6.12, whereupon I got two good results. First: I now have a good kernel that runs my firewire well, and doesn't do other weird things. 2.6.10 supposedly improved the Firewire support, but when I ran my laptop on that kernel, weird things would happen when the screen blanked, i.e., it wouldn't really blank, but would instead form very subtle, irregular patterns that would very slowly change color and pattern. They were kind of psychedelic and neat to watch, but since I didn't know what was causing them (and because they usually had bits of discoloration that looked like oozing liquid, suggesting the liquid from the liquid crystal display was leaking), this made me uncomfortable, so I didn't use that kernel, and went back to my old one.

The problem with Firewire on the old one was that if I mounted my external hard drive (my only Firewire device ATM) and subjected it to a heavy load (e.g., used it as the compile directory for something large like Mozilla), it would lock up, and I'd be unable to use it again without rebooting the computer. And it would mess up the ext2 filesystem as well, creating things that looked like directories but weren't. Bad stuff.

So, um, the new kernel doesn't do any of that bad stuff. Yay! Yesterday I compiled Firefox on it, and it just kept on humming.

Second: I've got gnome-terminal usable again. Ever since Gnome 2 came out, I think, I hadn't been able to get my favorite terminal font, misc-fixed 10, out of it. In early versions, it simply wouldn't show up as an available font. More recently, I could "choose" it, but when I actually clicked OK, it would change to something slightly different -- and much wider and uglier. I ended up using xterm because xterm still had that font, and that was the only way I could fit four terminal windows on my screen with a font that didn't look absolutely horrible.

So I checked out gnome-terminal again yesterday, after upgrading the kernel, having recently discovered that the problem is gone in Fedora Core 4. And it's gone in my Gentoo as well! I don't know exactly when that happened; I rebooted to my previous kernel to see if the kernel was somehow involved, but that didn't cause the problem to come back. So, dunno.

Yay, computer computing better! Yay!

Keeping a Middle-Aged iBook Cool

I had a number of little triumphs with my Gentoo iBook yesterday, and am much happier with it. One of my longstanding problems deserves its own entry (and actually has nothing to do with Linux).

I've always been amazed by the design of this iBook; it is SO quiet. It is quiet because, most of the time, there are no fans running, usually the greatest source of noise in a computer. It only runs the fans when the temperature gets above a certain, uh, temperature. But they put four little rubber feet at the corners of the laptop to keep the undersurface elevated off the resting surface just a millimeter or so. This millimeter of clearance provides enough airflow for much of the heat to be dissipated through the undersurface. The result -- at least when I first bought the laptop -- was that it stayed cool enough that the fan would only come on when the computer was under a heavy load for a good while, such as if it were compiling a large program like X.

But in the last year, I started to notice that it took a lot less to get it to overheat and make the fan come on. At first, it no longer required compiling a large program such as X; a smaller one like gqview would do. Then I'd find it starting to overheat after cleaning up a lot of blog entries. Finally, sometimes I'd come home from work and find the fan running, just because enought people had been hitting my blog to put it under a modest load. Like comforting a crying baby, I'd pick it up off the desk and put it in my lap until it quieted down.

So I wondered what it was that was making it overheat so easily. Were the newer kernels running hotter? Did dust get inside the laptop and clog some vital passage? Had part of my desk bulged over time, due to having a hot laptop on it constantly, so that gap no longer provided airflow?

I finally decided yesterday to check into that last possibility. I bent down and looked under the computer. I could see the clearance near both of the front corners, but not through the middle. Aha! No underside cooling! Then something occurred to me that hadn't occurred to me before for some reason: over the years, the whole laptop had started to sag. So after scratching my head a bit, I decided to try to make a "fifth foot" in the center of the laptop by putting a dime under it, right at the center.

Well, this Idiot is a genius sometimes. The overheating problem is gone. Once again, it only overheats when it's under a heavy load (like compiling) for an extended time. It's like I have a new computer again!

Roberts Named for Supreme Court

I heard this guy's a real dread. He will rob us of our freedoms and pillage the Constitution. God help us all.

Trumptactics: the Latest Blog Spammers

I don't know if Donald Trump has a direct or indirect hand in this, but the latest source of aggravation for me as far as my blog goes is this spam allegedly from "Donald Trump". It links to trumptactics.com, which is a badly put-together page introducing a "Trump University", and ostensibly signed by The Donald himself. If he didn't request this spamming (and really, why would you need to when you're Donald Trump?) then I sure hope he takes notice and puts a stop to it.

I am Data

I should be tired of these "which sitcom character/color/dictator are you?" quizzes, but I guess I'm not. The questions on this one (click the link) are interesting, a lot of them of a moral/ethical nature.

Google Nudge

Google needs to re-archive this entry. Turns out that line from Milton is hard to come by.

World's Smallest Website

The entire content of the world's smallest showcase gallery fits into a 16x16 square. Don't spend too long looking at it, with your face 3 inches from the screen, like I did. Ow, my eyes!