Gentoo! (Gesundheit!)

Well, there are a lot of spare corners in Gentoo with which I have to contend, but at the moment a lot of the system is running quite nicely. I have movies and music, both quite stable-- in fact, both keep running after a suspend and restart, which the 2.4 Redhat kernel could not do. The battery life seems comparable, although I won't really know that until later next week when I have bus trips. The 2.6.7 kernel does seem to do some things better, such as allowing me to keep running even when the harddrive is locked up-- which frequently happens on massive writes. XFCE is a stable windowing environment and Galeon 1.3 on top of Mozilla 1.6 is very, very nice. I have my editor of choice, and neither XMMS or MPG321 lectured me about copyrights and patents when I installed the MP3 code.

So far, about my only concern has been for the video decoder on mplayer; it seems unnaturally slow compared to the one that I had when running RedHat. As far as I can tell, it's the same one that's running on P'nyssa, which is a RedHat system. Running through the various modes, it seems to be a problem with the audio/video decoder; the display engine works great when using different codecs.

There are the odd corners: after a reboot, I have to manually reload pcmcia, sound, laptop, font and secure shell services. PCMCIA isn't configuring my networks right when I slap in a localized card, and network identity is a hazy thing for lain right at the moment. Not so bad I can't LJ, though. I've got Usenet, LiveJournal, the web (and too many freaking browsers), some email, most audio/video (I even have APE now! Whoo-freakin'-hoo), suspend, battery, wireless (but still set up manually), bittorrent and the binary harvester... all the geeky goodness.

Now, the only question is, can I get pygtk2 up and running? When I last lost lain, I lost a lot of the work on Plotlines. I figure it would behoove me to prototype it with pygtk2 first, get something up and running, and do the rest afterwards. (Yeah, I know, python is a perfectly good language in its own right. But I write these toy programs in C because I don't get to do C in my daily life anymore.)

Happy Freakin' Anniversary

Today is Omaha and my 15th anniversary of wedded joy. It was supposed to be a nice day. And it is, weather-wise. The sky is beautiful, mostly sunny with just a few clouds. I can see more clouds gathering on the horizon, but the weatherman warned us of those already.

I'm supposed to enjoy today, right? But, no, I'm going in to work. I have less than a week to get on deadline and while I'm not behind I'm not convinced I can get in every feature on time if I don't put in some extra hours, so here I am. Omaha and I have our anniversary day planned tomorrow.

But that's not the worst of it. Oh, no. After a lesiurely breakfast and hugs and kisses go by, I wander outside to discover that my car has been broken into. The CD player for the sound system is gone. Bastard cut the antenna wire while he was at it, so I don't even have radio now. Instead, there are a lot of miscellaneous cables hanging out of my glove box.

The police were very apologetic, but there wasn't much they could do about it. I didn't have the serial number so it's unlikely they'll find it.

Damn. Lessons 3 and 4 were in there, too.