Upgrade to X 1.5 surprisingly successful

I went through an accidental upgrade Wednesday afternoon. I wasn't paying attention when I installed something, and it sucked in the latest ATI driver for my laptop along with it. Cursing, I tried to back out, only to discover that the stable driver I'd been using since February of last year was no longer supported by the Gentoo team, since too many other people had decided it wasn't stable after all.

I managed to find an old repository of that driver, but installing it didn't work; I got a big "Unsupported Hardware" watermark in the lower right-hand corner, and many of the 3D features were broken. I decided to go for the full upgrade: the latest driver with the latest X server.

It took forever, but when it was over I had it all, and to my pleasant surprise hibernate/suspend still worked as advertised, PopCap games still work wonderfully, and most 3D features are still operant. I haven't had the courage yet to try and run Quake or Prey, but playing games on my laptop is a losing proposition anyway so maybe I won't bother.

Shouting at the radio...

I have to remember to recharge my MP3 player more often. I've been stuck in the car several times this week listening to the radio, and flipping through the dial I inevitably land on a talk show, and in Seattle we have one liberal station, one sports station, three "socially conservative" stations and one "fiscally conservative" station.

I stumbled into one of the socially conservative stations and there was some caller on the line. She said:

I hate the baby boomers. They're the ones that ruined this country. Back in the sixties they did all those drugs and did all that damage to their body [sic], and now they're old and they want Medicare to take care of them and it's expensive.

I hate to break it to this still-adolescent mind, but the salient fact is that very few people in the sixties "did drugs" to any great extent.

But more than that, she hates the baby boomers for one reason and one reason only: they're getting old. That happens. Getting old is expensive. Bodies start to break down, start to fail, start to show the accumulated damage of a lifetime of living a human life. And she's going to be right there, fifty years from now, worrying about her own health and wanting the next generation to help her survive longer and healthier.

Hey, lady, maybe we should introduce Carrousel.

Shouting at the radio, again

Again with the talk radio! This one happened yesterday. Mark Levin, who for some reason I always imagine looks like the scrawny, evil rat from The Secret of NIMH, was out of his chair yesterday, and there was a guest host, Michael Barrett. He was ranting about how the "current generation" has thrown out the wisdom of the past, and has proclaimed:

Man, if you think marriage ought to be between a man and a woman, and not between two men and two women, you're not with it. If you think our country is great, you're not with it. If you believe we should support the troops, you're not with it. If you believe we should not write hateful things about women and should not put those songs on the radio, man, you're just not with it.

I was gobsmacked by the hateful idiocy contained in that rant. This is one of those classic "ascribe to your enemies all the qualities you perceive in yourself" rants that seem to be coming more and more out of the right.

Karl Rove famously described his strategy thusly. Find your own candidates greatest weakness. Now, accuse your opponent of it. He'll be so flustered with the idea that he'll have a hard time defending himself against it, it will distract from your own candidate's weakness, and it will give the press something to talk about. It worked well against John Kerry and Al Gore: both Vietnam Vets, both athletes, yet by impugning their physical courage and getting the press to talk about it, Rove was able to give his cheerleader and draft-dodger candidate breathing room to make alternative cases while Gore and Kerry flailed about, shocked and horrified that anyone would dare make such an attack on their patriotism.

Barrett's rant makes me think that the Rovian cancer has mestastasized within the conservative body politic. Because here he is, the conservative talk show host, advocating a hateful attitude toward his own country: most people, he says, are idiots. Hate them. Resent them. The 53% of Americans who voted for Obama are either hateful anti-Americans or they're pureblind idiots.

I believe we should give our troops all the support they need: most of that support ought to be dedicated to making sure they get home safely from the unnecessary war of choice. I believe that my country is great and founded on great principles: principles I desperately want my country to embrace and honor in the fullest. I believe that it was and always has been a mistake for the state to arbitrarily recognize the religious commitment called "marriage," and that there is room enough in our civilization for the odd 2% to have civil relationships that encourage fidelity and responsibility. I believe that respect toward women and men is a crucial part of our culture, and that the foul material heard in some radio doesn't deserve the attention it gets, but censorship isn't the answer.

But Barrett wasn't done with his rant. He went on to say,

Let me ask you something. They all say we shouldn't look to the past, but we should look forward. The past has nothing to teach us. Tradition isn't valuable. Let me ask you this: Are cars better than they were 30 years ago? Are your children safer than they were 30 years ago? Are parents better than they were 30 years ago?

Cars are better than they were 30 years ago. (1978? Holy cow, that was a crappy year for cars!) They're safer in an accident, they get much better mileage, and they require less costly maintenance. Fewer people die in automobile crashes than they did at any time in history.

Parents: in general, yes. They know more. They have access to more information. There's a better support system than ever in terms of education and community, if only you have the wherewithall to use it. If they let their children fail, they have fewer excuses than at any time in the past.

And yes, children are far safer than they were 30 years ago. Crime statistics universally show them to be safer now than in 1978, or 1968, or even 1958. The current generation is growing up healthier and just as ready to take on the world we're leaving them as we were ready to take on the world our parents left us.

When Barrett goes off like this, what he's really telling his audience is that we should hate our successes, and wish for the "simpler" time, when the violence and mayhem went on behind closed doors and in the back pages of the newspaper, and we lived in blissful ignorance of the agonies outside our little towns.

Barrett's anti-Americanism, his opposition to the progress we've made, is on full display in his words, and we shouldn't be afraid to call him on it.

My GIMP-fu improves marginally.

Experiment #5

Recently, I did some experiments with the GIMP, attempting to reproduce some of the “how to do it in photoshop” experiments that come across on the Internet from time to time.   To the left is my latest experiment: an attempt to reproduce the Apple™ glowly mark used in some of their advertising by using the new Layer Effects toolkit available for Gimp 2.6.

The experiment was not a complete success.  I managed to figure out how to do the inner glow (hint: it’s not the Layer Effect “inner glow”; it’s an ordinary gradient fill), and I almost got the drop shadow, although obviously the professional version is much more crisp and clean.  There are four copies of the peach: one for the glow, one for the inner shadow, one for the outer glow (again, I suspect that a straight up gaussian blur would have gotten me the effect I wanted much better than using the Outer Glow layer effect), and one for the grey background, all again on a gently gradient background square.  Five layers all told.

I spent an hour on this experiment.  When I do nail it, I’ll put up a tutorial with screenshots of GIMP 2.6 in various stages as I work my way through the example.  But before I do, I’ll have to figure out for myself how it works.  I suspect that the first step is to work very large and shrink it down to the scale I want when I’m ready to publish.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

My First High Dynamic Range photograph

Afternoon Aftermath

This was my first deliberate attempt at creating a high dynamic range photograph, a photo in which several different photos of the same subject taken with different exposure rates are stacked to create a single image with a much higher range of colors than the camera can record with a single image.

While I'm not entirely happy with it, it has an interesting, moody feel to it that I really liked. I was surprised at how deep the darkness feels in this picture, which is not at all what I'd want to convey given the subject matter, but still, kinda nifty. The image is the result of only three photos, taken at the medium, high, and low exposures of a consumer-level Lumix camera, and then processed with the Hugin image processor in HDR mode.

Someday, when I'm rich, I'll have a much nicer camera and I'll be able to play with this more extensively.

"Born Again American"

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean." -- Humpty Dumpty

Omaha and I went to Yamaraashi-chan's school today for their annual "come see what we're feeding your child for lunch" lunch. It was an unremarkable affair; we were surrounded by screaming children who left a lot of litter on the floor by the time we were done, ate burgers that were halfway between USDA "Utility" grade beef and ground up unwanted cat, unripened watermelon and cookies with way too much guar gum in them. That brought back a lot of memories.

What made our eyebrows rise, however, was the back of the half-pint milk cartons, on which was a short blurb about the US Declaration of Independence and the URL: BornAgainAmerican.org.

That phrase, "Born Again," is such a loaded term that Omaha and I were very concerned: how could something like that have been distributed into a public school without raising more concerns than just our own?

As it turns out, Born Again American is a Norman Lear project. It's an attempt to take the sting out of the phrase "born again," by associating it not with Christianity, but with something else: a kind of American civil religion unassociated with one theistic creed or another.

Norman Lear is one of America's most successful, pervasive, and persuasive liberals. But co-opting the phrase "born again" just isn't going to happen, no matter how much money he throws at this project. It's too much a property of the evangelicals, and between the wincing the term causes among the secular and the appeal to the religionists, it's not going to fly.